Nof kdumim: Remaking the ancient landscape in East Jerusalem’s national parks

Abstract

This article explores two national parks in East Jerusalem and their legal administration as the focus of contradictory and complementary attempts at preservation, colonization, and normalization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with, and observations of, officials from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and others, I expose the Judaizing of the landscape in Jerusalem. Nature never stands for itself; it is always an echo of a human presence and, in this case, of a Jewish past and its modern reunion. The project of imagining the natural landscape as one that embodies an ancient past—what Israeli officials have referred to in our interviews as nof kdumim—and the contemporary Jewish people as those who hold the key to its revival as such, is a central aspect of Israel’s colonial dispossession agenda in East Jerusalem and a prerequisite to the land becoming Jewish in practice. Focusing on the perspectives of Israel’s nature officials, this article highlights not only the imaginary but also the legal technologies of erasing and remaking the national park landscape and the tensions between personal and collective, inclusion and exile, and memory and erasure that it inhabits. Arguably, while the identity of the Jewish settler as a nature lover who has returned to her lost Indigenous land is strengthened by the ancient biblical landscape of nof kdumim, the Palestinian is only granted authenticity and Indigeneity when she does not engage in what Israel perceives as “refugee camp” landscaping, and when she is willing to practice traditional forms of farming (or adam ba’har) so as to normalize this place as a universal tourist recreation site. Even then, however, the Palestinian’s labor goes to support orientalist environmental imaginaries. The natural landscape of East Jerusalem is thus recruited, only to discover that it has always been Jewish.

View from the Hilltop: Settler‐Colonial Visuality in Palestine

“…Holding not only the space but also the view is a security matter. This is a distinctly different orientation from the nof kdumim (ancient/biblical landscape) legal scholar Irus Braverman has described in her work on the Judaization of the Jerusalem landscape (2021). There, Palestinian dispossession is accomplished in part by the reimagining of natural space as ancient and biblical, timelessly Jewish.…”

Unspectacular spaces of slow wounding in Palestine

“…Claims here are tacit, grounded on the imitation of surrounding landscape and history, nonetheless containing a different way of coming-to-being -a more hidden mode of spatial "presencing" clearly understandable for the local Palestinian farmers and landowners. Such mimicry, therefore, should not be understood as a mere appropriation of culture, history, and landscape (see Ra'ad, 2010), less in terms of mere preservation of ancient landscapes (see Braverman, 2021). It is rather a form of plagiarism and theft -a colonial disguising of ab-normalisation to the everyday landscape, which subsumes, rather than credits, those it imitates.…”

Soil, territory, land: The spatial politics of settler organic farming in the West Bank, Israel/Palestine

“…Normalization takes different forms: Jewish settlers in the West Bank draw on the longue durée temporality of soil and biblical mythology to argue that Jews inhabited the region long before the Palestinians, thus substantiating their claim for exclusive autochthony. At the same time, the settlers profess environmental care, as opposed to the irresponsible neglect they attribute to the native ( inter alia repositioning Palestinian lands as terra nullius ; see also Braverman, 2019). Concomitantly, a process of normalization via the colonial quality turn (namely, a process of depoliticization by means of a discourse on agricultural quality) is taking place.…”

“…Accordingly, practices of working the soil ( avodat ha-adama ) embody a paradox: recognizing Palestinian expertise and mimicking it, while maintaining radically antagonistic relations to the original owners of this knowledge (Braverman, 2019; Ram, 2014). This differentiation is based on the valorization of Jewish organic farming, and explicitly blaming the Palestinians for harming the environment.…”