Unsettling Visual Politics: Militarized Borders in the Work of Palestinian Artist Raeda Saadeh

Unsettling Visual Politics: Militarized Borders in the Work of Palestinian Artist Raeda Saadeh Nayrouz Abu Hatoum American Quarterly, Volume 71, Number 4, December 2019, pp. 1059-1067 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/744973 Access provided at 26 Dec 2019 03:30 GMT from Concordia University Library Militarized Borders in the Work of Palestinian Artist Raeda Saadeh | 1059 Unsettling Visual Politics: Militarized Borders in the Work of Palestinian Artist Raeda Saadeh Nayrouz Abu Hatoum T his article looks at the work of the Palestinian artist Raeda Saadeh, which deals with militarized borders in Palestine. Through her mobilization of visual art—namely, through performance and video art—I show that Saadeh’s work not only subverts the hegemonic visual dominance of the Israeli state but offers a context for thinking through visual liberation and sovereignty. I argue that understanding the subversion of visual politics is crucial in mapping and identifying the multiple strategies, of which art is one, that Palestinians employ in resisting Israel’s militarized border apparatus. The construction of the Israeli military Wall on Palestinian lands in 2003 resurfaced a nearly century-old desire that was expressed by the Zionist thinker Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky in his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall.” Jabotinsky argued that “Zionist colonisation” should proceed on the premises of living separately from the Arab inhabitants of Palestine “behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”1 Ninety years since Jabotinsky’s proposal, the Israeli state has resorted to the building of walls as a way to imagine and enforce a separate life on the land. The Wall reintroduced the state’s nostalgia for large-scale projects that imagine the Israeli nation as a modern state with advanced technological capabilities, and is argued to be Israel’s largest and costliest infrastructure project since the 1950s–60s construction of the National Water Carrier.2 The Wall’s presence on the landscape is part of its inherent function as a militarized structure of incarceration; it is thus a return to the beginnings of Israeli settler colonial nation-building, which relied heavily on the domination of large-scale state projects that altered the land and natural resources, both materially and symbolically. I argue that the Wall restructured Israeli visual organization of the landscape in Palestine to the detriment of Palestinians’ presence on, and relationship with, the land on a colossal scale. For Palestinians, the construction of the Wall constituted, among other violations (such as withholding access to medical 2019 The American Studies Association 1060 | American Quarterly care, education, housing, work, or agricultural fields), a visual violation of their ever-shrinking landscape. This visual violence has instigated a range of critical responses from Palestinian artists centering on visualizing the claustrophobic living conditions that the Israeli regime created. Among these visual artists are Yazan Khalili, Larissa Sansour, Raeda Saadeh, Samar Hazboun, and Khaled Jarrar, as well as architects such as Sandi Hilal, in addition to the numerous anonymous artists who engage with the Wall through graffiti art. The Wall: A Brief Contextualization The Wall in Palestine is not the first apparatus of partition, incarceration, or enclosure constructed by Israel. One could argue that since the 1947 vote for the United Nations Partition Plan, Resolution 181, settler colonial border formation was strongly reinforced in Palestine. The border apparatus in Palestine was solidified with the 1948 establishment of the Israeli state, which entailed the forceful displacement and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of over 500 towns and agricultural lands.3 Palestinians refer to the events of 1948 as the Nakbah (or Nakba), Arabic for catastrophe. The militarization of Palestinian towns, the permit system that imposed travel restrictions on the Palestinian citizens of Israel (1949–66), land enclosures and confiscations, and the rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees were invigorated throughout the first decade of the newly established Jewish state, and have continued till the present day. In 1967, with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Israeli border control and regimes of surveillance were aggressively intensified, targeting the occupied civilian population (in the form of curfews, blockades, checkpoints, and incarceration), in addition to continuous policies further dispossessing and displacing Palestinians from their lands. The Israeli Wall is hence situated within a longer history of state separation, enclosures, and border enforcement in Palestine, which is crucial for understanding the Wall in the context of settler colonial expansion and racial segregation as well as of Palestinians’ relationship to these bordered spaces. Today, the Wall operates through incarcerating and confining Palestinian bodies to regulated spaces, but it does not, as the Israeli government claims, create a separation between Israelis and Palestinians; instead, it actually runs through Palestinian spaces, dividing Palestinian communities from one another and from their urban centers or agricultural lands. Furthermore, the Wall separates Palestinians holding West Bank or Gaza Strip identity cards from other Palestinians who have Israeli Militarized Borders in the Work of Palestinian Artist Raeda Saadeh | 1061 identity cards or Jerusalem residency cards. It also further isolates Palestinians from the rest of historic Palestine, due to the spatial incarceration produced by the Wall within the larger matrix of checkpoints, the military permit system, and segregated roads in occupied Palestine. In June 2002 Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the then Israeli minister of defense, initiated the construction of the Wall. The Wall was given multiple names by the National and Regional Planning Department in the Ministry of Interior: “security fence,” “separation fence,” and “separation barrier.” The emphasis on the security and the minimizing of the structure’s physical presence, through terms such as fence instead of wall, are political, and the effects of the Wall on Palestinian lives are thus minimized. For example, former B’Tselem researcher Eyal Hareuveni argued that he chose to call the structure a “separation barrier,”4 since only 10 percent of the structure is in the form of a concrete wall. Centering on the statistical—as in proportional—aspect of the Wall’s sections that are fencing or concrete is a rather politicized measurement. For most Palestinians, the structure slicing their landscape is referred to as jidar, the Arabic word for Wall, or more accurately jidar al fasl or jidar al fasl al ‘unsory, the separation wall or the racist separation wall (or Apartheid Wall), respectively. In this essay, I refer to the structure as the “Wall” to highlight the political, racial, and spatial history, trajectory, and repercussions that the Wall embodies and projects. By capitalizing the first letter of the word, I intend to signify the singularity of the experience that the Wall has produced for me and many of the Palestinians to whom I have spoken. By 2006 it became evident that for most of its route, the Wall was being built inside the West Bank (east of the Green Line: the ceasefire line between the Palestinian territories and the Israeli state), annexing almost 9.4 percent of the West Bank territory.5 Sixty-one kilometers of the Wall—cutting through urban areas such as Jerusalem, Tulkarem, Qalqiliya, and Bethlehem—consist of an eight-to-nine-meter-high concrete barrier.6 In agricultural areas, the structure consists of wire fencing, ditches, razor wire, groomed sand paths, an electronic monitoring system, patrol roads, and a buffer zone. The Wall as planned spans a total of 810 kilometers, twice the length of the Green Line. In July 2004 the Wall became a headline in Israeli, Palestinian, and international media, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague issued an advisory opinion, “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”7 The ICJ called on Israel to immediately cease the construction of the Wall and to dismantle the sections that had already been built.8 Israel completely ignored the ICJ ruling, and the Wall’s construction continued as planned. 1062 | American Quarterly The Wall in Palestine is clearly a continuation of policies concretely absenting the population: the route of the Wall has been planned on the basis of an assumption of the absence of Palestinians on the map and on the land. The construction of the Wall also transgresses temporal sequences, rendering the Wall as existing a priori to Palestinian homes or infrastructure. Thus, when the route of the Wall, as it was plotted on maps, cut through existing Palestinian homes or neighborhoods, the Israeli army demolished them to make way for the Wall. Visual Sovereignty I grew up in Palestine witnessing it as a colonized and militarized land; the Israeli state and its military apparatus have turned the Palestinian landscape, horizontally and vertically, into a visual laboratory of surveillance, erasure, and border control.9 Empirically speaking, Palestine is not an exceptional case of visual dominance by a colonial power. States, more significantly colonial and settler colonial states, have understood the significance of visual power as a means for domination and surveillance.10 Visual dominance is manifested through differential power relations vis-à-vis a state’s visual superiority, through which dominant institutions maintain power over who can see what, who is being watched, and who is hidden. It is against this colonial regime of visual domination that the work of Palestinian artists should be read as forcefully subversive. Gil Hochberg has argued that the unequal distribution of visual rights is key to Palestinian–Israeli relations and renders the Palestinian population, which Israel governs and controls, at a visual disadvantage.11 Palestinian traces on the land are continuously being erased by the Israeli state, while their lives and movements are constantly being surveilled. Hochberg shows that the Israeli state holds the power to rearrange the spatial and visual domain of the population it occupies.12 Hence the subversive visual projects created by Palestinian artists produce a “counter-visuality” to hegemonic state representation and uphold a “right to be seen.”13 Using the work of Raeda Saadeh, however, I argue that the language of rights in visual politics falls short when explaining the Palestinian culture of countervisuality. While Palestinian art does indeed subvert Israeli’s visual dominance, I suggest that it enacts claims to sovereignty, rather than rights. My research suggests that the language of “visual rights” is not intelligible to noncitizens of an occupying state. Instead I use the term visual sovereignty, which was coined, Militarized Borders in the Work of Palestinian Artist Raeda Saadeh | 1063 developed, and circulated by indigenous scholars.14 Inspired by Haudenosaunee scholar Jolene Rickard,15 I borrow the concept of visual sovereignty to describe what some Palestinian artists articulate through the language of liberation. While Palestinians often do not use the word siyadah to describe sovereignty in their discourse, they nonetheless perform, articulate, and circulate terms that express popular sovereignties, through concepts of tahrir and istiqlal (liberation and independence, respectively), as an anticolonial discourse.16 These forms of emergent popular sovereignties challenge state authority, forge new forms of collectivity,17 and resist displacement and dispossession. Visual sovereignty, therefore, is a form of performative sovereignty that expresses desires for liberation and independence, as does another key concept in Palestinian political discourse: sumoud (steadfastness). For those subjected to settler colonial regimes and refusing to live under such conditions, art becomes a site through which subversion of dominant visual politics demands liberation from the colonial regime of visual intelligibility. It is art that does not seek recognition; rather, it operates through a politics of refusal18: a refusal to seek acknowledgment or recognition from and within colonial semantics. Unsettling of Visual Politics in Raeda Saadeh’s Performance Art I discuss Saadeh’s video Arctic Action (2018) through the lens of visual sovereignty to demonstrate how it performs the politics of refusal in gestures of persistence that defy colonial borders. Saadeh offers an ironic critique of the notion of recognition and locates resistance in the ordinary and everyday practices of living. In the white landscape of the Nordic Arctic, Saadeh is shown in the video standing before an imagined audience of nations’ representatives at a world summit (fig. 1). She welcomes the audience, then murmurs sarcastically that there is “no audience.” Saadeh addresses the imagined audience with a crisis that requires the nations’ support. She holds a printed speech in her hand but tells the story in a hakawati (traditional storyteller) technique. Against the backdrop of snow bisected by a line of flags, Saadeh narrates a love story across a militarized border. Cinderella, the protagonist in the story, escapes her family home because she was being forced to marry Saaid, and in order to find her lover, Ahmad. The crisis intensifies when Cinderella faces a military checkpoint and a wall that prevents her from reaching Ahmad, who is on the other side. Saadeh ends her speech by rearticulating the urgency of this crisis while asking the representatives in the imagined audience to “solve this problem.” 1064 | American Quarterly The seriousness of the setting—a podium with a microphone and a lineup of flags, and the artist’s first words in welcoming national representatives—is contrasted with the hakawati style, the choice of a renowned folktale name, Cinderella, and the content of the story. On the one hand, there is the absurdity of addressing a world summit to help Cinderella and Ahmad meet, for their separation is clearly a product of a larger military regime and bordered reality, which is the “problem” that should be solved first. Moreover, the ordinariness of this love story, which is unrealized because of the militarized separation regime, is often the rule and not the exception on lands infested with militarized and securitized borders. The dissonance between the setting of the world summit and the everydayness of the “problem” and the manner it is presented in (traditional storytelling style) creates a satiric aura to the performance. One cannot but laugh at the placement of Cinderella and Ahmed’s story at a world summit, where the audience is left with the plea, “we must find a solution.” In her statement about this work, Saadeh writes: Figure 1. Raeda Saadeh, Arctic Action (2018). Screenshot from YouTube, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=E6HbRgWEi3o. Used with the permission of the artist. The occupying force has many facets: it can take the shape of physical tangible realities of the everyday, such as in a wall of concrete, a fence, a checkpoint, a curfew, a barrier of stone—or it can reassign its force unto a face of a child, a home, a language, and cultural, traditional expectations. . . . at times, [the woman] feels that it is almost as if she has to assume a sort of madness in her behavior so that she can live unharmed by oppression, in an attempt to always protect those she loves from negative forces of fear.19 Militarized Borders in the Work of Palestinian Artist Raeda Saadeh | 1065 Saadeh’s work sarcastically mimics, and hence critiques, the plea of the colonized to seek recognition from states that enforce the very conditions that strip the possibility for recognition. In other words, this recognition ironically constitutes the very reason that there is a “problem” today that needs be solved. Clearly, the inability of the lovers to meet is derived from a history and legacy of partitions, separation and militarized surveillance, and the border apparatus. The partition of Palestine and the militarization of borders were created by an assembly of nations (the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine—Resolution 181), at which Saadeh’s performance is possibly hinting. Saadeh murmurs that there is no audience to listen, let alone find a solution. Madness, therefore, becomes an embodiment of the politics of refusal, to use Simpson’s term.20 This refusal requires having one’s political sovereignty upheld while unsettling the legitimacy of those who are in the position of recognizing it.21 Saadeh employs madness in her performative gesture of redress narrating the mundaneness of a love story to create a performance that protests both the absurdity of Israeli military border regime, checkpoints, and the Wall and the quest for international recognition, acknowledgment, or support from the audience—or lack thereof. Ultimately, Saadeh offers a critique of Palestinian politicians who resort to asking for recognition from regimes who are not interested in listening and who created the “problem” in the first place. Cinderella in Saadeh’s performance is a powerful woman defying familial patriarchal pressures to marry someone she doesn’t love. Although she was unable to cross militarized borders, Cinderella is persistent in trying to do so. Palestinian persistence in defying militarized borders is evident in Saadeh’s earlier work. In a performance titled Going to School (2013), Saadeh appears as a Palestinian schoolgirl carrying a tall ladder in her backpack (fig. 2). The performance suggests that this girl routinely uses the ladder to cross from her home to the school on the other side of the Wall. Saadeh contrasts the ordinary act of going to school with the extraordinary violence that the Wall imposes on Palestinians’ daily lives. Refusing to obey the immobility that the Wall’s structure and visual force execute, the schoolgirl persists in trying to cross. Ultimately, the photograph is a performance of visual sovereignty. It subverts the power that the Wall holds visually and materially on the landscape and depicts the girl’s body as an embodiment of the act of crossing and refusal to comply with, and an interruption of, the colonial landscape.22 Conclusion Our world is increasingly securitized: rivers, seas, lands, or skies are militarized frontiers in the service of settler colonial or imperial states’ extractive aspiration 1066 | American Quarterly and genocidal policies. It is not surprising that we have seen linkages drawn in artistic and academic milieus between settler colonialism in Palestine and the Americas. Indeed, the Israeli-constructed Wall in the West Bank and the US wall along the US–Mexico border are meant to block movement of indigenous, racialized, and othered bodies into Israel or the US. The similarity between the two walls and their carceral architecture is conspicuous. Palestinian artists, such as Khaled Jarrar, who has produced art about the Wall in Palestine, are making these connections visible; see, for example, Jarrar’s 2016 work Khaled’s Ladder, which was installed on the Mexican side of the US–Mexico border in Juarez.23 An examination of Saadeh’s artwork, which I present as an invitation for further investigating the work of other indigenous artists, demonstrates that art, in Palestine and among different indigenous nations, is a crucial site for political subversion that cultivates and archives affective critiques of state violence and settler colonial sovereignties. Figure 2. Raeda Saadeh, “Going to School” (2013). Used with the permission of the artist. Militarized Borders in the Work of Palestinian Artist Raeda Saadeh | 1067 Notes I am thankful to Sunaina Maira for inviting me to be a part of this valuable conversation and for putting this panel together. I want to thank Shawk Ani and Simone Rutkowitz for taking the time to review, edit and provide feedback. Thank you to the Center for Palestine Studies for their continued support in my scholarly productions. 1. Vladimir Ze’ve Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall—We and the Arabs,” November 4, 1923, www.marxists. de/middleast/ironwall/ironwall.htm. 2. Eyal Hareuveni, “Life Interrupted: The Long-Term Affects of the Separation Fence” (Hebrew), B’Tselem, 2012, www.btselem.org/download/201210_arrested_development_heb.pdf. 3. Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: Zed Books, 2012). 4. Eyal Hareuveni, “UCP International Symposium—The ICJ and Israel’s Wall Five Years On,” 2009, vimeo.com/7283556. 5. UNOCHA-oPt. “Special Focus: Barrier Update. Seven Years after the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the Barrier: The Impact of the Barrier in the Jerusalem Area,” 2011, www.ochaopt.org/content/barrier-update-seven-years-after-advisory-opinion-international-courtjustice-barrier; Salem A. Thawaba, “Jerusalem Walls: Transforming and Segregating Urban Fabric,” African and Asian Studies 10.2–3 (2011): 121–42, doi.org/10.1163/156921011X586997. 6. UNOCHA-oPt. “Special Focus.” 7. International Court of Justice, “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion,” 2004, www.icj-cij.org/en/case/131. 8. Jeff Halper, Obstacles to Peace: A Framing of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 3rd ed. (Jerusalem: ICHAD, 2005). 9. Gil Z. Hochberg, Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, “Framing Visual Politics: Photography of the Wall in Palestine,” Visual Anthropology Review 33.1 (2017): 18–27. 10. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 11. Hochberg, Visual Occupations. 12. Hochberg. 13. Hochberg. 14. Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Macarena Gómez-Barris, “How to Block the Extractive View,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 24.4 (2018): 527–32. 15. Jolene Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110.2 (2011): 465–86. 16. Amahl Bishara, “Sovereignty and Popular Sovereignty for Palestinians and Beyond,” Cultural Anthropology 32.3 (2017): 349–58. 17. Bishara, 350. 18. Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 19. Raeda Saadeh, Arctic Action (2018), www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6HbRgWEi3o. 20. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus. 21. Simpson, 11. 22. Gómez-Barris, “How to Block the Extractive View.” 23. Elena Scarpa, Palestinian Artist Khaled Jarrar Installs “Ladder Installation” at Infamous US/Mexico Border Crossing, 2016, myartguides.com/posts/news/palestinian-artist-khaled-jarrar-installs-ladderinstallation-at-infamous-usmexico-border-crossing/.