The Antiquities Threshold: Gaza's Ruins and the Mandatory Muting of Ottoman Heritage (Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Volume 8, Number 1, Summer 2021, pp. 387-394)

European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948: Between Contention and Connection, 2021

When British forces took Palestine from the Ottomans in 1917, the territory's antiquities were high on their list of priorities. Fuelled by a long-standing British Protestant interest in-not to say obsession with-the Holy Land, 1 measures to establish control over and soi-disant protection of ancient and historic sites were quickly rolled out. These were in some respects the logical conclusion of decades of European and American archaeological interventions in the region in which investigation of tells 2 and other sites was often paired (especially in the British and American expeditions) with the desire to "prove" Biblical narratives and identify existing Palestinian sites with places named in scripture. But Mandate antiquities policy was also a multi-layered strand of cultural diplomacy, asserting British stewardship of the Holy Land

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Ruins typically mark the endpoint of historical stories, regarded as objects worthy of attention only for the bygone times they represent. But what might a history reveal if it took ruins as its departure point? How would a history of ruins look? This article aims to write ruins into history by pondering the case of Gaza in the aftermath of World War I. The ruins of the city, it is argued here, were the site of a transformation in the modalities of urban change: what had been a ubiquitous and organic process of evolution in the cityscapes of the Middle East up to the late nineteenth century was replaced by top-down spatial convention, imposed by the modern state. This transformation deprived ruins from their long-standing role as essential elements of the urban landscape and flattened them into mere emblems of cultural decay. Consistent with the ontological stance of the progress/decline binary, by the early twentieth century, spatial ruination had become regarded as a unidirectional rather than multidirectional process. This modern framing of ruins proved especially significant for postwar Gaza, whose reconstruction efforts were consequently plagued by internal contradiction.

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Abstract: The British Department of Antiquities (DOA) in Palestine intentionally constructed historical discontinuities to distance British rule from its Ottoman predecessor and tie it instead to earlier periods in the history of the land. To do this, however, the DOA had to unwittingly rely upon, and revalidate, political and cultural patterns laid by the Ottomans in the age of reforms. The article exposes this dynamic by delving into the written and visual record of the DOA in one of its first preservation projects in the " Tower of Ramleh. " The case of the tower as a multifaceted ruin shows that the " post-Ottoman " historical framing for the twentieth-century Middle East is not merely a matter of analytic investigation in hindsight, but a reality acknowledged and shaped by historical actors. It reveals thus far hidden agendas of the British rule in Palestine and enables the re-introduction of the history erased by it.

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The Gaza Strip may be the world’s most relentless conflict zone. After decades of destruction and resistance, it is hard to imagine a different reality. But before the Gaza Strip, there was Gaza—a gateway city within an eponymous region with a much-neglected history. Stripped is an exploration of the Gaza borderland that aims to salvage Gaza’s past from the conceptual and historiographic shackles imposed by the current reality of the Gaza Strip, as well as to render imaginable a horizon for Gaza beyond this reality. The work is the first to methodologically depart from the common understanding of the Gaza Strip as purely a consequence of the 1948 war. Instead, Stripped situates Gaza within a century-long history of the Eastern Mediterranean’s integration into the global market economy, the Ottoman-British quest for imperial sovereignty over the Sinai-Palestine-Hijaz desert corridor, and the Palestinian struggle to overcome the urban and environmental destruction of World War I in the face of British and Zionist colonialism. Relying on little-studied sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Hebrew, English, and French, the dissertation explores how the Gaza region adapted to Ottoman agrarian reforms and gravitated into British economic orbit in the Mediterranean. As a result of these processes, Gaza of the late nineteenth century reoriented its economy from land to sea and turned to fully rely on exporting its locally cultivated barley to the British beer-brewing industry overseas. While generating promising growth for some two decades, global demand for grains diversified widely in the early twentieth century, leading to an abrupt collapse of Gaza’s new financial base. Concurrently, the very trade Gaza relied upon sliced this historic borderland into separate zones of imperial domination, turning it into a frontier between the Ottomans and the British. Gaza thus became one of the Middle East’s most devastated battlefronts during the First World War. When Palestine was made a formal political unit under the British Mandate, Gaza was both financially and physically in ruins, forced into a slower, more convoluted historical trajectory than other parts of the country. Ruins and their meanings, therefore, are central to the dissertation’s inquiry, as they turned in the interwar period into a contested ground in the struggle for Gaza’s recovery. Dwelling among the physical debris of their former city, Gazans had to marshal waqf regulations and Ottoman land legislation to restore their urban and agricultural environments against British antiquities preservation and land development schemes. Navigating often contradictory reconstruction initiatives, the people of Gaza toiled to carve themselves a space within the emerging Palestinian national collective as well. However, after a century-long “stripping” of its previous economic, social, and political centrality, Gaza could only remain peripheral to the political upheavals of the Mandate period and finally even remote from the battlefields of the 1948 war. It thus almost naturally emerged as a safe temporary shelter for wartime Palestinian refugees, around which the Israeli and Egyptian armies demarcated the Gaza Strip.

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A New Critical Approach to the History of Palestine,, 2019

Palestinian history has been a widely debated arena of ideological struggle over the past century dominated by two competing narrative trends; an indigenous Palestinian or a settler- colonial Zionist perspective. This chapter aims to situate the Palestinian historical narrative in the last century within a dramatically shifting political context. It reviews the local historical narrative in comparison with alternative narratives. Taha, Hamdan, Palestinian Historical Narrative. In A New Critical Approach to the History of Palestine, edited by Ingrid Hjelm, Hamdan Taha, Ilan Pappe and Thomas Thompson, London and New York, Routledge, 2019: 19-42

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Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 1999

A history of the principal British archaeological institutions in Jerusalem between the two Wars, i.e. between 1917 and 1948, is the subject of the present article. These institutions include the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ), the Department of Antiquities of Palestine (DAP) and the Palestine Archaeological Museum (PAM). The important contribution made by the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), in establishing the BSAJ and in supporting excavations in Jerusalem, is also dealt with. The achievements of these institutions eventually led to a great deal of goodwill and co-operation with the other foreign archaeological institutions in Jerusalem at that time, particularly with the French and American Schools, and to the flourishing of internationally sponsored archaeological activities in the Holy Land. The British Mandate period is generally regarded as the formative 'Golden Age' of archaeology in Palestine.

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Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 2000

Résumé/Abstract During the years that Conrad Schick was a resident of Jerusalem, between 1846 and 1901, he was in close and constant contact with the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), helping British expedition members working in the field and also, importantly, ...

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2017

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A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Art, ed. Ann C. Gunter, 2019

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