Dorit Naaman

Jerusalem, We Are Here is an interactive documentary that digitally brings back Palestinians to the Jerusalem neighborhoods from which they were expelled during the 1948 war. Almost 70 years after the Nakba (Palestinian catastrophe), participants collaborated on a suite of short films and audio files organized as an online walking tour, and a map was developed to house the neighborhood residents’ documents, photos, and stories. As an archive of participants’ stories, Jerusalem, We Are Here challenges hegemonic ideas about Jerusalem that abide by a notion of singular sovereignty and entail forgetting those who are still awaiting justice. In what follows below, Dorit Naaman, Alliance Atlantis Professor of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and the director of Jerusalem, We Are Here, discusses the process of creating Jerusalem, We Are Here and using mapping to bring the Palestinian past into the present in order to consider a different, possible future. Where appropriate, the editors of GrayLit have included screenshots of Jerusalem, We Are Here, hyperlinks, and quotes from participants, but these barely begin to capture the depth and intricacy of the project, which is freely available online.

I found the map sixty years after the Nakba (or the Palestinian catastrophe, when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War). The map gave me—an Israeli Jerusalemite—a capacity to move beyond the Israeli idiom of an “Arab neighborhood,” an idiom that means high real-estate value but no Palestinians in sight. I started looking for the Palestinian owners of the homes, tracing documents, maps, bills, and photos.

As I passed houses in the neighborhood, I could “see” Hala Sakakini and her sister Dumia’s birthday party, a tea at the Moushabeck’s, and Marina’s mother, Anna, posing as a cocky teenager, wearing shorts, a sailor’s cap, and a cigarette in hand. All of these I came to know by the way of photographs, and slowly but surely, I became an embodied archive of the Palestinian history of Katamon, an odd experience, given that it was not my ancestral history, and that many of the Palestinians from Katamon who grew up in the diaspora had no access to those memories. I started wondering how to share this knowledge with Palestinian descendants, and how to make visible that which most Israelis have no interest in knowing. 

But then a different process started, and this one caught me by surprise: the more I learned about the Palestinian history of the neighborhood, the more Israelis wanted to know. It took me a while to realize that humanizing the Palestinians, educating Israelis about them, and sharing their stories, was a necessary, but utterly insufficient condition to evoke change. I realized that I wanted to bring the Palestinian past into the Israeli present, to trouble the notion of ultimate and ethnically singular sovereignty, and to try and imagine a different future for us all. In mainstream Israeli discourse, the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees equals the destruction of the State of Israel and is thus a “no-go” discursive zone. For most Palestinians, the Right of Return is at once a personal right and a collective right, without which no solution to the political impasse can emerge. For a long time I wasn’t sure if I could make an intervention into this seemingly zero-sum perception of territorial control. But slowly, organically, a non-didactic path forward emerged. 

In Bethlehem, an audience member asked me: “aren’t you worried this map will serve as the basis for claims for reparations or Return?” My answer was: “no, I am no longer afraid. It will make me happy, because without reparations and Return, we cannot move forward.” I also said that in the 1940s the neighborhood housed multiple couples across the religious/ethnic divide of Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, and no-one was expelled or shunned. It certainly was a more tolerant time, and if we want to move forward, perhaps we need to look back.

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