Summary
The settler logic, named by Rana Barakat in “Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History”, of preserving a depopulated Palestinian place as a symbolic museum of a dead past — structures without life — against restoration (or deruination): repatriation of the place as a lived space through return (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.173-175).
Details
- Barakat cautions against efforts to solely preserve Lifta — including UNESCO’s — without emphasis on restoration and return: in the settler narrative Lifta’s exodus is memorialized as a “beginning” to an “end” of Palestinian history there, and the village framed as the “only remaining abandoned Arab village”, although it was not abandoned and is not the only remaining village (PDF p.173).
- “Preservation … is incommensurate with restoration (or deruination). If preservation serves settlers’ interests, then restoration serves Indigenous interests”; “restoration means Palestinians will return to their village — repatriated as a lived space, not as a symbolic museum space of a former past” (PDF p.173).
- Dima Abu Ghoush’s model of Emwas models Barakat’s restoration with life instead of museumification: “We made a model village as a plan for return” (PDF p.175).
Related pages
Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Rana Barakat, Lifta, Emwas, Right of Return