Ways of seeing over time: the construction and imagination of ‘historic separation’ in Israeli and Palestinian cultures

• Main Author: Butler, Nina Melissa
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Rhodes University 2016
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/474

There exists an international consensus that Palestinian and Israeli societies are ceaselessly and essentially acrimonious. This thesis argues that the conceptualisation of ‘historic separation’ in Palestine/Israel is supported and nourished by national narratives that follow classic historicism and a linear trajectory of essentialised culture progressing over time. Given these patterns in historiography and cultural expressions, conceptualisations of the future are argued to be dominated by the ‘overdetermined’ and ‘sacralised’ pasts that arrest the ability to conceive of alternative horizons. These national narratives are analysed borrowing from the theorisation of Edward Said on hegemonic culture, and Ranjit Guha’s Subaltern critique of historicism. Zionism is argued to function as a cultural hegemony that operates in a mercurial, selfsustaining and vibrant manner that has the effect of what this thesis terms ‘centrifugal magnetism’ on discourse in the region. Palestinian national narratives are held to be in tangential relation to Zionism (a classic colonial master-narrative), thus entering into a ‘terrible embrace’ of destructive colonial/postcolonial repetition that tends towards violent conflict and the discrimination of minorities. This thesis then proposes a ‘way out’ of this historiographical pattern that is argued to tangibly inform the cultural fabric of the region. By drawing on the later works of Mahmoud Darwish, Mustaffa Hallaj and Said, it is proposed that there are traces of a notion of self and community that can be described as postnational. This demands a reconstruction of narratives of the past in the region in a pluralistic fashion that is based upon shared exilic identity in flux over what Darwish termed an ‘open historical space’. Crucially, this alternative postnational narrative opens up conceptualisations of the future and is founded upon a renewed disposition to temporality. This thesis thus concludes by proposing that an understanding of temporality as ‘ecstatic’ and essential to being (Martin Heidegger) should be included as a crucial consideration for the end to conflict and the attainment of just and equitable futures.