The Object Quality of the Problem: Palestine/Israel was an exhibition held at the Henry Moore Institute 1st June - 27th August 2008.  The ‘problem’ is the use of space in Palestine-Israel, a conflict most often explored in the increasingly dominant medium of the moving image. However, this exhibition proposed that the quality of this problem has a strongly sculptural aspect. For more information on this exhibiton please refer to the Henry Moore Institute website.

For the complete version of this text (footnotes included) please refer to the pdf download.

Space and the Other
Kamal Boullata

The ‘object quality of the problem’ is, as well, its ‘subject quality’. At first glance, the characterization of the so-called ‘Palestine/Israel space’ as being ‘contested’ insinuates some sort of symmetry. Conversely, the ambition to offer ‘a sculptural reading’ via film, video and photographs of a spatial problem vexed by what Eyal Weizman coined ‘the politics of verticality’ is a challenging proposal . The viewer here is invited to contemplate the subject of contestation and recognize that ‘the fact that the space of Palestine/Israel is so contested means that it is regulated not only horizontally but also vertically” .

On further consideration, however, one realizes that the term ‘contested space’ conveniently overlooks the heart and soul of ‘the problem’ -- which is materialized in life as the historical struggle between the colonizer and the colonized. When the introduction in the exhibition’s catalogue delineates ‘the problem’ at hand as being “the problem of Palestine” , it implicitly restricts our focus to the present political state as it has developed following the Oslo Accords. What is missing is a whole history that since the late 19th century has been shaped by European Zionist settlers --who had already begun to establish colonies in Palestine with the support of imperial powers -- and by the mounting resistance they faced from the country’s native Arab population. As you know, proceeding from a similar assumption of Palestine as ‘contested space’ (an abstraction beset by conflicting claims) in 1917 the mandated ‘space’ called Palestine was promised away to be ‘a national home for the Jewish people’. The man making the promise was the British Empire’s foreign secretary of the period Lord Arthur James Balfour who in his Declaration reduced the country’s indigenous people to being Palestine’s ‘non-Jewish communities’ .

Of course the word ‘space’ in the context of this exhibition, which has the reading of Weizman’s conclusions at its foundation, refers to a specific geographical region that is mainly the West Bank, which has been lying under a brutal military occupation since 1967. The abstract and seemingly neutral term ‘contested space’ is the artistic or academic version of the somewhat rougher expression, ‘disputed territories’, which is used by the Israeli authorities when referring to all Palestinian territories that fell under their military occupation and to additional territories when and as they too fall under military and settler occupation. This so-called space is not fixed or static, but is subject to an ongoing historic dynamic. The ‘space’ is more properly historicized as personal and civic property which one side takes and accumulates, and which the other is dispossessed of. Words such as ‘contention’ or ‘dispute’ do not accurately describe or weigh the substantive, historical relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.

Moreover, the term ‘contested space’ not only flies in the face of the historical background of the country as a living whole, it also overlooks the cultural ramifications of the significance of words associated with ‘space’ such as the word for ‘place’ in both Arab and Israeli culture.

In Arabic makaan, meaning ‘place’, derives from the trilateral root makuna and makkana meaning ‘to be fixed’, ‘stable’, and ‘firmly established’. By defining the parameters of space makaan is associated with the word kawn meaning ‘universe’ . Thus, the Arabic word connotes the fixity of place in the universe which in turn is understood to encompass the vast multitudes of places.

In Hebrew, on the other hand, the word for ‘place’ does not simply specify a locality. In its noun form makom, simply means ‘space’ or ‘area to be filled or occupied’. By preceding it with the article ha, the word ha-makom literally means ‘the place’. Coming from the trilateral root k-w-m, a word such as kiyyum could mean ‘existence’ as well as a ‘settled area ’. Most importantly, unlike the Arabic word makaan that has no metaphysical connotations whatsoever, HaMakom also refers to God . Believed to be omnipresent, “God is [thus] not only THE place, but place itself” .

The overlapping meaning simultaneously embodying a physical and a metaphysical reference in the Hebrew word for ‘place’ seems to translate in a nutshell the embryonic components of the national myth perpetuated by secular and religious Zionists alike. Aided by imperial powers, Zionists thus succeeded in establishing their colonies in Palestine. As soon as Jewish settlers were entrenched in one place they moved on to expand their exclusive domain in what was claimed by religious Zionists to be God’s territory that had been promised to them.

Today, perhaps the most glaring illustration of Zionist expansionist policies in Palestine is the fact that sixty years after its establishment, the Jewish state has yet to declare what its borders are. Theoretically, its ‘space’ is coterminous with the ‘space’ occupied by an omnipresent God, which is to say, a space with neither actual nor theoretical limit. Basing its claim on religious myths that propagate the chosen ‘self’ versus the demonized ‘other’, the militarized state of Israel has never ceased creating or extending new frontiers and new settlements. Meanwhile, the world goes on watching how Israeli settlements expand or proliferate, continuing to be illegally constructed on usurped Palestinian lands on the West Bank—the very lands referred to at our event as ‘contested space’. Here, armed Israeli settlers are encouraged by their state to contest this space—often consciously modeling their relationship to the native Palestinian ‘others’ on that of the Biblical Israelites who held to a negative view of native gentiles as ‘others’