Issue 15
—Autumn 2024.5

Violence: State Practice

Listening to Maps Closely

[work in progress]

Jumanah Abbas

Abstract

This contribution comprises some elements from a work in progress, short excerpts from an unfinished project that proposes to combine video, 3D modelling, oral narrative and image sources to visualise the untold story of the Israeli occupation of the Jawlan communities and territories of the Golan Heights in its political, socio-economic and cultural elements. (Jawlan is the Arabic name for Golan.) The work-in-progress introduced here is part of a larger process of collectively documenting Jawlani’s resistance to the occupation. In these excerpts we see the attempt to formulate acts of resistance to the intentional erasure of the Jawlani community. The core of the contribution is to consider how tools of mapping used by the occupying power might be repurposed to reverse the power inscribed in representation and begin to include the voices of the Jawlani community.

On 13 February 1982, a massive crowd gathered in the town square of Majdal Al Shams, which was once part of Syria but currently part of the occupied territories of Golan Heights (Jawlan in Arabic). During the six-month protest, children, women, religious leaders and activists demanded rights to their land, their identity as Arab Jawlani, their language and existence. As a form of retaliation, the Israeli army surrounded each town left in the Golan Heights, blocking roads and closely monitoring each movement while knocking on each home’s door to distribute the newly issued Israeli ID for members of the Jawlani community. Families and individuals rejected becoming part of the Israeli state, choosing to be identified as stateless instead.

The psycho-social experience of these events has disrupted the lived experience of Jawlani communities, causing a series of counter-reactions to Israel’s perpetual violence, which is continually imposed, and yet normalised. In school textbooks, for instance, the annexed territories of the Golan Heights are presented as part of the Israeli nation; Jawlani youth are encouraged to enroll in the Israeli army, study at Israeli Universities and institutes and enjoy the full benefits of being an Israeli citizen. Encroachment comes in all forms and in all modes of representation, as does resistance. What follows are some scenes from an ongoing work of assemblage that attempts to resist the multiple encroachments of the occupation.

In this scene from the strike, Sheikh Saygh narrates, “we [the Jawlani people] collectively decided to strike” against a backdrop of crowds protesting in Sultan Al-Atrash square. The 1982 six-month strike is recognised as the community’s political formation against the unilateral annexation of the Golan Heights.

In this scene from a composite video work exploring the historical forces behind the formation of Jawlan identity, a resident of Majdal Shams describes the action of the 1982 strike. Sheikh Hassan Sabbagh recalls, “we would go back home, we would eat, then go back to the public square.”

These animated scenes are constructed as an assemblage of spatial representations to provide alternative ways of learning about the history of Jawlan. The archive is animated to reflect how visual representations of Jawlanis have become disconnected from their lived experiences. These scenes are assembled as part of the process of (un)mapping, tracing, sketching and representing one trajectory of the occupied Jawlani community challenges the dominant postcolonial representation of these subjects. It is a process that not only invites looking at images but also listening to them closely.

In Listening to Images, Tina Campt describes a method of recalibrating photography and documenting quotidian practices that “rupture the sovereign gaze” and “refuse the very terms of photographic subjection.”^[i] To listen is to engage with the sonic registers of photographs, and to become attuned to the sensory modality that is often silenced by the state-colonial grammar of the archive.

Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Duke University Press, 2017.

Through listening to the maps closely, the project aligns with other emancipatory practices that seek to confront violence without simply reproducing it. It seeks to realise Denise da Silva’s proposition that art can enable a confrontation with violences that “can be catalogued without the risk of reproducing colonial effects.”[i] Maps are predominantly flat, two-dimensional drawing that have reduced and nullified the various social, cultural and political interactions that exist in communities. They are disengaged from the realities and multiple histories, offering only singular perspectives. As such, the language of modern representation reinforces the linear concept of time that does not take account of the ongoing processes of rupture. This project attempts to disengage from this language and offer a different approach towards representation.

[i] https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336390/reading-art-as-confrontation/

Munir Fakhr Eldin in speaking of Jawlan argues that to eulogize the “lost singularity of meaning” is to offer “a new meaning of hope,” and that this is possible through the process of collecting and assembling local narratives. As a result of such assemblage, Munir indicates that one may discover “a flow of new memories and stories” that refuse the settler-colonial project. Collecting these old memories entails producing new ones and the production of these visual assemblages elicits new mode of seeing and listening.

The stakes of this project are in the futurity that is possible through the multiplicity of representations and the re-assemblages of the archival. Each of the following scenes takes a site of violence, where encroachment is embodied in a either a place, or an object. Collectively, they question the past paradigm, and propose an archive for the future of Jawlan, one that maps territories, and the unmaps their colonial order, and in return, sketches, traces and represents the shared knowledge for the upcoming generations and their futures.

FIRST SITE: Atrash Square

In this scene, Sheikh Saigh’s account is narrated against a digital model of the public square, which contains a sculpture by artist Hassan Khater. All buildings are oriented to face the monument. The guardian-like figure is a stoic embodiment of the past that haunts the present moment as it looms large over the passers-by.

Towards the end of the scene, there are images of masses congregating in the public square. They demand liberation and reject the unilateral annexation law and throw Israel-issued identification cards onto the ground and burn them. The images have been gathered from various individuals from the internet. We also hear one resident of Majdal Shams reaffirms that Jawlan is a unique cultural and political space and a contested site that remains subject to colonial occupation.

The visual assemblage of the digital 3D-modelling of Sultan Al-Atrash square, derived from a documentary on urban plans of the four remaining Syrian villages in occupied Jawlan, with audio testimonies, video footage and images of the 1982 strike presents critical ways of understanding identity politics in Jawlan.

SECOND SITE: Mount Hermon

The Mount Hermon ski resort is typical of settler-colonial projects created through the physical alteration of the mountains, erasing villages and agricultural lands. It is located on Jabal al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon), which strategically overlooks the territories of Syria, Lebanon and the occupied territories of Palestine. Jabal el Sheikh is historically referred to as communal land that was not subject to ownership. The “Beyond Jabal el-Sheikh Resort” section of the project begins with Abu Jabal’s definition of Mount Hermon as communal land, which the Israeli state misused to extend its ownership over the mountains. The video continues with Abu Jabal’s explanation of the physical alteration of Jabal el-Sheikh’s landscape, including expanded military checkpoints and the illegal construction of “settler-only” roads, which normalised the state’s occupation over Jabal al-Sheikh and the refashioning of communal lands into ski-resorts.
In the video, the paradoxes and tensions in the vestigial digital model of Jabal al-Sheikh are presented against documentation of the idealised alternatives of landscape and lived experiences. Sheikh Sayegh speaks of Mount Hermon as a distant and far-away place, one that he has not visited.

THIRD SITE: Jebt el zeit village

We learn that Jebt el zeit village – a destroyed site, an erased history – is a settlement that was rebuilt twice by commando operations on top of the ruins of the village. Abu Jabal narrates that today the former residents of the settlement rely on agriculture. At the end of the video, Abu Jabal is asked about the future of the ski resort, the reason for the destruction of the village. His answer reveals that he hasn’t been to the mountains since the opening of the resort. This recollection of the history of Mount Hermon reveals his resolve not to visit it. This oral testimony, alongside the visual illustration of Jabal al-Sheikh’s material, has a double symbolic function. Firstly, it reveals the state’s control over Jawlan’s lands and resources, and the “normalisation” of colonial projects that continues until the present day. Secondly, it discloses the paradox between the vestigial digital model of Jabal al-Sheikh/Mount Hermon and the physical alterations to the landscape.
Whether it is through Abu Jabal’s own determination not to visit the resort or the visual exercise that begins to counter the hegemonic settler-colonial representation of Mount Hermon, both accounts are about acts of resistance.

FOURTH SITE: Lake Masa’ada

This scene is of Lake Masa’ada identified as Lake Rim by the settlers. The video begins with a conversation between long-time Jawlani resident Hayel Abu Jabal and Muna Dajani, in which Abu Jabal states, “the battle over water resources has been a longstanding battle with the occupation authorities.” Animated drawings, accomopanied by narration from different points in history reconstruct scenarios of the development of formal and informal water infrastructures by the Jawlanis, such as the creation of water ponds and the construction of tanks, artificial lakes, pipes and networks of pipelines. The accounts of different forms of water infrastructure in Jawlan were written by scholar Muna Dajani.

The aerial footage of Birket Ram and the digital scene of an agricultural landscape does not present an accurate cartographic depiction, because the land itself is much denser and more populated with local crops and fauna. Instead, the viewer is drawn to consider the different local responses against and relations with Israeli’s hegemonic conquest of the Jawlani agriculture systems and economy.

The animation, guided by a counter-map and informed by the testimonies of local farmers, reflects the community’s self-defined politics of care towards harvesting and preserving the land. Ways of dividing and distributing plots are communal efforts to establish water and agricultural cooperatives that are depicted in the animated video.

These scenes recognise the power relations and asymmetries of the occupation— the violence of settler-colonialism— and propose a world-making ontology. They are a practice of counter-cartography that falls outside of colonial logic, imperial techniques and its modes of knowledge. Against the settler-colonial frontier imaginary, this exercise in counter-cartography begins to sketch, trace, recollect and represent the shared knowledge of the Jawlanis about their homeland.

The visuals counter the Israeli representation of land and property regimes: they defy the formality and abstraction of the maps that normalise the occupation of Jawlan. The exercise is a combination of both maps and animated videos in which the colonial order is not restructured and the Jawlan is not reterritorialised through a conventional map, nor are the lands redrawn to its geo-historical boundaries in the animated videos. Instead, this project is a form of visual assemblage that networks researchers, scholars, artists, designers and activists who confront the state’s contemporary project of violence by refusing singular modes of representation. Furthermore, it resists the mechanisms of colonial cartography that range from cataloguing, naming, labelling and representing.

The modes of counter-mapping Jawlani lands and the resulting counter-cartography are aligned with emancipatory political practices and their non-hegemonic and non-representational worldviews. Counter-cartography is a critical reflection of dominant spatial imaginations. The language of the alternative spatial imaginaries of the Jawlan begins to disturb, refuse and flip hegemonic narratives towards thinking spatial issues anew.