Streetfighting in Ramleh

The town of Ramleh is 20 mins drive east from Tel Aviv and has a “mixed” population of Jews and Palestinians (ca. 80%-20% respectively). Large-scale ethnic cleansing (“Operation Dani”) in 1948 saw the majority of the indigenous Palestinian population driven out across the border into refugeedom (future Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin was there, and first PM, David Ben-Gurion, famously “lent a hand”), but a very few remained or were able to return from nearby sites of refuge [info on Ramleh in 1948]. A bit of a bugger for the architects of ethno-national purity, these remnants and their descendents have, like the rest of the Palestinian minority in Israel, since been the target of the full gamut of Israeli state programmes aimed at their marginalisation or eradication. Aside from legal, economic, and military violence, a range of spatial and commemorative practices have been brought to bear with the aim of divesting the minority of its purchase upon the historic, symbolic, and material fabric of this ancient Palestinian centre.

Reinscribing the town in order that it contribute to the development of a larger national “zionist homelandscape” has involved several complementary types of colonial spatial practice; the demolition and neglect of the remains of the sacked old town has gone hand in hand with the re-ordering of its space in accordance with markers of zionist exclusivity. The remnants of pre-1948 Ramleh are thus buried beneath parking lots and rubbish tips; street names claim the town as zionist, summoning Herzl and Weizmann to wage posthumous war upon the town’s Palestinian residents by seizing their parks and squares, roads and addresses.

OLD RAMLEH UNDER CAR PARK: LEFT - CAR STICKER = 'WE WILL WIN' (Heb.)

The town museum is combined with a memorial to its fallen Israeli soldiers (yad l’banim). Tickets in Hebrew only. A timeline diagram inside allows the town its antiquity, beginning in 705… “in the Land of Israel.” The P word is pointedly absent, leaving it hard to understand who the inhabitants of Ramleh are over the course of “history”. One thing is made clear though – these nameless people lacked gumption. Repeated references to an “abandoned” or “desolate” city and its nameless “inhabitants” seems to jar with the equally frequent attention paid to the site as a target for significant military campaigns, or with its subsequent administrative centrality for the British. Indeed the fact of the town’s location between Jerusalem and Jaffa at the coast (hence its control of trade, pilgrimage, and defence) is avoided by the authors of this history. This silence recurs however – and in so doing announces its logic – as the timeline arrives at 1948 without giving any indication as to why or how the zionist forces took such extensive measures to cleanse and claim the town on their way to the subsequent conquest of nearly 80% of the country. The vanishing of Ramleh’s Palestinian residents from history is in this way wed to an avoidance of the town’s vital geo-strategic location, its historic importance, and the pronounced, premeditated nature of the town’s de-population in July 1948. These acts of excision performed, the timeline allows one bright spot to emerge in a catalogue of flight, plagues, and earthquakes – the museum credits the town with “an impressive church” in 1141. Built by the crusaders.

TICKET TO RAMLEH MUSEUM- ARMED FORCES MEMORIAL

The timeline ends abruptly at 1948: “Operation Dani, Ramle succumbs to the Israeli defense.” The remaining exhibits might well have been put together by the teenage volunteers in the office. A model of a train station with ‘Ramle’ written on the lego-kit plastic building is in a glass box labelled “Ramle Train Station.” The word Palestine and Palestinian are entirely absent. Almost - the only crack in the façade coming due to the awkward fact the British called Palestine Palestine… and so two charts from the 1930s are labelled as such. For non English-speakers, disaster is averted however, as even here, the Hebrew signage accurately describes the map as a P.E.F. product; P.E.F. (indicating “Palestine Exploration Fund”) is then given in Hebrew as “A British Survey” of “The Land of Israel.”

Outside the museum is a sight common throughout Israel. A street sign in Hebrew, English and Arabic is defaced to eradicate the Arabic. Normally this form of public participation indicates an act of nationalist eradication, an affirmation of the state’s aspiration for Jewish domination combined with a gesture of contempt towards its Arab Palestinian citizens. Only, here in Ramleh, the municipality has already minimised the need for such performances by placing signs only in Hebrew and English throughout much of the “mixed” town. The sign outside the museum is in fact an exception, and the act of eradication constitutes a return to the norm; not so much “cleansing” as “dusting off”.

In the face of this enforced zionisation of space, Ramleh’s Palestinian population have limited opportunities for resistance. Municipal planning reflects state and nationalist objectives and so is structured wholesale against normative patterns of participation and organisation by the unwanted minority. Forced into a perverse form of complicity in their own eradication by the daily necessity of mobilising an exclusively Jewish or zionist historic-hagiographic canon to navigate in their home, Palestinian residents have sought alternative means of resistance. The poorest part of the town, home to many Palestinians (and ruined town remnants) as well as a portion of the town’s poorest Jews, is now known as “the Ghetto”. This subversive designation is so widely used amongst residents that even Israel’s establishment newscasters, with eyebrows raised for sure, are compelled to use it as a geographic reference.

In fact they did so when, recently, the matter of Ramleh’s street names gained a flicker of attention in the Israeli media. Indirectly. Ghetto residents petitioned the municipality unsuccessfully for a change in the street-naming practices and a review of current names. The head of the municipality, mayor Yoel Lavie responded to a telephone query from a local Jewish reporter on the subject:

“What? Should I change a name, because Jamal wants to change the name? Because Ahmad wants to change the name? He should change his god! They should all go fuck themselves!"

(An English language web version of a Yedioth article on the event is toned down – this is the actual quote; a streaming mp3 version of the taped conversation is up here for the moment: http://213.8.193.29/msnvideo/glz/yoel.mp3 Here Lavie goes on to ask if Jews who question his stance, such as the journalist, have “become the bitches of every ass-fucking Arab..” [Hebrew])

The Israeli supreme court – albeit in different timbre – has long backed Lavie’s view; petitioned since 1999 by Adalah (a Palestinian legal NGO in Israel) for the use of Arabic on street signs, the court, back in July 2002, ruled that municipalities were under “no binding legal obligation to post signs in Arabic” – despite its formal status as an official language. Perhaps with the knowledge of this full judicial support puffing his sails, mayor Lavie proposed that Ramleh’s Palestinians (“Arabs”) should leave the town and “go live in Jaljuliya” (a Palestinian village in Israel), somewhere he acknowledged had an “Arab name”.

ABOVE: NO ARABIC SIGNAGE IN THE GHETTO

Although unlikely to have figured in the residents’ evaluation of this offer, it ought to be noted that the village of Jaljuliya was itself the scene of recent ethnic cleansing. On January 24^th a nightime military operation was launched against the Palestinian citizens of the village. 36 women, many with children (some pregnant) were taken by force from their families and homes; 8 were eventually forced to leave to the West Bank and barred from returning to the village. No security threat cited. Rather a demographic one… indigenous-foreign bodies breeding in the Jewish state (Pappe, LRB 7-4-06). But the risk of becoming victims of this biopolitical warfare in Jaljuliya was not the issue which sparked protest this week in Ramleh.

Rather, Lavie’s latest crude demonstration that the colossal projects of cultural, material, symbolic and political violence directed against them by the state and its apparatuses had rendered them at once invisible and invalid. Their re-emergence at the level of the municipality (the state) came at the cost of their racist reduction to grotesque caricatures; the degree of contempt shown by the state for its Palestinian citizens underscoring not just their cultural and historical erasure from home, but their concomitant re-location into that invidious space reserved throughout history for the unclean, unwanted, undesirable; for the rootless, the homeless. A space outside recognition yet all too recognisable for anyone familiar with Jewish history.

ABOVE: HOMEMADE GHETTO SIGN - ARABIC AND HEBREW: "TAWFIQ ZIAD" (PALESTINIAN POET AND HISTORIC NATIONAL FIGURE)

Direct action is now being taken in the streets of the Ghetto. In some places street signs have simply been removed. And in others, new ones are being claimed with tape and paper. This is perhaps minor, gesture politics. But it is indication of a growing awareness that the politics of Palestinian rights and equality cannot reasonably be pursued in the Israeli parliament, or at the level of Israeli local government (even in “mixed” towns), but might rather be pursued without these structures of eradication, upon the streets. Any doubt about this evaporates once the municipality’s (Hebrew) sign outside the government complex is confronted: “Ramleh: Exploring the Past – Looking Ahead.” Quite staggeringly, the form of the Hebrew verb “exploring” chosen – other options are available – can also be read as “exiling” or “banishing.” The sign promises a “grass football pitch”… no likelihood of an even playing field though.