On a busy day, The Educational Bookshop on Salah Eddin Street in East Jerusalem feels more like a thinktank than a store. Visitors come and go: foreign activists browsing books, pilgrims looking for postcards and researchers seeking a conversation. Stocking texts from poetry by the local Palestinian activist Mohammed el-Kurd to recipe books, and analysis by Israeli scholar Ilan Pappé, the shop has become a focal point for East Jerusalem’s cultural, political and academic circles.
‘In 1997, the First Intifada began and many people came to the city, including human rights activists, aid workers and journalists,’ says owner Imad Muna. ‘The bookstore has become an important symbol of cultural resistance, providing a space where Palestinians can celebrate their heritage and share their stories with the world.’
Corroding a capital
In recent years, however, the Muna family has noticed a marked decline in sales, fuelled chiefly by a new and evolving consumer culture in the city. ‘It is becoming increasingly difficult to shop in East Jerusalem,’ says the bookshop’s assistant manager, Ahmad Muna. ‘The prices of goods are higher, a result of the occupation, so people inevitably go to the new malls in [Israeli] West Jerusalem.’ With this wave of shopping complexes and luxury hotels, focus is shifting away from the markets and shops that have been the backbone of the economy of East Jerusalem, recognized as occupied territory under international law, for generations.
Recently redeveloped, the square across the street from the bookstore has been adorned with an art installation of colourful umbrellas. ‘This is all part of the [Jerusalem] municipality’s efforts to remove the classic Palestinian elements of our city,’ sighs Ahmad.
As highlighted by recent events such as violent Israeli raids on Al-Aqsa mosque and the Trump-led relocation of foreign embassies to the city, Jerusalem is both a geographic frontline and political emblem of the Palestinian struggle. Divided by 1948 Armistice Line or ‘Green Line’, Jerusalem was until 1967 split between an Israeli-controlled west and Jordan-administered, Palestinian east, encompassing the Old City. Yet today approximately 86 per cent of occupied East Jerusalem is under direct control by the Israeli government and settlers.1 Local NGOs and human rights groups have long pointed to Israeli practices and policies in East Jerusalem that seek to alter the demographic balance in favour of Jews.
Jerusalem is both a geographic frontline and political emblem of the Palestinian struggle
This goal was made explicit in a recent masterplan by the Jerusalem municipality, aimed at ‘maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the city’.2 The plan provides for discriminatory measures against Palestinian residents, including the construction of new Jewish settlements, the demolition of Palestinian homes and businesses, and restrictive zoning regulations – while promoting Jewish immigration and heritage, and downplaying or erasing the Palestinian cultural and historical presence in the city.
Following the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) have been split between the PA-governed West Bank, Hamas-controlled Gaza, and East Jerusalem, managed by the Jerusalem municipality. This new divided reality has generated a change in Palestinian resistance. Where Oslo offered – albeit fleetingly – the prospect of a peaceful resolution to the conflict, culture emerged for some as a substitute for an armed resistance that was no longer seen as feasible. Others, however, argue that this shift represents a dangerous tendency towards depoliticization, with culture being used to mask the reality of the occupation and normalise the idea of co-existence with Israeli colonialism.
A few kilometres away from the bookstore, just outside the walls of the Old City, sprawls the new Mamilla Mall – a high-end shopping and entertainment complex built on the site of a former Palestinian neighbourhood, destroyed in 1948. Its luxury shops and restaurants cater primarily to a culture of Western consumerism with a client base of wealthy tourists and Israelis. Constructed as part of an Israeli redevelopment plan during the 2000s, the mall incorporates elements of traditional Palestinian architecture and is seen by many as an attempt to appropriate Palestinian heritage while exacerbating economic inequalities between Palestinian and Israeli neighbourhoods.
Simultaneously, Israeli authorities have temporarily or permanently closed at least 35 Palestinian public institutions and NGOs in occupied East Jerusalem, including a number of cultural institutions, since 2001.3
‘Settler colonialism aims to eliminate the colonized people, their history and culture, and replace it with a new one,’ says cultural scholar Daoud Al Ghoul. ‘In the case of Palestine, this is called Israelization or Judaization. So culture and heritage play an important role in strengthening the sumud (steadfastness) of the Palestinian people.’
After the devastation of the Nakba, the 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a new Palestinian culture of resistance, including musicians, filmmakers and writers such as Fadwa Tuqan and Mahmoud Darwish. Shrinking political space over the decades since has likewise led generations of Palestinians to culture as a platform for responding to the occupation.
Yet Palestinian cultural institutions are increasingly a target in this campaign of elimination. Theatres, museums and libraries have been destroyed or closed, and artists and cultural workers are regularly harassed, arrested and imprisoned. ‘After ‘67, there was a really exciting wave of grassroots culture in Palestine linked to the politics and social liberation movements of the time,’ says musician Sami Darwish, sipping coffee with local film-maker Yazid Abu-Khdeir in a café in Jerusalem’s Armenian quarter. ‘But after the Oslo Accords, we lost a lot of that community-oriented culture in Jerusalem.’
Commodification and control
In the rainy grounds of the American Colony Hotel, Mahmoud Muna, the youngest brother of the Educational Bookshop family, sits reading aloud from a review he published that morning in the progressive Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
‘Many [Palestinian] cultural figures are now becoming key figures in Jerusalem society, which is struggling with a political leadership vacuum,’ he says. ‘Many of our cultural leaders come from middle-class and well-educated communities; they do not reflect the diversity of the whole Palestinian society. They need to be aware of their lack of diversity and work to change that.’
This challenge is reflected in current funding models for cultural projects which encourage particular messages. As an act of resistance, many Palestinian cultural institutions in East Jerusalem have refused to cooperate with the Israeli government and municipality. But Israel has closed all offices and NGOs connected to the PLO in Jerusalem, as the Palestinian Authority is not allowed to operate there under the Oslo Accords. Since they cannot work with the PA either, cultural organizations often therefore rely on funding from humanitarian organizations and foreign governments.
Yet some in the field call this model an unsustainable ‘heroin shot’ that only contributes to the denigration of Palestinian culture. ‘Artists have stopped paying so much attention to the quality of their work and their connection to the community,’ Darwish sighs, ‘and so now they work mainly on projects that fit the criteria of NGO funders.’
As Abu-Khdeir continues, ‘the financing model has become part of the normalization process. Recently, I was approached and asked to make a film for €1.2 million ($1.3 million), but only if I make sure that “both sides” are in it, that the script had to be a love story between a Palestinian and an Israeli’.
Like him, many practitioners lament the apparent capture of Palestinian culture by neoliberalism. This, they say, has led to a commercialization of Palestinian identity, marginalization of grassroots expression and a suppression of political consciousness.
‘I am not going to make a film with this false political message,’ says Abu-Khdeir. ‘These stories are not real, they do not come from my community.’
The neoliberal paradigm underlying Oslo has thereby helped transform culture into a commodity to be packaged and marketed to the world – a substitute for resistance rather than a natural extension of it. ‘We are told not to make [the art] political,’ laughs Darwish, ‘but how could we not? Our whole existence is political.’
Resisting erasure
Many in East Jerusalem feel the added weight of Israeli monitoring of funding to civil society institutions. In 2017, five major cultural institutions in Jerusalem joined together to form the organization Shafaq (‘Twilight’), agreeing on a new ‘Jerusalem Cultural Strategy’ to create art by and for Palestinians, with a focus on working-class communities in Jerusalem. However, the former director Al Ghoul explains that Shafaq faced numerous internal and external challenges – including Israel’s so-called ‘anti-terror policy’, which changed conditions for funding cultural institutions in Jerusalem, classifying a number of Palestinian political groups as ‘terrorist organizations’ and prohibiting cultural institutions from collaborating with these groups.
Al Ghoul recounts being offered a grant of over one-million euros by the European Union in 2019, with a new anti-terror clause in the contract – his organization chose to publicly reject it as an act of resistance. ‘Israel is stealing our culture and history to pass it off as its own,’ says Al Ghoul. ‘We cannot use public spaces. We cannot raise the Palestinian flag. But we are here, we exist.’
It is this ongoing vitality that makes culture in East Jerusalem a continued threat to the occupation – a manifestation of the politics it so violently seeks to suppress. Culture sustains Palestinian resistance, mobilizes, and offers hope in the face of the seemingly insurmountable.
Although pressure from the Israeli authorities forced Shafaq to close its doors in 2020, leaving Jerusalem without a key cultural space, the importance of cultural resistance remains in the minds of many across the city. ‘We will be back,’ Al Ghoul says with a defiant smile, ‘there is still much more to do’.
- MAKAN, ‘Jerusalem’, nin.tl/3IPBe1S
- Al Jazeera, ‘Spotlighting Palestinian culture, despite Israeli restrictions’, September 2022, nin.tl/3I2ObVx
- Human Rights Watch, ‘A Threshold Crossed’, April 2021, nin.tl/41PG2er
