Towards the Morning After Revolution: Architecture, Aid, and the Possible in Palestine

• In Event: Political Imaginings of Palestine Beyond the Here and Now

Abstract

The recent wave of critical scholarship on Palestine has tended to emphasize Israeli colonial practices from a geopolitical perspective and has focused on the mechanics of occupation through issues of territory and territoriality, borders, violence, and militarization. Meanwhile, a growing body of comparative work in settler-colonial studies has made important links between the case of Israel/Palestine and other settler-colonial contexts. Less attention, however, has been cast on how Palestinians are negotiating, confronting, and transforming, what Derek Gregory has aptly termed, their “colonial present.”

While the situation in Palestine is a precarious one, it also being radically reshaped and transformed in innovative ways across global, regional, and local scales. Based on fieldwork conducted in the West Bank, this paper examines the ways in which a younger generation of Palestinian activists, artists, and grassroots organizers, many of whom are disillusioned with the Palestinian national leadership, on the one hand, and the western-backed “peace process” on the other, are creating new possibilities through transformative acts that both confront but also transcend the colonial realities that structure their lives.

Towards this end, this paper explores the work of two groups in particular. First, it engages the work of the Dalia Foundation, a Palestinian philanthropic organization based in the West Bank that distributes non-conditional aid to Palestinian community groups, grassroots organizations, village councils, and other local bodies, to help them achieve self-sufficiency and reconstitute local networks fragmented by decades-long processes of dispossession and colonization. The paper then turns to the work of Decolonizing Architecture, an architectural collective based in Beit Sahour that uses art and architecture to articulate a process of decolonization and envision "the morning after revolution." Centrally this paper situates, at the fore, the ways in which Palestinians are transforming the present while also shaping, in new and radical ways, the contours of the possible for the future, even as they remain subject to brute, sovereign power. In so doing, this paper argues, they simultaneously expose the limits of this power as an enduring fact.

Author

• Lisa Bhungalia, Syracuse University (NY)