Information Studies Colloquia: The Bible is Our Deed: Owning the Past and Heritage Territoriality in Israel and Palestine with Yair Agmon

Please join us for our next IS Colloquium on November 7, 2:00-4:00 p.m. in the Reading Room, 3340 Moore Hall. There will be refreshments to follow. This will be the first of several colloquia this year that feature the research of completing IS doctoral students.

The Bible is Our Deed: Owning the Past and Heritage Territoriality in Israel and Palestine

Yair Agmon

Abstract

In recent years, the Israeli government and private settler organizations have invested heavily in developing heritage tourism in Palestinian Occupied Territories. Governmental grants and state authorities have funded archaeological excavations, poured money into the tourism industry, and used the force of military actions to secure Israeli itineraries moving through Palestinian territory. This heritage tourism industry focuses on promoting a powerful imaginary based on a messianic interpretation of biblical scripture, in which Israeli nationalism is projected into antiquity to claim Jewish indigeneity and ownership over the land. Yet the Israeli state and private settler organizations have also used the administrative infrastructure and state power of heritage management to dispossess and displace Palestinians. Land use policies, economic disinvestments, and legal actions have transformed sites of heritage in which Palestinians live or work into sites of Jewish settlements. I describe this process as heritage territoriality, rendering symbolic claims to origins into places of dwelling, materializing Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s famous idiom that “The Bible is Our Deed.” 

​This presentation will map the development of heritage territoriality over the last 25 years across Israel and Palestine, closely examining The City of David National Park in East Jerusalem as the primary case study. Through this survey, I demonstrate how heritage regimes and cultural memory have produced a unique type of settlement that obfuscates the colonial violence of its own making through tourism. I discuss how, ultimately, Jewish settlers’ encounter with the material ruins of ancient Jewish life, interpreted through messianic readings of scripture, has resulted in a colonial theory of property based on a divine right to land that has produced racialized structures of identity, territory, and accumulation.

Bio

Yair Agmon is a scholar, artist, and activist. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA and holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.