Norma Musih writes in +972 May 24, 2020:I moved from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv in 2001. By then, I had understood the history of the hundreds of depopulated Palestinian villages that are scattered across modern-day Israel. I knew them as national parks, as ruins along the road, as picnic sites, and as Israeli cities; some I knew by their original Arabic names.
Tel Aviv itself stands over six Palestinian localities that existed before 1948: al-Jamasin al Gharbi, al-Mas’udiyya (Summayl), al-Shaykh Muwanis, Salameh, a fisherman’s village, and the northern Jaffa neighborhood al-Manshiyya. Yet when I saw their remains, entangled with the streets, galleries, and coffee shops of Tel Aviv, I could not imagine these villages or their inhabitants becoming part of the city again.
My inability to picture such a future speaks to the overwhelming power that the Zionist national imaginary has had on my thinking. The ethos of Zionism has redrawn the land by means of partition, segregation, and discrimination, leaving no space to envision anything other than what exists today. Very few Israeli Jews, for example, have the political imagination to see themselves as equals to the Palestinians, both those with Israeli citizenship and those without.
“Imagination” does not merely belong to the realm of fantasy; it’s not something unreal that “happens” when one closes their eyes. On the contrary, it is an action that takes place when one’s eyes are. And we need imagination to understand the past, present, and future of Israel-Palestine through a lens freed from the confines of Zionism’s exclusive imaginary.
For political theorist Hannah Arendt, imagination is about the relationships that emerge between people who can see each other and envision each other’s perspectives. The force of imagination, she writes, “makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public, open to all sides… To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”
Arendt teaches us that the imagination is not something that “appears” as a muse to an artist or as a quality we are born with. Rather, it is a capacity that we must train. The imagination is like a muscle in the body or the ability to write or think — an ongoing process that requires practice. Through this notion, Arendt suggests developing the imagination as a tool to overcome “dark times” and generate political change.
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