The Power of fiction and a shared framework in confronting contested pasts Open Access

In The Politics of Small Things (2006), Jeffrey Goldfarb combines Hannah Arendt’s and Erving Goffman’s theorisation to argue that when people meet in their differences and develop a capacity to act together on the basis of a shared definition of the situation, they develop political power. This power is constituted in social interaction and has the capacity to change social reality. An important condition for this capacity to develop is a public space in which people with different identities and social positions meet and speak ‘as if’ they are free and equal. This ‘as if’ does not equalise their power relations but creates a shared framework that enables an equal voice and participation that cannot be found in the larger society and dominant political discourse.

When dealing with violent histories and their legacies in cases of conflict and post-conflict, creating a shared framework between rivals is crucial but often more difficult. Consensus regarding equality of the rival sides, or whether the violent past or its legacy was (or is) symmetrical or asymmetrical, is in itself a conflicted issue. In this article, I explore a mode of memory-activist artwork that emerged in cases of conflict and post-conflict and may assist with this task.

This mode of ‘memorial intervention’ involves local memory activists who sought to air the silenced memory of a minority that was displaced in war and remains absent from the national land space and collective memory today. Using memorial interventions, they invite current residents to imagine a fictional and counterfactual state of affairs that stands in contrast to the present one by ‘bringing back’ the absent population to its local space. While such artistic ‘memorial interventions’ took place in post-conflict settings in different periods,¹ I focus here on memory-activist artworks that emerged in 2008–2015 in Israel–Palestine, a case of prolonged displacement (the continuous ‘Nakba’²), oppression and colonisation of Palestinians (as Israeli citizens and as governed non-citizens in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – OPT). These works, by Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian peace activists, use fiction and imagination as innovation in their repertoire of resistance.

Using fiction and imagination does not come naturally to peace activists. Activists who work in conflict-ridden areas for peace, human rights, and transitional justice often perceive themselves as engaged with truth-seeking and their practices include documenting and collecting evidence that can serve as the basis for public legitimacy (Gutman, 2017; McLagan, 2006). They use documents as evidence and collect testimonies as a strategy for mobilising audiences near and far (Gregory, 2006 McLagan, 2006;). Memory activists who work towards reconciliation during and after conflict engage in similarly fact-based efforts. They use memory practices strategically to change the dominant or official memory of their society as a step toward political change (Gutman, 2017). These practices often include documenting, archiving, and collecting testimonies to prepare a record of violent histories (Fridman, 2011; Katriel & Shavit, 2011). Their records are prepared according to the archetypical example of the South African Truth-and-Reconciliation Commission (Gutman, 2011; 2017). This model views a ‘coming to terms’ with a violent past as a condition for overcoming this past and creating a better society for the future.³

Moreover, in domestic public discourse, where the struggle over who has the legitimacy to write the national past takes place, a boundary is usually set between fact and fiction. Fact is attached to historical and legal truths, while fiction is linked to cultural and artistic production that is considered to be detached from the real state of affairs (Gutman, 2017). Yet recently, this binary distinction has been increasingly blurred in the realm of cultural production. A growing body of artistic and cultural products mixes fiction and documentation practices to impact prevalent perceptions of the actual state of affairs in the present, among them historical and futuristic novels and TV series, as well as documentary films. In the political realm, a mode of memory-activist artwork in recent decades uses fiction as an activist strategy for change.⁴

These memory-activist artists use documentation and memory practices to produce and disseminate knowledge about the past, while seeking to create not only remembrance but also a ‘memorial intervention’ into the present, if only temporarily. They use spatial memory practices such as tours, maps, sign-posting, visual projections, and site-specific performances to reconfigure local spaces and project the past onto today’s landscape. Yet temporal relations are the subject of inquiry and intervention. Instilling fragments of the past onto present-day city streets and current residents’ daily lives as if the past was indeed part of the present, raises the question ‘what if?’ What would life in the present look like had historical events unfolded differently?

As I will show, asking ‘what if?’ can facilitate ‘as if,’ an alternative but shared definition of the situation. Moreover, by opening up space for the consideration of silenced or counterfactual historical trajectories, a new public can form and expand the horizon of public debate.

Memorial interventions in Israel–Palestine demonstrate the mixing of fiction and scientific documentation practices by memory activists who seek to impact the dominant perception of the past as a path for political change. In my 2017 book on Nakba memory activism in Israel–Palestine,⁵ I followed three groups of memory activists who wish to air, document, and commemorate the silenced Palestinian memory of the 1948 war in Israel. In addition to touring pre-1948 Palestinian ruins, remapping the land, and collecting testimonies of their former residents, Palestinian refugees, they also engaged in artistic work that went beyond commemoration. Using their activist tools (tours, maps, testimonies), such work projected the pre-1948 past onto today’s landscape. It raised the question of ‘what if’ and the possibility that the pre-state Palestinian population would remain in the country today, side by side with its Jewish majority.

These memorial interventions were interactive, inviting current residents, visitors, and passersby, both Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian, to think, speak, and act as if they were equal in questioning and reconsidering past and present violence, displacement, and silences. By so doing, such artistic ‘what if?’ can create an alternative but shared definition of the situation among participants from different social groups and conflict sides.

This is best demonstrated by ‘The Ghost of Manshia Awakes’ (2007) by Jewish-Israeli artist Ronen Eidelman, commissioned by the memory-activist group ‘Autobiography of a City.’ The artist used equipment for marking the lines of football courts to draw the grid of the demolished Palestinian and Jewish neighbourhood of Manshia onto the recreational Charles Clore Park. In the 1870s, the Manshia Quarter was a Muslim suburb of Jaffa, with some Jewish residents, which was occupied by the right-wing Jewish militia the Etzel in 1948 and suffered massive destruction. In the young state of Israel, the neighbourhood was occupied by Jewish immigrants, including Holocaust survivors (Eidelman, 2007). The neighbourhood was demolished in the 1960s by the municipality of Tel Aviv-Jaffa for the construction of today’s beach-side park, which is used by both Jews and Arabs (residing in Israel or in the OPT) for picnicking. A museum commemorating the Etzel was created in 1983 and operates from one of the neighbourhoods’ few remaining original buildings. The Hassan Bek Mosque that serves Jaffan Palestinians is also located in the area.

Eidelman’s goal was to ‘resurface the past without destroying the present’ (Eidelman, 2007). He treated the remapping as an event to which residents and regular users of the space were invited. The users of the park are a diverse group: Jewish-Israeli students from the working-class neighbourhood of Tel Aviv Florentine, Arab-Palestinian families from Jaffa, migrant workers and refugees from Sudan and Eritrea, Yuppies from the gentrified neighbourhood of Tel Aviv Neve Tzedek, yoga practitioners, and people who take wedding-day pictures at sunset. During the remapping, the artist and his team engaged the site’s users in conversations in which they asked questions about the past, exchanged memories, and engaged in heated debates sparked by former Etzel members, bringing Manshia back to the minds of the park’s users.

The marking method channelled different types of truth that replaced the official history of Manshia on the municipality website: today’s leisure-oriented use of the park through the connotation of marking football courts; scientific knowledge production by using the tool of mapping, which asserts control and sets borders; and the evocation of a moral undertone of a crime scene, where a murder victim and evidence are marked in white lines (Monterescu, 2009). Eidelman’s artistic event emphasised mundane uses of the space by locals in the past and present, overlapping them onto a shared city space. Enabling today’s residents and visitors to reimagine their local site as it looked in the past as part of their life in the present, opens a space for questioning the official knowledge and present-day landscape.

The ‘Ghost of Manshia Awakes’ also reminds residents that relations between Jews and Arabs existed in the neighbourhood that were not the conflicted approach that Etzel members reflect. Jewish and Arab residents of Manshia suffered different ethnically related atrocities before the state was established but shared class marginalisation and dependency on public housing in Israel’s early decades. Eidelman's work questions why neighbourly relations and shared marginalisation between Jews and Arabs in Israel have been forgotten.

Another example of memorial intervention is the ‘Autobiography of a City’ project ‘Jaffa 2030’ (2012), which uses a fictional future rather than the past to reimagine the city’s landscape. The project was based on a map that shows Jaffa in the year 2030 as a city embedded in a different context than the present one: the Arab, Middle-Eastern, and Mediterranean world. This was its context before 1948, which is imagined in this project as its future in 2030. The map was the basis for a pop-up visitors’ centre in the Saraya Arabic-Hebrew theatre in Jaffa, from which one could register for tours of the city in 2030. The visitors’ centre website announced: ‘Come visit a city we don’t live in still, but we should ask ourselves how we might?’ [Jaffa 2030 website, 2012]

Mapping, the scientific tool that draws national borders between populations that previously lived in a shared space, is used here to lift borders and ‘free’ Jaffa from the binding Israeli borders (within and without), reuniting it with the region. Based on its pre-state past, Jaffa 2030 is imagined to be a cosmopolitan city that accommodates various populations that are currently excluded as equal citizens within the borders of the nation-state and that is connected to urban centres from Beirut to Marseilles. This mixing of fiction (Jaffa in 2030) and seemingly factual and authoritative forms of displaying knowledge, such as mapping, tours, and a visitors’ information centre, serves as a basis for exhibiting a post-national narrative that counters the present state of the city and its national context. Looking back on such a future and the past that it is imagined to continue, the present state of Palestinians in Jaffa and their exclusion as second-class citizens by Israel, seems temporary, a short period in a longer, pre-national and post-national process in which Palestinians regain their pre-state life and flourish.

However, raising the question ‘what if?’ does not mean that participants develop consensus or replace the dominant memory with a new unified perception of the past. This is neither possible nor desired. We see deep polarisation in todays’ societies not only in the context of active conflict but also in disputes over how to address legacies of historical violence, slavery, and colonisation. Ways to meet others in their differences and speak and act together seem scarcer, and reaching audiences beyond the convinced is far more difficult in contemporary public spaces that are increasingly polarising and isolating, especially online. However, memorial interventions that raise the question ‘what if?’ are a creative platform to mediate new critical perspectives without an indoctrination that may lead to immediate rejection of alternative perspectives. As demonstrated by the Manshia project, just raising the question in local spaces opens up an alternative trajectory to the national historical narrative that dominates political discourse, school curricula, the physical landscape, and legislation. Users of the site with different political identities and social positions are invited to participate in joint remembrance of the neighbourhood’s past and its binational residents and visitors then and now. They are encouraged to tell their own story and to listen to others’ stories without leaving their daily use of the space or preconceived notions. The historical processes, agents, and relations that come up in shared storytelling serve as a participatory platform to think about the present together from personal and collective perspectives. Such a shared framework for recollection and discussion of the conflicted past rarely exists in public debate and political discourse, particularly in Israel–Palestine.

Bringing the past (The Ghost of Manshia Awakes) or the future (Jaffa 2030) to city streets invites viewers to engage in an open conversation. By opening up space for the consideration of silenced or counterfactual historical trajectories (Azoulay, 2019; Gutman, 2017), a new public can form, even if temporarily for the length of the discussion. Such the public is self-formed by the artistic medium through its memorial intervention in space and time (Warner, 2005).

The formation of publics in democratic public life was the topic of a joint account Jeff and I published in the ‘The Cultural Constitution of Publics’ in The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology (Gutman and Goldfarb 2010). Some of the arguments we emphasised there are particularly relevant here. They stand in opposition to Jürgen Habermas’s arguments in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). First, we argued that democratic public life is not limited to well-informed rational deliberation; expressive and artistic exchanges and affect, convincing and raising public awareness in creative and critical manners, including the mixing of fact and fiction, are crucial manners in which contemporary public discourse can flourish. Moreover, the utilisation of fiction for envisioning, documenting, and intervening in political reality has a unique political potential. It invites emotional and imaginative reactions that are not limited to the concepts, positions, and tropes that frame the dominant political debate.

Second, we argued that the different social positions and identities of the participants in public life are significant and should not be bracketed. They matter not only because bracketing particular identities in debating the collective ‘public good’ is impossible and historically has been deployed as a strategy of exclusion and distinction of bourgeois men from other, competing, classes, genders, and publics (Eley, 1993; Fraser, 1993; Landes, 1998; Ryan, 1993). They matter also because the experiences and memories of marginalised publics and counterpublics expand the horizon of public debate (Warner, 2005). Memorial interventions like ‘The Ghost of Manshia Awakes’ invite users of the site with different ethnic, national, class, and political identities to jointly remember the neighbourhood’s past and its binational population of residents from their own perspective. The result expands the dominant memory of the city’s binational relations by combining real and imagined spaces, personal and collective perspectives and experiences.

Furthermore, according to Michael Warner, a public is self-established through media (2005). While Jeff has shown that with regard to talk radio and the Internet (2006), I focused on the creation of the publics through artistic memory work. Media forms have different attributes, from dogmatic assertion to interactive and dialogic potential, but democratic public life depends not only on how people use the form but also upon the self-formation of the publics without coercion (Warner, 2005). Eidleman’s memorial intervention in Israel–Palestine had the potential to form critical but pluralist conversations and new publics through participatory questioning of the dominant view of the past and present, and interactive imagining of the future.

Finally, it is important to note that the question ‘what if?’ is extremely hypothetical, without real cost or redress for those involved, as it does not make the absentees present again. This is especially problematic when the question is raised only by one of the groups involved in the difficult past at issue without the other (Jewish-Israelis without Palestinians, for example). However, this hypothetical quality can lower the guardrails and reveal the artificial constructed-ness and exclusion behind existing attitudes to difference and exclusion in the dominant political discourse and memory of the contested past. In the artworks I examined, ‘what if?’ was raised in a participatory and interactive manner that could expand the horizons of the dominant public debate beyond the established narrative. The meeting of others, real and imagined, ‘as if’ they have equal voices and power, created a joint framework for imagining a different future as a first step towards political transformation.

As I finish writing this from Tel Aviv in May 2024, the possibility that memory activists might create change in public opinion through the arts seems like a fantasy. The violence between Israelis and Palestinians, along with groups of people taking sides throughout the world, has escalated beyond anything imagined. Despite the wisdom I learned from Jeffrey Goldfarb about the importance of imagining a better future in the darkest of times, I find myself unable to approach this new situation with any confidence. Such dark times restrict the political imagination and previous visions for a more just and peaceful future are being marginalised and even criminalised. I still hope that Israelis and Palestinians will engage in imagining a shared future in the region nonetheless. This is, perhaps, the most radical move in today’s atmosphere.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).