• 27 تموز 2020
  • مقابلة خاصة

 

“ Jerusalem is a story that we never tire of hearing.
I enjoy listening to and reading Dr. Ali Qleibo describe, analyze and reconstruct the social history and intangible heritage of Jerusalem. His narratives are a lover’s discourse and in these bleak days I find his works stimulating, challenging and uplifting. A cultural anthropologist by training Dr. Ali Qleibo, is also a renowned artist; a combination that informs his exquisite portrayal of his hometown. His paintings, books and numerous articles spread over a period of forty years provide an insider’s analytic insights.
Prompted by a reader’s inquiry about the “cultural identity” and character of Jerusalem Dr. Ali decided to address the topic in a series of articles for the "Akhbar El Balad" focusing on the cultural, social and religious dimension of Jerusalem and its people.
In this article, the first in the series, Dr. Qleibo presents Jerusalem as a multicultural city composed of various ethnic Palestinian groups.

I  as the publisher  thank Dr. Ali for these special articles for the "Akhbar El Balad”  network, with the hope that those articles will provide references, guidelines and indicate directions for future researchers and academics to follow as references for their research on intangible heritage”.


 Dr. Ali Qleibo 

Jerusalem is a richly evocative city. The discourses deployed reflect the different images through the ages. In the Judeo-Christian-Muslim theological discourse Jerusalem is the holy city par excellence. It is one: it is eternal; it is whole and continuous, both in time and in space; it is immovable and immutable; it is limited, but limited only by itself; it is evenly extended in every direction, it is celestial and as believed in Islam, it is a piece of heaven on earth.

 

Jerusalem is also a politically contested city. The official Palestinian discourses deployed address the political condition of Jerusalem and the abuses Arab Jerusalemites suffer under Israeli occupation. However, de facto, Jerusalem has experienced a radical demographic transformation that parallels both the expansion of the municipal boundaries of East Jerusalem and an unprecedented rise in the economic standard of living.

Fifty three years after the Six-Day War the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem have expanded southward and northward. Greater Jerusalem has been extended to include 28 villages from Isawiyeh in the north and the villages of Silwan, Abu Tor, Jabal el Mukabber and Sur Baher in the south to name a few. Correspondingly the demography of Jerusalem has changed drastically. In the Israeli economic context extensive work opportunities have levelled the socio-economic and cultural barriers between the traditional aristocracy and uppity bourgeois population and that of the impoverished peasants and Bedouins in the adjacent villages. As white and blue collar workers they are beneficiaries of the Israeli economic market, medical and social security programs.

A heterogeneous multi-cultural ethnic socio-economic mobile middle class composed of migrants from Mount Hebron, together with Bedouin and peasant communities from the 23 Palestinian villages composing Greater Jerusalem, has emerged and dissolved the once exclusive closed homogenous Jerusalem bourgeois society. Fifty three years after al Nakseh known as the 1967(Six-Day War,) Jerusalem emerges as a multicultural city.

Before the forcible annexation of East Jerusalem to Israel and for centuries before the Six-Day War the social structure of Jerusalem was hierarchical. Throughout the Mamluke and Ottoman dynasties, alienated from the power structure, the Palestinian Muslim religious leadership was at the top of the pyramid followed by the class of wealthy merchants. Invariably merchants accrued status, prestige and land ownership privileges by having a member of the family educated in El Azhar University to become affiliated within the Sharia's juridical, theological structure.

One of the most distinguishing social characteristic features of Jerusalem, differentiating it from West Bank Palestinian towns, is its local aristocracy, "the sheriffs". Historically, Jerusalem's Muslim Arab aristocracy is composed of three classes, those descendant from the family of the Prophet Mohammed, e.g. those descendant from the comrades of the Prophet, the Sahabeh, such as the Nuseibeh and Ansari families; and those descendant from the ulama (theologians) and the leading Sufis, namely the Alami, el-Khalili (Qleibo,) and  Jarallah and Qutob families and Dajanis. It must be remembered that most Palestinian families have fragmented into smaller branches, and that many of these branches acquired nicknames that were adopted as family names in the nineteenth century.


Until the end of the Ottoman period, both Christians and Jews were considered ethnic minorities. The "Greek-Orthodox" Christian Arab population maintained its own class structure and social position through the centuries. The Christian population lived within the Christian Quarter in and around the various monasteries and most were provided with food and lodging by the church to which they belonged, be it Assyrian, Armenian, Coptic, Greek Orthodox, Russian, or Catholic.

The prosperity that accompanied the British Mandate booming economy provided great opportunities for building contractors and enterprising Palestinians in the sprawling western and southern suburbs. High rents for British officials and high salaries for government employees helped finance the emerging cosmopolitan consumer lifestyle, which Western education and curriculum in the nineteenth-century missionary schools had trained its Christian students and privileged Muslim class to enjoy. Within the overall context of the Crimean War and the Ottoman reforms/tanzimat to the Western European allies, the Christian community - in coordination with the respective churches - further developed their own prestige and social hierarchy as either “Les Bonnes Catholiques,” the good Catholics close to the Latin Patriarchate and the French and/or Italian consulates. The Anglicans and Jews in turn attached themselves to the Anglican Church and the British Consulate while the traditional Greek Orthodox local elite were attached to the Greek Patriarchate and the Greek Consulate.


Aristocratic Arab Muslim Jerusalemites tend to be exclusive, pompous, and elitist when it comes to the pedigree of fellow Jerusalemites. En parlance discriminatory distinction is made between "authentic", high-bred and of noble lineage and "inauthentic" a euphemism for plebeian Jerusalemites. An inauthentic Jerusalemite is considered an outsider that is, socially invisible, despite the fact that his/her parents and grandparents for generations have lived within the walls of the city. One major category of differentiation between genuine Jerusalemites, the socially visible, and "outsiders" is the fact that an authentic Jerusalemite is heir to inherited property and beneficiary of centuries old endowments i.e. waqf.

In this respect it must be remembered that the majority of the houses, cafés, hammams, and shops of the Old City are ancient family endowments inherited and privately administered or entrusted to the ministry of awqaf for their administration, maintenance, rent, and the distribution of the revenues among the heirs. Since endowed properties cannot be sold, exchanged, or altered, they become concrete objective archives of Jerusalem’s social history providing the city’s social registry.


El-niswan shabakeh (women form the network of social relationships) is a common saying in Jerusalem. Most of the Jerusalemites inherit shares of each other’s endowments, even if the inheritance is barely ten square metres. They are consequentially beneficiaries of the revenue, albeit a negligible sum. For most Jerusalemites are related to each other through centuries of intermarriages. The degree of kinship and its details are firmly established in the archival haser irth, certificate of inheritance. These documents specify the family interconnections and are more inclusive documents that establish the social history of the Jerusalem families in conjunction with the more rarefied male-centred patriarchal family trees.

Jerusalem has forever welcomed immigrants of various ethnic origins. International pilgrims and refugees from Armenia, Syria, Ethiopia, North Africa, Greece, Nigeria, Central Asia, India, and Jews from everywhere have settled throughout the ages among us. Communities of various sects, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, and Arab and non-Arab Muslims have enriched the mosaic of the Holy City. Local migrants from Mount Hebron have settled in Jerusalem in several waves as early as the late nineteenth century.

The success stories of the Muslim Arab Hebronites in Jerusalem illustrate the multi-ethnic cosmopolitan character of the city and the Muslim work ethic. Because of the great religious esteem in which they held Jerusalem, the first Hebronites settled in Jerusalem mostly in Abu Tor out of piety because of its proximity to Al Aqsa Mosque. Only after the 1930's and encouraged by Hajj Amin el Husseini's political rhetoric, "El Aqsa is in Danger"  and in the context of the economic possibilities provided in Jerusalem which had prospered in the Mandate period and post the Six-Day War did the steady flow of migrant workers increase. Nowadays Hebronites are patently visible and run most of the business enterprises and shops on Salah el-Din Street and in the Old City. Religious and God-fearing, they animate Al-Aqsa Mosque from sunrise to sunset.


Fifty years after the annexation of Jerusalem a de facto upgraded standard of living has been achieved through the innumerable employment opportunities in the Israeli system. Despite appeals by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan  the concept of Sumud (to resist and boycott the Israelis ) the integration of greater Jerusalem Arab residents within the Israeli economic sector has continued unabated.

Integration has also triggered other dramatic processes. The aforementioned socio-economic and demographic developments have ruptured the traditional social and historical character of Jerusalem. The monopoly of wealth, power and education of the traditional elite families’, descendants of early patrician founders of Arab Jerusalem, has lost its hold. Ulama (theologians,) sheikhs, muftis, imams and khatibs affiliated with the Dome of the Rock who had once formed Jerusalem's and Palestine's traditional aristocracy, have now lost their hold of their hereditary positions. The Jerusalemite Palestinian Christian community in relation to the various Christian sects and their respective relation to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, although for different reasons, suffered the same demise. Their privileged statuses have sustained the biggest blow. Though they retain the prestige of their class both communities have been undermined economically by the onslaught of new money. A new social economic demographic reality has been forged.

In the Israeli economic context extensive work opportunities have levelled the socio-economic and cultural barriers between the once urban Palestinian middle class population and the adjacent Arab villages. Cave-dwelling Bedouin shepherds and peasants living in penury have moved from caves with kerosene lit lamps and out-houses to comfortable villas and spacious apartments, with full amenities that include air-conditioning and at least two cars per household. As white and blue collar workers they are beneficiaries of the prosperous Israeli economic market.

The presence of Palestinian Arabs of greater Jerusalem is ubiquitous throughout Israel, in government offices, hospitals, medical centres, commercial centres, hotels, restaurants and garages…. From heads of surgery units in Hadassah hospitals to store managers, salesmen, janitors and labourers Jerusalemite Palestinian Arabs are employed throughout Israel.

 

Today, fifty three years after Israel's de facto annexation, Jerusalem has become a "melting pot" of the various Palestinian Arab ethnic groups. The image describes the fusing economic process and is an apt metaphor used to describe a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous. However, the progress in Jerusalem has been reversed for the previously homogeneous bourgeois Muslim and Christian social structure, eroding it and replacing it by a more heterogeneous society, composed of diverse rural ethnic groups from diverse backgrounds each with their own distinctive values, aesthetics and way of life.

 Since relations and modes of production within the Israeli capital is  extraneous to the Palestinian economy and is not a natural historical development, neither the Palestinian social structure nor consciousness of self and other have changed. The emerging urban ethnic groups remain estranged from the modern underpinnings of Israeli society. In this perspective the Israeli labour market is simply perceived as a propitious lucrative resource to further consolidate, update and uphold the respective ethnic identities of Bedouin, peasant and migrant workers in an urban context wherein each ethnic group have developed its own consumer lifestyle, values and aesthetics. Greater Jerusalem emerges as a multicultural city with a rich mosaic composed of diverse cultural ethnicities.

Overnight, Palestinian Arab Jerusalemites under Israeli occupation were stripped of their national rights in their homeland and assigned a status of alien residents obliged by law to provide legal proof that Jerusalem is their home center. This insidious legal bureaucratic means of dispossessing Jerusalemites of their homeland is the Israeli strategy known as the silent transfer. Though on the surface working conditions, social security, medical benefits and the average per capita income for blue collar workers is fair, yet, the general economic welfare does not change the fact that we remain stateless.

Our status as occupied people with rights, in accordance with the Geneva conventions, is constantly violated. Politically invisible, we are alternately marginalized, silenced and denied the right to represent ourselves. This systemic alienation, through the concurrence of various political factors, places Jerusalem's Arab residents in an untenable situation. The signing of the 1995 Oslo Interim agreement, places the problem of Palestinian Jerusalemites in focus: Jerusalemites are ineligible for Palestinian passports and are barred from participating in the Palestinian elections. Blockaded by check- points, greater Jerusalem has been separated from the West Bank. Though Jordan provides courtesy passports, Jerusalemites are prevented from attaining rights of residence in Jordan. They do belong neither to Jordan nor to the Palestinian Authority. Applying for Israeli nationality and an Israeli passport, a complicated procedure in itself, is also considered an act of national treason.

Today, Jerusalem's Arab residents exist between the "hammer and the anvil", a metaphor that aptly describes the political statelessness reflected by the unresolved relations between the Palestinian Authority Jordan and Israel.

Fifty three years after the 1967 War, Arab Jerusalemites continue to live with the deep-seated fear that their status and rights to live, work, and prosper in their historical city could be revoked at any time.