Politics of dwelling justice
Published in Arena, 9th March, 2023
Panel contribution:
When I was invited to participate in this forum I wasn’t sure what I could say about housing or the housing crisis given I haven’t engaged in activism for public housing or against homelessness in Australia. Palestine seems foreign to these issues, even though our struggle is primarily about our (un)homing.
A Palestinian friend who lives in San Francisco often says that he has a skyscraper waiting for him in Palestine. It is his ‘go to’ in battles with Zionists who claim Palestine as their ancestral land. I think it is a cool power fantasy to have given Israel’s dedication to the modern logic of improvement and development. Every Palestinian gets a glistering skyscraper as reparation, although only an American modern activist subject could imagine that. In the ridiculousness of this claim, however, we unsettle the ridiculousness of settler-colonial notions because it is settlers who are possessing, accumulating, building a hierarchical society based on commodifying land. Settler claims are of course counted as legitimate; they are part of the natural order under colonial modernity. It is we Palestinians who are dismissed when we assert that we have a right to return to Palestine. When we say that we are a nation in exile and we are going to return, the millions of us, we are considered excessive and oppressive in our imagining of justice, of dwelling justice. We are supposed to make productive, workable demands that are comprehensible to the liberal international community and its post Second World War sensibilities. Our dispossession makes sense while our return is beyond any sense.
When the stateless defend their homeland and demand freedom for their homeland, and when the homeless demand housing, their requests are considered ridiculous. There is a similar modern scolding and disciplining of the political ambition of these two groups because colonial modernity is not made for them.
The book Colonial Lives of Property came to mind as I contemplated the provocation of ‘dwelling justly’. In this book Brenna Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of Indigenous lands depends not only upon ideologies of European racial superiority but upon legal narratives that equate civilised life with English concepts of property as well. In this way, property law legitimises and rationalises settler-colonial practices at the same time as racialising those deemed unfit to own property. The solution, as argued in the book, is to develop a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession. Palestinians find all sorts of ways to continue having a sense of home, not necessarily tied to physical property, and even in the face of Israel’s destruction of their homes.
We see the necessity of alternative imaginings of home and dwelling as Palestinian homes are confiscated today through Israeli court documents and legal mandates. It is futile to resist on legal grounds and through respectable rights discourses. These are the Master’s tools for the Master’s house.
As a Palestinian born in Amman, I have grown up to know that dominant knowledge does not totalise. In the milk bars I walked to with my cousins in the alleyways of our urban refugee camp hung maps of the region that marked the historical land of Palestine. The stores there were Palestinian-owned, packed side by side now cement homes, which used to be made of tin, which prior to that were tents, after decades of waiting a few kilometres from home for the right to return. Shops hold such names as ‘Jerusalem Boutique’, ‘Bethlehem Bakery’ and ‘Jaffa Jewellery’, with Palestinian flags flying in front and cheap golden-framed pictures of the occupied Al Aqsa mosque hanging behind the cashier. This is the way Palestinians preserve a sense of home in exile.
To maintain this kind of epistemology in a diasporic, settler-colonial context requires continued resistance to whiteness, making sure that we do not embody white ways of dwelling in this place. Many Palestinians and Arabs come to the West to escape impoverishment and dispossession. The promise provided by white modernity is obviously appealing and we need to talk more about approaches to actively resist inhabiting its ways through epistemic and ontological co-struggle between our communities. That is the kind of work our movement has been investing in, connecting Indigenous struggle and Palestinian struggle, both as a tactic here of decolonial resistance and also as a way to educate and do political work without reproducing whiteness.
