"Army of Shadows: On Treason and Betrayal in Israeli and Palestinian discourses" is a lecture by Hillel Cohen, presented during Liminal Spaces III. “Army of Shadows” is also the book Cohen authored by the same name. In Army of Shadows, he tells the story of Arabs who, from the very beginning of the Arab-Israeli encounter, sided with the Zionists and aided them politically, economically, and in security matters. Based on newly declassified documents and research in Zionist, Arab, and British sources, Army of Shadows follows Bedouins who hosted Jewish neighbors, weapons dealers, pro-Zionist propagandists, and informers and local leaders who cooperated with the Zionists, and others to reveal an alternate history of the mandate period with repercussions extending to this day. Both the book and the lecture illuminate the Palestinian nationalist movement, which branded these "collaborators" as traitors and persecuted them; the Zionist movement, which used them to undermine Palestinian society from within and betrayed them; and the collaborators themselves, who held an alternate view of Palestinian nationalism. In his lecture, Hillel looks at the notion of "collaboration" both by Israelis and Palestinians to reconsider its connotations and suggest an alternative reading to treason.
Liminal Spaces is an international art project which aims at refuting the realities of occupation and its dynamics by examining notions of urban spaces, borders, mental and physical segregation, cultural territories and the possibilities of art within political frameworks. In light of the ever-growing hardship endured by Palestinians under Israeli occupation; persistent loss of land, deprivation of freedom of mobility, as well as basic political and civil rights, this international cooperative project takes as its starting point the spatial borders that characterize Israel’s colonial project. Frontier cities like Jerusalem have become laboratories of an urbanism of radical ethnic segregation. Since the Second Intifada and Israel’s unilateral construction of the Wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice at the Hague, this situation has intensified to an alarming degree and the urban fabric has disintegrated into a spatial and mental archipelago. This radical separation affects Palestinians in diverse ways; they suffer the loss of basic freedoms, restrictions on travel and severe surveillance that endanger the future of their society.
Project curators, Galit Eilat, Eyal Danon, Reem Fadda, and Philipp Misselwitz, say, "During the course of this project, we have had to repeatedly reiterate and clarify its aim; we underscored the fact that it is not an attempt at normalisation, and that it is not meant to offer a model for peaceful coexistence between two equal partners. Rather, we reasserted that the main aim of the project was to serve as a platform of resistance and vocal opposition to the ongoing Israeli occupation, and to its direct effects on the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank. This project operates in a context in which the distinctions between art and politics are blurred. We wish to examine the possible role of art as a catalyst for political and social change and to trigger a more active form of political engagement within the art world. We feel that the clear political stance of the participants and the curators is the basis for the network that Liminal Spaces has generated."
To read more, visit the project’s website http://liminalspaces.org
Catalogue no. 1449
File: Liminal Spaces
Community Activism History Israeli Palestinian relations Politics LIMINAL SPACES Collaboration
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