The Semiotics of Israeli Space and Time by Michael Feige

Author:Michael Feige [Feige, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789760774
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2020-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Tel Dizengoff and Extracting Place from Space

Not only does Berger confront Zionist, Israeli, or Tel Aviv history, she also has something to say about writing history in general. Her book breaks new ground, for Israel, in attempting to construct an archaeology of space à la Foucault. For Foucault, archaeology is a method of examining the conditions in which the subject is constituted as an object of knowledge.23 For Berger, archaeology is much more tangible, possibly because of the status of archaeology in Zionist history and the fact that many Israelis are familiar with the term and its meaning. The Israeli context makes this metaphor especially alluring. Berger looks at Dizengoff Center as an archaeological mound, or tell, which conceals historical strata. The city of Tel Aviv itself can be analyzed as such (the first element in its name is cognate with “tell” in this sense). Let us examine how the metaphor is used in the book and what it can teach us about the Israeli way of regarding history.

Berger does not write the history of a place but examines the archaeology of space, as revealed by scraps of memories, traces of documents, newspaper clippings, and so on.24 This kind of writing is inevitable because of her decision to concentrate on a localized space through which people and historical processes passed and left traces of their existence. The result is a pastiche of contradicting stories in which one historical episode follows another with no clear causal chain. The tell contains broken remnants of different times, many past decades coexisting in an eternal present, waiting for the archaeologist to decipher their meaning.

Berger describes three historical periods that can be seen metaphorically as three strata of the tell, while history keeps adding more detritus on its top. Readers tend to assume a dialectical model, with one historical stage leading through its inherent logic to the next; but this kind of modernistic meta-history does not exist in this book. Within each historical stratum there is a complex system of power relations and economic exploitation with a peculiar logic of its own, including local culture and memories. People living in one era can remember the previous one with nostalgia. But there are major fissures between the three periods, which destroy the previous systems altogether. In archaeological terms, there are “layers of ashes” that attest to the catastrophe that befell the system created in that space.

The points of demarcation between the periods involve the expulsion of the residents and destruction of the buildings and are external to the logic of the place and arbitrary in terms of the local power structure. They are the violent yet short visits of “occupation forces.” Nothing in the relationship between Hinawi and his tenants could have predicted the destruction of Arab Jaffa and the exile of the landowner’s family. The lives of the residents of Nordiyya did not lead through an obvious logic to the razing of their neighborhood and the erection of Dizengoff Center on its ruins. Zionist history,

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