Welcome to the 58th issue of The Funambulist, dedicated to Palestinian Return/Awda/العودة. In its original intentions, as defined in the beginning of 2024, this issue was thought to be published long after a ceasefire in Palestine would have been reached. Anticipating a significant decrease in global mobilization for the Palestinian struggle, this issue was meant to contribute to an effort of re-intensifying of this mobilization. In the end, the murderous siege on Gaza and its echoes in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria have lasted much longer than any of us could have imagined and this issue was produced in a context of duress and despair for many of its contributors. As I am writing these words, the ceasefire is about to be implemented and we are experiencing contradictory feelings of relief and grief, of victory and threat of what future colonial plans hold. In this context, this issue might still come at an appropriate moment, when imaginaries of liberation can and need to be reactivated.
It is the second time we have published an issue fully dedicated to Palestine. Admittedly, it is not in The Funambulist’s internationalist DNA to focus solely on one particular geography. Even in our issue Learning With Palestine (#27 Jan-Feb 2020), contributors from Palestine were invited in a dialogue with contributors from various other places. I could tell you that this choice is motivated by the idea that the Palestinian liberation struggle symbolically stands for many other struggles against colonialism around the world. To some extent, it is true. But if I’m being honest, this would be quite a rhetorical—if not disingenuous—argument, as I remain attached to the specificity of each struggle. What then justifies the exclusiveness of the issue to one particular movement of liberation? This question has several responses that are all debatable but, I think, are also legitimate. My own relationship with Palestine is one of these responses, despite the hyper subjectiveness it involves. Another has to do with the generosity of the Palestinian People to share their struggle for liberation with anyone who is willing to take a small part in it. The most important response however, would have to do with the intuition that this issue can actually be useful to many of us, Palestinians and non-Palestinians, contributing to an imaginary of liberation in Palestine at a time when it seems so distant.
This is how we asked 35 Palestinians—in the end, 22 have contributed to this issue, including in its translation—from Gaza, the West Bank, ‘48 Palestine (i.e. Israel), and the diaspora to reflect or envision what Return looks like to them at this moment. As I mentioned, I am forever grateful for the ways through which Palestinians have generously shared their struggle with us, and as such, I feel invited to believe that non-Palestinians can also be a part of imagining a free Palestine. Nevertheless, the diversity of visions and their sensitivities are already so great among Palestinians themselves, and our number of pages is limited, so it simply felt right this time around to ask only Palestinians to contribute to this issue. Explaining this is important to me, as we have gotten used to applying essentializing categorizations of who is legitimate (and who is not) to reflect on certain questions around our collective political practices. As such, I would not want this decision of only commissioning Palestinian contributors to be misconstrued as being part of this frame of exclusive legitimacies.
Asking people to envision liberation can be rather delicate, in an ongoing situation where Israeli bombs, shells, and bullets were still raining on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and to a lesser extent, the West Bank, to ask from people who have been living with this genocidal threat (on their nation, on their loved ones, on themselves) for the past year and a half—and with the slower, yet just as violent settler colonial processes of dispossession, extraction, and subjugation for the past century. In this issue, it is clearly palpable that many contributors struggle to envision Return in the present moment, even if Return means returning to a house from where people fled this past year to seek refuge from the bombs, the tanks, and the bulldozers. Nevertheless, our contributors present a multiplicity of understandings, visions and forms of what Return (sometimes, deliberately orthographed without a capital R) entails.
The very word Return contains in itself a potential semantic misunderstanding. Return may not mean returning to a past prior to the Nakba, prior to the British occupation, prior to the Balfour Declaration, prior to the Ottoman Empire, etc. Return may not even mean returning to the houses that were ethnically cleansed in 1948, whose ruins were later destroyed to make the Zionist narrative a self-fulfilling prophecy. Palestinians have chosen the Key as the symbol of Return, not because this small object that they have kept with them since the Nakba (or for some of them, since the 1967 Naksa) can still unlock a house door upon their return to the land, but because it is a symbol that expresses the inexorability of this Return, regardless of how many generations would have to pass it down to another. The key that otherwise crystalizes the architectural violence of colonial prison cells, colonies, closed roads, and checkpoints, can thus symbolize the Return through the image of the numerous locked doors it opens for all—making the walls around these doors obsolete.
Following this line of thought, Return might be considered through a more spatial framework rather than a temporal one (although the reconnection with past relationships with the land can certainly be a part of it). It is a practice that, depending on the vision, can be a grand and punctual gesture upon Liberation as traditionally imagined in the history of the struggle, in particular, by the millions of Palestinians who have been living in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank since the Nakba. An example of this grand gesture was during the 2018-2019 Great March of Return that saw thousands of Palestinians in Gaza marching weekly towards the heavily militarized walls of the colonial siege, facing the maiming and murderous fire of Israeli snipers. But crucially, as a few contributors suggest in this issue, it could also be a mundane if not furtive return that can already be enacted in present circumstances.
Given that the following pages only hosts contributions from Palestinians, I would not want to overstep my role of editor here, but I hope that you will accept the modest offering of these eleven photographs taken between 2008 and 2023 during my occasional visits in the West Bank, Al Quds-Jerusalem, and ‘48 Palestine. Put together around the time of my 2023 teach-in on the architecture of settler colonialism in Palestine, they were meant to also depict a vision of Palestine, in appearance, unaffected by the violence of the occupation. In reality, we all know that nothing really is as it appears, and many of these places are inaccessible for most Palestinians of the West Bank and even more so for the people of Gaza. However, could these pictures be seen not as photographs of the past, but rather images of a liberated future?
The absence of Gaza (which we want to imagine on the horizon in the photograph of the Jaffa coast above) is too strong for this photographic series to holistically represent Palestine. These small vignettes could perhaps help balance between any naiveté and the grave question our regular contributor Sophia Azeb asks in her essay: “How do we return to live the uninhabitable?”. With such a balance in mind, I wish you an inspiring read of the following poems, fictions, essays, and artworks. ■
All photos (Léopold Lambert 2008-2023): Fragments of a Future Palestine.