Somewhere in Tel Aviv, Israeli citizens are walking through an art exhibition called āStolen Arab Art.ā The title is not a metaphorāthe show features four unattributed video art installations created by Arab artists, without the consent of those Arab artists. Here, the word Arab is a placeholder for Palestinian, but I suppose that goes without saying. In every interview, the curator (an Israeli who is not Palestinian) defends the installation as a comment against the cultural boycott of the Zionist state, claiming the exhibition is a āperformative action,ā hence all visitors are performers, and everyoneācurators, attendees, and artistsāis implicated in the theft.
In a way, the curator is correct. At the center of all settler colonial projects is theft. All interactions with the settler colonial project, be they cultural or economic, normalize the existence of the aforementioned settler colonial project, which, again, is contingent upon theft by construction. The premise of the installation is a contradiction, much like the Zionist state: the curator, intending to criticize boycotts of the Zionist state, perpetuates the precise colonial theft being criticized.
āStolen Arab Artā is not an isolated phenomenon; earlier this year, an Israeli publisher released a translated collection of essays by Arab women without their consent to translate, print, or distribute the text. The publisher, Resling Books, titled the collection Huriya, which translates to āfreedomā in Arabic. The contradictory metaphor is self-evident, and the trend is unsurprising in a historical sense. Within the walls of an exhibition and the pages of a book, Israelis dare to imagine works of Palestinian imagination as their own. Isnāt that how this all began?
At the core of all art, much like all settler colonial projects, is the ability to imagine. The blueprint of the Zionist project was once a drop of ink, words on paper that mandated the project whose enactment occurred at the expense of Palestinian land ownership. The founders of the Zionist project imagined Palestinians into invalid occupants, voluntary exiles on the wrong end of a two-sided war, nonexistent. Nationalism is not unlike art in its fundamental separation between subject and perception of subject, imagination being the link between the two.
Imagination is necessary to both colonial systems and the people marginalized at its expense; the essence of resistance to oppression is the ability to imagine liberation. One distinction, however, between the colonial imagination and that of its subjects is in the ability to act upon it; the ability to build reality into and out of imagination favors colonial pragmatism by construction. But the two are not distinct. The colonial imagination survives by obstructing the imagination of its subjects: āStolen Arab Art,ā for example, could not exist without Arab art. The distinction between the two is not unlike the distinction between Palestine and occupied Palestine: the colonizers imagined ownership through a framework in which that ownership was not only convenient but always already assumed.
ā George Abraham, Imagining a Free Palestine
