Heritage is a key site of politics in the Middle East. Recent episodes of the relentless destruction and construction of heritage in the region convey just how deeply intertwined it is with the making (and unmaking) of the postcolonial state.Footnote ¹ In Palestine/Israel, heritage has developed over a long history into an important site where both state power and resistance against it are produced, reshaped, and disseminated. A current proliferation of urban regeneration projects there is linked to the struggle against the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, as well as the incomplete, truncated emergence of a Palestinian state. Most of these heritage projects are carried out by semi- or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In this essay, I argue for the value of thinking about heritage in terms of government and state-making, or more precisely in terms of a Foucauldian understanding of governmentality, to reveal the kind of work it performs in Palestine and beyond. States govern also by heritage,Footnote ² and both states and the local communities they attempt to control mobilize the language of heritage for a variety of different purposes in a variety of different settings.Footnote ³ What is distinctive about Palestine is the central role NGOs play in the institutionalization of a heritage field. In their work, they collapse the divide between mobilizing heritage to defend vulnerable communities and resist the encroachment of the (Israeli) state, and using heritage to develop institutions and help build the (Palestinian) state.

As a project largely allied first with colonialism and then with oppressive nationalisms, archaeology has played a major role in the history of heritage conservation in the Middle East. For more than a century, heritage initiatives in Palestine/Israel have targeted only a certain archaeological past, the monumental remains of the Bronze and Iron Ages viewed as biblical antiquities. This practice of archaeology has contributed to the colonial refashioning of Palestine, first as the cradle of Western civilization and Christianity, and subsequently as the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people—an old/new land where Arab and Palestinian traces were wiped out.Footnote ⁴ In allegedly postcolonial times, various Arab nationalisms have adopted a similar approach to the past in the service of nation-building and regime legitimation, or, more recently, tourism development. This kind of archaeology has often resulted in the perpetration of violence, including evictions, against local communities.Footnote ⁵

When viewed against this background, the past and the kind of historic environment that Palestinian heritage organizations are attempting to save today are new. This past is vernacular, ordinary, lived, small-scale, and centered on the home rather than the palace. The product of multiple global lineages, it is not exclusively “local,” but it is rooted, inhabiting living historical urban fabrics and rural landscapes. Rather than being preserved in a glass case, this past is creatively put to use for social and economic development. It is a site of cultural production in the present. It is a close past, acting as a bridge between the historical and the present, providing a sense of continuity, stability, roots, and ultimately dignity for people living on shaky ground and in a condition of perpetual temporariness. It calls to mind Andreas Huyssen's “bulwark against obsolescence and disappearance,” expressing the “need for spatial and temporal anchoring.”Footnote ⁶ It is a past focused on identity and continuity, yet one in which heritage and identity are not seen as static and essentialized, but rather as fluid, to be creatively developed in the present for the sake of a better future. One is tempted to see this new Palestinian past as the expression of a different voice, a past from below. But this, I believe, is only a partial truth.

The past is a passion and a mission for most Palestinians involved in these organizations, who refuse to be trapped in a conservative localism and a stifling attachment to essentialized traditions. In different ways, they turn heritage into a cosmopolitan endeavor. They frame the past that they “bring back to life” as the product of multiple, transcultural legacies, a past they value both for its specificity and its global horizons, its syncretism. Moreover, while heritage represents that which distinguishes the Palestinian nation (this being how cultural nationalism works), Palestinian civil society organizations understand heritage making itself as a terrain on which they can forge transnational alliances and produce transnational connectivity. Both heritage (of the Palestinian state-to-come) and countermemory (against hegemonic exclusionary Zionist narratives of the Land of the Hebrew Bible), governmental and nongovernmental, Palestinian heritage is also national and transnational. Although it participates in transnational flows of knowledge, this heritage is imbued with a unique identity, representing the fruit of a set of historical legacies that are themselves syncretistic and stratified.

Current heritage practices cannot be understood outside of the specific trajectory of Palestinian cultural nationalism, characterized by a strong interconnection between heritage, the arts, and anticolonial politics. A good example is the spread of the Folklore Movement in the territories in the late 1970s and 1980s, which was part of a broader nationalist mobilization that prepared the way for the First Intifada. In contrast to these older heritage initiatives, Palestinian heritage organizations of the new generation are more institutionalized and made up of professionals. Many of their founders are former political activists and critical intellectuals on the Palestinian Left. But these intellectuals are no longer active in formal politics, and most of the younger practitioners do not have much political experience. They consider themselves experts. The First Intifada gave birth to the oft-celebrated, well-developed Palestinian civil society. But following the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, which brought a major inflow of Western funding in support of the peace process, Palestinian grassroots organizations underwent a process of NGOization, becoming professionalized and depoliticized.Footnote ⁷

Largely funded by international donors, Palestinian heritage projects are part of a transnational infrastructure. International consultants and task forces often visit the West Bank, and Palestinian practitioners are often trained abroad and spend considerable time traveling the world to attend conferences, training programs, and meetings organized by international universities, research centers, and organizations such as UN-Habitat. Palestinian experts are also part of transnational professional networks such as the International Council on Museums and Sites, and a variety of regional cultural partnership programs. Through these encounters, they become active producers of the transnational idiom of heritage-as-development, most prominently articulated by supranational organizations such as UNESCO and even the World Bank. And it is exactly because of their capacity to articulate a discourse of multifaceted resonance, familiar with both local speech and donors’ lingo, that Palestinian heritage practitioners are effective in both procuring funds and international support as well as dealing with a vast array of problems related to the management of populations. In so doing, they blur the boundaries between resistance and a kind of “government by cultural heritage.”

Since the Oslo Accords, the contested construction of a national heritage along transnational lines has unfolded together with a redefinition of the urban experience and urban forms in the West Bank. Heritage professionals remake the centers of West Bank cities into places both old and new. This is not just a fringe phenomenon. In Hebron and the Old City of Jerusalem, as well as in many villages, Palestinian organizations have restored extensive areas. Threatened by several Israeli settlements, Hebron's large and important Old City, for example, has been almost completely restored by the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee since it began its work in the mid-1990s. As a result, over 6,000 Palestinians have moved back to the Old City, thus stopping the expansion of Israeli settlements in its midst. The national objective of Riwaq, the main Palestinian heritage NGO, is to rehabilitate the fifty most significant historic centers of the West Bank, and they are coming close to achieving this aim. The number of people who return to live in the restored quarters is small, but a much larger number of people are affected. The heritage schemes have drawn many people from other parts of town and the West Bank to visit these once-decaying and quasi-abandoned old cities. While the pressure to build due to land speculation and a real estate bubble is high, restored central quarters are turning into visible and symbolically important, if threatened, parts of West Bank cityscapes. Thus, heritage practices give shape to a new kind of “heritagized” urban experience that takes center stage in post-Oslo Palestine in a tense though shifting relationship with two other main forms, namely, the refugee camp and the neoliberal high-rise development common to the globalized Arab metropoles.

The intersection of heritagization and urban government is illustrated by the case of the old city of Birzeit, a small but important university town. After extensive restoration, the old city has begun to draw visitors, with a well-known festival, a museum, craft workshops, two restaurants, a famous falafel place, and two guesthouses, as well as the offices of several local organizations. Students, intellectuals, and professionals from the university and nearby Ramallah are the typical guests of the restaurants, while residents (still few) are mostly low-income families benefiting from low rents. During restoration, house number tags have been placed all over the restored areas, making Birzeit's old town a much more legible, regulated place.

Also, elsewhere in the Middle East there is a shift from folklore (and archaeology)-centered models of heritage towards urban regeneration and museum building. The mounting heritagization of historic towns is associated with novel forms of urban government, but urban regeneration schemes usually produce gentrification.Footnote ⁸ The effect of Palestinian urban regeneration is not the eviction of working-class and immigrant populations from areas transformed into heritage. Nor do the ensuing rising real estate values and capital accumulation, which are a key dimension of urban regeneration elsewhere, play a role in Palestine—at least, not yet. Rather, Palestinian urban rehabilitation schemes are projects of cities and citizenship in the making that have produced both democratic experiments and opposite tendencies of slummification and dependency. Often propelled by local governments allied with transnational capital using the rhetoric of development, gentrification is a key feature of neoliberal urbanism, producing radical shifts in the social geography of cities together with the heightened bifurcation of urban space along racialized class lines. In Palestine, a similar bifurcation is at play, but of a reverse type: restored inner cities tend to be inhabited solely by the urban poor, and heritagized homes are a kind of social housing. In all cases, however, urban regeneration functions as a technique of government in a dispersed field whereby nonstate actors play a crucial role as service providers and guarantors of the welfare of marginalized populations.

By remaking urban spaces into heritage, cultural heritage projects are implicated in governing people. By deploying an “accented” version of the transnational heritage discourse,Footnote ⁹ Palestinian organizations turn Palestinian cities into heritage landscapes, inscribed in a particular narrative of vernacular cosmopolitanism and civility. They turn them into sites that are much “tidier” and more governable than what was there before. In other words, the politics of heritage is not only about the inclusion or exclusion of certain narratives and identities in and out of dominant public representations; it is also about the concrete management of people's lives through the reshaping of their living environments and the spatial regulation of their daily practices. This is what I call cultural governmentality,Footnote ¹⁰ a term meant to emphasize the salience of cultural heritage for new rationalities of urban government. What is striking is the polyvalence of such techniques, which can be deployed towards emancipatory goals or co-opted and rearticulated by diverse forces in a “perverse confluence” of both democratic emancipatory and neoliberal projects.Footnote ¹¹