THE NEW ZIDONIANS A STORY
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THE NEW ZIDONIANS | A STORY HONORABLE MENTION TO THE INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION: JUST JERUSALEM DECEMBER 2007 CHRISTIANA IOANNOU CHRISTOS PAPASTERGIOU LONDON 2007
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THE NEW ZIDONIANS
* You can be a citizen or you can be stateless, but it is difficult to imagine being a borderi
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I
M
y
name
is
Rajiya.
My
father
is
Muhammad, like the great Prophet, and
my mother is Michal, like the legendary daughter of Saul, the ancient King of Israel. It is odd; it would rather seem odd ten years ago, to think of a Muhammad and a Michal to be married. It would once be odd as well to think of a Rajiya, a ‘hopefull’ii to live in this world, a world that for the last forty years suffered war, conflict and tragedy. As most people believe, with the joys of careless life sunken into oblivion. My homeland was an island in this archipelago of conflict.
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The year is 2050 and I am 18 years old. I am among the few to have survived the conflict and among the even fewer to be born after the Act of Segregationiii. Since when I remember myself I have only known war. My homeland was once known as the Space of Confinment, for me though, and for all of us who lived all our lives here, this was the space in between two enemies, a space that devided two states and a space that hosted an alternative to that war. I suppose, and that is what I have heard, that for a lot of people in many countries of the world, we did not exist at all. For the rest of the people that lead the conflict during the Age of Confinment, we were nothing more than rats. Rats leaving in the gap that their conflict left as useless, a space empty of any interest to them, beyond its attribute as a front of their conflict. For us though, and for a lot of Israelis and Palestinians, this space
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Rats leaving in the gap that their conflict left as useless
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meant
a
transmit
of
goods
and
people,
communication with families and friends. In a peculiar way, that status of transition between distinct sides, it meant hope. This year’s eve we will celebrate our new citizenship. This is already the third year from the Declaration of Indipendence and the first year for me to be formally a citizen of the ‘Third State’iv of Zidonia. We are a state that was formed out of conflict. With no borders to difine a territory, our homeland is itself a border. Does this sound strange to you? We are though used to live on a border; we are used in being a border. It has taken a lot of time and effort to the International Community to understand that peculiar kind of citizenship, that incredible kind of state. A state that is not sovereign over its people or its land, as the states of our Palestinian and Israeli neighbours are. Our state is one that exists only as equilibrium
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between
differences
and
is
fostered
accumulation of these differences. singularities
merge
with
by
the
Would these
eachother
into
a
homogeneous entity; our homeland will cease to exist. The history of these last forty years however has yet to be written. The historian to undertake this task, to write the Story of the New Zidonians, will have to show to the world, how this state was born out of the ruins that a division, a war and destruction left behind. From the stories of the elder I have heard about how everything started. I was still unborned in 2010, when people felt that everything had already been told and done about the old Israeli-Palestine conflict. Every summit had already been held, every intervener had played his part and every threat had been uttered. A solution to the conflict was far from evident and the people were
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already unwilling to compromise. Fanaticism was increasing at both sides. The idea of the green line was then dug out, an idea born after the 1967 war between Israel and Jordan, as the final solution. The land would be devided and two distinct, segregated, sovereign states would be created. Israel and Palestine. Every effort to form a jointly accepted solution would proove aimless and the two states would then be free to turn their backs at any common future. The idea of the one state, inhabiting until then at the fantasies of progressive Palestinians and left Israelis, with two communities coexisting in one entity, was ambandoned. The construction of a border was then commenced along the green line.
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my homeland was an island in this archipelago of conflict
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In 2011 a lot of the effort and resources of Israel and Palestine was put in the construction of the border. It was during this period of history that the activity of building the border which engaged the effort, labour and interest of the two sides, really acted as a mode of coexistance and interaction between the two enemies. One would say that it initiated even a mode of cooperation. An essential mode of cooperation since there had to be a lot of effort invested in meetings, talks, arguments over the design of the operation. A mutual agreement to ignore the existence of the other, over the building of a dividing wall, was really the first opportunity of the two enemies
to
work
together
towards
the
accomplishment of a task, the building of the dividing wall. At times, during this period, this engegement in the task was even reaching the status of an enthusiasm towards a common purpose.
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It was the difference of interpretation of the outline between the two sides and the fact that a lot of fragments of ones communities existed in the hostile land of the other in an indivisible relationship, that made that effort unbearable once again.
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The outline of the green zone though was not easy to be defined clearly. And the construction of that border challenged and imperiled the construction in a number of occasions. It was the difference of interpretation of the outline between the two sides and the fact that a lot of fragments of ones communities existed in the hostile land of the other in an indivisible relationship, that made that effort unbearable once again. The next five years, a lot of different modes of constructing the border were tested. Bars in parallel, crossing, walls along the dividing line or crossing it, fences surrounding fragments of land or land surrounding the fences. Hard or porous borders, transparent or opaque screens. In the meantime the two states, living seperately, started to develop indepentedly and to experience the construction of their
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Hard or porous borders, transparent or opaque screens.
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own identities. Only that marginal coexistance in a process of building a border justified a mode of interaction, of a shared interest of the two. By the year 2017 the two sides resulted in building two distinct borders, two parallel lines of separation. A very complicated structure that was hard to be understood as an entity that divides. In its coplicity it seemed to be rather an occasion of connecting. In the meantime, that green ‘line’, now beeing converted into a quite wide zone, a strip enclosed between two border lines, became a zone of transition, an illegal movement of people, goods and services between the two sides. A black market developed in this zone that created its own rules and spatial characteristics. The people who inhabited that peculiar kind of space,
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The emigrants that I know though they didn’t want to cross the border, but rather to inhabit it.
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lived that peculiar kind of lifes in that peculiar kind of social structure were a motley crowd, consisted of those people-palestinians and israelis- that were engaged in the construction of the two side building of the border and their families. Clandestine people that joint them, people that couldn’t find a place to fit in neither of the two devided soverign states. In school we learned that this kind of people, that inhabited our community and found a friendly environment in there since the beginning, were once named emigrants and -how odd!- they usually wanted to cross a border and move from one side to the other. The emigrants that I know though they didn’t want to cross the border, but rather to inhabit it. In neither of the two sides they would manage to find a better life. Then, the year of 2022 came, when the two sides felt the threat of that illegal transition through the so called ‘no mans land’ space of the green zone. It was a threat to a legal economy; however the real threat was to their distinct, self-referred identities.
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They both turned their backs at the green zone, interrupted every activity in or around it and –in their last act of cooperation- they both signed the agreement of the ‘Act of Segregation’. The zone would then be confined violently, cutting any passing flow through the zone and desregarding any people that inhabited the zone. In the morning of the 23d of September of the year 2022, on 3.00 am when the Act was carried out for the first time, anyone that insisted in staying in the zone, either by choice, or because of no alternative, was trapped into it.
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anyone that insisted in staying in the zone, either by choice, or because of no alternative, was trapped into it
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The zone would then be confined violently, cutting any passing flow through the zone and desregarding any people that inhabited the zone.
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PART II
M
y parents were amongst the people trapped that day. I was born in what the people
describe as trap. They say that I have not really known yet what the elder describe as freedom. They probably mean moving free in a Free State, going wherever they want and doing watever they please. I wonder though, wether this is really freedom? Or do the elder overvalue their nostalgia of their past lives? I think that moving in a land bound by the borders of the State and doing things permitted by the Laws won’t be in fact so liberating. It is rather like an animal living in a cage.
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They started to use fragments and pieces of the wall to make homes and public spaces; they started to dig undergroud halls, passages to communicate and structures to hover upon
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The environment of the Zone of Confinement though was so intriguing that at times we were really forgetting that this was also a war zone. All this effort of the people who constructed the Wall and the process of contructing that had to be redirected after every disagreement have created a very complicated structure. With fragments and corners and places to hide, everytime you could discover something new. It was this peculiar feeling of a potentiality and the need to seek for the posibilities in this environment of destruction that lead the people to take advantage of it. They started to use fragments and pieces of the wall to make homes and public spaces; they started to dig undergroud halls, passages to communicate and structures to hover upon.
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Sometimes a public space would lay over a cluster of houses. However one could not tell which of the two dominated over the other
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Sometimes spaces were totally emptied and other times they were stuffed with objects. Everything was reversible and everything was temporary. As our lives were temporary and reversible. A public space, for example, one day would be a place for people to meet and talk, while the very next day could be flooded and become a water deposit. Sometimes a space would be left and taken over by nature, people wouldn’t mind, because they didn’t own anything. And time didn’t matter. No one could actually predict what ones needs would be the very next day. What was missing from our use of space was what the elders call programme. Sometimes a public space would lay over a cluster of houses. However one could not tell which of the two dominated over the other. And the public space could sometimes be so intimate, that you would feel that it could be almost the kitchen of your house. There would be spaces to join and others to distinct people. However, and in every case, communication never ceased, it was the scale of communication that mattered.
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There would be spaces to join and others to distinct people. However, and in every case, communication never ceased, it was the scale of communication that mattered.
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It may seem very odd to you that although I started with describing times of despair, war and strategy I concluded my story with joy, play and freedom. I am not crazy though! I hear that people in other states pursue the second and try to avoid the first. For me though this is not the same. I can neither clearly pursue nor just avoid things, I have learned to live with every difference and their crazy transformations in time and space. And this is the tradition that our Space and Time Engineers try to accomplish in our new homeland, the New Zidonia. That every difference will coexist at the same time and space in a diversity and that they mutually cultivate eachother in a field of freedom as I know it and have experienced it all these past years. And I really don’t find it strange that people form our two neighbouring states and other places of the world have started to come to our homeland and stay here and enjoy this freedom of the unwritten.
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That every difference will coexist at the same time and space
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i
André Green, La Folie Privée: psychanalyse des cas-
limites. Paris: Gallimard, 1990: 107, cited in Étienne Balibar, “What is a Border?” in Politics and the Other Scene. Trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson and Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002: 75. ii
Rajiya in Arabic language means hopeful
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The Act of Segregation was signed in 2022 between
Israel and Palestine to define a deviding border between the two sovereign states and confine the buffer zone and whoever lived within. iv
Such a condominium would form a ‘third state’ defined
as the territory of cooperation between Israel and Palestine. Michael Sorkin, ‘Introduction’ in Against the Wall. Edited by Michael Sorkin. New York: The New Press, 2005: xv The ‘Third State’ of Zidonia is a Wedge State, recognized in 2047 as an indipendent State. Its population consists of 43 % Israelis and 41 % Palestinians, the rest 16 % is of unidentified ethnicity, muslims christians, nomads and roms.
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