Unsettled Responsibilities: Antiquity, Resistance, and Rubble in Mandate Palestine

Abstract

The 1927 Jericho earthquake caused widespread damage across Palestine and Transjordan, both ruled at the time by Britain. The worst-hit city was Nablus, where the Old City’s historic buildings became a field for conflict. Drawing on G. Gordillo’s differentiation between ruins and rubble and his analysis of colonial anxiety, power, and oppression, this article considers local and colonial reactions and competition over the material heritage of Nablus, particularly in the city’s Samaritan Quarter and the Crusader wall of the Great Mosque. Entangled in these are definitions of antiquity and ideas of archaeological value for the Ottoman and British rulers of Palestine. Decisions made and contested in Nablus and Jerusalem highlight the fine line between ruin and rubble, the mechanisms by which the mandatory administration sought to tame the built environment and indigenous communities of Nablus, and the way their confrontations reverberated in the city’s rebellious history and insurrectionary future.