Walking to Unsettle Jerusalem

From 2014 to 2017 I guided half a dozen public walks in Jerusalem’s southern neighborhoods. The walks were conducted during the research and production of the interactive documentary Jerusalem, We Are Here, which digitally reinscribes Palestinians into the neighborhoods from which they were expelled by the 1948 war, or the nakba. The walks were performative and participatory and joined a long tradition of walking as art. They offered an alternative to mainstream Israeli guided tours that manufacture linear and simplistic narratives about the politically contested space of Jerusalem. This article examines the guided walks within critical discourse about the place of art, and specifically the art of walking, as a political practice that unsettles colonial frameworks, or as decolonial gestures. I examine the ways in which the physical walks—primarily for Israeli participants—intervened in a nationalist paradigm and offered Israelis a (rare) emotional and ideological space from which to consider the communities whose dispossession enables Israel to exist. I review the strategies I used to disrupt Israeli denial and encourage accountability within relevant theoretical paradigms, using anecdotes and my own records for analysis. No qualitative data were collected during or after the walking tours. My conclusion is that walking tours can effectively “unsettle” nationalist narratives, encourage settler reckoning, and enable a different kind of seeing or restorying, one of the preconditions for decolonization.