Museumification of Palestine: Ayn Hawd, Haifa as a Case Study رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

In the contemporary discourse on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the concept of museumification provides a critical framework for understanding how the subtle mechanisms of erasure, appropriation, and the construction of settler-colonial sovereignty operate through cultural and spacial means. This thesis explores museumification as a discursive and spatial strategy that transforms Palestinian presence into curated absence, thereby consolidating Zionist settler-colonial claims of continuity and legitimacy. Within this process, the preservation and recontextualization of ruins become a means of transforming sites of dispossession into symbols of national identity and cultural authority. At the heart of this study is the case of Ayn Hawd, located south of Haifa, which exemplifies how a formerly inhabited Palestinian village was physically preserved yet culturally and symbolically redefined through Israeli narratives and artistic interventions. Following its appropriation in the early 1950s, Ayn Hawd was converted into the Israeli artists’ colony Ein Hod, where Palestinian homes and communal spaces were repurposed for cultural and touristic consumption while their original histories were systematically obscured. This act of rebranding exemplifies how the process of museumification commodifies the traces of Palestinian life, detaching them from lived memory and embedding them within the aesthetic and ideological framework of the settler state. Such practices reveal the broader settler-colonial logic of aesthetic domination, wherein strategies like art washing sanitize and naturalize the realities of displacement. The thesis argues that the museumification of Palestinian villages functions simultaneously as a mechanism of symbolic control and as a cultural technology for fabricating sovereignty. Through the focused analysis of Ayn Hawd, it demonstrates how spatial restructuring, aesthetic re-inscription, and heritage VI manipulation converge to erase Palestinian presence while consolidating the ideological and visual foundations of Zionist settler-colonial power. Yet, the persistence of Palestinian memory and attachment underscores the instability of this colonial order, revealing museumification itself as a contested terrain of visibility, belonging, and resistance