Silwan: A Long Palestinian History, Heritage, and Existence
Date
2026-06-19
Authors
Daoud Ghoul
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Publisher
Center for Jerusalem Studies - Al-Quds University
Abstract
Al-Quds (Jerusalem) is one of the most famous cities in the world — renowned for its history, religious sites, and tourism. It is also known for a long colonial struggle, during which the city acquired a unique position among its native people, visitors, and colonizers. It became targeted for Western and Israeli archaeological excavations as part of an effort to claim the history of the city and exterminate its Palestinian historical heritage. This colonial act is known in the literature as “the logic of elimination” (e.g., Wolfe 2006; Salamanca et al. 2012), or the elimination of memory ‘damnatio memoriae’ (Bodnaruk 2022). The settler colonial elimination in Silwan is carried out through various projects that use archaeology to erase the Palestinian history, memory, and existence, transforming the area into the ‘City of David’ (e.g., Hawari 2022). This reflects the Zionist notion that Palestine is ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’. In this paper, I examine the rich literature on Palestinian existence, heritage, and history in Silwan.