The Lost Paradise: The Role of the Witness in Shaping the Historiography of Jerusalem

Abstract

Jerusalem is not merely occupied; it is actively rewritten. This piece examines how Palestinian witness testimony defies the gradual violence of erasure, transforming the city from a site of dispossession into an assertion of historical continuity. Drawing from decolonial theory, phenomenology, and political philosophy, I argue that testimony is not merely an act of remembrance but an epistemic and ontological intervention that challenges both material oppression and the state’s monopolization of historical truth. I interrogate the material conditions of occupation, positioning them within a broader philosophy of spatial domination: the destruction of Palestinian homes, the calculated deprivation of infrastructure, and the juridical apparatus that renders Palestinian existence precarious. Drawing on Nur-eldeen Masalha’s concept of memoricide, I examine how settler-colonial power operates not just through territorial expansion but through the systematic erasure and reconstruction of historical narratives, turning Jerusalem into a battleground of meaning as much as land. Testimony emerges here not as passive recollection but as an act of existential resistance. The act of witnessing asserts both the primacy of lived experience and the refusal of epistemic erasure, positioning Palestinian memory as a challenge to the structures that seek to render it illegible. Judith Butler’s work on ‘grievability’ is mobilized to interrogate how international frameworks of recognition operate to exclude Palestinian suffering from the category of the politically visible. Further on, I situates testimony within digital landscapes, analyzing the El-Kurd family’s plight in Sheikh Jarrah as an extension of what James C. Scott terms ‘hidden transcripts,’ a counter-history that bypasses the gatekeepers of official discourse. ‘Digital sumud’ is introduced as a contemporary iteration of Palestinian endurance, where social media functions not just as documentation but as a subversion of hegemonic narratives. Ultimately, this essay argues that Palestinian testimony does more than document loss. It disrupts, resists, and reclaims. The struggle over Jerusalem is not just territorial; it is a war over meaning itself, and through the voices of those who refuse to be erased, the city remains a living archive of defiance.