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Heritage settlers: Yair Agmon, Memory and Destruction: Heritage Colonialism in East Jerusalem, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2025

15Jun25

Abstract: This research addresses how societies use heritage and the commemoration of past violence to the ruination and domination of Others. It examines cultural memory as integral to the settler-colonial desire for land and logic of elimination, and its findings offer a corrective to scholarship that views memory and destruction as ontologically distinct. They lead me to argue that commemorating loss imagines a past that is recoverable in the present and provides the administrative tools of heritage-making to construct sites of memory by displacing and dispossessing present-day communities—a process I term heritage colonialism. The research involved nearly five years of photo-ethnographic fieldwork at the City of David National Park, located in the heart of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem. Using data gathered over dozens of tours, over fifty interviews, photography, and endless hours of observation, I trace two key transformations. The transformation of the archaeological excavation of the city’s multicultural origins into a highly popular tourist attraction centered exclusively on cycles of destruction, exile, and triumphant return to Jerusalem by its Jewish inhabitants. At the same time, I trace how Jewish settlers have utilized the development of tourism, heritage, and archaeology at the City of David to capture a substantial portion of the lands and homes in Silwan, resulting in the ruination of its Palestinian community. Examining these twin destructions, I demonstrate that the construction of Jewish heritage is not merely a guise for a colonial project, nor a form of erasure or denial of its violence. Rather, I find that constructing the memory of the ancient past at the national park is integral to territorial expansion and colonial domination in several ways. Cultural memory envisions and produces an affective and intimate attachment to the ancient Jewish past while devaluing Palestinian life in the present. Israeli authorities have also utilized heritage development as a bureaucratic tool to slowly clear Silwan of its Palestinian houses and residents and to unearth the ancient City of David from beneath the surface. Yet, the valorization of the Jewish past does not conceal or obscure the violence. Instead, it has provided a way to live with it comfortably and has framed it as necessary to protect the past. Building on these findings, I argue that the ethnonationalist and territorial relationship between memory and destruction observed in the City of David has profoundly shaped Israeli memory culture and created the conditions for the increase in land seizure and settler violence we observe today across East Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as the upstream precondition for ethnic cleansing.


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