#sursock

[postcard-from-the-past]

Sursock borough of Beirut, Lebanon

British vintage postcard

[oldsardens]

Cici Sursock - Nude

[tamamita]

hey sal feel free to ignore this but i got into an argument with a zionist who claimed that arabs sold their lands to them, is this true

This is interesting, because it ignores a lot of context. Keywords to remember is the Ottoman capitulation, the Felaheen, the Sursock purchase and the eviction of Palestinians that inhabited the area at that time.

The Sursock family was a family of Aristocratic landlords with strong ties to the Turkish and European nobility dating back to the 19th century. The Sursocks were known to have mass purchased land in Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. While they were absentee landlords, they hired Arab labours who inhabited the purchased land at that time. When the Turks capitulated following WW1, the Turks were pressured into allowing the land to be sold to the PLDC, the Palestinan (later Israeli) Land Development Company. The PLDC sought to purchase the Jezreel valley, which consisted of 20-25 Arab villages, from the Sursock. . Keep in mind that the Jezreel valley was the most fertile land of Palestine and close to the economic city of Haifa. Following the mass purchase of land by the PLDC, the Jewish landbuyers expelled Arab tenants and depopulated the Arab villages despite their usufruct, and right to toll on the land. This all came as a surprise to the Arab inhabitants. This was all part of the idea that cheap Arab labour should be replaced with Jewish labour, this despite the fact that Arab labourers had greater expertise on the agricultural field; the settlers were unfamiliar with the land. Keep in mind that according to JNF, the Jewish national fund, only 3% of the Palestinian land were uncultivated, destroying the myth that the land bloomed as a result of its settler colonizers. The Hashomer Hatzaeer would come to be the center of these kibbutzim and would establish over 30 kibbutzim built ontop of the Arab villages before 1948. As a result, the Arabs, or Felaheen (The Arab peasant class) put up a resistance against the JNF out of concrete material reasons and attempted to fight back against the expansion of these kibbutzim. This was the first instance of Arab resistance against Zionism.

All of these lands were purchased before 1948 and the Arabs were expelled and depopulated only for the kibbutzim to be established with the help of the money provided by the Jewish Colonization association and its organs. However, the British mandate did not require the landowners to compensate for the expelled Arab tenants. The Arabs were forced to migrate to slums and towns. In one of these towns, a notable Syrian resistance fighter would rise up, namely, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, and declare jihad on the British. When the Arabs resisted their dispossession by every means necessary, even violence, the Zionists used this as an excuse to fortify their colonizers and expand them due to "escalating security needs". Since the colonizers were too weak to face the resistance, they turned themselves to the British to gain their support in an attempt to expand their lands as means of security for the Kibbutzim. In a memondarium written by the Kibbutz Hazora (a settlement in Jezreel) to the Jewish Agency in 1936: "Our basic demand is for our own instutions to help us ugently in getting the British authorities to expand our territory--this is a vital issue for us.". A similar pretext is used whenever the colonized put up resistance against their colonizers, in which the same excuse is used to further expand and colonize the lands. This is the logic of the oppressor in any context, whether it is colonial or in the class struggle.

[opencommunion]

Croatian-Lebanese artist Cici Tommaseo Sursock at her studio in Beirut, 1978

[argyrocratie]

"What makes all of this discussion of majorities and minorities relevant at all is a history of state-building: the state-building initiative that was decided upon by the League of Nations when they invented their system of mandates, transforming former German and Ottoman territories into territories governed by the so-called “People”. Prior to this history, ethnic majority was far less relevant. Under the rule of the Ottomans, there was no question that it was the Ottomans who were sovereign and that its subjects resided in Ottoman territory and resided on Ottoman land. It wasn’t until the Tanzimat in the mid-19th Century that these lands were registered and titles granted to landowners who could then treat such land as a commodity. And it is this development of land as private property which created the conditions of possibility for the historical developments that allowed the Jewish minority to grow through land purchases.

Before Zionism, the Jewish population of Ottoman Palestine was about 4% and the total population was somewhere between 450,000 to 500,000 people. This was not a large population for a region of its size. The ecological features of the region were themselves a limiting factor in how large of a population it could support. However, there were also several periods of drought, famine, and conflict that made it a difficult place to live. Although the Zionist notion “a land without a people for a people without a land” was an exaggeration that ignored not only the Arab peoples living there but also the Jews living there, the undesirability of much of the land was an important fact of the region. Besides being arid, malaria was extensive throughout. The eradication of malaria, the modernization of agricultural techniques, and the industrial development that followed later are the factors that made it possible for this region to support the population sizes that it does now.

Above are all factors that even made it possible for there to be 800,000 Arab people to displace during the Nakba, a number almost twice that of the total population prior to Zionism’s existence. From the Tanzimat when the land laws were reformed to the Nakba, capitalism and the creation of nation-states changed everything about what was possible.

The Ottomans reformed the land laws, which allowed the land to be accumulated by powerful individuals and families like the Sursock family, who sold hundreds-of-thousands of acres of land to Zionist organizations. The League of Nations then exacerbated the situation by giving the British a mandate to oversee the development of nation-states in the region. And since they were encouraging the development of nation-states, specifically, it was the notion of “nationality” that regulated the types of states that would form. According to the League of Nations and their emphasis on “national self-determination”, the new rulers would be those “nations” who could prove that they were capable of running a state… states that would be grounded in nationality and allied with the winners of first World War. In effect, nationalist groups were put into competition with one another for recognition by the developing global nation-state system. These conditions not only favored Zionist over Communist Jews. The conditions were intended to favor nationalist groups generally: Arab, Jew, or otherwise.

The factors that allowed the total population to grow did not on their own lead to the formation of nation-states. Those factors had to be harnessed by imperial powers and pointed towards the formation of nation-states. Additionally, the Soviet Union was also encouraging the development of nationalism, seeing such a development as the appropriate form of administering an industrial society. While some communists were opposed to nationalism, those with the approval of the Soviet Union were not opposed to it. There were indeed splits amongst the Jewish Left in Palestine along these lines, the nuances of which are outlined wonderfully in Zachary Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies. In the same book, we are also given an excellent overview of the very few and very weak forces opposed to the nationalists, both Jewish and Arab."

-A Response to "Ya Ghazze Habibti—Gaza, My Love"

[gravalicious]

Portrait of Tola Wade. Photograph: Émile Sursock. Saint-­Louis, Senegal, 1950s. Courtesy of Abdourahmane Niang. Reproduction: Leslie Rabine.

Source: Jennifer Bajorek - Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (2020: 49)

[art-damaged]

In the wake of the August 2020 explosions at Beirut Port in Lebanon, several international institutions stepped in to help repair artworks damaged in the event - including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which has unveiled a series of newly restored paintings from the collection of the Sursock Museum in Beirut.

The works included “Portrait of Nicolas Sursock” (1926-30) by Kees Van Dongen, “Portrait of Odile Mazloum” (1964) by Cici Tomazeo Sursock, and “Consolation” (1968) by Paul Guiragossian. While the first two endured several tears across their canvases, Guiragossian’s work had actually fallen apart in places, its surface of thick brushstrokes lost in the rubble. (In the end, the piece was only partially reconstructed, with portions left absent.)

The pieces are currently on view at the Pompidou until their return to Lebanon for the museum's reopening in May.

[graceafteraparty]

Silence, Vartan Aror

1995

Displayed at the Nicolas Sursock museum in Gemmayze, Beirut

[aestheticvh]

Fairuz - painted by Cici Sursock, 1980.

[michelangelob]

Artemisia Gentileschi: dopo 400 anni torna a Napoli la sua Maddalena

Dopo 400 anni torna a Napoli la Maddelena di Artemisia Gentileschi, opera dipinta a olio su tela proprio nella città partenopea nel 1630. L’opera verrò esposta al pubblico nel complesso monumentale di Santa Chiara a partire da domani 19 di luglio. Artemisia Gentileschi, Maddalena, 1630 – 1635. Olio su tela, 108×78,5 cm. Beirut (Libano), Sursock Palace Collection Il Complesso di Santa Chiara a…

[opencommunion]

Cici Tommaseo Sursock, "My Madonna of Three Faces," 1983

[ikasdu64]

Riapertura di tre musei libanesi di interesse: Il Museo della Seta- Il Museo della Preistoria – Il Museo Sursock

[fairuzstuff]

The historical meeting between Président Macron and Madame Fairuz August 31 2020 © Soazig de la Moissonniere / Présidence de la République

[wearelebanon]

Historic 1830 Fegali home in #Sursock was hit with the full impact of the blast on #August4th 🇱🇧♥️ By @diamradd #WeAreLebanon (at Sursock Museum) https://www.instagram.com/p/CD1_kpjDj9L/?igshid=191x4iowl1tj2