In “A Walk-through Wadi Hilwe: Archaeology, Tourism and Cameras as Tools of Dispossession,” a dialogue unfolds amid the contested landscape of Wadi Hilweh—an East Jerusalem neighborhood shaped by layered histories and present-day struggle.
Moving through national park designations, archaeological excavations, and eerie urban occupation, the uncanny digital conversation between researchers exposes how surveillance infrastructure carves and cuts the social and physical terrain. Cameras, once justified by security or tourism, emerge not only as tools of observation but as agents actively sorting bodies—tourists, settlers, and residents—into zones of privilege or precarity. We move through an archaeological-tourism settlement project that obfuscates contemporary dispossession through mobilising antiquity and preservation narratives. We walk through a neighborhood emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants and now occupied by Jewish families, talking about how visibility becomes both power and vulnerability and how the surveillance apparatus acts on present as well as absent bodies.
This piece is part of a larger effort to document and understand the role surveillance plays in the occupation of East Jerusalem. This work builds on Ariel Caine’s longstanding documentation of the area. It is situated within the Post-Visual Security project run by Rune Saugmann, where it contributes to understanding the agency of digital visual surveillance technologies.
The work draws on earlier mappings and datasets kindly shared with us by the NGO Peace Now.
Credits:
Rune Saugmann Andersen
Ariel Caine
Faiz Abu Rmeleh
Bibliography
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Weiss, Bari. 2019. “Opinion | Can an Archaeological Dig Change the Future of Jerusalem?” Opinion. The New York Times, March 30. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/30/opinion/sunday/jerusalem-city-of-david-israel-dig.html.
For further reading
Data from the project is used by Amnesty International in their report; to read click here.
Organizations that document these issues: Silwanic.net (Wadi Hilwe Information Centre), Peace Now, B’tselem, Amnesty International, WhoProfits & Emek Shaveh