By Elisa Ferrato, John Lewicki, and Mick Scott

This article is co-published with the Open Democracy Cities in Conflict series.

On February 14th a clash broke out in the Old City of Hebron as members of the Youth Against Settlements movement prevented a group of Israeli settlers from building a wall around the communal spring of al-’Ain al-Jadida. The wall was intended to consolidate settlement territory and make space for a road connecting the Ramat Yishai settlement to the infamous Al-Shuhada Street. This is the latest in an increasing number of incidents in the Hebron area understood as a process of ‘judaisation’ of the Old City by the settlements expanding metre by metre.

Throughout its history, the Old City of Hebron has been the site of frequent acts of violence in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; from the 1929 massacre of Jewish residents to the 1994 Goldstein killing of Muslim worshippers in the Ibrahmi Mosque. Reacting to this latter violent event and under the pretence of security concerns, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation signed the Hebron Protocol, thus dividing the city in two sectors, H1 and H2, placing the city under separate governing regimes.

The Hebron Protocol was intended to be an interim arrangement with caveats leading to greater Palestinian control; however the conditions of the agreement have remained in place for nearly 15 years.

In the context of the Occupied West Bank, Hebron is a unique city as it is the only one with Israeli settlements in its ancient centre.[1]

The creation of settlements in the Old City of Hebron has been entangled with violence and ultra-orthodoxy since the first attempts were initiated in 1968.

In the years that followed, Israeli government support led initially to the establishment of Qiryat Arba settlement in the outskirts, and of Beit Hadassah, Avraham Avinu, Beit Romano and Tel Rumeida in the very centre of the Old City. Today, more than 500 settlers and over 1,500 Israeli soldiers live among 30,000 Old City Palestinians near the Tomb of the Patriarchs in H2.

Closed businesses and workshops on a section of Al-Shuhada Street. (Elisa Ferrato)

As a result of spatial security restrictions imposed by the Israeli army, such as the closure of the central business district of Al-Shuhada Street, the introduction of roadblocks and finally the construction of checkpoints, the Old City has suffered an economic and social death over the last 20 years. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reports that 80% of Palestinian adults in the Old City are unemployed, while an estimated 75% of the general population live below the poverty line.

Concurrent with these spatial restrictions, Old City Palestinians have been the subject of physical, psychological and symbolic violence in their day-to-day lives, which has led to feelings of fear and insecurity.

The policies of the Israeli occupation safeguard the daily lives of the several hundred settlers, leaving the Palestinians open to systematic direct and indirect forms of hardship. In the Old City the space is colonised from above by the settlers, who inhabit the higher floors of buildings in the heart of Palestinian neighbourhoods. From there, they periodically raid the buildings and streets, marking the space with dirt, refuse, insulting graffiti and national flags.

These actions are manifestations of symbolic violence: a form of aggression which targets the values and cultural and social practices of a specific community. This materialisation of symbolic violence in everyday life has a tendency to normalise the situation particularly for the youngest population of the city who have never lived in an unoccupied environment.

However, amongst these difficult conditions, the resilience and desire to live normal lives as expressed by Old City Hebronites is remarkable. Their actions known as ‘Sumud’ (steadfast perseverance)[2] are a source of inspiration to those who espouse a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

A city divided in section: a high level cage and tarpaulins protect the street from the settlers who regularly drop rubbish, rocks, etc. from above. It is not enough though against filthy water and urine (John Lewicki)

One of numerous checkpoints in the Old City; this particular security point blocks what was previously the main junction of Shuhada Street to the centre of the modern city (Mick Scott)

Inside the Palestinian restricted zone, the Israeli checkpoint from the previous image can be seen in the distance; Israeli flags indicate an expanding occupation (Brigitte Piquard)

In Hebron’s Old City, conflict is played out through urban space in multiple ways. The forced evacuations, the displacement of everyday activities, and the suppression of public spaces can be seen as a violence against the fabric of the city itself.

It is in this complex setting that the interdisciplinary initiative known as the Building Sumud Project (BSP) operates. The project focuses on the interaction between the spatial and social impacts of occupation in the Old City and the enhancement of resilience and conflict transformation through heritage and architecture.

A previous entrance to Al-Shuhada Street from the Old City now blocked by precast concrete Israeli barriers (Elisa Ferrato)

Since the first pilot study in 2010, the BSP multidisciplinary team of researchers has carried out multiple fieldwork exercises in partnership with Paris-Est University, the Palestinian Polytechnic University and Al Quds Open University with the support of the the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) and the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC). The latter has been actively involved in preserving and rehabilitating the physical and supporting social fabric of the Old City . Sometimes they have to work in secrecy trying to preserve old houses in the “forbidden” H2 area. Their mission, to keep the historic buildings alive for future generations, despite the occupation, obtained the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1998.

Through this fieldwork, the BSP has mapped the effects of the presence of the illegal settlements on the residents of the Old City, using a mixed methodology that includes collections of life stories, walking tours, architectural mapping and interviews with relevant organizations. The integration of typical techniques from the social sciences with a spatial analysis provided the opportunity to explore both the individual/household level and the neighbourhood/community scale.

Map of restricted areas, settlements and checkpoints in the Old City (John Lewicki / Building Sumud Project)

As the project has progressed, three core research themes have emerged.

1. Home and Place Attachment

As the public or semi-public spaces of the city are subjected to harassment or threat from the settlers, the inhabitants have acquired a tendency to isolate or lock themselves inside their homes, compensating the loss of open spaces with courtyards or inner rooms of the house, where they spend time with neighbours or families. The traditional way of using the spaces shifts towards safer internal arrangements.

2. Symbolic Violence

Stephen Graham has described the situation in the Old City as urbicide : the fragmentation and destruction of architecture and the creation of hostile environments. On a daily basis this condition harms the population, with small doses of constant sufferance, which aims to erase their capability to imagine a different scenario for their future.

3. Sumud: Coping Strategies and Adaptabilities

The main strategy adopted by Old City Palestinians in order to reduce the effect of aggression on their lives is to avoid direct confrontation with settlers or soldiers, by for example, scheduling school timetables and planning spaces so that settlers and Palestinian children do not interact with each other, or by altering the use of spaces of livelihoods (rooftops or inner courtyards instead of streets). Unfortunately, the violent atmosphere is so extreme, that these Sumud actions are not enough to keep a proactive attitude towards the future.

As these three themes relate directly to the physical and social realities of occupation they offer useful reference to consider when addressing the links between interventions in space and effective conflict transformation.

In order to establish a physical presence for the Building Sumud Project in the Old City and to facilitate the introduction and running of practical initiatives, three architects from Oxford Brookes University, members of the BSP (Elisa Ferrato, John Lewicki and Mick Scott) have produced a design for a research and workshop centre located in a vernacular building in the Old City. The concept design, known as PLUG-In Hebron (People Liberated Urban Gaps In Hebron) was conceived for the international UN-restricted Access competition hosted by Architecture for Humanity. PLUG-In Hebron considers the Old City as a militarized space and utilises architecture as catalyst for an active, civic-led demilitarization and reclamation of public space. In the spirit of the BSP, the design seeks a reversal of the process of occupation that has severely disrupted civilian life, leading to deserted public spaces, community isolation and environmental degradation.

The PLUG-In Hebron project won the “Small scale intervention” category of the competition and was exhibited at the 2012 Venice Biennale.

View of the Building Sumud Project research centre – PLUG In Hebron (Elisa Ferrato, John Lewicki, Mick Scott / Building Sumud Project)

From the outset, it was the intention of the designers to match the objectives of the BSP, the result of which was the concept of the functional ‘stratification’ into three zones of distinctive but complementary agendas throughout the floors of the building. Firstly, the Open Space on the ground floor and street level will encourage civic activity, allowing people to gather for events, markets, exhibitions and workshops, enlivening the public space in and around the building. The middle floor is designated as the Lab – an academic research centre. On the rooftop, is the Hub. Largely housed in a new semi-enclosed lightweight structure, this space operates as an amphitheatre embracing the spectacular views of the Old City – a greatly needed event space and open forum for dialogue on the future of Hebron.

Elevation of the project building showing the layering of functions (Elisa Ferrato, John Lewicki, Mick Scott / Building Sumud Project)

The lightweight wooden structure is intended to have little physical impact on the historic architecture, which contrasts against the army outposts and settlement architecture scattered across the roofs of the Old City. Layers of soft fabric patterned with traditional Hebronite embroidery cover it, expressing the values of the project. The colourful, soft and familiar volume is designed to engage people from its urban environs, whilst offering a comfortable, secure, private and screened space.

View of the HUB forum space (Elisa Ferrato, John Lewicki, Mick Scott / Building Sumud Project)

This three-pronged programme is the expression of the BSP project agenda of advocacy, action-research initiatives, empowerment and enhancing local capacities by engaging with researchers, architects, activists, craftsmen, artists and community members. Here, architecture will be employed as a vehicle of conflict transformation in order to literally build resilience, to protect human rights, and to counter the economic and socio-environmental decline of the occupied Old City.

The realisation of the project as part of the BSP will touch upon many contrasting interests and will have an immense symbolic value. Therefore, it is important to proceed carefully and sensitively, starting with a process of evaluation and negotiation with the HRC and other local stakeholders.

The establishment of a permanent base in Hebron is fundamental to the realisation of the project’s long-term agenda. The first phase, proposed to take 3-5 years, is currently ongoing with the deployment of various advocacy and research initiatives. PLUG-In Hebron can be seen as the hub for the different actions, from the Public Space activation, which uses public spaces as initiators of social interaction that strengthen the ties inside the estranged communities; through the actions of the Observatory of Symbolic Violence which has begun monitoring the many forms of this indirect type of aggression; to the Sumud Ambassadors initiative focussing on younger generations, empowering their sense of belonging to the community and their possibilities for the future.

Among the more obvious impacts, it is intended that these actions will mitigate the effects of constant fear and insecurity on the psyche of the inhabitants of the Old City, many of whom have internalised decades of Israeli occupation, leading to self-imposed restrictions on movement, and a difficulty in envisioning an alternative future.

Ultimately, through encouraging assertive planning and action in the face of an ever expanding and intensifying occupation, a combined architectural and social approach might offer a key to successful conflict transformation and a definitive contribution to the liberation process in Hebron.

The Building Sumud Project is an action research initiative led by Dr. Brigitte Piquard, Reader at Oxford Brookes University, and run by the CERAR (Centre d’Études et de Recherches-Actions sur la Résilience) based in Paris, in partnership with the CENDEP (Centre for Development and Emergency Practice)  in the School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University.

More information about the Building Sumud Project can be found at: www.buildingsumud.org

End Notes

Not including East Jerusalem, which was unilaterally annexed by Israel after the Six Days War in 1967, but is defined occupied territory by the International Law.

Braverman, Irus. “Uprooting Identities: The Regulation of Olive Trees in the Occupied West Bank.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32.2 (2009): 237-264.

By Ahmad Barclay and Dena Qaddumi

This article was originally posted on opendemocracy.net as part of the Cities in Conflict Series.

The establishment of the village Bab Al-Shams (“gate of the sun”) on 11 January 2013 represented a new evolution in the unfolding patterns of spatial resistance in Palestine. Conversely, the response of the Israeli state – to evict the village within 2 days of its founding – suggests nothing extraordinary, save its underscoring of the continuity of Israeli practices of colonisation across historic Palestine. Media reports initially depicted Bab Al-Shams as mirroring tactics by Israeli settlers to establish illegal outposts and thereby create ‘facts on the ground’. Whilst the comparison is not unfounded, it fails to contextualize the actions politically, which necessitates an examination of the broader conditions of spatial appropriation and resistance operating in Palestine.

The establishment of Bab Al-Shams (Activestills.org)

The eviction of Bab Al-Shams (Activestills.org)

On Spatial Colonization
The transformation of the Palestinian landscape as a result of Zionist colonization from the early 1900s has been well documented. After the 1948 War, and the displacement of over 80% of the Palestinian inhabitants from the territory that would become Israel, this transformation was magnified. It necessitated practices of both construction and erasure; as new Jewish communities were being established and populated across the new state in accordance with the Israeli National Plan of 1950, so abandoned Palestinian villages were razed to the ground and concealed through the planting of pine forests. These actions exemplify a logic of spatial appropriation, through ‘civilian occupation’ and the physical transformation of natural landscapes, which continues, in essence, to this day.

The military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 provided the opportunity to expand the theatre of Israeli colonization. The military occupation soon evolved into a civilian one, driven initially by government-sponsored Jewish settlements in the Jordan valley and East Jerusalem. Further, religious settler groups such as Gush Emunim emerged, pushing for Jewish-Israeli settlement throughout the newly conquered territories.

The establishment of Israeli settlements and their continued growth have become emblematic of a political and legal system that is first and foremost subservient to colonial logic. The Green Line has been employed selectively; acting on the one side as a ‘sacred’ border to legitimise the colonisation within ‘Israel proper’, whilst Palestinian land on the other side oscillates between legal definitions of ‘occupied’, ‘disputed’ and ‘annexed’, depending on its strategic value. The recent attempt to move towards ‘legalising’ Israeli outposts – although they are considered illegal by every relevant international legal authority and Israel’s own Supreme Court – is indicative of this reality. In this context, the mere act of appealing to Israeli courts in the OPTs is seen by many to have the effect of legitimising and ‘normalising’ an unlawful reality.

Map of settlement areas and infrastructural devices around Nazareth. (Ahmad Barclay)

Map of settlement areas and infrastructural devices around Ramallah. (Ahmad Barclay)

Urban Control – From Jerusalem to Nazareth and Ramallah
At the urban scale, spatial appropriation assumes particular forms, dependent on a locality’s demography and its political and legal status. East Jerusalem is perhaps the location where this ‘Judaisation’ of space is most severe and apparent. It is promoted by the Jerusalem Municipality, whose political target of a 70/30 demographic split between Jewish and Palestinian residents is met through a complex regime of discriminatory zoning, refusal of construction permits, house evictions and demolitions, revocation of residency permits and the de-facto redrawing of the municipal boundary by way of the separation wall.

Similar practices are applied throughout historic Palestine, where the obsession with consolidating Jewish territorial presence while marginalising any ‘Arab’ presence permeates. In the West Bank, Palestinian localities are confined to Areas A and B, with their expansion circumscribed by the temporary lines of the Oslo era, and by the construction of Israeli settlements and a myriad of ‘closed military zones’. Inside Israel, Palestinian cities and villages have long been encroached upon by legal mechanisms for the expropriation of land. Meanwhile the so-called ‘mixed cities’ in Israel enact policies similar to those in Jerusalem, which promote Palestinian impoverishment and outward migration.

Palestinian Space Until Cast in Concrete
Notably, it increasingly seems that continuing Israeli military control and physical transformation of natural landscapes is no longer deemed sufficient to supplant the ‘Palestinianness’ of the land itself. Thus, Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank (and previously Gaza) has been overwhelmingly rendered in concrete ‘facts on the ground’. Meanwhile, the tragi-comic drive to ‘develop’ the ruins of Lifta (the most iconic remnant of the Palestinian Nakba) into luxury condos seems to evidence a deeply ingrained fear of the re-emergence of the ghosts of its Palestinian past.

On Spatial Resistance
In an effort to disrupt and weaken the spatial aspects of the continued Israeli colonisation of historic Palestine, a range of oppositional practices have emerged, centred on individual and collective agency. These practices of ‘spatial resistance’ act in various ways to challenge the Israeli spatial regime, and can be conceptualized broadly into four modes: spatial analysis, advocacy, critical speculation and physical intervention, summarised as follows:

Spatial Analysis involves research to expose the present spatial reality and the mechanisms of spatial domination that construct and maintain it. Further, it identifies potential sites for intervention.

Advocacy consists of legal and/or political campaigns to raise awareness and directly challenge the structures of spatial power, both from inside and outside of the political/legal system.

Critical Speculation is the creative application of knowledge of specific facets of the spatial conflict to assert alternative narratives of the present and future, whether through design, film, literature or other creative means.

Physical Intervention employs the concrete act of building, or the physical occupation of strategic sites, to directly challenge the structures of spatial power.

Location of E1 area in its relation to Israeli settlements and the West Bank. (OCHA, oPt)

Bab Al-Shams: Towards a New Model of Spatial Resistance
The establishment of Bab Al-Shams represents an innovation of previous embodiments of spatial resistance in its simultaneous employment of elements from each of the four modes outlined above. Beyond the physical intervention in the act of construction itself, the selection of E1 as the site for the village exhibited a level of strategic spatial analysis. Not only had E1 made international headlines just weeks earlier when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announced plans for the construction of new settler homes there, but it also represented a site of geographic and legal consensus as ‘Palestinian land’, even within liberal Zionist and US political discourse.

Further, the founders of Bab Al-Shams selected a site within E1 where they could offer documentary evidence of Palestinian private ownership, and went to the effort of obtaining express permission to occupy the site by its owner. In anticipation of being evicted by force, they employed legal advocacy by seeking an injunction from the Israel High Court. Since the site was clearly on private land – even by Israeli measure – the court granted a 6-day stay of eviction and, crucially, insisted that the Israeli government had to present legal grounds for any eviction.

A coordinated international advocacy campaign in the form press releases, social media activity and nominated spokespeople resulted in prominent and nuanced coverage of Bab Al-Shams in mainstream news outlets across the world, and the striking of a particularly strong chord in Arabic language media.

In spite of these measures, Netanyahu personally ordered the eviction of Bab Al-Shams within 48 hours of its establishment. That the action induced such a direct and immediate response from the highest level of government is revealing in itself. That Netanyahu’s intervention so starkly ignored the Israeli justice system, offered evidence to the world of the court’s position as little more than a veneer of legal legitimacy, ultimately submissive to Israel’s colonial policies and practices. Thus, the appeal to the courts did not serve to legitimate its authority; but rather to expose its absurdity.

It is in this particular dimension that the much-vaunted parallel with Israeli outposts is also revealing. Whilst the Israeli courts occasionally order the eviction of settler outposts, over 100 such communities continue to occupy hilltops across the West Bank under the active protection of the Israeli military, and alongside 124 permanent ‘legal’ settlements.

Looking Forward: Bab Al-Shams as Critical Speculation
Foremost, Bab Al-Shams represents a concrete physical intervention towards the re-appropriation Palestinian space and re-invigoration of Palestinian agency, whilst exposing the duplicity of Israel’s colonial practices to a global audience. Bab Al-Shams can be positioned within an existing web of direct-actions that have emerged and garnered attention over the past five years. These include the on-going struggle of the people of Al-Araqib against eviction from their land in the Negev, and the return of internally displaced Palestinians to the village of Iqrit in the upper Galilee.

Such actions physically re-assert a Palestinian right to space and also induce an Israeli response on the ground, in the court and in the media. A new condition is created whereby spatial resistance is enacted as a proactive strategy, directly challenging the assumptions of Palestine as a space permanently fractured by, or entirely lost to, Israeli colonisation.

Just days after the eviction of Bab Al-Shams, as if to signal the propagation of a new wave of spatial resistance, news broke of another new village constructed in the West Bank, named Bab Al-Karama (“gate of dignity”).

Ahmad Barclay is an architect and environmental designer based in Beirut. He is co-founder of arenaofspeculation.org, and previously worked with DAAR. His academic research has focused on practices of ‘spatial resistance’ in Palestine.

Dena Qaddumi is an architect, urbanist and co-founder of arenaofspeculation.org. Her writing is primarily concerned with how social movements engage with urban space and how this process creates new avenues for citizenship formation.

By Isis Nusair

This article is a co-publication, also appearing on Jadaliyya alongside arenaofspeculation.org.

I last visited Al-Khalil (Hebron) with my family when I was a child in the mid 1970s. I only have vague recollections of that visit, except for the place where Ibrahim was to sacrifice his son. For some reason, and maybe because as a child I was unable to comprehend why a father would be asked to sacrifice his son, that visit remained ingrained in my memory for years to come.

While studying in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, I always visited Ramallah, Bethlehem and Birzeit, especially for solidarity student visits during the first Palestinian Intifada. I have been living in the USA since 1993, yet despite my repeated visits back home for research and to see my family in Nazareth, Al-Khalil was never on my agenda. It was not until I agreed to be a discussant for the film, This is my Country Hebron, to be screened as part of the annual Human Rights Film Festival at Denison University, that I went back to Al-Khalil in January 2012 to see with my own eyes what was happening on the ground. I went again for another visit in early May the same year, and by now it seems that Al-Khalil will be part of every future visit I make.

Map of Al-Khalil, showing Israeli settlements and restrictions on Palestinians, 2007 (B'Tselem)

Arriving at the Checkpoint

Before arriving at Al-Khalil, I had to get a ride early in the morning from a friend who is originally from ‘Arabeh and currently lives in Beit-Safafa. We drove through the Israeli checkpoint in Bethlehem. He told me how he makes a point of shopping in Bethlehem to benefit the Palestinian economy. He described how, at times, the Israeli soldiers give him a hard time as he tries to re-enter into Israel, and how they restrict the quantity of grape leaves and other agricultural goods that he is allowed to bring back with him.

My friend also shared the story of how he was stopped a year ago at the Qalandiya checkpoint while he was driving to East Jerusalem with his wife and her sister. He was told by the Israeli soldier that he could only have his wife go through with him as they were related but not her sister. His wife immediately asked to switch to the driver’s seat, so the Israeli soldier had to let them through since then, as the driver, both her husband and sister were related to her.

The Wall in Bethlehem, close to the checkpoint from Jerusalem (Diego Segatto)

As we approached Bethlehem, we were confronted with giant concrete walls and barriers. This was an ugly reminder of how the Israeli Separation Wall has engulfed Bethlehem, and symbolically marked the start of my trip to Al-Khalil. I quickly found a place in an old mini-bus that drove me and other students to Al-Khalil.

An Encounter with Al-Khalil

On reaching Al-Khalil, I had no plan of where to go or what to do. I asked for directions to get to the old part of the city and started walking through the market. Speaking to a woman running a store selling Palestinian embroidery, I explained the aim of my visit and she immediately put me in touch with the son of a family whose neighbors are Israeli Jewish settlers.

I went to the roof of the family’s house and could see Israeli soldiers on guard on adjacent rooftops. The mother described how they had to put up nets to prevent their settler neighbors from throwing trash on their house. She also described the vast amount of money they were offered to sell their house to the settlers.

Old city rooftops (Isis Nusair)

Old market in Al-Khalil (Isis Nusair)

I had the chance to meet with representatives of the Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT), and they introduced me to a woman activist who invited me into her house to see her balcony overlooking Al-Shuhada (Martyrs) Street. Representatives of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), had placed metal barriers on her windows to protect her house from the stones of the settlers. Needless to say, she could no longer enjoy her balcony!

Overlooking Al-Shuhada Street (Isis Nusair)

Overlooking Al-Shuhada Street (Isis Nusair)

I continued walking in the old market until I reached another barrier where I could see more Israeli soldiers. I realised then that I must have arrived at the Ibrahimi Mosque. There was a triangle of Israeli barriers and checkpoints. I exited through one, went through another to get into the mosque, then passed by a third as I started walking towards the area in the heart of the city where Israeli settlers live.

Israeli security checkpoint by the Ibrahimi Mosque (Isis Nusair)

Entering the Enclave

The emptiness of the settlers’ area in comparison to the buzzing activity in the old city was eerie.

Walking in the Israeli Settler controlled area in Al-Khalil (Isis Nusair)

I continued walking until I arrived at an intersection and did not know where to go. I asked an Israeli soldier on-guard on how to get to Beit-Hadassah. He pointed in the direction.

Israeli security tower at the entrance to Al-Shuhada Street (Isis Nusair)

I felt terrified, as anything could happen in this seemingly forgotten and empty place. There was hardly anyone around except for a few settlers who were waiting for the bus and a lone Israeli soldier on guard.

Al-Shuhada Street (Isis Nusair)

All Palestinian stores were closed and I passed by what was once a vibrant vegetable market that had become completely lifeless except for a few cats.

The old vegetable market (Isis Nusair)

Before arriving at Beit-Hadassah/Al-Dabbuya, the heart of the settler enclave in Al-Khalil, I wanted to take a picture of a concrete barrier that I had been on the other side of (that is the Palestinian side) less than an hour before.

The Israeli security barrier from the Palestinian side. The Hebrew graffiti on the wall reads "Neighborhood of the heroes of Hebron" (Isis Nusair)

At that moment, my camera refused to cooperate. I am not sure if it was my fear that affected its function or a mere coincidence. I passed by Beit-Hadassah/Al-Dabbuya and continued walking until I arrived at another Israeli checkpoint. I wanted to go through but was prevented by the soldiers “for my protection” as I am (Palestinian, second-class) citizen of Israel. I told them that I wanted to go through back to the Palestinian section of town as it made no sense to return the way I came when the Palestinian section was less than a minute walk away. After I insisted that I wanted to go through, the soldier asked whether I was Arab, and when I answered in the affirmative, he allowed me to go through, but threatened: “Hope they don’t do anything to you” (shelo ya’asou lach mashehu).

I would have liked to think that by leaving the settler area, my trip to Al-Khalil was over, but I was yet to exit the whole city back to Jerusalem, rather than just the Israeli Jewish enclave within an enclave.

Returning to Jerusalem

When looking for public transportation, I was faced with two options, either take a cab via the Israeli tunnel straight to Jerusalem, or take the bus via Bethlehem back to Jerusalem. I ended up taking the bus and had to go through one last Israeli checkpoint before arriving into Jerusalem. The bus was stopped and a young Israeli female soldier got on board and asked very arrogantly in Hebrew with a strong Russian accent that we get off the bus. She rudely asked the driver: “What is this, a summer camp?” (ma zeh kaytana?), as there were many children on board the bus, and according to Israeli regulations, women with children were exempt from getting off the bus.

Although I traveled on my own, I refused to get off and was bluntly told by the same soldier that if I didn’t get off, I wouldn’t be able to enter into Jerusalem. Before I exited the back-door, I told her in Hebrew: “Enjoy your fake power” (tehani mehakoah hamezouyaf shelach). She was not happy with my comment and was waiting for me outside when the time came to check my bag before letting me back on the bus. By then, she had decided to call her superior to complain that I had cursed at her.

The word “fake” in Hebrew is mezouyaf and the word for “fucked” (and in certain contexts “armed”) is mezouyan. I insisted that I did not curse her and all I said was, “enjoy your fake power.” Her superior let me through, perhaps due to the “easing of regulations” in Bethlehem a day before Christmas eve for Greek Orthodox Palestinians. At that moment, I took a deep breath, feeling suffocated by my face-to-face encounter with this brutal politics of control, discrimination and segregation.

Returning to Al-Khalil

I returned to Al-Khalil with my Palestinian friend in early May. This time we drove together through Beit-Jala and were able to witness another unsightly extension of the Separation Wall. As my friend had her two young children with her, she decided that it was not safe to come with me to the area controlled by Israeli settlers. I walked there on my own to continue taking pictures from the point where my camera had stopped functioning a few months earlier.

Walking into the Israeli settler controlled area (Isis Nusair)

The other side of the barrier. Hebrew graffiti reads “So that the temple shall be built quickly in our time” (Isis Nusair)

Mural of Israeli rabbis Dov Lior and Mordechai Eliyahu next to the deserted vegetable market (Isis Nusair)

Walking on Al-Shuhada Street (Isis Nusair)

Walking on Al-Shuhada Street (Isis Nusair)

A Jewish Israeli child was happily driving his small motor-car on the road, and there were tour-buses as well as Israeli soldiers on patrol on Al-Shuhada Street. Nobody said anything to me, and I was on mission, still afraid, yet not as much as I had been during the first trip since I at least knew where to go. I did not dare enter into Beit-Hadassah/Al-Dabbuya, still feeling suffocated by the eerie atmosphere of the enforced closure of that major part of the city to accommodate just a few hundred Jewish settlers.

Beit Hadassah/Al-Dabbuya (Isis Nusair)

A child playing next to Beit Hadassah/Al-Dabbuya (Isis Nusair)

Barrier separating the Palestinian and Jewish parts of the city (Isis Nusair)

As I was going back to the Palestinian area, this time walking back the way I came in order to meet my friend by the mosque, I passed by closed shops and signs detailing where the taxi stop, hammam, cinema, barber-shop, and grocery-store used to be.

Deserted taxi stop (Isis Nusair)

Deserted taxi stop (Isis Nusair)

Deserted grocery store (Isis Nusair)

Hammam Al-Naim (Isis Nusair)

Temporary International Presence in Hebron, or TIPH (Isis Nusair)

Settler controlled area in Al-Khalil (Isis Nusair)

Settler controlled area in Al-Khalil (Isis Nusair)

Settler controlled area in Al-Khalil (Isis Nusair)

I kept imagining how buzzing and vibrant this area must have been before 1979. I passed by a small mosque that was open with hardly anyone inside. I also passed a group of Palestinian kids who were playing by a concrete separation wall that reminds me every time I see it of similar barriers at the Lvov and Warsaw Ghettos, etched in my mind through films such as The Pianist and In Darkness.

Palestinian kids playing by a concrete barrier (Isis Nusair)

Returning to the Palestinian section of town (Isis Nusair)

Isis Nusair is Associate Professor of International Studies and Women’s Studies at Denison University. She received her PhD in Women’s Studies from Clark University. She teaches courses on transnational feminism; feminism in the Middle East and North Africa; and gender, war, and conflict. Her research focuses on the gendered politics of location of four generations of Palestinian women in Israel, and the displacement of Iraqi women refugees in Jordan and the US.

Isis previously served as a researcher on women’s human rights in the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch and at the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. She currently serves on the editorial committee for the Middle East Research and Information Project.

by Suzanne Harris-Brandts

Amidst a series of dramatic events in recent weeks, the Palestinian strife of living under Israeli occupation for close to half a century has once again entered global media attention. Contributing to the headlines were two new Israeli announcements of Jewish-only settlement construction in the peripheries of East Jerusalem. The first- obfuscated by the fanfare of the United States Presidential elections- involving the announcement of 1,200 new Jewish-only housing units in Ramot and P’sgat Zeev, at the north end of the municipal boundary; and the second- ‘in response’ to the Palestinian bid for statehood recognition at the United Nations, involving the announcement of 3,000 new settlement units in unspecified locations throughout East Jerusalem, as well as the zoning and planning approval of the highly-contested area of E1 east of the city and adjacent to the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim.

A snapshot of the typical West Bank landscape of Miri land, where nature is ordered along stone-wall agricultural terraces and olive trees continue to grow where they have been for centuries. The deterioration of this Miri land across villages like Battir (shown here) threatens to render the historical vernacular of the Palestinian landscape extinct (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

Unilaterally Established Jurisdiction Through Urbanization

Following these announcements, the world’s attention was again drawn to the outright brazen geopolitical manipulations taking place ‘on the ground’ by Israel, outside of the peace negotiations, through unilateral settlement construction. Yet, more than simply highlighting Israel’s consumption of occupied land, the announcements underscored what has for decades been the less recognized political agency of architecture and urban design in the trajectory of this conflict. At the core of the Israeli occupation stands a fixation on the de-facto power that rapid urban development – the logic of “facts of the ground” – affords settler-colonialism in its quest for territorial gain. Urbanism has become a tactical form of war by other means.

As the development of fortified, ethnically-exclusive Jewish enclaves spreads across this contested landscape, it has invariably contributed to the marginalization of long-standing Palestinian agrarian practices and traditions. Those farmers still determined to cultivate their land do so under great duress, navigating permit, travel, and checkpoint restrictions, as well as struggling with water access and frequent attacks from armed Israeli settlers. Palestinian society’s strong rural and nomadic roots therefore remain constantly threatened and their futures in the region overwhelmingly uncertain. With individuals and organizations striving to preserve and reinforce such traditions, landscape, too, has been thrust into the political arena.

The relevance of olive cultivation to Palestinian land ownership and economic fortuity means that olive trees are preserved at all costs. Here, rather than being cut down, an olive tree is integrated into a concrete wall which is securing a private Palestinian residence in the West Bank city of Hebron (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

The annual Palestinian Olive Harvest has become perhaps the most notable of these politicized agrarian practices. As such, it offers insights into the vastly-overlooked political agency of nature and landscape. Having always been central to Palestinian society and the economy of the West Bank, in recent decades the olive harvest has also become a way for Palestinians to affirm their land ownership under occupation vis-a-vis the provisions of the Ottoman Land Law, which recognizes cultivation as a means of maintaining property title. This dual role of the olive harvest, however, places a substantial amount of pressure on olive cultivation. Olive orchards have also frequently been targeted and destroyed by Israeli settlers aiming to limit Palestinian land access. With roughly one quarter of the gross agricultural income in the Occupied Territories coming from the cultivation of some 12 million olive trees, and with olive groves occupying roughly 45% of Palestinian agricultural land, the stakes for a successful high-yield harvest impact not only the Palestinian economy, but also the West Bank’s prospective territorial boundaries.

Using the olive harvest as precedent, there is an opportunity to further explore new forms of politically-linked Palestinian agricultural amplification. These new forms could also alleviate the burden currently placed solely on olive cultivation. Shifting from an emphasis on land conservation to one of land activation and reclamation, a tactical approach could amplify the Palestinian agricultural sector while promoting new avenues for local economic stimulation. To be considered fully, the examination of the reassertion of Palestinian territorial rights on undeveloped West Bank land would need to be linked with the further examination of the continued imposition of the Oslo Accords some thirteen years after their expiration. It would also require in-depth scrutiny of the legitimacy of the occupation and the ongoing Peace Process- not to mention a multitude of other related historic, religious and political concerns. My own contribution here, therefore, is not towards the particular intricacies of the legality of the occupation or Oslo Accords, or to the current legitimacy and efficacy of the protracted Peace Process as it relates to territorial claims and land access. Instead, my aim is to conceive of the instrumentality of architecture, landscape and nature as overlooked political participants in the occupation’s processes while working within the constraints of its highly spatialized, militarized, and ethnically-divided framework.

Map of the various closed military areas in the West Bank (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

Harnessing Potential from the Residual: Considering the ‘Militarized Spatial By-Products’ of the West Bank

How might urban designers, architects and landscape architects devise ways of not only resisting damage to nature and agriculture amidst the disastrous environmental impacts of the occupation, but furthermore reconstitute agriculture and nature in a way which enlists them as agents of territorial re-appropriation within their broader political context? To begin addressing this question, I would like to make the case for considering the strategic political utilization of overlooked areas within the West Bank’s militarized landscape.

Attention to the territorial aspects of this conflict has long been focused on Jerusalem and the West Bank’s most geographically-strategic sites and resource-rich locations, particularly those – such as E1- in the periphery of East Jerusalem and along the fertile and water-rich spine of the mountain region near to the ‘Green Line’. While the political desirability of these most strategic sites and their relationship to natural resources is by now widely accepted, what has yet to be properly recognized in comparison is the great degree of opportunity simultaneously lying dormant in the West Bank’s least desirable sites: in its overlooked and forgotten areas of contamination, illicit solid waste dumping and demolition ruin; in its barricaded closed military zones and live firing areas, as well as in its multitude of off-limits settler security buffer spaces. These overlooked spaces collectively form what I have called ‘militarized spatial by-products.’

Map of nature reserve closed areas located in the West Bank and their overlap with IDF closed military areas (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

The Production of ‘Militarized Spatial By-Products’

Studying the West Bank’s processes of settler-colonial urbanization, it becomes apparent that the surge in fortified development associated with such processes cannot take place without the simultaneous production of a correlated body of ‘by-product’ space: those areas which serve as security buffer zones and places of territorial delineation disassociating the Israeli settlements religiously, ethnically, infrastructurally, and legalistically from their Palestinian context. The overall impact on the territory of these separation spaces is the presence of vast quantities of de-activated, under-utilized and banal land. Within the occupation’s framework, these frozen by-product areas are not merely underappreciated and less valuable real-estate, but rather something more fundamentally systemic to the settler-colonial process; they are territories which are actively generated by the occupation’s highly-secured urbanizing practices. Here, the term ‘by-product’ requires clarification since it may initially infer Israeli abandonment or undesirability with regards to such lands and their ultimate use. In many instances, however, the boundaries of security buffer zones and closed military areas have been intentionally exaggerated so that they may serve the tacit dual-purpose of securing undeveloped land away from Palestinian use, therefore safeguarding it for future Israeli settlement expansion. Therefore, it should be clear that when I refer to ‘spatial by-products’, the emphasis is on the relationship between fortified urban development and its adjacent underutilized areas in their present form, rather than on the legitimacy of Israel’s land classifications or on these land’s ultimate potential for future settlement use.

These ‘militarized spatial by-products’ can more broadly be seen as akin to what American urbanist Alan Berger has described as ‘Drosscapes’ and what French landscape architect Gilles Clement has termed the ‘Third Landscape’. Such spaces are the inevitable outcome of rapid development taking place across large sprawling areas, appearing as ‘remnants’ to development’s expansionist tendencies. In the context of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, these spaces emerge not merely as ‘remnants’, but more as frozen frontiers resting dormant within the restrictive conditions of land access and land use under military rule.

As designers struggling to operate within the overwhelming constraints of the current status quo, we have an opportunity to ask what unforeseen prospects exist in such networks of by-product spaces. How might they be enlisted from the ground up? As liminal areas devoid of development, these spaces have an unprecedented potential to push the political agency of landscape in the West Bank. Many such areas are exempt from the immediate threat of urban development (such as the sides of by-pass roads) and therefore vary greatly in terms of their potentiality from the prime undeveloped lands of their adjacency. Put differently, the residual ceases to be only that which separates fortified enclaves from one another, but itself becomes a unique and crucial territorial space for consideration and use.

Typical Target Areas for Extraterritorial Appropriation in Closed Military Areas of the West Bank (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

Typical Target Areas for Extraterritorial Appropriation in Closed Military Areas of the West Bank (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

Typical Target Areas for Extraterritorial Appropriation in Closed Military Areas of the West Bank (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

Yet, how do we relate this discussion of ‘spatial by-products’ to the problem of apprehending their use in highly militarized and confined contexts? Those entering into such an arena are immediately confronted with the task of establishing how much they will operate within the existing biased legal framework and how much they will respect its unilaterally-imposed territorial boundaries. With specific regards to utilizing landscape and nature, here I would argue for an approach which is malleable, flexible and ‘soft’ in nature. Taking into account the volatility of the landscape, such an approach employs a design methodology comprised of a network of interconnected spatial tactics operating in a responsive and indeterminate fashion which recognizes, yet simultaneously subverts and diminishes the current ‘on-the-ground’ restrictive boundary conditions. The designer is pressed to operate as agent and double-agent, at time working within- while simultaneously compromising the unilaterally imposed legal restrictions. The power of this soft form of design lies in its ability to operate in a manner which is non-linear; which can augment its performance and resilience in unpredictable situations because it is not fixed or static. The enlistment of nature further works to harness the complex adaptability of living ecologies- something absent in conventional means of more-permanent construction.

Extraterritorial wildflower growth on bypass road 55 (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

Using this ‘soft’ approach to design, I have begun exploring a series of theoretical spatial design tactics which first unpack the specific degree to which landscape and nature are implicated in the occupation’s land claiming processes and then extract, harness, and manipulate the political potency of nature and landscapes in overlooked sites, to inform a strategy towards Palestinian territorial re-activation. Shown here is a brief overview and sampling of one such propositional design. The tactical approach suggests a certain reinterpretation and loosening of our conventional conceptions of jurisdictional control within the West Bank’s politically volatile climate. And with it, the introduction of a new fissure through which to begin thinking critically about the potentials for ‘ground-up’ re-activation of militarized spatial by-products.

More broadly, these designs operate on a number of levels, decidedly residing in the tension between sincere pragmatic proposals for grass-roots agricultural amplification, and broader, more complex and symbolic statements aiming to elucidate the spatial restrictions facing West Bank Palestinians (something more closely aligned to political art and landscape installations). In line with the latter, these designs have aimed to use landscape and nature to underscore the madness of the ongoing protraction of the military occupation and to stress the inevitability of Israeli military reprisals to the point of their absurdity, potentially leading to restrictions on insect flight routes and the culling of a nation’s own protected wildflowers for ‘security reasons’. Accordingly, subverting the West Bank’s military laws and highlighting the impossibility of Israel’s vehement attempts at ethnic separation becomes equally as important as the provision of agricultural re-activation, economic fortuity and territorial reclamation through these designs.

The proposed extraterritorial wildflower growth for apiary feeding occurs on the lands surrounding a West Bank settlement (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

Cultivation Capsules are used as a projectile in order to plant wildflowers being used for Apiary feeding into closed military areas (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

Design Tactic 1: Extraterritorial Appropriation

In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israeli ‘closed military areas’ confine vast amounts of prime agricultural and grazing land -over 40% of the total West Bank- away from Palestinian use. The tactical design of Extraterritorial Appropriation therefore, seeks to introduce another layer of meaning and function to these highly restricted closed areas through the exploitation of their residual and neglected spaces.

Extraterritorially planted wildflowers turn large swaths of previously unusable lands into honey bee feeding grounds, which in turn re-activate Palestinian apiaries and contribute to the stimulation of the local Palestinian economy. By using ‘cultivation capsules’ as a proxy form of agricultural planting and honey bees as proxy agents for their cultivation, trespassing restrictions are obviated. Such planting resists military destruction by enlisting Israel’s own environmental protection laws (issued by the ‘Israeli Nature Reserves Authority’ and the ‘Israeli Society for the Protection of Nature’) which prohibit the uprooting of native protected plant species.

The proposed process of apiary re-invigoration moves beyond its role, contributing to economic stimulation and social cohesion to re-enforce the biodiversity of this scarred military landscape and symbolically reinstate a Palestinian claim to lands which have been unilaterally-seized as a result of the occupation. The simultaneous blooming of thousands of wildflowers in the West Bank’s derelict closed military zones is further intended to produce a rapidly legible visual register, rendering visible the spatial contours of Israel’s occupation and broadcasting the underlying confining conditions of Palestinian land access and use hidden within.

Map of extraterritorial wildflower growth and apiary management in the West Bank’s Bethlehem region (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

Propagation of wildflower growth across the West Bank over time (Suzanne Harris-Brandts)

Suzanne Harris-Brandts received her M.Arch from the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture under the supervision of Lola Sheppard where her thesis work investigated the role of architecture and landscape in the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. In 2010 and 2011 she was an ‘architect in residence’ at Decolonizing Architecture (DA/AR) in Beit Sahour, Palestine. Her work has been exhibited with Architecture for Humanity and was featured at Cambridge Galleries in the exhibition “Landscapes of Resistance: The Marshall Islands + Occupied Palestinian Territories”. Her work was also published in the book ‘[bracket] Goes Soft’ (2012) and will be forthcoming in an article for ‘Shift: Process”. She is currently an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture.

End Notes

Associated Press in Jerusalem. “Israel pushes forward with 1,200 homes in East Jerusalem settlements.” The Guardian. 06 November 2012

Peace Now. “11 thousand units in one week – the government’s settlement offensive.” 05 December 2012.

The Ottoman Land Law of 1858 remains in place in the West Bank due to the continuation of Jordanian law under the terms of military occupation. Structuring land ownership around the premise of effective agricultural cultivation, the Land Law enabled farmers cultivating land for ten consecutive years to be granted title. The farmers were further obligated to pay taxes on their new property. Land not cultivated for a period of three consecutive years, however, could be returned to the state, thus alleviating its owner of any tax burden. The law was never intended to be a tool for state seizure on the grounds of poor agricultural production. However, the Israeli government has since also reconceived of this law and took to utilizing it as a means of legally-obfuscated annexation of occupied land.

Aside from reinforcing territorial legitimization, olive cultivation in the West Bank provides employment and income to approximately 100,000 Palestinian families who cultivate the olives for their oil. A 2010 Oxfam report found that ‘in a good year, the olive oil sector contributes over $100 million income annually to some of the poorest communities.’ See: Oxfam. The road to olive farming: Challenges to developing the economy of olive oil in the West Bank (2010): 5, accessed November 22, 2011, and; UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “Olive Harvest Factsheet” (October 2011):1, accessed November 22, 2011

The Oslo Accords were produced as interim agreements and as such were slated to expire and be replaced by new mutually-negotiated agreements five years after their original imposition in 1995. Instead, to-date they remain de-facto in place as spatial divisions across the West Bank.

See Berger, Alan. “Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America.” New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.; and; Clement, Gilles. “Manifeste du Tiers-Paysage.” Editions Sujet/Objet, 2003.

18%, 10%, 10%, 7% & 1% respectively, as per the UN OCHA report “Restricting Space: The Planning Regime Applied by Israel in Area C of the West Bank.” (December 2009)

by Nura Alkhalili

This photo essay was originally published in the Berkeley Planning Journal. It is republished on arenaofspeculation.org with kind permission from the author.

The piece, based on a study between May and November 2011, traces the evolution of a wall located between a newly established “Public Fitness Park” in Ramallah city and the neighboring refugee camp. It seeks to narrate the social and spatial transformation that is taking place between Ramallah, a city in the process of substantial change, and the neighboring refugee camp. The public park reflects a site of social contestation occurring in Ramallah between refugee and non-refugee space.

The main emphasis of this photo essay is a hole in the wall. Through its frequent transformation it seems to have become the physical thermometer of the process of negotiation between the main actors.

Yousef Qadura Park (Yazan Khalili)

“A better appreciation of the growing social disparities that have deepened since the 1990s can be gleaned from an examination of the changing relationship between the city and its underclass in the refugee camps.” (Taraki 2008)

In the decades following the Oslo accords and the arrival of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Ramallah changed in both face and personality (Taraki 2008). The city of Ramallah experienced vast urban sprawl and the population doubled. These changes affected not only the physical appearance of the city, as Taraki outlines in her article, but also property laws and zoning regulations, which were altered to allow for the ownership of individual units in apartment buildings and the construction of multi-story buildings. This has changed the skyline of Ramallah dramatically. Ramallah has become the de facto capital of the Palestinian Territories, hosting local and international, public and private institutions and organizations (Aruri 2010).

The values of Ramallah’s inhabitants shifted from a focus on Sumud (resilience and steadfastness), in light of the oppressive Israeli occupation, to producing a globalized cosmopolis (Taraki 2008). The changes in zoning regulations, the rise in land prices, and the availability of housing loans and commercial building schemes had important social dimensions, especially in the deepening of residential segregation and the demarcation of more obvious status differentiation. Such social disparities are becoming more evident between the city and the refugee camps.

Ramallah recent multi-storey buildings (Yazan Khalili)

Ramallah recent multi-storey buildings (Yazan Khalili)

Yousef Qadura Park

Yousef Qadura Park was inaugurated in July 2011 after two years of construction. It is the first “Public Fitness Park” in Ramallah, and is a community initiative that has been adopted by the municipality. The location of the park is intriguing: located at the heart of Ramallah city where the land value is often up to seven digits, the park is partly surrounded by new high-rise buildings (some are under construction), while a public secondary school and a refugee camp lie on its eastern side. The process of creating the park was spearheaded by a special committee composed of representatives of the municipality (City Beautification Committee), the architects in charge, the Local Committee (LC) of the Qadura refugee camp, and several community activists.

Boundary between new 'public fitness park' and refugee camp (Nura Alkhalili)

Panorama over park with public secondary school in background (Nura Alkhalili)

May 2011

Sometime in May 2011, I was sitting in a café when I heard about the new “Skate Park.” I was curious to see it with my own eyes, so I later visited it. The park was closed as it was still under construction. However, I managed to enter and take a look around. My first thought was: for whom is this park designed? A window in a high wall located at the eastern border of the park caught my eye. As I got closer, I was able to clearly see the refugee camp standing right behind this wall. I asked myself: why was a wall built and a window opened? What is the function of the wall in this situation? And what is the use of this window? None of this seemed clear to me, and so I decided to further investigate this space, focusing particularly on the dynamics of the wall.

Main entrance from main street: “Not allowed to enter till the work is over” (Yazan Khalili)

Refugee Camps in the Palestinian Territory

Since the Oslo Accords, Israel’s new surveillance regime has fragmented the West Bank into three Areas (A, B, and C), Areas A (full civil and security control by the Palestinian Authority) and B (Palestinian civil control and Israeli security control) are 41% of the west bank, containing nearly 90% of the Palestinian population living in the west bank. The land area controlled by the Palestinians is fragmented into a multitude of enclaves, with a regime of movement restrictions between them. These enclaves are surrounded by Area C, which covers the entire remaining area and is the only contiguous area of the West Bank. Area C is under full control of the Israeli military for both security and civilian affairs related to territory. It is sparsely populated and underutilized (except by Israeli settlements and reserves), and holds the majority of the land (approximately 59%).

In this regard, the Palestinian Authority (PA) reinforced the division of its demography into refugee and non-refugee. Such politics have excluded refugee camps from PA urban laws and policies, keeping them solely under the responsibility of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The PA has therefore enabled the refugee camps to become invisible urban entities on the political level. Contacts between PA official representatives and the camps’ Local Committees (LC) are rare. This is represented by the exclusion of the refugee community from voting in municipal elections, thereby rendering the refugee camps as ‘enclosed extraterritorial’ urban enclaves that do not really belong to the place, yet simply emplaced but not ‘of’ the place (Hanafi, 2008).

The Palestinian refugee camps were stripped of their political symbolism obliging them to begin adjusting to new boundaries, territories, economic conditions and geo-political mappings.

View of Qadura Refugee Camp (Nura Alkhalili)

Qadura Refugee Camp

Qadura refugee camp is located in Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, just at the centre of Ramallah city. According to the latest statistics, the camp has a population of 1,558 inhabitants.

Qadura refugee camp was established in 1948. Unlike other Palestinian refugee camps, spatially speaking, it is not recognized as an official UNRWA camp. Thus, it is under the responsibility of the Ramallah Municipality regarding infrastructure services (sewage networks, solid waste collection, etc…). However, the people residing inside the camp have their full status as refugees, thus receiving their education/health services from UNRWA.

Qadura is “actually more akin to an impoverished neighborhood of the town than a camp set apart from the fabric of the city” ( Taraki, 2008).

June 2011

Sometime in June 2011 the park was still closed. The disappearance of the window caught my eye. Feeling perplexed, I asked the first man I saw about it. Murad said: “The municipality has closed it…. We struggled to keep it open but in the end the municipality insisted on closing it and even requested the assistance of policemen to close it.”

Murad is a refugee living in Qadura camp and his house lies right behind the wall. According to him, he and his family spend most of their time in the park even if it is still under construction.

After some conversation, Murad took me to his backyard behind the wall and showed me traces of a previous entrance and window to the park and explained what had happened.

Previous location of window that I saw in May 2011, viewed from inside park. Iron frame previously placed over window for protection (Nura Alkhalili)

Image of the wall from the refugee camp. Wall double its original height. Blocked-up window visible on right, over Murad's back yard (Nura Alkhalili)

The Old Site

According to Murad the site initially had three entrances: the first one from the main street, the second one from the school (this one was left closed on demand of the school) and the third from the camp. The site was used as a soccer field, as soccer is the most popular game in Palestine. It was also used as an open space for the refugee community. Many refugees living behind the site used this space as a way to bring large things in and out of the camp. The previous wall around the site was almost half a meter high.

I continued my talk with Murad, and he told me: “The municipality has raised the height of the wall to almost three meters, even the existing entrance from the camp has been closed. We asked the contractor for a window, at least to have an opening left, so he did it. Then the municipality closed it.”

Claimed Ownership…

Murad continued: “…this land belongs to us, [the residents of the refugee camp]. We used to protect it and take care of it. Now we have to take a long walk just to enter it, as the entrance is from the main street which is in the opposite direction of the camp.” He continued: “A hospital is located on the way to the park, and that is unsafe for our kids as many ambulances pass by in the street.”

Image of the site before development. Previous entrances from school (left) and camp (rear) visible (Hiba Ayyoubi)

Image of the site prior to creating the Fitness Park, showing the previous football field and the public school nearby (Hiba Ayyoubi)

Resistance vs. Border

Murad continued: “Since they closed the window we resisted, and we insisted on having our own accessibility, so we managed to have at least this hole in the wall…. It is only a small hole, but at least we have a small opening.”

In response to my puzzlement about what this hole could do and what kind of accessibility it might give them, he showed me how they use this hole.

View of the closed window (hole) from Murad’s backyard (Nura Alkhalili)

Accessibility through and above borders, view from refugee camp (Nura Alkhalili)

Accessibility through and above borders, view public park (Nura Alkhalili)

July 2011

In July 2011, after hearing Murad’s story, my curiosity about the dynamic process of wall modification increased. Thus, I decided to interview the officials involved in the creation of the park.

The first interview was held with the landscape architect involved in the design process. The design was delegated to the Department of Architecture at Birzeit University.

I began by addressing the topic of entrances. The architect said, “Initially, it was agreed that we would create a main entrance from the main street and another side entrance from the refugee camp [on the eastern border], by enhancing the already existing entrance.” The architect explained this by showing me the first Site Plan Design. The architect added, “However, after a series of negotiations we agreed to move the side entrance towards the corner of the wall as you see in the final Site Plan Design, after a series of other changes regarding the placement of internal facilities.”

So I asked the architect, “How come in practice there is no entrance, although in the design is it very clear?” The architect said, “All I know is that the side entrance was closed by mistake. The contractor in charge of implementation forgot to leave it open.” The architect continued, “During the implementation process, several cases of robbery occurred on some equipment to be used in the park. I am not saying the refugee community is to blame, but this prompted the idea of creating a control system on the park and maybe just leaving it with one entrance from the main road.”

My next question was: “And what about the reaction of the refugee community represented by their Local Committee (LC)?” The architect said, “As far as I know the LC has sought to re-open it, but at the end of the day, the ultimate decision maker is the municipality.”

First site plan, refugee camp to east, school to north

Final site plan, refugee camp to east, school to north

Even if there will be a side entrance

The architect continued, “Even though the side entrance was accepted in the final Site Plan Design, the municipality did not request a design for the stairs behind the wall, despite the difference in land levels. The design of the park finished right at the borders of the wall.”

The Director of Ramallah Municipality

The Director of the Ramallah Municipality kindly agreed to an interview, and one of my main questions concerned the accessibility to the park from the side of the refugee camp. He replied, saying, “This park has been created to serve marginalized social groups, and this is clear as it is located next to a refugee camp. If we intended to prevent the refugee community from using this space, we would have simply chosen other land.”

He continued, “The side entrance was cancelled at the implementation phase on request of some members of the Qadura LC. It is essential to keep in mind that the LC has always been part of the design process of the park. Furthermore, it is preferable for public parks to have only one main entrance for control reasons.”

“The window has been totally closed as it was opened illegally against the will of the municipality. The woman living behind the wall asked the contractor to open a window while constructing the wall. The family living behind the wall was using this opening in violation of property ownership of the municipality.”

The back image of the wall from Qadura refugee camp. The final side entrance has been approved to be placed over the shipping container (Nura Alkhalili)

'Violated' property by the refugee family between wall and furniture, according to the municipality (Nura Alkhalili)

Where did the idea of this ‘Fitness Park’ come from?

By that point in July, I realized it would be helpful to talk to the person behind the idea of this Fitness Park. A long time educator in a school for the privileged members of the Ramallah community had initiated the idea of this park, mainly addressing children and their mothers, and insisted on the need for such spaces. She said: “kids are suffering from inappropriate body coordination, flat feet, and clumsy movements due to the lack of open spaces. Ramallah is growing fast; there is a high increase in buildings yet with little consideration to open green spaces.”

This endeavour began in 2009 when the educator suggested the idea of a marathon to raise funds for projects concerning children. The Ramallah municipality welcomed the idea and supported its goal of creating green spaces for the public.

The architect of the project had previously said: “in order to identify the spaces needed, a survey was conducted among some of the students of the school where the educator teaches, and the main outcomes were: the respondents wanted skating space, and a basketball play ground. On another level, the educator insisted on having outdoor fitness machines for mothers who come with their children. Another thing that was essential, was a wooden pavilion that would function as a space for mothers to create a committee among themselves to take care of the park, tell stories for kids and observe them.”

Overview of public park (Nura Alkhalili)

Empty skateboard field (Nura Alkhalili)

Football in basketball field (Nura Alkhalili)

Kids use the outdoor fitness machines as games (Nura Alkhalili)

Mothers mostly come and sit, hardly using fitness equipment (Nura Alkhalili)

Wooden pavilion is often empty (Nura Alkhalili)

The hole in the wall is a point of accessibility for the refugee community

The hole in the wall is a point of accessibility for the refugee community (Nura Alkhalili)

The hole in the wall is a point of accessibility for the refugee community (Nura Alkhalili)

The hole in the wall is a point of accessibility for the refugee community (Nura Alkhalili)

Picnic food 'smuggled' through wall into park (Nura Alkhalili)

More resistance, more challenge?

In October 2011, returned to the park to check what had happened to the hole, and this was what I found.

Closing up and re-opening of hole, June 2011 (Nura Alkhalili)

Closing up and re-opening of hole, June 2011 (Nura Alkhalili)

Closing up and re-opening of hole, October 2011 (Nura Alkhalili)

To be continued…

In November 2011, I returned to the park by chance, and from far away the hole seemed gone… as I came closer, I could see that a new tree was recently planted right in front of the hole.

Tree in front of hole, November 2011 (Nura Alkhalili)

Bibliography

Aruri, Natasha. Master Thesis. RAMALLAH: Post the OSLO ACCORDS, Metropolitanism through shifts in Society, Domicile and the Neighborhood. Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, International Universit yof Catalunya, Barcelona, 2010.

Hanafi, Sari. Palestinian Refugee camps: Disciplinary space and territory of exception. Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, San Domenico Di Fiesole (FI): European University Institute, 2008.

Taraki, Lisa. “Enclave Micropolis: The Paradoxical Case of Ramallah/ Al Bireh”. Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol XXXVII, No.4, pp. 6-20, 2008.

By Mahdi Sabbagh

Lifta digital art exhibition poster (Collective MIP)

A picturesque ascent overlooking Wadi el-Shami greets every car driving from Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem. The valley is dotted with trees and shrubbery, adorned with a family of stone houses. Those familiar with Palestine’s history instantly recognize the ghostly presence of the deserted village of Lifta, one of the more than 400 Palestinian towns obliterated during the 1947 – 1949 Nakba.

Lifta, in collective Palestinian memory, is not just a destroyed village: it symbolizes Palestinian resilience and Palestinians’ relationship to their ancestral land.

In July of 2012, a group of architects and planners from Jerusalem and Bethlehem (مجموعة التخطيط الجماعي or COLLECTIVE Memory | Imaginaries | Planning) met at the Ma’mal LAB in Jerusalem’s old city to discuss a comprehensive response to Israel’s Plan No. 6036 for Lifta, which aimed to develop the remains of the historic village into an Israeli high end residential neighborhood and retail. None of us present at the inaugural meeting questioned the relevance of Lifta to contemporary planning in Israel and Palestine. It was clear to us, as it is to any planner who goes through a foundational understanding of political landscapes in Palestine, that Lifta is a battleground of narratives.

Postard from Lifta, 2028 (Emily Mourad Hanna / Dima Khoury)

Our initiative named Re:Lifta became an exercise in critical cartography and foraging into the memory and testimonies of Lifta’s dispossessed community. Our goal at Re:Lifta was to respond to plan No. 6036 by conceptualizing Liftawis in a post-return Lifta rather than finding an immediate solution to the remains of the village. We were interested in collaborative work that would re-imagine Lifta as a narrated typology of return, a landscape of memories and ideas.

Lifta on one hand had to be treated as a “conventional” site which we see as growing, expanding, changing, in very much the way architects consider a site in say Brooklyn, London or Paris. To have focused solely on Lifta’s current political landscapes would have prevented our minds from wondering beyond the physical and psychological barriers that define the majority of Palestinian visual culture: always in relation and reaction to its Israeli oppressor.

After a series of workshops and meetings it also became clear to us that our initiative had to expand to become truly collaborative. We expanded into a socio-cognitive process to include scholars, artists, graphic designers and Liftawis whom we could reach. This generated many conversations and culminated into a body of work that had to be returned and presented to Palestinian society.

Re:Occupy Lifta, poster (el Warsheh, Jordan)

Between November 15th and 18th, we transformed the Yabous Cultural Centre into “Lifta Cultural Week” with a series of talks, film screenings, and an exhibition. This was organized with the Cultural Heritage Protection Committee and the Yabous Cultural Centre.

Our work presented in the exhibition was divided into 4 parts: Infographics, Planning Return, Media-Morphosis and The Return Campaign. Infographics dealt with a visual articulation of the Palestinian narrative on Lifta. Planning Return imagined urban and infrastructural organizations that would facilitate the practice of return. Media-Morphosis experimented with the notion of “pre-serving collective imaginaries of the future” by displaying “ideal imagined scenarios” through fake media. The Return Campaign, a “post-return” effort to create images, postcards and posters that present a thriving decolonized Lifta.

The exhibition space, filled with locals, Liftawis and curious passerbys, became an interactive place in which to discuss return. A type of place rarely found in today’s Jerusalem.

Re-mapping Lifta (Collective MIP)

Greetings from Lifta (Jorge Lopez, Chile/France)

COLLECTIVE Memory | Imaginaries | Planning
Nora Akawi, Elias Anastas, Youssef Anastas, Victoria Dabdoub, Dima Khoury, Inas Moussa Wa’ary, Mahdi Sabbagh, Ahmad Wa’ary.

Mahdi Sabbagh is an architect and activist from East Jerusalem. He is currently an M. Arch. candidate at the Yale School of Architecture. Mahdi has previously worked with the UNRWA Camp Development Unit in Bethlehem, L.E.FT. Architects and Robert A.M. Stern Architects in New York.

By Ryvka Barnard

This article was originally posted on Jadaliyya, and is re-posted on arenaofspeculation.org with permission from the author.

Over one weekend, two seemingly incongruous sets of images dominated the news from Palestine: one set displayed local tourism operators and Palestinian Authority (PA) officials in Bethlehem celebrating the designation of the Nativity Church as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The other set of images, coming from Ramallah, showed PA police and thugs beating protestors, who had taken to the streets in anger over a scheduled (but later cancelled) Ramallah meeting between Israel’s Vice Premier Shaul Mofaz and PA President Mahmoud Abbas. The two sets of images together depict the sad and poignant reality of the occupation and the PA statehood bid. That reality is of an unelected and unrepresentative leadership, which is more committed to staging spectacles for the Israelis and Americans than resisting the occupation.

A few weeks ago, the Palestinian representative to United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) submitted a file for the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to be added to the list of “World Heritage Sites in Danger,” and to the consternation of Israel and the United States, it was accepted. In October 2011, Palestine’s admission to UNESCO as a full member took place in the context of the controversial statehood bid, prompting the United States to withdraw funding from the organization. The Church of the Nativity’s addition to the list is the first result of the Palestinian admission to UNESCO. It was hailed by the PA and many supporters of Palestinian rights as a great victory, and even, according to Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, “a triumph of justice.” Israeli and American officials frowned and expressed disapproval, adding fuel to the notion that this move was somehow deeply controversial and even an act of resistance. If only that had been the case.

Last fall, critics of the statehood bid warned that it was a PA move to retain power, to further disenfranchise Palestinians not under PA jurisdiction, and to create an international spectacle of the PA as a resistance force. Some astutely observed that the statehood bid could be redeemable if it resulted in using increased status in international forums to challenge Israel’s violations of international law. Unfortunately, the choice of the Church of the Nativity as the first site to recognize is nothing but a restatement of the status quo of occupation, and will likely be meaningless, if not destructive, to Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem (Stebunik, Wikimedia Commons)

The Church of the Nativity sits squarely in Area A, one of the small parts of the West Bank that is under full PA control (that is, control under occupation). It is visited by millions of foreign tourists every year, the great majority of whom are bussed in from their hotels in Jerusalem, past the apartheid wall, past the refugee camps, past the recently destroyed homes and businesses. The tourists are shuttled to an alternate reality in Manger Square, where they can see the ancient birthplace of Jesus without having to acknowledge that it is situated in a city, a city with people in it, people who are struggling under an ever-tightening occupation. Most tour operators carefully avoid any talk of politics or anything contemporary, not wanting to scare away these apparently delicate tourists.

Palestinian tourism operators all agree that at the end of the day, under the current conditions, the Church of the Nativity is a loss for Palestinian tourism. The tourism industry has a major leakage problem. This is not in reference to the leaky roof of the Church (a problem UNESCO will perhaps solve), but rather the fact that the tourism industry does not generate real income, and certainly not from visitors to the church. The money lost is money gained by the Israeli tourism industry. It is Israeli tour operators that meet groups in the airport while Palestinian tour operators wait for them behind the apartheid wall, hoping, usually to no avail, that they might spend more than an hour in the West Bank, and at least a few shekels, before leaving Bethlehem in a cloud of dust from their charter buses.

Of course, Palestinian tour operators that get any business related to the Church of the Nativity are the luckiest of the lot, particularly in comparison with tourism operations in the more rural parts of the West Bank, outside of the PA controlled enclaves. Area C, which is more than sixty percent of the West Bank, is under full Israeli control, meaning that Palestinians have extremely limited access and no decision making over zoning in those areas. They cannot build or even renovate without an almost impossible to obtain permit from the Israelis, whether it is for a person to dig a well on her own personal property, or to renovate a historic site which could be used for tourism development. Because of the PA’s limited control in Area C, some sites, such as the historic ruins in Sebastiya, have sought international sponsorship in renovations, to at least make their projects a bit more visible lest they be quietly swallowed by Israeli expansion.

One fantastic tourism venture underway in the Bethlehem municipal area is in the village of Battir, which straddles the green line in the Jerusalem hills. Battir and its neighboring village of al Walaja are home to a vast spread of two-thousand-year-old Roman agricultural terraces, which include an intricate system of stone-lined channels that bring water from the village springs to cultivated plateaus. The beautiful landscape, which is not only the heritage but also the livelihood of these villages, is scheduled to be cut off from the villagers by the impending construction of the apartheid wall. The landscape would then be included into a “Green Park” fashioned by the Jewish National Fund, which has already begun to boast of how the landscape tells the story of agriculture and settlement in “the Land of Israel.” Both villages have been mobilizing tirelessly to halt the construction of the wall. In fact, Battir has already prepared a file on these landscapes in accordance with UNESCO standards, and won a UNESCO award for their conservation activities and promotion of preserving the ancient agricultural practices.

Battir (Suzy Harris-Brandts)

Battir (Suzy Harris-Brandts)

Battir, most of which is Area C, would have been an obvious choice for a site in imminent danger, and had the PA chosen to submit its file, as many believed that they would, it would have presented a case much more compelling. The imminent danger in Battir, and in other Area C projects which could have been prioritized, stems from the direct threat of the wall’s construction and its annexation of land. Prioritizing such sites would be a direct challenge to Israel’s expansionist policies. Such a move would have forced attention to the occupation’s ongoing destruction and its appropriation of Palestinian heritage and livelihood into Israel’s “green” spaces and municipal boundaries. It would have challenged Israel’s redrawing of borders, a process that attenuates Palestinian land on a minute-by-minute basis in Area C.

Under these conditions, one would have hoped and expected that sites in Area C would garner priority in the UNESCO recognition process. But predictably the PA chose the uncontroversial Church of the Nativity; predictably, Israel and the United States expressed disapproval; predictably, the PA scripted its deeply uncourageous choice as some sort of bold and defiant move.

I am not suggesting that the occupation could be ended with a simple formula of choosing one site over another for the top of a UNESCO list of heritage sites in danger. Nobody has any illusions about the limited role of the UNESCO membership in the broader scope of Palestinian politics. But this is precisely the point: that PA decisions and statements about culture and heritage cannot be understood without the political context in which they are made. This political context is a regime that will not directly challenge Israel, and believes that it should keep law, order, and security to continuously indicate that it is ready and capable for statehood. But “security” under occupation is in reality maintaining Israel’s security by force and eliminating any threat to the status quo through political repression. PA repression is not an occasional occurrence; it is a regular feature of the current regime’s efforts to maintain and build power in the small enclaves of the West Bank that Israel and the US have designated as expendable to Israel’s expansion. It can be seen through the control of the population using the US-trained PA security forces (Dayton’s men); through the neo-liberal policies of Salaam Fayyad, which attempt to disable collective resistance by drowning West Bank Palestinians with individualized debt. And it can be seen in every aspect of state planning and development: tourism and the heritage industry is no exception.

In the following days, while celebrations took place in the Manger Square bubble, PA thugs beat and arrested Palestinians in a show of force that demonstrated to Israel their willingness to act as bodyguards for the apartheid minister Mofaz. These scenes are tied together by the PA’s statehood bid. It is unclear what will be more deafening: the noise of the wall’s construction as it seals in al Walaja and Battir, or the racket of Abbas, Fayyad, and their cronies as they celebrate their triumph of justice at the UNESCO restored church. Maybe they will invite Mofaz as a guest of honor.

Ryvka Barnard is a PhD student in Middle Eastern Studies at New York University. Her research is focused on tourism in Palestine.

Abe Hayeem, chair of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP), speaks with arenaofspeculation.org in a discussion covering professional ethics and modes of action being taken by architects and planners in solidarity with the Palestinian spatial struggle.

Specifically, the discussion focuses on the work of APJP in highlighting the role of Israeli architects and planners in ongoing practices of colonization, and in holding them accountable for these actions through international bodies and, further, how this work closely mirrors the role of UK Architects Against Apartheid (UKAAA) in the South African struggle.

See the interview: Abe Hayeem (Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine)

Homa Umigdal (Wall and Tower), early Zionist settlement typology (Wikimedia Commons)

Abe Hayeem is an architect, peace activist and the chair and co-founder of Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine. He has written for the Guardian Comment is Free, Architecture Week, Building Design, Palestine News, Red Pepper, and the IOA.

By Nasrin Himada

This interview originally appeared on Montreal Serai. It is re-published on arenaofspeculation.org with kind permission. For those based in the UK, the film Port of Memory will be screened in London later this month — including a Q&A with director Kamal Aljafari — as part of the London Palestine Film Festival.

Kamal AlJafari’s Port of Memory (2010) is situated in the port of Jaffa. The film explores the formation of time in space—durational affect—and constitutes a relation of space and architecture via the cinematic lens that conjures up a new way of expressing occupation and gentrification.  The use of space and architecture in the film perpetuate a new mode of expression that renders time in its suspension—an act of waiting.

Port of Memory, in rendering time in suspension, evades a narrative that situates the viewer in an already pre-known setting. Aljafari’s film deposes of the narrative that is already at work—that in between Palestine and Israel, occupied and occupier—in order to release the effect of the image from its representational context. He experiments with form and illustrates a rigor in technique that is constituent of a cinematic space that refuses to adhere to any pre-positional set-up.

Rather, we are situated in the in-between of space: the already there of the ruin, the disappeared landscape, the demolitions of homes, the development of new ones, and the complete erasure of the old Palestinian homes and cemeteries, to make way for the new developed condos and parks. Aljafari’s film invites us to dwell in the most fragile of spaces: disappearance-in-progress. How does one engage with what has already disappeared and is disappearing? Port of Memory draws on a different type of political inquiry that manifests in the non-representational form of the image through the architecture of time.

Aljafari is a graduate of the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne where he received the Visual Arts Award of the City of Cologne in 2004. His film The Roof won the Best International On Screen (Video) Award at the 2008 Images Festival in Toronto as well as best soundtrack at the FID Marseille Documentary Festival in France. His new film Port of Memory, opened the 2010 Images Festival, and has just received the Prix Louis Marcorelles given by CULTURESFRANCE of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was a featured artist at the 2009 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in New York. Through 2009-2010, he was the Benjamin White Whitney fellow at Harvard University. He lives in New York City.

Nasrin Himada (NH): How would you position yourself in the trajectory of Palestinian cinema? You grew up around films that were being made by Palestinian filmmakers, like Michel Khleifi, and seeing the kind of progression of Palestinian cinema taking form. I was wondering how you saw yourself fitting into the canon today, while it’s obviously still in development.

Kamal Aljafari (KA): I have seen films by Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman and most other films by Palestinian filmmakers. But I would say the only one, which at the time inspired me to make films, was Chronicle of Disappearance by Elia Suleiman.

Though, I wouldn’t say I am part of any cinematic movement in Palestine and I don’t see myself belonging to any. I find it very problematic that people often try to declare “A Palestinian Cinema.” There is no industry. We are only individuals living around the world who from time to time, once every couple of years, make a film. The situation, at times, is disheartening.

NH: You are doing something different and new that’s never been done before in terms of how you manage to consistently challenge any kind of framed national agenda through experimentation with form and rigor in technique, which is definitely challenging to the viewer. The use of specific technique in your film is very striking— especially sound. Can you talk about that?

Fatmeh sleeping, a scene from the film

KA: I am collecting and recording what exists in my immediate environment, places as well as people. I am treating sound exactly as I am treating image. They are documentary, in that sense, because this is what I find, but I’m not a documentary filmmaker.

Listen to the soundtrack, which exist in daily life, and you would never need to add any sound effects and ‘music’ to your film. Everything is there – for me, for instance, the sound coming from the TV is a great source of music.  Sound is a mode of composition.

I’m searching for what resembles my lost country, which has become a search for a cinema. Adorno says that for a man who no longer has a country, to write becomes a place to live. I would say for a Palestinian, the cinema is a country.

NH: Sound is not in the foreground, at least in some scenes. When the woman, for example, goes out to feed the cats, we can hear the demolitions going on in the background, which is very important for the film, in the context of gentrified Jaffa.  In this other scene, we hear the gunshots in the background in the café, before this man goes back to pick up the coal. This is a clever way of reminding the viewer that there is a kind of politics going on that is implicit. It’s a politics that is of a day-to-day violence, whether it is dealing with demolitions of Palestinian homes, or of people getting shot. What I find important about this audio-image technique is that it avoids falling into the trap of narrative capture that situates the viewer in an already pre-known setting. For example, can we talk about the scene where the film crew is inside this house? Is this your family’s house?

KA: No. It’s my neighbor’s.

NH: The neighbor’s house. For me this scene is very important because it pronounced these subtle moments of political inquiry that, again, wasn’t explicit. The scene starts with the two Palestinian women in a bedroom, with an Israeli film crew present, they shut the door on them, and they start filming a scene with an actor who’s having trouble emphasizing the phrase “I made these windows.”

KA: The owner of this house, the neighbor of my grandparents in Jaffa, told me about an Israeli film crew who came to her house to shoot a scene. Ironically enough, an Israeli bulldozer hit this same house four years ago (and was featured in my previous film The Roof). What you see is a re-enactment, but not what really happened.

This stems from an idea I had, which is very much related to reclamation of places and things. A couple of years ago, I was filming a short miniature in my father’s hometown Ramle. I was filming raw unfinished balconies when suddenly a young Israeli guy appeared and stood just behind my back. He waited and waited until he became impatient. He asked me: what are you filming? I said, the balconies. He reacted by saying: “you see all these balconies, they are mine.” Obviously, the balconies were much older than him.

Dozens of films were shot throughout the 60s and 70s and 80s in Jaffa – in most of them you would never see a Palestinian. And even if you see Arabs in films like The Delta force, staring Chuck Norris, they’re not Palestinians, they’re Israeli Mizrahi Jews acting as Arabs. We were completely excluded from the image and therefore uprooted twice in reality and in fiction.

These Israeli films were claiming the city. As if saying, “this is our city, these are our stones, these are our houses, and this is our sea.” For me, that’s the biggest and the strongest witness that they are not theirs. It may sound surreal but at times these films were even stealing the narrative of the remaining Palestinians of Jaffa – like in the film Kasablan from 1973, in which all the inhabitants of Jaffa are Jews who are struggling against the demolition of their houses by the Tel Aviv municipality.

I would like to know why these films weren’t shot in Tel-Aviv. There is a difference between shooting a film where the background is white, of white walls – and shooting a film where the background is an old wall. Cinema needs history – to create emotions you need history.

NH: I want to talk about the motifs that show up in your film.  There are several of them. The recurring image of the man in the café holding the coal up to his neck, for example, or the man on the motorcycle who screams, and the washing of your aunt’s hands, or, the recurring theme of your family watching a wedding video. These become part of how time is formed in your film. Also, there’s a lot of waiting around in different scenes, in cafés, or in the lawyer’s office. There’s a lot of play with time and waiting. I was wondering if that was intentional?  And if it was, how the motifs played with time in that sense?

Hamada standing, a scene from the film

KA: Everything you see is intentional. The long take of the washing of hands, watching TV, or the man who picks up the coal with tongs moving it toward his neck, are my favorite scenes in the film, because they resemble for me what cinema should be. I wish I could just have the washing of hands in my film in their actual length and rhythm, which lasts much longer than in the film.

NH: And they also are part of how the film avoids a representative form of expression, because they’re never complete images, or they never complete a thought, or whatever it is, as a viewer, you’re expecting to come next.

KA: I’m not fulfilling any desires on the side of the viewer, or fulfilling any desired narrative. I do what I find works best when I am composing the image. Some people are clever enough to see and to appreciate this kind of cinema. But I would say that I made this film for myself. I am not trying to target a specific audience, which again makes the financing and finding of resources for my films difficult.

NH: Can you explain more about how you are making the film for yourself?

KA: What is the value in watching somebody wash his or her hands? This is what I see.  She is my aunt, and I find the way she washes her hands to be beautiful and elegant. Although, every time I screen it somewhere, there is somebody who says, “my sister is the same way,” or “I know somebody who is doing the same thing.” And it has nothing to do with being Palestinian. I don’t want to explain how the washing of hands is significant, or representative of something. I find the image in itself valuable and I am happy when people share with me this affinity. People who appreciate it and who can relate to it, connect with what I feel. These elements are very much of a private inclination. And, in this specific project what I wanted to do is give these rituals or elements of daily life of my characters, if you want, a cinematic meaning.

For me, making a film is very much a search into the life of these people, and obviously, the place where these people have lived, which is my place, which is where I come from, and which is part of how and where I search for a cinematic language.

NH: This gets me to the part that I wanted to talk about – because I noticed this in The Roof as well, and was wondering about it. I feel like it’s become a trademark of yours – something you took from The Roof and used a lot in Port of Memory. You have this curious way of panning across, in close-up, onto buildings and walls, and the rubble that we see in Port of Memory. It’s almost like you want the buildings to move with you. Can you talk about that a little bit? Describe what attracts you to that building?

KA: I love these old walls, old stones. And I want to capture them. I know now that there were many films shot in my hometown, using my hometown as something else and excluding me from it, erasing my history from these images and from these films. I have a good reason to film this place the way I see it. And cinema can do it: with framing, and by shooting something for a long time, you can claim it, giving it a special importance, be it a stone or a human face. What I am trying to do in The Roof and in Port of Memory is to give attention to these places, reclaim them. Personally reclaim them. I see this as my project.

NH: This gets me to the question of how architecture plays such a significant role in Port of Memory, especially the recurring return to the derelict building, the one that you show at the beginning and that comes back often, maybe twice more throughout the film. Can you talk about the significance of the building itself – your relationship to it, and how it manifests in the film?

KA: I had been working for quite a while to find financing for Port of Memory – it took me about three years to find the resources to shoot this film –I was traveling between France, where I was living at the time, and Jaffa. Every time I went there, I hoped that this building that you mention was still there. These old buildings that you see in my films, are vanishing. They are being destroyed. And for me they are a witness to a city that existed. Jaffa is not a city anymore, it is just a couple of streets in the south of Tel Aviv, and my desire to capture its disappearance is obviously very strong, because I know that tomorrow it will not exist. So this becomes part of my role as a filmmaker, to capture something and to keep it. It becomes, in that sense, a document. The building stands there in the middle of the street. It’s a witness to all this destruction. An expression of what we have gone through since 1948, or for the last 100 years in fact. I treat this specific place exactly as I am treating my characters, and there is a cinematic attraction between them, these objects, and the characters. And the film is very much about place, being excluded from it, about being there and not being there at the same time. I know these buildings will vanish from reality, so at least I have them in my film. And these images are very much of the streets of my childhood.  These are my memories of this place.

NH: This reminds of the scene where you show the Israeli singer singing the song and walking on the beaches of Jaffa, juxtaposed with the scenes of your uncle walking through a landscape that’s really deteriorating and disappearing–

KA: It’s not disappearing.  It has disappeared.

NH: Right.

KA: When I shot the scene with my uncle I had brought him to Germany, and we shot it with a green screen. I made him walk in a certain way so that I can insert him into the image instead of the Israeli actor. And when I showed him the scene—where he is walking on the port of Jaffa, walking in the streets of Jaffa—he was so touched, he could hardly believe it. So it’s not only a film – in the sense of a cinematic object—it’s more than that. It affects.  I made my uncle go back and walk in the streets of his childhood, to the places that don’t exist anymore. I may have created pleasure for him, or more sadness, I’m not sure. Maybe both, I don’t know. But I made it possible for him to go back and be in these places for a moment.

The images were from Kasablan an Israeli film about Mizrahi, or Oriental Jews living in Jaffa, and their struggles with the Ashkenazi, European-born representatives of government. The narrative completely elides not only Jaffa’s Palestinian history, but also its remaining Palestinians, enacting a virtual, cinematic emptying of the city. In the film, the Israeli actor, Yoram Gaon playing a downtrodden Mizrahi, sings while walking through empty and ruined streets, along abandoned houses, open windows and doors:   “[…] It’s a place which is still far away, Narrow alleys near a huge sea, And empty houses crying silently, My heart’s still there behind the sea, I hear a prayer from an empty house, There is a place that’s still far away. Anywhere I run, there is a place I can’t forget, I’ll always have it in my heart. There’s a place, I’ll always love.”

This is my song.

Port of Memory film poster

Nasrin Himada is a researcher currently living and working in Montreal. Her research interests include Palestinian and Chilean cinema, architectures of warfare, and military urbanism.

Below is an introduction to a new project related to al-3awda. It can also be found in Arabic. arenaofspeculation.org has helped to establish this project and will post some of its features from time to time.

Image from project, Refugees March to Return, 15 May 2011. (Matthew Cassel)

Today we launch #3awda. A collective project seeking to harness social media and focus a new creative energy towards return to Palestine.

The events of 15 May 2011, as thousands of Palestinians marched towards their sites of dispossession, re-asserted the possibility to envision al-3awda (‘the return’) as a concrete act in the present, and created a new space to imagine the future. At a time when a global Palestinian diaspora is rediscovering its many voices, and in the midst of a political awakening across the Arab world, this project seeks to harness a moment of possibility and to focus a new collective energy towards return.

The 3awda.org website offers a digital hub and creative forum for the sharing of ideas and actions towards realising Palestinian return. We call on activists, artists, creative professionals, community organisers and entrepreneurs to engage in initiatives towards return, partaking in a collective act of creative imagining, participation and production towards realising a new vision of the future.

In this space, we not only affirm the ‘right of return’, but also explore critically and proactively the ongoing spatial, political and demographic realities of today’s Palestine. How do we imagine return not only as a physical act in the present, but also as a political horizon of justice and dignity towards which to aspire? What would such a political space mean for those people who seek to build their future in this territory? And how might this in turn create a new relationship with the Arab world beyond?

We are an independent team of Palestinian and international activists from a range of backgrounds and disciplines, brought together by a shared belief in the importance of 3awda (‘return’), wherein all Palestinians have a choice to build a just future in their historic homeland. We believe in the power of creative imagining and seek to utilize the possibilities offered by new media to develop shared visions and a new collective energy towards 3awda.

This project begins with the hashtag #3awda, and is limited only by our collective capacity to imagine.

Social Media
http://twitter.com/al3awda
http://fb.com/pages/3awda/240446762678351

Media Contacts
Muzna Al-Masri (Beirut) — muzna@3awda.org
Dena Qaddumi (Doha) — dena@3awda.org
Ismael Sheikh Hassan (Beirut) — ismael@3awda.org
Ramzi Jaber (Ramallah) — ramzi@3awda.org

Stamp of the State of Palestine, project by Khaled Jarrar.