Architectural planning for a different future

Sarah Irving, The Electronic Intifada, 15 July 2010

Ush Grab, occupied West Bank. (Decolonizing Architecture)

"If you live under a colonial regime, the first thing you are prevented from doing is thinking about a future," proclaims Sandi Hilal. "This is the first thing that the occupation imposes on you. And to propose in Palestine right now a future where you can plan, imagine, is something which is very important."

Hilal is one of the founding trio at Decolonizing Architecture, a project which, according to its website, "uses architecture to articulate the spatial dimension of a process of decolonization." In practical terms, according to director Alessandro Petti, the project brings together a "collective of artists, architects and scholars" which mixes residencies and studio work. Some of the collective's work is an artistic, gallery-based contemplation of what a future, post-colonization Palestinian landscape might mean. An example is its July/August 2010 participation in The Spacemakers, an UK exhibition which, according to its website, "explores artistic perspectives on the immediate challenges of creating a home, in some of today's most diverse and harried urban landscapes."

Lest this look like another detached artistic endeavor with little connection to the realities of occupation, the collective is firmly rooted in West Bank life. Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti both live in the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour located near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. Hilal works with refugee camp improvement programs sponsored by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). One of Decolonizing Architecture's most active roles has been in the struggle for the West Bank hilltop of Ush Ghrab, where Israeli settlers have been trying to take over a decommissioned Israeli military base and encroach on surrounding Palestinian farmland.

"In 2007," Petti explains, "after a decade of engaging in spatial analysis and theory and taking the conflict over Palestine as our main case study," he, Hilal and Eyal Weizman, their London-based colleague, "tried to shift the mode of our engagement and establish an architectural practice based around a studio residency in Bethlehem." The group wanted, Petti says, to be more "oppositional" but also to create "propositions" and ways for themselves and for ordinary people to think about a future beyond the current political impasse and its impact on Palestinian housing, travel, health and education.

Petti explains: "We are dealing with a complex set of architectural problems centered around one of the most important dilemmas around political practice -- how to act propositionally and critically [in] an environment where the political power is so dramatically distorted in favor of the colonizer?" In a practical sense, the group engages with issues of whether useful intervention is possible without becoming complicit with the Israeli colonial regime.

For the thinkers at Decolonizing Architecture, the term "decolonization" is key, representing a way to think about the concrete effects on the ground of the occupation, and of solutions to it. The current focuses for negotiations and discussions, the one, two and three-state solutions are, says Petti, "trapped in a kind of top-down perspective, each with its own self-referential logic." So the collective's thought goes beyond replacing one set of power structures, those of occupation, with a second set, those of a putative Palestinian state.

In practice, this means taking the architecture of occupation and, rather than simply using it for the same purpose under a different power, finding new ways for it to serve everyday uses. As Eyal Weizman points out, the destruction of the Gaza settlements during the Israeli withdrawal of 2005 created toxic waste which has poisoned the Strip's already sparse water supplies.

"In Palestine we find that there are basically three different approaches dealing with evacuated colonial structures: destruction, re-occupation and subversion," says Petti. "The impulse of destruction seeks to turn time backwards, reverse the development into virgin nature, the time at which a set of new beginnings can be articulated. Another strong contention has been to re-occupy the colonial structure and re-use it in a similar way to that used under the colonial regime. But such repossession tends to replicate the colonial power relations in space."

Decolonizing Architecture proposes another option: subversion. In 2007, the collective's first project sought to rethink the Israeli settlement of Psagot, near the Palestinian town of al-Bireh in the occupied West Bank. Their vision of a post-occupation, reconstituted Psagot did not simply transfer Palestinian families into settler homes, retaining the spatial separation, creating what Petti calls "a gated community for the Palestinian elite." Instead, the group found a 1950s Palestinian map of the hill now occupied by Psagot and superimposed it on plans of the settlement, using it to suggest ways in which sharply-defined modern structures could be blurred back into the surrounding landscape, introducing public spaces within the settlement, reintroducing relationships between Psagot and the neighboring homes of al-Bireh, and breaking down the rigid divisions within the Israeli settlement, with their separating walls between homes and between public and private spaces.

"But then in 2008 we actually had the opportunity to engage in a real case of decolonization," says Petti. After the military base at Ush Ghrab was evacuated by the Israeli army in 2006 a debate began over the use of the land, with proposals including a hospital, public park and children's play area. The side of the hill was rapidly opened up into public gardens, but after settlers tried to reclaim the summit, the area became the scene of regular demonstrations between the Israeli extremists who form the nucleus of most settlements, and local Palestinian residents and their international supporters.

Decolonizing Architecture's role shifted from drawing up the requested architectural plans for the Beit Sahour municipality and implementing solutions. This included painting over settler graffiti on the hilltop buildings as well as drawing up documentation for the legal struggle to keep Ush Ghrab out of settler hands. It also involved working with the Palestine Wildlife Society to think of ways in which Israeli military buildings can be "subverted" into breeding sites for local bird species.

"This project," says Petti, "deals with a fundamental question of how Israeli military bases could be reused, recycled or reorientated by Palestinians after the moment that the military power discharges it."

The impact of Decolonizing Architecture's role at Ush Ghrab and of its explorations of the possibilities for sites such as Psagot have, Petti claims, started to shift thinking amongst local planners and municipalities in the occupied West Bank.

"Before we started, we don't believe there was any thinking going on about Area C," he says. Under the Oslo accords signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s, "Area C" is under full Israeli control and represents the majority of the land in the occupied West Bank.

Envisioning what might be done with evacuated settlements might seem pie-in-the-sky, but Petti believes that thinking beyond the current political realities is vital. "The municipalities weren't preventing research on this," he says, "but it was a kind of self-censorship. It is not our solutions which are important, but allowing people to say, 'I have to think and write about this because this is our land, these are our houses.' Some of our students had a good point, that Palestinian workers built these houses, so it makes no sense to destroy them, it makes more sense to use them. Now, if you go to al-Bireh's municipality, their planning maps include Psagot."

"I have to admit that when we began this project, the three of us were not absolutely aware of the potential of the process itself, how important it is to propose a process," says Sandi Hilal. "Until now, the Israelis have been the ones who are planning and the Palestinians are the ones who are reacting." Decolonizing Architecture, she insists, "begins from the end," taking the reality of the occupied West Bank and wider Palestinian life and taking back for her fellow Palestinians "the right to plan their own future."

She also vehemently defends this position. Rather than returning to the analytical approach which all three members followed as students and scholars, Decolonizing Architecture deals with the "common ground" of daily life, exploring practical ways to re-appropriate Israel's architectural "facts on the ground." "Because otherwise we will be explaining and re-explaining the same thing," Hilal says. Of a 2011 architectural residency which the group is currently recruiting for, she declares: "if you come as a scholar and see [Israel's] wall or settlements for the first time, I can understand your reactions. But if you think that you have a tabula rasa and that you will be the first one to give a perspective to the wall, you will absolutely not be permitted to think like this."

As Decolonizing Architecture develops, says Petti, it engages with new aspects of the decolonization process. Working with the inhabitants of Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, the collective is trying to think with second, third and fourth generation Palestinian refugees about how they can substantively improve their living conditions within the camp, without giving up their claims to the land they were forced off in 1948.

As well as looking at this issue through the experiences of refugees living in the occupied West Bank, they emphasize the role of Palestinians living within Israel and the "returns" they exercise on a daily basis. Working with the Israeli group Zochrot, they have created a "Book of Returns" which uses interviews and drawings to create "a collection of ideas for an effective return of Palestinian refugees" and inform debate about what return might actually mean in a practical sense -- both for Palestinians coming to their ancestral homes, and for the West Bank and in the refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

"There is the main Israeli narrative about the right of return, which is the invasion of the barbarians, but Palestinians have a similar kind of image, that they will come back the day after this right is recognized," says Petti. "We were thinking about the contemporary practice around this right and images of how significant camps are in many Arab cities, and how political space needs to be created in the Middle East in order to allow people to not have to choose between a life in Beirut or a life in Palestine, but how it is possible to combine both of them."

Sarah Irving (www.sarahirving.net," is a freelance writer. She worked with the International Solidarity Movement in the occupied West Bank in 2001-02 and with Olive Co-op, promoting fair trade Palestinian products and solidarity visits, in 2004-06. She now writes full-time on a range of issues, including Palestine. Her first book, Gaza: Beneath the Bombs, co-authored with Sharyn Lock, was published in January 2010.

The Spacemakers will be featured at the Edinburgh Art Festival 30 July-24 August 2010. For more information visit The Delfina Foundation.

Related Links

• Decolonizing Architecture

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The plague of darkness has struck modern Israelites

Theodor Meron, whose warnings over settlements went unheedeed. (Getty)

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Last update - 10:33 29/03/2010

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1159849.html

By Akiva Eldar

One of the harshest of the 10 plagues has smitten the children of Israel this Passover, and they are stumbling about in pitch darkness, bumping blindly into anyone in their way as they head toward the edge of the precipice. Warm friends, cool friends, icy enemies: Jordan and Turkey, Brazil and Britain, Germany and Australia - it's all the same.

And if that's not enough, the myopic Jewish state also has gone and collided head-on with the ally that offers existential support. Israel has become an environmental hazard and its own greatest threat. For 43 years, Israel has been ruled by people who have refused to see reality. They speak of "united Jerusalem," knowing that no other country has recognized the annexation of the eastern part of the city. They sent 300,000 people to settle land they know does not belong to them. As early as September 1967, Theodor Meron, then the legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, said there was a categorical prohibition against civilian settlement in occupied territories, under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Meron - who would become the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and is now a member of the Appeals Chamber for both that court and a similar one for Rwanda - wrote to prime minister Levi Eshkol in a top-secret memorandum: "I fear there is great sensitivity in the world today about the whole question of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, and any legal arguments that we try to find will not remove the heavy international pressure, from friendly states as well."

It is true that for many years, we have managed to grope our way through the dark and keep the pressure at bay. We did so with the assistance of our neighbors, who were afflicted with the same shortsightedness.

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On Sunday, however, the Arab League marked the eighth anniversary of its peace proposals, which offer Israel normalization in exchange for an end to the occupation and an agreed solution to the refugee problem, in accordance with UN Resolution 194. But Israel behaves as if it had never heard of this historic initiative. For the last year, it was too busy realizing its dubious right to establish an illegal settlement in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, turning a blind eye to reality, has tried to persuade the world that what applies to Tel Aviv also applies to Sheikh Jarrah. He simply refuses to see that the world is sick of us. It's easier for him to focus on his similarly nearsighted followers in AIPAC. Tonight they'll all swear "Next year in rebuilt Jerusalem" - including the construction in Ramat Shlomo, of course.

Hillary Clinton is not Jewish, but it was she who had to remind the AIPAC Jews what demography will do to their favorite Jewish democracy in the Middle East. A few days earlier, she had come back from Moscow, where she took part in one of the Quartet's most important meetings. Israeli politicians and media were too busy with the cold reception awaiting Netanyahu at the White House. They never gave any thought to the decision by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations to turn Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's state-building plan from a unilateral initiative into an international project.

The Quartet declared that it was backing the plan, proposed in August 2009, to establish a Palestinian state within 24 months. This was an expression of the Palestinians' serious commitment that the state have a just and proper government and be a responsible neighbor. This means Israel has less than a year and a half to come to an agreement with the Palestinians on the permanent borders, Jerusalem and the refugees. If the Palestinians stick to Fayyad's path, in August 2011, the international community, led by the United States, can be expected to recognize the West Bank and East Jerusalem as an independent country occupied by a foreign power. Will Netanyahu still be trying to explain that Jerusalem isn't a settlement?

For 43 years, the Israeli public - schoolchildren, TV viewers, Knesset members and Supreme Court judges - have been living in the darkness of the occupation, which some call liberation. The school system and its textbooks, the army and its maps, the language and the "heritage" have all been mobilized to help keep Israelis blind to the truth. Luckily, the Gentiles clearly see the connection between the menace of Iranian control spreading across the Middle East and the curse of Israeli control over Islamic holy places.

Monday night, when we read the Passover Haggadah, we should note the plague that follows darkness. That may open our eyes

The Harlot's Grave - Israel's Heritage Sites - Uri Avneri

Uri Avnery

6.3.10

The Harlot’s Grave

SOME WEEKS ago, Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in Rome, was released after serving 28 years in prison.

The motives for his act have never been clarified. But a Palestinian leader once told me his version: God appeared to Agca in a dream and told him: Go to the Holy City and kill that damn Pole. But the Turk misunderstood, so instead of going to Jerusalem and killing Menachem Begin, he went to Rome…”

Which just goes to show that holy cities are a pain in the neck.

THE LATE Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an observant Jew and a resolute opponent of the religious establishment, used to praise a deed of the Wahhabis, the radical sect that arose more than 200 years ago to cleanse Islam of impurity. The first thing they did upon conquering Mecca was to destroy the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad. The sanctification of graves was, to their mind, a pagan abomination. Leibowitz lauded this act and poured his wrath on religious Jews who sanctify “holy” sites.

He was standing on solid ground. The last chapter of the Torah (Deuteronomy 34) states: “So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab…and he buried him…but no man knoweth of his sepulcher unto this day.” Clearly, the authors of the Bible, too, believed that the adulation of graves was a despicable habit of idolaters.

In the course of generations, Jews, too, were infected with this ailment. Orthodox Jews worshipped at the grave of Rabbi Nachman in the Ukraine and of Rabbi Abu-Hatzira in Egypt. The mutation of Judaism, which has become a kind of state religion in Israel, has turned this idolatry into a holy cult.

During the first years of the state, an official of the Ministry of Religions (as it was then called), a certain Shmuel Zanwill Kahana, toured the country and discovered holy sites right and left. He found graves of Muslim sheikhs and announced that they were, actually, the tombs of our forefathers. They were declared holy places and taken over by his ministry.

That aggrandized the ministry and its budget, attracted tourists and “proved” that Jews had deep roots in the country. Secular Israelis smiled in derision, and some religious Jews, like Leibowitz, were furious.

But after the Six-day War and the beginning of the occupation, the worship of holy places assumed a much more sinister character. It became an instrument of the settlers.

USING HOLY sites to justify conquest and massacres is by no means an Israeli, or Jewish, invention.

One of the most abominable examples is the First Crusade. Pope Urban II called upon the Christians of Europe to rise and liberate the Holy Sepulcher – not the country of Palestine, not the city of Jerusalem, but one specific site: the grave where, according to Christian tradition, the body of Jesus lay before his resurrection.

For this grave, many thousands of Christians crossed immense distances to Jerusalem, murdering masses of people (mostly Jews) on the way, and, after conquering the city, carrying out a horrendous massacre. According to Christian chroniclers, they waded up to their knees in blood. The victims were Muslims and Jews, men, women and children.

But there is no need to go back 911 years to find fanatical or cynical leaders using holy places to justify monstrous deeds. When Slobodan Milosevic carried out the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo – an act of genocide – his central claim was that the country was sacred to Serbs.

And indeed, in 1389 a historic battle took place there. The Christian Serbs were beaten by the Muslim Ottomans, who took over the country for the next 600 years. During that time, the local population voluntarily adopted Islam. But the Serbs sanctified the battlefield – a rare example of a people celebrating its defeat (as Jews do at Masada).

If Binyamin Netanyahu’s favorite expression – “the Rock of our Existence” – existed in Serbian, Milosevic would surely have used it. He argued that Kosovo was the spiritual and religious center of the Serbian people, in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants are now Albanian Muslims. Until this very day, Serbia does not recognize the independent state of Kosova, because of the ancient Serbian churches and monasteries located there.

AND HERE? Since the beginning of the occupation, the “holy places” in the West Bank have served as weapons in the hands of the settlers. They go there, they say, to restore Jewish rule over Judaism’s holy places, obeying God’s commandment.

The stories of the Bible are set mostly in these territories. The settlers and the Israeli army call them “Judea and Samaria”. Place names can be acts of annexation. They confirm the ownership of the Jewish people from ancient times. (In the 50s the British historian Steven Runciman, a leading expert on the crusades, drew my attention to the fact that the names have somehow been reversed: the Israelis are living in the land of the Philistines, from which the name Palestine is derived, while the Palestinians live in the land that was the ancient kingdom of Israel.)

The first settlement was established by a group of religious people who entered Hebron by deceit. Since the Israeli military governor forbade Jews to enter the city, they asked for permission to stay there for a few days in order to deliver their Passover prayers in the holy city.

Since then, the “Cave of Machpelah” in Hebron has become a holy battlefield. Near it, the most extreme Jewish settlers have established themselves. They are rabid Arab-haters and aim to drive out the 160 thousand Arabs, whose families have been living there for many generations. The most notorious mass murderer from among the settlers, the physician Baruch Goldstein, massacred Muslim worshippers in order to cleanse the holy place.

Holy places serve now as justification for the robbing expedition called settlement. Pieces of land are stolen all over the occupied territories because of their sanctity. The most extreme leaders of the settlers, all of them “rabbis”, fight for the liberation of holy graves. One of them is leading a crusade (or, rather, star-of-davidade) in order to take possession of the “tomb of Joseph” in the center of Nablus, which would turn the city into a second Hebron. The Israeli army chauffeurs the settlers there in armored vehicles, so they can “pray” there.)

But not only “fathers of the nation” deserve holy graves, on which blood can be spilt. Every secondary figure in the Bible can get one and become a target for the settlers. Now a battle is raging around the “tomb of Othniel”, bearing the name of Othniel the son of Kenaz, an obscure Biblical personality. The Muslim inhabitants of Hebron believe that it is the grave of the founder of their city.

Some days ago, settlers invaded an ancient synagogue in Jericho, which has been preserved by Muslims for generations. Jews had no problem visiting the place peacefully – the Jericho municipality, a part of the Palestinian Authority, has enabled all Jews to pray there. But the settlers did not go there to pray. They came to conquer.

Which reminds me of another prophecy by Yeshayahu Leibowitz on Jericho. The settlers, he said, would sanctify the tomb of Rahab the Harlot in Jericho. This heroine of the Bible (Joshua 2), the whore who betrayed her city and helped the invaders to conquer it and murder all the other inhabitants, is in good company with the settlers.

NO NEED to point out that the worship of these holy places is manifestly absurd. There is not a single grave in the country that can be seriously identified with any Biblical figure, real or imagined. Most holy graves are those of local Arab Sheikhs, who, because of their righteousness, were believed to be able to intercede with Allah. The location of most holy sites, including the Christian Holy Sepulcher, is much in doubt, to say the least.

That is also true for the two sites where bloody riots have lately broken out: the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem and the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron.

This is not the place to ask whether “Our Mother Rachel”, one of the most attractive figures in the Bible, belongs to the realm of legend or of history. But even according to legend, she is not buried at the spot that now bears her name. Many Bible experts (of those who believe that she really existed) think that she was buried North, not South, of Jerusalem. It is Muslim tradition that located her grave in the isolated, modest building that appears on the postage stamps of Palestine during the British Mandate.  Many generations of Muslim, Jewish and Christian women have prayed there, asking Rachel to bless them with offspring. This building cannot be seen anymore: the army has surrounded it with fortified walls and gates, so that the site now looks menacing, an ugly copy of a Crusader fortress.

The building in Hebron known as the “Cave of Machpelah” – actually no cave at all - has also been preserved by Muslim tradition, which sanctified it as “Ibrahim’s Mosque”. Many Bible experts who do not think that the story of Abraham is a legend believe that the Cave is located at another place altogether. But on this spot, much blood has been spilt.

This week’s riots took place at both holy sites. They were caused by a decision by Netanyahu to include them in a list of Jewish “Heritage Sites” to be renovated by the Israeli government. Since both are holy to Muslims, Jews and Christians, this unilateral act is nothing but an expropriation and a blatant provocation. If there were really a desire for the improvement of the sites, it could have been done by a joint committee of the representatives of the two peoples and the three religions.

Years ago, I was invited by the late lamented mayor of Florence, Giorgio La Pira, to take part in a joint prayer session with a Catholic priest, a Muslim Sheikh and a Jewish rabbi at the Cave of Machpelah. In spite of being a devout atheist, I went along. At the time, it crossed my mind that such a site could well serve as a symbol of fraternity for both peoples of the country.

Joint love for the country, including all its periods and sites, holy and unholy, could serve as a spiritual basis for peace and reconciliation. Even now I hope for the day when schoolchildren in both states, Israel and Palestine, will learn the annals of this country in all its periods, and not just Jewish history here and Muslim history there. The wonderful richness of this country’s history, from the time of the Canaanites to this day, could create a strong bond.

However, the intentions of Netanyahu and his settlers are quite the opposite: to misuse history as an instrument of occupation, and to build settlements around the harlot’s grave.

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Capital Murder - Jerusalem's Final Status

Written by Ben White

http://pulsemedia.org/2010/01/26/capital-murder/

January 26, 2010 at 3:39 pm

First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev — as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty…
– Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, on the vision for a “permanent solution”, 5 October 1995

Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, a city reunified so as never again to be divided
– Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 21 May 2009

The current consensus in the international community is that East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since 1967, is the capital of a future Palestinian state. Israel’s unilateral annexation of territory to create expanded municipal boundaries for a ‘reunited’ Jerusalem was never recognised.

Over the last forty-three years, Israel has created so-called ‘facts on the ground’ in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), in defiance of international law. Since the Madrid/Oslo peace process, successive Israeli governments have continued to colonise Palestinian land at the same time as conducting negotiations.

The extent and scale of Israel’s illegal settlement project across the West Bank, as well as the road network, the Separation Wall, and other ways in which Israel maintains its rule over the OPT, has led some to believe that the creation of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state is impossible.

Perhaps one of the clearest indicators that there is no Palestinian state-in-waiting under Israel’s regime of control is East Jerusalem.

Israel has three, inter-related strategic goals for East Jerusalem:

1. To make the claim that Jerusalem is the ‘eternal, undivided Jewish capital’ a physical reality.
2. Increase the Jewish presence/decrease the Palestinian presence (‘the demographic battle’).
3. Cut off East Jerusalem from the West Bank.

These are not new, but over two decades – and perhaps especially in the last few years – there has been an acceleration of the tactics being used to realise these goals. The rest of this article will provide a simple, by no means comprehensive, overview of Israel’s policies in East Jerusalem that have effectively killed the possibility of establishing a Palestinian capital.

Mapping the land and creating colonies

Since 1967, Israel has created a number of settlements in the unilaterally expanded city boundaries, with a current population of over 180,000. This represents an expansion of 65% since 1987, while the land taken up by the East Jerusalem colonies went up by 143% in the same time frame (OCHA, opens as PDF).

The purpose of the settlements, both those close to the Old City, as well as the ‘outer ring’ (or Jerusalem ‘envelope’) has been to make the annexation of East Jerusalem a fait accompli. As ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti commented, the aim of the expropriation of land around Jerusalem just three years into the post-’67 occupation was “to encircle the city with huge dormitory suburbs ‘that would obviate any possibility of the redivision of Jerusalem’”.

Israel’s annexation of land around Jerusalem almost tripled (PDF) the land under the city’s municipal authority. A third of the annexed land was expropriated for settlements, and over forty years, more than 50,000 housing units were built for the Jewish population on this land; none, of course, for Palestinians.

From 2000 to 2009, Israel confiscated PDF) over 40,000 dunams in Jerusalem; just under two-thirds of that total was taken in the last five years (’05-’09). In April last year, the UN OCHA reported (PDF) that only 13% of the Israeli-annexed area of East Jerusalem is ‘zoned’ for Palestinian construction (if permission is obtained).

‘Zoning’ land in East Jerusalem for particular purposes is an important way that Israel limits the natural growth of the Palestinian population. Some areas are declared ‘Green’, meaning no building is permitted there. In Jabal Mukaber, for example, 15,000 Palestinian residents are kept to 20% of the neighbourhood’s land, with the rest marked ‘Green’. However, there are a number of settlements that were built on land previously zoned as ‘Green’.

Targeting Palestinian neighbourhoods

Another strategy that has recently come under the spotlight is the targeting of Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem by extremist religious settler movements. In Sheikh Jarrah, Palestinians are being evicted from their homes in order for religious Jews to move in, a phenomenon described by ex-Tourism Minister – and supporter of the settlers – Benny Elon as “a microcosm of the entire story of Jerusalem”.

(Elon has highlighted Jewish settlement in Sheikh Jarrah as part of a plan “to create a Jewish continuum surrounding the Old City”, with other methods including “declaring open areas to be national parks and placing state property back-to-back with lands under Jewish ownership”.)

The irony about the Sheikh Jarrah evictions is that the settlers are making their case in the courts based on a claim of pre-1948 ownership. Palestinians dispossessed in the Nakba would not be hopeful of regaining their property on the same basis – whether in West Jerusalem or elsewhere.

Is not it absurd that the very same Palestinian whose property was confiscated in 1948 finds that his new home is confiscated on the grounds that it was owned previously to 1948 by Jews? What is it precisely that distinguishes the claim of the Jew from that of the Palestinian?

Uri Bank, a political activist for the extreme-right Moledet party, described the process and objective in comments made in 2003: “We break up Arab continuity and their claim to East Jerusalem by putting in isolated islands of Jewish presence in areas of Arab population…Our eventual goal is Jewish continuity in all of Jerusalem.” Ariel Sharon once boasted that the “goal” was “not leaving one neighbourhood in East Jerusalem without Jews”.

Meanwhile, archaeological excavations are delegated by Israeli authorities to ideologically-driven right-wing Jewish groups.  Silwan is home to the ‘City of David’ project, a tourism-oriented initiative of the settler group Elad. Dozens of Palestinian homes in Silwan are threatened with demolition, while Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat hopes to develop the area “in terms of historical and religious tourism”.

In May 2009, Ha’aretz revealed that the Israeli Prime Minister’s office and Jerusalem municipality were working with settler groups to “surround the Old City of Jerusalem with nine national parks, pathways and sites”. The Jerusalem Development Authority said the aim was “to strengthen Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel”.

The Israel Lands Administration works “together with the [settlement-promoting] Ateret Cohanim association”, while the new “Samaria and Judea District Police” headquarters in the strategic E1 area received funding from both the state and right-wing Jewish groups. It is little wonder that EU consuls in East Jerusalem felt moved to accuse “the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality” of assisting right-wing groups in “their efforts to implement this ‘strategic vision’ [of altering the city’s demographic balance and severing East Jerusalem from the West Bank].

The road network

Planning transportation links, and particularly road networks, is a vital part of shaping the nature of how a city develops. The Jerusalem municipality understands this, and thus the roads that go through and around occupied East Jerusalem are another part of Israel’s strategy.

One particularly key project is the Eastern Ring Road, the idea of which is to ‘join the dots’ between Israeli colonies in East Jerusalem, and West Jerusalem. A proposed 11km section of the route goes through numerous Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, meaning the confiscation of over 1,000 dunams of land. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post in 2006, the idea of the ring road goes back some years, “and was first sketched onto maps by Ariel Sharon during his tenure as a Likud minister and planner of construction efforts designed to erase Israel’s Green Line boundary with the West Bank”.

Palestinians, meanwhile, are being built ‘alternative’ roads, in order to link up different enclaves. When serving as the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the OPT, South African legal professor John Dugard described what he called “Israel’s broader plan to replace territorial contiguity with ‘transportational contiguity’ by artificially connecting Palestinian population centres through an elaborate network of alternate roads and tunnels and creating segregated road networks, one for Palestinians and another for Israeli settlers, in the West Bank”.

It is also important to mention the Jerusalem Light Rail, a project that has suffered setbacks on account of the international BDS movement. Once again, while the public, official purpose of the rail line is “relieving traffic congestion and renewal of the city centre”, the map of the route confirms that is another way of the Jerusalem municipality consolidating the colonisation of the eastern half of the city.

The dividing Wall

Israel’s Separation Wall cuts through occupied East Jerusalem, dividing neighbourhoods, villages, families, and streets:

The wall epitomises all the tactics of domination. It more than doubles the area of East Jerusalem, creating a clover shape to include the new settlements and their development zones: Bet Horon, Givat Zeev, Givon Hadasha and the future Nabi Samuel park; Har Gilo, Betar Ilit and the Etzion Bloc; Maale Adumim.

OCHA describes the Wall’s deliberate function of inclusion/exclusion:

The route runs deep into the West Bank to encircle the large settlements of Giv’at Zeev (pop. 11,000) and Ma’ale Adummim (pop. 28,000). These settlements currently lie outside the municipal boundary but will be physically connected to Jerusalem by the Barrier. By contrast, densely populated Palestinian areas – Shu’fat Camp, Kafr ‘Aqab, and Samiramees with a total population of over 30,000 – which are currently inside the municipal boundary, are separated from East Jerusalem by the Barrier.

The Wall has created an enclave in Bir Nabala, where 15,000 Palestinians are surrounded. There are now some 50,000 Palestinians with Jerusalem residency who find themselves on the wrong side of the Wall.

Palestinians: immigrants in their own city

The Palestinians of East Jerusalem have ‘permanent residency’ status from the Israeli authorities. They are not citizens. In fact, as Attorney Yotam Ben-Hillel put it, Palestinians of East Jerusalem “are treated as if they were immigrants to Israel, despite the fact that it is Israel that came to them in 1967”.

The next time someone tells you that Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, ask them why there are over 100,000 children in Jerusalem who were born without citizenship.

A Palestinian ‘resident’ does not need a permit to live and work in Israel, and is also entitled to health insurance and other social rights. However, ‘residents’ do not have the right to vote in national elections, can not automatically pass this status on to their children, and, are liable to having their ‘permanent residency’ revoked – which can happen without appeal or even notification.

In 2008, Israel stripped over 4,500 Palestinians in East Jerusalem of their residency status, which is a third of the total revocations since 1967. A leaked EU Heads of Mission report in 2005 observed that when it comes to the residency status policy, “Israel’s main motivation is almost certainly demographic”.

Restricting home construction

A fundamental part of Israel’s strategy in East Jerusalem is to restrict the ability for Palestinians to build or expand their houses, which restricts the growth of the community and also makes for conditions in which normal life becomes increasingly untenable.

The Jerusalem municipality’s discriminatory approach to housing means that as many as 40% of houses in East Jerusalem are ‘illegal’, because they were built without having received the proper building permit. Permits, like in ‘Area C’ of the West Bank, are routinely denied – an EU report last year noted that Silwan had received only 20 building permits since 1967. The process of applying is also highly – often prohibitively – costly: over $25,000 for a 200 sq metre building. In 2009, over 900 demolition orders for Palestinian houses were issued by the Jerusalem municipality, with dozens carried out.

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Yerushaliyim reported in April of last year that the Jerusalem municipality “intends to spend 1.2 million shekels on aerial photographing to track building offenders, in the eastern part of the city in particular”. Earlier this month, Ha’aretz referred to the existence of a NIS 2 million budget “for demolishing and sealing off illegal structures”.

While encouraging and facilitating intensified colonisation of East Jerusalem, Mayor Nir Barkat sometimes feels compelled to make positive noises about providing solutions to the ‘Arab housing shortage’. Yet even when Barkat announced plans for new houses, over two-thirds of the units will take 20 years to complete – by which time, there will be a 74% shortfall in Palestinian housing needs.

The death of Palestinian East Jerusalem and Israeli ‘democracy’

It is not difficult to understand the rationale behind the outworking of the permit system and the demolitions, or to see the vision at work behind all the various policies covered briefly here. Teddy Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993, quotes government officials in his 1994 book as saying that, “[It is necessary] to make life difficult for the Arabs, not to allow them to build…” An engineer and chief planner for the municipality once confirmed that the “only way to manage” the ratio between the Palestinian and Jewish population is “[through manipulation] of housing potential]”.

Amir Cheshin served as senior advisor on ‘Arab Affairs’ for ten years under Kollek and then Ehud Olmert. The book he went on to co-author does not shy away from the reality of Israel’s policies in East Jerusalem:

Kollek spearheaded the effort by Israel to settle east Jerusalem with Jewish families. In 1970 Kollek coauthored the proposal for development in east Jerusalem that became the basis for Israeli policy for the next decade. Indeed, the 1970 Kollek plan contains the principles upon which Israeli housing policy in east Jerusalem is based to this day – expropriation of Arab-owned land, development of large Jewish neighbourhoods in east Jerusalem, and limitations on development in Arab neighbourhoods.

This month, Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat described the Palestinians in East Jerusalem as a “strategic threat”, at a meeting of a Knesset lobby group. Barkat worried about the percentages, and the difficulty of keeping the Palestinians at 30% of Jerusalem’s population, the apparent goal. As ex-deputy mayor Benvenisti says, “It’s pure racism. We live in the only city in the world where an ethnic population ratio serves as a philosophy”.

In the words of the director of Israel’s Macro Centre for Political Economics, in order “to try to guarantee a Jewish majority and generate Jewish hegemony in Jerusalem”, Israel “has annexed huge parts of Jerusalem, enlarged the boundaries of the municipality, taken lots of land in the eastern part of the city and built more than 50,000 housing units on this land exclusively for Jews”.

This overview of Israel’s deliberate colonisation of East Jerusalem in defiance of international law only begins to scratch the surface. In the international ‘peace process’ and associated media reports, Jerusalem is typically presented as a ‘final status’ issue in the negotiations to establish a Palestinian state. Through policies going back 40 years, Israel’s leaders from across the political spectrum have made it clear that as far as they are concerned, Jerusalem’s ‘status’ is already final.



Are West Bank Settlements Illegal?

From: The Magnes Zionist -Blogspot

According to Rightwing Zionist Lawyers, No; According to Every Other Legal Expert In the World, Yes

Jeremiah Haber, 3 January 2010

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In his dissenting opinion to the 2004 decision of the International Criminal Court against Israel’s “Separation Wall” Judge Thomas Buergenthal wrote:

Paragraph 6 of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention also does not admit for exceptions on grounds of military or security exigencies. It provides that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”. I agree that this provision applies to the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and that their existence violates Article 49, paragraph 6. It follows that the segments of the wall being built by Israel to protect the settlements are ipso facto in violation of international humanitarian law. Moreover, given the demonstrable great hardship to which the affected Palestinian population is being subjected in and around the enclaves created by those segments of the wall, I seriously doubt that the wall would here satisfy the proportionality requirement to qualify as a legitimate measure of self-defence. (The opinion can be read on Mitchell Bard’s website, the Jewish Virtual Library, here.)

Buergenthal, a Holocaust survivor, a distinguished human rights judge, and a hero in Israel for his dissenting opinion in this case, did not even bother to argue that Israeli settlements are illegal. By 2004, no serious legal expert thought otherwise.

Perhaps it is fitting that one year after the Gaza fiasco, the Israeli Hasbara crowd – those on the right wing of it, anyway – are resurrecting some very old chestnuts, like: the West Bank is not Occupied Territory, or that if it is, the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to it, or that if it does, Israel is not violating it through settlements, blah, blah, blah.

These are pre-Intifada positions that date from the seventies and the eighties, and even then were advanced only by Israeli apologists, albeit some people who had distinguished themselves in other spheres, like Eugene Rostow and Julius Stone. In Israel, some of them may still be the official position, but no thinking person takes them seriously, certainly not in public discourse. The Israeli High Court, heck, even Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, considered the Palestinian population of the West Bank be under occupation. George W. Bush called upon Israel to end the occupation. Until Vladimir Avigdor Lieberman took over the Foreign Ministry, that particular chestnut weren’t even roasting on an open fire.

No further evidence of the death of these positions is needed than the venue of their “resurrection” (the Wall Street Journal and Commentary) and the right-wingers who are making them (deputy foreign minister of Israel, Danny Ayalon, and Northeastern law professor, David M. Philllips) Danny Ayalon, a member of the ultra-rightwing party Yisrael Beiteinu, claims that the territories are not occupied but rather disputed, using arguments that I have not heard in thirty years – in fact, since Gene Rostow and Julius Stone made them. In fact, I have no idea what is the Hebrew phrase for the “disputed territories” – whoever refers to “territories” (as opposed to Judea and Samaria) uses the adjective kevushim “conquered”. And since Israel controls these territories as a result of military conquest and against the will of the inhabitants, they sure are conquered.

Matt Duss does a good job of disemboweling Ayalon here. My favorite part is in his reference (thanks to Gershom Gorenberg’s “The Accidental Empire“) to the memo prepared by the legal counsel of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron in 1967

As recounted by Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg — whose history of the settlements is well worth reading — “the legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land.”

In a memo marked “Top Secret,” Mr. Meron wrote unequivocally, “My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

In the detailed opinion that accompanied that note, Mr. Meron explained that the Convention — to which Israel was a signatory — forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. [...]

Mr. Meron took note of Israel’s diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not “normal” occupied territory, because the land’s status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: the international community would not accept it and would regard settlement as showing “intent to annex the West Bank to Israel.” The second was legal, he wrote: “In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory.” For instance, he noted, a military decree issued on the third day of the war in June said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

Unfortunately, the Israeli government ignored Meron’s legal advice, and developed a series of shifting legal rationales to justify the annexation and colonization of the occupied land, which has helped to create the exceedingly difficult and volatile situation we have today

As for David M. Phillips’s piece, it is essentially preaching old (and one or two bizarre new) arguments to the choir, but in the sort of disingenuous manner expected from the ideological biased. For example, consider this seemingly innocuous paragraph:

To [Eugene] Rostow, “Jews have a right to settle in it under the Mandate,” a right he declared to be “unchallengeable as a matter of law.” In accord with these views, Israel has historically characterized the West Bank as “disputed territory” (although some senior government officials have more recently begun to use the term “occupied territory”).

One would hardly know from this description that a) Eugene Rostow, a life-long Zionist and defender of Israel, himself referred to the territories as “under occupation” or b) that “some senior government officials” included the two former prime ministers of Israel, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. True, they did not institute an official change of policy, but nobody to the left of Dore Gold’s rightwing think tank, the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs, bothers with arguing that the territories are not occupied.

Phillips writes like somebody who only recently converted to the hasbara squad and, with the zeal of the convert, revives the dead horse. And poor Julius Stone, introduced disingenuously by Phillips merely as “an international law scholar”! Stone was another example of a brilliant and influential Jewish legal thinker who used his considerable acumen (and passion) in defense of the tribe. (See Andrew Dahl’s overly generous deconstruction of Stone’s biases here.) At least Stone came up with those positions decades ago, when the Stock Zionist Narrative was dominant, before the work of the New Historians and the outbreak of two Intifadas. At that time, somebody could get away with the quaint view that the West Bank was captured in a defensive war, that the Palestinians did not have a right as a people to self-determination, that three “No’s of Khartoum” derailed Israel’s genuine desire for peace (on this see Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall), and most of all, that the Occupation was intended as a temporary measure until a credible partner would emerge.

Phillips argues (against everybody else in the world, except Stone, from whom he takes the argument), that the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids only forcible transfers of one’s population to occupied territory (surprise, the West Bank is now suddenly occupied!) So the settler’s “voluntary movement” is not prohibited. And this Phillips infers not only from the formal language but from the intent of the pertinent clause, which was to ensure that citizens would not be forcibly deported from their land, as the Jews were during the Holocaust. Phillips citation of Stone is revealing:

We would have to say that the effect of Article 49(6) is to impose an obligation on the State of Israel to ensure (by force if necessary) that these areas, despite their millennial association with Jewish life, shall be forever judenrein. Irony would thus be pushed to the absurdity of claiming that Article 49(6), designed to prevent repetition of Nazi-type genocidal policies of rendering Nazi metropolitan territories judenrein, has now come to mean that . . . the West Bank . . . must be made judenrein and must be so maintained, if necessary by the use of force by the government of Israel against its own inhabitants. Common sense as well as correct historical and functional context exclude so tyrannical a reading of Article 49(6).

After reading this passage, a reasonable person would simply dismiss anything Stone has to say in defense of Israel’s (then) legal position as blinded by his, quite admirable, Jewish loyalties. But more importantly, most intelligent Israelis also dismiss it. The issue is not merely Jewish settlement; it is Jewish settlement that serves as the basis for future claims of sovereignty, that thwarts the possibility of the self-determination of the Palestinians, takes away their resources, and confines them to Bantustans. For God’s sake – who but the settlers use the language of Judenrein anymore? And if one wants to talk about historical associations, what about the historical associations of the Palestinian refugees with Palestine, where whole sections are now Arabenrein?

Phillips writes:

The settlements are also a far cry from policies implemented by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s to alter the ethnic makeup of the Baltic states by initially deporting hundreds of thousands of people and encouraging Russian immigration.

Nor can they be compared to the efforts by China to alter the ethnic makeup of Tibet by forcibly scattering its native population and moving Chinese into Tibetan territory. Israel’s settlement policies are also not comparable to the campaign by Morocco to alter the ethnic makeup of the Western Sahara by transferring Moroccan Arabs to displace the native Saharans, who now huddle in refugee camps in Algeria, or to the variety of population displacements that occurred in the various parts of the former Yugoslavia.

Note that he does not say why these comparisons are invalid – on the contrary, they are quite valid, certainly in the eyes of the settlers, who view the goal of the settlements inter alia to thwart Palestinian self-determination and openly say that Arabs should be expelled from Eretz Yisrael. In fact, the settlers view themselves as the vanguard of a large movement of Israelis that would simply make a Palestinian state impossible. And while successive Israeli governments have not been as ideologically motivated as the hard-core settlers, or have shown more or less ambivalence, they have never put the settlers on the leash – on the contrary, they have encouraged them to settle in areas which Israel coveted. And they have used the resources of the Occupied Territories as cheap land for the expansion of their population. Still, the comparisons are not entirely valid; China, for example, made the Tibetans citizens of China, whereas the Israelis simply want to control the natural resources of the Palestinians, and herd them into enclaves. (A more valid comparison with China would be the actions of the Zionists in 1948).

And here is another example of Phillips’s disingenuousness:

After the Elon Moreh case, all Israeli settlements legally authorized by the Israeli Military Administration (a category that, by definition, excludes “illegal outposts” constructed without prior authorization or subsequent acceptance) have been constructed either on lands that Israel characterizes as state-owned or “public” or, in a small minority of cases, on land purchased by Jews from Arabs after 1967.

I cannot believe that a Northeastern University Law Professor is unaware of the Peace Now report in 2006, and its amended report in 2007, which shows that the majority of the West Bank settlements, including the outposts considered by Israel to be illegal, are built on what the Civil Administration itself considers to be Palestinian private lands. Or what about the Ofra settlement, which then Vice Prime Minister Haim Ramon, said was built almost entirely on private land? Not a week goes by without a Haaretz article that belies the official state position. Where has Phillips been for the last twenty years?

As for Phillip’s own arguments: well, consider this one:

Concluding that Israeli settlements violate Article 49(6) also overlooks the Jewish communities that existed before the creation of the state in areas occupied by today’s Israeli settlements, for example, in Hebron and the Etzion bloc outside Jerusalem. These Jewish communities were destroyed by Arab armies, militias, and rioters, and, as in the case of Hebron, the community’s population was slaughtered. Is it sensible to interpret Article 49 to bar the reconstitution of Jewish communities that were destroyed through aggression and slaughter? If so, the international law of occupation runs the risk of freezing one occupier’s conduct in place, no matter how unlawful.

In fact, if Article 49(6) allowed an occupier to reestablish by force ethnic communities that no longer existed, then that would give license to all sorts of irredentist schemes. For example, since Israel’s occupation of the areas outside the 1947 Partition Plan is still not formally recognized (except, perhaps, by the PLO), this would license Palestinian irredentists who wish to reconstruct the 500 villages that Israel destroyed during and after the 1948 war. (Phillips seems to be unaware that Israel has tripled the territory of the Ezion bloc under the rubric of “rebuilding a destroyed community”)

But my favorite argument – the real doozy – the one that illustrates the depth of Phillips’ grasp of the situation here — is the thought experiment that he suggests:

Suppose a group of Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of Israel requested permission to establish a community on the West Bank. Further, assume that Israel facilitated the community’s establishment, without the loss of their citizenship, on land purchased from other Palestinian Arabs (not citizens of Israel) or on state land. Would establishment of this settlement violate Article 49(6)? If not, how can one distinguish the hypothetical Arab settlements from Jewish settlements?

Let’s grant him, contra sixty years of experience, that the state facilitates the establishment of any new community of “Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of Israel” (what a pleasure to see that phrase used in Commentary!) Would it do so on land that it will claim during negotiations? Or land that it would trade for other land? Then clearly that would be a violation of Article 49(6), no matter who Israel placed there.

Reading articles like that of Phillips reminds me of the story that Gershom Gorenberg told me once. When attacked by a group of well-meaning, but clueless, American Zionists, he said to them, “You are the best reason I can think of for aliyah – at least in Israel I don’t have to listen to such narrishkeit.”

Serves me right for reading it.

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