Who will save Gaza's children?

Never mind Copenhagen, an environmental catastrophe is going on right now – contaminated water is poisoning babies in Gaza

Victoria Brittain

9 December 2009

Palestinian children take part in a human chain protest, near the Erez crossing, against the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/Reuters

Among all the complex and long-term solutions being sought in Copenhagen for averting environmental catastrophe across the world, there is one place where the catastrophe has already happened, but could be immediately ameliorated with one simple political act.

In Gaza there is now no uncontaminated water; of the 40,000 or so newborn babies, at least half are at immediate risk of nitrate poisoning – incidence of "blue baby syndrome", methaemoglobinaemia, is exceptionally high; an unprecedented number of people have been exposed to nitrate poisoning over 10 years; in some places the nitrate content in water is 300 times World Health Organisation standards; the agricultural economy is dying from the contamination and salinated water; the underground aquifer is stressed to the point of collapse; and sewage and waste water flows into public spaces and the aquifer.

The blockade of Gaza has gone on for nearly four years, and the vital water and sanitation infrastructure went past creaking to virtual collapse during the three-week assault on the territory almost a year ago.

What would it take to start the two UN sewerage repair projects approved by Israel; a UN water and sanitation project, not yet approved; and two more UN internal sewage networks, not yet approved? Right now just one corner of the blockade could be lifted for these building materials and equipment to enter Gaza, to let water works begin and to give infant lives a chance. Just one telephone call from the Israeli defence ministry could do it – an early Christmas present to the UN staff on the ground who have been ready to act for months and have grown desperate on this front, as on so many others.

Earlier this year, just one question face to face to the Israeli government, from Senator John Kerry after he visited Gaza, allowed pasta into Gaza. Who from Europe or the US will ask the Israeli defence minister the face-to-face question for the blue babies? Sarah Brown, the British prime minister's wife, would be the perfect candidate – an independent person who has the ear of the powerful, a mother who knows something about grief for babies. And she could be accompanied by Lord Mandelson in case there was any bullying.

The science on all this is unchallenged. Last September a UN report spelled it out in stark detail, including the regional implications for Israel and Egypt if the shared aquifer is not "rested" and alternative water sources found. The United Nations Environment Programme estimated that $1.5bn could be needed over 20 years to restore the aquifer, including the establishment of desalination plants to take the pressure off the underground water supplies.

Gaza's huge pale sandy beaches used to be society's playground and reassurance of happiness and normality, with families picnicking, horses exercising, fishermen mending their nets, children swimming and boys exercising in the early morning, but these days they are mainly empty, and not just because it is winter. Between 50m and 60m litres of untreated sewage have flowed into the Mediterranean every day this year since the end of the Israeli invasion in January, the sea smells bad and few fish are available in the three nautical mile area Palestinians are allowed in. This resource seems as ruined as the rubble of Gaza's parliament and ministries.

A visitor to Gaza could miss this underground disaster, seeing what the surreal economy of the tunnels from Egypt has brought in: a chic new coffee house, with new furniture and prints on the wall, which would not be out of place in Piccadilly, fish from Oman for restaurants, fat sheep and goats for the Eid feast, new cars reassembled after being cut into four, huge motorbikes straight out of Easy Rider, bustling markets full of foods, clothes, fridges, washing machines, pharmaceuticals, some brought in to order, and much more. Some people are getting very rich on both sides of the Rafah border.

But the tunnels are a small slice of the reality. "We have run out of words to describe how bad it is here," says John Ging, director of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza. Ging heads a team of 10,000 mainly Palestinian workers who run the aid supplies that are all that stand between the vast majority of Gazans and destitution. "We have 80% unemployment, an economy at subsistence level, infrastructure destroyed, etc, but even worse than the humanitarian plight is the destruction of civil society."

Ging's great preoccupation is "the 750,000 children susceptible to an environment where things are moving rapidly in the wrong direction, where the injustice is bewildering, and every day worse".

There is a big problem of insecurity and violence here, and it is getting worse. Most adults display stoic resilience, and cling to a belief in traditional values, but there is a compelling narrative by extremists which becomes ever more difficult to combat. Only lifting the siege would change the dynamic.

An international community that has accepted the "normalcy" of the degrading tunnel economy for Gaza, shames us all. Ending the water emergency should be the first step to breaking the blockade.

Shattering Israel's image of 'democracy'

By Ben White

Guardian 'Comment is Free'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/03/israel-negev

Thursday 3 December 2009 10.00 GMT

A struggle over land, home demolitions, and an Israeli government working with Jewish agencies to "develop" the land for the benefit of one group at the expense of another. It could be a picture of the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, but in fact, it's inside Israel – in the Negev.

The Negev, or al-Naqab in Arabic, is an area that since the inception of the state has been targeted by Israeli governments, along with agencies like the Jewish National Fund (JNF), for so-called "development".

This investment in the country's periphery is characterised by systematic discrimination against the Negev's Bedouin population, many of whom live in "unrecognised" villages or townships. Recent developments bring these policies into sharper focus, as well as pointing to fundamental problems with Israel's image as "the Middle East's only democracy".

First, three vital clinics serving Bedouin women and children have been shut down, with the result that the nearest equivalent facilities are now hours away. The official reason is a shortage of staff, but this does not sit well with the severity of the health problem among these Bedouin children, where the infant mortality rate is more than three times higher than in the Israeli Jewish community.

Second, in mid-November the Knesset passed an amendment to prevent around 25,000 Bedouins from voting for their mayor and regional councillors. Elections had already been postponed for two years, but now the law means "that as long as the minister of interior deems the residents not ready for elections, the elections will be postponed".

Finally, six weeks ago, lawyers acting on behalf of the Bedouins who live in the unrecognised village of Umm al-Hieran appealed against a previous court decision ordering the eviction of the community's residents.

Ironically, this village had been established by the Israeli military in the 1950s as part of a wider-scale forced relocation of Bedouins from territory intended for Jewish settlement. Now they are once again being targeted for removal, labelled "intruders", to make way for the planned creation of a Jewish town, Hiran.

Meanwhile, there have been reports about a Bedouin "mini-intifada" in the Negev, with Israeli military personnel targeted on the roads near a key base. Such fears are not new: a Haaretz article in 2004 predicted that a "Bedouin intifada" was "on the way" – a conclusion supposedly shared by senior government and military leaders.

What then, is the wider context? As a Human Rights Watch report put it last year, "the state's motives for these discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive policies can be elicited from policy documents and official rhetoric". The Israeli state's aim: "maximising its control over Negev land and increasing the Jewish population in the area for strategic, economic and demographic reasons". Professor Oren Yifatchel of Ben-Gurion University has put it bluntly: "the government wants to de-Arabise the land".

This is the common thread that runs through Israel's approach to the Negev since 1948: from physical expulsions and the legislation used to exclude communities from official recognition, through to budget allocations, creating Bedouin townships, and the flipside of "development" – demolitions.

In 2003, then-PM Ariel Sharon announced a new initiative calling "for the establishment of some 30 new towns" in the Galilee and Negev. One of the PM's advisers at the time, Uzi Keren, told a radio station that it was important to locate the new towns in "the places that are important to the state, that is, for Jewish settlement", in order to "strengthen settlement in areas sparse in Jewish population".

One of the groups helping the state is the Jewish Agency for Israel. A few years ago, the organisation's foreign media liaison officer was quoted on the JTA news website as describing the goal of the joint venture with the Israeli government as "a Jewish majority in all parts of Israel".

Another key organisation involved is the Jewish National Fund. Its UK website, for example, talks about how "the future of Israel lies in the Negev" and says the goal of the "major initiative" known as "Blueprint Negev" is to "revitalise Israel's southern region".

In January, the chief executive of JNF in the US, Russell Robinson, expressed his concern that "if we don't get 500,000 people to move to the Negev in the next five years, we're going to lose it". To what – or who – went unsaid. In 2005, Robinson was clearer about the consequences of the JNF's "project to remake" the demographics: "such an influx" of Jews would mean "a certain amount of displacement" for the Bedouin.

Robinson actually tried to present this as helping tackle Bedouin unemployment. With their slick focus on "environmentally friendly" initiatives and helping the disadvantaged Arabs, groups like the JNF do their best to make sure that scenes like this go unnoticed.

This is the Israel that its government and propagandists do not want to be seen, the Israel where non-Jews are a demographic "threat", and the state works with agencies (often funded by western donors) to "secure" a Jewish majority. It is the reality behind the myth of Israel as the region's only democracy, and away from the weekly twists and turns of the peace process, such policies shed light on the root problem preventing a resolution of the conflict just as well as, or better than, the number of housing units in Gilo.

In the shadow of an Israeli settlement

Givat Ze'ev settlement is separated from local Palestinians by Israel's West Bank barrier

Extensive diplomatic efforts towards reviving Mid-East peace talks have yielded little. The US has continued to demand Israel freeze settlement activity in the West Bank, while Palestinians refuse to negotiate without a freeze.

In the second of a two-part investigation, the BBC's Martin Asser sees the effect of settlements on the lives of Palestinians.

They are called the Seven Villages, situated north-west of Jerusalem where the West Bank hills fall away towards the Mediterranean.

SEVEN VILLAGES POPULATIONS Beit Anan - 4,264 Beit Duqqu - 1,600 Beit Ijza - 671 Beit Surik - 3,818 Qubeiba - 2,069 Qatanna - 7,496 Source: Palestinian Authority (2006)

Though their inhabitants live within the Palestinian Authority's Jerusalem governorate, few get to visit Jerusalem - though the city was "like a mother to us" one man said.

While Israelis in nearby Givat Ze'ev settlement bloc zip to Jerusalem by car in minutes, the Palestinian villagers need permission from Israel's military authorities.

If they don't get permission, apparently the norm, there are roundabout ways past Israel's defences and into the city, but this risks jail and a stiff fine.

Israel says all restrictions are imposed to prevent Palestinian militants wreaking havoc with suicide bombings.

But, the Seven Villages is known as a quiet area. Israeli soldiers I spoke to said there was very little militant activity.

Palestinian residents insist they are peaceable folk - famers, labourers, some professionals - who just want to live normal, decent lives.

Enclosed lives

Everyone I met said their world was dominated by Israel's occupation of the West Bank, in place since the 1967 war.

After occupation came Jewish settlements; after the violent Palestinian uprising of 2000 came Israel's vast infrastructure to protect the settlements. Now villagers in this area of the West Bank are hemmed in on all sides.

To the West and South Israel's West Bank barrier follows roughly the pre-1967 border. To the East it snakes deep into the territory around Givat Ze'ev. To the North is the heavily defended Highway 443, connecting northern Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

There are two official exits: via a 1.3km-long sunken road through the Givat Ze'ev loop towards Ramallah, and via Beit Iksa village towards Jerusalem.

The recently completed underpass - built on confiscated Palestinian land - made a significant improvement on the tortuous route people used to take to the West Bank's main city.

But simultaneously, Israel built a military checkpoint on the road to Beit Iksa, and now only its residents can pass.

Many villagers were concerned that, although the underpass undoubtedly made life easier, it also made it easier for Israel to lock down the whole area with a very small military deployment.

High price

While Palestinians insist the barrier is part of a land grab, Israelis officials say its purpose is purely defensive and, furthermore, temporary so it could be removed if peace breaks out.

Mahmoud Salim's lives in the "security zone" beside the West Bank barrier

But it has already taken a heavy price in the Seven Villages.

I met Mahmoud Salim on his way from Beit Ijza to the centremost village of Biddu to pay his electricity bill.

His house is located in a security zone for the barrier, which passes 15 metres away. His farmland lies on the other side and he has been told by the army he cannot "put one stone on another" in what's left of his garden.

He remembered the day in 2004 when Israeli troops first came to secure the area.

"People wanted to defend their land, but troops opened fire as though faced by another army. My son was the first one killed, though he wasn't involved in the demonstrations."

He is not the only such case in the Seven Villages. I met another man by chance in Beit Duqqu whose brother was killed in the same clashes.

Security anomalies

Some villagers, thanks to the barrier, find themselves in positions of such extraordinary and precarious absurdity you can scarcely believe what you're seeing.

The Sabri family home is in the middle of an elaborate high-security installation

The Sabris live on the east side of the barrier, embedded in a small settlement south of Givat Ze'ev, but completely surrounded by a six-metre-high wire fence.

Their simple hilltop house is reached by a stark concrete bridge over the barrier, which is dug into the rock below.

The bridge is controlled by a massive steel gate operated remotely by troops in the Atarot base 5km away.

To begin with, the family said, soldiers dutifully closed the gate at night, but now it stands open all the time. One can only guess how much this arrangement added to the cost of the barrier (estimated overall to be $1.3bn).

They talk about a settlement freeze, but they've forgotten the occupation. If we got rid of that, the settlements would go Schoolteacher, Beit Duqqu An Israeli settlement in close-up

On the other side of Givat Ze'ev, to the east, I met the Najadas, whose house lies in a "security zone" between the barrier and the settlement, cut off from their nearest village, al-Jib.

To get to work or school in the village, they walk along the security road next to the barrier to the nearest checkpoint. They cannot use cars or keep goats and have given up the idea of getting their crops to market.

I witnessed Abdul Baset Najada being told by checkpoint guards he couldn't walk along the road, although we were allowed to take him by car.

Disagreement

The people I spoke to seemed unimpressed by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's stance that peace talks cannot resume with Israel unless settlement construction ends.

"The papers are all talking about freezing settlements, but they've forgotten the occupation. If we got rid of that, the settlements would go," said a schoolteacher in Beit Duqqu.

Many see Mr Abbas as dancing to Israel's tune, while in their view settlements on 1967 land should not just stop growing, but should be removed completely.

Beit Duqqu is considered particularly affected by the expansion of Givat Ze'ev, one of the fastest growing Jewish settlements.

The village lies just across the valley from the Agan Ha'ayalot development, and it isn't hard to imagine its new Orthodox Jewish residents coming under militant attack from snipers or infiltrators one day.

"God help us if any settler gets hurt," says the schoolteacher, adding with a chuckle: "Maybe there will be an earthquake and we'll all be down in the valley."

Jerusalem's Obstructionist Construction

The pattern of Israeli construction in East Jerusalem is meant to erase the Clinton parameters for peace.

Gershom Gorenberg | May 8, 2009

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=jerusalems_obstructionist_construction

Construction workers build a new apartment complex for Israelis in east Jerusalem's Jabel Mukaber, a Palestinian neighborhood. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

So far, the bulldozers have carved a large hole in the chalky hillside for foundations. On the street, a developer's sign shows a picture of three multifloor apartment buildings that will rise on the site. The name of the developer, Bemuna, is written in Hebrew and means "in faith."

The company's Web site says the project is located in East Talpiot -- one of the Jewish neighborhoods that Israel built after it annexed East Jerusalem in 1967. That's a stretch, as I found when I visited the building site this week. The hole in the ground is surrounded by the houses of Arab a-Sawahra, a Palestinian neighborhood that borders East Talpiot. Once completed, the buildings will be three emphatic statements of Jewish presence in the neighborhood, three declarations that a political border can't be easily drawn between Arab and Jewish areas of the city.

Bemuna's project is not an isolated case. The first stage of the Nof Zion ( Zion View) development looks ready for buyers to move in. In one of the buildings, I found names written in English on two of 15 mailboxes in the lobby; the rest were still blank. Nof Zion is being marketed to Orthodox Jews from abroad. On the marketing Web site, a drawing {link: }of the full project shows that it will include a synagogue and a country club. But the project is inside Jabel Mukaber, another Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

These projects, and many more, should be of very deep concern to Barack Obama as he prepares for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's upcoming visit to Washington. Obama has already made clear that he's committed to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's likely that he, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Middle East envoy George Mitchell have been dusting off the most succinct American delineation of such a solution -- the parameters that Bill Clinton laid out just before he left the White House. The problem is that the Clinton parameters are being buried in construction refuse.

Clinton recognized that the city couldn't be divided along the pre-1967 lines. Too much had changed since the annexation. Physically, he said, Jerusalem should remain an open, undivided city. Politically, sovereignty should be split: "What is Arab should be Palestinian," and "what is Jewish should be Israeli." In other words, Jewish neighborhoods, including those built since 1967 in annexed territory, would remain under Israeli rule, while Palestinian neighborhoods would become part of the new state to be established in the West Bank and Gaza. According to unofficial versions of what Clinton told Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, that principle would apply to the Old City as well, difficult as it would be to work out arrangements for disputed holy sites.

The Clinton parameters assumed that Jews and Palestinians lived in distinct neighborhoods and that it would be possible -- even if not always easy -- to link those neighborhoods to Israel and Palestine. At the time, that was generally true.

But if supporters of peace took the parameters as a rough outline of a future agreement, the Israeli right has treated them as a warning. A shifting mix of government officials, commercial developers, and settler groups have done their best to make a political division more difficult. The building effort has become more intense since the Annapolis peace conference in November 2007. It's likely to accelerate further under Netanyahu -- unless a very clear warning from Obama convinces the prime minister to put on the brakes.

Part of the push is direct action by government agencies to expand Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. Immediately after Annapolis, the Israel Land Authority (ILA) announced that it was taking bids from contractors to build over 300 new units in Har Homa, a Jewish neighborhood in southeast Jerusalem. Established during the 1990s, Har Homa is placed to cut off territorial contiguity between Jerusalem's Old City and Bethlehem.

By mid-2008, the ILA and the Housing Ministry had invited bids for nearly 2000 apartments in East Jerusalem, according to a recent report by Ir Amim, an Israeli peace group that focuses on Jerusalem. The new projects expand Jewish areas, block growth of Palestinian ones, and make it harder to draw a political border in Jerusalem, the report says.

More quietly, planning authorities have approved more major developments for Israelis in East Jerusalem, and additional projects are in the planning pipeline. One of the approved developments, at Givat Hamatos on the southern side of the city, is placed to hem in the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Safafa, cutting it off from other Palestinian areas. The plan "will make final status territorial arrangements based on the Clinton parameters in the Beit Safafa area difficult, if not impossible," the Ir Amim report says.

One major housing development has been blocked, so far. That's "E-1" -- the bureaucratic name for an area of East Jerusalem between existing Jewish neighborhoods and the suburban settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim to its east. Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wanted to fill the area with housing for Jews -- to create a finger of Israeli settlement that would divide the West Bank in two. According to Israeli attorney Daniel Seidemann, an expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations in the city, Sharon froze the project under pressure from George W. Bush. That's the rare exception to Bush's hands-off attitude -- and proof that U.S. pressure can work. As a candidate, Netanyahu said he'd build at E-1. A clear message from Washington is needed quickly.

The projects in Arab a-Sawahra and Jabel Mukaber, it appears, are the initiatives of private developers with a mix of commercial and ideological motives. At a minimum, though, they benefit from government acquiescence. Lest there be any confusion, the developments do not represent peaceful integration. The new buildings are self-contained complexes, just inside the Arab areas but not of them. At the same time, their purpose is apparently to obscure "what is Arab" and "what is Jewish" and prevent a political division.

The area of Jerusalem most aflame with national claims and religious passions, though, is at the center of Jerusalem -- the Old City and its immediate environs, sometimes called the "holy basin" or "historic basin." The real political battle, Seidemann argues, is over this area. And with the help of government agencies, right-wing settler groups have focused their effort on ringing the historic basin with points of Jewish settlement. Ironically, the effort implies that the right -- angrily, despite itself -- knows that Israel will give up much of the West Bank. The ring around the Old City is a final defense, intended to keep the most ancient and holy areas of Jerusalem in Israeli hands.

One focus of settler activity is the City of David, a wedge of hillside in the Arab neighborhood of Silwan. Though it is located just outside the Old City walls, the City of David area is the original location of ancient Jerusalem. A right-wing organization called Elad has conducted a two-pronged offensive in the City of David. One prong is settling Jews in the area. The other is managing the national archaeological park in the City of David, where Elad guides present an exclusively Jewish history of the area and of Jerusalem as a whole.

To the east, on the Mount of Olives, is an apartment complex called Ma'aleh Zeitim (Olive Slope) -- a Jewish enclave in the midst of the Palestinian neighborhood of Ras al-Amud. The land is owned by right-wing American businessman Irving Moskowitz, a longtime supporter of settler projects in East Jerusalem. Two buildings at the site, with over 50 apartments, were completed several years ago; two more are under construction. When I came to look around this week, a heavily armed guard at the gate asked me, "Are you Jewish?" and what I wanted. I said I was interested in the new apartments, and he allowed me in. A few moments later, another security man -- apparently his boss -- found me and told me that I'd have to arrange in advance with a sales agent to visit.

When the first settlers moved in at Ma'aleh Zeitim, apparently in 2003, an article on a settler news site explicitly described the purpose of the project: Foiling diplomatic plans to allow free Palestinian access to the Temple Mount (and al-Aqsa Mosque) without passing through Jewish areas.

Foiling diplomacy, indeed, is the shared purpose of all these projects: rendering the Clinton formula irrelevant, blocking the political division of Jerusalem, and thereby eliminating a two-state solution.

For Obama, there are several implications: First, every bulldozer, crane, and cement mixer ignored today will make an agreement more difficult later. An immediate freeze on Israeli construction in East Jerusalem is essential for any diplomatic process.

Second, Obama can reasonably cite the Clinton parameters as a basis for peace. But the definition of "what is Arab" and "what is Jewish" can't be fluid, dependent on the latest housing starts. It needs to be attached to a date -- the end of 2000, or at an absolute minimum, today. What has been built, or is built, after that date, should not be part of the American proposal for political lines in Jerusalem.

To put it simply, Netanyahu should know that building Jewish enclaves in Arab a-Sawahra or Ras al-Amud won't change the borders. Anyone buying an apartment in those enclaves will eventually end up leaving or living under Palestinian sovereignty. Anyone selling those apartments -- and any official approving them -- is acting in bad faith.

Architecture as the continuation of politics: White City, Dark City

By V.G. Smith

10 February 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/feb2009/lett-f10.shtml

While Israeli tanks and bombs hit Gaza, a sales video for an apartment tower in Tel Aviv, 40 miles north of Gaza City, pitches the "Neve Tsedek White City Residence." As photos roll, the voice describes the tower in the heart of the "vibrant cosmopolitan city" of Tel Aviv; it cites "luxurious apartments," even a penthouse designed by Armani Casa, Milan, a "sophisticated lobby, lounge, and business rooms" for new enterprises. Sharing the same Mediterranean coast, Gaza City and Tel Aviv offer a brutal display of contrasts.

There is no need for conference rooms in Gaza, since 80 percent of inhabitants live under the poverty level, and 38 percent are unemployed. No call for penthouses by Armani, Milan, in Palestinian houses destroyed by US-supplied F16s. No sophisticated lobby for shelter, but refugee camps and darkened homes without electricity. While residents of the "White City" tower will enjoy sea views, Gaza inhabitants experience a blockade and see gunboats that occasionally fire "practice" shots inland, which last year killed a family picnicking on Gaza Beach. Where is the truth about these two towns?

The myth of Tel Aviv as "the White City" rests on the importation of style characteristics from European Modernism into Israel, and the number of Israeli architects educated or practicing in the "International style." This last connection centers largely on Arieh (not Ariel) Sharon, who studied with Hannes Meyer at the Bauhaus. The myth supports the presentation of Israel as a sophisticated, modern nation, understanding and willing to further goals of harmony and peace—a better life.

Those were the goals underlying buildings of the Modern Movement in Europe in the 1920s, practiced primarily in the Netherlands, Germany and France. The myth started in 1959 at the 50th anniversary of Tel Aviv, progressed in the 1980s through museum exhibitions in Tel Aviv and their publications; in 2003, the district was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO; and continued most recently in the Netherlands with an exhibition from Israel at the Technical University of Delft in September entitled "Revival of the Bauhaus in Tel Aviv," introduced by the Cultural Attaché of the Embassy of Israel.

Completed in Poissy, outside Paris, France, in 1929, LeCorbusier's Villa Savoye provides an iconic representation of early modernism, incorporating the five points which the architect used to define this "entirely new kind of building": columnar structure, roof gardens, open plan, horizontal window and free design of the facade.

In the construction boom of the 1930s, virtually all of Tel Aviv was built in the "International Style," understood here as white walls, flat roofs and massing of cube-like blocks, sometimes raised on columns. Conditions favored this style. Concrete construction was cheap and used unskilled workers. Buildings raised on columns like Corbusier's pilotis worked especially well in Tel Aviv because they allowed sea breezes to pass through. Flat roofs are not alien to Canaan, but stem from ancient tradition; David lusted after Bathsheba from his roof, and later, Jesus healed the man on a litter whose friends cut a hole in the roof to let him down (Mark 2:4). The Eastern aspect of Tel Aviv has been acknowledged and sometimes surfaces in White City "International" construction—atriums with splashing pools (not German), cupolas, tall arches, occasional ogees and ornament.

The International Style can be understood as a vocabulary of forms or as a social movement to achieve a better life through architecture. Its iconic buildings in Europe manifest both. Betondorf, a 1920s white concrete village outside Amsterdam, admitted only socialists, and provided a village green with adjoining library, but banned bars and churches. During a visit last autumn, it appeared to be still happily inhabited. The movement inspired sanitariums with balconies for TB patients, workers' housing projects, open-air schools and orphanages. The style allied architecture with a conscience.

Today, there are two architectures in Israel, as there are two politics. There are peace movements in Tel Aviv, and elsewhere in the land, and there are extremists, defiant of the law, even the laws of their own courts and certainly that of the UN. So there is another architecture alongside the imported/borrowed-International/Bauhaus style. It is the architecture of the outposts: wall and tower.

In July 2002, two Israeli architects won a competition within the Israeli Association of United Architects to produce an exhibition of Israeli architecture in Berlin. It was a trenchant critique of the architecture of occupation. When a spokesman for the Interior Ministry reviewed the exhibition the day before its shipment, he became enraged, demanding that the exhibition be cancelled and all the catalogs shredded.

The architects themselves revised and published the catalog as A Civilian Occupation (Verso, English edition 2003). In the catalog, they map the spread of settlements in the West Bank and document through photographs a new native building type, a hasty ensemble of a wall, a tower and dwellings. The wall area outlines and claims the territory, usually a hilltop, and the tower allows surveillance of the surroundings. The dwellings housed pioneer settlers. This model was favored by Ariel (the Prime Minister) Sharon when he constructed an upscale wall-and-tower residence on land allegedly taken from a Palestinian farmer.

As Israel continues its aggression on Palestinian land, wall-and-tower architecture appears as its authentic voice. To mimic International Style characteristics is as false as the nation's imitation of a modern state. Claiming a free press, it controls journalists at gunpoint at the Gaza border; having established a court system, it ignores its rulings; boasting of cosmopolitanism, it shuts down airports and forbids Palestinian travel—somehow in imitating Modernism it has violated all the beliefs of what was truly the spirit of Modernism, that of social justice.

V.G. Smith is a designer and design historian, and Professor Emerita of Art at City University of New York.

from World Socialist Website

www.wsws.org