Palestine's abandoned parliament – a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 46

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/29/palestine-abandoned-parliament-history-cities-50-buildings

Started after Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo accords 20 years ago, the empty building now embodies the dashed hopes of the failed peace process

by Ilene Prusher       29 May 2015       The Guardian

The abandoned Palestinian parliament building in Abu Dis, East Jerusalem. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum

Just beyond an 8-metre-high grey concrete wall – in some places decorated with graffiti and in some places burnt black by demonstrators – lies the building that was slated to become the Palestinian parliament. Today, it is a white behemoth of a building that sits hollow and unfinished, locked behind towering gates on a road that leads from Jerusalem into Abu Dis, a West Bank village just outside the Israeli-declared municipal boundaries of its capital.

A nearby guard provides the key to a building that seems to embody the dashed hopes of a failed peace process, and in particular, of a people who were told that the Oslo Peace Accords signed by Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1993 would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Soon after, Israel began to withdraw its army from major cities in the West Bank, and the two sides agreed on a plan to divide the West Bank into three temporary territorial categories: A, B and C. Among the other creative ideas bandied about in those heady days was to base the Palestinian capital on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

The building is a hulking skeleton on the scarred landscape of the city’s outskirts, a city whose boundaries may yet be redefined and redrawn in peace negotiations. Other cities around the world have their own white elephants – large empty buildings that have failed for a variety of reasons – often due to poor planning or a financial shortfall. Sometimes, such buildings can bring down a whole neighbourhood and contribute to urban blight. But here, the story is further complicated by political realities, and stands as an architectural reminder of the dysfunction that reins in this part of the world.

The gates in front of the abandoned parliament building. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum

Inside, we tread over parched earth and stones, broken glass, a discarded bottle of Israeli-made Maccabi beer. One can almost imagine the political life that was envisaged here when Ahmad Qurei – widely known as Abu Alaa and one of the architects of the now-defunct peace process – invested personal and political capital in the project, and brought in his friend, prominent Palestinian-Jordanian architect Ja’afar Touqan, to design it. Qurei, now retired, describes in a film by DAAR (Decolonising Architecture Art Residency), that one of the reasons he chose this spot was that it would have a view with the Al-Aqsa mosque in the background.

“This building was a work of art,” Qurei says in the film. “We designed the eastern room with a wide window because Abu Ammar [Yasser Arafat] liked to have an image of Al-Aqsa in the background in his photos, so here his office would be located where a view of Al-Aqsa would be visible from his window. It was his dream and his dream for all of us.” Qurei explains that the location was intended to move the Palestinian leadership closer to Jerusalem.

Today, the only life to be found inside what were supposed to be Palestinian corridors of power, is a tired dog who doesn’t bother to bark at us and a desert snake curled up on top of a door frame. The main plenum hall, built in a semi-circle on levels that descend towards a speaker’s platform at the bottom of the hall, is roomy compared to the current space in the city of Ramallah – the meeting place of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

When the builders broke ground in 1996, the Israelis were not in the know and several politicians – including Yitzhak Rabin, as Qurei explains in the film – soon raised opposition. When the story hit the press, many Palestinians were sceptical of the very idea of putting a parliament building in Abu Dis. Some embraced the concept as a workable interim solution – a long-term agreement over Jerusalem was to be decided further down the road in the final status talks that never came – but critics viewed it as too big a compromise on their basic principle of a state whose capital is in Jerusalem.

Hassan Kazen, a retired construction worker with a heavily lined face, sits on a tattered bench outside the gates of the empty parliament building. He remembers when it was being built and things were infinitely more hopeful. “I’m not optimistic today, but back then, I was. Our parliament should be inside Jerusalem,” he said. “Why did they put it here anyway?”

The future of the state Palestinians hoped for was already in question in the late 1990s, when Benjamin Netanyahu – who had been a harsh critic of the Oslo accords – became prime minister in 1996. With the building still not complete, a violent new tide of conflict sealed its fate. The Second Intifada broke out in September 2000, and suicide bombings aimed at Israeli cities became a devastating weapon of choice. Israel responded by building a wall throughout the West Bank. Here in Abu Dis, however, as in most urban areas, it’s a wall that climbs high and stretches long, so much so that a Palestinian parliament building based here today would only serve as a constant photo-op displaying an image of occupation and unsolved conflict.

Just down the road rimmed by the wall is the main campus of Al-Quds University. Hoping that Al-Quds would be able to transform the parliament building from a depressing white elephant into a functional space, ownership of the 1717-square-metre building was transferred to the institution. The school’s last president, Dr Sari Nusseibeh, found it impossible to attract funding to convert the building into a usable space, but Dr Imad Abu Kishek who took over last fall, says they’re still in search of an investor or donor who will breathe life into the building and turn it into a much-needed cultural centre.

The wall makes the idea of a Palestinian capital building in Abu Dis ‘even less palatable’, says Al-Quds University president Imad Abu Kishek. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum

“We tried our best for the last seven years, but unfortunately, we still didn’t find any country or person who will support renovating this beautiful building,” says Abu Kishek. “We can envision using this as a theatre and a cultural centre. We don’t have a real centre to which we can invite people from all over the world to have events in Jerusalem and its suburbs, and we very much need a place for activities like that.”

The wall, he says, not only makes it difficult for many students and faculty members to get to get to and from campus, but it makes the concept of a Palestinian capital building in Abu Dis – which lies just beyond the Israeli-declared municipal border of Jerusalem – look even less palatable than it was nearly two decades ago.

“If we have a parliament, it should be in East Jerusalem, and our political institutions should be there. Now that we took responsibility for it at Al Quds University, no one will even accept it as more than a cultural or community building.”

Adjacent to the campus is the offices of the Village Council of Abu Dis. Its chairman, Adel Salah, grew up here. The idea of putting a parliament building here only made sense, if at all, when Abu Dis was simply considered outer Jerusalem and residents could freely enter the city. Today, however, half of his own family members have West Bank identity cards, meaning they can’t enter Jerusalem without a special Israeli-issued permit. While people in Abu Dis and other villages on East Jerusalem’s borders – such as Izzariyeh and Anata – have always viewed themselves as attached to Jerusalem as say, Brooklyn is to Manhattan, they find that they’re now been turned into West Bankers without easy access to the city.

“Abu Dis is part of Jerusalem and we have always been integrated with it, socially, economically, medically,” Salah explains. “We could never substitute the Old City of Jerusalem, with its heritage and history, and be satisfied with just this small, crowded sliver of land as a capital. Honestly, when I pass this building, it’s not a feeling of sadness that prevails, but rather a feeling of discrimination, apartheid, and arrogance – a feeling that you must look every day at a wall that divides you from your city.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------