In Solidarity with Palestine

 We stand in solidarity with the victims of apartheid and occupation who endure violence and dispossession on a daily basis in Palestine. The built environment has historically played a key role in the application of force through the weaponisation of architecture, the division of cities, the destruction of infrastructure and the displacement of people.

Buildings are politicised by the manner in which they are erected, managed or destroyed. It is important for our profession to be aware of and to understand the narratives of oppression and conflict, as well as their consequent manifestation onto architecture. Just as the built environment has the scope to foster interaction and peace, it can equally facilitate despotism, violence and deprivation.

Below are a number of resources that we have come across and found incredibly useful. We hope that our community and profession understand the importance of awareness of the ongoing socio-political struggles and their manifestation into socio-spatial practices through architecture and planning.

Contribution on Palestine from issue 04 Land:

The Architecture of Occupation: Weaponisation of land in the context of Palestine

Article by Catherine Riachi and Alissar Riachi

Land in the context of Palestine is placed at the intersection of apartheid, settler-colonialism and human rights violations from the Israeli state, whereas the emotional connection to land within collective Palestinian heritage and national identity has been obliterated by colonial projects that have aimed to decimate the indigenous people’s bond with land belonging. Land, in the multiplicity of its layers, has the power to convey the story of generational oppression, cultural and historical appropriation and a legacy of political injustice. Therefore, the occupation of land, alongside the weaponisation of urban and natural landscapes, have been key tactics of Israel’s architecture of occupation. The Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and its transmutation through neo-imperialist approaches to design, governance and culture has consistently attempted the erasure of Palestinian identity and the unnatural transformation of land from both a political and environmental perspective. This, in combination with the infringements of human rights by the Israeli apartheid state, has seen the use of the built environment as a key tool for implementing settler-colonialism and land grabbing.

One of the key tactics of using land for the purpose of facilitating occupation is through the politics of separation, severing the ties between Palestinian communities and thus creating hollow archipelagos at the threshold of war and peace.1 This practice develops an architecture of violence and occupation that manipulates the Palestinian national landscape to disconnect the past, present and future. The renegotiation of Palestinian history and its associated spatial manifestation is a way of destroying the local identity, one deeply rooted in the land, which has been significantly transformed following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. In this context, the built environment has been continuously used as a weapon for the expropriation, occupation and destruction of land and its respective native population, through the segregation of both urban and rural landscapes and the imposition of immobility on the population. The so-called ‘Palestinian struggle’ and the intersection of land, human rights and cultural heritage, have been referenced and amplified through various forms of art, which have become necessary for preserving Palestinian identity.

Illegal Settlements

“I look out of the window and see my death getting near.” - Unnamed Palestinian [1]

Settler-colonialism in Palestine is evidently materialised through the introduction of planning legislation that facilitates the appropriation of land and the expulsion of its native population. Since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel’s settlement project has cost £10 billion, segregating land in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, with 132 settlements, 140 unauthorised outposts, and a total of 441,600 settlers in the West Bank.[2] Settlements, which are clusters of suburban houses usually placed in a radial fashion at hilltops, have been used as vehicles for militarising landscapes and the implementation of passive ‘defence’ systems. They are illegal under international law and considered violations of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.[2]

Israeli settlements were formed to dispossess local Palestinian population for the sole benefit of establishing a homogenous Jewish population, and were facilitated through a number of legislative orders that use discriminatory forms of urban planning. Many settlements were built on privately-owned Palestinian land that was requisitioned for ‘military needs’ or ‘public purposes’.[1] Rather than changing the title of ownership, this enables the ‘temporary’ use of said land. The resulting temporary permanence has created a blurred dialectical relationship between the state of war and peace, constructing a form of suspended present for Palestinians. Additionally, any public Palestinian land where private ownership cannot be proven, has been declared Israeli state land.[1]

Traditional Palestinian towns and villages were integrated with the rocky landscape, with houses of lime and stone naturally blending with the hills.[3] Many of these villages were depopulated and destroyed, with Israel then using parks and trees to cover their ruins.[4] Now, hilltops are associated with Israeli settlements, framed by Israel as opportunities for personal and national renewal, strategically placed based on military, economic and ethnoreligious logic.[1] Many settlements have been created near historic Arab towns and on hilltops in order to both physically and psychologically create a sense of domination. These civilian settlements were preferred over the creation of military bases, whereby they can be used as part of the Israeli integrated system of defence through their placement in a manner that allows passive surveillance.[5] Moreover, this has fragmented Palestine into enclaves, with the infrastructure servicing settlements separating Palestinian rural landscape and preventing the opportunity for natural growth and connectedness between cities and villages. Additionally, the sterility of settlements has transformed the vernacular architectural style into one resembling the American suburbia, forcing an unnatural form of planning for the setting.

Settlements also limit Palestinian access to resources, with water being a prime example. In 1967, Military Order 158 prohibited Palestinians from constructing any forms of water installations without a permit, one which was rarely granted.[6] Additionally, Israel controls the rainwater collection systems and has destroyed Palestinian water harvesting systems, leaving some Palestinian communities with no access to running water. Moreover, Israel often builds water infrastructure for Israeli settlers, thereby forcing Palestinians to buy it. A good example is the Jordan Valley, considered one of the most fertile areas in Palestine, where in the village of Ein al-Beida the local spring dried up after Israel’s national company Mekorot drilled two wells to serve the nearby settlement Mehola.[6] These practices have destroyed Palestinian agriculture and the ability to cultivate land, an example of which is the local citrus fruit no longer being able to grow, whilst many Israeli settlers use the vital water supply for leisure pools within their back gardens. This is a violation of the human right to water according to the UN, despite Israel bearing the responsibility as an occupying power to protect the Palestinian access to water. Thus, Israeli settler-colonialism enables the manipulation of the rural landscape in Palestine to facilitate a system of land apartheid.

Jerusalem as a Contested City

The militarisation of land as a form of apartheid is particularly evident in the case study of Jerusalem, which has long been regarded as a contested city, due to its historical, cultural and geopolitical significance. Jerusalem’s position within urban studies as one of the most "ethno-nationally divided and polarised cities"[7] demonstrates exclusionary architectural planning practices, which reinforce the socio-spatial marginalisation of vulnerable Palestinians. The historical context surrounding Jerusalem’s controversial belonging stems from the city’s legacy as a sacred place for all three Abrahamic religions, which has led to numerous territorial disputes surrounding the construction of Old City Temples. Despite the fact that the British Empire envisioned Jerusalem as an international city during the 1947 UN Partition Plan, the failure of this colonial project has led to a full-scale occupation of West Jerusalem by Israeli military forces, which severely restricts the movement of Palestinians to this day. The appropriation of land by the Israeli state has manifested not only through the continuous renewal and relocation of occupation boundaries, but also through the implementation of special identity documentation, marking the hierarchy of urban citizenships and their accessibility to public spaces and services.[8]

The construction of the Apartheid Wall, which also passes through East Jerusalem, as well as the setting up of various military checkpoints to obstruct the freedom and the right to movement, represents the weaponisation of land against the Palestinian people, which has been enforced through a system of oppression and discriminatory urban planning schemes. With Jerusalem being the cradle of all three Abrahamic religions and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, it is a palimpsest of various ancient and contemporary narratives, while the appropriation of land in this historic context by the Israeli state embodies neocolonialism and apartheid. This segregation alludes to the one during Israel’s establishment in 1948, when destruction and division of land was used as a tool of control and domination. The spatial developments in the occupied territories throughout the last few decades, especially since the forced evictions from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in 2021, illustrate the unjust power dynamics, which facilitate Israeli demographic and military expansion through the erasure of Palestinian cultural legacy and identity.[7]

This politics of expansion through the use of architecture as a tool of occupation leads to the ghettoization of the urban climate, where millions of indigenous people are subjected to inhumane living standards and limited patterns of mobility. The ongoing expulsion of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood by the Israeli state is not only a violation of international law but is also framed simply as a ‘property dispute’, which aims to justify the ethnic cleansing of the entire region. The appropriation of land in the occupied East Jerusalem is thought to facilitate the Jerusalem Master Plan, which envisions the territorial expansion of Israeli settlements through the fragmentation of Palestinian communities as well as associated freedom of movement, and explicitly creating pockets of Jewish demographic domination with the aim of reaching a 70% Jewish settler majority.[2] Another recent case of Israel’s discriminatory built environment policies is the demolition of Palestinian cemeteries for the purpose of constructing a Jewish-themed entertainment park, which showcases the eradication of all traces of Palestinian existence, even in death.9 The use of land as a tool for exploitation, ethnic subordination and implementation of racist projects is a prominent tactic in Israeli urban planning used to eradicate the legacy of Palestinian existence, by transforming Jerusalem into a hypersecuritized, yet a simultaneously insecure city.[7] This pattern of hypersecuritization and ghettoization is repeated in other key Palestinian cities in order to commit spatiocide, limiting the natural interactions that sustain the existing communities.

Barriers

The West Bank Barrier is one of the main facilitators of the politics of separation, materialising segregation in both urban and rural landscapes as argued above, and is a solid embodiment of the Israeli state’s ideology and attitude towards Palestinians. Spanning over 700 km, the $3 bln project is the most expensive in the state’s history, featuring 8-metre-high concrete slabs, electronic fences, barbed wires, radars, cameras, deep trenches, observation posts and patrol roads.1 Its construction began in 2002 following the Second Intifada and has been undertaken incrementally. The wall encircles Palestinian territory, ensuring the population is not only surrounded on the terrain’s surface, but also enclosed horizontally and vertically with Israel controlling the aquifer below and the airspace above.[1] Although the path sometimes aligns with the Green Line - the demarcation line serving as Israel’s de facto border - the majority of its route is within the West Bank and on Palestinian territory. Therefore, the course of the wall has been elastic, with the state often changing its trajectory to suit Israel, for example, to snatch key archaeological sites. Additionally, Palestinians are often cut off from social services, schools, and fertile farmland, which disrupts social continuity and creates an environment of ‘urbicide’, where people are meant to obey the urban climate and not vice-versa.10 The wall runs in areas where the Israeli and Palestinian landscape collide to create frontier spaces, in which the otherization of the two communities amplifies the divide between the Orient and Occident.3 This juxtaposition reinforces the colonial narrative behind the system of apartheid, one materialised through the use of the built environment as a facilitator of the politics of separation.

The physical partition of land on the east and west of the demarcation line aims to degrade the social fabric and to criminalise the natives that attempt to cross these racist boundaries. This maintains the various hierarchies between the coloniser and the colonised, where race, religion and gender intersect to create a hostile barrier that reinforces the violation of human rights. This in turn leads to the amplification of structural inequalities, where the Israeli Defense Forces limit the mobility of the native Palestinians through designing a highly weaponised landscape. This fabrication of artificial boundaries interrupts the social reproduction of Palestinian society, which is a key tactic used for the separation and ethnic cleansing of the population.

The politics of separation is thus enabled by the architecture of occupation which dictates and limits the subsequent sociospatial practices of the oppressed community. The purpose of land is therefore corrupted to become a weapon against the native population, instead of sustaining the cultivation of social interactions and cultural legacy. The sacredness of land is emphasized through the mourning of its loss, which has been passed on through Palestinian generations, while exile has strengthened the eternal bond with land through collective memory.

Resources

[1] Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land. London: VERSO Books, 2017.

[2] Amnesty International. Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity. London: Amnesty International, 2022. <https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/>

[3] Sharif, Yara. Architecture of resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017

[4] Saah, Daleen and Visualising Palestine. "Green Colonialism in Palestine". Accessed February, 2022. <https://www.instagram.com/p/CY4B-qFAp3T/>

[5] Al Jazeera English. "Rebel Architecture - The architecture of violence". September 2014. Video, 25:00. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybwJaCeeA9o&ab_channel=AlJazeeraEnglish>

[6] Amnesty International. "The Occupation of Water". Accessed February, 2022. <https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occupation-of-water/>

[7] Rokem, Jonathan. "Contrasting Jerusalem: contested urbanism at the crossroads". City 22, no.1 (2018) : pp.174-177.

[8] Yacobi, Haim. "Jerusalem: from a ‘divided’ to a ‘contested’ city—and next to a neo-apartheid city?". City vol.19, no.4 (2015): pp.579-584.

[9] Jundi, Aseel. "Jerusalem Palestinians fight to preserve cemetery slated for demolition". Published: October 2021 <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/jerusalem-palestine-israel-cemetery-demolition-fight#:~:text=Jerusalem%20Palestinians%20fight%20to%20preserve%20cemetery%20slated%20for%20demolition,-Footage%20of%20Ola&text=Just%20like%20the%20Palestinians%20living,in%20peace%20in%20their%20graves.>

[10] Dana, Karam. "The West Bank Apartheid/Separation Wall: Space, Punishment and the Disruption of Social Continuity". Geopolitics vol.22, no.4 (2017): pp.887-910