The Debris of War
This week we reflect on the loss of lives and the wholesale destruction of places that are victims of the Israel-Gaza conflict. The bombardment of Gaza and escalation of armed action in the West Bank by the Israeli military, following Hamas’s attack on military and civilian centers in southern Israel on October 7, has been accompanied by the silencing of speech against Israel’s campaigns in academic venues and college campuses in Israel, U.S. and other Western countries. There has also been an increase in the number of anti-Arab, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic violence and rhetoric in public spaces and in social media, recklessly and indiscriminately projecting animosity more broadly across the globe.
As those invested in questions of planning, building, and habitation of landscapes as well as the geographies of land occupation, how do we position ourselves, how do we move beyond the assumption of a military solution to the current Israeli government’s acts of targeted destruction in Gaza (bombing schools and hospitals)? How do we understand the magnitude of harm in the loss of entire families and neighborhoods, and the crippling of civil liberties? How do we mourn? How do we place the events within the historical record? How do architectural traces and war debris bear the burden of testimony?
There is a long history of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, predating the emergence of Hamas in 1987. This history is colonialist in its making and unfolding. Postcolonial historiography has taught us to move beyond the colonizer/colonized paradigm to recognize patterns of social inequity and the many-layered functioning of an occupying power. Colonialism brutalizes the victim and further corrupts the perpetrator. This does not lend to any false moral equivalence between colonizer and colonized, but signals the ethical hollowness that resides in colonialist claims to sovereignty. Colonialism’s necropolitics extends far beyond the war event and occupied territory in both space and time in everyday and exceptional acts of destruction and dehumanization. We need to learn to see the destruction of Gaza as connected to larger patterns of domination—of class, race, religion, and empire.
In the last four years, PLATFORM has published several articles concerning architecture and planning in Israel and Palestine. The selection of articles that follows provides glimpses of how we might register the loss and excavate the past to understand the current unfolding of events, with the hope that the disciplines of architecture and history may bear witness to the truths that defy silence and silencing.
Figure 1. The ruins of the village of Al-Sumayriyya, al-Sumayriyya, 1948. Photograph by Joseph Hass, the Joseph Hass Collection, Haifa University Library, Israel.
In “Kabri Aqueduct: A Neutralized Monument,” published on July 26, 2021, Adi Meyerovitch showed how the Kabri Aqueduct, a remnant of Ottoman infrastructure, has been selectively marginalized in present-day Israel. Since the country’s founding in 1948, the Israeli government has sought to distance itself from its Palestinian and Ottoman past, which is seen as a threat to the national narrative. The aqueduct, which from 1815 to 1948 supplied the Ottoman city of Akka (Acre) with fresh water, was a crucial instrument of power for the region’s governor and allowed the city to flourish. Since 1948, the aqueduct has been left to deteriorate, yet the ruins that remain are material proof of the region’s Palestinian past. Although Israel has begun to conserve portions of the aqueduct, these efforts are fragmented and perpetuate the negation of its significance. Meyerovitch argued that the Kabri Aqueduct, rendered now a monument to no one, must once again bear witness to the vibrant Palestinian communities it supported for so long.
Figure 2. An ancient tree honoring Ibrahim al-Adham, in Beit Hanina village in the West Bank. Photograph by Arpan Roy.
In an article published on October 25, 2021 “Islamic Pasts and Futures in Palestine,” Arpan Roy discussed the work and legacy of Taufiq Canaan, a Palestinian folklorist who in the early twentieth century guided a movement to catalogue the rich and diverse material culture of Palestine. Canaan, concerned that the continuity of the Palestinian past was at stake due to the influx of European Jews, led studies centered on the history and culture of the Palestinian peasantry. The article focuses on one such study, “Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine” (1927), which documents sites of folk worship, only less than half of which still stand today. Canaan saw these shrines as expressions of the multi-ethnic, heterogenic character of Palestine and Jerusalem: he speculated that once-pagan edifices, these sites were later adopted by the material cultures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Today many of the Muslim shrines are in ruins and inaccessible to pilgrims. What are we losing, Roy wondered, with the decline of Arab Jerusalem and the rich material culture of Palestinian devotion?
Figure 3. Palestinian youth watching the sunset from the Acre Old City ramparts, one of the few open public spaces they have access to, 2021. Photography by Mahdi Sabbagh.
The coastal city of Acre, wrote Mahdi Sabbagh, is plagued by the dispossession of its Palestinian occupants. In his article “Dispossession and Resistance in the City of Acre,” published on May 2, 2022, Sabbagh described the challenges Palestinians faced due to exclusionary Israeli policies. Stripped of home ownership, thanks to the 1950 “Absentee Law” that transferred the property of many Palestinians to the Israeli state, today, about one-third of the city is Palestinian, but most of them have been compelled to rent property that they once owned. Palestinians are routinely excluded from the city’s public spaces, including beaches and cultural institutions, and are subject to what many view as a campaign of racial segregation. Sabbagh wondered what the city might be like if Palestinians were not branded as a “weaker population” and were allowed to fully assert themselves.
