1.
Jerusalem: Petrifying the Holy City
On 27 June 1967, twenty days after the Israeli Army completed the occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem, the unity government of Levi Eshkol annexed almost 70 square kilometres of land and incorporated approximately 69,000 Palestinians within the newly expanded boundaries of the previously western Israeli municipality of Jerusalem.1 The new delimitations were designed by a military committee with the aim of redrawing the state’s 1949 borders, prior to any evacuation of occupied territories that might have been forced on Israel by international agreement. The outline attempted to include empty areas for the city’s expansion and to exclude, as far as it was possible, areas densely populated with Palestinians.2 The new boundaries sought to ‘unite’ within a single metropolitan area the western Israeli city, the Old City, the rest of the previously Jordanian-administered city, 28 Palestinian villages, their fields, orchards, and tracts of desert, into a single ‘holy’, ‘eternal’ and ‘indivisible’ Jewish capital. Years later, Mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek (who served in this post on behalf of the Labor party between 1965 and 1993) would say of the incongruousness captured within these borders: ‘Jerusalem is, most likely, the only contemporary capital that pays drought compensation to farmers in villages within its boundaries …’3
The following year a new urban masterplan for the city outlined in drawings and verbal instructions the guiding principles of development and ‘unification’ of the urban ensemble now called Jerusalem. The ‘first and cardinal principle [of the 1968 masterplan] was to ensure [Jerusalem’s] unification … to build the city in a manner that would prevent the possibility of its being repartitioned’.4 Following this masterplan and a series of subsequent masterplans, amendments and updates during the forty years of Israeli occupation, twelve remote and homogenous Jewish ‘neighbourhoods’ were established in the occupied areas incorporated into the city. They were laid out to complete a belt of built fabric that enveloped and bisected the Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages annexed to the city. Industrial zones were located beyond the new neighbourhoods on the fringes of the municipal area, keeping West Bank Palestinians who provided the city with a cheap and ‘flexible’ labor force (until Palestinian labor was almost completely barred from the beginning of the second Intifada in the autumn of 2000) out of the city itself. An outer, second circle of settlements – termed by Israeli planners the ‘organic’ or ‘second wall’, composed of a string of dormitory suburbs – was established beyond the municipal boundaries, extending the city’s metropolitan reach even further. It is around this ‘second, organic wall’ that the concrete Separation Wall now meanders. An ever-expanding network of roads and infrastructure was constructed to weave together the disparate shards of this dispersed urban geography. ‘Greater Jerusalem’ became thus a sprawling metropolis reaching the outskirts of Ramallah in the north, Bethlehem in the south, and Jericho in the east – a massive section of the middle of the West Bank – isolating Palestinians from their cultural centres in Jerusalem and cutting off the north of the West Bank from the south. At present the new Jewish neighbourhoods within the municipal boundaries is home to about 200,000 settlers – almost the same number as all the other settlers in the West Bank combined. Together with the inhabitants of the dormitory settlements of the ‘second wall’ around the city, the total Jewish population of ‘Greater Jerusalem’ represents about three-quarters of all Israelis settled on areas occupied in 1967. Israeli activist Jeff Halper was therefore not exaggerating when he stated that ‘metropolitan Jerusalem is the occupation’.5
This project could not have been undertaken without massive government investments in infrastructure and subsidized housing for Jews, but an additional major factor in this colonization was a cultural one – the attempt to ‘domesticate’ the occupied and annexed territories – to transform, in the eyes of Israeli Jews, the unfamiliar occupied territories into familiar home ground. The problem of planners and architects was not only how to build fast on this ‘politically strategic’ ground, but how to naturalize the new construction projects, make them appear as organic parts of the Israeli capital and the holy city. Architecture – the organization, form and style by which these neighbourhoods were built, the way they were mediated, communicated and understood – formed a visual language that was used to blur the facts of occupation and sustain territorial claims of expansion. This project was thus an attempt to sustain national narratives of belonging while short-circuiting and even blocking other narratives.
This role invested in architecture has been written into the 1968 masterplan. Although the planning principles that guided this masterplan were largely based on modernist town planning principles, apparent in the plan’s promotion of massive traffic networks and the separation of the city into mono-functional zones (housing, shopping, service, industry), the 1968 masterplan also professed its ‘commitment’ to the orientalist aesthetics and urban development principles of ‘colonial regionalism’, a sensibility characteristic of the period of British rule over Palestine (1917–48), especially in its earlier years.6 The manifestation of this sensibility, promoted across the British Empire by followers and members of the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement, was an attempt to preserve and incorporate local building traditions, materials and crafts within contemporary buildings. On the urban scale it was expressed in attempts to dissolve ‘old’ with new, archaeology with living fabric.
The Wall in the Jerusalem region. The red line includes the authorized and built sections of the Wall within and around the Jerusalem area. The dotted red line is the planned extension of the barrier eastwards around the settlement of Ma’ale adumim. The shaded area is the extent of Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries. The neighbourhoods/settlements are marked blue. Palestinian towns and village are marked brown.
A special section of the 1968 masterplan was dedicated to a discussion of a British Mandate-era municipal ordinance, a bylaw enacted in 1918 by the first military governor of the city, Ronald Storrs, which mandated a variety of different kinds of limestone, collectively and colloquially known as ‘Jerusalem Stone’, as the only material allowed on exterior walls in the city.7 During the early years of the Israeli state leading to the occupation (1948–67), the bylaw has remained officially in place, mainly at the centre of the western part of Jerusalem. However, as it became increasingly controversial in the eyes of architects and planners, it was not always rigorously enforced, especially not in the peripheries of the municipal areas. The 1968 masterplan supported the tightening of the stone bylaw and the use of stone cladding within the entire area annexed to the city. By emphasizing and reinforcing the power of the bylaw, stone cladding was used to authenticate new construction on sites remote from the historical centre, giving the disparate new urban shards a unified character, helping them appear as organic parts of the city. ‘The value of the visual impression that is projected by the stone’, stated the 1968 masterplan, is that it carries ‘emotional messages that stimulate other sensations embedded in our collective memory, producing [within the context of new construction] strong associations to the ancient holy city of Jerusalem’.8
Building in Jerusalem, 1967–72: Film stills, Ministry of Construction and Housing.
Storrs’ ‘stare of Medusa’
On 9 December 1917, surrounded and with their supply lines cut, the Jerusalem divisions of the Ottoman army surrendered to the Allied forces under General Sir Edmund Allenby in a battle celebrated in the British press as a modern crusade.9 Three weeks later, Colonel Ronald Storrs, a political attaché to the British military, was
