1968, to help deal with the complex implications of planning and building in Jerusalem, Mayor Kollek inaugurated the biennial Jerusalem Committee which was set up to review and advise on municipal plans for the city’s restoration and development. Kollek, the Viennese liberal who loved to surround himself with intellectuals who would portray him as an enlightened ruler, recalled that ‘immediately when the city was united, I invited 30 or 40 people here, the best minds of the world, to consult on what we should do …’29 The Advisory Committee included prominent international architects, urban planners, theologians, historians and academics, amongst them the architects Louis Kahn, Isamu Noguchi and Christopher Alexander, the architectural critic Bruno Zevi, the American historian of technology and cities Lewis Mumford, and the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The 1968 plan was presented to the Jerusalem Committee on its second meeting in December 1970. The passionate academic discussion of the Jerusalem Committee never challenged the political dimension of the municipal plan and Israel’s right or wisdom in colonizing and ‘uniting’ the city under its rule, nor did it discuss the dispossession of Palestinians that it brought about. Rather, it argued about the formal and architectural dimension of this colonization.30 The history of the occupation is full of liberal ‘men of peace’ who are responsible for, or who at least sweeten, the injustice committed by the occupation. The occupation would not have been possible without them.
Although members of the committee supported the use of stone cladding, as was already outlined in the masterplan, they were unanimous in their rejection of the plan’s overall modernist premise, especially in its lack of regard for the historical nature of the city. Upon being presented with the masterplan some of the committee members were enraged and others brought literally to tears, lamenting the impending ‘destruction’ of the city by a modernist development plan of yesterday, and demanding that Jerusalem’s planners instead ‘translate [Jerusalem’s] special quality into generative principles which would guide the city’s future growth’.31 The committee finally managed to convince the municipality to cancel a dense system of flyovers proposed in the 1968 masterplan to be contructed near the Old City. The main concern of the committee, however, was with the Old City itself, but before further engaging with its advice on plans for its restoration, a few words must be expended on its war-time destruction, and what was revealed under its ruins.
Destruction by design
On the evening of 10 June 1967, before the cease-fire was reached and while still under the fog of war, the Israeli military performed the first significant urban transformation in the Occupied Territories, flattening the entire Maghariba (north African) Quarter, which was located immediately in front of the Wailing Wall on the southeastern edge of the Old City. This destruction was undertaken in order to make way for an enormous plaza extending between the Jewish Quarter and the Wailing Wall. This urban transformation, undertaken by the military without explicit government order, demonstrates more than anything else that the military had no intention of retreating from this occupied area. Chaim Hertzog, the Irish-born first military governor of the Occupied Territories, and later the sixth president of Israel, took much of the credit for the destruction of this densely populated neighbourhood, home to several thousand people living in 125 houses. ‘When we visited the Wailing Wall we found a toilet attached to it … we decided to remove it, and from this we came to the conclusion that we could evacuate the entire area in front of the Wailing Wall … a historical opportunity that will never return … We knew that the following Saturday, June 14, would be the Shavuot Holiday and that many will want to come to pray … it all had to be completed by then.’32 In 1917 Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, pleaded futilely with the British military to do the same several months after they had occupied Jerusalem. With the Maghariba Quarter intact, access to the Wailing Wall was by means of a small winding alley, which became the focus of much conflict between Jews travelling to pray at the Wailing Wall and residents.
After the complete destruction of the Maghariba Quarter, the military set about evacuating the 3,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, who had settled in the Jewish Quarter, which was adjacent to the Maghariba Quarter in the west, and now overlooked the huge destruction site between it and the Wailing Wall. In 1948 the Jewish Quarter was besieged by the Jordan Legion, and its population of about 2,000 was forced to flee. Thereafter the Quarter became the destination of Palestinian refugees fleeing from areas that had come under Israeli rule. After the 1967 war the government wanted to restore Jewish life in the Jewish Quarter. First to be forcibly removed were eighty families of the Palestinian refugees who lived in buildings that had formerly been synagogues.33 The rest of the inhabitants of the Quarter – Muslims and Christians, Palestinians as well as Armenians – were gradually expelled after an Israeli High Court of Justice ruling allowed it. Prior to the 1948 war, the borders of the Quarter had been porous and its dimensions could not be precisely defined. After the 1967 war, the government cleansed an area of approximately 9 hectares, larger than all previous accounts of the area of the Quarter. Two months after the war, on 31 August, the entire Old City was declared a site of antiquity, and no building was permitted until an archaeological survey had been conducted. The enlarged Quarter, now brutally emptied of its life, became the site of intense archaeological surveys. Three years later, in 1971, a company for the restoration and development of the Jewish Quarter was set up, supported the by German-born British architectural historian and critic Nikolaus Pevsner.34
Archaeology provided not only a pretext for an Israeli ‘return’ to occupy Palestinian lands, but, as Palestinian writer Nadia Abu El-Haj claimed, also the ‘footprint’ of historical authenticity that could be developed into built form by Israeli architects. Biblical archaeology was used to validate the claim that Palestinian vernacular architecture was in fact Jewish at source, and allowed, as Nitzan-Shiftan showed, ‘Israeliness’ to define itself as a local ‘native’ culture, appropriated and altered by the latecomer Palestinians.35
The clearing of the Western Wall Plaza, 1967, IP.
Biblical archaeology
Archaeology has been central to the formation of Israeli identity since the establishment of the state. When Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, claimed in his memoirs that the Jewish right over Palestine is ‘based … on digging the soil with our own hands’,36 he was referring to the two practices that would establish and demonstrate Zionist rights to the land – agriculture and archaeology. Having established itself on much of the surface of an unfamiliar Palestine, Zionism continued its vertical quest for the Promised Land downwards. The existing landscapes of Palestine were seen as a contemporary veil under which historic biblical landscapes, battlegrounds, Israelite settlements and sites of worship could be revealed by digging. The national role assigned to archaeology was to remove the visible layer and expose the ancient Israelite landscape and with it the proof of Jewish ownership. The subterranean strata was thus perceived as a parallel geography akin to a national monument, providing an alibi for new colonization that could be argued as a return to sacred patrimony. Archaeology further influenced the reorganization of the surface terrain. Throughout Zionist history, new villages, towns and settlements had been established adjacent to or literally over sites suspected of having a Hebraic past, adopting their biblical names.37 Indeed, only a few metres below the surface, a palimpsest of 5,000-year-old debris, a vertical chronological stack of cultures and lives, narratives of wars and destruction, has been compressed by soil and stone. Israeli biblical archaeologists were interested in the deeper levels of the Bronze and Iron Ages,38 which generally cover the period of time mentioned in the Bible, and the first four centuries AD, referring to the period mentioned in the more recent interpretative religious studies of the Mishna. The upper layers of the Muslim and Ottoman periods were marginalized in digs and museums, often dismissed as representations of a stagnant period, discarded as ‘too new’, or simply left alone to rot and crumble.39 This reflected the tendency of Israeli biblical archaeologists to short-circuit history. In this, Israeli archaeology was not politicized in
