Moreover, the practices of Israeli biblical archaeology were largely inherited from British and American archaeologists who had been excavating the area since the nineteenth century.41 However, in contrast to their predecessors, Israeli biblical archaeologists had national rather than religious aspirations. Excavations were often carried out by secularists, men who, like Ben Gurion, saw the Bible as a historical national text that could fuse the relationship of a national identity to its state.42 The archaeological digs were themselves often reminiscent of military operations, with the work organized by retired military officers.43 On 27 June 1967, the same day that Arab Jerusalem and the area around it was annexed to Israel, the Israeli government declared the archaeological and historical sites in the West Bank, primarily those of Jewish or Israelite cultural relevance, to be the state’s ‘national and cultural property’,44 amounting to a de facto annexation of the ground beneath the Occupied Territories, making it the first zone to be colonized. The centre of attention for Israeli biblical archaeologists was the Jerusalem area and, in particular, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. After the war, archaeological data became more easily available, with the most organized archives of archaeology and antiquity – the East Jerusalem-based Rockefeller Museum, the American School for Oriental Research, the French École Biblique et Archéologique – together with their collections and libraries, coming under Israeli control and thereby providing Israeli biblical archaeologists with a treasure trove of sources.45
Louis Kahn, The Hurva Synagogue (left), IP.
Archaeology into architecture
In the Old City archaeological finds were incorporated into the overall urban design scheme. Louis Kahn, who was the leading voice in the early meetings of the Jerusalem Committee, envisioned the reconstruction of the evacuated quarter as ‘an archaeological grid in which [new] architectural, urban forms are shaped after and in juxtaposition to their ruins’.46 One of Louis Kahn’s most significant proposals for the reconstruction of the Old City, privately undertaken, was his plan for the restoration of the Hurva [Ruin] Synagogue, an eighteenth-century building that stood at the centre of the Jewish Quarter before it was demolished by the Jordan Legion after the 1948 war. The proportions and outline of Khan’s design for a monumental and archaic-looking synagogue-fortress, growing out of its ruins, were such that, if built, it would have competed on the city’s skyline with the Al Aqsa mosque and the Holy Sepulchre. Although never realized, the plan had considerable influence on Israeli architecture in the Quarter and beyond. Ram Karmi, one of the most promising young Israeli architects of the second generation of state builders, was Kahn’s foremost follower and promoter in Israel in the 1970s. For Karmi, writing in 1970, Kahn’s design for the Hurva Synagogue marked the end of Israeli modernism that was closely associated with the architecture of Israel’s founding generation and that of his father, Dov Karmi. ‘Israeli architecture … did not manage to artistically and properly express the desires of a nation returning to its routes … the new Hurva building provides an opportunity to fill this absence.’47 The call was for the disciplines of archaeology and architecture to merge. Indeed, throughout the restoration work in the Quarter, Israeli archaeologists and architects collaborated, carrying out, often simultaneously, excavation, restoration and reconstruction.48 Archaeology was vertically extended into a new building style that Zvi Efrat called ‘archaeologism’.49 In some cases, the upper storeys of new homes would become literal extensions of their archaeological footprints, while other buildings would be built using older stones for the lower floors and newer stones at higher levels: others still were simply built to appear old.
The reconstruction of Kikar Batei Machase, the main square in the Jewish Quarter early 1970s, IP.
In 1974 Karmi became chief architect at the Ministry of Construction and Housing, which at the time still oversaw most residential construction in Israel and which had gained a reputation for promoting fast and cheap housing solutions in rows of housing blocks. Karmi was the most visible of a group of Israeli architects attuned to the historicist tendencies of the Jerusalem Committee and to worldwide developments in architecture. These architects were mostly young, returning from study periods in elite architectural schools worldwide, and in particular from the hot-house of new architectural ideas, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, from which Karmi himself had graduated. Like many in Israel’s professional class, most of them were supporters of the Labor Party, which between 1967 and 1977 was the executive force behind the colonization of Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territories.
For these young practitioners, the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s – epitomized by the state-sponsored socialist housing blocks of European modernism – was sterile, heartless and lacking an important component, ‘meaning’. These architects had not for the most part returned to Israel out of nationalist conviction but rather because, as young architects, they were happy to be given the opportunity to build, and to engage with issues that were then at the centre of architectural discourse. They may have been aware that their projects were built on expropriated Palestinian lands, and precipitated personal and national tragedies, but they suppressed such thoughts, pretending to engage with these projects in a ‘purely’ professional way.
Upon taking up his role, in a move echoing that of Storrs, Karmi halted all projects in Jerusalem and set a team of experts to oversee a new citywide planning programme. For Karmi, ‘the search for national identity must be conducted through architecture.’50 In the introduction to ‘Israel Builds’ the 1977 official publication of the Ministry of Housing, he explained the shift in the focus of architectural production: ‘We live under the pressure of a shortage of housing … We make every effort to build as much as our budget permits … Still I feel that in all those efforts there is a lack of one component, the component around which Israel came into existence: the establishment of a “national home” … Home means more than just the narrow confines of one’s apartment; it also implies a sense of belonging to the immediate surroundings …’51 Architecture was to become a central player, no less, in the redesign of territory as a home.
But where was such ‘meaning’ to be found? According to Karmi, it was located in the particular nature of the nation’s terrain itself: ‘Just as we did not create the Hebrew language ex-nihilo, but built it up on the foundations of the language that was spoken 2000 years ago … so we are not starting [to construct buildings] on a blank sheet of paper.’52 Inspiration was sought and found, as Alona Nitzan-Shiftan forcefully demonstrated, both above and below the surface: ‘While architects were seeking locality on the ground, archaeologists sought Jewish history underneath its surface.’53 Above the ground, the fabric of Palestinian vernacular architecture – found in the hillside villages and Jerusalem neighbourhoods – was deemed by Israeli architects to retain not the social-physical typologies that have undergone complex historical development, but fossilized forms of biblical authenticity.54 Israeli-built culture has always been locked between the contradictory desires to either imitate or even inhabit the stereotypical Arab vernacular, and to define itself sharply and contrastingly against it. Zionists saw the Palestinians either as late-comers to the land, devoid of thousand-year-old roots or, paradoxically, as the very custodians of the ancient Hebrew culture and language of this land – all this without any sense of contradiction.55
Israeli architects’ attraction to local Palestinian architecture was also inspired by another theoretical framework prominent at the time: the 1964 MoMA exhibition ‘Architecture without Architects’. Its extended catalogue became influential in promoting the integration of principles derived from vernacular buildings into the context of international modern architecture. However, in focusing its attention on the formal dimension of vernacular domestic architecture, the exhibition ignored the political and social developments of the communities that constructed them, being
