architects’ fascination with the Palestinian vernacular was blind to the complex socioeconomic development of the Palestinian villages and towns they now studied; instead, they assumed that such housing forms had developed organically, without planning. It was a view encapsulated in an observation by Thomas Leitersdorf, another graduate of the Architectural Association in London, who had returned to Israel from a period of work abroad to plan Ma’ale Adumim, the largest settlements in the West Bank, a few kilometres east of Jerusalem: ‘in terms of beauty they [the Palestinians] are way ahead of us! “Architecture without Architects” – this is the Arab village, and this is its beauty … I look upon the morphology of the Arab villages with envy. The beauty of the Arab village lies in its accumulative and somewhat irrational nature … it is always better than when an architect comes in, the architect only spoils things because the architect has to work logically, and they do not …’57 The modernization of the Palestinian village – its development as a complex socio-political entity, the conversion of its agrarian economy into a semi-urban one, the abandonment of traditional stone construction, and even, more ironically, the influence of Israeli culture, economy, architecture and construction techniques – remained largely invisible to Leitersdorf and his contemporaries. But beyond his orientalist perspective, which doomed the Palestinian village to a permanent romantic backwardness, an island of ‘tradition’ within an ocean of ‘progress’,58 Leitersdorf has missed the contradiction in his own work: the buildings he designed to overlook the Palestinian villages are what irrevocably damaged them.
At the end of the ‘reconstruction’ of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem only about 20 per cent of the original buildings were actually conserved. The rest were rebuilt, with more storeys in order to accommodate government targets for larger numbers of residents. At present, more than 4,500 people, a third of them yeshiva students from all over the world live in the Jewish Quarter. Most of these inhabitants are national-religious Jews, many of them from the United States, but several artists and architects, influenced by the culture of ‘return to the city centre’ have also made it their home. An example for the latter type of settlers are the architects Moshe Safdie and Elinoar Barzacchi, later the Chief Architect of the District of Jerusalem, who returned to Israel in 1977 after a period of study and work in Paris and Rome. She recently explained her decision to settle there: ‘I came from Europe and I thought the most wonderful place to live in Jerusalem is in the Old City. In Rome I lived in the Old City. In Paris I lived in Montmartre. Here in the [Jewish] Quarter it looked to me like the most Jerusalemite thing there is, the most authentic, the most multicultural it can be.’59
Model of the Yeshiva of Porat Yosef, the Jewish Quarter, overlooking the Wailing Wall 1970 (Architect: Moshe Safdie), IP.
Rather than a multicultural city centre the Jewish Quarter might be better described as an artificial, ethnically homogenous, gated neighbourhood, whose construction was made possible by the forced displacements of its inhabitants. It is a ‘biblical’ theme park, sending out further tentacles of Jewish housing enclaves and religious study-centres into the Muslim Quarter to which it is connected above street level via protected and exclusive roof paths. The separation of this enclave from its surroundings is further enforced by the fact that all entrances and exits to the Jewish Quarter are guarded by the border police, providing access, after body and bag scans, only to Jewish residents/settlers, tourists, and the Israeli army and police.
Reproducing the Old City
The expropriations of Palestinian property that enabled the ‘reconstruction’ of the Jewish Quarter went in tandem with the beginning of a wave of expropriations at the peripheries of the municipal area. Over a third of the land annexed to by the state was expropriated from its Palestinian owners for the establishment and expansion of the Jewish neighbourhoods, under the pretext of catering for ‘public needs’. The use of the term ‘public’ reveals more than anything else the government’s political bias: the ‘public’ on whom expropriations were imposed always comprised Palestinians; the ‘public’ who enjoyed the fruits of the expropriation always exclusively comprised Jews.60
Notwithstanding the reconstruction of the Jewish Quarter, Jerusalem’s city centre was torn apart by centrifugal forces. In 1977, ten years after the war, when the right-wing Likud replaced Labor in power, the Jewish Quarter was home to almost 4,000 people, while about 50,000 Israeli Jews were already settled in the new Jewish neighbourhoods established on the peripheries of the occupied areas annexed to Jerusalem.61 The Jewish inhabitants of the city, wary of the congested, multi-ethnic and disputed older neighbourhoods of the western part of the city, opted for the ethnic, cultural and social homogeneity of the suburbs. These suburban developments were referred to as ‘urban neighbourhoods’ rather than ‘settlements’, not because of their nature, economy or distance from the centre, but because they were still located within the much-expanded boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality.
However, the significance of the Quarter’s ‘reconstruction’ lay not just in the number of people who inhabited it, but in the establishment of a foothold in the Old City and the creation of a laboratory for an emergent sensibility in architecture, one later exported and implemented in the construction of the city’s outer neighbourhoods. The neighbourhood of Gilo, located on the southernmost edge of Jerusalem, on a hilltop overlooking Bethlehem and the refugee camps surrounding it, offers one of the best examples of the attempt to reproduce something of the feel of the Old City within Jerusalem’s periphery. Marking the southern edge of the extended city, Gilo is, according to its planner, the architect Avraham Yaski, writing in 1977, both ‘part of the wall enclosing Jerusalem’ as well as ‘a well defined, enclosed city’. ‘Though Gilo is a suburban quarter’, Yaski admits, ‘an effort has been made to create the feeling that it is an organic part of Jerusalem and not a dormitory town.’62 With the reclusive nature of Gilo’s urban form, Yaski echoes yet another emerging ideal of the time – the American ‘New Urbanism’, which promoted a type of development (inspired by the writing of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford) that sought to replicate city-centre-like, human-scaled walkable communities most often on the fringes of American cities. In Jerusalem, city-centre-like developments meant the reproduction of the Old City. One of the best examples of this phenomenon is the ‘Housing Cluster’ designed by the architect Salo Hershman in Gilo in the early 1970s. The housing is laid out as several walled-city-like ensembles. They are entered via large gates leading into a series of internal courtyards and squares. The latter are woven together by arched walkways, alleyways and colonnades, and are overlooked by balconies. The entire concrete-built cluster is clad with slated ‘Jerusalem Stone’. Indeed, Gilo has been the most distinct of the new neighbourhoods in demonstrating the transformation of Israeli architecture. The modernist, standard, cheap, prefabricated apartment block, formerly the basic unit of state-sponsored housing, was replaced, according to Efrat, by other typologies of ‘formless, borderless clusters composed of a multitude of small terraced houses that morphed onto the existing topography of the Jerusalem hills … “contextual” architecture, sentimental buildings, influenced by alleged “regional” connections … pseudo historical creations of oriental and Mediterranean mimicry … embodying an association with antiquity and national roots’.63 This architecture would thereafter provide, through an eclectic agglomeration of episodes and a museum-like arrangement of elements, the fantasy deemed necessary for the consolidation of a new national identity and the domestication of the expanded city. It placed every remote and newly built suburb well within the boundaries of ‘the eternally unified capital of the Jewish people’, and thus, as far as most Israelis are concerned, away from the negotiating table. Whatever is called Jerusalem, by name, by architecture and by the use of stone, is placed at the heart of the Israeli consensus. Indeed, although in July 2000 the Israeli negotiation team in Camp David agreed in principle to Clinton’s proposal that asked for Israel to hand back the archipelago of Palestinian neighbourhoods and urban-villages in Jerusalem, they have insisted on maintaining sovereignty over the remote, stone-clad suburban neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, referred to in Israel as ‘Jewish Jerusalem’.
