Saving Lifta

2011-07-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

Fire burns outside J'lem in abandoned Arab village of Lifta

By MELANIE LIDMAN
07/04/2011 20:35

Firefighters struggled for hours to control a fire in the abandoned Arab village of Lifta, located at the entrance to Jerusalem. Heavy smoke in the area disrupted traffic on the highways leading toward Jerusalem.

Firefighters were aided by a helicopter, which relayed information about the fire's movement. A total of 30 dunams (7.5 acres) were burned. Firefighters evacuated four homes in the area, as well as a number of youths squatting in the abandoned houses. An investigation was opened into the cause of the blaze.

2011-05-11T12:13:00.000-07:00

Some good news...

Today, on the 11th May 2001, I got the news that Judge in the Israeli courts did not approve the Israeli Land Administration's (ILA) attempt to begin the bidding process to sell of the lands of Lifta. The Judge requested that there should be a survey for the village taking into conseration the opinion of the Israel Archaeological Department. The Judge asked the ILA to halt any further process or the decision would be taken against them; and then gave the ILA two weeks to respond to the suggestion.

In the short while, the possibility of a survey will slow down the pace of activities pursued by the ILA. It may encourage further investigation into the conservation planning for Lifta however it may still not over-ride the regional planning of this place; possibily a mediated alternative outlook instead.

Nevertheless, this will give my organisation - Belonging, the necessary time needed to develop their proposal for a long-term plan for Lifta in consideration to be alternatively planned as a place of conscience. And with regional and international advocacy allow us to sustain the campaign to make such an attempt.

Today was a good day for Lifta, lets hope we can say the same tomorrow...

To find out more about Belonging's vision for a long-term plan for Lifta please copy & paste the link below or read the Saving Lifta article below the last post:

http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=3407&ed=194&edid=194

Anil Korotane, director of Belonging

2011-05-03T08:05:00.000-07:00

Film Extract - The Lifta Controversy

This film extract by award-winning film-maker and friend Menachem Daum gives an oversight into the current controversy concerning Lifta whilst depicting Menachem's very own personal journey and investgation through his connection to Lifta. Menachem's uncle was possibly one of the members of the Stern gang militia who drove out the inhabitants of Lifta during the 1947/48 Nakba catastrophe. Menachem seeks to inquire into his initial simplistic views of what happened during the period that led to the creation of Israel, and through his family connection to Lifta, encounter what value this place holds to all still touched by her presence.

2011-04-28T06:11:00.000-07:00

Saving Lifta

By Anil Korotane

(This article on 'Saving Lifta' originally features in the May 2011 edition of the magazine 'This Week in Palestine'. 'Al Quds, A Living History' is this month's theme. The article will highlight the strategy currently pursued by Belonging's (an architecture, planning and humanrights organisation) attempt to devise a long-term strategy for Lifta and how it may be possible.)

Lifta, a Palestinian village inside Israeli territory, sits within a valley adjacent to and below the Jaffa Road on the northwest perimeter of Jerusalem. The village suffered the same fate as many Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed in 1947-48 during the Palestinian catastrophe, Al Nakba. Remarkably, a large proportion of the architectural antiquities that characterise the village still remain standing today. Lifta has evaded total erasure because her surrounding landscape, set within a valley, is virtually cut off and sunk beneath the surrounding civilisation. She has stood obscurely now for over 60 years and so far, no conquest has physically re-contextualised the place. Her unique circumstance, created out of these consequences, has led her to become a space of captivation, necessity, and privilege.

Now, however, the valley has been given an incarnation under the approved plan to transform the village into a commercial edifice allocated under the guise of “Mei Naftoah”-also known as Plan 6036. The redevelopment plan has been approved on and above Lifta, and will disregard any association of the memory of the village. It will appropriate her cultural heritage through architecture and planning that will re-invent the identity of the valley landscape. The Mei Naftoah approved plan will consist of a commercial centre with shops, hotels, bus stations and the development of 212 luxury apartments.

In January 2011, the Israeli Land Administration (ILA) announced a tender for Plan 6036, allowing private contractors to begin to bid and triggering the process to sell off Lifta’s plots of lands. This announcement provoked immediate reaction amongst former Palestinian descendants of Lifta (many of whom now reside in East Jerusalem), as well as Israeli and Palestinian conservationists and NGOs. This reaction led to a petition and resulted in a temporary court injunction issued on 7 March 2011, ordering the ILA to freeze the tender. Now a struggle commences forming solidarity amongst regional professionals and organisations. Opponents to Plan 6036 have appealed for Lifta’s recognition with UNESCO, the Worlds Monument Fund, and other agencies. Along with media campaigns and protests held more or less every fortnight by second and third-generation descendants of the village.

This is all promising in the short term, however there is a need for a long-term strategy that will clearly define the significance and necessity of this place. I have been involved on a research project-campaign concerning saving Lifta since 2006. And from this research, I shall highlight a long-term strategy. To begin with, what does it mean to save this place, and what significance does she bare for the region?

By saving Lifta, I posit that we are trying to protect a place that still exists in the form of a bond. “Memory” with respect to Lifta is the essence of the place; she is bare, without people telling their stories and affirming their union to the place. Recognition of the existence of this bond also means recognising cultivation, a history and a tangible reality.

A place with a history prior to 1948 and located within a territory of the governing power of Israel, Lifta sits inside a surrounding context identifiable by another historical narrative. For the two identities to sustain a shared value, an identifiable relationship, there has to be a reason. Situating Al Nakba into a revised historical narrative of the surrounding context is likely to create controversy and can easily be perceived as an historical problem. So how does it become possible to resolve this crisis of values?

For Israel, Lifta is a place needing enquiry for the purposes of practising self-reflection and self-reappraisal. Lifta allows the nation-state to have a space to contest, understand, and respond to the origins of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Taking aside the significance of memory relating to a catastrophe and an historical origin perpetuating “otherness,” the memory of Lifta also embarks upon a history of a different societal pattern and practice of space. Before the events of 1948, the village had a tribal community with a population consisting of around 3,000 people. Lifta was a place that embraced a strong sense of an ethnically and religiously diverse community of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. There was no inequality amongst this diversity, so there was never any conceivable idea of segregation.

Lifta’s traceable history prior the Palestinian Nakba and the creation of the modern State can begin to allow us to look beyond the symbol of the “other.” She sustained ethical values that can be deemed as necessary within in the current regional context of society. Recognition of this truth and quality can influence the possibility of allowing this heritage, traditionally perceived as belonging to the “other” existential narrative, to become admissible in the region. Lifta still is a traceable genealogy that gives insight into the origins of the conflict, and these issues are fundamental to the process of understanding, tangibly engaging and reconciling conflict. Emphasis of civil equality also enhances the opportunity of contesting other issues represented by this place to become more tolerable.

Upon reflection, the uprooting of the village was a tragedy for the Palestinian community of the village, however, the community encompassed multi-ethnic groups. Al Nakba in Lifta was a catastrophe for the Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and Jews. There is historical evidence that gives reason to believe that this event encompassed a discord for all ethnic groups associated to it. They provide a significant opportunity for suggesting alternative outlooks and views that can influence the working of a new narrative, a new history, and a new space. Exploration of memory can become paramount in creating and enabling mechanisms to defuse the attitudes that translate into a language of adversity and dissonance of the differing existential beliefs.

Taking on the question of justice concerning Lifta requires vision for long-term interventions. We can discuss the safeguarding and preservation of Lifta, or the United Nations Resolution 194 and its poignant regard to the Palestinian “right of return.” Yet there seems to be no significant answers of how to connect the past with the present. I believe an attempt should be made to construct a proposal for Lifta to be realized as a “Site of Conscience.” The role of the International Coalition for Sites of Conscience is to “interpret history through historic sites; engage in programs that stimulate dialogue on pressing social issues; promote humanitarian and democratic values as a primary function; and share opportunities for public involvement in issues raised at the site.”

My organisation, Belonging, is an architecture, planning, and human rights organisation that will carry out this investigation. We acknowledge that actively challenging discursive discussions on the environment is a necessary stepping-stone for creating the imaginings of utilities that stride towards supporting the changes needed for peace. The purpose will be to demonstrate why the heritage of Lifta is potentially invaluable and necessary for future peace in the region and the potential of Lifta’s space as a place for conciliatory dialogue.

Through a process of dissecting and illuminating the chasms of Lifta’s historical landscape, we will engage in and assert why this place has the potential to harbour such a proposal. A potential gateway to space-seeking to confront and reconcile narratives of histories, otherness, and conflict, whilst demonstrating possibilities of a place that promotes healing, pluralism, and inclusiveness.

Engaging in the memory of Al Nakba, in this instance from a place that has remained virtually desolate and un-appropriated since her uprooting in 1948, provides the backdrop for a real space within the Israel/Palestine region that has the capacity to make accessible an open dialogue, encountering a sense of shared values through the issues of “displacement,” “victimhood,” and “tragedy.” These are themes that resonate not only throughout the Palestinian narrative since 1948, but are also historically preserved and ever-present within the narrative of the Israeli “other” (for instance the Holocaust and the displacement of Arab Jews in the North African and Middle East region). Sharing and building upon multiple common themes and reaching beyond rivalry.

Lifta is a place that can challenge and defuse narratives that translate into a language of opposition or even hostility by presenting and addressing common themes shared in the tragic histories by both peoples. The narratives of displacement, shared together at Lifta, can create this place into a necessary common ground for the purposes of healing and conciliation, as well as drawing upon the potential of this place for the purposes of invaluable capacity-building for the regional civil society.

Conducting further research into Lifta’s memory and juxtaposing truths can possibly allow further contestable narratives and introduce new possibilities for the reconstruction of heritage. A heritage that can allow an acceptance of truths that can bring together both sides of the conflict to share the same grief and hope and re-evaluate relationships for the sake of the regional community.

Saving Lifta is only likely to be achievable if she asserts values that are inclusive in her objective of becoming recognized as a place. And a desire towards a monument that can convey new meaning and understanding as well as offer alternative capacity building can prove invaluable. A vision for an attainable value through the reconstruction of heritage; aiming to bridge worlds together by creating mechanisms out of a bond between memory and place.

Anil Korotane is an activist architect and director of Belonging: info@architecturehumanrights.org. Follow up-to-date news on the Saving Lifta project-campaign here: www.saving-memory.blogspot.com and the Facebook group: Saving Lifta.

2011-04-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

Blowback: Israel's bogus narrative on Palestinian refugees

Los Angeles Times - Ghada Karmi April 12, 2011

Ghada Karmi, author of "In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story," responds to The Times' April 7 article on Lifta, the last intact pre-1948 Palestinian village. If you would like to write a full-length response to a recent Times article, editorial or Op-Ed, here are our FAQs and submission policy.

What a timely article, “Israel and Palestinians have conflicting visions for village's future.” April is a good month for recalling the abandoned homes, towns and destroyed villages of what was once Palestine. It was the month in which my own family was forced to leave our home in Jerusalem. Contrary to the official Israeli version, still largely believed, that the Palestinian exodus of 750,000 people -- without which there would be no Israel today -- happened in the fog of war, people like me are living proof that many of us had been forced out of our homeland months earlier.

The Israeli version claims that during the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war, the Palestinians fled, as happens in wars everywhere, or were panicked into leaving by their leaders. For more than 60 years, this has served to absolve Israel of its culpability for that tragedy.

In fact, between January and May 1948, thousands of us were already leaving because of the violence and the deliberate tactics of the Jewish leadership intent on creating an empty space in which to erect a state. As a child, I remember seeing a poor Bedouin man walking down our street shot dead by Jewish snipers from an empty house opposite ours.

The people of Lifta (the village that The Times features), which is just three miles from my old neighborhood in west Jerusalem, were already fleeing in December 1947. The Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah and the Stern Gang, a Jewish dissident group, attacked the villagers with guns and hand grenades. By February 1948, most houses on the edge of the village had been demolished; the inhabitants fled in terror.

The same fate was intended for Katamon, where we lived. Increasing attacks on our street and its vicinity had the same desired effect as in Lifta. After January 1948, when the Semiramis Hotel on a street near ours was bombed by the Haganah, killing 26 people (a nightmare of horror that I dimly remember), the attacks against our neighborhood escalated. Families started leaving, fearful for their children and believing it would be a temporary evacuation. By the time we left, hardly any of our friends remained. The increasing danger around us forced my parents to leave. We took nothing with us, convinced it would not be long before we returned.

Terrible as this was when I look back, at least our street and our house still stand today. They were taken over by Jewish settlers and underwent various changes, but they largely remain. Yet I do not know which is worse: the hundreds of Palestinian villages Israel wiped out after 1948 and whose previous inhabitants can only hope to find through faded memories; the dozen villages left such as Lifta, still standing but ruined and depopulated; or, as in my case, my house being in the possession of strangers (New York Times correspondent Ethan Bronner lives in an upper story added on later), who do not recognize my history or my right to my family home.

On setting up its state in 1948, Israel set about demolishing every vestige of Palestinian life and history in the land. The physical destruction of the villages, the replacing of Palestinian names with Hebrew ones and the wholesale takeover of Palestinian culture, whether in food -- "Israeli falafel" -- or in the traditional Arab dabke dance, renamed the Israeli "hora," were all aimed at making the world forget there had ever been anyone other than Jews in the Holy Land.

Through the work of Israeli filmmaker Benny Brunner, I have discovered another refinement of this cultural theft: the takeover of private Palestinian book collections, including ours. After 1948, Israeli officials took what books they found from abandoned Palestinian homes. Tens of thousands were looted in this way. Some of them remain in the Israeli National Library today, designated abandoned property. Brunner is currently making a film of this, "The Great Book Robbery."

Palestinians have never accepted our enforced oblivion. We are fighting to tell our history, win a future of political freedom and secure the return of refugees forced from their homes and never allowed to return. For these reasons, the battle to preserve Lifta must be won -- its remains a physical memorial of injustice and survival.

2011-03-30T13:01:00.000-07:00

Palestinian Refugees Act to Save Jerusalem’s Lifta Village from Destruction

Tuesday, 29 March 2011 16:35 Shadi Rohana, Alternative Information Center (AIC)

“This is not just a construction plan- they want to erase our memory,” architect and Lifta refugee Nasser Abu-Lel told local and international media today [29 March] in East Jerusalem regarding the Israel Land Administration’s plan to build a luxurious residential and commercial zone on the remains of his village in West Jerusalem.

“The Israeli plan targets what remains of the houses we were forced to leave in the Nakba of 1948; the stones and walls that echo the daily life of our own parents, before the Zionist gangs forced them to leave.”

The proposed decade-long project, which the Israeli Land Administration now wishes to implement (plan number 6036), was issued following Jerusalem Municipal approval of the construction of 268 housing units, one hotel and a number of community institutions on the site of the Palestinian village of Lifta. Following the court petition to save Lifta that was submitted by various organizations Lifta refugees on 6 March, the Israeli court issued a temporary injunction on selling lots on the site.

The press conference this morning to protest the plan was organized by the Sons of Lifta Society, an organization that gathers refugees from Lifta and their descendents in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Speakers at the conference included the Mufti of Jerusalem Muhammad Hussein, Fatah’s Jerusalem Affairs Liaison Hatim abd al-Qader, representatives from the Sons of Lifta Society and refugees from the village, as well as Attorney Sami Arshid, who represented Lifta refugees and other organizations at court.

Arshid told reporters that his petition to the court was the culmination of work done on the ground by various Palestinian and Israeli organizations, architects, planners and other individuals since approval of the plan by the Jerusalem Municipality. “Our goal was modest and simple,” Arshid said, “we claimed in court that these lands and house have owners and they are still alive, whether in East Jerusalem and the West Bank or in exile, and that if Israeli law prevents them from fulfilling their property rights at this moment, this should not mean that the law is to consider their property rights as gone forever.”

Regarding the decision to go to an Israeli court to prevent the demolition of Lifta, Arshid said: “the decision was not easy. The Israeli law regards Lifta’s lands and buildings as ‘absentee property,’ something Palestinian refugees everywhere cannot accept. However, we managed to overcome this challenge by basing our demands on historic property rights.”

Yacoub Odeh from the Land Research Center and himself a refugee from Lifta, spoke about the measures already taken to save his village. According to Odeh, Lifta refugees in Palestine and exile are already contacting international bodies, including UNESCO, the EU and UNRWA, calling on them to protect Lifta’s land and houses. “It is our right to return to our land, rebuild our village and plant trees for the next generations, not those who wish to come here from abroad to build villas and hotels on our land. We will continue to hold on to our right as people of Lifta and as Palestinians; we are an integral part of the Palestinian people and Lifta is an integral part of Palestine.”

2011-03-27T00:34:00.000-07:00

The Lifta society is organizing a press conference on Tuesday 29th about the current situation on Lifta. As well as a march to Lifta on the 1st of April.

Press Conference:
Date: Tuesday 29/03/2011
Location: Ambassador Hotel - Sheikh Jarrah

24 March 2011

A court case is pending concerning the future of Lifta, a Palestinian village which is located both in West and East Jerusalem. Lifta has been targeted by the Israeli Land Authority for the development of a Jewish luxury residential/commercial neighbourhood. The plan will lead to the destruction of the place. The court ruling will decide whether the refugees of Lifta, who were forced to the leave the village in 1948, can keep their property, heritage, culture and memory. The people of Lifta have obtained a freeze on the processing the call for tender, through a petition, to the central court.

On the 6th March, Attorney Sami Arshid submitted a petition on behalf of Lifta Society and Jerusalem activists and Urban planners to object to the unlawful sale of the property of the Lifta refugees to the private sector. On Monday the 7th, Israeli Judge Yigal Marzel issued a temporary injunction ordering the Israeli Land Administration to freeze publication of the results of the tender to sell off plots of land. If these plots do get sold off new construction begins it will be impossible to preserve the history, heritage and culture of the people which will be lost forever under a wave of new construction.

A whole village is running the risk of losing its property and the people of Lifta need as much support as possible in order to save the village and raise the profile of their case and prevent the loss of their village forever.

Lifta Society
Cell phone no: 0522 872840

2011-03-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

Erasing Palestine from Lifta

Sophie O’Brien reports on the judaization of Lifta, the last remaining Palestinian village inside the Green Line - Palestine Monitor,19 March 2011

The Israel Land Administration (ILA) has put a plan in place which would see land in the village of Lifta, a former Palestinian village situated on the north-west edge of Jerusalem sold to private developers. A plan which would see Palestinian history completely stripped from the village.

The ILA plan calls for amongst other things, the building of 212 housing units exclusively for Jews, a luxury hotel, a shopping mall and a museum. In objection to these building plans, a large petition has been signed by various activists, NGO’s and descendents of Lifta and submitted by Attorney Sami Arshid. As a result of this petition a temporary injunction was issued by Judge Yigal Marzel on the 7th of March ordering the ILA to freeze publication of results for tender which would see plots of land sold off to these private developers.

Over 500 Arab villages were depopulated or demolished during the 1948 war by the ruthless colonial Zionist forces. Lifta is an exception in this respect as it is ‘The only village which remains as it was before 1948,’ Daphna Golan asserts, a Professor of Law at the Hebrew University and organiser of the petition to save Lifta. Whilst on the surface the plan is sold as a rejuvenation project bringing life to an otherwise ‘abandoned’ village, Golan is adamant that it is primarily a political venture. ‘It is a building plan geared towards erasing the past,’ she asserts. In other words, serving to continue the process of judaization of the land, a policy which aims to eradicate Palestinian history, memory and presence.

Most of the original buildings and houses still remain somewhat intact in Lifta, a village which dates back to biblical times. For Yacoub Odeh, a former Lifta resident, a human rights activist and a central figure in the Save Lifta campaign, this is bitter sweet. He speaks of his memories of living in Lifta with great fondness. It is tainted however with the reality that he no longer has any right to live in the village from which he was forcefully removed by the pre-state Zionist terrorist gangs working under the auspices of the Zionist movement. ‘I remember the bakery where I went with my mother to eat bread with olive oil and zatar, it was delicious…I will never forgive those who stole our history and our memory,’ he says.

Lifta was one of the first villages occupied before the 1948 war and the creation of the Israeli state. Its proximity to Jerusalem meant that it was of great strategic importance to the Zionist movement; Yacoub explain, ‘Whoever controlled Lifta controlled Jerusalem.’ In refutation of Zionist claims that depict the pre-state Zionist movement as a heroic, pioneering enterprise, Yacoub describes how the Muslim and Christian inhabitants of Lifta were evicted from their homes through the use of brutal, racist tactics. ‘They bombed the homes of twenty people…but the Jews were allowed to stay.’ The terrorising of the Muslim and Christian inhabitants of the village ‘achieved the Zionist goal of ethnic cleansing,’ Yacoub continued. After 1967, Jewish immigrants were moved into the houses of those who had been forcefully removed. It is the descendents of these families who remain the sole inhabitants of Lifta today.

The ILA plan to redevelop the village of Lifta is symbolic for the reason that it nullifies the possibility of the Palestinian refugees who once lived there of ever returning to their homes. For Yacoub, this is the greatest injustice. The Israeli Law of return grants Jews from around the world the possibility to ‘return’ to their ‘homeland’ and gain citizenship. The original inhabitants of Lifta are, however, not awarded with this option, ‘I was evicted from my house 63 years ago and I don’t have the right to return,’ Yacoub said.

Successive Israeli governments have to date managed to maintain an unstable status quo whereby all the so-called ‘final status’ issues have been left up in the air. Yacoub asserts that the right of return is prerequisite for peace, ‘Without the right of return, there will be more killing and more blood.’

Further evidence that the ILA plans are aimed at seizing the identity and completing the Judaization process of the last remaining Palestinian village can be seen in the details. There are plans to build a museum which Yacoub asserts will showcase a purely Jewish recollection of the history of Lifta, ‘Surely it will not mention the Palestinian people; they see with one eye only.’

Furthermore, the cemetery where many former Palestinian residents of Lifta have been buried has been designated as public land in the plan, thus creating the possibility that it may in the future be removed for the purposes of further building.

The village of Lifta is significant for the reason that it reminds us of a time when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived harmoniously on the land. In this sense, Golan asserts that ‘It should be used as a place where Jews and Arabs can meet to acknowledge their shared history.’ If the ILA plans are approved, it will therefore be removing a powerful symbol of reconciliation. More ominously, the ILA plans which are portrayed as being devoid of any political significance are in fact a painful reminder that the colonial Zionist enterprise is still thriving.

2011-03-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

Protest on the 18th March by the Lifta descendants is reported on Press Tv

2011-03-19T06:23:00.000-07:00

Desendants of Lifta visit their ancentral home in protest to the impending crisis facing this place

On Friday 18th March, a large group of descendants of Lifta, consisting of three generations - young and old, made their way to their ancentral home. A visit, that cannot have been easy to make for many of them who now reside in east Jerusalem and beyond, was a stand of defiance by the descendants against the decision by the Israeli Land Administation to sell of the remaining lands of Lifta to private developers and proceed with the new development plan 6036. A development plan that will ultimately erase the connection between these people and the landscape that is still a visible and formidable sign of their connection to these lands. The occasion of the protest, as shown through these pictures, can only have been monumental for these people as well as a moving occasion - to be able to recount the memories of one's house or of the village way of life, showing respect to the ancestors by clearing the cemetry of wild-overgrown weeds and bushes; experiences that will remain treasured and eternally remembered. Nevertheless a stand of defiance that will continue on throughout this current on-going situation.

2011-03-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

Plans for Lifta luxury housing project temporarily halted

By Melanie Lidman - Jeusalem Post 03/09/2011

Activists want to finish historical surveys before developers buy land.

A planned luxury housing complex in the historic Arab village of Lifta at the entrance to Jerusalem was temporarily halted on Monday after the Jerusalem District Court ordered the Israel Lands Authority ordered to freeze the published tenders.

A coalition of architects, activists, and former Lifta residents petitioned the courts to halt the project until archeological surveys are finished.

The project, which was approved by the Jerusalem Municipality and the Interior Ministry’s planning committees, calls for 212 luxury apartment villas, a hotel, and a network of roads and infrastructure to support the new neighborhood.

In January, the ILA published a tender for the project, which allows private contractors to bid.

The scenic area is famous for the old stone buildings that are visible from the western entrance to Jerusalem, which were built into the steep hillside by Arab residents in the 19th century.

The petition, filed by former Lifta residents, Rabbis for Human Rights, and Jafra, a Palestinian heritage organization, calls for the courts to freeze the bidding process and the transfer of the public assets into private hands. The court granted a temporary freeze until the project goes to trial to determine if the ILA can go ahead with the bidding process.

“The problem is that the contractors are supposed to be responsible for documentation, and preservation is something that’s very far away from their interests,” said architect Shmuel Groag, a professor of architecture at Bezalel who focuses on building preservation.

Groag was part of a group of architects that had started creating a plan for the Lifta area, which has been under consideration for development for the past 20 years.

Groag added that the process of documenting the village for historical and planning purposes was never completed, though the Israel Antiquities Authority offered to document the area. The state was reluctant to pay, said Groag, and mandated that the contractor that won the bid be required to do the documentation.

“If one of the contractors destroys something inside, no one will know, because no one knows what’s inside of them,” said Groag.

“To try and take shortcuts in the planning processes in a place that’s so sensitive and emotional will no doubt damage the preservation of Lifta,” he added.

The Society for the Protection of Nature and the Society for Preservation of Israeli Heritage Sites, however, said they had no opposition to the project, a popular hiking destination for Jerusalem residents.

“What’s happening now is the houses are getting destroyed by the passage of time,” said Isaac Schweky, the head of the Society for the Preservation of Israeli Heritage Sites.

“[The petitioners] asked us to join but I told them I’m not going to join them. If we don’t build there, won’t be anything left,” he said.

Schweky pointed out that since the area became a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes, the houses have deteriorated faster than ever. Some of the stones have been stolen, causing the buildings to crumble.

The only way to save Lifta, he believes, is to develop it.

But the petitioners claim that in addition to the environmental and historical problems the development project could create, there are political problems as well. Lifta was abandoned by its Arab residents in 1948, and is one of the only such Arab villages that was not destroyed or inhabited by Jews after the War of Independence.

“It’s an issue of how do we see our future. Do we see our future erasing the Arab side, or a future of reconciliation?” asked Daphna Golan, a lecturer at Hebrew University in human rights, who organized the various groups to file the petition.

“We should discuss these issues as opposed to erasing them. It’s part of our history, it’s part of our present. Rather than build housing for rich people, let’s keep it for future discussion for compensation.

We have to keep the past alive in order to have a dialogue.”

Attorney Sami Ershied, who filed the petition on behalf of the coalition of activists and residents, said he was “optimistic” that the courts would honor their request to halt the plan.

2011-03-09T17:11:00.001-08:00

Saturday, 12 March 2011, beginning at 10:00, in the Lifta parking lot in the city entrance, Ramot Road.

For detailed directions:
Rimmon Lavi 0548020576
Daphna Golan 0548820698
...
We will meet in order to clean and preserve the village for future generations.

The village of Lifta is the last surviving Arab village of its kind, the rest having been destroyed after 1948. It is the only village that can be preserved as a witness to traditional forms of architecture and argiculture that have otherwise almost completely disappeared.

Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who left their homes during the war of 1948, and who have never been allowed to return to their villages, the original inhabitants of Lifta have never been allowed to return to their village. Many of them live today in East Jerusalem, but are not included, like most of us – inhabitants of Jerusalem, experts in preservation, and others – in the process of planning intended for the village.

Stop the destruction of Lifta! Stop the construction of yet another memory-effacing site of luxury and leisure!

Come with broom and trash bag, and join the cleaning and preservation of Lifta, together with the original inhabitants – today refugees – of Lifta.

For more information about the event, contact Daphna Golan 0548820698

For support, action, and donations – Ilan Shtayer, 0545-69-20-89, ilan@makinghistory.co.il

نحافظ على لفتا

يوم السبت 12 مارس آذار 2011, في تمام الساعة العاشرة صباحاً
نلتقي لكي ننظف القرية ونحفظها للأجيال القادمة

قرية لفتا هي آخر شاهد على القرى العربية التي هدمت ما بعد ال 1948 , وهي القرية الوحيدة التي يمكن الحفاظ على ما تبقى منها كشاهد على أسلوب البناء والزراعة التقليدية التي تكاد تكون امّحت

على غرار آلاف الفلسطينيين الذين تركوا منازلهم خلال حرب ال- 1948 ولم يسمح لهم بالعودة إليها, هكذا سكان لفتا, لم بسمح لهم بالعودة إلى قريتهم, ويسكن العديد منهم اليوم في القدس الشرقية دون أن يكون لهم رأي أو قول في عملية إعادة التخطيط لبلدتهم, شأنهم في ذلك شأن العديد من سكان القدس وخبراء الترميم وغيرهم.

أوقفوا عملية البناء – لفتا لن تكون "هوليلاند" الثانية

تعالوا مع مكانسكم وأكياس النفايات وانضموا الينا لتنظيف القرية وترميمها والحفاظ عليها, جنباً إلى جنب مع أهل لفتا ولاجئيها

للدعم أو النشاطات أو التبرعات – أيلان شطاير, 0545-69-20-89 , ialan@makinghistory.co.il

للمزيد من المعلومات:

عطاء دائرة أراضي إسرائيل ים/405/2010 بموجب תב"ע 6036 للفتا

رَ تقارير مهنية: נספח ארכיאולוגי - רשות העתיקות -סקר אורבאני ראשוני של מינהל השימור ברשות.

من الصحافة: רגע לפני שהשקדיות ייעלמו (دفنا جولان, هآرتس)

שומרים על ליפתא

ביום שבת 12 מארס 2011 מהשעה 10.00

נפגש כדי לנקות ולשמר את הכפר למען הדורות הבאים

הכפר ליפתא הוא העדות האחרונה לכפרים הערבים שנהרסו אחרי 1948, והוא הכפר היחיד שניתן לשמר כעדות לבנייה וחקלאות מסורתית שכמעט נעלמה.

כמו מאות אלפי פלסטינים שעזבו את בתיהם במהלך המלחמה ב 1948 ומעולם לא הורשו לחזור, גם תושבי ליפתא מעולם לא הורשו לחזור לכפרם - ורבים מהם חיים היום בירושלים המזרחית אך לא שותפים כמו רובנו תושבי ירושלים, מומחי שימור ואחרים בתהליך התכנון המחודש של הכפר.

עצרו את הבנייה -ליפתא לא תהייה הולילנד שנייה.

בואו עם מטאטא ועם שקית לאשפה והצטרפו לפעילות לניקיון ושימור הכפר ליפתא יחד עם ילידי ופליטי ליפתא

לתמיכה, לפעולה ולתרומות – אילן שטייר, 0545-69-20-89, ilan@makinghistory.co.il

למידע נוסף:

מכרז מינהל מקרקעי ישראל ים/405/2010 על פי תב"ע 6036 לליפתא.

דוחות מקצועיים עיינו: נספח ארכיאולוגי - רשות העתיקות -סקר אורבאני ראשוני של מינהל השימור ברשות.

מן העיתונות: רגע לפני שהשקדיות ייעלמו (דפנה גולן, הארץ)

לפרטים והרשמה

דפנה 0548820698
רימון לביא 0548020576

2011-03-08T09:43:00.000-08:00

7 March 2011

Press Release

Temporary Injunction Issued against Tender for Building Plots in Lifta Village Coalition to Save Lifta

Administrative Petition: 8661-03-11

Following a petition submitted yesterday (6 March), Judge Yigal Marzel issued a temporary injunction today ordering the Israel Land Administration to freeze publication of the results of a tender to lease plots for building in the village of Lifta. The petition was submitted by Attorney Sami Arshid on behalf of Jerusalem activists, including descendents of Lifta, the Bnei Lifta Association, Rabbis for Human Rights and the Jafra Association.
In their petition against the Israel Land Administration, the petitioners requested court intervention to prevent the transfer of assets and property in Lifta to private hands for the establishment of an exclusive real estate project and to halt destruction of the village, which represents a final testimony to the Arab villages and culture of scenery that were widespread in Israel throughout history until the early 20th century.

According to the petitioners, “in the given situation and according to which the village of Lifta is an abandoned village and its original inhabitants live as refugees at a distance of only a few hundred metres from their village, it would have been befitting to abstain from all construction in the area and certainly to prevent building that would result in destruction of the village and the complete dispossession of the rights of the original inhabitants of the place”. The petitioners further write that the “marketing of plots for building in the village of Lifta and furthermore the construction of new buildings on the village lands and in place of the existing village could thwart the ability to preserve the existing village and foil any possibility of reconstructing the historic structure of the village, and everything that is derived from this.”

The petitioners requested that the court order an annulment of the tender to sell plots in Lifta and order the Israel Land Administration to desist from any action that would damage the physical and cultural heritage of the place, until an inclusive planning process is completed that includes the area of Lifta, and which will include planning for preservation of the site in accordance with professional standards and with public participation.
A professional opinion of five senior architects and preservation and planning professionals in Israel was attached to the petition, concerning serious preservation defects in the tender. In the opinion it was determined that the ILA tender does not meet the preservation criteria accepted in Israel and throughout the world, and that full data does not exist that would permit the marketing of the plots and issuance of building permits. Authors of the opinion determine that the tender process must be frozen until completion of the detailed documentation of Lifta, preparation of a building and development plan and conclusion of a development agreement between the ILA and the Jerusalem Municipality.

For additional details:

Petitioners:
Dapha Golan: 054 8820698;
Yaacoub Odeh (from Lifta): 052 287 2840
Attorney Sami Arshid: 02 6231244
Professional opinion: Architect Shmuel Groag: 050 5922428

2011-02-28T05:28:00.000-08:00

Before the almond trees disappear

We do not have to continue to obliterate the past of the Arabs who lived in this land. It would be better to acknowledge the pain of their loss and offer them peaceful coexistence.

By Daphna Golan, 27/02/11 - Haaretz.

In the abandoned village of Lifta, at the entrance to Jerusalem, the almond trees are blossoming, perhaps for the last time. The 50 or so abandoned stone homes, between the green terraces and the fruit trees, are about to be replaced by houses for wealthy foreigners that will be closed up for most of the year.

The Israel Lands Administration has begun marketing Lifta to private developers, without having first prepared a comprehensive preservation plan in accordance with the urban planning program approved for the site and without accounting for the reservations that were accepted by the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee.

The marketing campaign violates the Israel Antiquities Authority request to postpone construction until the completion of a comprehensive survey of the village's buildings, "in order to document this disappearing construction culture and pass it down to future generations." It also runs counter to the municipality's adoption last June of a policy designed to curb the flight of young people from the capital by providing affordable housing. The plans for the new development call for homes of from 190 to 300 square meters and development costs alone - not including the building plot - of NIS 500,000 to NIS 1 million.

Lifta is a small link in Jerusalem's shrinking green necklace, its extraordinarily beautiful terrace agriculture a reminder of an extinct cultural landscape. Its land is being divided up and marketed even though no caretaker has yet been assigned to see to the preservation of its springs and green spaces. Jerusalem's treasures are being privatized and given to well-connected developers, who become rich at the expense of the public and future generations.

The village could have symbolized the hope of reconciliation. Many former residents who fled and were driven out in 1948 live in East Jerusalem. The State of Israel obliterated over 400 Arab communities to built Jews-only kibbutzim, moshavim and cities. We do not have to continue to obliterate the past of the Arabs who lived in this land. It would be better to acknowledge the pain of their loss and offer them peaceful coexistence. Lifta allows us to ask the refugees how they see the future of their village. Lifta once had thousands of dunams, on which the Knesset, the Supreme Court, the Kiryat government complex, the central bus station and Hebrew University's Givat Ram campus were built. Now, with only 55 houses, a cemetery, a spring and a few dozen almond trees left, maybe it is time to ask what kind of neighborly relations we are building between Jews and Arabs. What is Israel offering to Yaqub and Sumaya and Zakariya, born and raised in Lifta? What are we, the Israelis who were raised on the denial of the Arab existence on this land, offering our own children?

Five minutes by foot from the Chorda Bridge, dozens of almond trees and hundreds of wildflowers bloom for perhaps the last time. Lifta, which did not become an exclusive artists village like Ein Karem or Ein Hod, stands in its unique desolation, with homes whose roofs were blasted off by the army.

Perhaps it is precisely at the feet of this giant Tower of Babel, that sparkles day and night, that the anemones will continue to blossom as they did last week. A small village, where Jews and Arabs will sit together in the cafe. One place where Israelis can acknowledge the misfortune of the Palestinian people, apologize and explore paths to future coexistence. Until peace is achieved we could ask the people of Lifta, many of whom are civil engineers, architects and contractors, to preserve the village and carry out minimal reinforcement of its homes while drawing up a blueprint for the future.

So long as there is no dialogue between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem over the city's future, every new building plan is the destruction of hope. From the local zoning committee's recommendation on new construction in Sheikh Jarrah-Umm Haroun earlier this month to the Lifta plan, the trend of building on Palestinian land must stop. Jerusalemites protected Gazelle Valley; perhaps we can also preserve Lifta, in its present, green and beautiful state, for future generations?

2011-02-21T06:38:00.000-08:00

Reclaiming Lifta

The fate of a desolate Arab village hangs in the balance.

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN - 17/02/11 The Jerusalem Post

For six years a proposal has been lying dormant in the planning department at Kikar Safra.

Plan 6036 was approved in 2005 to develop the land in Lifta, a deserted Arab village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The planning maps and documents are kept in a large gray cardboard box.

There are a dozen of them printed on laminated poster-size sheets, detailing all aspects of the 212 luxury homes that the architects envision being built at the site. The plans incorporate the vestiges of the village, which include 55 historic buildings, preserving their facades and incorporating them into the new homes that will all be perched on the hillside overlooking the spring and stream below. The famous spring will be left intact.

Lifta is an exceptional environment, an entire ruined Arab village being reclaimed, slowly, by nature. For years Lifta was an oddity, clinging precariously to the hillsides near Route 1 that leads to Jerusalem. It became a hiking spot, a mikve for haredi youth and a hangout for drug users who sometimes squatted in the abandoned buildings.

The latest plans for Lifta were drawn up by architects Shlomo Aronson, Kobi Kartes and Shmuel Groag. Aronson was born in Haifa in 1936 and studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard. An influential landscape architect, he has designed projects such as the new American Consulate and portions of Beit Guvrin archeological park, and he is the author of Making Peace with Land: Designing Israel’s Landscape.

Itzik Schweky, director of the Jerusalem district of the Council for the Preservation of Historic Sites, contends that the plan is a good one. “The plan now is better than what was… Without active preservation, the rocks will continue to be stolen, the building slowly degraded and ruined by visitors.”

But not everyone is so upbeat. Eitan Bronstein, spokesman for Zochrot, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of Arab villages in Israel, is up in arms. “It looks like they mean business this time.

Soon they will destroy Lifta… The destruction plan – it shouldn’t be called a preservation or development plan – will not only ruin the landscape but also the memory of the place.”

Bronstein believes that the plan is not an innocent isolated case but part of a larger drama. “This is a message to the world that Israel has no interest in reconciliation… It is destroying relations with the Palestinians.”
He argues that the village should be redesigned along the lines of what has been called a “symbol of a shared future.” This would include cooperation with the descendants of the Palestinian families who once lived there, building a museum about them and transforming the site into a place with boutique hotels and where “Jewish and Arab high school and university students visit as part of their civics courses, studying the Palestinian narrative in local history.”

Bronstein adds, “We suggest [for now] not to touch it. We think it could be rebuilt for the refugees.”

Yacoub Odeh, a Palestinian human rights activist involved in the struggle for land and housing, recalls growing up in Lifta. “I remember exactly my classroom in the school. You entered from the west, and there was a big olive garden and rocks, and we used to play on them all the way home.”

Odeh was born in 1940 in Lifta, in the house closest to the spring. In 1947, after several villagers were killed in the initial stages of the war, he fled with the rest of the villagers. He worked in Kuwait for several years, and in east Jerusalem he was a teacher before 1967. “There were more than 3,000 of us in 1948; now we are more than 35,000 and we have charitable organizations in Jerusalem and Amman. Just in Jerusalem there are at least 5,000 of us living here with blue ID [Israeli] cards.”

Odeh is determined in his efforts to preserve the memory of his village and return to it. He visits as often as he can, sometimes two or three times a month. He is insistent on pointing out the injustice and ironies of the situation.

“The village that was not destroyed in the time of war should not be destroyed in a time of peace… To build on it means to destroy it. No one has the authority to sell its land nor to demolish, not to build on it. Leave it for the time being until the goal of return is realized.”

But what if the people from Lifta got together and bought the plots currently being sold under the plan, like Basher al-Masri wanted to do at Nof Zion? Odeh says that he would not consider purchasing his own house back.

Avi Margolin, a licensed tour guide, has frequented the site for seven years and is passionate about Lifta.

Sporting an Australian bush hat, he surveys Lifta from the pedestrian walkway that crosses Route 1. “It is a nice place to go, except that it attracts a very haredi crowd, unlike the other springs in the Jerusalem area. In terms of its natural beauty, it is hard to beat.

If they develop it as an Ein Kerem type place, the character of the spring will change. It won’t be a relaxing place to go, to bathe and barbecue.”

He says, “The city should focus its energy on keeping the place clean and enforcing the law there to make it a more family-friendly environment. They should develop the trails around it and encourage people to go there. The last thing they need to do is put luxury houses there. It is better to develop it like a nature reserve like at Ein Yael [near the Jerusalem Zoo].”

Architecture researcher Michal Moshe did her MA thesis, entitled “Pattern of the Arab Village in the Judean Hills: Lifta Case Study,” at the Hebrew University in 2000. Her main concern with the project is the depth of the preservation. “There is no way to preserve something without understanding how it was used. Architects look at the details; but if they don’t investigate the how, it won’t be authentic but only an artificial preservation.”

For instance, “There are some buildings there that are ruined but were constructed in the 18th century.

They should try to reconstruct and use the older stones of these buildings so the preservation also shows the village in its stages,” not merely the most well-preserved newer homes.

Lifta is a story that reminds one of Mark Twain’s witticism: “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” A March 2000 report by the pro- Palestinian Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem claimed, “Israel destroys Lifta artifacts to build a resort for wealthy Jewish immigrants.” The latest plan is not the first one to develop Lifta. The question is whether it will be the last.

2011-02-16T09:32:00.000-08:00

Zochrot will have a tour of Lifta. Please attend if your are in the region.

The tour was postponed in one week exactly (all the other details stays the same), due to the weather. We apologize for any inconvenient that was caused. Please register to receive notification in case the tour will have to be postpone again: send your name and cellphone number to Efrat: efrat.even-tzur@mail.huji.ac.il

Transportation from Paris Square (Terra Sancta), next to the Kings Hotel in Jerusalem at 8:30 AM, is available for those registering by Wednesday, February 16.

When: 18/02/2011 09:00-12:00
Where: Start at the Upper entrance of Lifta
The village of Lifta, at the entrance to Jerusalem, was attacked a number of times during the Nakba in 1948 and was emptied of its inhabitants. They were not allowed to return even though they continued to live in the area. Some still live today in nearby Jerusalem neighborhoods.

Lifta is one of the few Palestinian villages in which many buildings remained standing. About two weeks ago the Israel Lands Administration published a tender offering lots for sale in the village. If the plan is implemented, Lifta will be demolished and an expensive neighborhood established in its place.

As part of the Jerusalem Nakba study group, we will conduct a tour of Lifta on Friday, 11 February 2011, led by Yaqub Ouda, a resident of Jerusalem who was born in the village. He’ll describe life in the village, its forced abandonment, and what the village’s refugees think about the construction plans.

The tour will be conducted in English, and is open to the public.

Here’s a link to recent article in Hebrew about the plan

The tour will begin at 9AM at the upper entrance to Lifta, and will end approximately at 12 noon.

By car: Take Begin Boulevard past the Golda Meir interchange. Pass the Electric Company’s facility. Turn right before the Giv’at Shaul interchange. There’s a small sign to “Mei Naftoah.”

Transportation from Paris Square (Terra Sancta), next to the Kings Hotel in Jerusalem at 8:30 AM, is available for those registering by Wednesday, February 9.

To register send your name and cellphone number to Efrat:
efrat.even-tzur@mail.huji.ac.il
Or by phone: 052/612-3965

2011-02-09T05:11:00.000-08:00

The Lifta that never will be

Instead of building luxury homes over the abandoned village, Israel could use the hillside ruins to preserve Arab memory and heal a rift. Don't hold your breath

By Esther Zandberg, Haaretz - 3/02/11

The first Arab residents have begun to enter their new homes in the village of Lifta at the western approach to Jerusalem. Many of them are descendants of Palestinian families who lived there until the eve of the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. When they left the village, it remained abandoned for decades and its ruins became a symbol of the destruction of the Palestinian community in Israel.

The village has been reconstructed according to a building plan advanced by the Israel Lands Administration in cooperation with residents' families. The streets teem with life and tourism and commerce are flourishing; boutique hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, souvenir shops and a colorful market have opened.

The old mosque has been rebuilt. Fifty-five historical buildings have been restored and converted to new uses. One of them serves as a historical museum.

Jewish and Arab high school and university students visit as part of their civics courses, studying the Palestinian narrative in local history. The newer buildings are constructed in a blend of the many different styles characteristic of Arab communities, and more than a little of their traditional character was lost. But even the strictest adherents of preservation admit that the historical justice carried out here was worth the price. On second thought, it is a kind of authenticity in itself and a thread that connects history to our time.

None of this ever happened nor will it ever; it does not jibe with current Israeli reality.

The Israel Lands Administration has in fact advanced a new building plan for the decade, and has just issued a tender for the acquisition of plots of land in Lifta. But this plan is light years away from the vision above, and chances that descendants of refugees from Lifta will ever step foot there are nil.

The plan calls for 212 apartments and a commercial and tourist center; it will turn into a luxury complex in the style of David's Village in Mamilla or the Yemin Moshe artists colony.

Although it is termed a preservation effort, it is in effect, paradoxically, an erasure of all memory of the original village. And there is also no chance that a Palestinian museum will be erected there.

Urban building plan number 6036 for the ruins of the village was authorized about five years ago after opposition by a number of non-profit groups, including Zochrot and Bimkom, was rejected. They called on the village to be developed as a preserve of Palestinian memory and in this way contribute to reconciliation between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. In its opposition to the plan, Bimkom emphasized every nation's right to memory, and wrote that the issues of preservation and memory "should be the basis of common cultural knowledge for every element of the population in Israel."

But all of this is a distant dream. Unlike the designers' fantasies, the voices of village refugees and their families were not heard at the discussion of the plan, which was not meant for them from the beginning. Many of them live in East Jerusalem, not far from the homes they were not allowed to return to, and where they are to this day not allowed to build homes.

Frozen memory

Lifta is a place frozen in time. It is unpopulated and has not turned into an artists' colony, like Ein Hod or Old Jaffa. The core of the village remains almost in its entirety, with dozens of original buildings and a landscape which has not been covered with JNF forests, and not styled by landscape architects - the fate now expected to befall the village according to the new plan.

Behind all this beauty lies all the elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the refugee problem, the demand for the right of return, denial of memory and so on.

The building plan for Lifta cannot be considered innocent. There is no reason to slaughter this beautiful piece of land for 200 homes for the rich; it answers no vital need and does not solve any of the housing problems in Jerusalem, and it will not contribute to reconciliation, but rather deepen the conflict and erase more proof that someone was here before us.

The only justification for the development of Lifta, and it too sounds like a fantasy today, is building that will serve Palestinian refugees and create a kind of historical justice with a symbol, a tribute.

This kind of effort would also be political and perhaps lack planning logic, but justice and ethics and the chance to turn the village from a memorial to destruction into a symbol of a shared future stand in its favor.

Because such an alternative is out of the question, there is nothing left to do but act to stop the plan, and raise funds to do the necessary work to strengthen existing buildings until a suitable solution is found.

It is to be hoped that such funds will be sufficient for an investigatory commission. This is the place to repeat the conclusions of the Or Commission on the events of September 2000, quoted by Bimkom in its opposition to the building plan and more relevant now than ever.

"The establishment of the state of Israel, which the Jewish people celebrated as the realization of the dream of generations, is connected to [the Palestinians'] historic memory, the most difficult trauma in their history, the Nakba," the Or Commission report said. "The programs and symbols of the state are also anchored in law that praises the victory in the conflict ... which is seen by the Arab minority as a defeat. It is appropriate to find ways to strengthen Arab citizens' feeling of belonging to the nation without hurting their connection to their culture and community."

2011-01-22T13:27:00.000-08:00

Israel moves to turn deserted Palestinian village into luxury housing project

Israelis and Palestinians dedicated to the village Lifta's preservation have called the plan to build 212 luxury units and a small hotel the end for the last Arab village of its kind.

By Nir Hasson, Haaretz 21.01.11

Yakub Odeh, 67, walks among the ruins of the Arab village of Lifta at the entrance to Jerusalem and is oblivious to the new neighborhoods and freeways that surround it. He doesn't see the train tunnel being dug above it or the secret escape route for the country's leaders being dug below.

Odeh doesn't see the "Death to the Arabs" graffiti at the entrance to the village or the Arabic version of the name that someone blotted out on the sign there. He sees a village and an area as it existed until March 1948, before it was abandoned by its Palestinian residents.

"Ali Badr's family lives here, and here's Salah Mohammed's house," he says on a walk through Lifta. The village for him is not limited to the houses left standing around the well-known village spring. For him, it is also the remnants of houses in the Romema neighborhood of Jerusalem. the land on which new housing in Ramot was built. It is also the village school, which now serves as an ultra-Orthodox educational institution, at the entrance to Jerusalem.

"My roots are here. My whole mentality is from here. I will never be able to forget," he says.

Now, the remains of the village are threatened by changes to the special character of the
place. Two weeks ago, the Israel Land Administration published a public tender for
construction in Lifta, which is to transform an abandoned Palestinian village on the edge of Jerusalem and a popular location for hiking into a luxury residential neighborhood. The developers have committed to preserve the houses and meticulously restore them. Plans call for the houses to become restaurants and galleries.

Odeh calls the redevelopment plan a second Nakba, Arabic for "catastrophe" and the word the Palestinians use to speak of the events surrounding the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Architect Gabriel Kertesz, who designed the new development in Lifta, together with Shmuel Groag and Shlomo Aronson, said the redevelopment is the best thing that could happen to Lifta.

"There is one approach that nothing should be done, which means the disappearance of the village. Our approach is one involving preservation and revival. The plan requires the most meticulous preservation rules and permits construction only after the historic buildings are preserved and everything is done under the supervision of the Antiquities Authority and a conservation architect," he said.

Odeh is now involved in human rights work, but he is a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who served a lengthy prison term. He was eight when his family fled Lifta. His former house overlooks the spring in the center of the village.

Lifta is an anomaly. Among the hundreds of Palestinian villages abandoned in 1948, it is the only one that was neither destroyed nor reinhabited. The villages of Ein Karem and Ein Hod, for example, remained standing but were inhabited by Jews.

Odeh and others see the remaining 55 homes in Lifta and the surrounding terraces as a kind of memorial to Palestinian society before Israel's War of Independence. After the village was abandoned, the ceilings in the buildings were deliberately destroyed to deter intruders, however the homeless and others on the margins of society took up residence there.

One of the buildings houses a successful program for young drug addicts, which has been operating there for 20 years. The program's director said yesterday that he doesn't know what will become of the program once the redevelopment of the village begins.

In open areas around the existing homes in the village, plans call for 212 luxury housing units and a small hotel. Israelis and Palestinians dedicated to Lifta's preservation have called the plan the end for the last Arab village of its kind.

Odeh said: "Our dream is that there be peace, and that we be able to return to our village.

There is enough room in Palestine for everyone. These are our homes. We were born here. We breathed the air here, and we are entitled to return here."

Not all of the opponents of the proposed development share Odeh's aspiration that he and descendents of other villagers return to live in Lifta. Architect Gadi Iron envisions Lifta as a world heritage site that should be preserved. He called it a "Garden of Eden" of streams and fruit trees and beautiful landscapes and a site containing important Palestinian architecture.

Iron said: "Lifta is more important than the Taj Mahal, from the standpoint of its beauty and for its Mediterranean heritage. The Taj Mahal is kitsch. In Lifta, there's no kitsch." He proposed the village be preserved as an architectural museum.

2009-11-19T01:37:00.000-08:00

This short video extract conveys a vivid account of how changes brought about by the 1948 Palestinian Nakba catastrophe also severed the reality for the minority native arab Jewish occupants of Palestine.

Having to come to terms with the tumultuous effect of forced seperations within their culture, dividing a longstanding socio-ethnic coexistence shared with the Arab Muslims and Christians of their society. A new reality depicting what is acceptable to acknowledge in their new homeland - and what should be erased from memory - somehow did not fit comfortably with some.

The landscape's scars of a forced forgetfulness have remained, profoundly and poignantly comforting to those who accept the fact that here lies, in this land now defined as Israel, a neurosis of forbidden truth - of what had been shaped and the discord that has followed, what has been oppressed and the existence that it denies.

(...thanks Abe for the video)

Anil Korotane, Belonging

2009-07-30T05:25:00.000-07:00

Saving Lifta Event

BELONGING have posted the first part of the brief for an event we are arranging in Lifta (the timetable for the event will be announced at a later date); it will form the first encouraging advance of activism for the Saving Lifta project-campaign in the Jerusalem region.

The first part of the brief will focuss on Lifta as a 'Space for Conciliatory Dialogue'. Although explained in a very short, simple, clear and straightforward way, the brief is highly sensitive as it will involve issues and necessary actions that will be very challenging - it will require the involvement of both Palestinians and Israelis to focus on the issue of the Nakba in Lifta, but also to focus on the wider issue of displacement that occurred around that particular time in history.

The ideas and issues presented in the brief have been very carefully articulated and the strategy presented has been mainly derived from the continuation of a discourse based on principles and values of Lifta's significance as a place that can be found in the 2007 entries of posts on this blog. Ultimately the agenda for the Saving Lifta project-campaign is that by presenting Lifta's historical truth and narratives as a place, it will enable us to show the potential of her value for the wider region. Inevitably, through the activism for alternative planning we are maintaining a real case for her protection.

Although the first part of the brief was articulated a few months prior to the knowledge of a bill just recently approved by the Knesset that undermines the commemoration of the Nakba inside Israel, the strategy for activism not only sets itself against the bill but also proposes a challenge that counter-acts its by endeavouring to show what is possible through preserving places such as Lifta.

The brief is derived to show the potential of Lifta becoming both a space of encounter as well as a space of the possible - where not only is it possible to preserve a memory that portrays the catastrophe of the Palestinian people which requires justice and recognition of its truth, but also to have a tangible place in the region that can allows Israelis to address the narrative of the 'other' whilst also allowing them to reach out and across to the Palestinians through the narratives of displacement.

Lifta can be in part preserved as a place to recognise, share and deal with the intricate task of confronting existential narratives, histories and identities for the purposes of conciliation. The brief for the first event pushes the boundaries on this task only so it can show the potential of possible opportunities in cultural-production by preserving memory of places such as Lifta. Both representatives of Zochrot and the regional Ramallah Lifta Commitee recognize that the brief is potentially a 'one day scenario' for civil-building using both the regional community and resources. The first event therefore begins to set out a 'proto-type' of a place and process towards healing for an imagined-future for this region.

In due time we will post the second part of the brief - it will focuss on Lifta as a 'Space for Habitation'. The brief will draw upon holding an event (at the same time and in concession to the first event) for a site investigation to gather the necessary contextual information to redetermine Lifta of how she once was as a place, and then to portray Lifta in the present and future context as a space for habitation in justice of recultivating her memory, the international law of the 'right of return', and equal living.

Saving Lifta Event (Brief - Part 1)

Announcement of the first stage of the Saving Lifta project-campaign in the Jerusalem region.

To begin the first stage of the project-campaign in the region, our first objective will be to hold a series of events in Lifta. The purpose of the events is to demonstrate why the heritage of Lifta is potentially invaluable and necessary for future peace in the region. And we will convey this possibility by orchestrating a series of events that engage into the potential of Lifta’s spaces and demonstrate what can be possible.

The aim of holding an event will be to demonstrate the potential of Lifta’s space as a place for conciliatory dialogue, followed by assessing and re-imagining her space for the purposes of habitation. All stages of the events will be loosely based around exercises capable of reconstructing the memory of Lifta. All work conducted in the events will be creatively and critically devised to ascertain the necessary information needed for the 2nd stage - to derive with the design of a master-plan for Lifta. The 3rd stage will be to lobby the master-plan, both regionally within the Jerusalem municipality and internationally, in a case aimed to protect Lifta.

Working towards a new narrative, a new history, and a new space.

The overall objective of the project-campaign will be to try and save Lifta by engaging her upon a theme that demonstrates her potential to become an innovative ‘space of reconciliation’. As a space of reconciliation Lifta has the potential to transform into a place for the purposes of conciliatory dialogue and habitation. A potential gateway to a space seeking a goal to confront and reconcile narratives of histories, otherness and conflict whilst, demonstrating possibilities of a place that promotes healing, pluralism and inclusiveness.

Task 1 of the event - A space for conciliatory dialogue:

The first task will focus on Lifta as an ‘origin’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The aim is to convey the memory of the Nakba catastrophe through eye witness accounts from the displaced people of Lifta. We aim to demonstrate and document that an encounter between an intangible memory and a tangible place allows a displaced people and community to confront their trauma and their tragedy. A poignant encounter nevertheless vital because firstly it establishes an authentic relationship of a bond existing between a people and a land; and secondly, it can play a vital role towards the healing of a people and the larger regional community.

Through observance of the memories of the displaced people, during this encounter, we aim to record and document the individual memories creating a mapping of a narrative of the Nakba catastrophe in Lifta. This information will be later used (in stages 2 & 3 of the project-campaign) as evidence demonstrating that this village has the potential to convey, in part as a memorial, a story of the origins of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The next task of the event will continue to focus on observing Lifta as an ‘origin’ of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Again, during the observance of the memories of the displaced people that unfold the narrative of the Nakba in Lifta, we will use these observations to demonstrate that Lifta has the potential to become a place for the creation of dialogue between the uprooted people of Lifta, as well as all Palestinians in general, with the Israeli public.

Engaging into the memory of the Nakba, in this instance from a place that has remained virtually desolate and un-appropriated since her uprooting in 1948, provides the backdrop for a real space within the Palestine/Israel region that has the capacity to make accessible an open dialogue and encounter a sense of shared-values through the issues of ‘displacement’, ‘victimhood’ and ‘tragedy’. Themes that not only resonates throughout the Palestinian narrative since 1948, but are historically preserved and ever-present within the narrative of the Israeli ‘other’; for instance the Holocaust, and the displacement of Arab Jews in the North African and Middle East region. Sharing and building upon multiple common themes, reaching beyond rivalry, and consoling upon the seeds of despair.

Lifta is also accessible to the ‘other’ because she allows us to re-imagine communities. Although her community consisted of an ethnic-religious majority of Muslims, the community still shared a religious diversity that consisted also of Christians and Jews. The uprooting of Lifta was a tragedy for the Palestinian community of the village however, the Nakba in Lifta was a catastrophe for the Palestinian Muslims, Christians and Jews. The Jewish Hilo tribe, who were part of one of the five main tribes in Lifta, apparently were given the option by the pervading force to remain in the village, decided to share the same fate with their community and vacated the village.

And now 60 years have gone by, enabling enough time to take a step back and reflect at histories. Histories, that are usually referred to in their own unique set of circumstances and disparate narratives, can be engaged together in one space. In this task of the event, we will orchestrate an encounter between the Israeli public and the people from Lifta, engaging into the real memories of displacement set against the tangible backdrop of the valley landscape of Lifta. We will demonstrate that Lifta can become a space of encounter; a necessary place where both Palestinians and Israelis can come together and share a dialogue and speak of their narratives of tragedy, victimhood and displacement. An encounter made admissible because there still stands and exists a place in the region that is virtually desolate; where memory concealing a narrative of displacement can be reconstructed and sustained from a bond between a people, who can recount and relive their tragedy, and this place. A place that can challenge and defuse narratives that translate into a language of opposition or even hostility by presenting and addressing common themes shared in the tragic histories by both peoples.

The narratives of displacement shared together at Lifta can create this place into a necessary common-ground for the purposes of healing and conciliation. During the event, we will demonstrate and document these encounters on the space of Lifta, drawing upon the potential of this place for the purposes of invaluable capacity-building for the regional civil society. And the information gathered and collected will be used to inform and towards the case for the alternative master-plan.

Anil Korotane, director - BELONGING

2009-06-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

Saving Lifta in the current political context

Whilst we make steps forward with the Saving Lifta project-campaign it is also important to keep you informed with the political context that is concurrent and has bearing on the cause. In light of the fact that the village of Lifta is located in West Jerusalem, and within Israeli territory, the following three articles address the current political nature of the Israeli government and measures setout by this government that ultimately challenge the project-campaign.

The first and third articles discuss a bill approved by the Knesset created potentially to obstruct Israeli Arabs the right to commemorating the Nakba whilst making them place allegiance to a polarized Jewish Democratic State of Israel, the implications of which are utterly devasting for those whose seek a reality of a democracy for 'all its people' within Israel. If the bill is approved, it potentially has the ability to obstruct future potentialities of conciliatory processes inside Israel. Looking further a field and bearing in context the Lifta, the bill can hinder any protection of the Palestinian cultural heritage inside Israel - especially if the heritage bears any connection to the palestinian collective narrative of 1948, again obstructing the potential of places of historical interest that have recognition to the 'other' playing part of any future concilatory role between identities and equal living.

Already the early ramifications of the bill is challenging the work of peace activists and educational organisations. The second article concerns an educational kit on the Nakba that is is being disseminated among teachers throughout Israel. It was developed by Zochrot, a non-government organization, and is meant to serve the Jewish educational system for pupils aged 15 and above, and includes history plus literary and personal views on the Nakba, as well as discussion of the ways the issue has been sidelined in public discourse. (The education kit can be found on the Zochrot website - http://www.nakbainhebrew.org) In light of the newly approved bill, also supported by the Israeli Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar the Education Ministry, a compromise bill is also being prepared, which would ban government bodies or any organization benefiting from state funding, from organizing or funding activities related to the Nakba.

Very shortly, FAST will post the first part of a brief highlighting the next phase of activism of an event that will take place in Lifta. Although articulated through the gradual build up of a inquiry setout by FAST well in advance of these new revelations of the approved bill, on the contrary, the strategy for activism not only sets itself against this bill but also proposes a challenge that counter-acts its necessity by endeavouring to show what is possible. Hopefully once we illuminate this strategy of activism we can, with your support, deliver something to the particular needs of this region and period that is totally relevant and essential.

Anil Korotane, FAST

As Israel Prepares Laws to Deepen its Discrimination, the World Must hold Israeli Racism to Account

4 June 2009, Bethlehem, Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights - For decades Israel has practiced discrimination and forced displacement against its Palestinian citizenry with impunity. But now it seeks to impose consent for its crimes upon its Palestinian victims.

Three bills currently making rounds in the Israeli Knesset reveal an obscene and dangerous targeting of the individual and collective rights of Palestinian citizens.

One bill seeks to prohibit marking the day Israel declared its independence as a day of mourning. A second prohibits negating the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The third requires Israeli citizens to sign oaths of loyalty to the state, its flag and national anthem, and to perform military or civil service. Though still at an early stage, if the bills pass, violators could face harsh sentences including imprisonment and revocation of citizenship.

Palestinian citizens of Israel are part of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine who were made a minority in their homeland through the expulsion of two thirds of their people in 1948 by Zionist militias during Israel's establishment – events Palestinians commemorate as the Nakba (Arabic for Catastrophe.)

Their leaders have likened the potential approval of the bills to a declaration of war. The bills "require the Arab minority to deny its history and Arab-Palestinian identity on one hand and to identify with Zionist values that negate its national identity on the other," in the words of Mohammed Zeidan, head of the Higher Arab Follow-Up Committee, an informal collective leadership body of Palestinian citizens.

Attempts to force compliance with the Zionist narrative, character and practice of the state is equivalent to demanding that Palestinians sanction their own historical dispossession while rubber stamping their contemporary second-class citizenship as "non-Jews" in the Jewish state.

Moreover these attempts come in the context of an escalating campaign against this community that seeks to paint it as a "demographic time bomb" and a "fifth column." Yuval Diskin, Director of the General Security Service has described Palestinian citizens' demands for equality as constituting "a strategic danger to the state", that must be thwarted "even if their activity is conducted through democratic means”; Israeli politicians and "peace proposals" speak openly of "population exchanges" between Palestinian citizens and Israeli settlers in the West Bank; and the Hebrew press has even made recent revelations that the Israeli army is engaged in training special units to occupy Palestinian towns and villages inside Israel in the event of a regional war, to prevent protests and access to highways.

A broader campaign of incitement is at play here. These laws aim to polarize the situation between Jewish and Palestinian citizens, while justifying the quashing of legitimate Palestinian demands. Israel also appears intent to extend elements of its military practices against Palestinians in the OPT to those who are its citizens.

Given Israel's historical record of repeatedly dispossessing Palestinians – be it beneath the 'fog of war' or through incremental bureaucratic means - the initiation of these laws can only be seen as strengthening Israel's de jure policies of apartheid to compliment its de facto apartheid practices on both sides of the Green Line.

In this context, instead of trying to engage the new Israeli government, it is time for the world to boycott, divest and sanction the Israeli regime until it abandons all racist policies and practices and implements international law.

Are teachers introducing Nakba to students against state's wishes?
By Or Kashti - Haaretz 04/06/2009

An educational kit on the Nakba [catastrophe] - the Palestinian term for what happened to them after 1948 - is being disseminated among teachers throughout the country. It was developed by Zochrot, a non-government organization, and is meant to serve the Jewish educational system for pupils aged 15 and above, and includes history plus literary and personal views on the Nakba, as well as discussion of the ways the issue has been sidelined in public discourse.

Some teachers have reportedly been making use of the kit, even though it has not been approved by the Education Ministry. A meeting next week in Jerusalem aims to introduce the kit to educators. The kit's materials were developed over three years and involved school teachers as well as lecturers at teachers' colleges. Its 13 units deal with the Palestinian communities before and after 1948, a historical probe of the period's events, personal stories of Palestinians, a discussion on the "right of return" and a tour "of a destroyed Palestinian village with a refugee as a guide."

The kit's fourth unit offers an "initial introduction to the history of the Nakba" with numerical data about "how Palestine was prior to the Nakba" and "a historical study presenting the main reasons for the departure and expulsion of the Palestinians, incorporating testimonies and quotations [from sources]." There is also a discussion on the "methods used to prevent the return of the refugees."

The kit is modular and designed so teachers of different subjects may use it in classes on history, literature, civil studies, social studies, etc.

Amia Galili of Zochrot says nearly 100 teachers have been introduced to the kit, and it has been sent to 160 other educators.

"The purpose of our work is to include the Nakba in the educational system, from a viewpoint that the minute the pupils study about it, it will be possible to begin talking about a process of reconciliation," Galili said. In the Jewish educational system many teachers are hesitant to teach the subject of the Nakba. In upper-level secondary school history reference is made to the "cease-fire agreements and the creation of a Palestinian refugee problem," said Galili, but in practice the subject is taught in a very limited way, if at all.

Many subjects in the curriculum are inevitably left behind for lack of time, but there is also an element of "too few teachers who are willing to enter this minefield of a subject," as one history teacher put it.

Two years ago, former education minister Yuli Tamir was criticized when a geography book meant for the Arab schools referred to the Nakba. The Education Ministry at the time said the book had been based on curriculum materials that had been approved during the tenure of Limor Livnat and Ronit Tirosh at the ministry.

Ten days ago, the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee approved a bill proposed by MK Alex Miller of Yisrael Beiteinu, "forbidding by law the commemoration of Independence Day or the establishment of the state as a day of mourning." The bill was supported by Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar. As a result of the ruckus that resulted from the proposal, a compromise bill is being prepared, which would ban government bodies or any organization benefiting from state funding, from organizing or funding activities related to the Nakba.

One of the teachers who began using the kit, Avital Spivak, says that "the Palestinian side of the story is missing completely from the educational system." She teaches civics to 11th and 12th graders at the Reali School in Haifa, and says "there is a complete blind spot, which leads to ignorance and racism and blocks the possibility of understanding and dialog. There is no need to agree to the right of return to talk about the Nakba, and there is no contradiction between being a Zionist and refusing to be blind and deaf to the pain and the story of the other side."

Spivak says initially "the pupils express all the usual opposition such as denial, justification of the Jewish side and sometimes even calls to kill the messenger - in this case the teacher. The pupils find it very difficult to accept there is no one truth to the story. Spivak says there is no 180-degree change in the pupils' views but "I can see that there is the start of questioning."

The Education Ministry responded: "The education kit was not approved by the ministry. Teachers using materials not approved by the ministry are acting against ministry procedure and policy." The ministry also said it would conduct "an immediate investigation, including into this case."

“Racists for Democracy” - Uri Averni's Weekly 30/05/09

HOW LUCKY we are to have the extreme Right standing guard over our democracy.

This week, the Knesset voted by a large majority (47 to 34) for a law that threatens imprisonment for anyone who dares to deny that Israel is a Jewish and Democratic State.

The private member’s bill, proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev of the “Jewish Home” party, which sailed through its preliminary hearing, promises one year in prison to anyone who publishes “a call that negates the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State”, if the contents of the call might cause “actions of hate, contempt or disloyalty against the state or the institutions of government or the courts”.

One can foresee the next steps. A million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State. They want it to be “a state of all its citizens” – Jews, Arabs and others. They also claim with reason that Israel discriminates against them, and therefore is not really democratic. And, in addition, there are also Jews who do not want Israel to be defined as a Jewish State in which non-Jews have the status, at best, of tolerated outsiders.

The consequences are inevitable. The prisons will not be able to hold all those convicted of this crime. There will be a need for concentration camps all over the country to house all the deniers of Israeli democracy.

The police will be unable to deal with so many criminals. It will be necessary to set up a new unit. This may be called “Special Security”, or, in short, SS.

Hopefully, these measures will suffice to preserve our democracy. If not, more stringent steps will have to be taken, such as revoking the citizenship of the democracy-deniers and deporting them from the country, together with the Jewish leftists and all the other enemies of the Jewish democracy.

After the preliminary reading of the bill, it now goes to the Legal Committee of the Knesset, which will prepare it for the first, and soon thereafter for the second and third readings. Within a few weeks or months, it will be the law of the land.

By the way, the bill does not single out Arabs explicitly – even if this is its clear intention, and all those who voted for it understood this. It also prohibits Jews from advocating a change in the state’s definition, or the creation of a bi-national state in all of historic Palestine or spreading any other such unconventional ideas. One can only imagine what would happen in the US if a senator proposed a law to imprison anyone who suggests an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

THE BILL does not stand out at all in our new political landscape.This government has already adopted a bill to imprison for three years anyone who mourns the Palestinian Naqba – the 1948 uprooting of more than half the Palestinian people from their homes and lands.The sponsors expect Arab citizens to be happy about that event. True, the Palestinians were caused a certain unpleasantness, but that was only a by-product of the foundation of our state. The Independence Day of the Jewish and Democratic State must fill us all with joy. Anyone who does not express this joy should be locked up, and three years may not be enough.This bill has been confirmed by the Ministerial Commission for Legal Matters, prior to being submitted to the Knesset. Since the rightist government commands a majority in the Knesset, it will be adopted almost automatically. (In the meantime, a slight delay has been caused by one minister, who appealed the decision, so the Ministerial Commission will have to confirm it again.)

The sponsors of the law hope, perhaps, that on Naqba Day the Arabs will dance in the streets, plant Israeli flags on the ruins of some 600 Arab villages that were wiped off the map and offer up their thanks to Allah in the mosques for the miraculous good fortune that was bestowed on them.

THIS TAKES me back to the 60s, when the weekly magazine I edited, Haolam Hazeh, published an Arabic edition. One of its employees was a young man called Rashed Hussein from the village of Musmus. Already as a youth he was a gifted poet with a promising future.

He told me that some years earlier the military governor of his area had summoned him to his office. At the time, all the Arabs in Israel were subject to a military government which controlled their lives in all matters big and small. Without a permit, an Arab citizen could not leave his village or town even for a few hours, nor get a job as a teacher, nor acquire a tractor or dig a well.
The governor received Rashed cordially, offered him coffee and paid lavish compliments to his poetry. Then he came to the point: in a month’s time, Independence Day was due, and the governor was going to hold a big reception for the Arab “notables”; he asked Rashed to write a special poem for the occasion.

Rashed was a proud youngster, nationalist to the core, and not lacking in courage. He explained to the governor that Independence Day was no joyful day for him, since his relatives had been driven from their homes and most of the Musmus village’s land had also been expropriated.

When Rashed arrived back at his village some hours later, he could not help noticing that his neighbors were looking at him in a peculiar way. When he entered his home, he was shocked. All the members of his family were sitting on the floor, the women lamenting at the top of their voices, the children huddling fearfully in a corner. His first thought was that somebody had died.

“What have you done to us!” one of the women cried, “What did we do to you?”

“You have destroyed the family,” another shouted, “You have finished us!”

It appeared that the governor had called the family and told them that Rashed had refused to fulfill his duty to the state. The threat was clear: from now on, the extended family, one of the largest in the village, would be on the black list of the military government. The consequences were clear to everyone.

Rashed could not stand up against the lamentation of his family. He gave in and wrote the poem, as requested. But something inside him was broken. Some years later he emigrated to the US, got a job there at the PLO office and died tragically: he was burned alive in his bed after going to sleep, it appears, while smoking a cigarette.

THESE DAYS are gone forever. We took part in many stormy demonstrations against the military government until it was finally abolished in 1966. As a newly elected Member of Parliament, I had the privilege of voting for its abolition.

The fearful and subservient Arab minority, then amounting to some 200 thousand souls, has recovered its self-esteem. A second and third generation has grown up, its downtrodden national pride has raised its head again, and today they are a large and self-confident community of 1.5 million. But the attitude of the Jewish Right has not changed for the better. On the contrary.

In the Knesset bakery (the Hebrew word for bakery is Mafia) some new pastries are being baked. One of them is a bill that stipulates that anyone applying for Israeli citizenship must declare their loyalty to “the Jewish, Zionist and Democratic State”, and also undertake to serve in the army or its civilian alternative. Its sponsor is MK David Rotem of the “Israel is Our Home” party, who also happens to be the chairman of the Knesset Law Committee.

A declaration of loyalty to the state and its laws – a framework designed to safeguard the wellbeing and the rights of its citizens – is reasonable. But loyalty to the “Zionist” state? Zionism is an ideology, and in a democratic state the ideology can change from time to time. It would be like declaring loyalty to a “capitalist” USA, a “rightist Italy”, a ”leftist” Spain, a “Catholic Poland” or a “nationalist” Russia.

This would not be a problem for the tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews in Israel who reject Zionism, since Jews will not be touched by this law. They obtain citizenship automatically the moment they arrive in Israel.

Another bill waiting for its turn before the Ministerial Committee proposes changing the declaration that every new Knesset Member has to make before assuming office. Instead of loyalty “to the State of Israel and its laws”, as now, he or she will be required to declare their loyalty “to the Jewish, Zionist and Democratic State of Israel, its symbols and its values”. That would exclude almost automatically all the elected Arabs, since declaring loyalty to the “Zionist” state would mean that no Arab would ever vote for them again.

It would also be a problem for the Orthodox members of the Knesset, who cannot declare loyalty to Zionism. According to Orthodox doctrine, the Zionists are depraved sinners and the Zionist flag is unclean. God exiled the Jews from this country because of their wickedness, and only God can permit them to return. Zionism, by preempting the job of the Messiah, has committed an unpardonable sin, and many Orthodox Rabbis chose to remain in Europe and be murdered by the Nazis rather than committing the Zionist sin of going to Palestine.

THE FACTORY of racist laws with a distinct fascist odor is now working at full steam. That is built into the new coalition.

At its center is the Likud party, a good part of which is pure racist (sorry for the oxymoron). To its right there is the ultra-racist Shas party, to the right of which is Lieberman’s ultra-ultra racist “Israel is our Home” party, the ultra-ultra-ultra racist “Jewish Home” party, and to its right the even more racist “National Union” party, which includes outright Kahanists and stands with one foot in the coalition and the other on the moon.

All these factions are trying to outdo each other. When one proposes a crazy bill, the next is compelled to propose an even crazier one, and so on.

All this is possible because Israel has no constitution. The ability of the Supreme Court to annul laws that contradict the “basic laws” is not anchored anywhere, and the Rightist parties are trying to abolish it. Not for nothing did Avigdor Lieberman demand – and get – the Justice and Police ministries.

Just now, when the governments of the US and Israel are clearly on a collision course over the settlements, this racist fever may infect all parts of the coalition.

If one goes to sleep with a dog, one should not be surprised to wake up with fleas (may the dogs among my readers pardon me). Those who elected such a government, and even more so those who joined it, should not be surprised by its laws, which ostensibly safeguard Jewish democracy.

The most appropriate name for these holy warriors would be “Racists for Democracy”.

2009-05-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

"The Eye of Lifta" by Aida Qasim

Foreword by Anil Korotane -

Aida Qasim, regards herself as a 1st generation descendant of Lifta born out of Palestine, in Exile. She is also a 2nd generation poet who perceives her task is to purposefully create alchemy of oneness between her poetry and Palestine. A purpose initially brought to the fore and epitomized by the late great Mahmoud Darwish, a figure who she commemorates in the opening lines of her Poem: 'The Eye of Lifta':

O, beloved swallow of the Galilee:
I (too) belong there—

The first line of my poem addresses Mahmoud Darwish, he is the swallow of the Galilee and he wrote the poem: "I belong there"; hence Aida's affirmation and retort. I asked Aida, paraphrasing 'I (too) belong', did she really? Or more precisely, knowing she was an American Palestinian - born on another land - and now resettled to a life in the affluent Abu Dhabi with her family, in what sense? Is it a sense of an injustice that has been passed down into her own experience, therefore yearning for justice to a past inherited? Or as a Palestinian American now living in Abu Dhabi, is it about sustaining a sense of 'origin' to something identifiable to a place?

She concurs - "In fact on all counts - yes, I think it is the injustice of it all the experience of being 'othered', the rootlessness...it breeds anger, rage in fact, if not self loathing as a result of being dehumanized, made invisible. And also, I (too) belong there, because I am a recipient of that history and were it not for the Nakba, I too would have been there. I am nostalgic for that which never was. My experience as a refugee-exile who was born out of Palestine and not of that era is intertwined with the Nakba. In fact it is intertwined with the history of Palestine.

An imaginative Gardner
tends to her fragmented umbilical cord
and I am vessel for her obsessions
over your aborted dreams and my still birth.

“The Nakba generation's dreams have been aborted, while mine are still birth. I don't know which is more agonizing!" To make clearer this enunciation she goes on by referring to the next lines of the poem:

A parasite scavenges the remains of you
from my scattered shards,
and then escapes like an elusive acrobat.

She explains, "Here the parasite and acrobat are nostalgia. If you are familiar with post memory which was observed with descendants of the holocaust, it's a sort of post traumatic stress disorder, where the survivors carry the trauma and grief which gets communicated in different ways, even subversively by those who have witnessed it to subsequent generations." "Even as a child it’s as though I had an antenna that picked up on the pain and I felt it - like an open wound, and still is.

Aida's poetry is a new visitation into the postmodern experience and she is grateful that she can use her writings as a vehicle to turn the energy into something constructive, "I write to make a case for a disenfranchised people and gather strength from a universality of the Palestinian cause as it enables me to channel my rage at and be engaged by all forms of oppression and subjugation."

“Like the title of Edward Said's Memoir: Out of Place; I, like many who have experienced the kind of displacement and injustices visited upon the Palestinian people, have always felt out of place. "And yet, I never quite allowed myself to assimilate. It was a decision I made as a young child growing up in predominately middle class Anglo American neighborhood at the height of American Xenophobia in the early seventies. I suppose even then, I was aware that I had inherited a most noble cause and so I felt compelled to defend it by asserting my identity, with painful consequences in the form of peer rejection.

I think, also my rebellious nature precludes me from ever truly belonging anywhere. And if Palestine were to be liberated today, I would surely be opposed to the ruling government and stifling social conventions. Perhaps it’s the temperament of the poet, perhaps it’s the feminist, or the disenfranchised native carrying the weight of centuries of colonization or all those things.
But I also see my exile as a profoundly postmodern experience. And that's why, the poet can be a metaphor too for the stateless and disenfranchised: in a perpetual state of moving, not quite belonging anywhere and yet everywhere. I (too) belong there (inside) and I belong (to) there (outside) positions at once...one exists in many states. I think limbo is a state that always seems to hover right beneath the surface, where home is neither here nor there, alternating between searching and waiting... But then at times, one comes to terms with one’s exile and home becomes exile and exile--home, and yet when all is still... a dormant desire for paradise lost, gently erupts and reminds us..."

In commemoration to the 61st Nakba Day -

“The eye of Lifta”

O beloved Swallow of the Galilee,
I (too) belong there—
where old men are boys
and fig trees
—mothers birthing memories like moss
in the valley of a mischievous mulberry tree.

There—
where a desolate kingdom of an eternal spring
fortified with an unwearied wind
pollinated Sixty-One autumns
with Sixty-One offerings:
to consummate a reunion with an almond seed.
Sixty-One offerings:
rebuffed by an unbending river
that flows neither here nor there;
Sixty-One offerings:
overruled by obstinate threads
luring a dying metaphor into a river of limbo;
Sixty-One offerings:
exiled for hijacking a glimpse
of the Golden Dome;
Sixty-One offerings:
frozen at nostalgia’s salon.

Nostalgia passes over infertile soil
like a punitive teacher
passes over an absentminded student.
An imaginative gardener
tends to her fragmented umbilical cord
and I am vessel for her obsessions
over your aborted dreams and my still birth.
A parasite scavenges the remains of you
from my scattered shards,
and then escapes like an elusive acrobat.
Nostalgia is for nostalgia’s sake
and the scorn of time her bed-mate.
This coveted mistress bleeds mosaic memories
and dwells deep in the cervix
of splintered selves.

Memories born of the same womb (wound):
Do BATTLE!

O weeping Goddess of Canaan,
Rise up from your grief!
Accept this poem sculpted from clay
of words and tears;
all is constructed and destroyed
with words and tears!

There—
where a jury of motherless cacti
is witness to Franks taking refuge
from the peddlers of forgetfulness
in a dome of dancing Byzantine terraces
and ululating golden Aleppo threads
celebrating an agnostic olive tree’s
mutiny against false prophets
of an unyielding harvest.
A paperless traveler scales walls
of indifference
and a nameless peasant paints green kohl
in the eyes of stone monuments,
with the devotion of a pilot sowing mines
on the edges of orphaned cities,
while a pensive sky archives maps and resolutions
under the pillow of a banished raindrop.
--
A poet collects her belongings:
a duffle bag;
a rain coat;
the scribbled lines to an unfinished poem:
I belong (to) there—
written on the back of an unpaid bill,
in the smoking lounge of an airport.

Aida.Qasim@gmail.com

2009-04-09T04:56:00.000-07:00

A Poem and Writing by Aida Qasim, a poet and Lifta descendant, and her father Isa's memories of Lifta.

Aida, the youngest of her father's children recognizes the value of her father's stories and feels a sense of urgency to record them. She realized whilst reflecting on Lifta that her father Isa, who will be 80 next december, never told her stories of Al Nakba; the stories had always been about the Lifta of his childhood and Aida wanted to capture that in a poem which will be forthcoming. Aida, who will participate with FAST in forthcoming events for the Saving Lifta Project, has generously contributed a poem she had written last year- "Neruda's blue rose"- in commemrotation of the passing of 60 years since Al Nakba. The other piece illustrates a parable of the very poignant and personal ressurgent affect that the Nakba has through the generations and onto the present zeitgeist. FAST would like to thank Aida and Isa for their contributions and we will continue to post their writings on the blog.

Nerduda’s Blue Rose

My dreams are not enchanted springs of jasmine
Laced with the musings of romantic artists

Or utopian meadows
Where gazelles fall in love with lions under starry skies

They are not safe havens for tilled soil
Sanctioned by a punishing rain

But are hungry children
Luring a nostalgic pilgrim into the narcissistic desert night

Restless bats taunting a gentle swallow
Armed with a warm blue silence

Muted witnesses to your fleeing echo
And to the seagull’s yearnings for Neruda’s blue rose

O repentant kings of a bygone moon
Weep not for blind men of the Imposturous Setback

Weep for your beloved son
Born again in the cradle of another Catastrophe!

Aida Qasim

Isa's Memories of Lifta

The prevailing notion, among those who are not intimately familiar with Lifta is that it is the old village down the valley west of Jerusalem. True Lifta is that village, but it is in fact much wider and larger.

That old village, romantic and beautiful whose houses are very old and which contains the famous water spring, is the original village. All Liftawis come from there. But early in the twentieth cencury many Liftawis started spreading around. Why not when those vast areas of land to the west and north of the old city of Jerusalem belonged to them. Sheikh Jarrah, Romema, Sheikh Badr, to name but few, belonged to the people of Lifta. If fact much of what is now west Jerusalem belonged to Litawis.

As you approach Jerusalem, coming from the west along Jaffa road, you will see two rows of nice and elegant houses on top of a hill on your left. Those are the houses of my extended family - my father's and my uncles' etc. We moved to that house when I was about five years old. At that time we had our first radio set, and the first radio set in the area, a big His Master's Voice and had electricity.

To me, most memorable was a big mulbrry tree that was standing majestically in the front yard. That tree was my friend. Many a time had I played around it and climbed high in it, ostensibly to collect its delicious fruit but in fact trying to do what Sammy now does best: to climb for the sake of climbing and to jump for the sake of jumping. And that tree was very tolerant and wise. I believe it still stands after over seventy five years. For, some years ago I went there and from some distance I could see it. Sad, maybe, but it still stood in its place. Is it waiting for me to go back?

Narratives intersect at the crossroads of memory

Though life’s circumstances have been the stated reason for my procrastination, there was a sense that to begin my journey towards a PhD, I needed geographical and emotional space from my place of enduring exile. Conversely, my father’s approaching eightieth birthday left me with a compelling need to register his narrative before it was lost to oblivion, and in so doing, discovered my own.

In reviewing the literature, I came across Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “To my mother”. The line: “I love my life, because if I died, I would be ashamed of the tears of my mother”, made me weep. Never had those familiar words resonate so deeply; until then, the metaphor of an idealized mother was a stranger to me. My earliest memory at the age of three, informed my understanding of this construct, subsequently orchestrating the assimilation of successive losses into my repertoire of being.

She stood wailing near the television screen as though intent on entering the box and rearranging the scenes. The defeat of the Arab armies and ensuing occupation of the rest of Palestine, including her birth place –Jerusalem- unraveled my mother like a forgotten sweater who had not been mothballed. A three year old little girl looked on, mesmerized by the histrionics of a strange woman who up until then had been her proverbial anchor.

Queasy at any perceived unruliness of emotions, my father urged her to calm down for his sake as much as mine. My mother’s tattered edges came together in a crescendo of uncharacteristic fury as she shot back a perfectly lucid proclamation: “Let her know the truth!” And for countless nights thereafter, I lay anxiously in the “truth”, overwhelmed by an insidious feeling that the world was an intensely unsafe place.

More than three decades later, I watched helplessly as American tanks rolled into the West Bank while the Israeli army waged its merciless war on Palestinians with its “incursions”. My husband, concerned for our three year old son urged me to take hold of my feral emotions which vacillated between despair and rage. His seemingly treacherous request prompted me to summon the freighted and bemused little girl that remained accessible. Resurrecting the intensity of an earlier time, I reiterated the same maternal sentiment with equal conviction. Palestine had become my abducted child; innocence usurped. And as the notion of abandoning a three year old girl seemed inconceivable, so was deserting a sixty year old boy standing defiantly in the squalor of a refugee camp, with both hands behind his back- patiently observing history unfold- awaiting liberation.

That moment’s idiosyncratic reading of an iconic poem jolted me. No longer did my invention live in the context of the defiant daughter I had always been, but rather experienced through the forgiving Mother I have become. I paced through the vacant rooms of the second floor to our rented villa; the bare walls and furniture that seemed sparse in relation to the size of the place gave it an air of aloofness. Slothfully, I inched towards the hard edge of our oversized bed and covered my head under the inviting sheets. Failed attempts at commanding my body to travel the bed’s full splendor prompted me to surrender with un-bashful abandon my somewhat trusty resolve. Tears that were not mine alone or solely of this time and place commandeered the day’s agenda; a creative process unfolded, derailing what had set out to be an academic exercise.

Aida Qasim

2008-11-07T12:55:00.000-08:00

Commencement of the Saving Lifta project-campaign in Jerusalem

Between 19th - 26th October 2008, FAST engaged in various appointments with figureheads and organizations in the Palestine/Israel region to initiate the next phase of Saving Lifta project-campaign.

The discussions held included a meeting with figureheads of the Lifta Committee (Hassan A.Shalbak, Ali Hamoudeh, Rabie H. Rabie, Abed Abu-Liel, Husni Salah) and their representative Yacoub Odeh in Ramallah; a meeting with Eitan Bronstein, Director of Zochrot (Remembering) in Tel Aviv; as well as various meetings in Jerusalem - including a trip to Lifta - with 2nd & 3rd generation Lifta activists (Anan Odeh - Human Rights Lawyer, Sihan Rashid, Lena Meari - Anthropologist, Thair Odeh, and Zacharia Odeh - Executive Director of the Civic Coalition for Jerusalem.)

FAST addressed to the Lifta Committee a history of the work undertaken so far in the project-campaign. We discussed the conference that we held on Lifta in Amsterdam 2006, and the international campaigning, such as the proposal of a project to UNESCO World Heritage as well as the application on the World Monument Fund's list for 100 most endangered places. And concluded with our appraisal on Lifta's significance and how she inspired FAST to set about an initiative for regional activism.

FAST agendas not only serve to expose violations in architecture and planning, our aim is to create architectural responses that empower marginalised, segregated and displaced groups, communities and people. To show what has the potential to be possible, whilst considering the human component as the most fundamental criteria.
In Lifta's case, to set about a campaign against the Approved Redevelopment Plan(s) that erase all memory of Lifta, FAST are leading a project to advocate the recognition of Lifta through the creation of alternative plans and an alternative master-plan.

Lifta should be reserved as a special place of conscience, for truth and justice, regarding issues at the very heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is a place that bears testimony to the memory of the national catastrophe of the Palestinian people - al Nakba. And a place that can serve as a potential testing-ground for General Assembly Resolution 194; Israel’s obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law to allow and facilitate the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes. If Lifta was attentively planned, in re-instatement of her recognition and her possibilities as a place, she could play a significant role in the event of a concilatory process and changes needed for peace.

The Saving Lifta project-campaign aim is towards a common vision, for a 'space of reconciliation', using alternative plans and a master-plan that can be articulated and lobbied using both Palestinian & Israeli civil society. The objective is to create regional movement, action and a voice that can monoeuvre the campaign to effect and reposition the Jerusalem Municipality Authority's tops-down prospects on Lifta; anticipating that the project-campaign will be lobbied through the Israeli judicial administration and not under-estimating the possibilty of lobbying as far as the Knesset Parliament.

The next step will see FAST setting out a detailed brief proposing the agendas of the project. The brief will be issued at the beginning of February 2009 to potential participants of the project. Between now and January, working with our partners Yacoub Odeh - a Lifta refugee and Eitan Bronstein - Zochrot, with support from our team of regional Lifta activists, we will reach out to regional organizations, education/research faculties and potential sponsors that can play a key role in this project through their participation (such as building conservationists, legal advocates in environment & planning, civil building and peace activists, and local architecture schools.)

In a period of a week in March 2009 a series of meetings will be arranged to be held in Jerusalem and the region. FAST will present the project agendas and invite potential regional participants to discuss the proposition in context to creative opportunities and their own agendas. We hope (in that week) to resolve forming a two year plan (2009 and throughout 2010) involving a dynamic coalition of participants and supporters, reaching across the divides between Israeli and Palestinian, and making Saving Lifta an eventful yet decisive example of an effort that transcends expectations of the possible.

Anil Korotane, FAST

2008-06-13T00:25:00.000-07:00

An announcement to the people from Lifta -

Dear Liftawa,

We call upon you for your help and support.

Lifta, your ancestral village still stands defiantly. However, there is now a masterplan that has been approved that will change Lifta into exclusive private accommodation and a commercial centre with a different name - Mei Neptoach and with a different identity. All association to your cultural heritage and history with Lifta will be erazed.

FAST (an architecture, planning and humanrights organization) are leading a project that will try to protect Lifta by offering an alternative masterplan solution.

We feel that to be able to save Lifta we will need to preserve and proclaim the truth about Lifta with all people in Israel/Palestine. And to do that we need your help. We need your help because you - the Liftawa - and your 'truth' can actually be used to bring real justice and healing to this region.

Lifta is unique because she still stands after having witnessed a catastrophe; the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. Unlike the 500+ towns and villages that dissappeared during this catastrophe, Lifta was not fully razed to the ground and nearly all of her valley was never resettled . She still remains nearly the same as she did just after the Nakba.

Lifta has untold stories to tell. And the buildings and structures that still remain standing in her landscape also has the potential to reflect the very rich cultural heritage of the Liftawa community. However, we believe that Lifta can also be more - she can be a symbol for peace.

Your bonds holding your memories with Lifta are very important and significant today. You bear witness and testimony to a catastrophe that affected the whole region. But at the same time, your bonds holding your memories of Lifta also tells a story of a time when muslims, jews and christians were once living harmoniously together in the same Liftawa community.

Lifta should be deemed invaluable and worthy of preserving her identity, culture and history for the sake of peace in the region. FAST are campaigning to uphold this belief. To do this we need to ask you the Liftawa to help us by allowing us to know about your life in Lifta, the history of Lifta from your truth, and your understanding of Lifta's community culture.

FAST want to meet you Liftawa and with your permission film record and document your memories and stories about Lifta. FAST will use what you have told us to reconstruct the memory of Lifta. And FAST will use your truths as the vital information needed to generate and produce the alternative masterplan whose objective is to show the importance to protecting Lifta for the region.

Please contact me (Anil Korotane - FAST) at anil@savinglifta.org if you wish to participate in this cause, or concerning discussions about the intentions of the organizations and any of the above.

Peace be with you.

Anil Korotane, FAST.

2008-03-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

The Reconstruction of Memory and Architecture as Activism.

The Reconstruction of Memory.

Over the last year, FAST has analysed the value of Lifta through studies of her memory to determine what extent Lifta's particular situation could be considered as an invaluable component of conservation practice in regard to the present cultural and civil context. To briefly reiterate -

Lifta is preserved as a place not only with tangible significance to the bonds of her descendants, but also a shared value amongst a people who can relate to an open space that conceals signs of their tragedy. To be able to express this mourning from a place which symbolizes and recreates a backdrop to the moments of a tragic event allows confronting and exploring issues of trauma to become a real experience.

Lifta is a tangible embodiment and representation of the larger context of events in the region during 1947/48. This conflict that defines this particular moment in history has essentially unfolded into the current existential values of today. The current issues of dissonance between the Israeli Jew and Palestinians seen unfolding in the present context have their origins traced at a place whereby the source of the conflict becomes tangible. As an origin, she can be a vital place for contemplating and understanding historical continuity.

Lifta's cultural heritage is a story of a society consisting of different ethnicities existing harmoniously under the same cultural pretext; embracing a strong sense of an ethnically and religiously diverse community of Muslims, Jews and Christians. Lifta's traceable history prior the Palestinian Nakba and the creation of the modern State can begin to allow us to look beyond the symbol of the ‘other’. She sustained ethical values which can be deemed as necessary within in the current regional context of society.

There is historical evidence that gives reason to believe that the Nakba event encompassed a discord for all ethnic groups associated to it. And there is a significant opportunity for suggesting alternative outlooks and views that can influence the working of a new narrative, a new history, and a new space. Exploration of memory can become paramount in creating and enabling mechanisms to defuse the attitudes that translate into a language of adversity and dissonance of the differing existential beliefs.

Lifta has a credible history that is invaluable to the present situation and context of identities in the region. FAST's objective is to advocate the preservation of Lifta, so that she can be clearly recognized as a place, whilst introducing a monument into the environment that's equivocal workings is aimed at addressing the conflict. So rather than asking who officially gets the right to choose or imply history and heritage, the needs should be to preserve and develop instruments that actively seek to contest truths.

Conducting further research into Lifta's memory and juxtaposing truths can possibly allow further contestable narratives and introduce new possibilities for the reconstruction of heritage. A heritage that can allow an acceptance of truths that can bring together both sides of the conflict to share the same grief and hope and re-evaluate relationships for the sake of the regional community. And a desire towards a monument that can convey new meaning and understanding as well as offer alternative capacity building can prove invaluable.

Architecture as Activism.

FAST is placed in a cross point of culture, architecture and human rights practices. It brings different disciplines together. It explores new ground and builds a new know-how resulting in a practice of 'activist architecture'. FAST aims to promote the preservation and alternative planning of a place that has the potential capacity to provide a supporting role for the changes needed for peace and democratisation of a region.

FAST has initiated a strategy that aims to address the significance of saving Lifta's memory as well as Lifta's unique status and what she is potentially and 'truthfully' capable of representing for the region. FAST will lead a task to develop the alternative planning of Lifta through architectural and conservation design.

FAST will explore, collect and document Lifta's memory, history and cultural heritage to create a Preservation File - through a 2 year task coordinated with intermediary to the association representing her diasporas world-wide; the Lifta Association. FAST will emphasize the value between the relationship of memory and the tangible cultural heritage so the landscape can convey historical truths capable of empowering opportunities for civil building. FAST will use the information within the Preservation File to master-plan the design of a Memorial.

Memory cannot change the past, but it can give us thought to change the future. If Lifta was attentively planned in reference to preserving her memory, she can envisage a unique platform for communication that has potential to harbour a significant role in the possibilities of a conciliatory process. Lifta can offer the region an apparatus to use as a foundation for the purposes of truth and reconciliation and the transformation of conflict resolution by restoring respect for others and enhancing dignity.

Through the practice of activist architecture, FAST will engage and affiliate with the services of professionals, organizations and institutions necessary for utilizing practices to realize goals. To promote and enhance the case for the protection of Lifta, advocating with civil rights organizations within the Israeli region will be necessary. FAST will affiliate with individuals, organizations and institutions required to utilize the regional activism to promote the idea of 'truth and reconciliation' as an opportunity for the necessity for heritage diversity and alternative planning.

There will be 4 areas of plan of action that will utilize the SAVING LIFTA Activism:

1. The Reconstruction of Memory.

To gain and achieve the emphasis of the strategy for regional activism, the campaign process for SAVING LIFTA has to sustain qualitative documentations of histories that will promote the emphasis of the 4 principles and values.

(i.) Recognize that Lifta has an existing cultivated bond, and that this bond (warrants legitimate recognition) evokes an identity and a relationship to identities.

(ii.) Recognize that this place is inextricably tied and linked to the creation of the modern Nation State of Israel, and therefore is testimony to the phenomenom/event of the creation of the Modern State as well as placing historical perspective and context to her present identity.

(iii.) Recognize that this place contains a unique example of a tangible cultural heritage that evokes a legacy of a place which had a healthy civil equality and no ethnocentric division or segregation.

(iv.) Recognize that Lifta, a place which has an inextricable relationship to the identity of a people and also of a Nation, should have her cultural heritage reappraised so that she can sustain an 'attainable value' for the evaluation of healthy civil progress for the future of this region.

The qualitative documentations will be collected within a Preservation File. FAST will work alongside and together with the organization representing the Lifta diaspora - the Lifta Association to obtain the necessary information needed sustain a Preservation File. FAST will produce qualitative mappings, documentary accounts from of oral histories from the surviving 1st generation Lifta diaspora, and any other documentation obtained as part of the Lifta diaspora that can be used as evidence to support the principles and values.

2. A Memorial and Conservation MasterPlan.

FAST will devise a conservation plan whilst proposing an architectural design masterplan of Lifta as a memorial for the Israel/Palestine region. FAST will architecturally masterplan Lifta's landscape as a memorial based on alternative planning for heritage and the necessity of heritage diversity for long-term regional sustainability. The emphasis of the memorial design will be based on the set of principles and values under a 'Truth and Reconciliation' proposal scheme. The conservation planning will be devised with advocate consultation to specialists in Arab/Palestinian Architecture.

3. Advocacy.

FAST will rally support against the Approved Mei Neptoach Redevelopment Plan by advocating - exposing, through the media (websites, magazines, blogs, public events) the case against unjust exclusive planning with a case supporting alternative heritage planning for long-term sustainability for the region. FAST will affiliate with local partners in Israel to achieve the necessary goals needed to bring the plight of Lifta into the Israeli and Palestinian public consciousness. FAST will also bring the plight of Lifta into a regional debate between professionals, governmental institutions, universities and knowledge institution, civic society and peace organizations for the development of new know-how, for the necessity of heritage diversity for long-term sustainable planning.

4. Civil Action.

FAST will work with a local partner to transform its plans into legal documents and use local and international multidisciplinary network to lobby it locally and internationally. FAST will represent a case against the Approved Redevelopment Plan through the representation of a case based on the set of principles and values. FAST will affiliate with Civil Rights organizations in Israel and will present the case to the Judicial Courts in the Jerusalem region accompanied with the solution for alternative heritage planning.

posted by Anil Korotane, FAST.

2007-10-30T09:02:00.001-07:00

Episode 4.

- Recognize that Lifta, a place which has relationships to the identity of a people and also to a Nation, should have her cultural heritage reappraised so that she can sustain an attainable value for the evaluation of healthy civil progress for the future of this region.

Photo: The wadi spring - the 'eye of Lifta' & 'spring of Mei Neftoah'.

Many of the structures cultivated into the landscape remain as ruins, however the spring and part of the pathway leading to it has been slightly refurbished. The spring, known as the 'eye of Lifta' still brings fresh water to its well. Once the focal point of the village, the wadi spring was used by the village ladies to wash their clothes and fill their pitchers with fresh water. Families would sit, in the long afternoons and mild evenings, telling each other of their sorrows and joys. The communal relationship that exists between the spring, the graveyard and the mosque still remains. Villagers would take the bodies of their deceased relatives to the spring where they would be washed under the trees by the spring, then taken to the mosque which was very close, and then onto the graveyard to be buried which was also in close proximity. Today, the spring is a haven for all venturing to enjoy the coolness of her water and is also encouraged by a sentiment to fulfil a purpose of ceremonial use as a Mikvah. The wadi-spring has also an historical reference as a border landmark between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin in the bible 'Joshua 15:9' and 'Joshua 18:15' as the spring of Mei Neftoah.

From the official Israeli outlook the ruins on the landscape are merely oriental remains interwoven with the mystique of the ancient past. The valley has had several incarnations and names through out her history. There are archaeological findings of a Canaanite settlement from the Bronze era. The name Lifta means corridor in Aramaic, Naftoh was its Roman name, which was then renamed Kabesta by the Crusaders. It was during the second Islamic era that it regained its Aramaic name. A few attempts have also been made to transform the valley in some form or another since the creation of Israel. Such as the use of the buildings to house immigrants from Arab countries, such as the Yemenites during the 1950s, or conserving the buildings and transforming the village into the headquarters of Israel's National Parks Protection Authority. And now the valley has been given a another incarnation under the approved plan to conserve and transform the village into a commercial edifice allocated under the guise of Mei Neptoah. The Mei Neptoah approved plan will consist of a commercial center with shops, hotels, bus stations and with land sold for individual housing on the western slopes.

Coupled by the biblical reference of Mei Neftoah the valley is attracting symbolic value amongst the Israelis. Nonetheless, even with this symbolic association one cannot override and dismiss the place is still tangible through memory and a bond that still exists with Lifta. However to have multiple values, such as recognizing ruins in association to the legacy of Lifta, is currently implausible to identifying a role with the existing context, traditions and narrative of the Israeli State. The only possibility of Lifta attaining such a value will be if she can demonstrate her necessity as invaluable and engaging at a level akin to a progression and goodwill for the region. Therefore, any value has to be able to penetrate the imagination of the Israeli consciousness and National narrative. However, in her current form, Lifta only sustains a relative value as a place with an identity through memories held together by a bond. By acknowledging that the principle agent and influence sustaining the place is the bond, it will be necessary to demonstrate if this bond can also redefine its location within a definable context of the Nation State.

The potential to demonstrate the accessibility of this bond is possible through further examination of the location. Currently, the ruins on the landscape lies disparately as if frozen in time between two epochs, two histories, and the two dominant cultures of the region; a place in-between and connecting two paradigms. The event that occured during the uprooting of the Palestinian and the establishment of the Israeli is inextricably tied together by a context which needs reason behind one historical event to explain the other. Traces of the event are preserved and made tangible only through the memory sustained by a bond to the ruins. Lifta reveals a dissonance and conflict that arose in the uprooting of this village is inextricably tied together to the creation of the Modern State. She is a contextual origin whereby the struggle of the Palestinian people that has perpetuated from the events of 1948 and the genealogy of Israel's history can be traced back to her location as a point of departure. The current issues of dissonance between Israel and the Palestinians seen unfolding in the present context have their origins traced to a place whereby the source of the conflict becomes tangible.

This conflict that defines this particular moment in history has essentially unfolded into the current existential values of today. Part of the influence of their constructions are achieved through a protagonist quality of dissonance, a staging of a conflict of values, constructing differences and establishing the 'other'. If the State allowed the removal of the signs of history, that is still tangible, it would be detrimental in erasing an historical location that forms part of their current existential truth. A place that reveals the creation of the two dominant existential identities of the region; a 'point of departure' of the two current narratives of the Israeli and the Palestinian. Lifta is a unique insight into truths that are crucial to understanding part of the nature and construction defining identities. The two existential narratives opposed in conflict share the same story through the same language of a reality through the given context of Lifta. What the narratives oppose of one another is also brought together by this place. The language of history of the Palestinian and the Israeli are bound and concealed by a place. To fail to recognize Lifta is to also to deny both Palestinian and Israeli history.

The importance of the relationship of the bond connecting memory and place here is that the common history is sustained through an origin. It is a common history that is tangible and a particular history that needs to be re-visited as well as engaged by both parties inextricably tied together to the conflict. Lifta as an apparatus can allow us to contemplate and attend to issues involving dissonance and history by stabilizing memory through a duality. Memory is an invaluable resource and a principle reason for officially wanting to have this place recognized. Memory can provide a stage of communication for those confronting the undeniable raw emotion of trauma and a denied sense of anguish and loss. Memory thus re-inventing a place that has the opportunity to deal and tangibly confront the tragedy. It is through such a common-ground that a gathering involving both sides represented in the conflict can in some instance be imagined. Creating the capacity of a space for the sake of openly redeeming rather than reservedly confining the existential natures of identities. The bond provides the capacity to engage with a space envisaged to create acknowledgement for the purposes of reconciliation.

The consequences of the situation today can be understood by a place that locates its entirety into a context. An historical point of origin that has the capacity to engage at the tangible constructions of the making of confrontation, differences and narratives. Locating Lifta in this particular historical context, confronting the real experiences of the conflict of 1948, is important for acknowledging the tragic events of history. Insubordinate and vulnerable with current reality it may shamelessly be however, the necessity to give insight into this place is not conceivable unless it seeks to create an opportunity from the definable differences. As a common-ground Lifta verges onto a space of encounter, but can she continue to voyage further into a space of the possible? For instance, can reciprocation of the bond between memory and the ruins have the capacity to sustain an all-encompassing sense of justice and truth towards the lost temporal landscape? Or in the pursuit to illuminate genealogy, can the common past be used to resort to reconcilable narratives and situations? So by contesting history can a challenge be set against the moving spirit of dissonance notably characterized within the current situation of the region?

Lifta's last moment during the upheaval of her cultivated platform lay besieged to a conflict. Thus creating an origin that perpetuated into the region's struggle between the two existential narratives of the Israeli and the Palestinian. Either of the cultural narrative's intent and actions can have the effect of creating a counteraction synonymous to a dissonance producing 'otherness'. For instance, attitudes and outlooks of a cultural narrative can interpret situations or a version of events performed by the 'other' as inconsistent and contradictory. The eventual action of response between the narratives can have an effect of reproducing values of difference and discord thus sustaining a potential conflict. The question remains can a likely removal of this central character of dissonance be accomplished if the desolate valley that is an origin of the conflict and two narratives was to stage a meeting with the 'other'? Can using a common-ground enable the possibility of a reality to be accessible to both narratives with the same mutual acknowledgement? And can the common-ground be capable of contesting the events of a particular poignant moment in history whilst encouraging a dialogue towards an all-embracing judgment?

The central character of dissonance can be interrupted if the prominence of the conflict of narratives is reduced by converging on truths that readdress traditional conceptions. The idea and impression of Lifta as a contextual genealogical power origin to the Modern State of Israel is an argument tended towards addressing the creation of dissonance. The interaction of people with a memorial preserving a specific historical period plays with the idea of relevant cultural objects that evoke a new interplay between histories, cultures and place. A need for this particular intervention serving as a place of observation creates an opportunity to question and examine cultural assertions. Demonstrating to educate people about the past for the urgency of reconciling discordant situations in the present context of civil society. Nonetheless, reinforcing history can prove to be an obstacle especially if it required officially acknowledging Palestinian memory about the origins of the conflict. The challenge is finding approaches that can make communicating to broader audiences compatible and acceptable. And the memory of Lifta has evidently more to impart with to allow such a capable intervention.

Language can make realities accessible. Language processes experiences through recognition and interpretation, therefore allowing us to ascertain realities. Israel has a traceable genealogical power origin that recognizes an identifiable character within the current identity of the State. A place where language can recognize contextually and interpret the legacy of the divide of the two main existential narratives is tangibly accessible and can be absorbed, but nonetheless is not immune from being interrupted. This point is significant as the same language has the capability of making other realities accessible and therefore accessible to a same narrative. The bond to the ruins bears testimony to a quintessential form of civil behaviour, allowing a memory of civil equality to be evoked whilst sustaining a unique insight into the origin of a lineage of historical conflict. Both the genealogy and ontology directly connected to this place offer an ideal and significant opportunity towards providing an historical foundation for reconciling conflict. Memory can be utilized for ascertaining realities to introduce the possibility of new constructions; consequently, the possible ramifications might enable a power origin to be subverted through the common-ground.

Genealogies are important because they can also be identified and distinguished as power systems. Power as control or force can commonly be interpreted within historical social conditions as motivations and attitudes. Genealogies as power systems contain and carry belief systems that define the very nature of our behaviour or nature of being; ontology. Genealogical origins sustained within histories, memories and tangible traces have the capacity to nurture and cultivate future successions of behaviour. (for example, the relationship between the creation of a genealogical origin of the Modern State of Israel and the creation of dissonance.) Nonetheless, rather than resuming specific modes of reproductions as a linear series of ongoing motivations, genealogies can also have the capacity to restore alternative modes of behaviour previously retracted and deemed unnecessary; evolving the ongoing ontology of a lineage. The idea of Lifta as a contextual genealogical origin to the Modern State of Israel is that the argument can be used to create an observation of place that can prove important to the current context and social values. Civil equality as an ontological value can serve to break down obstacles whilst contributing on it's own qualities to readdress a social heritage.

Upon reflection, the uprooting of the village was a tragedy for the palestinian community of the village however, the community encompassed multi-ethnic groups. The Nakba in Lifta was a catastrophe for the palestinian muslims, christians and jews. The jewish Hilo tribe, who apparently were given the option by the pervading force to remain in the village, decided to share the same fate with their community and vacated the village. There is historical evidence that gives reason to believe that this event encompassed a discord for all ethnic groups associated to it. These insights fully deserve to be accounted, recognized, as well as expressed; they provide significant opportunities for suggesting outlooks that provide alternative views upon the region's history and place. What is interesting is that new insights can begin to create a working of a new narrative, a new history, and a new space. The creating of this space which recognizes experiences of both the conflict and of civil equality begins to contests its' own history. The fact that the same language, through and because of a memory, sustaining a history of civil equality 'meets' with the reconstructive language of the conflict means that the acknowledgement of this connection of histories can possibly have influence on a new consciousness making. Where one is aware of their environment and of a space for the re-imagined.

There has to be some form of social upheaval that is constantly reminding the environment of truths such as civil equality, so to bring some form of contradiction and ambiguity of power contesting the ideology of the environment. Again, through investigative examination into Lifta's memory and juxtaposing truths such as that this place unfolds a story of a tragedy, or is relatively a contextual origin for Israel, and where a multi-ethnic community once thrived - may allow further contestable narratives to be obtainable. Memory can influence the necessary negotiation needed to sustain a dialogue on the recognition of truths underlining currents of genealogical and existential constructions. Again this is significant as it can allow the potential capacity to address issues that fundamentally seek reconcilable possibilities. Exploration of memory can become paramount in creating and enabling mechanisms to defuse the attitudes that translate into a language of adversity and dissonance of the differing existential beliefs. Conducting further research into Lifta's memory and juxtaposing truths can possibly allow further contestable narratives and introduce new possibilities for the reconstruction of heritage. So rather than asking who officially gets the right to choose or imply history and heritage, a need to preserve and develop instruments that actively seek to contest truths can be envisaged as a devisable method for this common-ground.

So what is the objective? Is the objective to sustain the preservation of Lifta so that she can be clearly recognized as a place, or is the objective also to introduce a monument into the environment whom's equivocal workings is aimed at addressing the conflict? Both. The valley landscape should be noted for her many encarnations, from the early Canaanite settlement from the Bronze era, and including the present practices such as the attraction of her natural spring that fulfills the ritual as a mikvah. Nonetheless, there is also a credible history that is invaluable to the present situation and context of identities in the region. A heritage that can allow an acceptance of truths that can bring together both sides of the conflict to share the same grief and hope and reevaluate relationships for the sake of the regional community. Symbolism of place can confirm power and control over the environment; identities can be inclusive and foundational just as they can be exclusive and oppressive. Saving Lifta is only likely to be achievable if she asserts values that are inclusive in her objective of becoming recognized as a place. And a desire towards a monument that can convey new meaning and understanding as well as offer alternative capacity building can prove invaluable. In prospect, an attainable value through the reconstruction of heritage; aiming to bridge worlds together by creating mechanisms out of a bond between memory and place.

Next time.....the tools devised for action will be highlighted, thus unfolding the manifesto and taking the next step into the journey of the grassroots activism.

written by Anil Korotane, Architectural Activist, FAST.

2007-10-26T05:21:00.000-07:00

A slide show of the antiquity and landscape of Lifta.

Geographically, Lifta it is part of the 'new' West Jerusalem; however, it represents and symbolizes the architecture and the topography of Palestinian towns. Topographically, it is located lower than its surroundings; this gives the feeling that Lifta somehow exists beneath the surface of the city. The antiquities of this village has been described as one of the countrys most genuine and traditional examples of arab vernacular architecture. The 4 storey houses with their architectural arches woven in the houses reveal a presence of a once affluent society thriving in this village. What remains there today is mainly an Arab village that developed during the 19th century. The village is comprised of a nucleus bulk of stone houses densely situated side by side along the main street, and gradually growing sparse towards the periphery. A visit to Lifta reveals an organic settlement where the village pace of life is almost tangible; a place where one can still experience the wealth of architectural spaces - homes, streets, a spring, oil/olive presses, a cemetery, a school, workshops, inn and a mosque that has endured years of evolution. In addition, the natural scenery of the place - the spring, trees, and terraces; the authentic surroundings of Lifta.

Episode 4 coming soon....

2007-10-15T03:59:00.000-07:00

Episode 3.

- Recognize that this place contains a unique example of a tangible cultural heritage that evokes a legacy of a place which had a healthy civil equality and no ethnocentric division or segregation.

Lifta is a place of important value, through the preservation of her memory she can reveal insight into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a place, Lifta is a commonground to history through an historical-event, tangibly related to the Palestinian Nakba catastrophe and the origins of the modern State of Israel. She sustains the traces of a dramatic scene, a conflict that has perpetuated into the discord between the Israeli and Palestinian narratives. She has the capability of becoming a space of encounter whereby a meeting with the 'other' is possible. And she has the potential to play a role, where this common history can be contested for the purposes of recognizing the creation of difference. A place to reflect upon a conflict of values and a reproduction of identities within the region. Nonetheless, recognizing this place as a commonground to histories is still controversial.

History testifying to the Palestinian tragedy - the Nakba, is not Israel's official line on the history of the Independence of the Nation State and history since. Any plan that envisages Lifta's history as part of a vision for addressing difference will out of consequence contest attitudes that are traditionally defined within the narrative of the modern State. It will be asking Israel to reflect upon her history for the efforts of contesting and reconciling differences within the region. By contesting an historical narrative that can be traced back to a point of origin, it may question the legitimacy of constructions that influence the state of difference in the relationships between identities and space. For example, how consequences of historical phenomena have filtered through into territorial rules of engagement in public, private, local and national space. Fundamentally, it could also establish a connection between an origin in history with the current situation of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and beyond.

Nonetheless, the creation of dissonance and difference in the space of the region can be traced back to an origin and to an event that is still tangible. This origin, born out of conflict, has influenced the nature of the rules of engagement throughout the history of the Modern Israeli State and Palestinian region. For example, attitudes formed from the narratives act further as agencies of power, affectly influencing and differentiating exclusive engagement in the practice of territory and planning throughout the region. However, this was not always the case and never was a pre-condition to the social relationship of space within this region. The legacy of this conflict as an agency of power halts at the origin where it began. If memory relating to a point of origin is capable of establishing real significance about a tangible heritage, then the same memory can also elaborate upon the society that previously existed and cultivated the landscape.

Taking to one side the significance of memory relating to a conflict and the current context, memory of Lifta also has the capacity to engage and provide a history of a different societal pattern and practice of space. If we were to take a closer examination of Lifta's culture pre-dating the conflict, we can consider that her social identity will have a different set of societal values and relationships. This pre-history reveals a lot more into the everyday life of Lifta, a lot more about her ontology; nature of being. Disclosed from the memory is a heritage of vast richness and potential for the region, excavating Lifta's history reveals a large village that sustained and reflected a society of civil equality. Lifta was a place that embraced a civil society that contained a strong sense of community amongst the ethnic diverse community of muslims as well as jewish and christian minority.

Before the events of 1948 the village had a tribal community with a population consisting of around 3000 people. There was five main tribes consisting of many smaller tribe families within each of the main groups, and most predominantly muslim by religion. However there was also a Jewish tribe from Lifta known as the Hilo who were not immigrants, but also part of the older assembly of the native people that were from this region. There was also a small christian minority as well as Mizrahi jews from Iraq and Jordan; they quite commonly rented and or shared the same houses with muslim families. Quite a large percentage of houses in Lifta were more than two storeys, so it was quite a common occurence that the local tribes to rent of their accomodation. For example, there are descriptions of the grande 4 storey houses of having 2 floors rented to Jewish families, whilst the rest of the property was accomodated by the tribe family.

There was more prosperity in the upper Lifta, known as Romema, this was mainly due to the land being extensively cultivated for olive farming. Lifta was known for the quality of her olives and an industry of olive farming thrived in Romema and was supported by a big factory. There was also other produce cultivated and made in upper Lifta, such as a drink like cola known as cassouse which was also distributed around the larger region. Lifta's community had also an extensive farming community. The shepherds would travel from east to west and back through the upper plains of Lifta's valley grazing their large herds of cows and sheep. The roads were well construct and very accessible. Stone from Lifta was also quarryed and regarded for its aesthetic quality in building houses and mosques throughout the Palestinian region. Romema, also had industrial factories next to the family plots producing calcium fabric to produce paint from the stones.

A map sketching traces of boundary lines, around the scattered buildings (yellow), of the land areas owned by the multi-ethnic villagers in the valley of lower Lifta.

Statistics:

Land ownership before 1948 uprooting -

Muslim 7,780 Jewish 756 Public Land 207 Total 8,743

Land usage in 1945 -

Area planted w/ olives - Muslim 1,044 Jewish 0
Planted W/ Cereal - Muslim 3,248 Jewish 288
Built up - Muslim 324 Jewish 102
Cultivable - Muslim 3,248 Jewish 288
Non-Cultivable - Muslim 4,415 Jewish 366

Statistics supplied by Palestineremembered.com

Lower Lifta in the valley was known as the old Lifta. The families plots were more condensed although each family still cultivated their own produce or sustained trade on their plots. People would slaughter meat at their homes instead of buying from the shops. A jew called Yusuf Isra and his daughter Shishana were sharing the lower two floors of a house with a muslim tribe family. The family above them would supply milk to Yusuf and he produce cheese as trade. Lower Lifta had an intricate web of woven streets, bustling with markets, coffee houses, a bakery, and their very own pharmacy. Lifta's community was inclusive to both muslims, jews and christians alike. They would sit together at the same coffee houses and their children would go to the same village school. Just outside the village, between Lifta and Jerusalem, were public services which gave access to all. For example, the community in Lifta had free access to the neighbouring jewish eye hospital. The village and the region was a vibrant place sustaining a healthy civil equality.

The community within the village embraced one another's religious events and celebrations. There were many festivals in Lifta for prophets. All cultural and religous festivals were celebrated with the christians and jews and all villagers would participate. Festivals were a time to show appreciation to another through customs such as giving each other presents. During Ramadan, all would fast and invite families over to open fast with cakes and sweets, and visit the graves and read Koran of anyone who had died in the village. The muslim tribes would join their fellow jewish villagers to the Dead Sea and celebrate the festival of a Jewish Prophet. Another Jewish festival that was celebrated together with a procession carrying green flags. Socially, there was a very good relationship with the Jewish. The village mosque became a social ground to discuss current issues during these festival times.

The jewish and christian minorities were treated like family by the tribes, they had been on these lands all the time. There was no inequality amongst the socio-ethnic diversity, so there was never any conceivable idea of segregation. Lifta's traceable history prior the Palestinian Nakba and the creation of Israel is of a society that practised civil equality in the region. Her identity sustained a different set of social values that is quite destitute today in the Modern State. Lifta allows us to look beyond the symbol of the 'other', she is able to show her ontology - nature of being. She sustains ethical values which can be deemed as necessary within in the current regional context of society. Recognition of her heritage can promote the idea of alternative strategies in the social relations of space, not denying the real potential of place in this region. Emphasis of her civil equality can also challenge and mediate Lifta's cultural heritage within the narrative of the Nation State of Israel.

Lifta's cultural heritage is a story of a society consisting of different ethnicities existing harmoniously under the same cultural pretext. This truth should be observed as advantageous and upheld for the efforts of creating solidarity amongst a people. Signifying qualities of justice of the peace and for this reason alone is worthy of preservation for the present and future generations to aspire to. Recognition of this truth and quality can influence the possibilty of allowing this heritage, traditionally percieved as belonging to the 'other' genealogy and existential narrative, to become admissable in the region. Emphasis of civil equality also enhances the opportunity of contesting other issues represented by this place to become more tolerable. Lifta still is a traceable genealogy that gives insight into the origins of the conflict, and these issue are fundamental to the process of understanding, tangibly engaging and reconciling conflict. Unveiling an archaeology towards civil equality eases the process of recognition whilst sustaining a greater acknowledgement of tragedy and understanding its implication on identity.

written by Anil Korotane, Architectural Activist, FAST.

2007-10-04T01:56:00.000-07:00

Episode 2.

- Recognize that this place is inextricably tied and linked to the creation of the modern Nation State of Israel, and therefore is testimony to the phenomenon/event of the creation of the modern State as well as placing historical perspective and context to her present identity.

Photo: The valley landscape of Lifta.

Lifta is unique and offers an unrivalled insight into the history of this region. Whilst many palestinian places affected by the Nakba tragedy were either totally removed or annexed under the State of Israel, Lifta stood obscurely due to nearly 60 years of unhinderance from redevelopment. She is a place that conceals the traces of a dramatic scene, of an historical phenomenom preserved and made tangible through memory; a space yet to encounter. She has remained predominantly desolate since the uprooting of her population; no conquest has fully re-contextualized the place. A place located disparate between two epochs, two histories, and the two dominant cultures of the region; a space in-between and connecting two paradigms. Through the phenomena of this relationship she reveals that the dissonance and conflict that arose in the uprooting of her village is inextricably tied together to the creation of the Modern State of Israel.

Lifta is a unique and real trace of a contextual origin of the Modern State of Israel. She is a place where the Modern State can be traced back to an historical event. And regarding genealogical origins, Lifta can also be perceived as important to substantiating the contextual origins of the identity of Israel. She is a contextual origin whereby the genealogy of Israel's history can be traced back to a point of departure; or in this particular case a phenomena made tangible through a bond. The events that occured during the uprooting of the Palestinian and the establishment of the Israeli are inextricably tied together by a context which needs reason behind one historical event to explain the other. Lifta is a place that encounters the creation of the two dominant existential identities of the region; a 'point of departure' of the two current narratives of the Israeli and the Palestinian. The language of history of the Palestinian and the Israeli are bound and concealed by a place; to fail to recognize Lifta is to also to deny both Palestinian and Israeli history.

The two existential narratives opposed in conflict share the same story with the same language of a reality through the given context of Lifta; what the narratives oppose of one another is also brought together by this place. Lifta is a genealogical origin, a place where the language of the conflict is created and departed into two distinctly seperate existential narratives. Their constructions are achieved through dissonance, a staging of a conflict of values, constructing differences and establishing the 'other'. She is a tangible embodiment and representation of the larger context of events in the region during 1947/48, the larger dissonance and the conflict of values. This conflict that defines this particular moment in history has essentially unfolded into the current existential values of today. The current issues of dissonance between the Israeli Jew and Palestinians seen unfolding in the present context have their origins traced at a place whereby the source of the conflict becomes tangible.

Lifta is a place that can allow and sustain a greater insight into the current conflict. As an origin to the modern State, she can be a vital place for contemplating and understanding historical continuity. For instance, the central character of dissonance staged within this region today has the possibility of being objectively engaged and disclosed at this origin. Reflection from a place that conceals the cause increases the likelihood to address further understanding. For Israel's region, Lifta is a place needing enquiry for the purposes of practising self reflection and reappraisal. She is important to situating, establishing and addressing disregarded aspects of the identity of the Modern State. Evidence of the events of 1948 are not only crucial for establishing the preservation of a memory in rememberance to the tragedy, but can connect these historical events to discordant elements inherent within the current nature of planning.

Buildings that still exist today - 2007
Buildings destroyed in the event of the 1948 conflict
The event of the attack by IZL/Stern gangs conquering Lifta's valley
Direction of villagers fleeing in process of uprooting

Map: 'The 1948 conflict in Lifta; the creation of dissonance and the two narratives. (*The information documented in the mapping is an impression of the phenomena/event that occured in the village during the 1948 conflict.)

Due to the ideological outlook of space and a vision subsequently reappraising regional identities, Lifta was uprooted as part of ongoing strategy for a modern Nation-State of Israel. The conflict created during the uprooting of the village, along with the many hundreds of village and towns in the region, underlined the consequence of a radical practice of space and the process of planning. This discord created from this conflict also characterizes particular phenomenons of exclusive constructions in the current nature of planning. (For an example of a detailed analysis into this observation, please refer to the article in the sidelink - 'Reinventing Lifta'.) With this original 'point-of-departure', the modern Nation State of Israel has a genealogical power origin that recognizes a traceable character of exclusivity within the current identity of the State. It explains today why parts of Israel's identity can be percieved as an ever-present reproduction of a conflict of 1948, and thus a history sustained through an exclusive existential narrative.

Alive and in practice through reconstructions the current struggles in the region can be perceived an uncontested phenomena of the original departure and a character also visible within the current nature of planning. If the Nation State allowed the removal of the signs of a unique history, that is still tangible, it would be detrimental in erazing a history which forms part of their current existential truth. Lifta is a unique memorial of facts-on-the-ground that sustains a truth which is significantly crucial to relating and defining the construction of identities. Profoundly, she substantiates Israel's authenticity through the exclusive existential character of her history. Lifta is historically important to the legacy of the State of Israel as well as archaeological evidence of the origin of the modern Nation State. The consequences of the situation of today can be understood by a place that locates exclusivity to a context. An historical point of origin that has the capacity to engage as a common ground at the tangible constructions of confrontation, differences and narratives.

If the past can be understood, drawn upon and engaged at by either side in the conflict, then it can allow greater insight and understanding of the present. Notwithstanding acknowledgement and understanding of the 'other', of how they have become determined and also the situation of being determined in terms of one another. Lifta allows the State to have a space to contest, understand, and respond to the origins of the conflict. It would also be a significant step if truths appearing as confrontational are tolerated through the recognition and preservation of this unique context of place. If cultivations on an historical ground can be recognised as still retaining a form of tangible existence, then here lies an opportunity for the possibility of reconciling differences. Opportunities such as reconciling histories may also allow the possibilty to re-narrate sustainable cultivations; it will also allow Lifta to exist as heritage of the modern State and the region.

For the modern Nation State of Israel to deny the existence of Lifta is also to disregard part of their own history, and of what gets overlooked obliviously and unattended within their own reproductive identity. To recognize Lifta is to also understand a particular characteristic of the Nation State's cultivation, ontological practice of space and how it has an affect on the present. Notwithstanding, identities are distinguished out of their particular differences in cultivation; commongrounds between identities are not conceivable unless they seek to create opportunities from the definable differences. Concerning Lifta and in pursuit to sustain a genealogy this is an important analogy to make, because the common past can be used to resort to reconcilable narratives and situations. Fundamentally, heritage can provide new insight by elaborating history and determine opportunites in the nature of how we locate inclusively or exclusively.

written by Anil Korotane, Architectural Activist, FAST.

For an insight into the tragedy of 1948 from the memory of an uprooted descendant of Lifta, refer to 'Reactions & Memories' side link and scroll down to 'Hussien from Lifta By Mike Odetalla'.

For the Introduction into the Grassroots Campaign & Episode 1, please scroll down below.

2007-09-17T03:57:00.000-07:00

(The iconography in this image by a native american indian artist symbolizes a grassroots struggle and solidarity - Also later shown to me, the image seemed very fitting to a poignant poem by Mourid Barghouti - Extracts from Midnight - is featured below the following introduction.)

Setting the challenge for a Grassroots Manifesto and Activism Campaign

Introduction
by Anil Korotane,
Architectural Activist, FAST.

So far in the campaign, we have raised issues such as challenging existing notions on the discourse of Cultural Properties, and questioned the practices on existing international mechanisms and conventions that ultimately aim to protect cultural heritage. We have learnt that international conventions may not suffice as palpable instruments or safety nets for providing the protection of cultural heritages within Nation States. Ultimately Nation States can reside to selecting history and cultural heritages in favour of main-stream ideological agendas. Notwithstanding, that this can influence negative consequences such as the neglection of cultural heritages amongst the marginalised and segregated communities. Nonetheless, in our quest to further understand and challenge discourse on cultural heritage, we have also encountered a greater tenacity amongst the professional planning community in generating new agendas to unfold reconstruction and rehabilitation projects.

FAST's aim is to offer substantial projects guided by conceivable agendas with alternative planning solutions. We are in the process of advocating a grassroots strategy within Lifta's regional context using the wider Israeli and arab Israeli network. To sustain an achievable goal the campaign will adopt a strategy that will contest existing cultural notions; such as the traditional cultural assumptions in the selection of heritage against the more purposeful opportunities arising from heritage diversity. Nonetheless, any agenda for alternative discourse will be in context to preventing the neglection of heritage created in the Redevelopment Plan. To substantiate an agenda will require a reappraisal of this situation concerning the current conflict of interest between the different needs and values regarding Lifta. Any strategy will therefore be dependant upon attitudes, either existing or supported as intervention, that will be vital towards supporting a solution.

For example, this campaign may be perceived as controversial, not coinciding with the current outlook and interests of the authority overseeing Lifta's land and the Nation State. By acknowledging that the character premise of the Israeli Nation State is undoubtly embodied by its own set of exclusive values and cultural traditions, any reality construction may have to reflect upon this on the premise that it is a rule of engagement. It will be necessary in our objective to engage and challenge existing cultural notions with ideas that have the capacity of penetrating traditional attitudes with alternative breadth of view. Lifta represents an identity, and an identity in context to a reality can be perceived and defined as a series and a set of power relationships. With the agenda to protect the place Lifta, any underlining cause should seek to reappraise this identity amongst the traditional conceptions, constructions of rival symbolism and outlooks of place.

FAST's reappraisal is to contend with the cultural workings of identity with a strategy approaching place with the intent to recultivate through gaining regional and national recognition. The real challenge will be to create an informed strategy that can stipulate within the real context of obstacles that are present not only in mind but also on facts created on the ground. For instance, the ethnocentric prejudices and segregation in civil society and the constant barrage of scepticism and antagonism of the 'other'. The grass-roots strategy will aim to counteract such obstacles by reconstructing Lifta's heritage. For instance, FAST will emphasize the value of the relationship between memory and the tangible cultural heritage so that the landscape can convey historical truths capable of empowering Lifta's identity. The workings of the specific use of heritage can have the effect to demystify, reconcile or suggest alternatively to dominant truths present in the conflict.

So the most invaluable resource for an informed strategy will involve relationships to truthful values of Lifta's cultural heritage. Inevitably, the pursuit to justify Lifta's right to exist will also form to define her as a proponent for capacity building in the region. Architectural writings shall be used to create discourse to be used as a vehicle to guide the exploration. The methods proposed will use a clearly defined set of principles and values to create the tools for regional activism. FAST believes that their undertaking will sustain the most integral and credible opportunity of generating a reappraisal to Lifta's situation.

The emphasis of the strategy for regional activism will be based upon the following sets of principles and values:

(i.) Recognize that Lifta has an existing cultivated bond, and that this bond (warrants legitimate recognition) evokes an identity and a relationship to identities.

(ii.) Recognize that this place is inextricably tied and linked to the creation of the modern Nation State of Israel, and therefore is testimony to the phenomenom/event of the creation of the Modern State as well as placing historical perspective and context to her present identity.

(iii.) Recognize that this place contains a unique example of a tangible cultural heritage that evokes a legacy of a place which had a healthy civil equality and no ethnocentric division or segregation.

(iv.)Recognize that Lifta, a place which has an inextricable relationship to the identity of a people and also of a Nation, should have her cultural heritage reappraised so that she can sustain an 'attainable value' for the evaluation of healthy civil progress for the future of this region.

Appraisals of these principles and values will be made clear in individual episodes - beginning with the first episode below and then followed consecutively each week. After the final episode the tools devised for action will be highlighted, thus unfolding the manifesto and taking the next step into the journey of the grassroots activism.

Episode 1.

- Recognize that this place, Lifta, has an existing cultivated bond, and that this bond (warrants legitimate recognition) evokes an identity and a relationship to identities.

Our purpose, first and foremost, is to safeguard the harmony that currently exists between the vivid memories and the architectural antiquities on the landscape. To safeguard a nature of recognition and a sense of belonging. By saving Lifta, we mean to imply that we are trying to protect a place that still exists in the form of a bond. 'Memory' in respect to Lifta is the essence of the place, it is bare without people telling their stories and affirming their union to the place. So sustaining this truthful value is to imply that Lifta is an identity in the shape of a duality. Recognition of this bond existing will mean to recognize a cultivation, which in turn also means to recognize history and a place consisting of a tangible reality.

Considering that an identity in context to a reality can be related to a series and a set of power relationships, Lifta's tangible reality has relationships to other identities either in the form of continuity or of spatial consequence. These relationships are either distinctively within memories - stories - mythologies or through the forms of territory and spatial governance. Authenticating any of Lifta's history would also be laying down the foundations for justifiable cultivations. With the relationship of Lifta, a place with a history prior to 1948 and sited within a territory of the governing power of Israel, Lifta sits inside a surrounding context identifiable by another historical narrative. For the two identities to sustain a shared value - an identifiable relationship, there has to be reason and a value.

Nonetheless, acknowledging that any engagement will initially reflect upon a history of conflict, divisions and segregations between the two identities. And given the differences of outlooks of the main ethnic groups and national identities defined by this history, this should be presumed first as a given situation of the region's reality. However even under these situations Lifta, a place identifiable to a Palestinian origin, still has the capacity to construct a narrative that can allow her identity to be recognised within her regional frontier of the Israeli Nation State. Lifta may be a modern-day ruin, but more importantly she is a monument of the present. She has a unique quality, sustained by her current condition, that can inspire a capacity building opportunity with genuine civic purpose. Again, this is on the assumption of acknowledging that differences, which are currently viewed and designated in the identity of Lifta, can be tolerated for the purposes of contesting and creating curative outlooks between identities and place.

Lifta is tangibly connected to a generation of people who still regard the place to be their ancestral home; if not their home. This same essence and feeling of ancestral origin and home has passed down the next generation and is still strongly felt amongst them. Tragically, Lifta's inhabitants were forcibly abandoned from the place in 1948 during the catastrophic mass exile of Palestinian people known as the Nakba or "catastrophe". A sequence of events synthesized with the establishment of the State of Israel. It refers to the tragedy when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted and most of their villages and cities - over 530 - were destroyed. Whilst many palestinian places affected by the tragedy were either totally removed or annexed under the State of Israel, Lifta stood obscurely due to nearly 60 years of unhinderance from redevelopment. The uniqueness of Lifta is due to the phenomenom that no conquest has physically re-contextualized the place.

This valley landscape torn between Lifta and the proposal of Mei Neptoach lies frozen between two epochs, two histories, two cultures. She is a bond and a sense of belonging amongst 3 generations of people. Her unique circumstance, created out of these consequences, has led her to become a space of captivation, necessity and privalege. At regular periods tours are taken around the grounds of Lifta by Zochrot. Zochrot was founded in March 2002 to promote recognition of the Palestinian Nakba to the State of Israel, its residents and institutions. Yacoub Odeh, a 1st generation descendant of Lifta usually accompanies Zochrot and gives guides to both Palestinians and Israelis on his personal accounts of memories in Lifta. Yacoub is very fond cherishing his childhood memories as he accompanies the tour around his father's old house which is still standing. However, his delight is usually followed by trauma, the trauma of a memory which clearly stays with him always; the Nakba.

Lifta's unique situation has allowed her to be utilized as a memorial in consequence to the tragedy of the nakba. Lifta attracts many people who see her as a place where they can console their grief. Where her desolate state conceals a place which appeals amongst those who want to openly reflect upon an event and a history. She is preserved as a place that has not only tangible significance to the bonds of her descendants, but also amongst the shared value of a people who can relate to an open space that conceals signs of their tragedy and reveals the trauma of their fate. The regular trips by Zochrot and Yacoub Odeh have already demonstrating that Lifta has significant value. They are certain that preservation of a respectful, dignified, and sensitive consideration of this tragedy is a necessary stepping-stone on the path to resolving the conflict between the two peoples and achieving reconciliation between them.

The importance of keeping alive this memory, preserving and sustaining this bond and shared value is that it allows the moment of tragedy to become tangible. To be able to express this mourning from a place which symbolizes and recreates the moments of a tragic event allows confronting and exploring issues of dissonance and trauma to become a real experience. This makes recognition of Lifta an affirmation of a previous discontinuity, of an uprooting of Palestinian memory, of history, and of cultivated identity to a land. Any recognition of this bond has to engage that the story of the Nakba is being told whilst inside a surrounding context juridiscially governed and owned to another historical narrative. Allowing this duality to have legitimate recognition would therefore require some form of mediation and renegotiation on behalf of a narrative that can allow Lifta and the surrounding context to coexist.

However, this would require a narrative that openly accepts truths that occurred during the Palestinian Catastrophe Nakba and the Independence of Israel. 'Memory' begins to take on a whole new meaning as it would have to take into account the narrative of the birth of the modern Israeli State. There is quite a distinct seperation that places meaning on the land between the narrative of Israel and the narrative of the palestinian. Lifta's value can be distinctly characterised as contrasting and incompatible with the historical narrative of the Israeli State. Her ontology can quite easily be perceived as an act of subversion; a conflict of interest and values further provoking discord and confrontation in an act of becoming recognised. Situating the Nakba into a revised historical narrative of the surrounding context is more than likely to create tension and controversy and can quite easily be perceived as an historical conflict and problem.

So how does it become possible to resolve this crisis of values, designating Lifta for curative purposes for the Nakba is bound to any real conceivable reason and sense to justify her existence. Lifta may be perceived as a proponent for Palestinian existentialism, nonetheless she needs her history to be told within the narrative of the region that she belongs. Recognition of Lifta's ruins as a memory, a monument, a bond, and a possible cultural foundation existing within Israel adds extra possibilities for the nation. Lifta has the potential to become the untold story of a nation, epitomizing a common history shared between two disparate cultural groups. She confronts conquest and despair; tying together two opposing value systems. This would mean any real pursuit to safeguard the protection of Lifta would also require a strategy that further creates an enquiry that moneuvres and mediates between a tapestry of recognising histories.

written by Anil Korotane, Architectural Activist, FAST.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Extracts from Midnight
by Mourid Barghouti

Translated by Radwa Ashour

My grandfather, still harbouring the illusion
that all is well with the world,
fills his countryside pipe
for the last time
before the advent of the helmets and bulldozers.

On the bulldozer's teeth
my grandfather's cloak gets hooked.

The bulldozer retreats a few yards,
empties its load,
comes back to fill its huge fork
and has never had enough.

Twenty times, the bulldozer
comes and goes,
my grandfather's cloak still hooked on it.

After the dust and smoke
had cleared from the house that had been standing there
and as I was staring at the new emptiness
I saw my grandfather
wearing his cloak,

wearing the very same cloak,
not one that was similar
but the very same.

He hugged me and maintained a silent gaze
as if his look
ordained the rubble to become a house,
restored the curtains to the windows,
brought my grandmother back to her armchair,
and retrieved her coloured pills,
put back the sheets on the bed,
the lights on the ceiling,
the pictures on the walls,
as if his look brought the handles back to the doors and the balconies to the stars,
as if it made us resume our dinner,
as if the world had not collapsed,
as if heaven had ears and eyes.

He went on staring at the emptiness.
I said:
What shall we do after the soldiers leave?
What will he do after the soldiers leave?
He slowly clenched his fist
recapturing a boxer's resolve in his right hand,
his coarse bronze hand,
the hand which had tamed the thorny slope,
the hand which holds his hoe lightly
and with ease like prayer,
his hand which can split a tree stump with a single blow,
his hand open for forgiveness,
his hand closed on sweets to surprise his grandchildren,
his hand amputated
years ago.

2007-06-28T05:52:00.000-07:00

Row over Israeli architects deepen

follow up article by Susannah Tarbush, published in the Saudi Gazette June 11 2007.

The world of international architecture is being rocked to its foundations by a fierce row over a campaign which demands Israeli architects end their complicity in creating “facts on the ground” which exclude and oppress Palestinians and wipe out the possibility of a viable future Palestinian state.

The dispute has engulfed some of the leading figures in British and Israeli architecture. In an interview in the latest issue of the British weekly magazine Building Design, Israel’s most prominent architect, Moshe Safdie, accuses British architects of being “hypocritical, self-serving and hateful” for signing a petition organized by the London-based organization Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP).

The temperature was raised further when it emerged that a lobbying group British Architect Friends of Israel and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have written jointly to the Paris-based International Union of Architects (UIA) - the worldwide umbrella of 102 national organizations and 1.3 million architects - calling on it to suspend the membership of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) unless RIBA dissociates itself from the APJP petition. The letter alleges that with its “anti-Israeli focus” the campaign violates EU clauses and definitions on national discrimination and anti-Semitism.

The petition was signed by RIBA’s current president Jack Pringle as well as by former presidents Sir Richard MacCormack, Paul Hyett and George Ferguson, and president-elect Sunand Prasad. Boston-based Safdie lambasted Pringle for signing the petition and suggested he should either have resigned as RIBA president before doing so, or should have sought a decision from the RIBA Council over whether it supported the petition.

The petition, which was published as a half-page advertisement in the Times newspaper of London, was signed by more than 260 architects, planners and others from around the world, among them some of Britain’s most famous architects and a number of Israeli architects and human rights activists. The petition says that the actions of Israeli architects and planners working in conjunction with Israel’s policies building of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory are “unethical and contravene professional codes of conduct and UIA codes.”

The petition argues that it is time to challenge the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) and the Israeli government to end such projects, and says the IAUA should adhere to UIA codes. It calls on the IAUA “to declare their opposition to the inhuman Occupation, and to end the participation of their members and fellow professionals in creating facts on the ground with a demographic intent that excludes and oppresses Palestinians.” APJP has sent copies of the petition with letters to the presidents of the IAUA and the UIA.

The petition has infuriated the Israeli government and its supporters, and readers of Israeli newspaper and TV websites have posted numerous hostile messages, in some cases accusing British architects and the British in general of anti-Semitism. A typical message said that “Israel-bashing” England is on its way to becoming “the first Islamic state in Western Europe”. One reason for the anger aroused by the APJP petition is that it came around the same time as the University and College Union (UCU) voted at its annual meeting to support moves towards an academic boycott of Israel. The boycott issue is now one of the hottest topics in British-Israeli relations, and in the House of Commons Prime Minister Tony Blair called on the UCU to drop the resolution it had adopted. The APJP petition does not specifically call for a boycott, but it is being drawn into the boycott controversy.

Moshe Safdie claims to advocate a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict and says that “many have objected, as I have, to building in the West Bank. Some have joined groups fighting the construction of the wall, but we are all aware of the complexity of the issues and all of us, collectively, are disappointed and angered by the position of our British colleagues.” Safdie said he was disgusted that British architects, including Will Alsop, Terry Farrell and Richard MacCormac, had singled out Israel when regimes across the world carry out “the most terrible atrocities.”

Jack Pringle robustly rebutted Safdie’s remarks. He told Building Design: “Moshe Safdie is a brilliant architect but it’s not for him to make policy for the RIBA, myself individually or as president.” Pringle “totally accepts” that there are oppressive regimes all over the world, “but to say you can’t criticize one without criticizing them all is extremely naïve”.

In his blog on the RIBA website, Pringle explained that he and his successor, Sunand Prasad, had signed the petition in their own capacities and not as representatives of RIBA, which is a non-political organization. He added that although he is a staunch supporter of a State of Israel, he signed the petition because “I believe, as a citizen and as an engaged observer, that the Israel/Palestinian issue is the most destabilizing and the most important issue in the Middle East and thus in the world today.” Until a lasting and fair peace is established in the region, there can be no prospect of a stable world peace. “To do this both sides must play by the rules with a measure of respect for each other’s rights. These particular petitions relate to Israel’s actions on territory in contravention of many UN resolutions, with the notable involvement of architects and planners.” Pringle also condemned the “many grave, violent and heinous Palestinian misdemeanors in other spheres of the ongoing war, with its attendant terrorism.”

Pringle rejected any charge of anti-Semitism as “very offensive to me and quite absurd as a glance at the petition with its many Jewish co-signatories will show. Indeed, many Jewish agencies support the petition, and its main promoter is Jewish himself.” (The last reference is to the APJP chairman, the architect Abe Hayeem). He was sorry if any RIBA members were offended by his signing the petition, “but I trust they will understand the balance of my opinion – and my right to express it.”Other signatories to the petition have also publicly defended their stand. The eminent architect, critic and theorist Charles Jencks (pictured below)wrote a letter of protest to Building Design after Michael Peters, who is founder and chairman of the international branding consultancy Identica and has worked extensively with Israeli architects, warned that as a result of the petition “British architects are going to burn their bridges with a number of developers – Israeli, British and European”, Jencks, who has been one of APJP’s most vocal supporters since it was set up in February 2006, described Peters’ warning as being in “the worst tradition of intimidation. Of course, some architects will succumb to such veiled and explicit threats because it sometimes pays to be silent, but the list of signatories – including four RIBA presidents and the next one – shows that, contrary to Peters, many British architects do indeed understand the situation in Israel and that number is growing…One cannot but protest at the destruction of a nation.”

The issuing of the petition coincided with the 40th anniversary of the 1967 war, which has focused world attention on the massive changes that have been wrought by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. As the APJP petition states, acting against international law Israel continues to build illegal settlements on Palestinian territory, with the help of Israeli architects and planners.

The APJP petition highlights “three typical projects that make Israeli architects, planners and design and construction professionals complicit in social, political and economic oppression, in violation of their professional ethics.” One of the projects is in the village of Silwan near Jerusalem, where 88 Palestinian homes are under threat of demolition as part of a development for ultra-religious Israeli settlers from the El-‘Ad group on illegally annexed Palestinian land. The EU has condemned the development. APJP points out that the Ministry of Housing for the Jerusalem District and Jerusalem Municipality appointed Moshe Safdie’s Jerusalem office to prepare a Master Plan for the southern slopes of the Old City which include the Silwan neighbourhood of Al-Bustan where the 88 threatened houses are located.

The second project is for the conversion of the ruins of the Palestinian village of Lifta , also near Jerusalem, into a development for wealthy American visitors with, APJP says, “the exclusion of the original Palestinian inhabitants, their heritage and memory.” APJP is supporting the campaign to save Lifta which is spearheaded by the group the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST).

The third project is the E1 plan to expand the largest illegal Israeli settlement, Ma’ale Adumim, to link it with metropolitan Jerusalem. This will dissect the northern and southern West Bank, destroying the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.

The issuing of the petition raises the question of whether architects should involve themselves in political issues. Former RIBA president Paul Hyett wrote in Building Design that politics has a role to play in architecture. He recalled his past as a member of Architects Against Apartheid, when he played a part in the 1972 decision of RIBA to sever links with the South African Institute of Architects.On a 2002 visit to South Africa, when he was RIBA president, Hyett apologized to the South African Institute of Architects for any upset caused by the decision to sever links 30 years earlier. However, “many South African architects told me that severance had been a huge boost to morale. They said it had highlighted international support for their own disgust at their government’s actions.”

2007-06-15T11:06:00.000-07:00

FAST exhibited the Lifta project in the EU parliament building in Brussels

FAST Call on the EU Parliament to use their influence in making a change by reintroducing the human scale to abstract plans that violate human rights on base of ideological agendas.
The fate of Israel and the fate of Palestine are bound together. The destruction of the country’s genuine cultural heritage is a threat to future sustainability, not just of Palestine and Israel but also of the region and of the world.

At FAST, we truly believe that a just solution for Lifta will form a vital step in reconciliation process between the nations, between Israel and Palestine.

2007-06-14T03:37:00.000-07:00

2007-06-14T01:35:00.000-07:00

Chomsky supports ‘Saving Lifta’ campaign.

(The WMF nomination described in this post has since been rejected - please refer to http://www.wmf.org/ to view nominated sites)

Noam Chomsky along with many leading professionals and academics join the ‘Saving Lifta’ campaign by supporting FAST’s application to nominate Lifta on the 2008 World Monument Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites.

Lifta is one of the last places intact and one of the last opportunities to change the conservation policies in Israel. It is also one of the last chances of officially recognizing the Palestinian history as part of the history of the area, a crucial factor for future sustainability. However, there is no governmental acknowledgment to the fact that the approved redevelopment plan for Lifta is insufficient and subsequently prevent its execution. The current practice of the State defining within its territiory control over heritage policies does suggest the problem that not all heritages within the border will be represented. Quoting non-profit Israeli organization Zochrot, ‘Palestinians villages and cities destroyed in 1948 do not enjoy the protection of relevant bodies, for example the protection accorded to natural sites by the Israeli Society for the Protection of Nature or the protection accorded to ancient historical sites by the Antiquities Authority.’ There is no formal recognition that a good preservation plan for Lifta can allow a precious and unique part of Palestinian patrimony to be conserved.

The main obstacles to the realization of effective site protection are likely to be related to changing influences and policies in both the local and international sphere. On the contrary, our previous encounter with UNESCO to nominate Lifta for World Heritage protection was brushed aside with a remark of disillusionment. For an non-governmental organization (FAST) approaching UNESCO to create an application was inconcievable in coordance to the conventions and terms currently in place between the dynamic of the United Nations and the Nation-State. International conventions and instruments are not substantial safety nets if they don't reach out to cultural heritages that are marginalized within predominant ruling cultures. FAST’s attempt was to highlight issues with the World Heritage Committee to examine existing conventions on the protection of volatile cutural heritages that are denied or under-represented any formal recognition. (For further reading on FAST's intention to contact UNESCO, please click on the December blog: 'Crime & Retribution'.) Lifta represents this sector of heritage, and our efforts were to encourage dialogue in support of her protection whilst addressing her as a place worthy of the recognition of outstanding universal value to the international community. Nonetheless, excepting the partiality of the Quartet of powers (the USA, the EU, the UN & Russia) over the 2 State geopolitical solution and Israel’s current unilateral position, the reality at the moment is that this palestinian heritage existing within the territory of Israel is more likely to turn a blind eye than receive a warm welcome. However there is an influential scheme which responds to threats to cultural heritage sites around the world whilst empowering individuals and organizations the capacity to nominate cultural heritage sites without direct authorization through governments.

Announced every two years, the Worlds Monuments Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites calls international attention to cultural heritage sites around the world threatened by factors such as neglect, vandalism, armed conflict or natural disaster. The Watch raises awareness of the dangers facing cultural heritage sites and can help to raise public awareness of lesser known, but significant sites that are threatened. Each site selected for the Watch list is included in a special publication and the Watch list receives extensive publicity in the international media. Since the Watch's program inception, 481 sites in 109 countries have been included in the Watch. The List of 100 Most Endangered Sites is a program founded by the World Monuments Funds (WMF). Founded in 1965, the WMF is a private, international nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of significant and endangered architectural and cultural heritage sites and pursuing its mission by providing financial support through advocacy, fieldwork, technical assistance, education and onsite training. Unlike national or international designations, the Watch list does not confer permanent historic status or permanent recognition on a site. Instead, by featuring sites every two years, the Watch list seeks to generate public awareness - a sense of urgency - and support the preservation of a wide range of sites at risk. Through the Watch, WMF intends to bring the key problems facing threatened cultural heritage and encourage timely responses for governments, local organizations and the general public.

If Lifta’s nomination is successful, FAST intends to include the nomination in their strategy to devise the drafting of an alternative conservation plan. The alternative plan for Lifta will underline the preservation of the old village as an 'open to public' space. A place where the real history of the village is being told and is accessible to everyone. Also, there is no official recognition to the fact that the participation of the village's former inhabitants and descendents are necessary in underlying Lifta’s fate; it is the very last possibility for Lifta’s inhabitants to maintain a role in the fate of their home town. So planning will accompany an emphasis on tracking down the original community and having their involvement in drafting a conservation plan. There are also local individuals and regional organizations in the field of conservation who are prepared to play a role in a conservation taskforce. However, FAST also fully acknowledges that the viability of any solution towards the drafted conservation plan will ultimately have to seek its acceptance by the Israeli government, as it is the only body that can legally bring to its execution. So a substantial capacity-building conservation plan has to present a proposal which shares an all inclusive appeal.

The nomination to the World Monument Watch can help FAST highlight the plight of Lifta to the wider international audience. The WMF 2008 (to 2010) Endangered Sites nomination’s recognition and accessibility to international media sources and coverage can help place into effect alarm and concern on the current proceedings of the existing redevelopment plan. Gathering advocacy from an internationally respected Cultural Heritage institute such as the WMF can substantiate the real cause of concern in the international community, urging pressure on the Israeli Land Authority and the Jerusalem Municipality Planning Department to reassess the situation of the existing proposal. Both a media campaign and an alternative plan have to coincide to place substantial pressure on the Israeli authorities. We are hoping that the WMF can advocate on the cause by acknowledging that a viable solution has the possibility of being created, and support our efforts for proposing a plan which appeals to the necessary conservation effort. We will also focus efforts to sustain acknowledgement and legal protection for the preservation of Lifta's heritage and freeze any action and progression of the redevelopment plan. It will be important for FAST to determine, through the development of conservation planning instruments, that Lifta can create and meet the criteria to establish herself as heritage worth protecting. We will develop the conservation plan, finalizing the plan in 2009.

The 2008 Endangered List Nomination may be one of only a few possible opportunites of by-passing Israel’s restrictions of what is at present ideologically considered in that region as cultural heritage of outstanding universal value. Volatile cultural heritages such as in the case described for Lifta are in need of recognition so that their histories are neither appropriated or erazed.

To quote Chomsky’s letter of support accompanying Lifta’s 2008 Endangered List nomination:

I have been informed of a proposal to the World Monument Funds to preserve the Palestinian village of Lifta, near Jerusalem, evacuated during the huge dispossession of the population in the 1948 war, one of the rare villages that has not been destroyed. Unless action is taken soon, it too will disappear, absorbed into the expanding suburbs of Greater Jerusalem.

Whatever one’s attitudes and opinions about these grim events and their aftermath, no decent person can fail to recognize the trauma of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled or were expelled during what is by now recognized by leading Israeli historians of very different persuasions as large-scale “ethnic cleansing” (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, to mention two). And it is evident to all that the events led to a dramatic transformation of a small region of the world of unique historical importance, from the earliest days of human evolution and through the formation of some of the world’s major civilizations. Very little remains from the pre-war period, its culture, traditions, and historical memories. The survival of Lifta is an unusual exception, a treasure that should not be lost. I hope very much that some way will be found to protect and preserve it.

Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor
MIT
Cambridge MA 02139
Jan. 12, 2007

2007-06-13T00:51:00.000-07:00

The separation wall near Qalandia checkpoint, between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah, 28 December 2006. (Fadi Arouri/MaanImages)

Pressure mounts on Israel's architects

Susannah Tarbush, The Electronic Intifada, 10 June 2007

(FAST - 'This article by Susannah Tarbush extracted from The Electronic Intifada continues on the petitions made to the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) by the Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP). The APJP have consulted the professional codes of conduct of the International Union of Architects, the UIA codes, as a plight for a universal ethical code to be upheld by the IAUA. This article elaborates more extensively on this ongoing story occurring in the backdrop of the Lifta campaign.')

Just days before 5 June's 40th anniversary of the start of the June 1967 war, some of the biggest names in British architecture signed a petition calling on Israeli architects and their fellow professionals to stop participating in the creation of "facts on the ground", which obliterate the idea of a viable future Palestinian state.

The petition, organised by London-based Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP), condemns "three typical projects that make Israeli architects, planners and design and construction professionals complicit in social, political and economic oppression, in violation of their professional ethics." The three projects are the E1 plan to expand the largest illegal settlement -- Ma'ale Adumim -- to link it with metropolitan Jerusalem, and developments in the village of Silwan and the deserted village of Lifta.

The signatories include Charles Jencks, Will Alsop (Stirling Prize winner in 2000), Ted Cullinan, Rick Mather and Sir Terry Farrell. The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Jack Pringle is also a signatory as are former presidents Sir Richard MacCormack, Paul Hyett and George Ferguson and president-elect Sunand Prasad.

In all, more than 260 architects, planners, academics and others have signed the petition, from countries including Britain, Israel, Palestine, Australia, the USA, Japan, Cuba, Brazil, Finland and the Netherlands. The petition was published as an advertisement in the London newspaper The Times; the full version can be seen (and signed) on the APJP website at http://www.apjp.org/.

Coincidentally, the issuing of the petition came as the London Independent newspaper reported that Theodor Meron, who was the Israeli Foreign Ministry's legal adviser in 1967, still believes he was right to warn the Israeli government after the 1967 war that it would be illegal to build Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Judge Meron is now one of the world's leading international jurists.

The APJP petition asserts that the actions of Israeli architects and planners working in conjunction with Israel's policy of building illegal settlements on Palestinian territory are "unethical and contravene professional codes of conduct and [International Union of Architects] UIA codes." It says it is time to challenge the [Israeli Association of United Architects] IAUA and for the Israeli government to end such projects, and calls on the IAUA to adhere to UIA codes. APJP calls on the IAUA "to declare their opposition to the inhuman Occupation, and to end the participation of their members and fellow professionals in creating facts on the ground with a demographic intent that excludes and oppresses Palestinians."

The petition has been sent to UIA President Gaetan Siew, IAUA President Anda Barr and to the Israeli Housing Ministry. A copy has also been sent to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office.

APJP says this is the first time Israeli architects have been directly challenged in this way. As APJP chairman, the architect Abe Hayeem, put it to SaudiDebate: "The occupation is an architectural enterprise, with the separation wall, settlements and the matrix of control -- bridges, tunnels, checkpoints and complex terminals." The occupation projects are perpetuating apartheid, with all settlements built within a matrix of separation. The terminals -- including the Kalandia terminal -- are elaborate architectural constructions.

Crucially, the petition has been signed by a number of Israeli individuals and organisations, such as the head of Bezalel Academy's architecture department Professor Zvi Efrat, the architect, author and scholar Eyal Weizman, the director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) Jeff Halper, Zochrot director Eitan Bronstein, director of BIMKOM (Planners for Planning Rights) Shmuel Groag, director of the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST) Malkit Shoshan, graphic designer David Tartakover (winner of the Israeli prize for design in 2002) and professor of geography at Ben Gurion University Oren Yiftahel.

Palestinian signatories include architect Haifa Hammami (the secretary of APJP), architect and professor at Al-Quds University Osama Hamdan, architects Fahmi Salameh and Nadia Habash, and the director of the Ramallah-based NGO RIWAQ -- the Centre for Architectural Conservation, Suad Amiry.

The petition has aroused criticism from Israel's supporters. The chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jon Benjamin, told the Guardian newspaper: "What they are saying is that they have a certain view and that Israeli architects must publicly declare that to be their position as well." Benjamin said that Israeli Arabs and Jews were working together on numerous low profile but worthy projects in the Occupied Territories, and that "the two sides should be encouraged to work together."

When the Guardian article was republished by the Israeli daily the Jerusalem Post and on the Ynetnews website it attracted a host of hostile comments from readers accusing APJP, British architects, and the British in general of anti-Semitism. Many of those posting comments assumed that APJP was calling for a boycott of Israeli architects -- although the petition makes no mention of a boycott -- and drew parallels between the petition and the boycotts of Israel called for by organisations of British academics, doctors and journalists. Jerusalem-based Infolive.tv website said that "anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bias and one-sidedness has often been cited by observers as prevalent in the British media and academic world. " There were also negative reactions in the blogosphere; one blogger compared the British architects to Nazi architect Albert Speer.

"The IUA principle states that architects 'shall respect and help conserve the systems of values and the natural and cultural heritage of the community in which they are creating architecture. They shall strive to improve the environment and the quality of the life and habitat within it in a sustainable manner, being fully mindful of the effect of their work on the widest interests of all those who may reasonably be expected to use or enjoy the product of their work'."An article in the British weekly magazine Building Design quoted Michael Peters, founder and chairman of the international branding consultancy Identica, as warning: "British architects are going to burn their bridges with a number of developers -- Israeli, British and European."

Peters, who has worked extensively with Israeli architects, alleged that British architects do not understand the situation in Israel. "Getting involved in a lobby group can only do a disservice to the whole architectural profession" he said. "To accuse [Israeli] architects of being complicit is nonsense."

But Abe Hayeem told Building Design that his fellow architect supporters were "pretty courageous" and insisted that architects would not be deterred from backing causes they supported. British architect Will Alsop strongly defended the petition, saying it is "not against Israel, it's for Palestine". Alsop said: "I think the Palestinians are living in a prison and they deserve better than that. I'd like fellow colleagues in Israel to feel some responsibility about this shabby treatment. Architects are a fairly humanitarian lot and perhaps they could help."

For architects to be supportive of APJP can potentially have adverse career repercussions, as was dramatically shown by the volte face of one of Britain's most famous architects, Lord Richard Rogers. When APJP was set up in February 2006, its inaugural meeting took place in Lord Rogers' offices in London and Lord Rogers made some introductory remarks.

But within weeks Rogers publicly dissociated himself from the group, dismaying APJP and its sympathisers. His U-turn came after powerful pro-Israeli interests in New York threatened him with the loss of his commission for the $1.7 billion project to expand the Jacob K. Javits Convention Centre in Manhattan because of his links with APJP. The late Senator Javits was an ardent supporter of Israel. Other Richard Rogers Partnership projects in New York were also threatened.

Rogers at first said he was dissociating himself from APJP because of its published aims and "in view of the suggested boycott by some members," although APJP denied it was promoting a boycott. He said he had only hosted the APJP meeting as a favour to Abe Hayeem. Rogers subsequently enlisted the services of legendary New York PR man Howard Rubenstein and hardened his line, coming out with statements defending Israel's right to build its separation wall. He described the Israel-Palestine conflict as being between a "terrorist" state and a "democratic" one and said that he was "all for the democratic state".

Despite this initial setback, APJP has proved effective in mobilising opinion within the architectural profession in Britain and worldwide. As in its latest petition, it strengthens its arguments by focusing on specificities in addition to stating its broad ethos and aims. In Silwan, one of the three projects detailed in the APJP petition, 88 Palestinian homes are under threat of demolition as part of a development for ultra-religious settlers from the El 'Ad movement. Silwan is part of East Jerusalem, whose annexation by Israel after the 1967 war is considered illegal under international law.

The Ministry of Housing for the Jerusalem District and Jerusalem Municipality appointed the Jerusalem office of the Israeli architect Moshe Safdie to prepare a Master Plan for the southern slopes of the Old City. The plan includes the Silwan neighbourhood of Al-Bustan in which the 88 threatened houses are located, near the archaeological site of biblical Siloam.

The planned area -- termed the historical 'City of David' -- is the brainchild of El 'Ad, a fundamentalist settler group which has been buying and expropriating houses in Palestinian neighbourhoods for many years with the tacit approval of the Jerusalem mayoralty. APJP points out that the EU has condemned the development, and that the Silwan plan contravenes the spirit and letter of the Road Map. The Road Map states that Israel should end actions including the confiscation and demolition of Palestinian homes and property as a punitive measure or to facilitate Israeli construction.

APJP is coordinating its call on Silwan with local Israeli and Palestinian architects and NGOs including BIMKOM, ICAHD, FAST, Ir Amim (City of Peoples), ACRI (Association for Civil Rights in Israel), Bat Shalom and ARIJ (Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem).

The second project highlighted in the petition concerns the deserted village of Lifta. The 4,000-year old village lies just outside Jerusalem and its last Palestinian inhabitants were killed or driven out by the Israeli Army and the Irgun in 1948. Today it is more or less a ghost town frozen in time, with its former inhabitants scattered between East Jerusalem, Ramallah, Jordan and the US.

APJP describes the campaign to save Lifta as "a plea against architectural erasure and the destruction of memory. While Israel proudly preserves its biblical heritage and archaeological sites, the rich Palestinian heritage is being allowed to disappear or deliberately destroyed."

A renovation project by architect Gabriel Cartes of the Groug-Cartes firm, in collaboration with Ze'ev Temkin of TIK projects, aims to turn Lifta into an expensive and exclusively Jewish residential area, mainly for Americans. It would have 300 luxury flats, a large hotel, a big mall and a large tourist resort. Hundreds of pre-1948 Palestinian homes would be destroyed to obliterate any reminder that the area was once a prosperous Arab town. APJP says this is "a process amounting to cultural vandalism."

APJP is supporting the Israeli group FAST in the campaign to preserve Lifta. Israeli organisations Zochrot and BIMKOM have also opposed the Lifta Master Plan. APJP's petition asks for Lifta to be retained as a ruin or a memorial as a reminder of its real past or -- preferably -- to be allowed to be re-inhabited by survivors or descendants of the original residents. Either way, survivors and descendants should be consulted. Four generations later the descendants are still protesting for the right to return: the APJP petition has been signed by a number of "Liftawis".

The third project named in the petition is the E1 plan to expand the largest illegal settlement, Ma'ale Adumim, so as to link it with metropolitan Jerusalem. Ma'ale Adumim is the largest settler city, housing 30,000, and "stands out as the key element in Israeli's colonial expansion as far west as possible from Jerusalem towards Jericho." E1 is the hilly area between East Jerusalem and Ma'ale Adumim and Israel is intending to annexe it to make a continuous urban development. Under the project, designed by Shlomo Aharonson, some 5,600 settlement homes for 25,000 new residents will be added to the municipal area of Ma'ale Adumim. In addition, some 1,600 dunums of land are being confiscated to erect Israel's separation wall for Ma'ale Adumim.

APJP says the project contravenes the Road Map and blocks any future possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state by cutting off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, and cutting off the northern part of the West Bank from the southern part. "This deliberate violation of the road map and the Oslo accord forestalls any basis for negotiating land for peace. When complete, the total area of Ma'ale Adumim and E1 will be 55,000 dunums -- an area larger than Tel Aviv in the heart of what should have been a Palestinian state."

In calling on the IAUA to stick to International Union of Architects (UIA) codes, it particularly has in mind the principle in the UIA charter on obligations to the public. This principle states that "architects have obligations to the public to embrace the spirit and letter of the laws governing their professional affairs, and should thoughtfully consider the social and environmental impact of their professional activities."

The principle states that architects "shall respect and help conserve the systems of values and the natural and cultural heritage of the community in which they are creating architecture. They shall strive to improve the environment and the quality of the life and habitat within it in a sustainable manner, being fully mindful of the effect of their work on the widest interests of all those who may reasonably be expected to use or enjoy the product of their work." IAUA is a member of UIA, as is RIBA, and it is possible that the issue of IAUA members' alleged contraventions of the UIA's charter will be raised at the UIA council.

APJP's activities have inevitably aroused controversy, including its petition last September addressed to the organisers of the 10th International Architecture Biennale in Venice asking them to consider withdrawing the Israeli pavilion. The petition argued that the Israeli pavilion "totally excludes the Palestinians who are the target and real victims of the seemingly unending series of wars being memorialized, and awards Israeli the sole position of victim and victor."

The Israeli pavilion, funded by the Israeli government, consisted of 15 memorials built between 1949 and 2006 to commemorate Israeli military war dead or the Holocaust. The Israeli Defense Ministry provided substantial support.

In an interview during the Biennale the eminent British architect, critic and writer Charles Jencks said the problem with the pavilion was that it had no place for the Palestinians who are "not allowed to commemorate or memorialize anything in their past that has been repressed, such as the 560 villages, towns and cities which have been destroyed and wiped out." Jencks acknowledged that "architects can't be heroes", but asked: "How do we as architects not become complicit with power and a negative national situation? ... I don't believe architects willingly knew they were letting themselves in to be an arm of the Israeli defence department, but that is the way it has come out."

Jencks alluded to the tensions between some Israeli and other architects when he said that he had discussed APJP's objections to the Israeli pavilion with Moshe Safdie, one of Israel's best-known architects, but Safdie had failed to see his point of view. "Moshe Safdie says he'll never speak to me again, he hates me for saying this. I still regard him as a great architect and a friend."

Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmith's College, University of London, is a strong supporter of APJP and has over the years produced a body of work of much relevance to the organisation. In his latest book -- Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation -- to be published shortly in London by Verso, Weizman "unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a constructed artifice, in which natural and built features function as weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged." He "lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation."

Susannah Tarbush is a London-based British freelance journalist and consultant.

2007-06-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

2007-06-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

Staring into the abyss to envision a conservation plan.......

The goal: mediating between the Israeli national narrative and the Lifta conservation plan.

The conservation plan for Lifta will be unique. The local planning authority and the legal land owner will be confronted to closely examine the offer to negotiate the space for the design of the conservation plan. This is with attention to the period just prior to the events of 1948; the uprooting of the village. Therefore, any concept of place has to envisage that the story of the village Lifta is being told within a national narrative that openly accepts truths that occurred during the Palestinian Catastrophe Nakba and the Independence of Israel. FAST's campaign journey so far has concluded an appraisal of Lifta to be synonymous of a tragedy and a stark symbol of Retribution. (For further reading on Lifta’s appraisal click on the December blog: 'Crime & Retribution' or scroll down below.) So how do you sustain the trust of the vanquisher so that they may anticipate their past actions without the predicament of compromising their truths to a vulnerable effect? And how do you appropriate a place of reconciliation in hope to consequently redeem this symbol of retribution?

Lifta becomes the untold story of a nation. It epitomizes a common history shared between two ethnic groups. Each group subjective by experience and having their own individual identity of higher values articulated through dualities of orientation, outlook and beliefs. Lifta confronts conquest and despair; the place ties together two opposing value systems. Both the existential identities of the conqueror and the conquered also have the further capacity to engage and recipricate their mythologies into a combination of curative acts. How do the conjunctions of these truths fit together? How is the role of the conservation plan and architecture involved to allow a contestation of history through sustainability and creativity? What beneficial reality constructions can these opposing value systems generate together? And finally, what new environment will result out of this re-imagined narrative?

These are preliminary questions etching the surface of an investigation into creating Lifta's conservation plan. To commence shortly.....

2007-05-29T03:51:00.000-07:00

2007-05-29T03:21:00.000-07:00

Opposing the architects of the occupation

By Esther Zandberg

(This article extracted from Israeli newspaper Haaretz recounts more on APJP's petitions and their efforts to heighten awareness and consolidate support against the violations imposed by discriminating planning techniques. FAST will like to thank the APJP for their generous support for highlighting attention to the Lifta campaign.)

About 200 British and Israeli architects and academics, including people of international renown, have signed a manifesto initiated by the British organization Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, which calls on Israeli architects and planners to put an end to being "partners in social, political and economic oppression" in the occupied territories, "which violates the professional ethics acceptable to all."

The manifesto points to three representative projects currently promoted bythe planning authorities: the master plan for the E1 region between the settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim and Jerusalem, which will prevent Palestinianterritorial contiguity; construction in Silwan in East Jerusalem, which involves the demolition of dozens of homes; and a plan to build a luxury neighborhood on the remains of the former Palestinian village of Lifta.

The organization considers participation in these projects, construction in the occupied territories and any planning in Israel that involves discrimination and repression, to be a blatant violation of international conventions, which require professional and ethical responsibility for the social and environmental consequences of planning and construction work. The organization has sent letters on the subject to the International Architects Association and to the Israel Association of United Architects. It has also turned to Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski and to Minister of Construction and Housing Meir Sheetrit on the matter.

The British organization has been trying for a long time to arouse international awareness on the subject. About two years ago it initiated a boycott against the Israeli architectural community, which does not forbid its members from being involved in the kind of planning and construction the organization defines as unethical. Prior to the opening of the International Architecture Biennale in Venice last September, the organization tried to prevent the presentation of the Israeli exhibition "Life Saver: Typology of Commemoration in Israel," which dealt with the architecture of commemoration, ignoring the Palestinian side. The initiatives did not result in any kind of action, and the architectural community in Israel continues to bury its head in the sand.

Among the signatories to the manifesto, which was initiated by architect Abe Hayeem, the chair of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, are architectural historian Charles Jencks; president of the Royal Institute of British Architects Jack Pringle; American sociologist Saskia Sassen; geographer Oren Yiftachel of Ben-Gurion University in the Negev; and architects Will Alsop of Britain, Zvi Hecker of Israel and Berlin, Yaron Turel of Israel, as well as Israeli Zvi Efrat, who heads the architecture department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.

The manifesto was published in The Times of London and in the British architectural journal Building Design. A new book by architect Eyal Weizman, called "Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation," has recently been published in Britain. Weizman, who is among the signatories of the manifesto, was one of the first to point an accusing finger at the Israeli planning community for cooperating, through both silence and action, with a policy of repression and occupation, and placed the subject on the agenda of international architectural discourse.

2007-05-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

Big names urge Israelis to end ‘oppressive’ works

(Article extracted from British 'Building Design' magazine surrounding APJP's 3 Petitions - including support for Lifta campaign)

25 May 2007

By Helen Crump

Alsop, Farrell and MacCormac join call to stop work on schemes that oppress Palestinians.

A host of celebrated architects including Will Alsop, Terry Farrell, Richard MacCormac, Rick Mather and Ted Cullinan have waded into the politics of the Middle East with a challenge to fellow professionals in Israel to cease work that “excludes and oppresses” Palestinians.

The architects, who also include RIBA president Jack Pringle and president-elect Sunand Prasad, have signed a petition organised by Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine which accuses construction professionals working on three separate Israeli developments of “social, political and economic oppression.”

“APJP asserts that the actions of our fellow professionals working with these enterprises are clearly unethical, immoral and contravene universally recognised professional codes of conduct,” a spokesman said.

“We ask the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) to meet their professional obligations … to declare their opposition to this inhuman occupation.”

The IAUA was unavailable for comment, but the action was condemned as foolish and damaging by Michael Peters, founder and chairman of the Identica brand agency, who has worked extensively with architects in Israel.

“British architects are going to burn their bridges with a number of developers — Israeli, British and European,” he said.

Last year Richard Rogers faced stinging criticism from US clients after he hosted a meeting of APJP (News March 10, 2006).

The petition, which focuses on the village of Silwan in east Jerusalem, the E1 plan for the expansion of Israeli settlement Ma’ele Adumim, and former Palestinian village Lifta, was strongly defended by Alsop.

“I think the Palestinians are living in a prison and they deserve better than that,” he said. “I’d like fellow colleagues in Israel to feel some responsibility about this shabby treatment. Architects are a fairly humanitarian lot and perhaps they could help.”

He added: “This is not against Israel, it’s for Palestine.”

Petition organiser Abe Hayeem, a London-based architect and APJP chair, called his fellow architect supporters “pretty courageous”, and insisted architects would not be deterred from backing causes they supported.

But Peters said British architects did not understand the situation in Israel.“Getting involved in a lobby group can only do a disservice to the whole architectural profession,” he added. “To accuse [Israeli] architects of being complicit is nonsense.”

2007-05-24T02:24:00.000-07:00

2007-05-24T01:36:00.000-07:00

Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP) have advertised in The Times (24/05/2007) for support for 3 petitions including Lifta campaign.

Shortly, the APJP will be sending 3 petitions in protest to challenge the unethical actions of Israeli architects and planners. Their half-page advertisement includes a list of signatories from highly acclaimed British and International professionals and academics who have signed the petition in support to the projects. The advertisement reads as follows:

Acting against international law, Israel continues to build settlements on Palestinian territory. Israeli architects and planners have helped build settlements and towns on appropriated Palestinian land. Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP) assert that the actions of Israeli architects and planners working in conjunction with this enterprise, are unethical, and contravene professional codes of conduct and UIA codes. It is time to challenge the IAUA and the Israeli government to end such projects. We have launched a petition to highlight 3 projects that typify the appropriation of Palestinian land aided by Israeli architects and other design professionals:

In Silwan 88 Palestinian homes are under threat of demolition. This is part of a development for ultra-religious Israeli settlers on illegally annexed Palestinian land. The E1 Plan expands the largest illegal settlement, Ma'ale Adumim, to link it with metropolitan Jerusalem; it will dissect the northern and southern West Bank, destroying the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state. Support the campaign to save Lifta, ruins of a Palestinian village, from being converted into a development for wealthy American visitors, to the exclusion of the original inhabitants, their heritage and memory. We call on the Israeli Association of United Architects to adhere to UIA Codes of Coduct, and end the participation of their members and fellow professionals in creating 'facts on the ground' to obliterate the idea of a viable future Palestinian state. If you would like to add your name to the petition or see the complete list of signatories, please go to http://www.apjp.org or mailto:info@apjp.org

2007-05-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

VOLUME #11 Cities Unbuilt

Volume is a project by Archis + AMO + C-LAB + MIT +...

'It seems an eternal distinction: sometimes people build, sometimes they destroy. However, since we have a concept of modernity, we also understand that building is very often based on sheer destruction. It is ‘the price of progress’. A new insight is now emerging: much destruction also has an agenda. It has a precision that reminds us of architecture. It has a formal dimension that reminds us of design. In this issue: explore the sinister creativity of Cities Unbuilt.'

FAST's articles on Lifta will also feature in this issue of Volume magazine, as well as FAST's Maps of Reconstruction and the collaboration work with Partizan Republic and DJ Visser in the South Caucasus.

You can order a copy from http://www.archis.org

2007-02-07T04:34:00.000-08:00

2007-02-07T04:33:00.000-08:00

SAVING LIFTA – A CASE AGAINST ARCHITECTURAL ERASURE

"Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine" calls on the Israeli Association of United Architects and the Mayor of Jerusalem, to support this campaign to save Lifta from real estate development, and to stop the proposals by Gabriel Cartes of the Groug-Cartes firm, which collaborated with Ze'ev Temkin of TIK Projects.

This is a plea against architectural erasure and the destruction of memory. While Israel proudly preserves its biblical heritage and archaeological sites, the rich Palestinian heritage is being allowed to disappear or is deliberately destroyed.

A poignant example, and an important symbol of this is the 4000 years old village of Lifta, which lies just outside Jerusalem, the nearest Arab village to the Jerusalem wall. It has been abandoned and has remained relatively untouched since the creation of Israel. T he Israeli army and the Irgun killed or drove out the last Palestinian inhabitants in 1948. Today Lifta is more or less a ghost town , frozen in time. The former villagers live mainly in East Jerusalem, Ramallah, Jordan and in exile in the United States.

Now, however, a renovation project by the architect Gabriel Cartes of the Groug-Cartes firm, which collaborated with Ze'ev Temkin of TIK Projects, aims to turn Lifta into an expensive and exclusively Jewish residential area, mainly for Americans. The planned neighborhood would include three hundred luxury flats, a large hotel, a big mall, and a large tourist resort. In the process of carrying out the scheme, hundreds of Palestinian homes, all of which predated the creation of Israel in 1948, would be erased to obliterate any reminder that the area was once a prosperous Arab village – erasing its Palestinian history in the process. Architecture is being used to eradicate ethnic culture, that amounts to cultural vandalism.

Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine are supporting FAST (Foundation for achieving Seamless Territory) in a campaign to preserve Lifta by being put on the World Monument Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites. The Israeli organizations Zokhrot and BIMKOM have also opposed this Israeli real-estate plan.

There is an ongoing ban on ‘internal refugees’ to return to the remnants of their destroyed villages. The Lifta masterplan does not refer to its Palestinian past. In this effort, architecture is being used as a political device to further Israel’s colonial policy.

The “Or Commission” report, which investigated the causes of the riots by the Israeli Arab population in October 2000, is quoted in the written objection filed by BIMKOM in their original defence of Lifta. "The role of the state is not reduced to material matters alone," it states. "Governing authorities must find ways that will enable Arab citizens to express in public life their culture and identity in an appropriate and respectful manner.

"We ask that Liftah is retained as a ruin to be a reminder of its past or it should be allowed to be re-inhabited by survivors or descendants of the original residents. In either case they should be consulted. Four generations later the descendants are still protesting for the right to return.

Yakub Odeh, a Lifta refugee says:“ Land ..that is designated for residential use should be planned such that it will be appropriate for the housing of the original residents of Lifta and their descendants, whose property was taken from them through no wrong of their own. This would enable the purchase or return of the land to them, and would constitute a rectification of the wrongs done to the place and its residents, and not only provide land to people of means who never had the slightest connection or link to the place."

He continues…

“There are 37 Lifta refugees in East Jerusalem and Ramallah, and we have a Lifta Association; and now the internet makes it possible to keep in touch with those that have moved further away. We all want to return to our village. I’m sure we can achieve our dream through peaceful means….We will never give in. They say that every human being is born in the land, but for us Palestinians, our land is born in us.”

Esther Zandberg said in Haaretz in November 2004, when the plan was first presented: “the construction plan that has been under discussion since 1996 is a cause for wonder with regard to why it was ever commissioned. On such a emotionally charged and politically symbolic site, with terrain conditions that are difficult for modern construction, on a site on which the development of road, water or sewage infrastructure would require immense technological effort and heavy monetary expenditure, in a landscape in which any intrusion could be the source of perpetual regret, and on land on which there are no real estate pressures that might have provided an easy excuse, the plan seems opposed to all common sense, harmful to the interests of all of the parties on both sides of the conflict, and perhaps an attempt to conceal evidence of the existence of a people living in a "country without a people."

In conclusion, Dafna Golan Agnon a prominent Israeli sociologist from the Hebrew University:

“It is possible and proper to develop Lifta as a village that preserves the historical Palestinian memory of the place. Preserving the memory of the village and its history could be a focal point for reconciliation between Jewish and Arab citizens, and offer an experience that helps lead to a solution of peace with our neighbors.

In a country that sanctifies memory, erasing Palestinian history is not only immoral, it is also foolish. We will not be able to build a future worthy of the name here if we erase and deny the memory of thousands of Palestinian refugees. It is possible to take their homes and erase their villages from the face of the earth, but as we know from Jewish history, longing for the roots and memories of homes is preserved for many hundreds of years. It is still possible to preserve the village, repair its buildings and turn it into a place of study of the past, forming a basis for dialogue about a common future of Israelis and Palestinians.”

If you would like to add your name to the petition by APJP, please go to:

http://www.apjp.org or mailto:info@apjp.org

Signed

Charles Jencks, Eyal Weizman, Abe Hayeem, Sunand Prasad, Hans Haenlein, Haifa Hammami, Neil Lambert, Wade Sowman, Mike Gwilliam,Joanna Chambers, Antoine Raffoul, Jake BrownIan Martin, Mike Macrae, Phil GusackKate Mackintosh, Martin O’Shea, Stefano FerrariTerry Meade, Fahmi Salameh, Michael GwilliamOsama Hamdan, Steve Fox, John HodgeAdrian King, Joe Lynes, Steve Kessel, Vassilis Ierides, Issa Sarie, Dr. Gaetano Palumbo, Nadia Habash, Rand el haj Hasan, Saleem Jaleel, Tariq Z. Khayyat, Jalal El Ali, Tarek RaghebAmal Moh, Abdulmajid Karanouh

2006-12-15T06:10:00.000-08:00

2006-12-15T06:09:00.000-08:00

Crime and Retribution

UNESCO says 'Get Real' to a World Heritage nomination for a Palestinian village in Israel.

FAST - 'The Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory’ is campaigning to save the heritage of a Palestinian village in Israel. The consequences of which can take a significant step towards the reconciliation question that firmly delves within the causes of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

On May 15th 2006 a conference at Amsterdam's Debalie cultural centre called 'Reconstruction of Memory' was held by FAST in conjunction and commemoration to the 58th Nakba Day. The Nabka was the Palestinian tragedy that coincided with the creation and Independence of Israel. In that single event of 1948 many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly uprooted from their native lands. Before the events of 1948, Muslims and Jews were living relatively in peace. This was also very true in Lifta, a Palestinian village on the north-west edge of Jerusalem. Although the village consisted of 5 big tribes of roughly 3000 people, there was still a Jewish minority who were considered as equal people - they went to the same schools, sat together at the coffee houses, went to each others festivals, and were known to have been living in and sharing the same houses. However, Lifta suffered the same consequences as many other towns and villages that were uprooted during the catastrophe of the Nakba.

Lifta was also the talking point of the conference at Debalie. The village stands obscurely due to nearly 60 years of unhinderance from development. The antiquities of this village consist of a traditional example of arab vernacular architecture cultivated over hundreds of years. Although tens of houses have been either destroyed or deteriorated since the war in 1948 and since then, many of them still remain poised and dominant on the landscape . The uniqueness of Lifta is due to the phenomenon that no conquest has physically re-contextualized the place. Lifta's geographical location within a valley has largely led to the place being protected from the civilization that passes above on the Tel Aviv highway. It is a place that lies frozen between two epochs, two histories, and two cultures. A place untouched by ideological regime change, set within a picturesque landscape and the first remnants of a place to glance as the gateway into Jerusalem.

The architecture of Lifta is important because a generation of people are still able to recognize the place. It exists as a place within the memories of a people, identifiable by the ruins of the buildings and structures cultivated into the landscape. 'Memory' in respect to Lifta is the essence of the place, it is bare without people telling their stories and affirming their bonds. Lifta also bares the scars of the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is a memory in which victimization has formed part of the Palestinian identity of the 'self'; and a memory which defines shared values amongst the Palestinians. An old lady recounts the day her family were forcibly removed from Lifta, "The first attack in May 1948; I was at home with my family - we did not have weapons to defend ourselves. From my family, 5-6 people were killed by the bomb on the coffee shop. A man from our family hit a Jewish bus. They would collect money from each of the houses to buy rifles. In the end, they attacked us. No-one helped from outside. Then we ran to the lower part of Lifta. The militia was hitting everyone in the upper hills of Lifta and then we ran away." She goes on to say, "To see your land and that your land has been taken away and now that we're living in refugee camps, you do feel pain and suffering. If they were to give me a tent I would go back because it is my homeland." FAST believes that this place has the capacity to allow exiled refugees to re-engage with memories associated to the tragic events of the Nakba.

This place also represents a sector of heritage that is understated and over-looked, not fitting the image or the natural assumptions of cultural heritage. We are calling it the 'ordinary', what we can generally accept as places of the everyday - buildings, structures and landscapes reciprocated and cultivated into everyday cultural life. However to be more clear in our distinction of the 'ordinary' as cultural heritage, places which have forged bonds over time between people and place and accustomed the value of becoming identifiable as native places of origins - genealogical foundations. The 'ordinary' in Lifta's context has a real case to be presented as a cultural heritage. Lifta's buildings and structures are every bit as much important to the future of this region. The duality that exists between the memory of a people and the tangible heritage can allow possibilities to directly engage with issues of history and tragedy. It is a place of study and reflection and has the potential to seek consolation through justice, and healing though the opportunity of reconciliation. Lifta can also act as an instrument of dialogue between different cultural allegiances and offer a common vision aimed at cultural development. Lifta has the potential to provide the unique opportunity to show what potentially can be possible in this region. The site contains a 'cultural heritage' which should be regarded as a common-ground to be used as a foundation to be built upon.

However all of this is threatened by a redevelopment plan and this we believe has great consequences. The redevelopment plan will remove the heritage by re-appropriating the architecture with a new name and identity with an indifferent reference to its palestinian heritage. It will eradicate the memory that is currently attributed to the identity of Lifta. The redevelopment plan will change the name of Lifta to Mei Neftoach (Spring) in accordance to an ancient historical name to the place. And architectural mimicry of the Palestinian cultivated houses shall be mass produced around the lands of Lifta to supplement desirable and exclusive developments to cater for hotels and private accommodation for the non-resident Jewish elite. All reference to its cultivated Palestinian heritage will be undermined through forgetfulness; terminally erased.

It has been important for FAST to reflect upon the term of 'cultural heritage' and gather the necessary paths Lifta have to consider to be part of a cultural heritage worthy of protection. The conference at DeBalie consisting of a variety of academics and practicing professionals, either working in the context of Israel or internationally on projects involving heritage. Lifta was placed into a variety of contexts ranging from the destruction of heritages and cultural properties to reconstruction and rehabilitation projects, as well as the real and historical context of the situation of Israel and Palestine. The American architecture historian Andrew Herscher, who spoke at the conference, wrote the reports on the destruction of cultural heritage at the Slobodan Miloševic trial for the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity in Kosovo. The survey was not focused solely on listed monuments and this issue was to raise further debate over the definition of monuments in the trial. An initial distinction between monuments of culture and ordinary religious monuments was not singled out when evaluating destruction to properties of a particular ethnicity. If monuments could be declared as fulfilling cultural and religious function; heritage could also be presumed of comprising of people's 'belief' systems. Was there a case to redefine what constitutes to cultural monuments of protection i.e. 'fulfilling cultural and religious function and comprising of people's beliefs systems'? And could it be proved that the intent to destroy a cultural identity was evident by the complete removal of a sign that a monument ever existed? Andrew Herscher points out that after the war and the destruction of important buildings, the violence of renovation and restoration begins. They are, says Herscher, entirely ideological terms. In Pristina, he says, more damage was inflicted by reconstruction than by war. Political and economic interests determine what, where and how restoration takes place. Similarly, listed monuments in Israel are likely to be conditioned to a considerable extent by ideological considerations; how could they be by-passed? It has been important for FAST to determine to what extent heritage organization's planners and planning conventions would take into consideration 'memory', from Lifta's particular situation, as an invaluable component of conservation practice. We wanted to put across the 3 following questions to UNESCO, ICOMOS and the World Heritage Committee.

- What are the criteria for an 'ordinary environment' to become a monument?

- If 'history is written by the victors'; how can the heritage of the 'losers' be preserved?

- How can the planning community address the political and ideological abuses of heritage?

FAST set out to establish the significance and value of the 'ordinary', and wanted the World Heritage Committee to participate at the very least by answering these questions put forward to them. If the organization could act further, there was an opportunity to engage in a critical discourse. FAST saw these questions also underlining the incentive to create a World Heritage Application. Quite naturally, it would be deemed as unconventional in circumstance and from the point of arrival of a non-governmental organization and not officially from a State. By placing the 'ordinary' in context to protection, whilst gaining a deeper level of understanding of a real situation such as Lifta, could UNESCO set about a practical framework which allowed them to correspond to such cases if they were recognized as heritage? Nevertheless, the aim was to create an application which stepped beyond existing conventions and try and create room for the scope of creativity, of values and professional judgment to encourage a mutual concern for welcoming and developing a cultural intervention. Structures, buildings and places which are nominated for World Heritage have to qualify to a merit of distinction notably appraised as of 'outstanding universal value'. Lifta represented a case of a cultural heritage worthy of recognition by the international community for having the capacity to provide significant cultural opportunities as well as encourage discussion on the awareness and undertaking for protecting volatile cultural heritages.

Lifta represents a bond between a tangible cultural heritage and an intangible cultural heritage. Lifta would have to establish through the development of planning instruments for alternative planning and rectified discourse on the 'ordinary', realization that it can create the criteria to establish itself as heritage worth protecting. To save Lifta is also to know what you’re saving. It is evidence of a history which defines the collective memory and existential identity of the Palestinian people; the scattered remains of a place keep the association of a collective memory alive. Authenticating history is also laying down the foundations for justifiable cultivations. Lifta has the potential to become a contesting ground for a new narrative. The place can provide unique and vital capacity building programs to deal with issues of identity and place constructions as well as national memory. Placing the application under scrutiny is also welcoming a debate which introduces the Nakba into an institutional process. However, by placing the nakba into perspective, there is also controversy for such an application. Firstly, the Nakba is affirmation that the Palestinians identity, their history, their memory does exist. More importantly, it is an affirmation of a dis-continuity to the land. The bond, Lifta, is a potent historical tool because it represents the Nakba - a symbol of retribution. To paraphrase a definition of retribution, "It is to be remembered that one of the primary reasons for the law's existence, indeed the state's existence, is that people are to be relieved of their need to strike out against those who have wronged them. Not to argue the rights or wrongs of it; it is entirely natural for an individual, when injured or harmed by another or others, to seek revenge and retribution. It is potentially harmful to the state if it does not satisfy these needs, these urges." 'Memory' could begin to take on a whole new meaning as it would have to take into account the position of the State. And you can only really justify the protection of Lifta if you are to consider some form of reconciliation process. However, does affirmation of an existential identity allow the Nakba to redeem itself? This question needs to be answered. Lifta is a proponent for Palestinian existentialism that needs its history told within the narrative of the region in which it belongs. Will the Israeli State recognize that a place relating to a Palestinian continuity has an inextricable common history with the Israeli national narrative? The importance of Lifta's ruins is that they are a memory, a monument, a bond, and a possible cultural foundation existing within Israel and adding an extra 'what if' possibility for the nation. Lifta has the potential for an all-inclusive vision. It is a common-ground for identities to delegate on the same space, the same time, the same land for a possible vision for the future.

Ciral Rassool, a heritage academic gave a substantial account of a memory and heritage project that he is trustee to at the Debalie conference in Amsterdam. The District 6 Museum in Cape Town, South Africa is a small, community-based initiative; the museum nevertheless saw itself as being of national significance, telling a national history of forced removals. As an independent space of knowledge-creation, the Museum wanted to tell its story nationally, thereby intervening in the field of cultural representation. Ciral Rassool also practices and writes extensively on the reconstruction of South African heritage after the apartheid - the 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' was a product of political compromise, which attempted to establish 'the truth' of apartheid's gross violations of human rights, as well as to promote reconciliation of apartheid's victims and perpetrators. In the process of creating an 'official history' of apartheid, apartheids' hidden history was simultaneously revealed and revised as an essential 'building block' for the new nation. The resources of memory were drawn upon in the imaginative reconstruction of South African society through the medium of cultural heritage. It seeks to begin an examination of the cultural workings of heritage, public history and identity formation under conditions of political transition in South Africa. South Africans were also encouraged to consider, narrate and visualize their society and its past, as well as their own identities as individuals within it. It was also in this domain of historical production that important contests were unfolding over the South African past and the dominant discursive forms were contested.

The idea of creating a World Heritage Application was a reference to the attempt of actively suggesting that the history of the Nakba should be established within the history of Israeli consciousness. However, even with our critical explanation to the World Heritage committee, our initial contact was repudiated with the suggestion to 'get real'! However, I do sympathize with the less than a handful of people, as I was told, having to deal with the 400-odd World Heritage applications. Guarantying time for a single organization raising the interest of a single village would be too much to carry out. FASTs' attempt to create a nomination was to also be in protest and representative for all the volatile cultural heritages around the world which are in need of recognition so that their histories are neither appropriated or erased. The current practice of the State defining within its territory control over heritage policies does suggest the problem that maybe all heritages within the border may not be represented. Conventions are not universally representing the 'heritage of all' for the fact that they are not reaching far enough to represent the undermined cultures within predominant cultures who really need representing. Heritage theory, legislation and practice has not caught up yet with the growing acknowledgement of the misuse of cultural heritage. The reality at the moment is that the 'heritage of the losers' is likely to be avoided under the circumstance when you are asking questions with a context such as the State of Israel. International conventions and instruments are not substantial safety nets if they don't reach out to the 'other' cultures that seek protection and saving.

History has the tendency to repeat itself if not contested which is what is happening in Israel at the moment. Territories are shifting, forced removals are the norm, and the Nakba is relived day to day. Whilst a two-state solution is politically and supposedly physically being acting out, let us not forget that dealing with memory and place is vitally important. Cultural reality is also painted on the landscape in that which we recognize. So, is there any possibility of Israel also embracing an alternative vision? Ultimately, it is the Israeli Land Administration (ILA) who has juridical control and authority over Lifta’s land. Lifta still has the opportunity to prove that there is a case for saving the heritage of this village. FAST will continue to campaign and raise awareness in hope to the prospect re-examination by the State of a project of worthwhile recognition and cause for the history of all.

2006-10-02T08:47:00.000-07:00

2006-10-02T03:44:00.000-07:00

2006-10-02T03:43:00.000-07:00

What is our strategy for activism? What will we be asking? Who will we be appoaching?

one year on........

Setting the challenge for a Grassroots Manifesto and Activism Campaign

Introduction.

So far in the campaign, we have raised issues such as challenging existing notions on the discourse of Cultural Properties, and questioned the practices on existing international mechanisms and conventions that ultimately aim to protect cultural heritage. We have learnt that international conventions may not suffice as palpable instruments or safety nets for providing the protection of cultural heritages within Nation States. Ultimately Nation States can reside to selecting history and cultural heritages in favour of main-stream ideological agendas. Notwithstanding, that this can influence negative consequences such as the neglection of cultural heritages amongst the marginalised and segregated communities. Nonetheless, in our quest to further understand and challenge discourse on cultural heritage, we have also encountered a greater tenacity amongst the professional planning community in generating new agendas to unfold reconstruction and rehabilitation projects.

FAST's aim is to offer substantial projects guided by conceivable agendas with alternative planning solutions. We are in the process of advocating a grassroots strategy within Lifta's regional context using the wider Israeli, Arab Israeli and Palestinian network. To sustain an achievable goal the campaign will adopt a strategy that will contest existing cultural notions; such as the traditional cultural assumptions in the selection of heritage against the more purposeful opportunities arising from heritage diversity. Nonetheless, any agenda for alternative discourse will be in context to preventing the neglection of heritage created in the Redevelopment Plan. To substantiate an agenda will require a reappraisal of this situation concerning the current conflict of interest between the different needs and values regarding Lifta. Any strategy will therefore be dependant upon attitudes, either existing or supported as intervention, that will be vital towards supporting a solution.

For example, this campaign may be perceived as controversial, not coinciding with the current outlook and interests of the authority overseeing Lifta's land and the Nation State. By acknowledging that the character premise of the Israeli Nation State is undoubtly embodied by its own set of exclusive values and cultural traditions, any reality construction may have to reflect upon this on the premise that it is a rule of engagement. It will be necessary in our objective to engage and challenge existing cultural notions with ideas that have the capacity of penetrating traditional attitudes with alternative breadth of view. Lifta represents an identity; and an identity in context to a reality can be perceived and defined as a series and a set of power relationships. With the agenda to protect the identity Lifta, any underlining cause should seek to reappraise this identity amongst its traditional perceptions, constructions of rival symbolism and outlooks of place.

FAST's reappraisal is to contend with the cultural workings of identity with a strategy approaching place with the intent to recultivate through gaining regional and national recognition. The real challenge will be to create an informed strategy that can stipulate within the real context of obstacles that are present not only in mind but also on facts created on the ground. For instance, the ethnocentric prejudices and segregation in civil society and the constant barrage of scepticism and antagonism of the 'other'. The grass-roots strategy will aim to counteract such obstacles by reconstructing Lifta's heritage. For instance, FAST will emphasize the value of the relationship between memory and the tangible cultural heritage so that the landscape can convey historical truths capable of empowering Lifta's identity. The workings of the specific use of heritage can have the effect to demystify, reconcile or suggest alternatively to dominant truths present in the conflict.

So the most invaluable resource for an informed strategy will involve relationships to truthful values of Lifta's cultural heritage. Inevitably, the pursuit to justify Lifta's right to exist will also form to define her as a proponent for capacity building in the region. The methods proposed will use a clearly defined set of values to create the tools for regional activism. FAST believes that their undertaking will sustain the most integral and credible opportunity of generating a reappraisal to Lifta's situation.

The emphasis of the strategy for regional activism will be based upon the following sets of principles and values:

(i.) Recognize that this place, Lifta, has an existing cultivated bond, and that this bond (warrants legitmate recognition) evokes an identity and a relationship to identities.

(ii.) Recognize that this place is inextricably tied and linked to the creation of the Modern State of Israel, and therefore is testimony to the phenomenom/event of the creation of the Modern State as well as placing historical perspective and context to her present identity.

(iii.) Recognize that this place contains a unique example of a tangible cultural heritage that evokes a legacy of a place which had a healthy civil equality and no ethnocentric division and segregation.

(iv.)Recognize that Lifta, a place which has an inextricable relationship to the identity of a people and also of a Nation, should have her cultural heritage reappraised so that she can sustain an 'attainable value' for the evaluation of healthy civil progress for the future of this region.

Appraisals of these principles and values will be made clear in individual episodes coming shortly.....

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one year previously........

We believe that Lifta and it's particular situation should be addressed to the International community. We want to generate enough attention so that it may pave a path towards a mutual concession to disenable the redevelopment plan.

For instance, we will approach UNESCO's World Heritage Centre. In respect to the legitmacy of cultural development, Lifta's cultural heritage should be critically re-appraised and established so that the governing State power system do not authorize cultural appropriation in pursuit of their own particular agendas. Although World Heritage protection is conventionally sort through the instrument of a State nominating a property, as a form of activism FAST (a non-governmental organization) will nominate the place of Lifta for World Heritage Protection. We believe that the significance of the place is enough for it to be granted protection. We believe that we represent the interests of universal human rights and cultural heritage protection.

FAST will also use this opportunity to bring a whole discussion of 'memory' forward with UNESCO and joint heritage organizations such as ICOMOS. This application is not only important to Lifta but can also be taken as a case-study on the discussion of the relativity of memory.

We want to put across the 3 following questions to the planning community :

-What are the criteria for an "ordinary environment" to become a monument?

-If "history is written by the victors"; how can the heritage of "the losers" be preserved?

-How can the planning community address the political and ideological abuses of heritage?

We believe that in the case of Lifta, what may usually be termed as the 'ordinary' in building type, should also be recognized as a 'monument' of universal value. We will ask the heritage organizations if their planners and planning conventions would take into consideration 'memory', from Lifta's particular situation, as an invaluable component of conservation practice? We are also asking UNESCO what they would consider as a way forward?

We will approach various institutions and bodies that we call upon either to offer opportunities to substantiate our cause, or to call them into question. Ultimately, it is the Israeli Land Administration (ILA) who have jurisdicial control and authority over the Land. If we were to raise enough awareness in the International community, it may enhance the prospect of a reexamination and a closer look by the State authorities to the situation of Lifta.

(Please follow articles between september 2006 to may 2007 for information regarding confronting UNESCO and the international heritage organizations on saving Lifta.)

2006-10-02T03:36:00.000-07:00

What is the significance of saving Lifta?

Lifta's buildings and structures are every bit as much important to the future of this region. Lifta bares all the scars of the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and buried memories reflected by ruins of the catastrophe, the Nakba. It is a memory in which a victimization has formed part of the palestinian construction of the 'self'; a memory which defines national shared values amongst the palestinian people. Lifta also bears the hall-mark of the unresolved political issue of the 'right of return'. It is a place worth protecting because it is a place which can seek consolation through justice, and provide healing through the opportunity of reconciliation.

We are also readdressing and reflecting upon the term of 'cultural heritage'. The State does not recognize Lifta and its heritage, therefore it is important that we are able to develop an understanding of the importance of Lifta ruins and most importantly 'establish' the connection between memory and the recognition of place. We will try to achieve getting recognition of the historical connection between the culture that transmitted/generated the architecture and the buildings and structures which are currently there. Through saving this place, a duality that exists between the intangible experience and memory of a people and the tangible cultural heritage can provide a platform to directly engage with reality-constructions of identity, place and national memory.

Lifta has the potential to provide unique and vital capacity building programs. We believe that this is site contains a cultural heritage which should be regarded as a common-ground to be used as a foundation to be built upon. It is a place of study and reflection and is important to major issues of our time. It can act as an instrument of dialogue between different cultural allegiances and offer a common vision aimed at cultural development.

2006-10-02T03:30:00.000-07:00

2006-10-02T03:25:00.000-07:00

So why are we developing a campaign to save Lifta?

We are trying to save a place from loosing all record of its cultural heritage as well as it's roots to a people whom of which it once belonged. By saving Lifta, we mean to imply that we are trying to protect a place that still exists in the form of a bond. It exists as a place within the memories of a people, identifiable by the ruins of the buildings and structures cultivated into the landscape. 'Memory' in respect to Lifta is the essence of the place, it is bare without people telling their stories and affirming their bonds to the place.

Sitting within a valley underneath and adjacent to the Tel-Aviv road entering the north-west corridor of Jerusalem, Lifta is a suburb and a gateway into this city. Lifta's inhabitants were forcibly abandoned from the place in 1948 during the catastrophic mass exile of Palestinian people known as the Nakba; a sequence of events synthesized with the establishment of the State of Israel. Whilst many palestinian places affected by the tragedy were either totally removed or annexed under the State of Israel, Lifta stood obscurely due to nearly 60 years of unhinderance from redevelopment. The uniqueness of Lifta is due to the phenomenom that no conquest has physically re-contextualized the place. Lifta lies frozen between two epochs, two histories, two cultures. At present the place has drawn attention to itself, by the hope and demand that a bond can be sustained without the total removal of the signs that the place was once home to a particular people for many hundreds of years.

We do not know what the solution is to this situation, but we do know that if the current authorized plan for redevelopment is built, it will eradicate the memory that is currently attributed to the identity of the place. With new signs and symbols, a new memory would be cultivated onto the landscape. The redevelopment plan will change the name of the Lifta to Mei Neftoach (Spring) in accordance to an ancient historical name to the place. The land processing structures will be placed on display and given biblical references rather than their authentic palestinian heritage. And architectural mimicry of the palestinian cultivated houses shall be mass produced around the lands of Lifta to supplement desirable and exclusive developments to cater for hotels and private accomodation for the non-resident Jewish elite. All reference to its cultivated palestinian heritage will be undermined through forgetfulness; terminaly erazed. (Please read Article 'Reinventing Lifta' for a full appraisal of Lifta and the Redevelopment Plan.)

Our purpose, first and foremost, is to safeguard the harmony that currently exists between the vivid memories and the architectural antiquities on the landscape. To safeguard a nature of recognition and a sense of belonging. Lifta may be a modern-day ruin, but more importantly it is a monument of the present. The place is tangibly connected to a generation of people who still reguard the place to be their ancestral home; if not their home. This same essence and feeling of ancestral origin and home has passed down the next generation and is still strongly felt amongst them.