Transcript (FAST presentation)

 

Thank you all for coming, participating and contributing to this meeting.

Tomorrow is the Nakba day.

The memorial day of the destruction of more then 500 Palestinian villages.

A destruction that is continuing up till this day.

As FAST, we hope to add another angle to the discussions that are taking place

Yesterday, today and tomorrow in Vancouver, New York, London,  Ramallah and Jerusalem on the Naqba.

 

I would like to start my presentation with a quick overview on the invention of Israeli Heritage and the destruction of the Palestinian one.

 

Going back to the beginning of the 20 Century.

 

 

Since the beginning of the 20st century, waves of Jewish immigration washed the land of Palestine.

 

The new Jewish immigrants wanted to build a new and better nation, a new and better society, a new and stronger identity. On the virgin land of Palestine.

 

This appealing wave of an exterritorial nationalism took place

 

ON TOP of the HOMELAND of another nation, ON TOP of Palestine.

It took Approximately 50 long years of local and international transitions to redeem the land.

 

Dressing it with uniformity, new identity, new landscape, new people.

Ignoring an existing landscape, existing people, existing culture, existing nation.

Keep Inventing itself through territorial encounter.s As if it was empty, Building an autistic dream: the land without people for the people with out land.

A weird hybrid of Modernity, Nationalism and Biblical glow

In 1948 the dream became reality.

 

One Nation celebrated its official recognition and the other grieved on its destruction.

The destruction of one nation monuments and communities goes hand in hand with building a new nation.

 

We have seen processes similar to the Israeli Palestinian situation before and after…

 

isn't it that the destruction of Europe during the Second world War made it possible for Europe

To reconfigure itself? with New homogenous nations, Along new borders, new cities, new landscape?

 

Brutally deleting the darkness of its past?  Or as we have seen happening relatively recently in the Balkan? Above which we will hear more by Andrew Hertscher.

 

In the book, Post War Tony Judt  describes the transformation of the European landscape.

 

Massive migration and Resettlement brought the elimination of mixed communities, especially in central Europe, and forged new nation states.

 

And at Robert Bevan book:  The destruction of Memory, he describes the crimes against architecture and the way political and ideological changes goes together with destruction and the appropriation of the landscape, with, of course, the Balkan in the 90’s as the last step of the post war reconfiguration that Judt describes..

 

Acknowledging these processes, that Nation building goes hand by hand with destruction.

 

The international community has played and have to play an important role in preserving cultural heritage through the implementation of treaties.

 

Unesco was founded during the 40’s  as one of the post war international institutions.

 

Its original aim was to protect and preserve the built environment in times of war and national conflicts.

 

While linking cultural heritage to human rights, in particular the rights of persons belonging to minorities.

 

Its central idea was that cultural heritage is important and necessary for future sustainability.

 

And that cultural diversity is a fundamental part of our society.

 

The unesco treaties and resolutions evolved over time.

 

Being adjusted to new realities.

 

Looking at different treaties, signed by world nations including Israel. Made me optimistic, imagining what would have happen if those words and ideas would have been implemented into the Israeli landscape, in order to preserve the heritage of Palestine.

 

There are 3 points in the Unesco treaties that I would like to point out:

 

1st Cultural heritage sites do not include just monuments but also the ordinary environments and its objects, such as streets, districts, shops, gardens, dwellings etc.

 

And not just its objects but also its social structure.

 

The second point is that not just the ancient past should be preserved but also recent history, the 19th and the 20st century. The last point is the one of Museums and their role within society.

 

Museums, according to Unesco, are open and interactive institutions for the service of people and their environments.

 

Museums should act as catalyzer of dialogue between nations, minorities , ethnic groups and their cultural heritage.

 

More on museums and their function in conflicting territorial, social, political and ideological context, we will hear from Mr. Rassul.

At FAST we discuss the idea of (having Unesco) listing Lifta as cultural heritage site.

 

Lifta is a Palestinian village, which located within the municipal borders of Jerusalem.

 

It’s community was driven away by the Israeli army in 1948.

 

Today Lifta is more or less a ghost town while, the former villagers live in exile.

 

Now, however, a preservation project, initiated by the Israeli government, aims to turn Lifta into an expensive and exclusive Jewish residential area - erasing its history in the process.

Lifta, is a place where recent memory and national transformations are coming together.

 

Lifta should be protected by unesco since its one of the last possible Monument of: The Palestinian past before the establishment of israel

 

And of The Memory of, the Naqba, the destruction of Palestine - as it is a fundamental part of the country heritage.

 

The larger context of Lifta

Demographic changes within the larger context:

The first diagram

made by the official demographic numbers taken from the Israeli statistic burro

From the year 1918 to 2006

(The red stands for Palestinian majority and the blue for Israeli.)

 

We can see that 1948 (the nakba) is the moment of transition

 

The second diagram, considering the dynamic of population growth

within the current claimed borders of Israel.

It seems that the numbers are almost equal.

 

The deference derive from the fact that the occupied, Palestinian,  population is not being considered in the official numbers.

 

The transformation within the built area.

 

More then 800 Israeli localities have been built…and  more then 500 Palestinian ones have been destroyed.

This process and the context of destruction is important to the understanding of why Lifta needs to be protected.

Here we see the distribution of Palestinian villages before 1948

In this map we see the distribution of the destroyed Palestinian communities after 48.

 

Where we can also see the out line of the new ’48 borders of Israel

 

Between 1918 and 1960 97% of the lands have been expropriated by the state of Israel.

Now I will Zoom-in to the Regional context of Lifta

The biblical claims of the land became a strategic tool to judaize the region

 

Since of the beginning of the century Jerusalem Grew 10 fold.

 

This map shows Jerusalem:

 

the old city, The new city around it, Lifta and the destroyed villages around it.

 

The destruction had started with a strategic reason, getting the hold over the Jerusalem Tel Aviv road.

 

How the Palestinian landscape around west Jerusalem were transformed.

 

I will run quickly a sequence of photos showing the transformation of the destroyed villages

 

please note the time line in the bottom.

 

 

“According to the UN Partition resolution. Jerusalem, with about 100,000 Jews and 50,000 Arabs, was to be an international zone, Its access roads were dominated by Arab villages.

When the hostility erupted the Jewish neighborhoods, mostly in the western part of the town, came under sniping attacks from the Arab quarters and the community was gradually strangled by the Arab blockade of the main road to Tel Aviv.

At a certain point, the city’s Jewish districts were under almost complete siege.

However, armed Jewish resistance  fought  the Arab neighborhoods along the “seam” between the two communities and the semi-isolated Arab quarters in mostly Jewish western Jerusalem THAT were repeatedly hit.

The depopulation of the Arab neighborhoods in western Jerusalem began with the suburb village of Lifta, and the adjacent district of Romema and Sheikh Badr, which dominated the beginning of the Jerusalem Tel-Aviv road.

 

… Ben-Gurion summarized what had happened in Jerusalem at a meeting of Mapai leaders on 7 February:“from your entry to Jerusalem through Lifta-Romema, through Mahane Yehuda, King Goerge street and Meah Shearim there are no strangers [i.e. Arabs]. One hundred percents of Jews. Since Jerusalem’s destruction in the days of Romans – it has not been so Jewish as it is now.

In many arab districts in the west one sees not one Arab. I do not assume that this will change…what had happened in Jerusalem…could well happen in great parts of the country –

if we hold on…and if we hold on, its very possible that in the coming 6 or 8 or 10 months of the war there will take place great changes…and not all of them to our determent. Certainly there will be great changes in the composition of the population of the country.”

 

End quote:

Taken from Benny Morris book ‘The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee ‘ Problem, 1947-1949

 

Lifta

This map show the built area of Lifta as it was in 1946. This map shows the ruins of Lifta today. which is to be appropriated with the new preservation plan.

The preservation plan.

 

The area of the plan is 455 dunams (45000 sq. meter)

 

The main program of the plan is residential areas 

 

The plan offers:

 Areas for commerce, shops, public buildings, a hotel, and passages

 Some parts of the scenery will remain untouched for the public to enjoy

 50 Palestinian buildings, pre 48, will be preserved

In addition, 243 housing units and 120 rooms-hotel will be built

You can find within the plan instructions

on how to preserve, restore and reconstruct the existing structures and  the terraces inside the village, their integration with the new development areas.

 

Houses should maintain the architectural nature of the existing structure…the construction work of preserving will be done only by reusing old stones”.

 

The plan aim at the appropriation of Lifta. Reconstruct Lifta from its old materials; both physically and esthetically.

 

Reinvent its history, change its name, add some cultural elements to it and sale it to the country’s wealthy people While ignoring the Palestinian heritage of the village.

 

I would like to conclude the presentation with 3 questions to our guests and to the public.

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?