...the planner...For many years conservation has been seen as a purely aesthetic matter, and the social aspect largely ignored – this is of course still the case in the new luxury-villas plan for Lifta. And, while there is little documentation of the Palestinian heritage, the Israeli project has, in contrast, documented itself exhaustively from the start, all its accounts jumping from biblical to Zionist times to show ‘proof’ of ownership, while avoiding all mention of the intervening Islamic period...

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 Khaldun Bshara

..Palestinian architecture is still a target for the Israelis...Palestinian conservation architects are forced to be pragmatic...We can’t afford to pay any attention to Unesco, nor can we concentrate on design – we can only adapt our solutions to the users’ needs. ..we’d never get money for conservation, so we ask for funding for job creation ...