Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman
families have built homes ‘illegally’ and exposed themselves to the random actions of municipal demolition squads. These demolitions are undertaken mainly in the most disadvantaged Palestinian neighbourhoods, where residents cannot afford legal defence.69
Other spatial manipulations were similarly undertaken to try to maintain the ‘demographic balance’. The construction of the new Jewish neighbourhood/settlements were also seen as antidotes to Palestinian urbanization and were planned in such a way as to create wedges between Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages, limiting their possible expansion and splintering Palestinian urban contiguity. For example, the neighbourhoods of Ramat Eshkol and the French Hill north of the Old City were laid out to form an elongated arc that cut the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuafat from the Palestinian Old City and the neighbourhood of Seikh Jarah, which previously comprised a continuous urban area. Indeed, the location and layout of the new neighbourhoods were conceived not only as a utilitarian receptacle for the Jewish population, but also as a means of preventing Jerusalem from functioning as a Palestinian city and making it harder to be a Palestinian in Jerusalem.
The massive overcrowding in Palestinian neighbourhoods, and the rapid increase in property prices that ensued, ultimately forced many Palestinian families to leave Jerusalem for nearby towns and villages in the West Bank, where housing is considerably cheaper. This was precisely what the government planners intended. By leaving the city, Palestinians also lost the status of ‘Israeli residency’, which differentiates those Palestinians included within Jerusalem’s post-1967 borders from those in the rest of the West Bank, and which, among other things, allowed the former access to state services and healthcare, and freedom to enter and work in Israel. In the past forty years more than 50,000 Palestinians have lost their residency status in this manner. Tens of thousands of others have moved outside the municipal boundaries but have kept an address in the city in order to keep these rights and often travel to work there. One of the factors in the routing of the Separation Wall around Jerusalem was to cut these Palestinians out of the city, and close this loophole. The Palestinian residents of Jerusalem now face having to choose which side of the Wall to live on – a crowded and expensive Jerusalem, where they cannot build, or give up the rights they previously had and live in the surrounding towns and villages of the West Bank.70
Throughout the years of Israeli domination in Jerusalem, about 40 per cent of the land that would have been available for Palestinians in the occupied part of the city was marked up on municipal plans as open, public space. This was presented, for legal reasons, as an amenity for the improvement of the quality of life and air of the residents of the Palestinian neighbourhoods, but it effectively framed them within zones into which expansion was forbidden. Whenever the status of these ‘green areas’ was ‘unfrozen’ and earmarked for construction, they were allocated for the expansion of Jewish neighbourhoods. This was openly admitted by Mayor Kollek: ‘the primary purpose of defining Shuafat Ridge [then still an empty hill in the occupied part to the north of the city next to the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuafat mentioned above] as a green area was to prevent Arab building [there] until the time was ripe to build a new Jewish neighbourhood’.71
Yet another planning strategy used to limit Palestinian residential construction and demographic growth is the pretext of preservation. Professing to protect the traditional rural character of Palestinian villages within the municipal area, and the historic nature of Palestinian neighbourhoods, the municipality insisted that the floor area ratio (FAR) – a planning ratio that defines the relation between the size of a plot and the size of the building – is kept low. So, while the building rights in the Jewish neighbourhood of Talpiot-Mizrah permit the construction of buildings of five storeys, in the adjacent Palestinian neighbourhood of Jabal al-Mukaber, buildings may occupy only 25 per cent of the building plot, resulting in a small house within a large plot.72
Jerusalem (north). 1. Hebrew University on Mount Scopus; 2. Jewish neighbourhood of French Hill; 3. Government district; 4. Jewish neighbourhood of Shuafat Ridge; 5. Jewish neighbourhood of Ramot; 6. Shuafat refugee camp; 7. Palestinian neighbourhood of Anata; 8. Palestinian neighbourhood of Beit Hanina; 9. Jewish neighbourhood of Pisgat Ze’ev; 10. Palestinian neighbourhood of Issawa; 11. ‘Green Open Space’ zone forbidden of Palestinian construction; 12. Erich Mendelsohn’s Hadassah-Hebrew University medical complex; 13. Tunnel mouth of the Jerusalem ring road; 14 ‘Vertical intersection’; 15. Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuafat; 16. The old Jerusalem-Ramallah road.
Horizontally limited by the green zones around them, and vertically by a ‘preservation’ policy, the Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem were transformed into an archipelago of small islands of conjured ‘authenticity’, within an ocean of Jewish construction, their architecture functioning as an object of aesthetic contemplation to be seen from the concrete-built but stone-clad Jewish neighbourhoods. These ‘preservation zones’ surrounded by parks, multiply the principle of the 1918 McLean plan, and reproduce, on the urban scale, the image of the Palestinian ‘Bantustans’ of the West Bank.
Moreover, Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods in Jerusalem very often exhibit anything but the ostensible ‘oriental authenticity’ which they are meant to embody. Contrasting sharply with the Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem’s periphery, the Palestinians often do not abide by the Jerusalem stone bylaw and the architectural styles that attempt to give Israel’s colonial architecture an image of authenticity. Many buildings constructed without permits and facing prospective demolition are built cheaply, with their structural walls of raw concrete and cinder blocks left bare. The utilitarian modernist silhouette of their slab construction, supported over the hilly landscape by columns, was influenced by the modernist ethos of early Zionist architecture. Appearing as a local adaptation of modernist villas, they testify to a complete reversal, which the policies of Israeli domination have brought on the building culture of Israelis and Palestinians alike.
The vertical schizophrenia of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. Illustration: Walter Boettger, Eyal Weizman 2003.
The Temple Mount is the site of the First and Second Temples. Haram al-Sharif is where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located. Both sites share the same location – a flattened-out, filled-in summit supported by giant retaining walls located by the eastern edge of the Old City of Jerusalem. The western retaining wall of the compound is believed to be the last remnant of the Second Temple. The Wailing Wall is the southern part of this retaining wall.
The issue of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif was the most contentious one in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in July 2000. Although most Israeli archaeologists would agree that the Second Temple stood on a platform at the same height of today’s mosques, US mediators seemed to have believed in another, more politically convenient archaeological-architectural explanation. They argued that the upper parts of the Wailing Wall were originally built as a free-standing wall, behind which (and not over which) the Second Temple was located at a depth of about sixteen meters below the level of the water fountain between Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The theory originated with Tuvia Sagiv, a Tel Aviv based architect and amateur archaeologist. Sagiv spent much of his time (and money) surveying the site, and even overflew it several times with helicopters carrying ground-penetrating radar and thermal sensors. Sagiv’s report determining that the remains of the Temple are located under the mosques were submitted in 1995 to Ariel Sharon, then an opposition Knesset member, together with an architectural proposal that aimed to resolve the problems of Jews and Moslems praying on the same site by dividing it vertically, in different floors. According to Sagiv’s architectural proposal, a giant gate would be opened in the Wailing Wall through which Jews could reach a subterranean hall at the level of the Temple, under the level of the mosque. Via Sharon, Sagiv’s proposal reached the attention of the American administration which asked the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to obtain a copy. Clinton thought that if remains of the Temple are indeed, to be found under the present level of the mosques, the issue of sovereignty could be resolved along the outline of Sagiv’s architectural proposal. Clinton delivered his proposal – geopolitics performed