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On 27 June 1967, twenty days after the Israeli Army completed the occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem, the unity government of Levi Eshkol annexed almost 70 square kilometres of land and incorporated approximately 69,000 Palestinians within the newly expanded boundaries of the previously western Israeli municipality of Jerusalem.¹ The new delimitations were designed by a military committee with the aim of redrawing the state’s 1949 borders, prior to any evacuation of occupied territories that might have been forced on Israel by international agreement. The outline attempted to include empty areas for the city’s expansion and to exclude, as far as it was possible, areas densely populated with Palestinians.² The new boundaries sought to ‘unite’ within a single metropolitan area the western Israeli city, the Old City, the rest of the previously Jordanian-administered city, 28 Palestinian villages, their fields, orchards, and tracts of desert, into a single ‘holy’, ‘eternal’ and ‘indivisible’ Jewish capital. Years later, Mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek (who served in this post on behalf of the Labor party between 1965 and 1993) would say of the incongruousness captured within these borders: ‘Jerusalem is, most likely, the only contemporary capital that pays drought compensation to farmers in villages within its boundaries …’³

The following year a new urban masterplan for the city outlined in drawings and verbal instructions the guiding principles of development and ‘unification’ of the urban ensemble now called Jerusalem. The ‘first and cardinal principle [of the 1968 masterplan] was to ensure [Jerusalem’s] unification … to build the city in a manner that would prevent the possibility of its being repartitioned’.⁴ Following this masterplan and a series of subsequent masterplans, amendments and updates during the forty years of Israeli occupation, twelve remote and homogenous Jewish ‘neighbourhoods’ were established in the occupied areas incorporated into the city. They were laid out to complete a belt of built fabric that enveloped and bisected the Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages annexed to the city. Industrial zones were located beyond the new neighbourhoods on the fringes of the municipal area, keeping West Bank Palestinians who provided the city with a cheap and ‘flexible’ labor force (until Palestinian labor was almost completely barred from the beginning of the second Intifada in the autumn of 2000) out of the city itself. An outer, second circle of settlements – termed by Israeli planners the ‘organic’ or ‘second wall’, composed of a string of dormitory suburbs – was established beyond the municipal boundaries, extending the city’s metropolitan reach even further. It is around this ‘second, organic wall’ that the concrete Separation Wall now meanders. An ever-expanding network of roads and infrastructure was constructed to weave together the disparate shards of this dispersed urban geography. ‘Greater Jerusalem’ became thus a sprawling metropolis reaching the outskirts of Ramallah in the north, Bethlehem in the south, and Jericho in the east – a massive section of the middle of the West Bank – isolating Palestinians from their cultural centres in Jerusalem and cutting off the north of the West Bank from the south. At present the new Jewish neighbourhoods within the municipal boundaries is home to about 200,000 settlers – almost the same number as all the other settlers in the West Bank combined. Together with the inhabitants of the dormitory settlements of the ‘second wall’ around the city, the total Jewish population of ‘Greater Jerusalem’ represents about three-quarters of all Israelis settled on areas occupied in 1967. Israeli activist Jeff Halper was therefore not exaggerating when he stated that ‘metropolitan Jerusalem is the occupation’.⁵

This project could not have been undertaken without massive government investments in infrastructure and subsidized housing for Jews, but an additional major factor in this colonization was a cultural one – the attempt to ‘domesticate’ the occupied and annexed territories – to transform, in the eyes of Israeli Jews, the unfamiliar occupied territories into familiar home ground. The problem of planners and architects was not only how to build fast on this ‘politically strategic’ ground, but how to naturalize the new construction projects, make them appear as organic parts of the Israeli capital and the holy city. Architecture – the organization, form and style by which these neighbourhoods were built, the way they were mediated, communicated and understood – formed a visual language that was used to blur the facts of occupation and sustain territorial claims of expansion. This project was thus an attempt to sustain national narratives of belonging while short-circuiting and even blocking other narratives.

This role invested in architecture has been written into the 1968 masterplan. Although the planning principles that guided this masterplan were largely based on modernist town planning principles, apparent in the plan’s promotion of massive traffic networks and the separation of the city into mono-functional zones (housing, shopping, service, industry), the 1968 masterplan also professed its ‘commitment’ to the orientalist aesthetics and urban development principles of ‘colonial regionalism’, a sensibility characteristic of the period of British rule over Palestine (1917–48), especially in its earlier years.⁶ The manifestation of this sensibility, promoted across the British Empire by followers and members of the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement, was an attempt to preserve and incorporate local building traditions, materials and crafts within contemporary buildings. On the urban scale it was expressed in attempts to dissolve ‘old’ with new, archaeology with living fabric.

The Wall in the Jerusalem region. The red line includes the authorized and built sections of the Wall within and around the Jerusalem area. The dotted red line is the planned extension of the barrier eastwards around the settlement of Ma’ale adumim. The shaded area is the extent of Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries. The neighbourhoods/settlements are marked blue. Palestinian towns and village are marked brown.

A special section of the 1968 masterplan was dedicated to a discussion of a British Mandate-era municipal ordinance, a bylaw enacted in 1918 by the first military governor of the city, Ronald Storrs, which mandated a variety of different kinds of limestone, collectively and colloquially known as ‘Jerusalem Stone’, as the only material allowed on exterior walls in the city.⁷ During the early years of the Israeli state leading to the occupation (1948–67), the bylaw has remained officially in place, mainly at the centre of the western part of Jerusalem. However, as it became increasingly controversial in the eyes of architects and planners, it was not always rigorously enforced, especially not in the peripheries of the municipal areas. The 1968 masterplan supported the tightening of the stone bylaw and the use of stone cladding within the entire area annexed to the city. By emphasizing and reinforcing the power of the bylaw, stone cladding was used to authenticate new construction on sites remote from the historical centre, giving the disparate new urban shards a unified character, helping them appear as organic parts of the city. ‘The value of the visual impression that is projected by the stone’, stated the 1968 masterplan, is that it carries ‘emotional messages that stimulate other sensations embedded in our collective memory, producing [within the context of new construction] strong associations to the ancient holy city of Jerusalem’.⁸

Building in Jerusalem, 1967–72: Film stills, Ministry of Construction and Housing.

Storrs’ ‘stare of Medusa’

On 9 December 1917, surrounded and with their supply lines cut, the Jerusalem divisions of the Ottoman army surrendered to the Allied forces under General Sir Edmund Allenby in a battle celebrated in the British press as a modern crusade.⁹ Three weeks later, Colonel Ronald Storrs, a political attaché to the British military, was appointed military governor of Jerusalem. Storrs considered the return of Jews to their land as an act of salvation and historic justice. He later wrote that the Zionist enterprise was ‘forming for England “a little loyal Jewish Ulster” in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’.¹⁰ Storrs saw Jerusalem through the religious-orientalist perspective of a European purview, and his role in Herodian terms, as a link in the long line of the city’s builders. Although Jerusalem of the late Ottoman era was a rather cosmopolitan city, with large, often lavish, compounds belonging to different nations and faiths, the war had transformed it quite radically. Mud, wood and tin constructions proliferated as Jerusalem became a destination for war refugees. For the British administration the urgent urban problem was the city’s ‘parasitic population … priests, caretakers, monks, missionaries, pious women, clerks, lawyers, and a crowd of riffraff’. The Jewish Quarter was referred to as a ghetto possessing ‘the squalid ugliness and disharmony of the cities of south-eastern Europe’.¹¹ An artificial topography had been created outside the city walls by generations of refuse deposited there.

Determined to find a solution to the city’s ‘overcrowding and unsightliness’, Storrs invited Alexandria’s British city engineer, William H. McLean, to draw up a redevelopment plan. McLean arrived in Jerusalem in March 1918 and took two weeks to submit an initial report to the military administration recommending that all new structures within the Old City, including those rooftops that were visible from higher ground, were ‘to be constructed of and covered with stone’.¹² Furthermore, according to McLean, the municipality should have removed all rubbish and ‘ramshackle buildings’ abutting the external perimeter of the Old City wall in order to make way for a ring-shaped park where thousands of trees were to be planted. Set in the centre of this green parkland, the Old City was to be presented as a precious rock, an exhibition-piece of living biblical archaeology. On 8 April 1918, a week after McLean’s departure, Storrs declared a freeze on all construction within and around the Old City. He went on to ban the use of plaster, mud, tents or corrugated iron as construction materials, stating that only local limestone was to be used in the construction of new buildings, extensions and rooftops within the perimeter around the Old City.¹³ Storrs then invited an architect of the British Arts and Crafts movement, Charles Robert Ashbee, one of the main promoters of ‘colonial regionalism’, whom he had met during his service in Cairo, to become director of a newly founded Pro-Jerusalem Society, which was conceived in 1919 to oversee the preservation and reconstruction of the city according to the McLean plan.

For Storrs, stone embodied biblical tradition. ‘Jerusalem is literally a city built upon rock. From that rock, cutting soft but drying hard, has for three thousand years been quarried the clear white stone, weathering blue-grey or amber-yellow with time, whose solid walls, barrel vaulting and pointed arches have preserved through the centuries a hallowed and immemorial tradition.’¹⁴ Although the stone regulation attempted to reinforce an image of orientalized locality, it had also made the cost of new construction prohibitive to all but the rich, the British authorities, and large overseas organizations; paradoxically, therefore, by pricing out the local population of Jerusalem, it delocalized the city with its own supposed vernacular crafts and architecture.

Although the aim of the McLean plan and Storrs’ stone regulation had been to isolate and differentiate the Old City from its surroundings, ten years after Storrs’ departure from Jerusalem, in the 1936 Town Planning Ordinance, the stone regulation was extended to apply to the entire municipal area and, significantly, to the new neighbourhoods that were rapidly sprawling beyond the Old City walls. By requiring the same architectural rigour outside the walls, this amendment allowed the outer neighbourhoods to share in the city’s particular visual character.¹⁵ The spread of Jerusalem had been accelerated by the relative prosperity of the 1920s and by improvements in building technology. As concrete technology developed and concrete structures became cheaper, more available and more efficient, the Arts and Crafts tradition promoted by Ashbee and Storrs through the Pro-Jerusalem Society, with its emphasis on traditional stone construction, came under attack from developers and builders. Towards the end of World War II and the period of the British Mandate, the pressure to develop led to a compromise that was represented by a seemingly minor textual modification of the stone regulation. While the previous Ordinance of 1936 demanded that ‘the external walls of all buildings shall be constructed of stone’, the masterplan of 1944 confirmed practices that were already in effect when it demanded only that ‘the external walls and columns of houses and the face of any wall abutting on a road shall be faced with natural, square dressed stone’¹⁶ [my emphasis]. This amendment reduced the role of stone from a construction material to a cladding material. Stone became a stick-on signifying element for creating visual unity between new construction and the Old City, thus visually confirming the municipal boundaries – as whatever building appeared to be built in stone was perceived part of the city of Jerusalem.

With the years, the layer of stone has thinned. At the beginning of the Mandate period, and following the principles of the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement, stone was primarily used as a construction material, and walls were made of large blocks of solid stone. Since the 1930s a mixed concrete and stone construction technique became more common and a thinner layer of stone – 20cm thick – became part of the structural logic of the building, and together with reinforced concrete, took some of the building load. As mere cladding, the stone has become thinner still and no longer formed a structural part of the building. Today, Israeli building standards allow layers of sawn stone just 6cm thick.

In the 1948 war, Jerusalem was divided between the Kingdom of Jordan and the state of Israel, with the former securing total control over the Old City and its eastern neighbourhoods. In the Jordanian city, whose size under Jordanian administration was deliberately restricted to prevent it competing with the Jordanian capital, Amman, the 1944 masterplan still remained in full effect. The plan was updated in 1964 by its original architect, Henry Kendall, a Briton who continued to enforce the stone cladding bylaw throughout the entire though compact Jordanian city. On the other side of the partition lines, until the 1967 war, Jerusalem’s 1955 planning codes separated the Israeli part of the city into rings in which the use of stone was required to varying degrees.¹⁷ At the centre, comprehensive use of stone cladding on all visible planes of the building was still required. In the second ring out from the centre, the requirement became more lenient, allowing the use of other materials to varying degrees, while the outermost circle, which included the industrial areas, was entirely liberated from the requirement to use stone. In the post-1967 period, this logic was effectively inverted. The demand for a varied application of stone was replaced by a unifying regulation that demanded the most rigorous application of stone cladding throughout the entire expanded municipal area. Since most new construction now took place on the periphery of the city, remote West Bank hilltops, never historically part of Jerusalem and now gerrymandered into it as sites for new construction, fell within the legal boundaries of the most rigorous application of the stone bylaw.

This time, the demand to stone clad the housing projects in the new Jewish neighbourhoods met with the resistance of Israeli developers. Indeed, two political considerations seemed to meet head on over this issue. The Ministry of Housing, implementing government policy, wanted to promote new construction as fast and as far away as possible from the city centre in order to buttress Israeli claims to the entire annexed area. Fast construction meant doing it cheaply and there was no place in such a scheme for the rigorous use of expensive stone cladding. The alternative, political-aesthetic consideration was presented by Mayor Kollek and his Deputy Mayor for Physical Planning, the historian Meron Benvenisti, who wanted a smaller, denser city, and to make new neighbourhoods appear as parts of an organic whole by demanding the use of stone cladding.¹⁸ Facing intense government pressure, the municipality has been unable to determine the location and size of the new neighbourhoods. Furthermore, although the Jerusalem planning department and even Mayor Kollek personally insisted that the extra investment in stone cladding would repay itself in little over a decade through savings on repainting and other maintenance costs, developers were under pressure to reduce their immediate expenses, and so insisted on a relaxing of the bylaw.¹⁹ Under the jurisdiction of the municipality, the bylaw was not relaxed, but developers were granted a bizarre but revealing concession: the stone cladding was allowed to project beyond the building’s envelope. Where this jutted out into a public thoroughfare, the layer of stone performing a ‘public’ service could occupy a thin sliver of public space.

There were other grounds for resistance to the requirement for stone cladding. For Israeli architects raised on modernist traditions, stone cladding countered their belief in the ‘honesty of materials’, and the received wisdom that the function and structure should dictate a building’s organizational logic and visual appearance. These architects saw stone cladding as decadent veneer. Debates between municipal planners and architects regarding the use of stone cladding also engaged with other formal and technical questions, centring at different periods on the relation of stone cladding to raw concrete, on the logic of applying stone cladding to the upper floors of high-rise buildings, and on the correct relation between stone and glass in office buildings. Various cladding details and construction methods were developed in response to these debates. Some cladding elements sought to emulate the appearance of solid stone construction. Cladding exposes its thickness, and thus its nature, at the corners of buildings, and it is usually enough for an architect to study the corner to verify whether a building is clad or built of solid construction. The architecture of the corner has thus quickly become an obsession in Jerusalem and a particular architectural detail – the ‘Dastor Stone,’ a hollowed-out stone with a 90-degree ‘L’ section – can now be placed on the corners of buildings thereby rendering cladding indistinguishable from solid construction. While some cladding details were designed to simulate authentic stone construction, others were developed in order to make sure the observer understood that the stone is anything but structural.²⁰ The 1968 Jerusalem masterplan referred to these architectural details and alluded to the debates regarding the use of stone cladding, siding firmly with those seeking to preserve its rigid application. ‘The function and value of the masonry construction must be measured not only according to an architectural value that seeks to reveal a building’s construction method in its appearance, but according to a cultural value that sees buildings as conveyors of emotional messages referring to the image of the city. It is against this cultural value that we must weigh the [extra] price of construction … this justifies, even today, the requirement to maintain the continuity of stone facing as the material which embodies the appearance of the city.’²¹ That a simple limestone cladding could be imbued with this quasi-religious mysticism is hardly surprising in a climate in which ‘Jerusalem Stone’ is presented in the sales brochure of one of its local manufacturers as ‘a precious stone, carved from the holy mountains of Jerusalem … a wonderful masterpiece of nature’, or by an Israeli architectural critic as an element ‘in whose texture, the signature of the twentieth century is not yet engraved, sensually reminding us that man is but a small detail in a large and timeless life-cycle’.²²

Indeed, for a succession of the city’s builders, from Ronald Storrs to the Israeli planners of post-1967 Jerusalem, the stone has embodied not only the earthly nature of place, but also a sense of spirituality and even holiness. Indeed, by the various religious traditions that inhabit it, Jerusalem is perceived to be much more than a city that contains a number of holy places, or the location of historical holy events; instead, it is perceived to be a holy-city in its entirety.²³ When the city itself is perceived to be holy, and when its boundaries are flexibly redrawn to suit ever-changing political aims, holiness inevitably becomes a planning issue. Since the extent of the municipal area is also the border of a zone that is understood to be holy, wherever the stone façades were applied, so the holiness of Jerusalem sprawled. And holiness, as Meron Benvenisti explained, is an extremely potent political definition, for ‘all of the territory within its municipal boundaries is regarded as the “Holy City” by the religious establishment [that forms part of the Israeli state]. And this is no trivial matter, since from the moment a particular area is designated as part of the Holy City, it comes under Jerusalem’s religious laws, whose sole objective is to strengthen the spiritual ties between Jews and their sacred city.’²⁴ Like the stare of Medusa, Storrs’ bylaw has been used by Jerusalem’s planners to petrify all construction in the new neighbourhoods – shopping malls and kindergartens, community centres and synagogues, office buildings, electrical relay stations and sports halls and, above all, housing – into stone. Suburban neighbourhoods placed on remote sites outside the historical boundaries of the city were thus imbued with the city’s overall sacred identity.

But these architectural/optical manipulations were not always convincing. Azmi Bishara, the notable Palestinian member of Israeli parliament, sarcastically observed: ‘only in Jerusalem the natural stone that was quarried from these very rocks could look as a foreign element within these same mountains …’²⁵ Furthermore, the stone itself is often foreign to Jerusalem. Contrary to perceptions, before the 1967 war, ‘Jerusalem Stone’ also came from outside the city, from quarries adjacent to Palestinian villages and towns in Galilee in the north of Israel. When the environmental hazard of stone dust restricted the quarrying industry in Israel ‘proper’, the stone quarries mushroomed in the West Bank to cater for Jerusalem’s endless appetite for stone. It is a paradox that the very material used for cladding the expanding Jewish Jerusalem has become one of the most important branches of the Palestinian economy, quarried mainly from the bedrock around Hebron and Ramallah. The largest of these quarries, located just outside the northern limit of the Jerusalem municipality, leaving a layer of dust on the clothes and skin of anyone travelling past it, is referred to by Palestinians as ‘Tora-Bora’ because the monochromatic tone of its artificial topography is reminiscent of images of the landscape of Afghanistan.

The Jewish neighbourhood of French Hill.

East Talpiyot neighbourhood, early 1970s. Images courtesy of IP.

Housing Cluster in Gilo, 1972 (Architect: Salo Hershman), IP.

Architectural transformations

Throughout its ninety-year history, the Jerusalem stone bylaw has been applied within the context of different architectural periods, styles and fashions. Not being an exclusive feature of any of these, it has been applied and understood differently within these various contexts. Stone has been demanded and applied in the ‘traditional’ context of colonial regionalism, it has clad buildings of the modern movement’s ‘international style’, it was used to clad hotels and tall office buildings, government buildings, theatres, shopping malls and community centres. It has been also a central element in the production of the historicist context of post-modern architecture that fully emerged in the city to coincide with the housing boom of the post-1967 war period.

Two Israeli critical architectural historians of the new generation – Zvi Efrat²⁶ and Alona Nitzan-Shiftan²⁷ – have each showed that 1967 marked the culmination of a process of stylistic transition within Israeli architecture. It was primarily the state housing projects in and around Jerusalem that helped redefine Israeli architectural practice. Although the emergent style has been a continuation of previous attempts by Israeli architects to ‘orientalize’ architecture, the post-1967 war period coincided with a time of uncertainty and turmoil in the development of architecture worldwide. As the 1960s were drawing to an end, the tenets of the modern movement were being challenged. The vanguard of planning and architecture attempted to escape the ‘simple’ utilitarian logic of the modern movement, reinvigorate design with a reawakened obsession with urban history and charge the language of architecture with symbolic, communicative and semiotic content. The architecture of the period started to be infatuated with ‘place’, ‘region’ and the ‘historic city’, with a passion that pitched the idea of ‘dwelling’ against that of ‘housing’, and ‘home’ as a remedy for an increasingly alienating modern world.²⁸ These emergent sensibilities went worldwide under the general terms of ‘post-modernism’. Within this context it is not surprising that Jerusalem became an international cause célèbre.

In 1968, to help deal with the complex implications of planning and building in Jerusalem, Mayor Kollek inaugurated the biennial Jerusalem Committee which was set up to review and advise on municipal plans for the city’s restoration and development. Kollek, the Viennese liberal who loved to surround himself with intellectuals who would portray him as an enlightened ruler, recalled that ‘immediately when the city was united, I invited 30 or 40 people here, the best minds of the world, to consult on what we should do …’²⁹ The Advisory Committee included prominent international architects, urban planners, theologians, historians and academics, amongst them the architects Louis Kahn, Isamu Noguchi and Christopher Alexander, the architectural critic Bruno Zevi, the American historian of technology and cities Lewis Mumford, and the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The 1968 plan was presented to the Jerusalem Committee on its second meeting in December 1970. The passionate academic discussion of the Jerusalem Committee never challenged the political dimension of the municipal plan and Israel’s right or wisdom in colonizing and ‘uniting’ the city under its rule, nor did it discuss the dispossession of Palestinians that it brought about. Rather, it argued about the formal and architectural dimension of this colonization.³⁰ The history of the occupation is full of liberal ‘men of peace’ who are responsible for, or who at least sweeten, the injustice committed by the occupation. The occupation would not have been possible without them.

Although members of the committee supported the use of stone cladding, as was already outlined in the masterplan, they were unanimous in their rejection of the plan’s overall modernist premise, especially in its lack of regard for the historical nature of the city. Upon being presented with the masterplan some of the committee members were enraged and others brought literally to tears, lamenting the impending ‘destruction’ of the city by a modernist development plan of yesterday, and demanding that Jerusalem’s planners instead ‘translate [Jerusalem’s] special quality into generative principles which would guide the city’s future growth’.³¹ The committee finally managed to convince the municipality to cancel a dense system of flyovers proposed in the 1968 masterplan to be contructed near the Old City. The main concern of the committee, however, was with the Old City itself, but before further engaging with its advice on plans for its restoration, a few words must be expended on its war-time destruction, and what was revealed under its ruins.

Destruction by design

On the evening of 10 June 1967, before the cease-fire was reached and while still under the fog of war, the Israeli military performed the first significant urban transformation in the Occupied Territories, flattening the entire Maghariba (north African) Quarter, which was located immediately in front of the Wailing Wall on the southeastern edge of the Old City. This destruction was undertaken in order to make way for an enormous plaza extending between the Jewish Quarter and the Wailing Wall. This urban transformation, undertaken by the military without explicit government order, demonstrates more than anything else that the military had no intention of retreating from this occupied area. Chaim Hertzog, the Irish-born first military governor of the Occupied Territories, and later the sixth president of Israel, took much of the credit for the destruction of this densely populated neighbourhood, home to several thousand people living in 125 houses. ‘When we visited the Wailing Wall we found a toilet attached to it … we decided to remove it, and from this we came to the conclusion that we could evacuate the entire area in front of the Wailing Wall … a historical opportunity that will never return … We knew that the following Saturday, June 14, would be the Shavuot Holiday and that many will want to come to pray … it all had to be completed by then.’³² In 1917 Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, pleaded futilely with the British military to do the same several months after they had occupied Jerusalem. With the Maghariba Quarter intact, access to the Wailing Wall was by means of a small winding alley, which became the focus of much conflict between Jews travelling to pray at the Wailing Wall and residents.

After the complete destruction of the Maghariba Quarter, the military set about evacuating the 3,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, who had settled in the Jewish Quarter, which was adjacent to the Maghariba Quarter in the west, and now overlooked the huge destruction site between it and the Wailing Wall. In 1948 the Jewish Quarter was besieged by the Jordan Legion, and its population of about 2,000 was forced to flee. Thereafter the Quarter became the destination of Palestinian refugees fleeing from areas that had come under Israeli rule. After the 1967 war the government wanted to restore Jewish life in the Jewish Quarter. First to be forcibly removed were eighty families of the Palestinian refugees who lived in buildings that had formerly been synagogues.³³ The rest of the inhabitants of the Quarter – Muslims and Christians, Palestinians as well as Armenians – were gradually expelled after an Israeli High Court of Justice ruling allowed it. Prior to the 1948 war, the borders of the Quarter had been porous and its dimensions could not be precisely defined. After the 1967 war, the government cleansed an area of approximately 9 hectares, larger than all previous accounts of the area of the Quarter. Two months after the war, on 31 August, the entire Old City was declared a site of antiquity, and no building was permitted until an archaeological survey had been conducted. The enlarged Quarter, now brutally emptied of its life, became the site of intense archaeological surveys. Three years later, in 1971, a company for the restoration and development of the Jewish Quarter was set up, supported the by German-born British architectural historian and critic Nikolaus Pevsner.³⁴

Archaeology provided not only a pretext for an Israeli ‘return’ to occupy Palestinian lands, but, as Palestinian writer Nadia Abu El-Haj claimed, also the ‘footprint’ of historical authenticity that could be developed into built form by Israeli architects. Biblical archaeology was used to validate the claim that Palestinian vernacular architecture was in fact Jewish at source, and allowed, as Nitzan-Shiftan showed, ‘Israeliness’ to define itself as a local ‘native’ culture, appropriated and altered by the latecomer Palestinians.³⁵

The clearing of the Western Wall Plaza, 1967, IP.

Biblical archaeology

Archaeology has been central to the formation of Israeli identity since the establishment of the state. When Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, claimed in his memoirs that the Jewish right over Palestine is ‘based … on digging the soil with our own hands’,³⁶ he was referring to the two practices that would establish and demonstrate Zionist rights to the land – agriculture and archaeology. Having established itself on much of the surface of an unfamiliar Palestine, Zionism continued its vertical quest for the Promised Land downwards. The existing landscapes of Palestine were seen as a contemporary veil under which historic biblical landscapes, battlegrounds, Israelite settlements and sites of worship could be revealed by digging. The national role assigned to archaeology was to remove the visible layer and expose the ancient Israelite landscape and with it the proof of Jewish ownership. The subterranean strata was thus perceived as a parallel geography akin to a national monument, providing an alibi for new colonization that could be argued as a return to sacred patrimony. Archaeology further influenced the reorganization of the surface terrain. Throughout Zionist history, new villages, towns and settlements had been established adjacent to or literally over sites suspected of having a Hebraic past, adopting their biblical names.³⁷ Indeed, only a few metres below the surface, a palimpsest of 5,000-year-old debris, a vertical chronological stack of cultures and lives, narratives of wars and destruction, has been compressed by soil and stone. Israeli biblical archaeologists were interested in the deeper levels of the Bronze and Iron Ages,³⁸ which generally cover the period of time mentioned in the Bible, and the first four centuries AD, referring to the period mentioned in the more recent interpretative religious studies of the Mishna. The upper layers of the Muslim and Ottoman periods were marginalized in digs and museums, often dismissed as representations of a stagnant period, discarded as ‘too new’, or simply left alone to rot and crumble.³⁹ This reflected the tendency of Israeli biblical archaeologists to short-circuit history. In this, Israeli archaeology was not politicized in a substantially different manner to these employed in the service of other national movements.⁴⁰ Moreover, the practices of Israeli biblical archaeology were largely inherited from British and American archaeologists who had been excavating the area since the nineteenth century.⁴¹ However, in contrast to their predecessors, Israeli biblical archaeologists had national rather than religious aspirations. Excavations were often carried out by secularists, men who, like Ben Gurion, saw the Bible as a historical national text that could fuse the relationship of a national identity to its state.⁴² The archaeological digs were themselves often reminiscent of military operations, with the work organized by retired military officers.⁴³ On 27 June 1967, the same day that Arab Jerusalem and the area around it was annexed to Israel, the Israeli government declared the archaeological and historical sites in the West Bank, primarily those of Jewish or Israelite cultural relevance, to be the state’s ‘national and cultural property’,⁴⁴ amounting to a de facto annexation of the ground beneath the Occupied Territories, making it the first zone to be colonized. The centre of attention for Israeli biblical archaeologists was the Jerusalem area and, in particular, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. After the war, archaeological data became more easily available, with the most organized archives of archaeology and antiquity – the East Jerusalem-based Rockefeller Museum, the American School for Oriental Research, the French École Biblique et Archéologique – together with their collections and libraries, coming under Israeli control and thereby providing Israeli biblical archaeologists with a treasure trove of sources.⁴⁵

Louis Kahn, The Hurva Synagogue (left), IP.

Archaeology into architecture

In the Old City archaeological finds were incorporated into the overall urban design scheme. Louis Kahn, who was the leading voice in the early meetings of the Jerusalem Committee, envisioned the reconstruction of the evacuated quarter as ‘an archaeological grid in which [new] architectural, urban forms are shaped after and in juxtaposition to their ruins’.⁴⁶ One of Louis Kahn’s most significant proposals for the reconstruction of the Old City, privately undertaken, was his plan for the restoration of the Hurva [Ruin] Synagogue, an eighteenth-century building that stood at the centre of the Jewish Quarter before it was demolished by the Jordan Legion after the 1948 war. The proportions and outline of Khan’s design for a monumental and archaic-looking synagogue-fortress, growing out of its ruins, were such that, if built, it would have competed on the city’s skyline with the Al Aqsa mosque and the Holy Sepulchre. Although never realized, the plan had considerable influence on Israeli architecture in the Quarter and beyond. Ram Karmi, one of the most promising young Israeli architects of the second generation of state builders, was Kahn’s foremost follower and promoter in Israel in the 1970s. For Karmi, writing in 1970, Kahn’s design for the Hurva Synagogue marked the end of Israeli modernism that was closely associated with the architecture of Israel’s founding generation and that of his father, Dov Karmi. ‘Israeli architecture … did not manage to artistically and properly express the desires of a nation returning to its routes … the new Hurva building provides an opportunity to fill this absence.’⁴⁷ The call was for the disciplines of archaeology and architecture to merge. Indeed, throughout the restoration work in the Quarter, Israeli archaeologists and architects collaborated, carrying out, often simultaneously, excavation, restoration and reconstruction.⁴⁸ Archaeology was vertically extended into a new building style that Zvi Efrat called ‘archaeologism’.⁴⁹ In some cases, the upper storeys of new homes would become literal extensions of their archaeological footprints, while other buildings would be built using older stones for the lower floors and newer stones at higher levels: others still were simply built to appear old.

The reconstruction of Kikar Batei Machase, the main square in the Jewish Quarter early 1970s, IP.

In 1974 Karmi became chief architect at the Ministry of Construction and Housing, which at the time still oversaw most residential construction in Israel and which had gained a reputation for promoting fast and cheap housing solutions in rows of housing blocks. Karmi was the most visible of a group of Israeli architects attuned to the historicist tendencies of the Jerusalem Committee and to worldwide developments in architecture. These architects were mostly young, returning from study periods in elite architectural schools worldwide, and in particular from the hot-house of new architectural ideas, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, from which Karmi himself had graduated. Like many in Israel’s professional class, most of them were supporters of the Labor Party, which between 1967 and 1977 was the executive force behind the colonization of Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territories.

For these young practitioners, the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s – epitomized by the state-sponsored socialist housing blocks of European modernism – was sterile, heartless and lacking an important component, ‘meaning’. These architects had not for the most part returned to Israel out of nationalist conviction but rather because, as young architects, they were happy to be given the opportunity to build, and to engage with issues that were then at the centre of architectural discourse. They may have been aware that their projects were built on expropriated Palestinian lands, and precipitated personal and national tragedies, but they suppressed such thoughts, pretending to engage with these projects in a ‘purely’ professional way.

Upon taking up his role, in a move echoing that of Storrs, Karmi halted all projects in Jerusalem and set a team of experts to oversee a new citywide planning programme. For Karmi, ‘the search for national identity must be conducted through architecture.’⁵⁰ In the introduction to ‘Israel Builds’ the 1977 official publication of the Ministry of Housing, he explained the shift in the focus of architectural production: ‘We live under the pressure of a shortage of housing … We make every effort to build as much as our budget permits … Still I feel that in all those efforts there is a lack of one component, the component around which Israel came into existence: the establishment of a “national home” … Home means more than just the narrow confines of one’s apartment; it also implies a sense of belonging to the immediate surroundings …’⁵¹ Architecture was to become a central player, no less, in the redesign of territory as a home.

But where was such ‘meaning’ to be found? According to Karmi, it was located in the particular nature of the nation’s terrain itself: ‘Just as we did not create the Hebrew language ex-nihilo, but built it up on the foundations of the language that was spoken 2000 years ago … so we are not starting [to construct buildings] on a blank sheet of paper.’⁵² Inspiration was sought and found, as Alona Nitzan-Shiftan forcefully demonstrated, both above and below the surface: ‘While architects were seeking locality on the ground, archaeologists sought Jewish history underneath its surface.’⁵³ Above the ground, the fabric of Palestinian vernacular architecture – found in the hillside villages and Jerusalem neighbourhoods – was deemed by Israeli architects to retain not the social-physical typologies that have undergone complex historical development, but fossilized forms of biblical authenticity.⁵⁴ Israeli-built culture has always been locked between the contradictory desires to either imitate or even inhabit the stereotypical Arab vernacular, and to define itself sharply and contrastingly against it. Zionists saw the Palestinians either as late-comers to the land, devoid of thousand-year-old roots or, paradoxically, as the very custodians of the ancient Hebrew culture and language of this land – all this without any sense of contradiction.⁵⁵

Israeli architects’ attraction to local Palestinian architecture was also inspired by another theoretical framework prominent at the time: the 1964 MoMA exhibition ‘Architecture without Architects’. Its extended catalogue became influential in promoting the integration of principles derived from vernacular buildings into the context of international modern architecture. However, in focusing its attention on the formal dimension of vernacular domestic architecture, the exhibition ignored the political and social developments of the communities that constructed them, being somewhat more inclined to see them as atemporal embodiments of ‘the noble savage’.⁵⁶ In a similarly romantic and orientalist vein, Israeli architects’ fascination with the Palestinian vernacular was blind to the complex socioeconomic development of the Palestinian villages and towns they now studied; instead, they assumed that such housing forms had developed organically, without planning. It was a view encapsulated in an observation by Thomas Leitersdorf, another graduate of the Architectural Association in London, who had returned to Israel from a period of work abroad to plan Ma’ale Adumim, the largest settlements in the West Bank, a few kilometres east of Jerusalem: ‘in terms of beauty they [the Palestinians] are way ahead of us! “Architecture without Architects” – this is the Arab village, and this is its beauty … I look upon the morphology of the Arab villages with envy. The beauty of the Arab village lies in its accumulative and somewhat irrational nature … it is always better than when an architect comes in, the architect only spoils things because the architect has to work logically, and they do not …’⁵⁷ The modernization of the Palestinian village – its development as a complex socio-political entity, the conversion of its agrarian economy into a semi-urban one, the abandonment of traditional stone construction, and even, more ironically, the influence of Israeli culture, economy, architecture and construction techniques – remained largely invisible to Leitersdorf and his contemporaries. But beyond his orientalist perspective, which doomed the Palestinian village to a permanent romantic backwardness, an island of ‘tradition’ within an ocean of ‘progress’,⁵⁸ Leitersdorf has missed the contradiction in his own work: the buildings he designed to overlook the Palestinian villages are what irrevocably damaged them.

At the end of the ‘reconstruction’ of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem only about 20 per cent of the original buildings were actually conserved. The rest were rebuilt, with more storeys in order to accommodate government targets for larger numbers of residents. At present, more than 4,500 people, a third of them yeshiva students from all over the world live in the Jewish Quarter. Most of these inhabitants are national-religious Jews, many of them from the United States, but several artists and architects, influenced by the culture of ‘return to the city centre’ have also made it their home. An example for the latter type of settlers are the architects Moshe Safdie and Elinoar Barzacchi, later the Chief Architect of the District of Jerusalem, who returned to Israel in 1977 after a period of study and work in Paris and Rome. She recently explained her decision to settle there: ‘I came from Europe and I thought the most wonderful place to live in Jerusalem is in the Old City. In Rome I lived in the Old City. In Paris I lived in Montmartre. Here in the [Jewish] Quarter it looked to me like the most Jerusalemite thing there is, the most authentic, the most multicultural it can be.’⁵⁹

Model of the Yeshiva of Porat Yosef, the Jewish Quarter, overlooking the Wailing Wall 1970 (Architect: Moshe Safdie), IP.

Rather than a multicultural city centre the Jewish Quarter might be better described as an artificial, ethnically homogenous, gated neighbourhood, whose construction was made possible by the forced displacements of its inhabitants. It is a ‘biblical’ theme park, sending out further tentacles of Jewish housing enclaves and religious study-centres into the Muslim Quarter to which it is connected above street level via protected and exclusive roof paths. The separation of this enclave from its surroundings is further enforced by the fact that all entrances and exits to the Jewish Quarter are guarded by the border police, providing access, after body and bag scans, only to Jewish residents/settlers, tourists, and the Israeli army and police.

Reproducing the Old City

The expropriations of Palestinian property that enabled the ‘reconstruction’ of the Jewish Quarter went in tandem with the beginning of a wave of expropriations at the peripheries of the municipal area. Over a third of the land annexed to by the state was expropriated from its Palestinian owners for the establishment and expansion of the Jewish neighbourhoods, under the pretext of catering for ‘public needs’. The use of the term ‘public’ reveals more than anything else the government’s political bias: the ‘public’ on whom expropriations were imposed always comprised Palestinians; the ‘public’ who enjoyed the fruits of the expropriation always exclusively comprised Jews.⁶⁰

Notwithstanding the reconstruction of the Jewish Quarter, Jerusalem’s city centre was torn apart by centrifugal forces. In 1977, ten years after the war, when the right-wing Likud replaced Labor in power, the Jewish Quarter was home to almost 4,000 people, while about 50,000 Israeli Jews were already settled in the new Jewish neighbourhoods established on the peripheries of the occupied areas annexed to Jerusalem.⁶¹ The Jewish inhabitants of the city, wary of the congested, multi-ethnic and disputed older neighbourhoods of the western part of the city, opted for the ethnic, cultural and social homogeneity of the suburbs. These suburban developments were referred to as ‘urban neighbourhoods’ rather than ‘settlements’, not because of their nature, economy or distance from the centre, but because they were still located within the much-expanded boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality.

However, the significance of the Quarter’s ‘reconstruction’ lay not just in the number of people who inhabited it, but in the establishment of a foothold in the Old City and the creation of a laboratory for an emergent sensibility in architecture, one later exported and implemented in the construction of the city’s outer neighbourhoods. The neighbourhood of Gilo, located on the southernmost edge of Jerusalem, on a hilltop overlooking Bethlehem and the refugee camps surrounding it, offers one of the best examples of the attempt to reproduce something of the feel of the Old City within Jerusalem’s periphery. Marking the southern edge of the extended city, Gilo is, according to its planner, the architect Avraham Yaski, writing in 1977, both ‘part of the wall enclosing Jerusalem’ as well as ‘a well defined, enclosed city’. ‘Though Gilo is a suburban quarter’, Yaski admits, ‘an effort has been made to create the feeling that it is an organic part of Jerusalem and not a dormitory town.’⁶² With the reclusive nature of Gilo’s urban form, Yaski echoes yet another emerging ideal of the time – the American ‘New Urbanism’, which promoted a type of development (inspired by the writing of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford) that sought to replicate city-centre-like, human-scaled walkable communities most often on the fringes of American cities. In Jerusalem, city-centre-like developments meant the reproduction of the Old City. One of the best examples of this phenomenon is the ‘Housing Cluster’ designed by the architect Salo Hershman in Gilo in the early 1970s. The housing is laid out as several walled-city-like ensembles. They are entered via large gates leading into a series of internal courtyards and squares. The latter are woven together by arched walkways, alleyways and colonnades, and are overlooked by balconies. The entire concrete-built cluster is clad with slated ‘Jerusalem Stone’. Indeed, Gilo has been the most distinct of the new neighbourhoods in demonstrating the transformation of Israeli architecture. The modernist, standard, cheap, prefabricated apartment block, formerly the basic unit of state-sponsored housing, was replaced, according to Efrat, by other typologies of ‘formless, borderless clusters composed of a multitude of small terraced houses that morphed onto the existing topography of the Jerusalem hills … “contextual” architecture, sentimental buildings, influenced by alleged “regional” connections … pseudo historical creations of oriental and Mediterranean mimicry … embodying an association with antiquity and national roots’.⁶³ This architecture would thereafter provide, through an eclectic agglomeration of episodes and a museum-like arrangement of elements, the fantasy deemed necessary for the consolidation of a new national identity and the domestication of the expanded city. It placed every remote and newly built suburb well within the boundaries of ‘the eternally unified capital of the Jewish people’, and thus, as far as most Israelis are concerned, away from the negotiating table. Whatever is called Jerusalem, by name, by architecture and by the use of stone, is placed at the heart of the Israeli consensus. Indeed, although in July 2000 the Israeli negotiation team in Camp David agreed in principle to Clinton’s proposal that asked for Israel to hand back the archipelago of Palestinian neighbourhoods and urban-villages in Jerusalem, they have insisted on maintaining sovereignty over the remote, stone-clad suburban neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, referred to in Israel as ‘Jewish Jerusalem’. Borders designed by a military committee have been visually domesticated and culturally naturalized to such a degree that returning or removing state housing projects built within them has become a politically controversial act of ‘partitioning Jerusalem’. Any act of decolonization in the area now called Jerusalem must thus start with a process of secularizing and denaturalizing the Jewish neighbourhoods/settlements of greater Jerusalem.

Demographic architecture

Like many colonial cities, Jerusalem has its dark enclaves for its native inhabitants, ruled by the border police, with surprise checkpoints between neighbourhoods. For the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem, unlike the Jewish residents, hardly anything was ever planned but their departure. Within the municipal borders of the city, architects and planners were given the task not only of constructing homes and developing a new ‘national style’ but also of maintaining the ‘demographic balance’, which at the time of occupation in 1967, and within Jerusalem’s gerrymandered borders, stood at about three Jewish inhabitants to every Palestinian. The faster growth rate of the Palestinian population was seen by Israel as a ‘demographic time-bomb’. In 1993 City Engineer Elinoar Barzacchi echoed an ongoing state policy when she outlined how the municipality intends to deal with this problem: ‘There is a government decision to maintain the proportion between the Arab and Jewish populations in the city at 28 per cent Arab and 72 per cent Jew. The only way to cope with that ratio is through the housing potential.’⁶⁴ This policy of maintaining ‘demographic balance’ has informed the underlying logic of almost every masterplan prepared for the city’s development.⁶⁵

Model of the neighbourhood of Gilo (Architects: Arvraham Yaski, Yaakov Gil, Yosef Sivan).

Design session on Gilo in the early 1970s. In the centre, pointing, is team leader Avraham Yaski, who later received the Israel Prize for this design. Ram Karmi (with sunglasses and sideburns) is sitting at the centre.

By trying to achieve the demographic and geographic guidelines of the political masterplans, the planners and architects of the municipality of Jerusalem and those working for them have effectively taken part in a national policy of forced migration, unofficially referred to in Israeli circles as the ‘silent transfer’, a crime according to international law.⁶⁶ The evidence for these crimes is not only to be found in protocols or in the wording of political masterplans, but in the drawings of architects and planners. They can be seen as lines in their plans.⁶⁷ Yet, remarkably, in spite of all Israel’s efforts to keep the 28 per cent Palestinian to 72 per cent Jewish ratio, its planning policy is falling short of its target. Out of the 650,000 registered residents of Jerusalem in 2005, about a third were Palestinians. This has obviously increased the frustration that further accelerates Israel’s draconian measures.

Whereas demographic policies are clearly outlined in political masterplans, which are seen as guidelines only, in town-building schemes and local plans – which are statutory documents having the force of law – these intentions are camouflaged within the techno-professional language of planning. Since the government guidelines are in blatant violation of both Israeli and international law, a deliberate discrepancy in language has opened up between political and architectural documents. The illegal policy was implemented by manipulating seemingly mundane planning categories. Maintaining the ‘demographic balance’ through the ‘housing potential’, when Palestinian demographic growth is so much faster, implied the use of one or both of two planning policies: one promoting the construction of housing in Jewish neighbourhoods and the other limiting the expansion of Palestinian ones. While issuing an annual average of 1,500 building permits to Jewish Israelis and constructing 90,000 housing units for Jews in all parts of East Jerusalem since 1967, the municipality has issued an annual average of only 100 building permits to Palestinians in the city, thus creating a Palestinian housing crisis with a shortfall of more than 25,000 housing units.⁶⁸ Without the possibility of obtaining planning permissions, many Palestinian 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 on an architectural scale – orally so that it could be withdrawn at any point. In a daring and radical manifestation of the region’s vertical schizophrenia he proposed a stack of horizontal sovereign borders. The first would have passed under the paving stones of the compound. There the border between Arab Al-Quds and Israeli Jerusalem would, at the most contested point on earth, flip from the horizontal to the vertical. Palestinians would gain sovereignty over the platform of the Haram al-Sharif, the mosque of Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. Under the paving of this platform would be a layer of 150 centimeter deep UN zone. This zone will be uninhabited but will function to separate the parties. Israeli sovereignty would comprise the volume below this layer to include the Wailing Wall and the sacred ‘depth of the mount’, where the Temple is presumed to have existed, extending further down to the centre of the earth. Furthermore, the airspace over the site, just like that over the entire heavenly city would remain in Israeli sovereignty. This startling proposal of stacking sovereign volumes in layers, earned it, as Gilead Sher lightheartedly told me, its nickname – the Arkansas ‘Big Mac’. Since Israeli sovereignty would extend over the entire area around the compound, Barak, who claimed, for the purposes of negotiation, that he was only ‘willing to consider the proposal’ but in effect fully embraced it, suggested ‘a bridge or a tunnel, through which whoever wants to pray in Al-Aqsa could access the compound’. This special pedestrian bridge would have connected the Palestinian areas east of the Old City with the religious compound, otherwise isolated in a three-dimensional ‘wrap’ of Israeli sovereignty in all directions. The bridge, on which Palestinians would have received full sovereignty, was to have itself spanned a section of the Mount of Olives and the ancient Jewish cemetery there on which Israeli sovereignty would be internationally recognized. The Palestinians, long suspicious of Israel’s presence under their mosques, wary of Israel’s presence in the airspace over them and unreceptive to the idea of their capital woven together with bridges, flatly rejected the plan. Arafat, somewhat bemused, asked Clinton whether he would have accepted ‘a foreign sovereignty under the paving of Washington DC’. Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian minister and chief negotiator in Camp David dryly summed up Palestinian demands that ‘Haram al-Sharif … must be handed over to the Palestinians – over, under and to the sides, geographically and topographically’.

Israeli Defence Force outpost at the Rafah Salient, circa 1969, IP.