Category: In the Media

Rebuilding Gaza’s infrastructure with mud

Eva Bartlett | Electronic Intifada

14 October 2009

SHEIKH ZAYED, occupied Gaza Strip (IPS) – On a searing summer morning, workers are adding layers to the mud-brick police station being constructed in Sheikh Zayed, northern Gaza.

“We started building on 20 June,” says Mohammed al-Sheikh Eid, a consultant engineer with Gaza’s Ministry of Interior. “Since this is the first time we’ve built something on this scale with mud bricks, we can’t estimate exactly how much longer it will take to complete. Maybe another two months or so.”

He is confident, however, that they will finish before the winter rains begin.

Since the war on Gaza ended, a number of houses have been built using mud to create simple, square, two or three-room homes. The new Sheikh Zayed police station is one of the larger and more ambitious projects.

An intricate series of thick-walled, deep-arched chambers form what is on the whole a much more artistic rendition of the former square, cement police station bombed during the attacks. When finished, the station will be 550 square meters, including seven 3.5m by 3.5m office rooms and eight long, arched-roofed chambers 3m wide and 8m long.

In contrast to Gaza’s basic new mud-brick homes, with their cracked-earth finish inside and rough, straw-flecked outer layer, the police station design replicates that of the elegant, traditional Palestinian stone or brick buildings: neatly-packed rows of brick frame windows and doorways in graceful arcs; with surprisingly smooth domes that top off vaulted rooms and corridors. The one-level station, with its multiple rooftop domes, resembles the architecture of Palestinian homes from Nablus to Jerusalem.

The site, just off the coastal road serving Beit Lahiya, is open and spacious, with a contrasting backdrop of cement block apartment buildings, built long before the Israeli siege on Gaza, when cement was accessible.

Engineer and site supervisor Sameh al-Khalout explains the small-scale and hand-crafted construction process.

“The mud bricks take between one and two weeks to cast and dry,” he says, gesturing at the rows of bricks drying in the sun. “Each brick costs roughly one shekel [a quarter of a dollar] to make.”

Al-Khalout says the clay is brought from a nearby area of Beit Lahiya, and the straw comes from local farmers. “We will put plaster on the roof, to seal it and protect it from rain.”

Wood is temporarily used to buffer ceiling arches and windows until the clay mortar hardens. The wood is then removed and used elsewhere in the same manner.

Apart from these wood bracings, conventional and excessively expensive building materials are not used.

Cement smuggled in via the tunnels between Egypt and Gaza is as much as ten times the pre-siege price. A ton of cement costs 3,400 shekels ($850), compared to the 350 shekels it cost prior to June 2007.

Husam Toubil from the United Nations Development Programme says Gaza requires 50,000 tons of cement to rebuild destroyed homes, and 41,000 tons for public buildings.

Al-Khalout says problems extend beyond lack of availability of materials. “For most of our workers, this is their first experience building with mud bricks.”

“Since we have to bring in clay, straw and gravel, and mix the mud cement, make the bricks and then build the actual station, we require more workers than we would using cement.”

In an enclosed Strip where unemployment is near 50 percent and poverty has reached 90 percent, according to a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCATD) report, the workers will brave the heat for the chance to earn 40 shekels a day.

Since the siege on Gaza tightened in June 2007, almost no construction materials have entered Gaza, according to the OCHA report. This is in comparison to the pre-attacks, pre-siege import levels of 7,400 trucks per month, from January to May 2007.

According to the United Nations Relief Web news, 3,900 truckloads entered Gaza from January to May 2007. Over the same period this year, six trucks were allowed in. These carried material for water projects, greatly in need and long awaiting completion.

The Israeli authorities say the ban on building materials is to prevent Hamas from using so-called “dual use” items for military activities.

Yet, non-Hamas run agencies, schools, and healthcare centers are facing the same blanket restrictions on import of cement, gravel, wood, tiles, piping, paint, glass and steel bars, notes the OCHA report.

The mud brick technique, extended beyond the simple clay ovens prevalent in Gaza to the building of houses, potentially meets some of Gaza’s great construction needs.

East of Gaza city, in the al-Shejayia district, engineers have tackled the challenge of a multi-level clay-brick building: a three-story school for 600 disabled children is under construction, using a combination of mud brick and rubble from the remains of homes and buildings destroyed during the Israeli attacks.

According to a Guardian news report, engineer Maher al-Batroukh and university engineers experimented with clay to create strong bricks. When finished, the school will be roughly twice the size of the Sheikh Zayed police station, with similar domed ceilings and plaster coating.

Noting the success of clay building endeavors, the Hamas Ministry of Public Works is likewise pursuing the mud-brick alternative, with plans to build multi-story houses and re-build destroyed public buildings.

While some are finding means to get around the Israeli ban on nearly everything needed to re-build in Gaza, the on-going siege on the Strip continues to hit daily life to an extent that the latest UN report notes that closed borders and delays in allowing in goods are “devastating livelihoods” and causing gradual “de-development.”

The OCHA report further cites the damage to education, including overcrowding due to destroyed or damaged schools, and denied or delayed education materials.

In an August 2009 statement, Maxwell Gaylard, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, noted that the “deterioration and breakdown of water and sanitation facilities in Gaza is compounding an already severe and protracted denial of human dignity in the Gaza Strip.”

Gaylard, along with the Association for International Development Agencies (AIDA), notes that the Israeli denial of entry of equipment and supplies needed for the construction, maintenance and operation of water and sanitation facilities since June 2007 has led to “the gradual deterioration of these essential services.”

Further citing destruction from the Israeli attacks, the statement says Gaza’s sanitation and water services are on the “brink of collapse,” noting that the sparse supplies allowed in have been “nowhere near enough to restore a fully functioning water and sanitation system.”

About 60 percent of the population does not have continuous access to water, the statement notes. Roughly 10,000 people in Gaza have no access to the water network at all. This, combined with the 50-80 million liters of untreated and partially treated wastewater that is being discharged daily since January 2008, compounds the water and sanitation crisis.

Although some resourceful individuals have built homes despite the ban on cement, these various reports highlight that the manifold problems created by the ongoing siege and Israeli attacks on Gaza are too extensive to be solved by improvisation and mud alone.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reports that 60 police stations were destroyed or damaged during the winter 2008-2009 Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) August 2009 report says more than 6,400 homes were destroyed or severely damaged, and over 52,000 suffered minor damage from bombing during Israel’s winter war on Gaza.

The OCHA report notes that the continued Israeli-led siege on Gaza has prevented reconstruction or repair of 13,900 homes, including approximately 2,700 homes damaged or destroyed in earlier Israeli military operations, and of 3,000 housing units intended to replace inadequate homes in crowded refugee camps.

Over 20,000 Palestinians remain displaced in Gaza, with approximately 100 families still living in emergency tents provided by aid agencies.

PCHR also reports that 215 factories and 700 private businesses, 17 universities or colleges, 15 hospitals and 43 health care centers, and 58 mosques were destroyed or damaged during the attacks. The United Nations says that 298 schools were destroyed or damaged.

They all await reconstruction, as does Gaza’s shattered economy.

Family who lost 29 members in Gaza war: We envy the dead

Amira Hass | Ha’aretz

18 October 2009

Richard Goldstone visited the Gaza City neighborhood of Zaytoun in late June to tour the compound of the extended Samouni family, the subject of coverage here in recent weeks (“‘I fed him like a baby bird,'” September 17; “Death in the Samouni compound,” September 25). Twenty-nine members of the family, all of them civilians, were killed in the Israel Defense Force’s winter assault – 21 during the shelling of a house where IDF soldiers had gathered some 100 members of the family a day earlier.

Salah Samouni and the owner of the house that was shelled – Wael Samouni – took Goldstone around the farming neighborhood, showing him its devastated homes and uprooted orchards. In a telephone conversation this week, Salah described how he had shown Goldstone a picture of his father, Talal, among the 21 killed in the house. He told the Jewish South African judge and head of the United Nations inquiry team into Operation Cast Lead, that his father “had been employed by Jews” for nearly 40 years and that whenever he was sick, “the employer would call, ask after his health, and forbid him to come to work before he had recovered.”

The Samounis were always confident that, in the event of any military invasions into Gaza, they could always manage to get along with the Israeli army. Until 2005, before Israel’s disengagement from the Strip, the Jewish settlement of Netzarim was located right next door, and several family members worked there from time to time. When the joint Israeli-Palestinian patrols were active, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security officials sometimes asked the Samounis to “lend” them a tractor to flatten a patch of land or repair the Salah al-Din Road (for example, when a diplomatic convoy needed to pass through). While Samouni family members worked on their tractors, gathering sand, the soldiers would watch them.

“When the soldiers wanted us to leave, they would fire above our heads. That’s what experience taught me,” recalls Salah Samouni, who lost a 2-year-old daughter in the IDF attack, along with uncles and both of his parents. The older men of the family, among them his father and two uncles who were killed by IDF soldiers on January 4 and 5, worked in Israel until the 1990s in different localities, including Bat Yam, Moshav Asseret (near Gedera) and the “Glicksman Plant.” They all believed that the Hebrew they had learned would assist and if necessary save them during encounters with soldiers.

As was reported here last month – on January 4, under orders from the army, Salah Samouni and the rest of the family left their home, which had been turned into a military position, and moved to the other, the home of Wael, located on the southern side of the street. The fact that it was the soldiers who had relocated them, had seen the faces of the children and the older women, and the fact that the soldiers were positioned in locations surrounding the house just tens of meters away, instilled in the family a certain amount of confidence – despite the IDF fire from the air, from the sea and from the land, despite the hunger and the thirst.

On the morning of Monday, January 5, Salah Samouni walked out of the house and shouted in the direction of another house in the compound that he thought other family members were still in. He wanted them to join him, to be in a safer place, closer to the soldiers. Nothing prepared him for the three shells and the rockets the IDF fired a short time later.

“My daughter Azza, my only daughter, two and a half years old, was injured in the first hit on the house,” Salah told Haaretz. “She managed to say, ‘Daddy, it hurts.’ And then, in the second hit, she died. And I’m praying. Everything is dust and I can’t see anything. I thought I was dead. I found myself getting up, all bloody, and I found my mother sitting by the hall with her head tilted downward. I moved her face a little, and I found that the right half of her face was gone. I looked at my father, whose eye was gone. He was still breathing a little, and then he stopped.”

When they exited the house – injured, confused, dazed, fearing the fourth shell or rocket would soon land – determined to get themselves to Gaza despite the soldiers’ shouts from nearby positions to go back, they believed only corpses remained in the house. They did not know that under the dust and rubble in one large room, nine family members remained alive: the elderly matriarch and five of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren – the youngest of whom was three years old, the eldest 16 – along with another kinsman and his son. They had passed out, some of them beneath corpses.

When they regained consciousness, 16-year-old Ahmad Ibrahim and his 10-year-old brother Yakub saw the corpses of their mother, four of their brothers and their nephew. Mahmoud Tallal, 16, had lost his toes; bleeding, he saw that his parents – Tallal and Rahma – had been killed. Three-year-old Omar, Salah’s son, was buried unconscious under 24-year-old Saffa’s dead body, explaining why they hadn’t found him during the terrible moment of panic as they left the house. Ahmad Nafez, 15, recalled how when little Omar woke up and pulled himself out from under the corpse, he spotted his grandfather Tallal and started shaking him, crying: “Grandpa, Grandpa, wake up.”

The previous day Amal, a nine-year-old girl, had witnessed soldiers bursting into her home and killing her father, Atiyeh. She had taken shelter in her Uncle Tallal’s home and together with other family members was moved to Wael’s house. She did not know that her brother Ahmad was bleeding to death in his mother’s arms, in another house in the neighborhood.

The children found some scraps of food in the kitchen and ate. Later, Ahmad Nafez told his relatives how Ahmad Ibrahim had gone from corpse to corpse – his mother, his four brothers and his nephew among them – shaking them, hitting them, telling them to get up. Perhaps from the blows, Amal regained consciousness, her head bloody and her eyes rolling in their sockets. She kept crying out “water, water,” said she wanted her mother and father, and beat her head on the floor, her eyes rolling the whole time.

It is too dangerous to remove the shrapnel embedded in her head – that is even what the doctors at a Tel Aviv hospital say. Now everything hurts her and will continue to hurt her: when it’s cold, when it’s hot, when she’s in the sun. She will not be able to concentrate on her studies.

No one can reconstruct how the hours passed for them in Wael’s bombarded house; some remained in a state of exhaustion and apathy. The first to recover was actually Shiffa, the 71-year-old grandmother. On the morning of Tuesday, January 6, she realized that no one was coming to rescue them anytime soon. Not the soldiers positioned just meters away, not the Red Cross nor the Red Crescent nor other relatives. Perhaps they didn’t even know they were alive, she concluded. Her walker had been bent and buried in the house, but she managed to leave with two of her grandchildren – Mahmoud (his legs bleeding) and little Omar.

They hobbled out and started walking – along the silent street, among the vacated houses, realizing some were occupied by soldiers. “The Jews saw us from above and shouted to us to go into the house,” related Shiffa. That was when they were walking down the street and passed by her sister’s home. They went inside, but didn’t find a living soul. The soldiers – firing into the air – came in after them. “We begged them to let us go home. ‘Where is your home?'” they asked. She told them “over there” and pointed east, toward the home of one of her sons, Arafat, located closer to Salah al-Din Road. The soldiers let them continue on. “We saw people coming out of Arafat’s house and Hijjeh’s house. Everyone was a bit injured and the soldiers were shooting overhead.”

At Hijjeh’s house she found everyone crying, each with his own story of those dead or wounded. “I told them what had happened to us, how everyone had fallen on everyone else, in heaps, the dead and the wounded.” She remained there with the rest of the injured for another night. Omar remembers this house fondly: He was given chocolate there.

Only on Wednesday, January 7, did the IDF allow Red Cross and Red Crescent crews to enter the neighborhood. They attest that they’d been asking to enter since January 4, but the IDF would not let them – whether by shooting in the direction of the ambulances that tried to get closer or by refusing to approve coordination. The medical teams, which were allowed to go in on foot and had to leave the ambulances a kilometer or a kilometer and a half away, thought they were going to rescue the injured from Hijjeh’s house. But then the grandmother told them about the wounded children who remained behind, among the dead, in Wael’s house. The medical team set out to rescue them, totally unprepared for the sight they found.

On January 18, after the IDF left the Gaza Strip, the rescue teams returned to the neighborhood. Wael’s house was found in ruins: IDF bulldozers had demolished it entirely – with the corpses inside.

In a general reply to questions from Haaretz regarding the behavior of the military forces in the Samouni family’s neighborhood, the IDF Spokesman said that all of the claims have been examined. “Upon completion of the examination, the findings will be taken to the military advocate general, who will decide about the need to take additional steps,” the spokesman said.

Salah Samouni, during the telephone conversation, said: “I asked [Richard] Goldstone to find out just one thing: Why did the army do this to us? Why did they take us out of the house one at a time, and the officer who spoke Hebrew with my father verified that we were all civilians – [so] why did they then shell us, kill us? This is what we want to know.”

He feels that Goldstone, in his report, lent the victims a voice. He did not expound on his frustration upon learning that the debate on the report had been postponed, but sought a way to describe how he feels nine months after the fact. “We feel [we are] in an exile, even though we are in our homeland, on our land. We sit and envy the dead. They are the ones who are at rest.”

EI exclusive video: Protesters shout down Ehud Olmert in Chicago

Maureen Clare Murphy, The Electronic Intifada

16 October 2009

Approximately 30 activists — mainly students from area universities — disrupted a lecture given in Chicago by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday which was hosted by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. While Olmert’s speech was disrupted inside the lecture hall, approximately 150 activists protested outside the hall in the freezing rain.

Protesters inside the hall read off the names of Palestinian children killed during Israel’s assault on Gaza last winter. They shouted that it was unacceptable that the war crimes suspect be invited to speak at a Chicago university when his army destroyed a university in Gaza in January. They reminded the audience of the more than 1,400 Palestinians killed during the Gaza attacks and the more than 1,200 killed during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006. Both invasions happened during Olmert’s premiership.

With interventions coming every few minutes throughout his appearance, Olmert had difficulty giving his speech and often appeared frustrated. At one point he appealed for “just five minutes” to speak without being interrupted.

The demonstration was mobilized last week after organizers learned of the lecture, paid for by a grant provided by Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Within hours an appeal was issued, urging those concerned with Palestinian rights to call the university and demand that the lecture be canceled. The call was put out by major community organizations such as the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC)-Chicago, American Muslims for Palestine and the United States Palestine Community Network, as well as solidarity organizations al-Awda, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, the International Solidarity Movement, the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago and area campus groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at DePaul University and the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as the Arab Student Union at Moraine Valley.

The security presence at the lecture was severe with university police, the US Secret Service and Israeli security present — many of them visibly armed — with Israeli security checking in those who had registered in advance to attend the lecture. Video and photography was banned inside the hall and media were not allowed to cover the lecture. Despite these restrictions, activists managed to take video inside the hall and drop an eight-foot-long banner from the mezzanine that read “Goldstone” in both English and Hebrew, referring to the recently published UN report investigating violations of international law during the Gaza invasion. One activist was arrested and put in a headlock by a police officer, witnesses said, and released around midnight. Approximately 30 supporters waited for him at the police station while he was detained.

Towards the end of the lecture, Olmert put his hand over his brow and squinted to search out the source of the shout, “There’s no discussion with a war criminal — the only discussion you should be having is in court!” That call was made by Ream Qato, who graduated from the university in 2007, and added, “You belong in the Hague!” Qato told The Electronic Intifada that yesterday’s protest “Set the stage for University of Chicago students and students in the Chicago area … no one should be afraid of speaking out against someone.” She added that the demonstration was significant because “The Palestinian community [in Chicago] for the first time went to a university campus to protest.”

Second-year medical student Afshan Mohiuddin was removed from the hall after she voiced her disapproval at the Harris School dean’s on-stage assertion that Olmert was invited to express his views. “He can do that at the International Court of Justice, not at this university,” Mohiuddin shouted, adding, “[Olmert] belongs in a cage, not on a stage!”

Mohiuddin told The Electronic Intifada that “it was ironic that they searched us [instead of him],” considering that Olmert is suspected of war crimes. She added, “As a University of Chicago student I was upset with the lack of commotion on behalf of the student body before the event … No one has protested the event.”

Mohiuddin’s frustration was echoed in a commentary published by the University of Chicago’s student publication The Chicago Maroon earlier this week, in which third-year student Nadia Marie Ismail decried the lack of protest by the university community towards the Olmert speech. She contrasted this silence with the pressure the Center for Middle Eastern Studies faced after a lecture earlier this year by The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah (who was the first to disrupt Olmert’s speech yesterday), University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Norman Finkelstein, whose lost bid for tenure at DePaul University is attributed to outside pressure by Israel government apologists. “[T]hat University center was put under unprecedented pressure for weeks before and months after the event, with claims that University centers and schools should not host ‘one-sided’ speakers,” Ismail wrote.

Olmert’s lecture in Chicago was one of several scheduled throughout the United States. His speech at the University of Kentucky the previous day was disrupted by activists and met with a protest outside. These demonstrations are part of a wave of notched-up dissent towards Israeli officials implicated in war crimes and racist policy. In 2003, former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky was greeted with a pie in the face by an activist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Last year at the UK’s Oxford University, a speech by Israeli President Shimon Peres was drowned out by protesters outside while students inside the hall disrupted his talk.

One of the organizers of the protest, Hatem Abudayyeh, National Coordinating Committee member of the United States Palestine Community Network, hoped for a larger count of protesters despite the adverse weather. However, he said, “The fact that there’s people around the world who know about it, the fact that PACBI [the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel] sent us a letter of support and endorsement of our action, the fact that there was coordination with the outside protest and the inside disruption — all of these components and aspects of the action made it one of the more successful ones that we’ve done.”

He added, “There is real change happening, whether it’s the international response to the Lebanon war or the international response to the Gaza war. The US is the most powerful country in the world, Israel is a powerful military as well, but the Palestinians have the world on their side.”

Video shot and produced by The Electronic Intifada.

Maureen Clare Murphy is Managing Editor of The Electronic Intifada and an activist with the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago, which co-sponsored the demonstration.

West Bank settlers use ‘price tag’ tactic to punish Palestinians

The Times

15 October 2009

In the farmlands between the Jewish settlement of Qedumim and the Palestinian village of Imatin, the wreckage of the endless struggle for control of the West Bank is visible.

On a hilltop, blankets, pots and broken chairs are strewn where the Israeli army tried to demolish an illegal Jewish settlement outpost. In the fields opposite, 70 olive trees are scorched and blackened after the settlers took revenge — not on the army, but on the local Palestinians.

It is a new and effective settler tactic known as the “price tag”: if the Government sends police or soldiers to dismantle an outpost that is being built, the settlers make the Palestinian population pay the price.

“It’s quite simple and smart but evil,” said Michael Sfard, a lawyer with the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din. “They attack Palestinian property, people, and blockade roads every time the Israeli security forces do something they don’t like” — such as demolish outposts.

Many settlers in the West Bank are religious hardliners who believe that they are fulfilling a biblical prophecy by taking over the land that they call Judaea and Samaria.

They are playing a game of cat and mouse with the Government, which is trying to stop unauthorised outposts from being built while it pushes the international community to allow it to continue building its established West Bank settlements, some of them already large towns.

Israel considers the larger towns to be completely legal and has agreed only to dismantle unauthorised outposts that have been built since March 2001.

The more radical settlers, who are unable and unwilling to fight the Israeli army, retaliate by attacking Palestinians in neighbouring villages.

When the army dismantled the tiny hilltop outpost of Shvut Ami, an outcrop of the established Qedumim settlement, this week it was the Palestinians of Imatin who suffered.

“While the people in the place are confronting the security forces, people in another place will start harassing Palestinians to inflame the ground,” Mr Sfard said.

This has the double effect of forcing commanders to split men from their first objective, and making them think twice about launching future operations.

Ahmed Ghanem, a Palestinian farmer from Imatin and the owner of the burnt trees, said that the settlers invaded his land opposite the outpost before dawn, at the same time as the army was trying to evict a large group of settlers from the nearby hilltop.

His son went to see what was happening but ran when he saw that some of the men were armed. “Even if I plant the land again, they’ll come back and burn it,” he said.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official who deals with the settlements issue in the northern West Bank, said that since the beginning of the year, Jewish settler attacks around the city of Nablus had killed two Palestinians and wounded seventy-five. They also killed 25 sheep and destroyed 3,400 trees.

“These groups of settlers are organised and support each other,” he said. “A few days ago they were handing out leaflets inviting people to come and stop Palestinians harvesting their olives. If there’s an outpost evacuation, they call people from Hebron to Jenin to stop the Palestinians working on their lands.”

Not all settler leaders agree with the “price tag” as a tactic. Daniella Weiss, a leader from Qedumim, said that it had diverted settlers from what she considered to be their priority: setting up more caravans and tents to lay claim to ever more hilltops.

Many of the settlers agreed. “My issue is to settle the land of Israel. If they evacuate an outpost I’ll go and build another,” said Yishai Gilad, a 19-year-old from Qedumim who is a member of the Youth for the Land of Israel movement. He lives in Shvut Ami, across from the burnt olive orchards.

Mr Gilad spoke while he and his comrades were tidying up and moving back into the cave that they had dug on the hill. “It’s not a war, it’s our right,” he said, brushing aside the issue of what might happen to the Palestinians if his movement succeeds in settling the land.

“It’s not my problem, it’s not something I have to solve. This is a land that was promised by God, that’s all I know,” he added.

Mr Sfard said that there were anywhere between a few dozen and a few hundred settlers using the violent tactic, which was proving to be effective.

“It’s slowing down the security forces and demanding much larger and heavier forces,” he said. “It’s such a big headache that many of the relevant authorities give up without trying.” The outposts are rebuilt quickly by determined settlers once the army leaves.

The dark side of Tel Aviv

Abe Hayeem | The Guardian

13 October 2009

The centenary of Tel Aviv, a city said to date from 1909, has provided a useful opportunity to present the face of Israel as a hip country built by Jewish pioneers on empty sands. Its vibrant cosmopolitan flavour, its commercial centre, its Mediterranean beaches, its liberal society and culture, are seen as signifying a truly commendable Zionist enterprise. According to the blurb on the centenary celebrations “several dozen families gathered on the sand dunes on the beach outside Yafo to allocate plots of land for a new neighbourhood they called Ahuzat Bayit, later known as Tel Aviv”.

After the horrors of the Gaza onslaught and unending blockade, and the evidence of war crimes committed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) early this year (which Israel has responded to with hysterical denial) no effort has been spared by the Israeli embassy and its propaganda machines to deflect the attention of the world to Israel’s marvellous technical and medical discoveries, and to use Tel Aviv to present its upbeat image. Hence Tel Aviv festivities were organised in New York, Vienna, Copenhagen and Paris, with the creation of Tel Aviv beaches in Central Park and along the banks of the Seine, the Danube and Copenhagen’s canals.

In London this week, the Israeli embassy teams up with easyJet to promote its new flights to Tel Aviv with a series of events around London to provide “a sweet taste of Israel’s 24-hour city” as a “celebration of Israeli culture, which includes the valuable contribution from many minorities in Israel, such as Christians, Muslims and Druze”.

While there is much on the surface that makes Tel Aviv enticing, this picture must be not be allowed to mask the dark underlying history of ethnic cleansing and land expropriation on which Tel Aviv was built, and that still continues today, even in Jaffa, while savouring the Israeli food and the Bauhaus architecture. In fact, the whole myth of Tel Aviv being built on empty sand dunes has been taken apart by various Israeli scholars, but none of this will feature in the promotional events.

As Yonathan Mendel says in his article “Fantasising Israel” in the London Review of books:

It [Tel Aviv] didn’t just emerge from the sand in 1909, as the Zionist myth tells us. Al-Sumayil, Salame, Sheikh Munis, Abu Kabir, Al-Manshiyeh: these are the names of some of the villages that made room for it and the names are still used today. Tel Avivians still talk about the Abu Kabir neighbourhood, they still meet on Salame Street. Tel Aviv University Faculty Club used to be the house of the sheikh of Sheikh Munis.

The Israeli organisation Zochrot has published maps of Tel Aviv showing where Arab localities existed, particularly in Jaffa and its suburbs to the south, and in smaller villages east and north of the city, but which have been erased from maps of the region and its posted signs.

Initially Tel Aviv in its infancy was an adjunct of Jaffa, which Mendel says:

was probably the most prosperous and cosmopolitan of all Palestinian cities, with a port, an industry (Jaffa oranges), an international school system and a lively cultural life. In 1949, after Jaffa had been almost completely emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants (only 4,000 were left out of a population of 70,000), the Israeli government decided to unite the two cities in one metropolis, to be called ‘Tel Aviv-Jaffa’. In doing this, Ben-Gurion not only created a new Tel Aviv that was ‘part of’ biblical Jaffa, he erased the Palestinian city.

The city was subject to intensive shelling in 1948, when more than 60,000 of its residents were forced to leave – mostly fleeing to Gaza. Seventy-five per cent of the city was bulldozed, leaving only 4,000 Palestinians in the now run-down Ajame and Jabaliah neighbourhoods, which in fact today are the subject of intended clearance by the Amidar corporation, who have imposed fines on the residents for “illegally” improving their houses when they had refused to allow them to upgrade

What will be built in their place is luxurious real estate at fantastic prices beyond the reach of the existing inhabitants. Jaffa today has been turned into a picturesque artists’ colony, in the houses expropriated from their Palestinian owners.

Distant from the portrayal of Tel Aviv as a beautiful cultural city is its significance as the centre for the Israeli military and military research in an area called HaKirya, where the IDF has had its headquarters since it was founded in 1948. In addition to occupying large areas in the heart of Tel Aviv it accommodates the Israeli military deep underground, where the pre-planning and the daily orders for the assaults on Gaza were made.

This supposed “mixed city” of Tel-Aviv/Yafo (even the name Jaffa is not used) has only 4.2% Palestinian residents, compared with the 20% of Israel’s wider population – hardly an indication of the city’s vaunted “diversity”. In fact, as the author and architect Sharon Rotbard has pointed out, Jaffa existed before 1909 as mainly Arab, but in fact a mixed city, with many Palestinian Jews in suburbs established in 1887 and 1905. The new Tel Aviv was established by white European Jews, and thus, as Gabriel Ash says the centennial “is legitimising colonialism through the commemoration of the arrival of white Europeans to the orient”.

The American historian VG Smith comments on Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus architecture:

The myth of Tel Aviv as ‘the White City’ rests on the importation of style characteristics from European Modernism into Israel … and can be understood as a vocabulary of forms or as a social movement to achieve a better life through architecture. To mimic International Style characteristics is as false as the nation’s imitation of a modern state.

As an open letter put it last month, protesting at Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to spotlight Tel Aviv:

Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodising about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto.