A Voice from Gaza: Let's Rethink Architcture

By Yara Sharif

Coming from a place that is so divided by geo-political conflict as Palestine/Israel, it is crucial to define one’s role as an architect. Choosing an ideology of practice in such circumstances is not a technical activity: rather, it becomes an ‘ethical’ approach as well as a political statement.

In the case of Israel’s current hegemonic relationship with the Palestinian people, the line as drawn on paper is normally based on an explicit ideology of military expansion – one which is destroying both the space of land and the space of imagination. Despite the aim of different Israeli politicians, architects and planners to manifest Zionist power and obliterate all signs of Palestinian relation to the land, a range of counter-strategies have evolved lately, creating a new consciousness that seeks to reveal and challenge the underlying Israeli agendas of control and territorial aggression. However, what has been happening lately in Gaza has made even more visible the destructive strategies of the Israeli government towards human beings and their homes. What is taking place doesn’t need any further interpretation; rather it calls for practical and clear action by architects, planners and human rights activists to stop the massacres and follow a different course of action.

Daniel Libeskind a few months requested a boycott of China, calling for greater human rights and social equality. And his call spread fast through most architectural magazines including ‘Building Design’. It is quite impressive how loud the voice of an architect could be, however, the impact of their lines on paper and ground is even more effective, especially an architect like Libeskind, or Gehry, or Calatrava, who all left a huge imprint with their designs. The ‘Cord Bridge’ - an ‘outstanding’ design intervention which cuts across Jerusalem to help divide it off into a Jewish state which has no Arabs, and the ‘‘Museum of Tolerance’ by Gehry has been designed to be built on a Muslim cemetery in the area of ‘Mamilla’ in West Jerusalem. Is this justice? And where is Libeskind’s call now for architects to boycott Israel because of acts that betray human rights and justice? An international court ruled in 2006 against Israel's so-called ‘apartheid wall’ as being both illegal and violating human rights. Neither Libeskind, nor any other ‘star architect’ of that kind, have yet condemned the wall or spoken out on the subject. Those who thankfully did, were either not publicized enough or found themselves criticized for doing so. Richard Rogers, who took the initiative and had a leading role in objecting the ‘wall’, later changed all his political views and beliefs as his projects in New York are much more worthy than people’s life in Palestine.

As architects, it is time to question equality and justice in every line we draw, and because architecture can never be dissociated from politics, it is our role at this critical stage to make visible the fractures created by Israeli occupation and work on healing these fractures. It is time for a clear ideology to cut into the very heart of the Israeli occupation strategy through an ethical and just practice of architecture.

This letter is therefore a call to break the silence and to support the community in Gaza through design contributions which can connect rather than divide. In wake of this act of mass destruction, which many observers are denouncing as war crimes, there is an urgent need to rebuild communities as well as buildings. So let’s follow the steps of British Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, and take an action through an open forum where each can speak in their own language to support Palestine. This is an open invitation to say out loud: STOP THE MILITARY INTERVENTION, STOP WAR CRIMES, AND BOYCOTT ANY ISRAELI ARCHITECTURE THAT PROMOTES OCCUPATION AND FRAGMENTATION.

Yara Sharif is a PhD student at the University of Westminster, London, UK.

A Note on the Uprising in Greece

In Greece and capital city Athens, as everybody knows, there has been a series of protests and riots following the tragic killing of a teenager. With all due respect to the victims of these events (family, friends and others related) it also shows the power of affect in a tragic situation like this. A moment filled with anger, brutality and hostility towards the Greek government and the Police is also an air of contentious feelings, impulses jumping between bodies and affects minds. A certain emotional tenor had already been potentialized following massive strikes over pension reform and privatizations, furthering the economic crises in Greece, and large portions of the Greek population could be said to express a certain degree of bodily distress over this situation – bodies were open and in a state of pre-action or proto-active-body-state “tending” towards action (see Massumi 2002) Within a series of violent images across global and national mediascapes (producing sights of action passing via functional technological vectors [Virilio]) there were for example the images of schoolgirls and schoolboys surrounding police offices, literally expressing a wall of resistance with their movements, rhythm and bodily texture; forming a collective body of action, that worked as transversal vectors of affect via media and resonated within other sectors such as the bodies of university staff, teachers and union workers. They were intensive patterns of information or “tipping points” [DeLanda, 1997], small scale events working as catalyzers in a protest cycle, which could possibly turn the social order out of balance and into a far-from-equilibrium state, an intensified “revolutionary” order which self-organized at another basin of attraction [DeLanda 2006].

More but not full, it seems that the full text of the paper will be published in the next issue of Resistance Studies Magazine.