Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman
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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,