IJIA 2.1_FM_1-2.indd - Ingenta Connect

IJIA 2 (1) pp. 41–75 Intellect Limited 2013

International Journal of Islamic Architecture Volume 2 Number 1 © 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijia.2.1.41_1

Yael Allweil Technion–Israel Institute of Technology

Surprising Alliances for Dwelling and Citizenship: Palestinian-Israeli Participation in the Mass Housing Protests of Summer 2011 Abstract

Keywords

Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, or Palestinian Israelis, are marginalized in a society based on Jewish nationalism, religion and ethnicity. While Israel witnessed numerous social struggles for equality and inclusion, none attempted to challenge Jewish nationalism as its core principle. The 2011 eruption of mass social unrest, the largest since the 1970s, focused on popular demands for housing as a basic right of citizenship. Indeed, protest started with a housing act: the creation of dozens of tent camps all over the country. Protesters called for a new polity based on housing, expressed by one of the movement’s symbols: an Israeli flag whose national/religious Star of David was replaced by a house. The right to housing was thereby proclaimed as the primary criterion for social inclusion. While the housing-based social movement initially puzzled Palestinian Israelis, tents soon appeared in Arab towns. Palestinian-Israeli participation proved significant, forming surprising alliances among social strata previously understood as irrevocably polarized. Examining the camps of Jaffa and Qalansuwa, this article looks into the history and implications of housing for Palestinian Israelis, and for Israeli society at large. Using Chantal Mouffe’s and Bruno Latour’s work, we ask: ‘Can dwelling be a strong enough ground for a citizenry-based polity?’

social struggle housing Israel, Palestine Jaffa Qalansuwa tent

Introduction On July 14, 2011, six months after the first mass demonstration of middleclass Egyptians in Tahrir Square and seven months after the onset of the Tunisian uprising that followed the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, 41

Yael Allweil

Israeli protesters representing a broad social spectrum poured into the streets, declaring ‘Egypt is here’ [Figure 1]. The movement explicitly associated itself with other Arab spring public movements through its critique of Israel as an oligarchy of the rich, and it affiliated itself with Arab spring demands for popular sovereignty within the nation state. Echoing the Egyptian protests, participants identified Israel as a quasi-democracy, just like all the other countries in the Middle East.1 Essentially, then, protesters were calling for a ‘revolution’ in terms of how the state of Israel is governed and managed. ‘Governments can be replaced – citizens cannot,’ claimed the protesters, adding, ‘When the government is against the people – the people are against the government.’2

Activestills/Oren Ziv.

Figure 1: Banner stating below in Hebrew ‘Egypt is here’ and above in Arabic ‘Leave’. Mass demonstration, Tel Aviv, July 30, 2011. After twenty years of neo-liberal privatization, Israeli protesters were demanding that the Israeli state reassume its commitments to them, chanting ‘The people – demand – social justice.’ As observed by Michael Walzer, ‘This is the first uprising, anywhere in the world, against a successful neo-liberal regime.’3 Economists agree that Israel’s macro-economy is doing very well: unemployment is low; the shekel is strong; foreign investors are interested; there is a lot of entrepreneurial energy; and economic growth is substantial and steady. Yet, as Walzer observes, … there is no crisis here of state indebtedness, of inflation, or of unemployment. The crisis has to do with inequality and injustice, and the people marching, who may well turn out to disagree about many things, seem to agree about that.4 During the demonstrations, protesters demanded that the state renew its commitment to them as citizens, framing this commitment as based on housing. According to Daphne Leef, initiator of the protest movement,

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Surprising Alliances for Dwelling and Citizenship

We can disagree; however some things are basic. A roof over one’s head is the basis which everyone ought to have […] the roof is the basis, the home is the basis. [As the people] we are the foundation upon which this state is built, and we have to claim what’s ours. Leef’s comments came at a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv on July 23, 2011.5 Such views emphasized the protesters’ position that the government was irrelevant if it could not ensure all citizens access to housing. And as a common ground underlying Israeli citizenship, housing manifested itself in one of the movement’s key symbols, a national flag whose Star of David was replaced by a house. The symbol suggested that housing should provide the basic framework for the Israeli nation state – rather than Judaism, as ethnicity or religion [Figure 2]. The movement thus proposed the idea of a homeland as the concrete material right to dwell in one’s place of birth for all Israeli citizens.

Yael Allweil.

Figure 2: An Israeli flag whose Star of David is replaced by a house. Mass demonstration, Tel Aviv, July 30, 2011. The 2011 housing protest in Israel was further significant for not unfolding through proclamations and demonstrations but rather starting with a housing act: the pitching of dozens of tent camps in public spaces all over the country. Protest was ignited by Leef, a 25-year-old film editor whose landlord had raised her rent.6 To protest her inability to afford the increasingly high cost of living in Tel Aviv, she set up a tent on the posh Rothschild Boulevard, claiming that housing was ‘a right rather than a commodity’.7 Shared via Facebook, Leef’s tent was rapidly joined by dozens, and then hundreds, of additional tents in Tel Aviv and across the country, forming a built environment no one could disregard. Eventually, the Rothschild tent camp expanded to become an ‘urban’ grid of four parallel ‘streets’, including public spaces and other amenities. Across the city and all over the country, citizens set up similar camps in central public squares, parks and boulevards. After two weeks there were 26 tent camps in all, occupied by urbanites and suburbanites, the middle class and the very poor, renters and homeowners, Jews and Arabs.8 By September, 66 camps had formed across the country, supported by five encampments of Israelis living abroad in London, Berlin, and the United States [Figure 3].9 Tent towns soon

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Yael Allweil

Hagar Shezaf.

Figure 3: Map of protest camps across Israel, August 18, 2011. Note Shezaf’s choice to frame the geography of the Israeli protest movement so as to include the Cairo area, Jordan and parts of Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq at the expense of zooming in on Israel. included communal amenities like shared kitchens, ‘living rooms’ for meetings and debates, and urban planning in the form of organized tent layouts, individual tent ‘addresses’ and the designation of ‘plots’ for public services such as medical clinics and public toilets [Figures 4, 5 and 6]. Why was housing used by protesters to demand popular sovereignty in terms of the state? Why was housing a strong enough demand, able to draw hundreds of thousands to the streets and align people of diverse and often conflicting social groups? This article builds a historical analysis of how housing became linked to state legitimacy and evaluates how these demands might form an alternative basis for the Israeli polity.

Housing and Nation Building The advent of the modern nation state marked a shift in the basis of governance from the divinely legitimized authority of kings to the rule of institutions ‘in the name of the people’.10 As Michel Foucault has shown, the shift from absolutist state to nation state required the development of institutional frameworks for governing modern subjects.11 Within this context, housing the common citizen became a key basis by which nation states could legitimize their rule.12 Indeed, in some instances today the provision of housing may be even more important than the administration of courts or parliament as a locus for nation building.13 In Israel, housing has been the cornerstone of the nation-building project, based on re-rooting Jews in the homeland and producing them as citizen subjects.14 Zionist thought, sharply defined by David Myers as ‘a Judaism that submits to the contingencies of time and space’, has been inherently invested both in ‘being restored to history’ and in recuperating the space of a homeland.15 Above all, Zionism’s task to materialize a national home has involved connecting homeland and future subjects, geographically disconnected for millennia, in order to form a sovereign political entity legitimated by the people. This task was partially addressed by associating national home

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Yael Allweil.

Figure 4: The original ‘street’ of individual tents, communal tents for congregation and a clinic.

Yael Allweil.

Figure 5: The tent camp on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, July 23, 2011. Address ‘25 Tent Boulevard’, which housed the couple Amir and Merav.

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Figure 6: The tent city, July 31, 2011. Now an ‘urban’ grid of four main ‘streets’ of tents. with individual housing, and was accomplished through the gradual accumulation of housing for proto-citizens since the 1860s.16 The establishment of sovereignty in 1948 represented the consolidation of Zionist nation building as a state housing regime, wherein access to housing was used to manage the relationship between the nation state and its citizens.17 It is therefore not accidental that protestors in Israel evoked this history and used housing to demand the renewal of the state–citizen contract. Based on a differentiated system of citizenship as identified by Holston for Brazil, however, the state–citizen contract in Israel never attempted to include all citizens.18 Rather, the state considered its Arab-Palestinian citizens an ‘enemy citizenry’, competing with the Zionist movement for access to the homeland. As a result, state housing policies since 1948 have repeatedly attempted to undercut rival claims to the land by limiting access by ArabPalestinian citizens.19 In other words, housing was never part of the contract between the state of Israel and its Arab-Palestinian citizenry. Moreover, while housing served other marginalized publics in Israel as a nexus for demands for inclusion and equality, protesters never attempted to challenge the basic identity of the state. Rather, marginalized social groups demanding housing as a right performed as if they were worthy of it because they belonged to a body politic that was nationally, ethnically and religiously Jewish [Figure 7].20 While protesters often self-identified as ‘Zionism’s victims’ due to their being Mizrahim (Jews immigrating from Arab and Muslim countries), their rhetoric thus also distanced them from Arab-Palestinian citizens.21 As ‘enclaves of resistance’, following Gramsci’s phrasing, these protesters focused on demands to be included in the national hegemony rather than to change its frame of reference.22 Public protest in Israel, therefore, historically reinforced rather than challenged the basic terms of the state. In turn, protestors participated in the further exclusion of Arab-Palestinian citizens.

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Oscar Tauber.

Figure 7: The Wadi Saliv protests of 1959 in Haifa. Housing for Palestinian Israelis is much more than an instrument of dwelling.23 The housing condition of Arab Palestinians at the close of the 1948 war was even more important for determining citizenry status, political affiliation and national ideology than it was for affecting living conditions. The May 1949 truce agreements between Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt consolidated the place-based identities and dwelling environments of Arab Palestinians according to their (often arbitrary) locales at that time. For generations of Palestinians, therefore, housing was decisive in determining their national frame of reference, identity, rights and position with regard to the problem of sovereignty.24 Despite the central role of housing for the Palestinian condition, literature on Palestinian history focuses primarily on the role of the war in galvanizing and expanding Israel’s sovereignty and creating the ‘catastrophe’ (nakba) of Palestinian uprooting and loss of hope for national sovereignty.25 These areas of historiographical inquiry focus on detailed accounts of the war’s every turn using state and military archives as well as on the history of the array of Zionist ideologies and approaches to the Palestinian population.26 Yet, in addition to the loss of a collective national home, the 1948 war resulted in a mass loss of individual housing for Palestinians who once resided on lands subsequently included within the borders of the state of Israel. Of the 650,000 Palestinians estimated to have lived on these lands before 1948, only 134,000 remained in Israel after the war. Indeed, some 400 villages and 20 towns were entirely depopulated.27 Thus, while making significant contributions, the literature nonetheless disregards the centrality of the nakba as a loss of housing.28

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Yael Allweil

The nakba also resulted in the loss of housing for many Palestinians who remained in Israel and became Israeli citizens. As ‘enemy citizens’, the majority of these people were placed under military rule between 1948 and 1966.29 In general, rural populations of Palestinian Israelis were placed under the military regime, while urban populations living in ‘mixed cities’ like Jaffa and Haifa were not. However, while those living in rural villages were able to maintain legal ownership of some of their lands, the vast majority of urban dwellers lost legal rights to their properties and became tenants of the state, deeply dependent on programmes of public housing. The limited modes of action and resistance available to this ‘enemy citizenry’ eventually made housing the main venue of summud, or ‘resistance to being swept away’. Palestinian-Israeli insistence on staying in place is, first and foremost, therefore, based on the ability to dwell on ancestral village or town lands and maintain the viability of such communities.30 Whereas the better-studied Palestinian refugee housing is posited on temporariness, in order to claim the right of return, summud housing is posited on permanence, in order to ‘resist being swept away’.31

Tents of Protest The 2011 housing protest largely surprised and confused the Palestinian-Israeli public. Ignited on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv by educated, employed, Jewish Ashkenazim, the movement was regarded by marginal social groups as a Jewish-white-Ashkenazi protest for privileged rights.32 Palestinian-Israeli citizens were explicitly reluctant to join and suspicious about the Jewish-led housing protest. ‘Many find it difficult to partake in the movement since the reasons for the hardships faced by the Arab minority are substantially different from those faced by the Jewish majority,’ explained Amnon Bari-Soliziano and Mohammad Darawsha, co-executive directors of the Abraham Fund Initiatives for Advancing Coexistence and Equality among Jews and Arabs in Israel, at the time. Differences lie primarily in a continual policy of institutional discrimination on national grounds, which must not be blurred. People fear that the protests will result in solutions for Jews only – affordable housing for discharged soldiers, for example – or in the same old solutions at the expense of Arabs, like the Judaization of the Negev and Galilee.33 Yet the movement’s explicit inspiration by the Egyptian Tahrir movement, as well as its ability to mesh social justice with housing, spoke to the deepest sentiments underlying the decade-long struggle by Palestinian Israelis against the Israeli housing regime.34 In order to understand their reluctant yet active participation in the protest, it is necessary to understand the tension between their long-standing claims of a right to dwell in their place of birth and the use of that same rhetoric by the new housing movement. ‘We were here first. People [with no housing solutions] lived in tents here since the 80s. This is the third tent camp in Jaffa,’ explained Sami Abu Shehada of Dar’na (Jaffa Popular Committee for Land and Housing) and the representative of Arab Jaffa at the Tel Aviv–Jaffa city council.35 ‘Our political language is deeper – this is the continuation of the nakba.’ The protest movement’s rhetoric of a right to the homeland via a right to dwell in one’s place of birth, as voiced by white Ashkenazi urbanites, the oppressors/occupiers, was an uncanny experience for many Palestinian Israelis.36

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Jewish National Fund Archive.

Figure 8: First housing in Kibbutz Ein Harod, 1922. This uncanny feeling was only deepened by the movement’s use of the tent as a protest symbol. In collective Israeli memory the tent is associated with the pioneer communal kibbutz settlements of the 1920s. In this sense, it served in the eyes of supporters and critics alike to historically associate protesters with one of the symbolic building blocks of the nation [Figures 8 and 9].37 Yet, the tent is also associated by Palestinians

Our Commune (Jerusalem: Yad Yizhak Ben Zvi, 1988 [1922]); and Aviva Opaz, ‘The Symbolic World of “Our Commune”’, Katedra 59 (1991).

Figure 9: Cover of ‘Our Community’, founding records of the Hashomer Hazair movement.

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Rahem Alhelsi, Palestine Remembered online archive, accessed October 26, 2012, http://www.palestineremembered.com/.

Figure 10: Graffiti image on Deheisha house, 2009. with the post-nakba built environment of the refugee camp [Figures 10 and 11]. In the form of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) tent, it has also performed as a symbol of the Palestinian right of return, and it was thus disorienting to see it erected in the heart of the Israeli space.38

UNRWA Archive, Gaza.

Figure 11: Naher El Bared refugee camp, Lebanon, 1950.

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In addition, within the context of mass absorption camps of the early 1950s, tents represented the first dwelling spaces in Israel for many older Mizrahim. Being housed in tents at that time epitomized their precarious position within the state in comparison to European-born Jews (Ashkenazim) and their subsequent marginalization as second-class citizens ever since [Figures 12 and 13].39 A milieu of tents was therefore capable of embodying the housing histories of different and alienated social groups and expressing their competing narratives, while simultaneously serving as a common shared space for political action.

NPC (National Photo Collection).

Figure 12: Beit Lid immigrant camp, 1949.

NPC.

Figure 13: Beit Lid immigrant camp, 1949.

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Facing the movement’s uncanny rhetoric and use of space, some Palestinian Israelis remained reluctant to participate. Some, nonetheless, chose to form tent clusters, speaking the spatial language of the protest movement as well as of Palestinian post-nakba refugee housing. These eventually appeared in the Arab towns of Qalansuwa, Jaffa, Lydda, Nazareth and even in the heart of the Islamic movement, the town of Umm Al Fahim. Palestinian-Israeli participation in the movement, claimed Bari-Soliziano and Darawsha, was ‘based on their understanding that the protest movement includes a civilian common ground […] a physical materialization of the new civilian discourse formed here, the [only] one challenging the prevailing social order based on ethnicnational discrimination and separation’.40 The most noted tent camps were the Jaffa camp in that mixed city’s central HaShnaim Park and the Qalansuwa camp at the entrance to this ‘Little Triangle’ town. These two camps represented the two main built environments historically populated by Arab Palestinians in Israel, the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’. While this distinction no longer represents the political economy or built environment of Arab-Palestinian settlements in Israel – which are now mostly urban (like Qalansuwa itself) – it is nonetheless still significant because it reflects issues of land ownership and home ownership, as indicated by the two camps.41

The Jaffa Tent Camp The first act of protest by Palestinian-Israeli citizens occurred in the Jaffa camp and formed two weeks after the movement broke out on Rothschild Boulevard on July 14. Located in HaShnaim Park on central Yefet Street, the camp included tents sheltering families evicted from public housing, along with several communal tents for discussion and protest. Currently, some 800 Jaffa families face eviction orders from public housing. According to Abu Shehada, ‘[This] means the eviction of thousands of people from Jaffa. This is fatal for a community of merely 20,000. With no Arabs in Jaffa there will be no Arab Jaffa.’ The housing conditions among Arabs in Jaffa are the culmination of a long process of dependency, as public housing has been continuously torn down despite the dire need for it. Jaffa is characteristic of urban housing conditions among Palestinian Israelis and thus serves as an instructive example. The city was mostly vacated by its Arab-Palestinian population during the 1948 war, and their properties were subsequently nationalized by the state. The legal status of these properties was addressed by the Deserted Areas Order, issued May 16, 1948, which declared all property left unoccupied by its owners to be state property. Of the 70,000 Arab-Palestinian residents of Mandatory Jaffa only 4,000 remained after the war, and most of them lost title to their houses and became renters in nationalized property (like the many immigrants who came to populate the city after the war).42 Vacated housing, abundant in cities, was managed as public housing by the Amidar Governmental Company; it charged rent for space in newly subdivided houses to both Jewish immigrants and internally displaced Palestinian Israelis.43 With the vast majority of property nationalized, the issue for Palestinian Israelis in urban areas became access to housing rather than land. Most of this poor population had little choice but to rely on public programmes. However, as a result of competing economic agendas, the availability of public housing has dramatically decreased over time. For example, in Jaffa between 1970 and 1987, 3,127 dwelling units were torn down within the framework of the 2,660 urban plan for slum clearance and the development of high-end waterfront

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housing.44 And since the early 1990s the neo-liberal Israeli regime has further limited state responsibility for social housing through the sale of public buildings, matched by support for a steady hike in rents. As a result, many public housing tenants who have been unable to purchase apartments have had their buildings sold out from under them to private developers. Meanwhile, little new public housing has been built by the state or the city in Jaffa since the 1990s. While many Jews have suffered as a result of these policies, the poor Palestinian-Israeli community in Jaffa has been especially vulnerable. Processes of gentrification and neo-liberal municipal planning have further exacerbated the commodification of lived space.45 With no housing available, the Jaffa population has found shelter by way of illegal construction of home additions, rendering them ‘squatters’ to be evicted. In 1995, within what came to be known as the ‘Housing Intifada’ (Intifadat al-Sakan), 30 Palestinian-Israeli families squatted in empty houses owned by the state and administered by Amidar that had been taken out of the public housing pool and designated for future private development.46 Eventually, a state-sponsored plan for 400 affordable housing units in Jaffa put an end to the Housing Intifada and heralded the start of negotiations between community leaders and municipal authorities. However, so far only 22 new units have been built.47 As Abu Shehada pointed out, the 2011 Jaffa camp is indeed not the first, but the third, tent camp formed in HaShnaim Park over the years with an explicit demand for housing. In 2011, however, the Jaffa protests were not merely articulated by a small, marginalized group, but formed part of a largescale movement. Therefore, according to Abu Shehada, ‘it was clear to us that we had to partake in it by setting a camp here’. Housing in Arab Jaffa is understood as a collective rather than an individual problem, a fact well represented in the composition and layout of the camp. Its formation during the month of Ramadan was not easy, and required cooperation between many interest groups and political movements. This manifested itself in the very formation of the camp: its first two tents were a large mourners’ tent provided by the Islamic movement and a Jewish sukkah (a temporary hut constructed for use during the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot) provided by the homeless Steinling family and used by the Jaffa Popular Committee for Land and Housing, which moved its office to the park.48 The concentric landscape of the HaShnaim Park dramatically affected the nature of the tent camp activity within it, just as the linear nature of Rothschild Boulevard affected the urban grid landscape of the Tel Aviv camp. HaShnaim Park is composed of onion-like concentric layers. Its central space is a large, round paved area surrounded by stone benches. This central space served as a meeting space for debate and performance. Tents were laid out on the grass encircling this area [Figures 14 and 15]. Tent locations were determined by dwellers based on the location of shade trees and the availability of outlets for electricity and water. The main tent supplied by the Islamic movement was placed at the far end of the park next to a public shelter where campers could access electricity, toilets and a shower. A small stone stage for performances, located by Yefet Street at the opposite end of the park, served as a third focal point, providing a venue for speakers and musicians during rallies and demonstrations. The Jaffa camp structure thereby highlighted the functions of public and communal debate, significant for the camp’s formation in the conservative Jaffa society, especially during the sensitive period of Ramadan. Camp codes, articulated on the first day of its formation, forbade

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Activestills/Keren Manor.

Figure 14: Jaffa camp, August 2011. Note camp structure with a central space for congregation and debate and surrounding tents. The central tent is seen at the back of the picture. single protesters from dwelling in tents for fear of immodest behaviour. Likewise, they restricted eating during the day, drinking alcohol and the presence of dogs. Many of the young activists therefore used the camp primarily for protest and debate, and camp dwellers were primarily homeless families, many of them headed by single mothers.49


Figure 15: Jaffa camp, August 2011.

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Yudit Ilani.

Figure 16: Jaffa Popular Committee office in the camp, making use of a sukkah structure. The centrality of housing in Jaffa camp discourse was explicit. ‘We are here to demand all our rights, at the top of which is the right to housing,’ declared Jaffa camp leader Hanah Amouri. ‘We call upon past and future governments to fulfil their duty to the citizens and provide adequate and fair housing, the basic right for shelter, for each citizen in this country.’50

Yudit Ilani.

Figure 17: Waffa Abu Shamis, a resident of the Jaffa tent camp, speaking at the JaffaTikva rally at HaShnaim Park, August 28, 2011.

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Yael Allweil

Yudit Ilani.

Figure 18: Ramadan prayer at the Jaffa camp. Abu Shehada defined the cause of the protest as ‘housing first’. As he declared: Housing first, since everything starts at home. Good education starts at home, good [civic] culture starts at home, well-being starts at home, children’s emotional well-being starts at home, and therefore our just and joined struggle, Jews and Arabs, in Jaffa, in Tikva, in Kfar Shalem, in the south, in the northern periphery, starts at home. First of all – housing. Housing is at the top of our list of priorities.51 Locally, of course, the struggle for housing was also conceptual, crucial to maintaining the Palestinian identity in Jaffa. Activists at the Jaffa camp soon identified the need to form a coalition of the ‘social periphery’ to represent those whose dire need for housing had been ignored by the state for years.52 Solidarity around this issue led to the formation of surprising alliances in the Jaffa camp, both among different segments of the Jaffa community and between the Arab-Palestinian Jaffa camp and camps from neighbourhoods of the Jewish social periphery. While dominated by members of the Balad party, the camp nonetheless included a main tent provided by the Islamic movement, where public evening prayers closing the fast were managed by local Muslim leaders [Figure 18].53 A more surprising alliance still was formed between the Jaffa camp and the Tivka camp, the traditional base of right-wing Jewish nationalist politics. Based on the dire housing conditions shared by the two public-housing-dependent populations, this alliance took the form of mutual visits and a united march declaring: ‘Jaffa, Tikva, same revolution!’ [Figures 19 and 20]. Dana Amsalem, one resident of the Tikva camp, declared at the joint rally that ‘we hope for the entire social periphery to unite, so that our cry will be heard so loud no one will be able to shut their ears from it. We are the real struggle.’ And Waffa Abu Shamis, a resident of the Jaffa camp, declared: ‘We want housing. Each person

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Yudit Ilani.

Figure 19: Joint meeting of Jaffa and Tikva camp activists at the Jaffa main tent, in preparation for their joint march. needs housing. The Islamic movement, Balad, the youth, all the (interest) groups. Enough. Please unite [Figure 17].’54 The joint march was the result of intense debate and negotiation, requiring both publics to forsake national symbols like flags to be able to march together under the same banner. Gil Mualem-Doron identified national identity, both Jewish and Palestinian, as a threat to the newly formed coalitions created in the tent camps.55 So, instead of national symbols, the housing coalition used the tent as its symbol [Figure 21].56

Yudit Ilani.

Figure 20: The joint march of the Jaffa and Tikva camps, August 28, 2011. The banner states ‘Jaffa and Tikva united for public housing’.

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Activestills/Keren Manor.

Figure 21: The ‘tent-mobile’, driven by Gil Mualem-Doron at the head of the Jaffa-Tikva joint march. The tent reads ‘I want a home [in Arabic]. Enough with piggish Capitalism! Bring back the Welfare state! [in Hebrew]’.

The Qalansuwa Tent Camp A new master plan for Qalansuwa, prepared by the Regional Planning Department of the Eastern Sharon geographical region, was released to the public on July 21, 2011, a week after the breakout of the protest.57 Qalansuwans saw it as a devastating blow to their town. It disregarded their efforts to define future living conditions and prosperity by proposing to encircle the town with highways, a power line and a nature reserve, thereby limiting prospective development. Moreover, because the plan does not legalize the houses built in Qalansuwa during the long period it was devoid of a plan or any legal way to obtain construction permits, it means that some 200 houses in the town are now ‘illegal’ and subject to demolition.58 In not allowing for the liquidation of agricultural land or for the legalization of existing structures, the plan also does not meet the town’s need for further expansion in housing. In response, the Qalansuwa Popular Committee for Land and Housing set up a tent camp on public land at the entrance to the town, aligning Qalansuwa’s struggle with the housing protests of various publics throughout the country. The Qalansuwa camp did not include dwelling spaces, but only tents for solidarity and debate. It was initiated by Ijya Jayyusi, an activist of the Hadash political party, who is also a devout Muslim.59 ‘The tent camp formed following the release of the town’s new master plan,’ Jayyusi emphasized. We were afraid we are alone in this struggle. It was both Ramadan and school holiday, and the Committee for Land and Housing was on summer break. The master plan was announced at the worst time for us. The 20,000 inhabitants of Qalansuwa were largely unaware of the plan and its consequences for them. We had merely two months to pull out a formal legal objection to the master plan as required by the law. We stressed out and thought we had no chance to reach out

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to the people. The housing protest [throughout the country] was what motivated us. We organized a meeting at the community centre. I said [that] the land needs a mourners’ tent. Let’s form a protest tent, like elsewhere in the country, but ours will be a mourning tent for the land.60 Land has been the contested issue for Palestinian Israelis in rural settlements since 1948. At independence, the Israeli state assumed ownership of lands managed by the British Mandate and it nationalized absentee property to gain control over a total of 94 per cent of territory within the new national borders.61 These lands were subsequently developed by forming some 500 new rural settlements for Jewish immigrants, creating a ‘belt’ of internal and external settlements to bolster border defence and help safeguard state sovereignty over territory.62 Nationalization of Palestinian-Israeli land has been a creeping process, lasting in some cases to the present day. The nationalization of Galilean lands in the 1970s for the formation of the new Jewish town of Carmiel led to the first upfront, organized protest by Palestinian-Israeli citizens on March 30, 1976.63 Protests against the ‘Judaization of the Galilee’ and the nationally based marginalization of the Arab-Palestinian public have since developed into yearly ‘Day of the Land’ protests across the country.64 Yet a more salient and pressing mode of Palestinian-Israeli resistance to the nation state is the everyday individual construction of housing.65 Remaining in the village, or summud, means being able to provide one’s sons with access to housing there. A summud housing strategy therefore means constructing new dwellings behind or on top of an existing family home or on private agricultural land, often without permits and in defiance of the Israeli housing regime. Since no state lands have been allocated for village expansion, summud has also led to the densification and urbanization of village housing environments.66 From a rural environment of single-storey houses, Qalansuwa has thus been transformed into an urban environment of three- and four-storey houses, serving several nuclear branches of an extended family. Moreover, as private lands are gradually filled up, and as not all families own land, the village-turned-town has become totally dependent on the allocation of state lands and urban planning for the future construction of homes.67 Comparing the new master plan for Qalansuwa with the previous one [Figure 22], it is evident that the new plan includes three main changes to the current situation. The first is the addition of a business and industry area (in purple, at the top right of the plan) to compensate for the need for non-agricultural employment in the town. The second change involves the conversion of land dedicated to agricultural uses to housing uses at the top left of the town – where illegal housing construction already exists – albeit not including the legalization of the existing structures. Third, the plan seems to suggest a dramatic change to agricultural land north of the town (no longer marked in green on the new plan). Qualanswans hoped these lands would be included within the town’s municipal boundary (blue line) in the new plan, to allow for the town’s much needed future expansion. As the lands are clearly omitted from the new plan, i.e. no longer marked as the town’s future realm of expansion, the plan caused further anxiety regarding a possible premeditated confiscation of these lands.

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Israel Ministry of the Interior (courtesy of Bimkom).

Figure 22: The new Qalansuwa master plan. Current condition (top) and proposal (bottom). The plan thereby does not meet the dire need for new housing in Qalansuwa, and it denies the desire of town residents to remain summud.68 ‘There are many young people who want to get married but cannot buy a house,’ said camp activist Zaher Sharif. All vacant land in Qalansuwa is privately owned, and owning families keep it for their own sons. The state does not allocate public land for Arab settlements; there are few apartments for rent; and the price of private land is very high. In these conditions it is very hard for Qalansuwans to

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Haim Schwarczenberg.

Figure 23: The Qalansuwa new master plan presented at the camp main tent, during a vigil organized by Solidarity NGO, August 28, 2011. remain in the town. Having no other option available, they construct houses on agricultural land without permits and face demolitions and losing their houses.69 When looking for an appropriate site for the Qalansuwa tent camp, Jayyusi wanted to identify a plot of unused public land so as to appeal to all Qalansuwans, and avoid any association with one of the town’s families or political sects. As a registered surveyor familiar with the area, he knew of such a plot at the entrance to the town – land allocated in British Mandate plans for a public road parallel to the existing road between Qalansuwa and the nearby Triangle town of Tira. ‘As this is public land, only the public can object to its use as a protest camp,’ said Jayyusi. The linear nature of the chosen location, like the Rothschild Boulevard site, determined the Qalansuwa camp’s development. According to Jayyusi: We spread along the entire extent of this axis. People from across the area called us ‘the Rothschild of Qalansuwa’. We printed out the new master plan and hung it in the camp, and invited people from the town and nearby settlements to discuss it with us. This is a strategic spot, and we stayed here until 1 a.m. each night. The camp attracted visitors from nearby Jewish settlements (the assumed beneficiaries of limiting the expansion of Qalansuwa), including members of the Jewish-religious Sha’ar Efrayim. ‘We showed them the plan, enclosing us like in a ghetto,’ he said. ‘They sympathized with us. Is it hard to believe?’ The first tent in the Qalansuwa camp was a mourners’ tent. As it was Ramadan, activity in the camp centred on the evening fast-breaking dinners. It was an opportunity for public gathering and for attracting people from

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neighbouring settlements, and yet constituted a challenge for the pious. According to Jayyusi: I spent all my Ramadan evenings in the camp, my wife was angry with me. I called on the men praying at the mosque to come pray in our tent. In the end, my wife even sent carpets [for praying] to the camp. Praying in the tent is more important than praying in the mosque. ‘We set up the camp, and our first guests, after one hour, were the police. We told them we are protesting like elsewhere in the country, and they left us alone and were even very nice,’ said Jayyusi. This incident manifested the importance of aligning with the larger, national protest. It provided residents of Qalansuwa an additional reason to remain in a public space and voice their protest against their own disenfranchisement. According to Sharif: We set up the camp in order to be part of the people. The tent represented solidarity with all those devoid of housing – in Rothschild, in Tikva and in Qalansuwa. There are [Palestinian] nationalists who objected to the camp because they don’t believe in cooperation. But the camp itself, once it was formed, was able to change old people’s opinions. In the five months our camp was open we had at least one bus-full a week of Jewish people who came to support us. For the first time in the history of Qalansuwa we had a united demonstration of 500 people, Arabs and Jews, who came from near and far. People already ask me when we will reopen our tent camp.70 In addition to banners protesting against the demolition of houses and claiming ‘The lands of Qalansuwa for the people of Qalansuwa’, protesters carried banners framing their struggle in the context of the entirety of Israeli society. The banner stating ‘The people demand’ [in Arabic] ‘social justice’ [in Hebrew], held by an elderly Qalansuwa resident in a demonstration at the town’s main square, made a surprising statement, unsettling much of the Arab-Palestinian common-sense political discourse [Figure 24]. The banner used the 2011 movement’s key slogan, ‘the people – demand – social justice’, with one significant alteration. Its Arabic use of the term ‘the people’ (used in Arab-Palestinian political discourse to refer to Palestinian nationals in Israel as a separate public) here indicated the alignment of the Palestinian public with the rest of Israeli society in a demand for social justice. While a highly contested statement, Sharif and Jayyusi insisted that ‘Arab and Jews in this area eat from the same pitta bread. It is the very idea of Jews and Arabs living together that freaks [the regime] out – not national conflict. This is why the most important thing is for people to be able to have housing.’71 Intense discussions at the camp and the work of two planning NGOs: the Arab Centre for Alternative Planning and Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights, eventually provided the expertise needed to produce a legal document objecting to the new master plan for Qalansuwa by the ordained deadline. No response has yet been made by state planning authorities to Qalansuwa’s objection.72

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Figures (from top to bottom): Qalansuwa camp demonstration, August 27, 2011. 24: Banners state ‘The people demand’ [in Arabic] ‘social justice’ [in Hebrew]; 25: ‘No to land confiscations’ and ‘Jews and Arabs against land confiscations and house demolitions’ [in Hebrew]; 26 ‘No to house demolitions’ [in Arabic].

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Housing as the Object of Agonism ‘Arab participation has the capacity to cement the protest as a constitutional cross-Israeli civil event […] this is the time for solidarity,’ Bari-Soliziano and Darawsha have written.73 Moreover, as expressed by Abu Shehada, ‘While public buildings like mosques and synagogues separate us – housing unites us. [The right to] housing is the only thing we agree upon, and our common struggle for housing brought us many achievements.’74 The 2011 social struggle was unique, said Abu Shehada. As he explained, For the first time the entire country was occupied with one basic issue: housing. The struggle for housing is different from struggles for other rights because it cannot be postponed. Free education can be postponed, but if you have no housing you literally do not exist. If Arabs cannot live in Jaffa there is no Arab Jaffa. This cannot be postponed. Housing therefore requires many compromises. We have to do anything in order to keep our people in Jaffa. The social-economic periphery of Israeli society has to work in a coalition among people with different views in order not to be marginalized. We will tolerate the Tikva and Kfar Shalem [Likud party strongholds], and the Housing Minister in order to keep our community in Jaffa.75 At the same time, Abu Shehada was careful not to claim that the housingbased alliances formed between conflicting social groups would erase political differences. ‘The housing protest created the illusion of a common ground,’ he said. ‘We still differ on many respects.’ Abu Shehada’s observation was shared by Mizrahi activist Zehorit Adani of the Tikva camp, who took part in organizing the joint Jaffa–Tikva march. While happy with the alliance formed between the two groups, she objected to the attempt to blur existing power relations among the various social groups taking part in the protest movement. Breaching the distrust is not simple. After all, how can one align in a joint struggle, even for housing, with those who oppressed them? It is not trivial for Mizrahim to march with Ashkenazim, and for Arabs to march with Jews. Any attempt to project equality among the non-equal in effect maintains power relations rather than collapses them. Unless power relations are actively recognized and compensated for by giving the marginalized a voice, members of the social periphery are merely used patronizingly rather than included as equal.76 Like Abu Shehada, Adani recognized housing as the issue around which alliances can form among conflicting social groups, since housing is the only issue important enough to generate significant compromise, like the forsaking of national flags by the Tikva and Jaffa protesters so that they could declare: ‘Jaffa, Tikva, same revolution!’77 Housing, in fact, subverts the overt political agendas of the conflicting publics. While the Tikva protesters may approve of the ‘Judaization of Jaffa’, their acknowledgment of the right of Jaffa Arabs to housing is a contradictory political position. And while Jaffa Arabs consider Palestinians inside and outside Israel to be nakba victims and support the Palestinian right of return, their acknowledgment of the right of Jews to housing, including residents of formerly Palestinian houses like those in Kfar Shalem and Jaffa, also represents a conflicting political view.

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Housing emerges in these proclamations and performances of protest as an object of agonism in Israeli society. Chantal Mouffe has identified conflict as central to the very formation of a polity. For her, agonism, ‘a conflict that cannot be resolved’, suggests a productive role for conflict in assembling a society, based on the object upon which the irresolvable conflict is waged. This object thereby forms a polity out of conflicted social actors by ‘bringing them together because it divides them’.78 Mouffe therefore identifies the insolubility of the conflict as essential to political communities. Conflict is the analytic framework commonly deployed for Israel-Palestine,79 but it is understood by scholars and the public alike in normative terms as undesirable and in need of ‘solving’.80 Liberal thought usually reads societies of conflict as deviant: ‘pathological or deemed to the expression of irrational forces’.81 Such societies are therefore conceived of as politically underdeveloped – ‘on the way to becoming’ a proper polity. However, scholars of subaltern studies, as well as scholars advocating for ‘South–South relations’, have pointed to the deep fallacies of the liberal-developmental perspective for the study of these societies, as well as for the production of knowledge on political societies at large.82 Assuming conflict to be contrary to community, scholars of the IsraeliPalestinian case point with surprise to a number of policies of cooperation among different social groups in Palestine – since the early stages of Zionist settlement during the late Ottoman period, through the British Mandate and the 65 years of Israeli statehood as described in this article.83 From Mouffe’s perspective, however, these policies are hardly surprising: they formed as a direct result of agonistic conflict in Israel-Palestine. Mouffe’s theory of a plural democracy ‘confronts the consequences of acknowledging the permanence of conflict and antagonism. From such a standpoint, conflicts are not seen as disturbances that unfortunately cannot be eliminated, as empirical impediments that render impossible the full realization of harmony.’ Moreover, Mouffe has written, ‘[P]lural democracy is always a democracy “to come” as conflict and antagonism are at the same time its condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of its full realisation.’84 Mouffe defines public space as an object of agonistic struggle, challenging the widespread conception that informs most visions of political public space as the terrain where consensus can emerge. For the agonistic model, on the contrary, public space is the battleground where different hegemonic projects confront each other, without any possibility of final reconciliation.85 Mouffe’s argument regarding agonism in political space is supported by findings in a number of ethnographic research projects documenting public spheres throughout the world, which demonstrate that such spaces were formed as a result of agonistic conflict rather than consensus. Among these studies, Abdou-Maliq Simone’s analysis of African cities shows how networks of conflicted negotiation among parties representing different interests form the very infrastructure for these seemingly ‘malfunctioning’ cities. Aihwa Ong’s study of China’s experimentations with capitalism discusses the deeply contested nature of ‘Special Economic Zones’ and spatial modes of removing them from the geographical body of the nation. Teresa Caldeira’s study of crime and urban segregation in São Paulo shows how violent race–class conflict produces the public sphere of the city and consequently, the political sphere of city and nation. Nezar AlSayyad and Ananya Roy’s study of informality identifies the constant struggle of marginalized publics to integrate themselves into the city and its economy.86

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A number of architectural studies have also identified the private/domestic space of housing as the site for continuous struggle over the identity of nation and citizens. Notable are the works of John Archer on the roots of Americandream suburban housing; Becky Nicolaides on blue-collar suburbs; Diane Harris on the construction of race in American post-war housing; Andrew Shanken on architecture as a site for proposing alternative visions for the nation; and Margaret Crawford on race and gender in post-war public housing. Scholars commonly frame these studies through Henri Lefebvre’s notion that the public sphere is collectively produced through social conflict, and that ‘the production of space’ in the city is a result of the constant struggle among social classes.87 The idea of agonism draws attention to an important element within a conflict and suggests that it is not simply a matter of social interaction. Namely, Mouffe points to what she calls ‘the object of agonism’ over which conflict is waged and a polity is formed. This object, for Mouffe, is not an obstacle to harmony but the very thing enabling a pluralistic political society.88 Agonism, Mouffe proposes, is based on the object upon which the irresolvable conflict is waged. This study of the 2011 protest movement in Israel proposes that adequate housing is the object of agonistic struggle for Israel-Palestine, enabling the formation of political societies around the contested, yet shared, demand. Yet, how can we discuss the social agency of housing, or refer to its socio-political role? Mouffe’s revolutionary thought is complemented by Bruno Latour’s work on the social significance of objects, and, as examined in this article, proposes an analytical framework for exploring how objects of conflict nonetheless form political entities. Objects, claims Latour, bind all of us in ways that map out a public space profoundly different from what is usually recognized under the label of ‘the political’. ‘We might be more connected to each other by our worries, our matters of concern, than by any other set of values, opinions, attitudes or principles,’ Latour writes.89 Latour discusses ‘object-oriented democracy’, including not only who is to be concerned, but also what is to be considered. Referring to the Roman res publica, or ‘thing public’, Latour asks: ‘What is the Res in Res-publica?’ Political science, he observes, is mute just at the moment when the objects of concern should be brought in – the issues themselves, the matters that matter, the res that creates a public around it.

Conclusion and Epilogue This study suggests that the story of Israel-Palestine is an agonistic one of the gain and loss of homeland via the gain and loss of individual housing. Housing is thus the object of agonistic struggle around which this society is formed as a polity. The revolutionary use of housing by protesters in the 2011 uprising is a daring critique of the basic founding principles of Israel as a Jewish state, and thereby of the social segments comprising it and marginalized from it. Housing is at the centre of this social struggle for equality, as expressed through the movement’s symbol of a national flag whose central emblem is a house. Identifying housing as the most basic of rights, this movement has thus identified a society based on dwelling and citizenship. Can the joint struggle for housing form and reshape the terms of an Israeli polity?

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Once the regime realized housing’s revolutionary power to transform the basic terms of the state, it refused to allow tents to be erected upon public space in 2012. Protest events quickly took a violent turn, including protest dispersal techniques used by the military police in the occupied territories, and culminated in the self-immolation of Moshe Silman when denied public housing. His protest stands in direct association to Mohammad Boazizi.90 We should closely follow how this struggle unfolds as it renews and assumes different shapes in 2013 and beyond.

Suggested Citation Allweil, Y. (2013). ‘Surprising Alliances for Dwelling and Citizenship: Palestinian-Israeli Participation in the Mass Housing Protests of Summer 2011’, International Journal of Islamic Architecture 2: 1, pp. 41–75, doi: 10.1386/ ijia.2.1.41_1

Contributor Details Yael Allweil is the 2012–13 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and faculty member at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. E-mail: [email protected] Yael Allweil has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

Endnotes 1. Yossi Gurevitz, ‘Demi-Cratia’, accessed October 26, 2012, http://www. hahem.co.il/friendsofgeorge/?p=2914. 2. Mass demonstration, Tel Aviv, July 30, 2011. 3. Michael Walzer, ‘Why the Protests in Israel Are a Cause for Hope’, New Republic (August 8, 2011), accessed November 19, 2012, http://www.tnr. com/article/world/93318/protests-israel-tel-aviv#. 4. Ibid. 5. The author has taken an active part in the protest movement both as a citizen and as a scholar of housing. 6. For a discussion of female leadership of the protest movement, see Shir Dafna-Tkoa and Ayelet Harel-Shalev, ‘Me-Rothschild Le-Rothschild: Mechaat HaZedek HaChevrati BeKol Shone’, Bezalel Proceedings of History and Theory, 23.1 (2012): unpaginated, accessed November 19, 2012, http:// bezalel.secured.co.il/zope/home/he/1328560844/1328647081.

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7. Yarden Harel, Nana 10, July 18, 2011. 8. Channel 2 News, ‘Meyuchad: Mapat Ohaley Hamechaa BeRachvey HaAretz’, July 28, 2011. 9. 1-Ha’am, ‘Mechaat HaDiur – Mapat Ohalim’ (2011). ‘1-Ha’am’ alludes to Ahad Ha’am, literally ‘one of the people’, the pen-name of Asher Zvi Ginsberg, one of the foremost pre-state Zionist thinkers. 10. Richard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (Altona, VIC: Common Ground, 2003). 11. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1977). 12. Manuel Castells, L. Goh and R.Y.W. Kwok, The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome: Economic Development and Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore 4 (Hong Kong: Pion Ltd, 1990). 13. Ibid.; Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983); Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Nezar AlSayyad and Ananya Roy, Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). 14. Rachel Kallus and Hubert Law-Yone, ‘National Home/Personal Home: Public Housing and the Shaping of National Space in Israel’, European Planning Studies 10.6 (2002): 765–769. 15. David N. Myers, ‘Can There Be a Principled Anti-Zionism? On the Nexus between Anti-Historicism and Anti-Zionism in Modern Jewish Thought’, Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture 25.1 (2006): 33–50. The majority of the scholarship regarding Zionism’s ideology as ‘a Judaism submitted to the contingencies of time and space’ focuses on issues of historiography. Little work has been done so far to address the central spatial component of Zionist thought. See, for example, Eyal Chowers, The Political Philosophy of Zionism: Trading Jewish Words for a Hebraic Land (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 16. For the history of Zionist nation building as a history of housing, see Yael Allweil, ‘Building a Home-Land: Zionism as a Regime of Housing 1860–2005’, (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011). 17. Ibid. 18. James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

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19. Ilan Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Hillel Cohen, ‘The Internal Refugees in the State of Israel: Israeli Citizens, Palestinian Refugees’, Israel-Palestine Journal 9.2 (2002): unpaginated, accessed October 26, 2012, http://www.pij.org/details. php?id=159. 20. See, for example, Yifat Weiss, Wadi Saliv: The Present and the Absentee (Jerusalem: Van Lear Institute, 2007). 21. Ella Shohat, ‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims’, Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35. 22. Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 23. There is growing scholarly and political understanding of this citizenry as a national minority in addition to ethnic-religious minority signifiers denominated in the term ‘Arab’. See, for example, Cohen, ‘The Internal Refugees in the State of Israel’; Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians; and Azmi Bishara, ‘The Palestinians in Israel: An Interview with Azmi Bishara’, in The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid, ed. Roane Carey (London: Verso Books, 2001): 139–158. 24. Nils A. Butenschøn, Uri Davis and Manuel S. Hassassian, Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). 25. Walid Khalidi, ‘Why Did the Palestinians Leave, Revisited’, Journal of Palestine Studies 34.2 (2005 [1959]): 42–54; Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Owl Books, 2001); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Nur Masalha, Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel and the Internal Refugees: Essays in Memory of Edward W. Said (1935–2003) (London: Zed Books, 2005). 26. For a history of ideas of nationalism among Jews, see Dimitri Shumsky, ‘Historiography, Nationalism and Bi-Nationalism: Czech-German Jewry, the Prague Zionists, and the Origins of the Bi-National Approach of Hugo Bergmann’, Zion 69.1 (2004): 45–80; Myers, ‘Can There Be a Principled Anti-Zionism?’; and Chowers, The Political Philosophy of Zionism. 27. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem; Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001); Masalha, Catastrophe Remembered. 28. The exact number of displaced Palestinians and destroyed villages is disputed. The numbers used here follow Khalidi’s accounts. See Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora (Washington DC: Institute of

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Palestine Studies, 1991); Noa Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness (Jerusalem: November Books, 2009). 29. Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians. 30. Jacob Peled, Archi-Texture: The Arab House as a Social Text (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2012). 31. Julie Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Romula Sanyal, An Architecture of Displacement: Spatializing Identity and Refugee Space in Beirut and Calcutta (Berkeley: University of California, 2008); Fatina AbreekZubiedat, ‘The Architecture of the Palestinian “Refugee Camps” in the West Bank. Dheisheh Refugee Camp as a Case Study 1948–1967’ (M.Sc. Thesis, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, 2010). 32. Author’s interviews with Zehorit Adani, Yudit Ilani, Sami Abu Shehahda and Gil Mualem-Doron, April 12, 2012. 33. Amnon Bari-Soliziano and Mohammad Darawsha, ‘Aravim ViYehudim Zeu LeHafgin!’ (2011), accessed October 26, 2012, http://j14.org.il/ articles/4328. 34. Asama Agbaria-Zahalka, ‘Aviv HaZibur HaArvi’, Kul al-Arab, May 25, 2012: unpaginated. 35. Daniel Monterescu, HaKehila HaArvit BeYaffo: Doch Tichnun Hevrati. Shatil NGO (Jerusalem, 2007). 36. Jamal Zahalka, in Rachel Leah Jones, ‘Ashkenaz’ (2007), accessed October 26, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAw4r6_RE_s. 37. The association of tent camps and the kibbutz was made by supporters and critics alike. See, for example, Sheizaf’s critique of the Rothschild camp as white elitist, burgeoning with talk of justice and fraternity among the nations. Noam Sheizaf, ‘It’s All About Real-Estate: Understanding the Tent Protests’, 972, July 22, 2011, accessed November 19, 2012, http://972mag.com/understanding-the-tent-protest/19204/; Author’s interview with Zahurit Adani, April 2012. 38. This association was made explicit in the ‘Tent 1948’ tent, part of the Rothschild Boulevard camp, which also formed as a separate Facebook group under the same name. See page, accessed October 26, 2012, at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tent No-1948/145119862236730. 39. Mordechai Naor, ed. Olim Ve Ma’abarot, 1948–1952 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1988). 40. Bari-Soliziano and Darawsha, ‘Aravim ViYehudim Zeu LeHafgin!’. 41. Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians.

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42. Sebastian Valerstein, Emily Silverman and Naama Meishar, ‘Doch: Mezukat HaDiur BeKerev HaKehila HaFalestinit BeYaffo’, Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights (Jerusalem, 2009); Benni Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Monterescu, HaKehila HaArvit BeYaffo. 43. ‘Development Authority’ properties were managed by a number of national companies: first by Amidar, then by Arieli, Gadish and Amidar again. As a result, the lease terms and individual house files changed hands over time, resulting in the loss of information, and disabling residents to claim rights for housing. For more details on Amidar’s role, see Sebastian Valerstein, Emily Silverman and Naama Meishar, ‘Doch: Mezukat HaDiur’; and Kallus and Law-Yone, ‘National Home/Personal Home’. 44. Tel Aviv Jaffa Municipal Archive, file of plan number 2,660. 45. Author’s interview with Sami Abu Shehada, April 2012; and Monterescu, The Arab Community of Jaffa, 2007. 46. Daniel Monterescu, ‘The “Housing Intifada” and Its Aftermath’, Anthropology News (November 2008): 21. 47. Author’s interview with Yudith Ilani, Dar’na: Jaffa Popular Committee for Land and Housing, April 2012. 48. Author’s interviews with Sami Abu Shehada, Yudith Ilani and Gil MualemDoron, April 12, 2012. 49. Waffa Abu Shamis, interviewed for Social Television, (December 21, 2011), accessed October 26, 2012, http://tv.social.org.il/social/2011/12/21/sederchevrati-21-12-2011; and author’s interviews with Abu Shehada, April 12, 2012; Adani Ilani, April 6, 2012; and Gil Mulaem-Doron, April 12, 2012. However, as Jaffa camp residents had no alternative housing, tents remained in the camp until the last family was provided with housing. Ahmed Mashrawi, ‘Mishpahat Abu Shamis Avra MiOhel LeDira’, YaffoPortal, January 27, 2012. 50. Hanah Amouri speaking at a demonstration on August 28, 2011, 2012. See video of the demonstration, accessed October 26, 2012, at http://www. youtube.com/watch? feature=player_embedded&v=7YSTCjGJWsc#!. 51. Sami Abu Shehada speaking at a demonstration on August 28, 2011. See video of the demonstration, accessed October 26, 2012, at http://www. youtube.com/watch?feature= player_embedded&v=7YSTCjGJWsc#!. 52. See the work of Teresa Caldeira on the idea of the social periphery and the spatial intermingling of centre and periphery in the city’s landscape, with built-in spatial mechanisms to prevent mixing and interaction: Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Teresa Caldeira and James Holston, ‘Urban Peripheries and the Invention of Citizenship’, Harvard Design Magazine 28.1 (2008): 19–23.

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53. The Balad National Democratic Alliance party calls for a bi-national state, thereby materializing Palestinian national claims for a homeland. See Bishara, ‘The Palestinians in Israel: An Interview with Azmi Bishara’. 54. See a video of the Jaffa-Tikva march, closing with a rally at the Jaffa camp, at the JaffaPortal channel on YouTube, accessed October 26, 2012 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v= 7YSTCjGJWsc#! Speeches start at minute 2:35 of the video, JaffaPortal channel on YouTube. 55. Gil Mualem-Doron, ‘HaSmol HaYafoyi Lean?’ (2011), accessed October 26, 2012, http://www.yaffo.co.il/article_k.asp?id=2768. 56. Gil Mualem-Doron, a teacher, architect and Jaffa resident, was one of the few Mizrahi activists at the Jaffa camp, which included primarily Arab Jaffans and Jewish Ashkenazi activists from Tel Aviv. MualemDoron’s activism at the Jaffa camp generated the tent-mobile installation shown in Figure 21, as well as communal work with the tent children, resulting in an exhibition of their camp-life drawings at the Jaffa Nuzhaa Art Gallery. Author’s interview with Gil Mualem-Doron, April 12, 2012. 57. ‘Israel Land Administration’, accessed October 26, 2012, http://www. mmi.gov.il/iturtabot/taba4.asp?MsTochnit=%EE%E7/276&kod= 638&gis=false. 58. Qualanswa Popular Committee for Land and Housing, ‘BIMKOM Planners for Planning Rights’ and ‘The Arab Center for Alternative Planning’, Local Master Plan for the City of Qualanswa – Objection (2011). Discussion with Cesar Yehudkin, BIMKOM, June 3, 2012. 59. According to Jayyusi himself, as well as fellow Hadash activist Zaher Sharif, this is a complex and uncommon identity in Qalansuwa. Author’s interviews with Jayyusi and Sharif, May 13, 2012. 60. Author’s interview with Ijya Jayyusi, May 2012. 61. Iris Greicer and Ofer Gonen, Design of the State’s Early Settlement Map (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2009); As’ad Ghanem, ‘The Palestinian Minority in Israel: The “Challenge” of the Jewish State and its Implications’, Third World Quarterly 21.1 (2000): 87–104. 62. Levi Eshkol, The Hardships of Settlement (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1959). 63. Oren Yiftachel, ‘Day of the Land’, in Fifty Years to 1948, ed. Adi Ophir (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993): 279–284. 64. Meir Vilner, ‘The First “Day of the Land”’, Arachim 2 (1996): unpaginated; Ahmad Sa’adi, ‘The Concept of Protest and its Representation by the Or Commission’, Adalah Newsletter 6 (2004), accessed October 26, 2012, http://www.adalah.org/newsletter/eng/oct04/sadi.pdf.

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65. For a discussion of Day of the Land events, see Yiftachel, ‘Day of the Land’, 1993. For a deeper discussion of summud housing strategy, see Peled, Archi-Texture, 2012; and chapters 3 and 7 of Allweil’s Building a Home-Land: Zionism as a Regime of Housing 1860–2005. 66. Yizhak Shnel, ‘Transformations to the Arab Village in Israel: Urbanization in Conditions of Marginality’, in The Arab Settlement in Israel: Geographical Processes, ed. David Grossman (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1994):, 127–149. 67. Qualanswa Popular Committee for Land and Housing, ‘BIMKOM Planners for Planning Rights’ and ‘The Arab Center for Alternative Planning’, Local Master Plan for the City of Qualanswa – Objection; Rassem Khamaisi, ‘Urbanization without Cities: The Urban Phenomena among the Arabs in Israel’, Horizons in Geography 60–61 (2004): 41–50. 68. Qualanswa Popular Committee for Land and Housing, ‘BIMKOM Planners for Planning Rights’ and ‘The Arab Center for Alternative Planning’, Local Master Plan for the City of Qualanswa – Objection. 69. Author’s interview with Zaher Sharif, April 13, 2012. 70. Ibid. 71. Author’s interview with Sharif and Jayyusi, April 13, 2012. The very idea of a common and non-national ‘people’ is a highly contested one, and was referred to by Abu Shehada of Balad as ‘nonsense’. Author’s interview with Sami Abu Shehada, June 6, 2012. 72. Qualanswa Popular Committee for Land and Housing, ‘BIMKOM Planners for Planning Rights’ and ‘The Arab Center for Alternative Planning’, Local Master Plan for the City of Qualanswa – Objection. 73. Bari-Soliziano and Darawsha, ‘Aravim ViYehudim’. 74. For a discussion of the social role of ‘thing’ in the works of Latour and Mouffe, see note nos. 78, 81. 75. Author’s interview with Sami Abu Shehada, April 8, 2012. 76. Author’s interviews with Zehorit Adani, April 10, 2012 and August 12, 2012. 77. Ibid. 78. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2005), 23 and 200. 79. Use of Israel-Palestine in this article does not refer to any specific ‘solution to the conflict’ but rather to the condition of a homeland shared and contested by two nations. 80. See Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Ilan Pappé, The Making

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of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994); Baruch Kimmerling, The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989) and Mark LeVine, Overthrowing Geography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 81. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso Books, 2005), 3. 82. Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, ‘Writing the World from an African Metropolis’ Public Culture 16: 3 (2004): 347–372. 83. These studies tend to be nostalgic about ‘a period when this was possible’ or read cooperation as abnormal, based on Palestinian traitors and Zionist cynical exploiters. See, for example, Salim Tamari and Meron Benvenisti, ‘From a Multiethnic City to Nationalism? Jerusalem in the Early Twentieth Century’ in City of Collision: Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism, ed. P Misselwitz and T Rieniets (Bern: Birkhauser, 2006): 33–49; Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 84. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces’, Art & Research 1.2 (2007), accessed November 20, 2012, http://www.artandresearch.org. uk/v1n2/mouffe.html. 85. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 8; Chantal Mouffe and Enrique Diaz Alvarez, ‘Interview with Chantal Mouffe: “Pluralism is Linked to the Acceptance of Conflict”’, Barcelona Metropolis (Autumn 2010), accessed October 26, 2012, http://www.barcelonametropolis.cat/en/page. asp?id=21&ui=438. 86. See Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Caldeira, City of Walls; AlSayyad and Roy, Urban Informality; Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); John Archer, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Diane Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Andrew M. Shanken, 194x: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 87. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). 88. Mouffe and Diaz Alvarez, ‘Interview with Chantal Mouffe’. 89. Ibid. 90. See Ami Kaufman, ‘Moshe Silman’s Self-Immolation is a National, Not just a Personal, Tragedy’, The Guardian, July 18, 2012, accessed

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October 26, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/ jul/18/moshe-silman-self-immolation; Yoav Zeitun, ‘Military Vehicle of Information Collection at the Tel Aviv Protest Rally’, YNET, July 7, 2012, accessed October 26, 2012, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L4249644,00.html.

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