المناظر الطبيعية في القدس

A review of papers on Jerusalem landscapes that were delivered at the Fifth International Conference 12-15 November 1998 at Birzeit University, entitled "Landscape Perspectives on Palestine." The papers were part of the session entitled "Urban Landscapes: Struggle for the Palestinian City."

In his keynote address, "Landscape and Idolatry: Territory and Terror," W.J.T. Mitchell of the University of Chicago observed that landscape is a semiotic system that can serve to reify and naturalize the terrain it depicts, occluding the traces of history and of current social relations that, in reality, mark the environment. Therefore landscape has been a potent ideological weapon in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In the Zionist ideological program--embodied in diverse media from literature, paintings, and photographs to historical theme parks--landscape has served to erase the Palestinian presence in Palestine as a distinct culture and civilization with a long and diverse history. Landscapes have envisioned Palestinians as exotic "Arabs" with no real local roots or, conversely, depicted them as an autochthonous people inseparable from the landscape itself and submerged in its timeless, natural rhythms. In these renderings, the land largely lies waste and uninhabited, except for traces of its ancient Jewish history amidst the decay, beckoning Zionist pioneers to come and reclaim their lost heritage. If the existence of the inhabitants is recognized, they are romanticized as figures frozen in biblical times, or depicted as primitives lacking the energy and skill to improve the land through their labor, and therefore without any real claims to ownership. As part of nature, they stand over against the linear progress, history, and civilization brought by Zionism. As Mitchell noted, this ideological program persists into the present. In the form of the West Bank areas designated as "Nature Reserves" in the recent Wye agreement (and, we should add, in the form of the "Green Areas" within Jerusalem), the Israelis use landscape as a concept to justify excluding Palestinian‘s from building on and developing land that is in fact already deeply etched with their own labor and history.^[1]

As Mitchell‘s talk suggested, the term "landscape" usually connotes scenes of "nature" defined as rural, pastoral, primal, and non-urban. The session under review, however, provided a valuable qualification, emphasizing that urban spaces are also imagined as landscapes. In his introductory remarks to the session, Dr. Nazmi Al-Jubeh, the Chairperson of the History Department at Birzeit, noted that in the Bronze Age there were 181 cities in the region. He thus drew attention to the deep roots of urban civilization in Palestine and subverted the nature/culture and rural/urban oppositions through which Zionist ideology has attempted to conceptually subordinate and expunge Palestinians.

In his paper, "Transforming the Face of the Holy City: Political Messages in the Built Topography of Jerusalem," Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago contended that while building in Jerusalem has always been designed to meet a variety of functional needs, it has at the same time always projected religious and secular meanings and affirmed and legitimized political supremacy on the scale of the city as a whole.

For Khalidi, this enterprise has always entailed an effort on the part of different rulers and regimes to integrate the built topography of the city into its physical topography so as to give concrete expression to their ruling values. This was an assertion of political dominance and of the supremacy of the hegemonic religion, which certainly involved the subordination and marginalization of previous regimes, rulers, and faiths. Nevertheless, Khalidi argues, throughout most of its long history this building had successfully preserved the organic relation between the city and its physical environment. For Khalidi, the Dome of the Rock epitomizes this organic ideal in the way it beautifully incorporates into itself the blue and gold of the sky and sun.

For Khalidi, however, this integration of the city organically into its environment ended in 1967 when the Israelis began their program of settlement building in Arab Jerusalem and sacrificed the ideal of organic integration to their political agenda of ethnic cleansing and territorial control. In realizing these goals, they have marred the surrounding skyline with fortress-like settlements exclusively inhabited by Jews that lack any organic connection to the city or the surrounding landscape. As he noted, "They are uniform in aspect, closely packed in ranks, and exude both an aggressive and a defensive aura…. Their austerity and plainness against the existing landscape and in contrast to the rest of the city‘s built topography reflect the very political nature of their existence; they are meant to occupy space, to cover territory, and to stake a claim to land, plainly and simply."

The next talk, by Shadia Touqan, a development specialist at the Welfare Association, focused on the present development of these exclusionary trends shaping the Jerusalem landscape and on grass-roots Palestinian efforts to resist the suffocation of Arab Jerusalem, especially in the Old City. In her paper "Preservation and Development of the Old City of Jerusalem: Future Plans," she reviewed the current efforts and future plans of Palestinian NGO‘s to preserve and develop the Old City in the face of Israeli impediments and countermeasures. She praised the range of grass-roots activities underway to renovate buildings, mosques, schools, and monasteries; to mount legal defenses of property rights; and to train artisans in the art of renovation. At the same time, she noted that most of the NGO work in Jerusalem has followed an ad-hoc, "fire-fighting" approach until recently. She called for more coherent and coordinated planning, especially during this interim phase of the peace process when no centralized Palestinian governing authority can as yet direct projects in Arab Jerusalem.

She went on to describe the three-pronged strategy of action that the Welfare Association is implementing involving 1) careful documentation of housing types and buildings, 2) coordinated planning and action among NGO‘s, and 3) the establishment of "mechanisms of implementation," that is, efficient and sustainable means of raising funds, training skilled artisans, renovating buildings, and improving the economy.

The next paper stepped back from this focus on NGO development projects in the Old City to survey the broader consequences of Israeli Policy on the environment of Jerusalem as a whole. In "Jerusalem: Israeli Policy and its Effects on the Landscape and Environment of the City," Khalil Tafakji, a geographer at the Arab Studies Society, examined the specific transformations that Israeli policies have wrought on the landscape and environment of Jerusalem. He noted that their policies have always been linked to two goals: 1) creating a majority of Jews in East Jerusalem and 2) controlling the area for purposes of security, regardless of aesthetic considerations.

He proceeded to give examples of the way Israeli settlement activity has disregarded the relation between the city and its environment. He noted how the settlements on French Hill, for instance, have blocked the view of the city from Ramallah so that now, when one approaches from the north, the Old City no longer rises into view like a distant castle on a hill. Indeed plans for new high rises in the city may eventually obscure the Old City entirely. For example, the planned high rises in the settlement of Gilo will block the view from Bethlehem, further cutting off the two cities from each other. Moreover, the planned Jewish settlement of Har Homa (on Jabal Abu Ghneim) will destroy another one of the beautiful forests that once served as foils to the city. And the beautiful vistas of the Old City from Jabal Mukaber will be obstructed by the planned construction of high-rise hotels and towers. Despite these gloomy forecasts, Tafakji stressed that Palestinians have real power to retard and check, if not to roll back, this transformation of their city through stepped-up organized resistance. He also noted that there has been significant internal Israeli opposition to these plans, especially from environmental groups, suggesting the possibility of forming ad hoc Israeli-Palestinian coalitions in order to challenge the continuing policies of ethnic cleansing and environmental degradation.

During the discussion period Dr. Salim Tamari of Birzeit University and the Institute of Jerusalem Studies asked the panelists why the conference had devoted so little time to querying the role of Palestinians themselves in the current degradation of their landscape. He pointed out that despite the rapid exhaustion of available space and the growing strain on the environment from the spate of building since Oslo, Palestinian culture still valorizes the single family villa (a fact often cited by Israeli authorities to justify their not building any high-rise apartment complexes for Arabs in Jerusalem^[2]). This question suggested an important area for future reflection and creative work. Palestinian representations of landscape have always involved not only a backward-looking and critical component, but also a forward-looking and creative one responsive to changing experiences.^[3] The two activities are part of one and the same process of self-discovery. As Edward Said argued in his keynote address, "Palestine: Memory, Invention and Space," nations invent themselves in the present through the way they remember their past. Landscape is one important means by which a nation invents itself. Since Oslo, Palestinians have had greater opportunity to shape and develop their land through government-sponsored development and planning in the West Bank and Gaza. This more active relation to the land through proto-state institutions will no doubt spur Palestinian artists and writers to re-imagine landscape in a way that responds both creatively and critically to these new circumstances.