So why are we developing a campaign to save Lifta?
We are trying to save a place from loosing all record of its cultural heritage as well as it's roots to a people whom of which it once belonged. By saving Lifta, we mean to imply that we are trying to protect a place that still exists in the form of a bond. It exists as a place within the memories of a people, identifiable by the ruins of the buildings and structures cultivated into the landscape. 'Memory' in respect to Lifta is the essence of the place, it is bare without people telling their stories and affirming their bonds to the place.
Sitting within a valley underneath and adjacent to the Tel-Aviv road entering the north-west corridor of Jerusalem, Lifta is a suburb and a gateway into this city. Lifta's inhabitants were forcibly abandoned from the place in 1948 during the catastrophic mass exile of Palestinian people known as the Nakba; a sequence of events synthesized with the establishment of the State of Israel. Whilst many palestinian places affected by the tragedy were either totally removed or annexed under the State of Israel, Lifta stood obscurely due to nearly 60 years of unhinderance from redevelopment. The uniqueness of Lifta is due to the phenomenom that no conquest has physically re-contextualized the place. Lifta lies frozen between two epochs, two histories, two cultures. At present the place has drawn attention to itself, by the hope and demand that a bond can be sustained without the total removal of the signs that the place was once home to a particular people for many hundreds of years.
We do not know what the solution is to this situation, but we do know that if the current authorized plan for redevelopment is built, it will eradicate the memory that is currently attributed to the identity of the place. With new signs and symbols, a new memory would be cultivated onto the landscape. The redevelopment plan will change the name of the Lifta to Mei Neftoach (Spring) in accordance to an ancient historical name to the place. The land processing structures will be placed on display and given biblical references rather than their authentic palestinian heritage. And architectural mimicry of the palestinian cultivated houses shall be mass produced around the lands of Lifta to supplement desirable and exclusive developments to cater for hotels and private accomodation for the non-resident Jewish elite. All reference to its cultivated palestinian heritage will be undermined through forgetfulness; terminaly erazed. (Please read Article 'Reinventing Lifta' for a full appraisal of Lifta and the Redevelopment Plan.)
Our purpose, first and foremost, is to safeguard the harmony that currently exists between the vivid memories and the architectural antiquities on the landscape. To safeguard a nature of recognition and a sense of belonging. Lifta may be a modern-day ruin, but more importantly it is a monument of the present. The place is tangibly connected to a generation of people who still reguard the place to be their ancestral home; if not their home. This same essence and feeling of ancestral origin and home has passed down the next generation and is still strongly felt amongst them.
