Row over Israeli architects deepen

follow up article by Susannah Tarbush, published in the Saudi Gazette June 11 2007.

The world of international architecture is being rocked to its foundations by a fierce row over a campaign which demands Israeli architects end their complicity in creating “facts on the ground” which exclude and oppress Palestinians and wipe out the possibility of a viable future Palestinian state.

The dispute has engulfed some of the leading figures in British and Israeli architecture. In an interview in the latest issue of the British weekly magazine Building Design, Israel’s most prominent architect, Moshe Safdie, accuses British architects of being “hypocritical, self-serving and hateful” for signing a petition organized by the London-based organization Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP).

The temperature was raised further when it emerged that a lobbying group British Architect Friends of Israel and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have written jointly to the Paris-based International Union of Architects (UIA) - the worldwide umbrella of 102 national organizations and 1.3 million architects - calling on it to suspend the membership of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) unless RIBA dissociates itself from the APJP petition. The letter alleges that with its “anti-Israeli focus” the campaign violates EU clauses and definitions on national discrimination and anti-Semitism.

The petition was signed by RIBA’s current president Jack Pringle as well as by former presidents Sir Richard MacCormack, Paul Hyett and George Ferguson, and president-elect Sunand Prasad. Boston-based Safdie lambasted Pringle for signing the petition and suggested he should either have resigned as RIBA president before doing so, or should have sought a decision from the RIBA Council over whether it supported the petition.

The petition, which was published as a half-page advertisement in the Times newspaper of London, was signed by more than 260 architects, planners and others from around the world, among them some of Britain’s most famous architects and a number of Israeli architects and human rights activists. The petition says that the actions of Israeli architects and planners working in conjunction with Israel’s policies building of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory are “unethical and contravene professional codes of conduct and UIA codes.”

The petition argues that it is time to challenge the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) and the Israeli government to end such projects, and says the IAUA should adhere to UIA codes. It calls on the IAUA “to declare their opposition to the inhuman Occupation, and to end the participation of their members and fellow professionals in creating facts on the ground with a demographic intent that excludes and oppresses Palestinians.” APJP has sent copies of the petition with letters to the presidents of the IAUA and the UIA.

The petition has infuriated the Israeli government and its supporters, and readers of Israeli newspaper and TV websites have posted numerous hostile messages, in some cases accusing British architects and the British in general of anti-Semitism. A typical message said that “Israel-bashing” England is on its way to becoming “the first Islamic state in Western Europe”. One reason for the anger aroused by the APJP petition is that it came around the same time as the University and College Union (UCU) voted at its annual meeting to support moves towards an academic boycott of Israel. The boycott issue is now one of the hottest topics in British-Israeli relations, and in the House of Commons Prime Minister Tony Blair called on the UCU to drop the resolution it had adopted. The APJP petition does not specifically call for a boycott, but it is being drawn into the boycott controversy.

Moshe Safdie claims to advocate a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict and says that “many have objected, as I have, to building in the West Bank. Some have joined groups fighting the construction of the wall, but we are all aware of the complexity of the issues and all of us, collectively, are disappointed and angered by the position of our British colleagues.” Safdie said he was disgusted that British architects, including Will Alsop, Terry Farrell and Richard MacCormac, had singled out Israel when regimes across the world carry out “the most terrible atrocities.”

Jack Pringle robustly rebutted Safdie’s remarks. He told Building Design: “Moshe Safdie is a brilliant architect but it’s not for him to make policy for the RIBA, myself individually or as president.” Pringle “totally accepts” that there are oppressive regimes all over the world, “but to say you can’t criticize one without criticizing them all is extremely naïve”.

In his blog on the RIBA website, Pringle explained that he and his successor, Sunand Prasad, had signed the petition in their own capacities and not as representatives of RIBA, which is a non-political organization. He added that although he is a staunch supporter of a State of Israel, he signed the petition because “I believe, as a citizen and as an engaged observer, that the Israel/Palestinian issue is the most destabilizing and the most important issue in the Middle East and thus in the world today.” Until a lasting and fair peace is established in the region, there can be no prospect of a stable world peace. “To do this both sides must play by the rules with a measure of respect for each other’s rights. These particular petitions relate to Israel’s actions on territory in contravention of many UN resolutions, with the notable involvement of architects and planners.” Pringle also condemned the “many grave, violent and heinous Palestinian misdemeanors in other spheres of the ongoing war, with its attendant terrorism.”

Pringle rejected any charge of anti-Semitism as “very offensive to me and quite absurd as a glance at the petition with its many Jewish co-signatories will show. Indeed, many Jewish agencies support the petition, and its main promoter is Jewish himself.” (The last reference is to the APJP chairman, the architect Abe Hayeem). He was sorry if any RIBA members were offended by his signing the petition, “but I trust they will understand the balance of my opinion – and my right to express it.”Other signatories to the petition have also publicly defended their stand. The eminent architect, critic and theorist Charles Jencks (pictured below)wrote a letter of protest to Building Design after Michael Peters, who is founder and chairman of the international branding consultancy Identica and has worked extensively with Israeli architects, warned that as a result of the petition “British architects are going to burn their bridges with a number of developers – Israeli, British and European”, Jencks, who has been one of APJP’s most vocal supporters since it was set up in February 2006, described Peters’ warning as being in “the worst tradition of intimidation. Of course, some architects will succumb to such veiled and explicit threats because it sometimes pays to be silent, but the list of signatories – including four RIBA presidents and the next one – shows that, contrary to Peters, many British architects do indeed understand the situation in Israel and that number is growing…One cannot but protest at the destruction of a nation.”

The issuing of the petition coincided with the 40th anniversary of the 1967 war, which has focused world attention on the massive changes that have been wrought by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. As the APJP petition states, acting against international law Israel continues to build illegal settlements on Palestinian territory, with the help of Israeli architects and planners.

The APJP petition highlights “three typical projects that make Israeli architects, planners and design and construction professionals complicit in social, political and economic oppression, in violation of their professional ethics.” One of the projects is in the village of Silwan near Jerusalem, where 88 Palestinian homes are under threat of demolition as part of a development for ultra-religious Israeli settlers from the El-‘Ad group on illegally annexed Palestinian land. The EU has condemned the development. APJP points out that the Ministry of Housing for the Jerusalem District and Jerusalem Municipality appointed Moshe Safdie’s Jerusalem office to prepare a Master Plan for the southern slopes of the Old City which include the Silwan neighbourhood of Al-Bustan where the 88 threatened houses are located.

The second project is for the conversion of the ruins of the Palestinian village of Lifta , also near Jerusalem, into a development for wealthy American visitors with, APJP says, “the exclusion of the original Palestinian inhabitants, their heritage and memory.” APJP is supporting the campaign to save Lifta which is spearheaded by the group the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST).

The third project is the E1 plan to expand the largest illegal Israeli settlement, Ma’ale Adumim, to link it with metropolitan Jerusalem. This will dissect the northern and southern West Bank, destroying the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.

The issuing of the petition raises the question of whether architects should involve themselves in political issues. Former RIBA president Paul Hyett wrote in Building Design that politics has a role to play in architecture. He recalled his past as a member of Architects Against Apartheid, when he played a part in the 1972 decision of RIBA to sever links with the South African Institute of Architects.On a 2002 visit to South Africa, when he was RIBA president, Hyett apologized to the South African Institute of Architects for any upset caused by the decision to sever links 30 years earlier. However, “many South African architects told me that severance had been a huge boost to morale. They said it had highlighted international support for their own disgust at their government’s actions.”

FAST exhibited the Lifta project in the EU parliament building in Brussels

FAST Call on the EU Parliament to use their influence in making a change by reintroducing the human scale to abstract plans that violate human rights on base of ideological agendas.
The fate of Israel and the fate of Palestine are bound together. The destruction of the country’s genuine cultural heritage is a threat to future sustainability, not just of Palestine and Israel but also of the region and of the world.

At FAST, we truly believe that a just solution for Lifta will form a vital step in reconciliation process between the nations, between Israel and Palestine.

Chomsky supports ‘Saving Lifta’ campaign.

(The WMF nomination described in this post has since been rejected - please refer to http://www.wmf.org/ to view nominated sites)

Noam Chomsky along with many leading professionals and academics join the ‘Saving Lifta’ campaign by supporting FAST’s application to nominate Lifta on the 2008 World Monument Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites.

Lifta is one of the last places intact and one of the last opportunities to change the conservation policies in Israel. It is also one of the last chances of officially recognizing the Palestinian history as part of the history of the area, a crucial factor for future sustainability. However, there is no governmental acknowledgment to the fact that the approved redevelopment plan for Lifta is insufficient and subsequently prevent its execution. The current practice of the State defining within its territiory control over heritage policies does suggest the problem that not all heritages within the border will be represented. Quoting non-profit Israeli organization Zochrot, ‘Palestinians villages and cities destroyed in 1948 do not enjoy the protection of relevant bodies, for example the protection accorded to natural sites by the Israeli Society for the Protection of Nature or the protection accorded to ancient historical sites by the Antiquities Authority.’ There is no formal recognition that a good preservation plan for Lifta can allow a precious and unique part of Palestinian patrimony to be conserved.

The main obstacles to the realization of effective site protection are likely to be related to changing influences and policies in both the local and international sphere. On the contrary, our previous encounter with UNESCO to nominate Lifta for World Heritage protection was brushed aside with a remark of disillusionment. For an non-governmental organization (FAST) approaching UNESCO to create an application was inconcievable in coordance to the conventions and terms currently in place between the dynamic of the United Nations and the Nation-State. International conventions and instruments are not substantial safety nets if they don't reach out to cultural heritages that are marginalized within predominant ruling cultures. FAST’s attempt was to highlight issues with the World Heritage Committee to examine existing conventions on the protection of volatile cutural heritages that are denied or under-represented any formal recognition. (For further reading on FAST's intention to contact UNESCO, please click on the December blog: 'Crime & Retribution'.) Lifta represents this sector of heritage, and our efforts were to encourage dialogue in support of her protection whilst addressing her as a place worthy of the recognition of outstanding universal value to the international community. Nonetheless, excepting the partiality of the Quartet of powers (the USA, the EU, the UN & Russia) over the 2 State geopolitical solution and Israel’s current unilateral position, the reality at the moment is that this palestinian heritage existing within the territory of Israel is more likely to turn a blind eye than receive a warm welcome. However there is an influential scheme which responds to threats to cultural heritage sites around the world whilst empowering individuals and organizations the capacity to nominate cultural heritage sites without direct authorization through governments.

Announced every two years, the Worlds Monuments Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites calls international attention to cultural heritage sites around the world threatened by factors such as neglect, vandalism, armed conflict or natural disaster. The Watch raises awareness of the dangers facing cultural heritage sites and can help to raise public awareness of lesser known, but significant sites that are threatened. Each site selected for the Watch list is included in a special publication and the Watch list receives extensive publicity in the international media. Since the Watch's program inception, 481 sites in 109 countries have been included in the Watch. The List of 100 Most Endangered Sites is a program founded by the World Monuments Funds (WMF). Founded in 1965, the WMF is a private, international nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of significant and endangered architectural and cultural heritage sites and pursuing its mission by providing financial support through advocacy, fieldwork, technical assistance, education and onsite training. Unlike national or international designations, the Watch list does not confer permanent historic status or permanent recognition on a site. Instead, by featuring sites every two years, the Watch list seeks to generate public awareness - a sense of urgency - and support the preservation of a wide range of sites at risk. Through the Watch, WMF intends to bring the key problems facing threatened cultural heritage and encourage timely responses for governments, local organizations and the general public.

If Lifta’s nomination is successful, FAST intends to include the nomination in their strategy to devise the drafting of an alternative conservation plan. The alternative plan for Lifta will underline the preservation of the old village as an 'open to public' space. A place where the real history of the village is being told and is accessible to everyone. Also, there is no official recognition to the fact that the participation of the village's former inhabitants and descendents are necessary in underlying Lifta’s fate; it is the very last possibility for Lifta’s inhabitants to maintain a role in the fate of their home town. So planning will accompany an emphasis on tracking down the original community and having their involvement in drafting a conservation plan. There are also local individuals and regional organizations in the field of conservation who are prepared to play a role in a conservation taskforce. However, FAST also fully acknowledges that the viability of any solution towards the drafted conservation plan will ultimately have to seek its acceptance by the Israeli government, as it is the only body that can legally bring to its execution. So a substantial capacity-building conservation plan has to present a proposal which shares an all inclusive appeal.

The nomination to the World Monument Watch can help FAST highlight the plight of Lifta to the wider international audience. The WMF 2008 (to 2010) Endangered Sites nomination’s recognition and accessibility to international media sources and coverage can help place into effect alarm and concern on the current proceedings of the existing redevelopment plan. Gathering advocacy from an internationally respected Cultural Heritage institute such as the WMF can substantiate the real cause of concern in the international community, urging pressure on the Israeli Land Authority and the Jerusalem Municipality Planning Department to reassess the situation of the existing proposal. Both a media campaign and an alternative plan have to coincide to place substantial pressure on the Israeli authorities. We are hoping that the WMF can advocate on the cause by acknowledging that a viable solution has the possibility of being created, and support our efforts for proposing a plan which appeals to the necessary conservation effort. We will also focus efforts to sustain acknowledgement and legal protection for the preservation of Lifta's heritage and freeze any action and progression of the redevelopment plan. It will be important for FAST to determine, through the development of conservation planning instruments, that Lifta can create and meet the criteria to establish herself as heritage worth protecting. We will develop the conservation plan, finalizing the plan in 2009.

The 2008 Endangered List Nomination may be one of only a few possible opportunites of by-passing Israel’s restrictions of what is at present ideologically considered in that region as cultural heritage of outstanding universal value. Volatile cultural heritages such as in the case described for Lifta are in need of recognition so that their histories are neither appropriated or erazed.

To quote Chomsky’s letter of support accompanying Lifta’s 2008 Endangered List nomination:

I have been informed of a proposal to the World Monument Funds to preserve the Palestinian village of Lifta, near Jerusalem, evacuated during the huge dispossession of the population in the 1948 war, one of the rare villages that has not been destroyed. Unless action is taken soon, it too will disappear, absorbed into the expanding suburbs of Greater Jerusalem.

Whatever one’s attitudes and opinions about these grim events and their aftermath, no decent person can fail to recognize the trauma of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled or were expelled during what is by now recognized by leading Israeli historians of very different persuasions as large-scale “ethnic cleansing” (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, to mention two). And it is evident to all that the events led to a dramatic transformation of a small region of the world of unique historical importance, from the earliest days of human evolution and through the formation of some of the world’s major civilizations. Very little remains from the pre-war period, its culture, traditions, and historical memories. The survival of Lifta is an unusual exception, a treasure that should not be lost. I hope very much that some way will be found to protect and preserve it.

Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor
MIT
Cambridge MA 02139
Jan. 12, 2007

The separation wall near Qalandia checkpoint, between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah, 28 December 2006. (Fadi Arouri/MaanImages)


Pressure mounts on Israel's architects

Susannah Tarbush, The Electronic Intifada, 10 June 2007


(FAST - 'This article by Susannah Tarbush extracted from The Electronic Intifada continues on the petitions made to the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) by the Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP). The APJP have consulted the professional codes of conduct of the International Union of Architects, the UIA codes, as a plight for a universal ethical code to be upheld by the IAUA. This article elaborates more extensively on this ongoing story occurring in the backdrop of the Lifta campaign.')


Just days before 5 June's 40th anniversary of the start of the June 1967 war, some of the biggest names in British architecture signed a petition calling on Israeli architects and their fellow professionals to stop participating in the creation of "facts on the ground", which obliterate the idea of a viable future Palestinian state.

The petition, organised by London-based Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP), condemns "three typical projects that make Israeli architects, planners and design and construction professionals complicit in social, political and economic oppression, in violation of their professional ethics." The three projects are the E1 plan to expand the largest illegal settlement -- Ma'ale Adumim -- to link it with metropolitan Jerusalem, and developments in the village of Silwan and the deserted village of Lifta.

The signatories include Charles Jencks, Will Alsop (Stirling Prize winner in 2000), Ted Cullinan, Rick Mather and Sir Terry Farrell. The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Jack Pringle is also a signatory as are former presidents Sir Richard MacCormack, Paul Hyett and George Ferguson and president-elect Sunand Prasad.

In all, more than 260 architects, planners, academics and others have signed the petition, from countries including Britain, Israel, Palestine, Australia, the USA, Japan, Cuba, Brazil, Finland and the Netherlands. The petition was published as an advertisement in the London newspaper The Times; the full version can be seen (and signed) on the APJP website at http://www.apjp.org/.

Coincidentally, the issuing of the petition came as the London Independent newspaper reported that Theodor Meron, who was the Israeli Foreign Ministry's legal adviser in 1967, still believes he was right to warn the Israeli government after the 1967 war that it would be illegal to build Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Judge Meron is now one of the world's leading international jurists.

The APJP petition asserts that the actions of Israeli architects and planners working in conjunction with Israel's policy of building illegal settlements on Palestinian territory are "unethical and contravene professional codes of conduct and [International Union of Architects] UIA codes." It says it is time to challenge the [Israeli Association of United Architects] IAUA and for the Israeli government to end such projects, and calls on the IAUA to adhere to UIA codes. APJP calls on the IAUA "to declare their opposition to the inhuman Occupation, and to end the participation of their members and fellow professionals in creating facts on the ground with a demographic intent that excludes and oppresses Palestinians."


The petition has been sent to UIA President Gaetan Siew, IAUA President Anda Barr and to the Israeli Housing Ministry. A copy has also been sent to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office.

APJP says this is the first time Israeli architects have been directly challenged in this way. As APJP chairman, the architect Abe Hayeem, put it to SaudiDebate: "The occupation is an architectural enterprise, with the separation wall, settlements and the matrix of control -- bridges, tunnels, checkpoints and complex terminals." The occupation projects are perpetuating apartheid, with all settlements built within a matrix of separation. The terminals -- including the Kalandia terminal -- are elaborate architectural constructions.

Crucially, the petition has been signed by a number of Israeli individuals and organisations, such as the head of Bezalel Academy's architecture department Professor Zvi Efrat, the architect, author and scholar Eyal Weizman, the director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) Jeff Halper, Zochrot director Eitan Bronstein, director of BIMKOM (Planners for Planning Rights) Shmuel Groag, director of the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST) Malkit Shoshan, graphic designer David Tartakover (winner of the Israeli prize for design in 2002) and professor of geography at Ben Gurion University Oren Yiftahel.

Palestinian signatories include architect Haifa Hammami (the secretary of APJP), architect and professor at Al-Quds University Osama Hamdan, architects Fahmi Salameh and Nadia Habash, and the director of the Ramallah-based NGO RIWAQ -- the Centre for Architectural Conservation, Suad Amiry.

The petition has aroused criticism from Israel's supporters. The chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jon Benjamin, told the Guardian newspaper: "What they are saying is that they have a certain view and that Israeli architects must publicly declare that to be their position as well." Benjamin said that Israeli Arabs and Jews were working together on numerous low profile but worthy projects in the Occupied Territories, and that "the two sides should be encouraged to work together."

When the Guardian article was republished by the Israeli daily the Jerusalem Post and on the Ynetnews website it attracted a host of hostile comments from readers accusing APJP, British architects, and the British in general of anti-Semitism. Many of those posting comments assumed that APJP was calling for a boycott of Israeli architects -- although the petition makes no mention of a boycott -- and drew parallels between the petition and the boycotts of Israel called for by organisations of British academics, doctors and journalists. Jerusalem-based Infolive.tv website said that "anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bias and one-sidedness has often been cited by observers as prevalent in the British media and academic world. " There were also negative reactions in the blogosphere; one blogger compared the British architects to Nazi architect Albert Speer.

"The IUA principle states that architects 'shall respect and help conserve the systems of values and the natural and cultural heritage of the community in which they are creating architecture. They shall strive to improve the environment and the quality of the life and habitat within it in a sustainable manner, being fully mindful of the effect of their work on the widest interests of all those who may reasonably be expected to use or enjoy the product of their work'."An article in the British weekly magazine Building Design quoted Michael Peters, founder and chairman of the international branding consultancy Identica, as warning: "British architects are going to burn their bridges with a number of developers -- Israeli, British and European."

Peters, who has worked extensively with Israeli architects, alleged that British architects do not understand the situation in Israel. "Getting involved in a lobby group can only do a disservice to the whole architectural profession" he said. "To accuse [Israeli] architects of being complicit is nonsense."

But Abe Hayeem told Building Design that his fellow architect supporters were "pretty courageous" and insisted that architects would not be deterred from backing causes they supported. British architect Will Alsop strongly defended the petition, saying it is "not against Israel, it's for Palestine". Alsop said: "I think the Palestinians are living in a prison and they deserve better than that. I'd like fellow colleagues in Israel to feel some responsibility about this shabby treatment. Architects are a fairly humanitarian lot and perhaps they could help."

For architects to be supportive of APJP can potentially have adverse career repercussions, as was dramatically shown by the volte face of one of Britain's most famous architects, Lord Richard Rogers. When APJP was set up in February 2006, its inaugural meeting took place in Lord Rogers' offices in London and Lord Rogers made some introductory remarks.

But within weeks Rogers publicly dissociated himself from the group, dismaying APJP and its sympathisers. His U-turn came after powerful pro-Israeli interests in New York threatened him with the loss of his commission for the $1.7 billion project to expand the Jacob K. Javits Convention Centre in Manhattan because of his links with APJP. The late Senator Javits was an ardent supporter of Israel. Other Richard Rogers Partnership projects in New York were also threatened.

Rogers at first said he was dissociating himself from APJP because of its published aims and "in view of the suggested boycott by some members," although APJP denied it was promoting a boycott. He said he had only hosted the APJP meeting as a favour to Abe Hayeem. Rogers subsequently enlisted the services of legendary New York PR man Howard Rubenstein and hardened his line, coming out with statements defending Israel's right to build its separation wall. He described the Israel-Palestine conflict as being between a "terrorist" state and a "democratic" one and said that he was "all for the democratic state".

Despite this initial setback, APJP has proved effective in mobilising opinion within the architectural profession in Britain and worldwide. As in its latest petition, it strengthens its arguments by focusing on specificities in addition to stating its broad ethos and aims. In Silwan, one of the three projects detailed in the APJP petition, 88 Palestinian homes are under threat of demolition as part of a development for ultra-religious settlers from the El 'Ad movement. Silwan is part of East Jerusalem, whose annexation by Israel after the 1967 war is considered illegal under international law.

The Ministry of Housing for the Jerusalem District and Jerusalem Municipality appointed the Jerusalem office of the Israeli architect Moshe Safdie to prepare a Master Plan for the southern slopes of the Old City. The plan includes the Silwan neighbourhood of Al-Bustan in which the 88 threatened houses are located, near the archaeological site of biblical Siloam.

The planned area -- termed the historical 'City of David' -- is the brainchild of El 'Ad, a fundamentalist settler group which has been buying and expropriating houses in Palestinian neighbourhoods for many years with the tacit approval of the Jerusalem mayoralty. APJP points out that the EU has condemned the development, and that the Silwan plan contravenes the spirit and letter of the Road Map. The Road Map states that Israel should end actions including the confiscation and demolition of Palestinian homes and property as a punitive measure or to facilitate Israeli construction.


APJP is coordinating its call on Silwan with local Israeli and Palestinian architects and NGOs including BIMKOM, ICAHD, FAST, Ir Amim (City of Peoples), ACRI (Association for Civil Rights in Israel), Bat Shalom and ARIJ (Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem).

The second project highlighted in the petition concerns the deserted village of Lifta. The 4,000-year old village lies just outside Jerusalem and its last Palestinian inhabitants were killed or driven out by the Israeli Army and the Irgun in 1948. Today it is more or less a ghost town frozen in time, with its former inhabitants scattered between East Jerusalem, Ramallah, Jordan and the US.

APJP describes the campaign to save Lifta as "a plea against architectural erasure and the destruction of memory. While Israel proudly preserves its biblical heritage and archaeological sites, the rich Palestinian heritage is being allowed to disappear or deliberately destroyed."

A renovation project by architect Gabriel Cartes of the Groug-Cartes firm, in collaboration with Ze'ev Temkin of TIK projects, aims to turn Lifta into an expensive and exclusively Jewish residential area, mainly for Americans. It would have 300 luxury flats, a large hotel, a big mall and a large tourist resort. Hundreds of pre-1948 Palestinian homes would be destroyed to obliterate any reminder that the area was once a prosperous Arab town. APJP says this is "a process amounting to cultural vandalism."

APJP is supporting the Israeli group FAST in the campaign to preserve Lifta. Israeli organisations Zochrot and BIMKOM have also opposed the Lifta Master Plan. APJP's petition asks for Lifta to be retained as a ruin or a memorial as a reminder of its real past or -- preferably -- to be allowed to be re-inhabited by survivors or descendants of the original residents. Either way, survivors and descendants should be consulted. Four generations later the descendants are still protesting for the right to return: the APJP petition has been signed by a number of "Liftawis".

The third project named in the petition is the E1 plan to expand the largest illegal settlement, Ma'ale Adumim, so as to link it with metropolitan Jerusalem. Ma'ale Adumim is the largest settler city, housing 30,000, and "stands out as the key element in Israeli's colonial expansion as far west as possible from Jerusalem towards Jericho." E1 is the hilly area between East Jerusalem and Ma'ale Adumim and Israel is intending to annexe it to make a continuous urban development. Under the project, designed by Shlomo Aharonson, some 5,600 settlement homes for 25,000 new residents will be added to the municipal area of Ma'ale Adumim. In addition, some 1,600 dunums of land are being confiscated to erect Israel's separation wall for Ma'ale Adumim.

APJP says the project contravenes the Road Map and blocks any future possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state by cutting off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, and cutting off the northern part of the West Bank from the southern part. "This deliberate violation of the road map and the Oslo accord forestalls any basis for negotiating land for peace. When complete, the total area of Ma'ale Adumim and E1 will be 55,000 dunums -- an area larger than Tel Aviv in the heart of what should have been a Palestinian state."

In calling on the IAUA to stick to International Union of Architects (UIA) codes, it particularly has in mind the principle in the UIA charter on obligations to the public. This principle states that "architects have obligations to the public to embrace the spirit and letter of the laws governing their professional affairs, and should thoughtfully consider the social and environmental impact of their professional activities."

The principle states that architects "shall respect and help conserve the systems of values and the natural and cultural heritage of the community in which they are creating architecture. They shall strive to improve the environment and the quality of the life and habitat within it in a sustainable manner, being fully mindful of the effect of their work on the widest interests of all those who may reasonably be expected to use or enjoy the product of their work." IAUA is a member of UIA, as is RIBA, and it is possible that the issue of IAUA members' alleged contraventions of the UIA's charter will be raised at the UIA council.

APJP's activities have inevitably aroused controversy, including its petition last September addressed to the organisers of the 10th International Architecture Biennale in Venice asking them to consider withdrawing the Israeli pavilion. The petition argued that the Israeli pavilion "totally excludes the Palestinians who are the target and real victims of the seemingly unending series of wars being memorialized, and awards Israeli the sole position of victim and victor."

The Israeli pavilion, funded by the Israeli government, consisted of 15 memorials built between 1949 and 2006 to commemorate Israeli military war dead or the Holocaust. The Israeli Defense Ministry provided substantial support.

In an interview during the Biennale the eminent British architect, critic and writer Charles Jencks said the problem with the pavilion was that it had no place for the Palestinians who are "not allowed to commemorate or memorialize anything in their past that has been repressed, such as the 560 villages, towns and cities which have been destroyed and wiped out." Jencks acknowledged that "architects can't be heroes", but asked: "How do we as architects not become complicit with power and a negative national situation? ... I don't believe architects willingly knew they were letting themselves in to be an arm of the Israeli defence department, but that is the way it has come out."

Jencks alluded to the tensions between some Israeli and other architects when he said that he had discussed APJP's objections to the Israeli pavilion with Moshe Safdie, one of Israel's best-known architects, but Safdie had failed to see his point of view. "Moshe Safdie says he'll never speak to me again, he hates me for saying this. I still regard him as a great architect and a friend."

Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmith's College, University of London, is a strong supporter of APJP and has over the years produced a body of work of much relevance to the organisation. In his latest book -- Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation -- to be published shortly in London by Verso, Weizman "unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a constructed artifice, in which natural and built features function as weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged." He "lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation."

Susannah Tarbush is a London-based British freelance journalist and consultant.

Staring into the abyss to envision a conservation plan.......

The goal: mediating between the Israeli national narrative and the Lifta conservation plan.

The conservation plan for Lifta will be unique. The local planning authority and the legal land owner will be confronted to closely examine the offer to negotiate the space for the design of the conservation plan. This is with attention to the period just prior to the events of 1948; the uprooting of the village. Therefore, any concept of place has to envisage that the story of the village Lifta is being told within a national narrative that openly accepts truths that occurred during the Palestinian Catastrophe Nakba and the Independence of Israel. FAST's campaign journey so far has concluded an appraisal of Lifta to be synonymous of a tragedy and a stark symbol of Retribution. (For further reading on Lifta’s appraisal click on the December blog: 'Crime & Retribution' or scroll down below.) So how do you sustain the trust of the vanquisher so that they may anticipate their past actions without the predicament of compromising their truths to a vulnerable effect? And how do you appropriate a place of reconciliation in hope to consequently redeem this symbol of retribution?

Lifta becomes the untold story of a nation. It epitomizes a common history shared between two ethnic groups. Each group subjective by experience and having their own individual identity of higher values articulated through dualities of orientation, outlook and beliefs. Lifta confronts conquest and despair; the place ties together two opposing value systems. Both the existential identities of the conqueror and the conquered also have the further capacity to engage and recipricate their mythologies into a combination of curative acts. How do the conjunctions of these truths fit together? How is the role of the conservation plan and architecture involved to allow a contestation of history through sustainability and creativity? What beneficial reality constructions can these opposing value systems generate together? And finally, what new environment will result out of this re-imagined narrative?

These are preliminary questions etching the surface of an investigation into creating Lifta's conservation plan. To commence shortly.....