(The iconography in this image by a native american indian artist symbolizes a grassroots struggle and solidarity - Also later shown to me, the image seemed very fitting to a poignant poem by Mourid Barghouti - Extracts from Midnight - is featured below the following introduction.)
Setting the challenge for a Grassroots Manifesto and Activism Campaign
Introduction
by Anil Korotane,
Architectural Activist, FAST.
So far in the campaign, we have raised issues such as challenging existing notions on the discourse of Cultural Properties, and questioned the practices on existing international mechanisms and conventions that ultimately aim to protect cultural heritage. We have learnt that international conventions may not suffice as palpable instruments or safety nets for providing the protection of cultural heritages within Nation States. Ultimately Nation States can reside to selecting history and cultural heritages in favour of main-stream ideological agendas. Notwithstanding, that this can influence negative consequences such as the neglection of cultural heritages amongst the marginalised and segregated communities. Nonetheless, in our quest to further understand and challenge discourse on cultural heritage, we have also encountered a greater tenacity amongst the professional planning community in generating new agendas to unfold reconstruction and rehabilitation projects.
FAST's aim is to offer substantial projects guided by conceivable agendas with alternative planning solutions. We are in the process of advocating a grassroots strategy within Lifta's regional context using the wider Israeli and arab Israeli network. To sustain an achievable goal the campaign will adopt a strategy that will contest existing cultural notions; such as the traditional cultural assumptions in the selection of heritage against the more purposeful opportunities arising from heritage diversity. Nonetheless, any agenda for alternative discourse will be in context to preventing the neglection of heritage created in the Redevelopment Plan. To substantiate an agenda will require a reappraisal of this situation concerning the current conflict of interest between the different needs and values regarding Lifta. Any strategy will therefore be dependant upon attitudes, either existing or supported as intervention, that will be vital towards supporting a solution.
For example, this campaign may be perceived as controversial, not coinciding with the current outlook and interests of the authority overseeing Lifta's land and the Nation State. By acknowledging that the character premise of the Israeli Nation State is undoubtly embodied by its own set of exclusive values and cultural traditions, any reality construction may have to reflect upon this on the premise that it is a rule of engagement. It will be necessary in our objective to engage and challenge existing cultural notions with ideas that have the capacity of penetrating traditional attitudes with alternative breadth of view. Lifta represents an identity, and an identity in context to a reality can be perceived and defined as a series and a set of power relationships. With the agenda to protect the place Lifta, any underlining cause should seek to reappraise this identity amongst the traditional conceptions, constructions of rival symbolism and outlooks of place.
FAST's reappraisal is to contend with the cultural workings of identity with a strategy approaching place with the intent to recultivate through gaining regional and national recognition. The real challenge will be to create an informed strategy that can stipulate within the real context of obstacles that are present not only in mind but also on facts created on the ground. For instance, the ethnocentric prejudices and segregation in civil society and the constant barrage of scepticism and antagonism of the 'other'. The grass-roots strategy will aim to counteract such obstacles by reconstructing Lifta's heritage. For instance, FAST will emphasize the value of the relationship between memory and the tangible cultural heritage so that the landscape can convey historical truths capable of empowering Lifta's identity. The workings of the specific use of heritage can have the effect to demystify, reconcile or suggest alternatively to dominant truths present in the conflict.
So the most invaluable resource for an informed strategy will involve relationships to truthful values of Lifta's cultural heritage. Inevitably, the pursuit to justify Lifta's right to exist will also form to define her as a proponent for capacity building in the region. Architectural writings shall be used to create discourse to be used as a vehicle to guide the exploration. The methods proposed will use a clearly defined set of principles and values to create the tools for regional activism. FAST believes that their undertaking will sustain the most integral and credible opportunity of generating a reappraisal to Lifta's situation.
The emphasis of the strategy for regional activism will be based upon the following sets of principles and values:
(i.) Recognize that Lifta has an existing cultivated bond, and that this bond (warrants legitimate recognition) evokes an identity and a relationship to identities.
(ii.) Recognize that this place is inextricably tied and linked to the creation of the modern Nation State of Israel, and therefore is testimony to the phenomenom/event of the creation of the Modern State as well as placing historical perspective and context to her present identity.
(iii.) Recognize that this place contains a unique example of a tangible cultural heritage that evokes a legacy of a place which had a healthy civil equality and no ethnocentric division or segregation.
(iv.)Recognize that Lifta, a place which has an inextricable relationship to the identity of a people and also of a Nation, should have her cultural heritage reappraised so that she can sustain an 'attainable value' for the evaluation of healthy civil progress for the future of this region.
Appraisals of these principles and values will be made clear in individual episodes - beginning with the first episode below and then followed consecutively each week. After the final episode the tools devised for action will be highlighted, thus unfolding the manifesto and taking the next step into the journey of the grassroots activism.
Episode 1.
- Recognize that this place, Lifta, has an existing cultivated bond, and that this bond (warrants legitimate recognition) evokes an identity and a relationship to identities.
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. By saving Lifta, we mean to imply that we are trying to protect a place that still exists in the form of a bond. 'Memory' in respect to Lifta is the essence of the place, it is bare without people telling their stories and affirming their union to the place. So sustaining this truthful value is to imply that Lifta is an identity in the shape of a duality. Recognition of this bond existing will mean to recognize a cultivation, which in turn also means to recognize history and a place consisting of a tangible reality.
Considering that an identity in context to a reality can be related to a series and a set of power relationships, Lifta's tangible reality has relationships to other identities either in the form of continuity or of spatial consequence. These relationships are either distinctively within memories - stories - mythologies or through the forms of territory and spatial governance. Authenticating any of Lifta's history would also be laying down the foundations for justifiable cultivations. With the relationship of Lifta, a place with a history prior to 1948 and sited within a territory of the governing power of Israel, Lifta sits inside a surrounding context identifiable by another historical narrative. For the two identities to sustain a shared value - an identifiable relationship, there has to be reason and a value.
Nonetheless, acknowledging that any engagement will initially reflect upon a history of conflict, divisions and segregations between the two identities. And given the differences of outlooks of the main ethnic groups and national identities defined by this history, this should be presumed first as a given situation of the region's reality. However even under these situations Lifta, a place identifiable to a Palestinian origin, still has the capacity to construct a narrative that can allow her identity to be recognised within her regional frontier of the Israeli Nation State. Lifta may be a modern-day ruin, but more importantly she is a monument of the present. She has a unique quality, sustained by her current condition, that can inspire a capacity building opportunity with genuine civic purpose. Again, this is on the assumption of acknowledging that differences, which are currently viewed and designated in the identity of Lifta, can be tolerated for the purposes of contesting and creating curative outlooks between identities and place.
Lifta is tangibly connected to a generation of people who still regard 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. Tragically, Lifta's inhabitants were forcibly abandoned from the place in 1948 during the catastrophic mass exile of Palestinian people known as the Nakba or "catastrophe". A sequence of events synthesized with the establishment of the State of Israel. It refers to the tragedy when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted and most of their villages and cities - over 530 - were destroyed. 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.
This valley landscape torn between Lifta and the proposal of Mei Neptoach lies frozen between two epochs, two histories, two cultures. She is a bond and a sense of belonging amongst 3 generations of people. Her unique circumstance, created out of these consequences, has led her to become a space of captivation, necessity and privalege. At regular periods tours are taken around the grounds of Lifta by Zochrot. Zochrot was founded in March 2002 to promote recognition of the Palestinian Nakba to the State of Israel, its residents and institutions. Yacoub Odeh, a 1st generation descendant of Lifta usually accompanies Zochrot and gives guides to both Palestinians and Israelis on his personal accounts of memories in Lifta. Yacoub is very fond cherishing his childhood memories as he accompanies the tour around his father's old house which is still standing. However, his delight is usually followed by trauma, the trauma of a memory which clearly stays with him always; the Nakba.
Lifta's unique situation has allowed her to be utilized as a memorial in consequence to the tragedy of the nakba. Lifta attracts many people who see her as a place where they can console their grief. Where her desolate state conceals a place which appeals amongst those who want to openly reflect upon an event and a history. She is preserved as a place that has not only tangible significance to the bonds of her descendants, but also amongst the shared value of a people who can relate to an open space that conceals signs of their tragedy and reveals the trauma of their fate. The regular trips by Zochrot and Yacoub Odeh have already demonstrating that Lifta has significant value. They are certain that preservation of a respectful, dignified, and sensitive consideration of this tragedy is a necessary stepping-stone on the path to resolving the conflict between the two peoples and achieving reconciliation between them.
The importance of keeping alive this memory, preserving and sustaining this bond and shared value is that it allows the moment of tragedy to become tangible. To be able to express this mourning from a place which symbolizes and recreates the moments of a tragic event allows confronting and exploring issues of dissonance and trauma to become a real experience. This makes recognition of Lifta an affirmation of a previous discontinuity, of an uprooting of Palestinian memory, of history, and of cultivated identity to a land. Any recognition of this bond has to engage that the story of the Nakba is being told whilst inside a surrounding context juridiscially governed and owned to another historical narrative. Allowing this duality to have legitimate recognition would therefore require some form of mediation and renegotiation on behalf of a narrative that can allow Lifta and the surrounding context to coexist.
However, this would require a narrative that openly accepts truths that occurred during the Palestinian Catastrophe Nakba and the Independence of Israel. 'Memory' begins to take on a whole new meaning as it would have to take into account the narrative of the birth of the modern Israeli State. There is quite a distinct seperation that places meaning on the land between the narrative of Israel and the narrative of the palestinian. Lifta's value can be distinctly characterised as contrasting and incompatible with the historical narrative of the Israeli State. Her ontology can quite easily be perceived as an act of subversion; a conflict of interest and values further provoking discord and confrontation in an act of becoming recognised. Situating the Nakba into a revised historical narrative of the surrounding context is more than likely to create tension and controversy and can quite easily be perceived as an historical conflict and problem.
So how does it become possible to resolve this crisis of values, designating Lifta for curative purposes for the Nakba is bound to any real conceivable reason and sense to justify her existence. Lifta may be perceived as a proponent for Palestinian existentialism, nonetheless she needs her history to be told within the narrative of the region that she belongs. Recognition of Lifta's ruins as a memory, a monument, a bond, and a possible cultural foundation existing within Israel adds extra possibilities for the nation. Lifta has the potential to become the untold story of a nation, epitomizing a common history shared between two disparate cultural groups. She confronts conquest and despair; tying together two opposing value systems. This would mean any real pursuit to safeguard the protection of Lifta would also require a strategy that further creates an enquiry that moneuvres and mediates between a tapestry of recognising histories.
written by Anil Korotane, Architectural Activist, FAST.
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Extracts from Midnight
by Mourid Barghouti
Translated by Radwa Ashour
My grandfather, still harbouring the illusion
that all is well with the world,
fills his countryside pipe
for the last time
before the advent of the helmets and bulldozers.
On the bulldozer's teeth
my grandfather's cloak gets hooked.
The bulldozer retreats a few yards,
empties its load,
comes back to fill its huge fork
and has never had enough.
Twenty times, the bulldozer
comes and goes,
my grandfather's cloak still hooked on it.
After the dust and smoke
had cleared from the house that had been standing there
and as I was staring at the new emptiness
I saw my grandfather
wearing his cloak,
wearing the very same cloak,
not one that was similar
but the very same.
He hugged me and maintained a silent gaze
as if his look
ordained the rubble to become a house,
restored the curtains to the windows,
brought my grandmother back to her armchair,
and retrieved her coloured pills,
put back the sheets on the bed,
the lights on the ceiling,
the pictures on the walls,
as if his look brought the handles back to the doors and the balconies to the stars,
as if it made us resume our dinner,
as if the world had not collapsed,
as if heaven had ears and eyes.
He went on staring at the emptiness.
I said:
What shall we do after the soldiers leave?
What will he do after the soldiers leave?
He slowly clenched his fist
recapturing a boxer's resolve in his right hand,
his coarse bronze hand,
the hand which had tamed the thorny slope,
the hand which holds his hoe lightly
and with ease like prayer,
his hand which can split a tree stump with a single blow,
his hand open for forgiveness,
his hand closed on sweets to surprise his grandchildren,
his hand amputated
years ago.
