After the complete destruction of the Maghariba Quarter, the military set about evacuating the 3,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, who had settled in the Jewish Quarter, which was adjacent to the Maghariba Quarter in the west, and now overlooked the huge destruction site between it and the Wailing Wall. In 1948 the Jewish Quarter was besieged by the Jordan Legion, and its population of about 2,000 was forced to flee. Thereafter the Quarter became the destination of Palestinian refugees fleeing from areas that had come under Israeli rule. After the 1967 war the government wanted to restore Jewish life in the Jewish Quarter. First to be forcibly removed were eighty families of the Palestinian refugees who lived in buildings that had formerly been synagogues.33 The rest of the inhabitants of the Quarter – Muslims and Christians, Palestinians as well as Armenians – were gradually expelled after an Israeli High Court of Justice ruling allowed it. Prior to the 1948 war, the borders of the Quarter had been porous and its dimensions could not be precisely defined. After the 1967 war, the government cleansed an area of approximately 9 hectares, larger than all previous accounts of the area of the Quarter. Two months after the war, on 31 August, the entire Old City was declared a site of antiquity, and no building was permitted until an archaeological survey had been conducted. The enlarged Quarter, now brutally emptied of its life, became the site of intense archaeological surveys. Three years later, in 1971, a company for the restoration and development of the Jewish Quarter was set up, supported the by German-born British architectural historian and critic Nikolaus Pevsner.34
Archaeology provided not only a pretext for an Israeli ‘return’ to occupy Palestinian lands, but, as Palestinian writer Nadia Abu El-Haj claimed, also the ‘footprint’ of historical authenticity that could be developed into built form by Israeli architects. Biblical archaeology was used to validate the claim that Palestinian vernacular architecture was in fact Jewish at source, and allowed, as Nitzan-Shiftan showed, ‘Israeliness’ to define itself as a local ‘native’ culture, appropriated and altered by the latecomer Palestinians.35
The clearing of the Western Wall Plaza, 1967, IP.
Biblical archaeology
Archaeology has been central to the formation of Israeli identity since the establishment of the state. When Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, claimed in his memoirs that the Jewish right over Palestine is ‘based … on digging the soil with our own hands’,36 he was referring to the two practices that would establish and demonstrate Zionist rights to the land – agriculture and archaeology. Having established itself on much of the surface of an unfamiliar Palestine, Zionism continued its vertical quest for the Promised Land downwards. The existing landscapes of Palestine were seen as a contemporary veil under which historic biblical landscapes, battlegrounds, Israelite settlements and sites of worship could be revealed by digging. The national role assigned to archaeology was to remove the visible layer and expose the ancient Israelite landscape and with it the proof of Jewish ownership. The subterranean strata was thus perceived as a parallel geography akin to a national monument, providing an alibi for new colonization that could be argued as a return to sacred patrimony. Archaeology further influenced the reorganization of the surface terrain. Throughout Zionist history, new villages, towns and settlements had been established adjacent to or literally over sites suspected of having a Hebraic past, adopting their biblical names.37 Indeed, only a few metres below the surface, a palimpsest of 5,000-year-old debris, a vertical chronological stack of cultures and lives, narratives of wars and destruction, has been compressed by soil and stone. Israeli biblical archaeologists were interested in the deeper levels of the Bronze and Iron Ages,38 which generally cover the period of time mentioned in the Bible, and the first four centuries AD, referring to the period mentioned in the more recent interpretative religious studies of the Mishna. The upper layers of the Muslim and Ottoman periods were marginalized in digs and museums, often dismissed as representations of a stagnant period, discarded as ‘too new’, or simply left alone to rot and crumble.39 This reflected the tendency of Israeli biblical archaeologists to short-circuit history. In this, Israeli archaeology was not politicized in a substantially different manner to these employed in the service of other national movements.40 Moreover, the practices of Israeli biblical archaeology were largely inherited from British and American archaeologists who had been excavating the area since the nineteenth century.41 However, in contrast to their predecessors, Israeli biblical archaeologists had national rather than religious aspirations. Excavations were often carried out by secularists, men who, like Ben Gurion, saw the Bible as a historical national text that could fuse the relationship of a national identity to its state.42 The archaeological digs were themselves often reminiscent of military operations, with the work organized by retired military officers.43 On 27 June 1967, the same day that Arab Jerusalem and the area around it was annexed to Israel, the Israeli government declared the archaeological and historical sites in the West Bank, primarily those of Jewish or Israelite cultural relevance, to be the state’s ‘national and cultural property’,44 amounting to a de facto annexation of the ground beneath the Occupied Territories, making it the first zone to be colonized. The centre of attention for Israeli biblical archaeologists was the Jerusalem area and, in particular, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. After the war, archaeological data became more easily available, with the most organized archives of archaeology and antiquity – the East Jerusalem-based Rockefeller Museum, the American School for Oriental Research, the French École Biblique et Archéologique – together with their collections and libraries, coming under Israeli control and thereby providing Israeli biblical archaeologists with a treasure trove of sources.45
Louis Kahn, The Hurva Synagogue (left), IP.
Archaeology into architecture
In the Old City archaeological finds were incorporated into the overall urban design scheme. Louis Kahn, who was the leading voice in the early meetings of the Jerusalem Committee, envisioned the reconstruction of the evacuated quarter as ‘an archaeological grid in which [new] architectural, urban forms are shaped after and in juxtaposition to their ruins’.46 One of Louis Kahn’s most significant proposals for the reconstruction of the Old City, privately undertaken, was his plan for the restoration of the Hurva [Ruin] Synagogue, an eighteenth-century building that stood at the centre of the Jewish Quarter before it was demolished by the Jordan Legion after the 1948 war. The proportions and outline of Khan’s design for a monumental and archaic-looking synagogue-fortress, growing out of its ruins, were such that, if built, it would have competed on the city’s skyline with the Al Aqsa mosque and the Holy Sepulchre. Although never realized, the plan had considerable influence on Israeli architecture in the Quarter and beyond. Ram Karmi, one of the most promising young Israeli architects of the second generation of state builders, was Kahn’s foremost follower and promoter in Israel in the 1970s. For Karmi, writing in 1970, Kahn’s design for the Hurva Synagogue marked the end of Israeli modernism that was closely associated with the architecture of Israel’s founding generation and that of his father, Dov Karmi. ‘Israeli architecture … did not manage to artistically and properly express the desires of a nation returning to its routes … the new Hurva building provides an opportunity to fill this absence.’47 The call was for the disciplines of archaeology and architecture to merge. Indeed, throughout the restoration work in the Quarter, Israeli archaeologists and architects collaborated, carrying out, often simultaneously, excavation, restoration and reconstruction.48 Archaeology was vertically extended into a new building style that Zvi Efrat called ‘archaeologism’.49 In some cases, the upper storeys of new homes would become literal extensions of their archaeological footprints, while other buildings would be built using older stones for the lower floors and newer stones at higher levels: others still were simply built to appear