Notwithstanding the reconstruction of the Jewish Quarter, Jerusalem’s city centre was torn apart by centrifugal forces. In 1977, ten years after the war, when the right-wing Likud replaced Labor in power, the Jewish Quarter was home to almost 4,000 people, while about 50,000 Israeli Jews were already settled in the new Jewish neighbourhoods established on the peripheries of the occupied areas annexed to Jerusalem.61 The Jewish inhabitants of the city, wary of the congested, multi-ethnic and disputed older neighbourhoods of the western part of the city, opted for the ethnic, cultural and social homogeneity of the suburbs. These suburban developments were referred to as ‘urban neighbourhoods’ rather than ‘settlements’, not because of their nature, economy or distance from the centre, but because they were still located within the much-expanded boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality.
However, the significance of the Quarter’s ‘reconstruction’ lay not just in the number of people who inhabited it, but in the establishment of a foothold in the Old City and the creation of a laboratory for an emergent sensibility in architecture, one later exported and implemented in the construction of the city’s outer neighbourhoods. The neighbourhood of Gilo, located on the southernmost edge of Jerusalem, on a hilltop overlooking Bethlehem and the refugee camps surrounding it, offers one of the best examples of the attempt to reproduce something of the feel of the Old City within Jerusalem’s periphery. Marking the southern edge of the extended city, Gilo is, according to its planner, the architect Avraham Yaski, writing in 1977, both ‘part of the wall enclosing Jerusalem’ as well as ‘a well defined, enclosed city’. ‘Though Gilo is a suburban quarter’, Yaski admits, ‘an effort has been made to create the feeling that it is an organic part of Jerusalem and not a dormitory town.’62 With the reclusive nature of Gilo’s urban form, Yaski echoes yet another emerging ideal of the time – the American ‘New Urbanism’, which promoted a type of development (inspired by the writing of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford) that sought to replicate city-centre-like, human-scaled walkable communities most often on the fringes of American cities. In Jerusalem, city-centre-like developments meant the reproduction of the Old City. One of the best examples of this phenomenon is the ‘Housing Cluster’ designed by the architect Salo Hershman in Gilo in the early 1970s. The housing is laid out as several walled-city-like ensembles. They are entered via large gates leading into a series of internal courtyards and squares. The latter are woven together by arched walkways, alleyways and colonnades, and are overlooked by balconies. The entire concrete-built cluster is clad with slated ‘Jerusalem Stone’. Indeed, Gilo has been the most distinct of the new neighbourhoods in demonstrating the transformation of Israeli architecture. The modernist, standard, cheap, prefabricated apartment block, formerly the basic unit of state-sponsored housing, was replaced, according to Efrat, by other typologies of ‘formless, borderless clusters composed of a multitude of small terraced houses that morphed onto the existing topography of the Jerusalem hills … “contextual” architecture, sentimental buildings, influenced by alleged “regional” connections … pseudo historical creations of oriental and Mediterranean mimicry … embodying an association with antiquity and national roots’.63 This architecture would thereafter provide, through an eclectic agglomeration of episodes and a museum-like arrangement of elements, the fantasy deemed necessary for the consolidation of a new national identity and the domestication of the expanded city. It placed every remote and newly built suburb well within the boundaries of ‘the eternally unified capital of the Jewish people’, and thus, as far as most Israelis are concerned, away from the negotiating table. Whatever is called Jerusalem, by name, by architecture and by the use of stone, is placed at the heart of the Israeli consensus. Indeed, although in July 2000 the Israeli negotiation team in Camp David agreed in principle to Clinton’s proposal that asked for Israel to hand back the archipelago of Palestinian neighbourhoods and urban-villages in Jerusalem, they have insisted on maintaining sovereignty over the remote, stone-clad suburban neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, referred to in Israel as ‘Jewish Jerusalem’. Borders designed by a military committee have been visually domesticated and culturally naturalized to such a degree that returning or removing state housing projects built within them has become a politically controversial act of ‘partitioning Jerusalem’. Any act of decolonization in the area now called Jerusalem must thus start with a process of secularizing and denaturalizing the Jewish neighbourhoods/settlements of greater Jerusalem.
Demographic architecture
Like many colonial cities, Jerusalem has its dark enclaves for its native inhabitants, ruled by the border police, with surprise checkpoints between neighbourhoods. For the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem, unlike the Jewish residents, hardly anything was ever planned but their departure. Within the municipal borders of the city, architects and planners were given the task not only of constructing homes and developing a new ‘national style’ but also of maintaining the ‘demographic balance’, which at the time of occupation in 1967, and within Jerusalem’s gerrymandered borders, stood at about three Jewish inhabitants to every Palestinian. The faster growth rate of the Palestinian population was seen by Israel as a ‘demographic time-bomb’. In 1993 City Engineer Elinoar Barzacchi echoed an ongoing state policy when she outlined how the municipality intends to deal with this problem: ‘There is a government decision to maintain the proportion between the Arab and Jewish populations in the city at 28 per cent Arab and 72 per cent Jew. The only way to cope with that ratio is through the housing potential.’64 This policy of maintaining ‘demographic balance’ has informed the underlying logic of almost every masterplan prepared for the city’s development.65
Model of the neighbourhood of Gilo (Architects: Arvraham Yaski, Yaakov Gil, Yosef Sivan).
Design session on Gilo in the early 1970s. In the centre, pointing, is team leader Avraham Yaski, who later received the Israel Prize for this design. Ram Karmi (with sunglasses and sideburns) is sitting at the centre.
By trying to achieve the demographic and geographic guidelines of the political masterplans, the planners and architects of the municipality of Jerusalem and those working for them have effectively taken part in a national policy of forced migration, unofficially referred to in Israeli circles as the ‘silent transfer’, a crime according to international law.66 The evidence for these crimes is not only to be found in protocols or in the wording of political masterplans, but in the drawings of architects and planners. They can be seen as lines in their plans.67 Yet, remarkably, in spite of all Israel’s efforts to keep the 28 per cent Palestinian to 72 per cent Jewish ratio, its planning policy is falling short of its target. Out of the 650,000 registered residents of Jerusalem in 2005, about a third were Palestinians. This has obviously increased the frustration that further accelerates Israel’s draconian measures.
Whereas demographic policies are clearly outlined in political masterplans, which are seen as guidelines only, in town-building schemes and local plans – which are statutory documents having the force of law – these intentions are camouflaged within the techno-professional language of planning. Since the government guidelines are in blatant violation of both Israeli and international law, a deliberate discrepancy in language has opened up between political and architectural documents. The illegal policy was implemented by manipulating seemingly mundane planning categories. Maintaining the ‘demographic balance’ through the ‘housing potential’, when Palestinian demographic growth is so much faster, implied the use of one or both of two planning policies: one promoting the construction of housing in Jewish neighbourhoods and the other limiting the expansion of Palestinian ones. While issuing an annual average of 1,500 building permits to Jewish Israelis and constructing 90,000 housing units for Jews in all parts of East Jerusalem since 1967, the municipality has issued an annual average of only 100 building permits to Palestinians in the city, thus creating a Palestinian housing crisis with a shortfall of more than 25,000 housing units.68