Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012

7. Up from the Ruins?

221 7 Up from the Ruins? Demolishing Homes and Building Solidarity in a Colonial City The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. —David Harvey, “The Right to the City” While walking the contemporary urban landscape of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, from realms poor to privileged, I would occasionally come across peculiar mounds of ruin. These piles of crushed concrete, broken bricks, and twisted iron were usually the remains of hundreds of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem demolished by Israel since 1967. The owners of these destroyed dwellings rarely have the resources to clear away these remains—so they remain. They “stand” as silent monuments to the force of Israeli colonial authority and its efforts to impose the rule of one national community over another in contemporary Jerusalem. Each razed structure possessed multiple stories of despair, I came to learn, layers of hidden hardship and humiliation. Interviews with family members who had witnessed the cruel felling of the places most intimate to them revealed anguish and anger that dissipated very slowly. Those sentiments were compounded all too often by the loss of movable property buried beneath the rubble. These were belongings that the Israeli authorities would not let families remove before dismantling their homes: a mother’s 222 ◆ Colonial Jerusalem jewelry, an adolescent’s artwork, a student’s photographs or books, family heirlooms, a grandfather’s cane. In this final chapter, I continue my examination of spatial and racial politics in contemporary Jerusalem by analyzing the centrality of homes to the national struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. I focus on the specific ways in which colonial violence impinges on the land and housing of Jerusalem’s Arab communities. But I also highlight how Palestinians and Israelis have constituted an array of small-scale forms of resistance to military occupation, particularly around housing justice. Over the last fifteen years I have researched the efforts of several activist organizations in Palestine/Israel. The preponderance of my time has been spent with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), a human rights collective founded in 1997 and based in West Jerusalem. Members of this group and their proliferating supporters internationally have been involved in a range of political projects whose overarching aims are, in their own words, “to end Israel’s occupation over the Palestinians.”1 To both its admirers and detractors within Palestine/Israel and abroad, ICAHD has become perhaps best known for acts of creative civil disobedience . These efforts have grown significantly in the last decade and have often (though not always) involved Israelis and Palestinians working together to impede nonviolently the destruction of familial places. This chapter is based on forty-one interviews with Palestinians, Israelis , and internationals committed to housing rights activism in Jerusalem and elsewhere. In addition, I spent several months engaging in participant observation at three of ICAHD’s annual summer work camps and on roughly 20 tours organized by this and other human rights organizations from the late 1990s until 2012.2 Chapter 2 highlighted the more mixed and less hierarchical Arab-Jewish relations during the era of British colonial Jerusalem(1917–1948).AsIconcludethisbook,myanalysisinasensecomes 1. See Halper (2010) as well as the ICAHD web site: http://icahdusa.org/. Accessed November 20, 2012. 2. These include the inaugural ICAHD work camp in 2003, as well as those in the summers of 2006 and 2012. Demolishing Homes and Building Solidarity ◆ 223 full circle as I detail constructive interactions and antiracist encounters in the city among Palestinians and Israelis involved in a budding movement for the right to live safely in one’s own home. What might these expressions of solidarity offer toward the transformation of a city premised on equality and social justice rather than on separation and inequality? Over the last several decades, anthropologists and other scholars have detailed the ways in which familial places represent complex social and cultural locales. They have explored myriad ways in which kinship ties, domestic networks, and relationships most intimate are constituted, negotiated , and contested.3 And as these writers have done so, they have emphasized the importance of not romanticizing familial realms with all of the 3. For innovative anthropological analyses...