Letters - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2002

ISRAELI ARCHITECTURE: ARM OF APARTHEID?

SIR: Tom Kay's straightforward eyewitness account from Ramallah (AR May, p32) seems to have outraged those (mainly Israeli) readers who want their architecture unsullied by images of destruction. Such images have sadly become a more than occasional occurrence in urban conflicts around the world, making it a valid subject for comment in the AR. The photograph and caption of sunglasses were rather unfortunate, but in fact did not convey the true extent of the wanton destruction by the Israeli Army of the security, civic, domestic, cultural, social and medical infrastructure of every historic West Bank city (except Jericho), using sledgehammers, bulldozers, tanks, Apache helicopters and Fl6s. The blindfolding and stamping of numbers on Palestinian males who have been rounded up and many of whom are now in administrative detention in torrid desert jails, the flouting of international law and the Geneva Convention, the imprisonment and siege of a whole population in the West Bank and Gaza, the encirclement by chec kpoints, barbed wire, electrified fences and concrete walls along borders, the rampages by fanatical settlers, do recall images of events experienced by those who were once victims of Nazism. I, as a jew, find this painful, but cannot say, 'I did not know.'

It is understandable that Israelis (and most normal humans) feel shattered at the devastation caused by the suicide bombers in Israeli cities. Such killings have been condemned by human rights organizations like B'tselem and Amnesty as much as the war crimes committed by the IDF. But the compassion of your correspondents seems one-sided. They do not wish to acknowledge the damage caused by the Occupation, which, with the recent near-continual curfew for 700,000 Palestinians under collective 'house arrest' has become a huge humanitarian crisis of starvation, destitution, disease and the total breakdown of economic, social and civilian life. Children cannot go to school, their parents cannot go to work. Three times as many Palestinians as Israelis have been killed, and tens of thousands injured, many of them children. The extra-judicial assassinations of their leaders, the high-tech weaponry used on civilians, and the lack of hope for peace, have been the root of the horrific suicide bombings and militant Pales tinian resistance. Sharon's deliberate instigation of retaliation feeds his ultimate agenda of a permanent delay to a Palestinian state and possible transfer of the Palestinians from the West Bank.

Un Zrubavel, President of the Israeli Association of United Architects, seems annoyed that the AR should publish an article that deviated from pure architecture (AR August, p23). He it was who prevented Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal's excellent and courageous entry for the UJA Expo -- The Politics of Israeli Architecture -- being shown, on the grounds that the IAUA 'represents its members in regard to their profession and not in regard to the political aspect'. Yet Israeli architects are the architectural arm of the Israeli government's apartheid policies in their design and construction of illegal towns and settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, creating the key element inflaming the Intifada. Architects with a social conscience would have said no.

Yours etc

ABE HAYEEM

London, England

DISBELIEF

SIR: Somewhat belatedly, we have been sent a copy of the 'View from Ramallah' article. As the representative body of the British Jewish community, we have received a number of complaints about it from Jewish people in many parts of the world.

We read the article with growing disbelief. It is bad enough that the author can find it in himself to write an article so filled with hostility towards Israel, but like the rest of us, Tom Kay is entitled to his opinion. What we find extraordinary is that it should have found a place in your journal. What on earth has its content to do with architecture? Is yours a journal that will publish anything, however crass or irrelevant, as long as it is written by an architect? Mr Kay's article is entirely one-sided and subjective. It has no architectural content or relevance whatsoever. A political article of this kind has no place in a professional magazine.

There is no attempt to mention, let alone explain, the background or the context in which Israel moved into Ramallah following the shocking massacre of Jews at a religious ceremony in Netanya in March. It is particularly disturbing that Mr Kay makes the odious comparison between the actions of Israel in seeking to root Out terrorist cells in Ramallah and the mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz. Such comparisons are calculated to diminish the significance of the Holocaust and to dehumanize Jewish people. This undoubtedly creates a climate in which expressions of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic incidents become more prevalent It is shameful to see a journal such as yours contributing to such an outcome.

I notice from your website that around 80 people have already written to complain about the inappropriate nature of this article. I should welcome your assurance that its publication was an unfortunate lapse which will not be repeated.