Homeland: Zionism as Housing Regime, 1860–2011 On 29 March 2016 the New York based online journal, Realty Today reported ‘Israel is facing a housing crisis with …[the] home inventory lacking 100,000 apartments… House prices, which have more than doubled in less than a decade, resulted in a mass protest back in 2011’. As Yael Allweil reveals in her fascinating book, housing has played a pivotal role in the history of nationalism and nation building in Israel-Palestine. She adopts the concept of ‘homeland’ to highlight how land and housing are central to both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, and how the history of Zionist and Palestinian national housing have been inseparably intertwined from the introduction of the Ottoman Land Code in 1858 to the present day. Following the Introduction, Part I, ‘Historiographies of Land Reform and Nationalism’, discusses the formation of nationalism as the direct result of the Ottoman land code of 1858. Part II, ‘Housing as Proto-Nationalism’, focuses on housing as the means to claim rights over the homeland. Part III, ‘Housing and Nation-Building in the Age of State Sovereignty’, explores the effects of statehood on national housing across several strata of Israeli society. The Afterword discusses housing as the quintessential object of agonistic conflict in Israel-Palestine, around which the Israeli polity is formed and reformed. Yael Allweil is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Haifa, Israel. Her research centres on the history of housing in Israel and Palestine and the struggles over urban public spaces. Planning, History and Environment Series Editor: Ann Rudkin, Alexandrine Press, Marcham, UK Editorial Board: Professor Arturo Almandoz, Universidad Simón Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile Professor Nezar AlSayyad, University of California, Berkeley, USA Professor Scott A. Bollens, University of California, Irvine, USA Professor Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Professor Meredith Clausen, University of Washington, Seattle, USA Professor Yasser Elsheshtawy, UAE University, Al Ain, UAE Professor Robert Freestone, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Professor John R. 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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Allweil, Yael, author. Homeland : Zionism as housing regime, 1860-2011 / Yael Allweil. p. cm. — (Planning, history and environment series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–138–77605–0 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978–1–315–39598–2 (ebook) Housing policy— Palestine—History—19th century. Housing policy— Palestine—History— 20th century. Housing policy—Israel—History. Dwelling—Social aspects—Palestine—History— 19th century. Dwellings—Social aspects—Palestine—History—20th century. Dwellings—Social aspects—Israel. Nationalism and architecture. HD7358.45.A3 A44 2017 333.33/80956940904--dc23 2016027270 ISBN: 978–1–138–77605–0 (hbk) ISBN: 978–1–315–39596–8 (ebk) Typeset in Aldine and Swiss by PNR Design, Didcot Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Home-Land: The Historigraphy of a Blind Spot 1 Part I: Housing Outside City Walls: New Forms of Sovereignty in Late Ottoman Palestine 1 Empire Land Commodification and the Backlash of Nationalism 29 2 Experimentation in Housing for Nationalism, 1858–1917 53 Part II: Housing for Proto-Nationalism 3 ‘New Native’ Palestinian Housing: Plantation as Backdrop for Nationalism 1858–1948 81 4 ‘Houses Before Street’: Tel Aviv’s Housing-Based Urban Planning by Weiss and Geddes, 1909–1925 106 5 ‘Today’s Child is Tomorrow’s State’: Kibbutz Children’s House as Nursery for the Good Zionist Subject, 1922–1948 134 Part III: Housing and Nation-Building in the Age of Sovereignty 6 Immigrant Housing and the Establishment of the State–Citizen Contract, 1948–1953 167 7 ‘Resistance to Being Swept Away’: Summud Arab-Palestinian Housing in Israel, 1948–2004 194 8 Differentiated Citizenship in Differentiated Housing, 1948–2005 227 9 Afterword: For the Nation Yet to Come 258 References 264 Index 281 Acknowledgements This book is the product of generosity and support from a number of different individuals, organizations and institutions. Manuscript completion was generously supported by grants from the Hebrew University Truman Institute, David Azrieli Foundation and Israel Institute. Research at the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley was generously supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, an American Association of University Women International Award, and several University of California, Berkeley fellowships. This research was awarded with a Graham Foundation Citation of Special Recognition in the framework of the Carter Manny Award. At Berkeley my research benefitted tremendously from the guidance and support of my advisors Nezar AlSayyad, Andrew Shanken, Teresa Caldeira and James Holston. I am especially thankful for Nezar’s belief in this project and me, supporting my career and intellectual achievements; and for Andy’s continuous emotional and intellectual guidance at Berkeley and since. I started developing this research in book form as a Post-Doctoral researcher at Hebrew University’s Harry S. Truman Institute for Peace where I continue to benefit from a wonderful cohort of scholars as associate fellow thanks to academic chair Menahem Blondheim and executive director Naama Shpeter. Much of the writing and editing was conducted during my first 2 years at Technion Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, where I benefit from the support of Dean Yehuda Kalay and my colleagues, especially Rachel Kallus, Michelle Portman, David Behar and Alona Nitzan-Shiftan. I thank my housing seminar students for their enthusiasm for housing as subject matter and architectural field. My deep thanks go to the many archives I explored during this research. Staff at the State Archive, the Central Zionist Archive, National Photo Collection and Tel Aviv Municipal and Technical Archives all went out of their way to help me locate data and high-resolution images. The wonderful people at Kibbutz Beit Alpha and Mazraa, and holders of the private archives of Akiva Arieh Weiss and architect Alfred Mansfeld all shared with me information I could never have accessed without their help. My wonderful Berkeley cohort was a great source of support and intellectual stimulation, I learned and continue to learn so much from you. Special thanks go to Lusi Morhayim, Cecilia Chu, Clare Robinson, Tiago Castella, Ahmed El Antabli, Kartikeya Date, Yael Perez, Ipek Tureli and Adriana Valencia. My beloved family, my partner architect Meir Allweil, our lovely Alma, Omri and Noam, and my parents Miriam and Jacob Ninio nurture my life and without whom this book would have been impossible. Yael Allweil April 2016 For Lola-Lydia Cracaur Introduction Home-Land: The Historiography of a Blind Spot On 14 July 2011 Israeli protesters representing a broad social spectrum poured into the streets demanding ‘social justice’ in housing. Six months after the first mass demonstration of middle-class Egyptians in Tahrir Square, and after 20 years of neoliberal privatization, Israeli protesters were demanding that the Israeli state reassume its commitments to them. As observed by Michael Walzer, ‘This is the first uprising, anywhere in the world, against a successful neo-liberal regime’ (Walzer, 2011). The movement critiqued Israel as an oligarchy of the rich and affiliated itself with Arab Spring demands for a ‘revolution’ in terms of how the state of Israel is governed and managed. ‘Governments can be replaced – citizens cannot,’ called protesters, adding, ‘When the government is against the people – the people are against the government’ (Allweil, 2013; Marom, 2013; Leibner, 2015). The 2011 eruption of mass social unrest, the largest since the 1970s, focused on popular demand for housing as a basic right of citizenship – both substantive and political. Indeed, protest started with a housing act: pitching dozens of tents in public spaces in Tel Aviv, which quickly spread all over the country. The Rothschild Boulevard tented camp expanded to become an ‘urban’ grid of four parallel ‘streets’, including public spaces and other amenities, populating the pedestrian centre of the boulevard completely with a tent city. And across the city and all over the country, citizens left their apartments to set up tents in similar camps on central public squares, parks, and boulevards. After two weeks there were twenty-six tent camps, occupied by urbanites and suburbanites, the middle class and the very poor, renters and homeowners, Jews and Arabs (News, 2011). By September, sixty-six camps had formed across the country, supported by five protest encampments of Israelis living abroad in London, Berlin, and the US (1Haam, 2011).1 Tent towns soon included communal amenities like shared kitchens, ‘living rooms’ for meetings and debates, and urban planning in the form of organized tent layouts, individual tent ‘addresses’, and the designation of ‘plots’ for public services such as medical clinics and public toilets (figure 0.1). Protesters’ call for a new polity based on housing was expressed by one of the movement’s symbols: an Israeli flag whose national-religious Star of David was replaced with a house (figure 0.2). Why was housing used to demand popular sovereignty of the state? Why was