The sign for an USAID project in the West Bank. Among other things, USAID helped fund a large portion of the road that bypasses the Israeli settlement Ma’ale Adumim. (Photo: Hannah Meszaros-Martin)
I moved to Ramallah about a year ago with no intention of leaving. I enrolled in some Arabic courses at Bir Zeit University and started to work for a small organization called Grassroots Jerusalem. The journey from Ramallah to Jerusalem is something I did hundreds of times. The road was always the same; my feelings about it would always change. When I would ride back from Jerusalem sometimes I would feel relieved, like I was escaping, sometimes it was the opposite.
Along the road structures were moving up and down, created and destroyed. In Ramallah structures are built on every spare corner. All from foreign money of course, contributing to even more foreign money, not to the future of Palestine. Once I snuck into Pisagot settlement, which sits on a hill overlooking Ramallah. Inside a man named Norm told me that those empty apartment buildings lining the streets of the city below were for the time when all the “Arabs” will return from Jordan. I thought of the empty shells being made ready for a great return beyond Norm’s vision. Those buildings are not these shells obviously; no one who returns wants to sleep inside with the USAID workers. In Jerusalem, they were tearing Palestinian structures down – these were also identities.
I hated walking up the hill from Musara into other Musara and onto Jaffa- waking up in the western shopping street. Even in the beginning when my spatial awareness was quite limited I didn’t need to be told that now that I was entering the west. But many things do not need explanation: do we really need to be told that Musara is divided in half when there is a giant highway running down the middle? And now roads are borders. This isn’t so original. This isn’t some new idea; the other side of the tracks is always closer than it appears. Sometimes I thought of Jerusalem as one long street running from Ramallah to Bethlehem. Anything that deviated from this line was confusing to me. My comfort zone clung to this horrible border as well, not because I liked it, or because the landscape made sense to me, in fact it was the opposite. Maybe this will make it clearer: I was invited to an activist festival being thrown by some Israelis. They told me, “the festival is in the mountains just outside of Jerusalem”. I told them that there were a lot of “mountains” just “outside” of Jerusalem and if could they be more specific. The festival ended up being on the hills facing the village of Battir in the West Bank. I didn’t realize this at the time and I was feeling deep into unknown territory when I found that I had Jawwal coverage, I looked up and there was a green light of a mosque on the opposite hill, and suddenly I knew what I was looking at. Nothing is that far away on this border, maybe that’s why I found it comforting. I guess the green line was floating around somewhere in the valley below. Later I would visit Decolonizing Architecture and discover exactly where I had been and where the line was. I guess this comes with specific experience, but spatial geography only made sense to me on one side of the line. But this is false comfort, because it’s working, their manipulation of terrain is working, how else would it make more sense to go around Ma’ale Adumim instead of through it? I have to remember that this is just one landscape with many, many different impossible, sometimes porous and always moving, borders.
Grassroots Jerusalem is mapping grassroots movements in and around Jerusalem. My main role in this project was researching and interviewing as many local organizations as possible. Every activist told me the same thing; they are taking our space away. An integral part of Israeli disempowerment of Palestinian communities is the denial of the right to determine your own surroundings. This is coupled with an isolationism that communities either experience from their own influence, or are forced into by outside powers (and of course the two sources feed each other). Like so many other consequences of spatial unawareness and disempowerment most people cannot manage to see over their own fence (and of course I am speaking about real fences). This is spatial disorientation in its extreme, when communities are experiencing the same reoccurring problems and no one is talking about it. I think a part of the larger goal of Grassroots Jerusalem is to collapse these gated communities, all making up a larger grassroots community, into a wider picture. This is where open-source mapping comes in. Giving communities the power to describe and name their own surroundings can be very powerful especially in a place where spatial self-determination is the crux of existence. The project is twofold: concentrating on neighborhoods and conducting needs assessments, whilst finding the local organizations that are trying to address these needs. The idea is if you map everything, like the amount of schools or trash disposals, or house demolitions, there will be certain immediate disparages between Jewish neighborhoods and Palestinian ones. To visualize this imbalance for the wider public is vital. It is a part of the path to invert these patterns of spatial dominance back into resistance. We know what the architecture of oppression looks like, now how about the architecture of freedom?
It seemed to me like activity like this might provoke inspiration, but really most of the time I felt hopeless. Talking to Bimkom, an organization of architects and planners for planning rights, had this effect more than anyone else. The spatial war in Jerusalem is not something negotiable. Palestinians are losing everyday both in ways you can see on the ground and then more invisible injustices. Like stripping away IDs – silent transferal of space through national identity. They can move lines we can’t see but Palestinians have to hold onto them. How can I not be involved with spatial politics in this environment? I am consumed by them.
Hannah Meszaros-Martin is originally from Rhode Island and has spent the last five years living in England, Ecuador, the West Bank and Jerusalem.
