Beit Ummar: Stagnation of Occupation and of Narrative

Several days ago, I had the privilege of meeting residents of Beit Ummar. A friend organized a tour of the town and surrounding area, with the proceeds going to a local development organization supporting farmers, women’s cooperatives, and others. With sixty to eighty percent of Beit Ummar said to be unemployed, and its infrastructure dilapidated and eroding in plain sight, it was painfully clear that the town desperately needs the services of such an organization.

Our guide that day was someone quite high-up in Palestinian civil society. He took us around, pointing out roads that simply fade into sand and rocks as Area B becomes Area C. This is but one sight of how the Occupation’s restrictions have contributed to a stranglehold on commerce and normal construction in Beit Ummar.

He showed us a field where teargas frequently flows through the air, supposedly with no justifiable provocation. We were standing right by a dense cherry orchard owned by Jewish settlers, while a small distance away, Palestinian children popped their disheveled heads out from rooftops. I waved to them; they waved back enthusiastically.

He also took us to a small gathering place where community members welcomed us so warmly and served us Arabic coffee on the porch. Beneath a gorgeous blue sky and with a constant, refreshing breeze, he told us how thirty residents in that small part of the neighborhood are sitting in jails of the “Zionist Occupation forces.” I had asked him earlier if he sometimes used the word “Israel,” to which he unabashedly replied that he’ll never recognize the “Zionist entity” as “Israel.”

By then, this man’s charisma had somehow had a curious effect on me. I realized I wasn’t experiencing any knee-jerk reaction I have felt toward those who would be so counterproductive as to reject Israel in toto. Under that blue sky, my narrative that Israel be recognized for both its bad and good elements seemed to fall away. Not suppressed, but rather it was somehow at rest…

I was drawn in as the man spoke of a time when he was tortured, out of the roughly twenty times he has been jailed. One of his captors, a mid-aged Israeli, whispered in his ear: “I support what you do, but I need to earn this money.” In the warped reality of that jail cell or interrogation chamber, the captive saw this as reaching out, a gesture. In his mind, numerous “excuses” surfaced to justify his own captor’s actions because he too is human. Giving the benefit of the doubt to a fellow human being.

In listening to this story, I felt he truly understands the very essence of “humanizing the other.” I could feel my ears—my heart—make way to listen to more.

But what else can I say? It wasn’t all rosy. I was later disappointed to find out that his views don’t stop at branding Israel an apartheid state. In his calm, uncondescending words, I started to smell the faint scent of mold—a mold of polemical thought, flowering into such claims as Tel Aviv being Yafa. Ashkenazim are Khazars, not Semites. If Jews have any right to the Holy Land, so should Persians, Romans, worldwide Christians (because Jesus was from here), and others. As a guest, I could not easily call out a hygienic problem in someone else’s home…

Some days later, I still keep thinking about my guide. I cannot wave away my disquiet about how deeply the man seems to reject the Israeli-Jewish narrative, thereby entrenching the Occupation in his own right. This, I keep thinking, is the very mentality that Israelis fear at their core. The real or imagined idea that, if given the chance, Arabs would clear away Jews from the Holy Land because they, as many believe, fundamentally do not belong here. I also keep pondering the genuine connection he said he felt with his Israeli captor and the comforting goodness of that story.

So how can I hope to distil anything from all this? Perhaps merely that people are not monochromatic. They can carry many contradictory elements. But to those who have read this far: I just can’t shake the feeling that he truly needs to change. Similar to how I can’t shake the feeling that Israel’s approach to “security” beckons its own destruction.

I sometimes chuckle though… look at me, never having gone through a shred of what an Israeli or Palestinian has, pondering who or what needs to change.

Global Cities: Concepts of the Universal

In 2001, sociologist Saskia Sassen coined the term “global city” in her seminal work, The Global City: Introducing a Concept. Deeply rooted in economic theories and nodes of production, she proposed that perhaps cities had more in common across methods of capital versus geography.

In a class I took this past semester on urbanism and heritage in Asia, we sought to study what distinguished our East Asian cities of study when compared to Western cities and moreover, whether this common binary categorization of East versus West is reductive and limiting in reaching a deeper understanding of these places. Indeed, one of the most personally compelling ideas that drew on throughout the semester has been the notion of finding commonalities between these cities, rather than distinctions.

After having studied abroad in Barcelona during my undergraduate junior year, I had been particularly fascinated with this idea of finding ties between seemingly disparate cases. The pairing of Barcelona and Hong Kong presents compelling similarities that illustrate the ways in which a city’s history and political identity can inform its present urban fabric.

Both Barcelona and Hong Kong are cosmopolitan port cities with historic precedents of contested relationships with its “mother countries,” that lends a uniquely somewhat separatist sentiment amongst the population. Indeed, Catalonia has historically, and recently with more force, demanded increased autonomy from the rest of Spain citing a historic divide that distinguishes the regional culture from food, to music, tradition, and language. While the resurgence of Catalan culture took particular stock after the repression of the dictator Francisco Franco, in which all Catalan language and culture was banned except for in the soccer stadiums, a division between Catalonia and Castilla has been present since medieval times. Today, general sentiments indict the rest of Spain’s region as having fed off the economy of Catalonia, the richest region in Spain who also claims to have been unfairly taxed as a result. Couple that with the proud assertion that Catalan is linguistically at its root, a different language from the predominating Castillian Spanish, and it made from some curiously similar parallels between the two cities on wholly different continents. Indeed, recent tensions between Hong Kong and mainland China have spurred uproar over resources from education, to hospital rooms to give birth, and infant formula. Hong Kong has by and large retained a sense of other, a wary neighbor that has set itself apart economically, while brewing a sense of discontent that they too, are different from language to manners.

I am not fully condoning these sentiments, however I thought it was particularly fascinating that when my host family made the clear distinction of always stating that they were first and foremost, of Barcelona and not of Spain, I understood. They too, were all together wholly shocked that one could find so much similarity between too seemingly disparate cities separated by such a vast distance.

Truthfully, this has become one of the strongest lessons I took away from my study abroad experience. Everything can be related, everything can be connected to a broader context and general patterns – themes that transcend the labeled constraints. And that ultimately, the lessons learned or wisdom gleaned from cities far flung from ones hometown can be applied right back home on as large or small scale as the situation at hand.

Shaping a Memorial, Shaping a City

For the vast majority of tourists who have traveled to the country since the early 1990s, an inherently complex cultural and social history spanning thousands of years has been dissolved into two overwhelmingly dominant, yet polarized, episodes: one modern and “tragic,” and the other ancient and “glorious” Authors of television documentaries and guidebooks, not to mention numerous journalists and photographers, have all enjoyed considerable stylistic mileage from juxtaposing the Khmer Rouge (1975-79) and Angkor (802-1431) eras as paradoxical, contradictory, and inherently ironic – Tim Winter, ” When ancient glory meets modern tragedy: Angkor and the Khmer Rouge in contemporary tourism”

I fell in love with Cambodia upon visiting in 2013. As a place of extreme dichotomies, with a history marred by great instability, the future of Cambodia is uncertain and provided for fascinating, heartbreaking, and challenging ruminations to consider – especially as someone studying historic preservation. Indeed, every act upon a piece of urban fabric is an act of interpretation. How are narratives shaped? How do you balance preservation in a place where basic necessities take precedence? And in the case of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, how are these narratives treated with sensitivity, contextualized, then transmitted in places of memorial and great tragedy?

I felt incredibly struck by my time in Cambodia and sought to explore these questions in a semester-long research project about the state of affairs in the capital city. Below is an excerpt of discussing the creation and appropriation of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

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Indeed, if not the colonial architecture nor the modernist structures, the decidedly darker history of Phnom Penh has seemed to be given the greatest primacy within the city. The exhibition of places that were sites of terrible tragedy and genocide raises several ethnical considerations of historic preservation, as any type of interpretation and exhibition must be done with caution and sensitivity. In Phnom Penh, the sites of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek underscore the heavy undercurrent of the still freshly recent Khmer Rouge regime that suffuse the country’s narrative. Ultimately apart from Angkor Wat, the name “Cambodia” typically is also synonymous with great suffering of the Khmer Rouge and the preserved sites of Phnom Penh reflect that.

In the case of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, it was a converted high school that later became one of 196 Khmer Rouge prisons and the brutal national headquarters of their secret police. The complex itself is preserved largely in-situ, with blood stains still visible on the classroom tiles, and is composed of four unremarkable three-story white concrete buildings that enclosed a courtyard that contained a small wooden house that was used to store Khmer Rouge documents. Tuol Sleng was simultaneously a “prison, a torture facility, a holding pen, and an extermination center” that saw only seven survivors out of the 14,000 that passed through it. Shortly after the Vietnamese discovered the high school upon the liberation of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian narrative was once again shaped by external forces as the Vietnamese army and later Vietnamese-backed government in Cambodia transformed the site into a Genocide Museum as early as 1979 with the aim of justifying their military action by the exhibition of the thousands of mug shots of those who had perished under the Khmer Rouge. Thus, a collective memory that lingers still was heavily shaped by the visual, physical structures and archival evidence of the Khmer Rouge regime at Tuol Sleng, acting as a point of closure and catharsis which attracted 320,000 people (309,000 Cambodians and 11,000 foreigners) between July to October of 1980. Ultimately, the popularity of the museum’s displays both helped to create the national narrative of suffering while also reinforcing the “’master narrative’ advanced by the Vietnamese-backed government” – that ultimately the actions of the Khmer Rouge were carried out by a few, rather than a socialist collective that was precipitated by other influencing factors.

The development of both Tuol Sleng and The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, the site of 129 mass graves just outside of Phnom Penh, thus represent one of the weights of Cambodia’s inherited past. In both sites, much is actually left in situ: bones and skulls can be seen within The Killing Fields, particularly on a rainy day, while the rooms of Tuol Sleng have also been largely preserved undisturbed. However, while the viewers are confronted by the gravity of the past, it can be at least noted that the there is a supplement to the narrative of victimhood with the transformation of these records into agents of respectful social change, such as the digitization of the Khmer Rouge records and development of the unused space at Tuol Sleng to be used as a classroom for education purposes As author Michelle Caswell notes, the majority of tourists she observed “behaved with reverence, quiet reflection, [and] an explicit desire to know more about the Khmer Rouge”[8] rather than “vulgar thrill seekers” Indeed, having created much of the exhibitions with input from several of the few remaining Tuol Sleng survivors, to view the site as “victimized by tourist cameras oversimplifies and denies the suvivors’ agency in creating them

Ethical Considerations in Adaptive Reuse

I will openly admit that I dorked out real hard during a presentation of  past case studies, specifically The Liberty Hotel, illustrating the power and process of viably reusing historic structures.  Having gone to undergrad quite near to the Liberty Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I usually try to make a point to stop in whenever I was nearby to gawk at the gorgeous space. For those unfamiliar with it (and I definitely recommend that you check it out if you’re ever in the area) it was originally a jail that was rehabilitated to its present use as a swanky hotel.  And beyond the elegant interior, I found it particularly impressive that they also have a permanent exhibit section devoted to the history and subsequent reuse project.

Beyond Cultural Consumption, Towards Cultural Confluence

Before this past Halloween, an article by Jarune Uwujaren for Everyday Feminism was circulating around the blogo-Facebook-sphere entitled “What’s the Difference Between Cultural Exchange and Cultural Appropriation?” Simultaneously, my class had been discussing audience interactions with culture through an article written for the Getty Conservation Institute’s spring newsletter entitled  “Cultural Tourism” by Dean MacCannell, professor in the Landscape Architecture and Geography Department at University of California, Davis.