Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-npj9w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-08T00:21:16.402Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Up/Rooting: Breaching Landscape Architecture in the Jewish-Arab City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2017

Naama Meishar
Naama Meishar*
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University Technion–Israel Institute of Technology
*
naama.meishar@mail.huji.ac.il

Abstract

This article portrays and theorizes a new utterance of landscape architecture within Israeli Jewish-Arab urbanity, which aims to represent the prolonged and multifaceted Palestinian urban loss since 1948 in the design of a major city park. The analysis of design discourses at Jaffa Slope Park examines differing Israeli and Palestinian landscape sign systems. Dominant and breaching landscape architecture utterances in the constructed landscape of the park will be interpreted and theorized in the context of the discursive landscape sign systems, together with the local post-1948 history of urban institutional ruination and planning. The park's design involves both the intensive use and destabilization of a traditional Zionist/Israeli landscape mold that aims at greening ’Ereẓ Yisra'el and at concealing ruined pre-1948 Palestinian locales under green shields. Through a close reading of the park's landscape, the paper explores ethical, political, and allegorical utterances of landscape architecture, immersed in both Israeli and Palestinian landscape semiotics, yet undermining these sign systems at the same time.

Information

Type
Jews and Cities
Information
AJS Review , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , April 2017 , pp. 89 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2017 

Exposition

Three graceful, verdant hills recline on the brim of the Mediterranean waters, covering the lion's share of Jaffa Slope Park (fig. 4). Hilly lawns are the bedrock of Israeli urban landscape architecture,Footnote 1 and constitute a key reference for framing the reading of this park's landscape architecture. Inaugurated in 2010, Jaffa Slope Park sprawls beneath the Ajami neighborhood, originally a Palestinian neighborhood that grew south of Jaffa's walls at the end of the nineteenth century. Currently Ajami is a Jewish-Arab neighborhood in the city of Tel Aviv–Jaffa. With a quarter of a square kilometer of land reclaimed and built from construction waste that was recycled onsite, the new park beneath Ajami is celebrated in Israel as an environmental achievement. While this type of environmental project has been widespread in landscape architecture practices worldwide since the 1990s, it is the first of its kind in Israel, earning immediate local public attention and international professional exposure.Footnote 3

Figure 1.

Jaffa Slope Park general plan, courtesy of Braudo-Maoz Landscape Architecture Ltd. (labels added by the author).

Figure 2.

Jaffa Slope Park: a hill and seaside promenade, September 5, 2011.Footnote 2

But Jaffa Slope Park has a substantial local milieu that transcends the environmental realm. The grind waste that became this lawny park's raw materials—earth, gravel, and planting soil—contains the ruins of hundreds of pre-1948 Jaffan Palestinian homes and buildings.Footnote 4 As such, the park's materiality and the site's perception delineate urban contexts of national conflict, spatial institutional ruination, housing insecurity, civilian experience of loss, and civilian resistance.Footnote 5 Raymond Williams's strategy of relating the history of the landscape to “the common history of a land and its society” is thus helpful in contextualizing the neighborhood and the site.Footnote 6

The focus on the strata of landscape architecture enables us to analyze a multifaceted professional terrain that generates varying spatial activities and experiences.Footnote 7 Landscape architecture scholar James Corner wrote that “because of its bigness—in both scale and scope—landscape serves as a metaphor for inclusive multiplicity and pluralism … [Landscape architecture] may still embrace naturalistic and phenomenological experience but its full efficacy is extended to that of a synthetic and strategic art form.”Footnote 8 In other research fields landscapes are analyzed as physical and imaginary ideological apparatuses.Footnote 9 Geographers Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels argued that a park is “more palpable but no more real, nor less imaginary, than a landscape painting or poem.”Footnote 10 Thus the physical landscape architecture of Jaffa Slope Park reveals its landscape as a medium of signification that not only produces ideology, but may undermine it as well.Footnote 11

In 1991, Landscape Journal published a collection of short conference papers featuring a preliminary theoretical discussion about undermining “critical landscape architecture.”Footnote 12 Since then, there have been no case studies methodologically and theoretically elaborating on the issue. Jaffa Slope Park helps illustrate the figural formation of dominant ideological landscape architecture in Israeli cities, and underscores three novel critical landscape architecture significations—ethical, political, and allegorical—that challenge this dominant figural formation.

The breaching utterances found at the park undermine prevalent imagined and concrete semiotics of landscape, especially in the way they interrupt the coherence and spatial order of two key landscape emblems of Jewish-Arab shared urbanities that are routinely laid vertically: (1) the repressed pre-1948 Palestinian urbanity and the remains of ruined Palestinian structures and landscapes;Footnote 13 and (2) the repressive Israeli landscape mold of a green layer that veils both the ruins and the state's acts of ruination.Footnote 14 The first landscape emblem of urban ruination emerges from the history of the park's site and materiality, from the park's design, and from residents’ requests uttered and documented during public participation meetings concerning the park's design.Footnote 15 The second landscape emblem, the repressing greening mold in urban environs, is further theorized on the grounds of the design of Jaffa Slope Park and other major public parks in Tel Aviv–Jaffa, and based on the residents’ discourse during the public input meetings. These ethical, political, and allegorical landscape utterances destabilize yet another two dichotomous landscape syntaxes that were evident in the public meetings’ discourse: one attributed to typical lawny urban park landscapes created by Jews, the other to agricultural Arab landscapes.Footnote 16

Research addressing spatial representations of pre-1948 Palestinian urbanity and the urban Nakba is grounded in the concept of memory.Footnote 17 But one can also view design discourse and spatial representations through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas's theory of the ethical face-to-face encounter between the I and the Other and the utterance of this ethical experience.Footnote 18 Levinas's theory describes the necessity for reflexive interruptions to traditional and logical modes of signification in order to ethically represent the Other and the ethical event of encounter.Footnote 19 Several interviews with Alisa Braudo,Footnote 20 the park's leading landscape architect, disclose lingual traces of ethical experience that may have occurred during the public participation meetings. Additionally, the haunting, interrupted design of some park elements reflects moral debt to the local aftermaths of the Nakba and to PalestinianFootnote 21 residents’ loss, which were articulated in the course of the public meetings.

The landscape architecture of the park is interpreted and theorized based on this historic, emblematic, and discursive contextualization, drawing from both park experience and photographic documentation.Footnote 22 The park's landscape is discussed as a medium of signification immersed in dominant ideology, which produces it, but moreover, breaches it with exceptional, first-of-their-kind landscape architecture utterances.Footnote 23

Ruination, Ruins, Loss

The 1948 war—the Palestinian NakbaFootnote 24 and the Israeli War of Independence—are key historical events that shaped the park's materiality and its design conceptualization. The besieged, bombarded city of Jaffa surrendered in April 1948. About 4,000 Arab residents remained following the war, a small fraction of the 73,000 who lived in this booming Palestinian city prior to the conflict. Those who left their homes during the protracted battles were not allowed to return, prohibited by the new Israeli state's legislation.Footnote 25

Depopulated, Jaffa and its confiscated homes were immediately occupied by thousands of Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors.Footnote 26 Israeli authorities architecturally distorted and dissected Palestinian homes in order to multiply the number of residential units, which were in great demand.Footnote 27 Arabs and Jews intimately shared divided apartments in the jammed city.Footnote 28 They were all protected tenants in the depopulated Palestinian properties that the state appropriated and leased.Footnote 29

The first Israeli urban master plans for west Jaffa compiled in the 1950s and 1960s called for an almost total demolition of the existing Palestinian built environs, which were to be replaced with modern housing projects.Footnote 30 This widespread scheme of urban planning during the state's first three decades led to a massive physical destruction and exclusion of Palestinian residents,Footnote 31 a spatial process that was termed by Ziva Kolodney and Rachel Kallus (referring to the similar case of Haifa) “erascape … a mechanism based on erasing an existing landscape to make way for another …a powerful method of creating new spatial order by uprooting and displacing.”Footnote 32

During the 1970s and 1980s Jewish residents gradually moved out of Jaffa's western neighborhoods to new neighboring housing projects.Footnote 33 This exodus resulted in a massive destruction of hundreds of buildings in the neighborhood, in accordance with the urban master plans. But the protected Arab residents remained and continued to live in this perforated urban setting, underserved by the municipality for another three decades.Footnote 34 Jaffa's ruins were piled on the city's shore together with additional construction waste from the entire Tel Aviv area, gradually creating a fifteen-meter-high construction-waste mound that steadily expanded deep into the Mediterranean (fig. 4). In 1981, a new city general plan unveiled the municipality's vision to allocate the reclaimed land for public open areas and lucrative land uses, such as hotels and recreation.Footnote 35

Over these decades, the remaining Palestinian families grew, and since the construction of the planned new housing projects in western Jaffa was delayed and the Israeli urban master plan restricted any extension to existing buildings, their homes were expanded without legal permits. Many of these extensions constructed without permits were subsequently destroyed, adding an additional layer of construction waste to the waste mound and a broadening sense of ruin to the Palestinian residents’ life experience.Footnote 36

In the 1980s, in response to the growing popularity of the “Arab house” in the Jewish-Israeli housing culture,Footnote 37 the municipality began to prepare a new urban master plan that preserved Palestinian buildings and urban textures in west Jaffa.Footnote 38 The new plan added new building rights to many of the existing buildings.Footnote 39 The additional rights and intensive public development of infrastructure attracted new private investments to the neighborhood in the 1990s, and still do today. But as Palestinian residents suspected already in 1988,Footnote 40 the plan did not protect poor renters from spatial exclusion in a prolonged process of gentrification.Footnote 41 Jaffa Slope Park cannot be separated from this policy in west Jaffa. The park is a public amenity that improves the quality of life and hence boosts property values and the displacement of Palestinian old-timers from their locale.Footnote 42

This synopsis of the recent urban history of Jaffa, with its home splitting, “erascape,” and exclusion, affirms the asymmetrical ethnic power relations by which the state and municipal institutions profoundly shaped ethnically mixed urban spaces by planning. However, in an alternative analysis of the production of space in Jaffa, Daniel Monterescu maintains that Jaffa forms “political and cultural arenas that defy the binary logic of ethnonationalism and urban colonialism.”Footnote 43 He describes an urban “relational spatiality” created by forces of capital, state, and municipality and by quotidian cultural transactions between stranger identities, which produces cultural indeterminacy and separates (mandatorily and voluntarily) between spaces and identities.Footnote 44

Such relational spatiality can be traced in two civilian campaigns that have had an impact on the park's site. The first, a joint campaign by Jewish gentrifiers and Arab old-timers, resulted in ending land reclamation and waste disposal in 1988. The second multi-identity fight focused on residents’ inclusion in Jaffa Slope Park's planning, which resulted in public meetings in which visions for the park represented both separate and entwined ethnic landscape sign systems.

Design Discourse: Landscape Sign-Systems and Presence of the Other Who Utters Loss

The public meetings about the park's design were organized by municipal officials with the participation of landscape architects. The deliberations were conducted in Jaffa in 2004 and 2005 among nine ethnically and geographically divided groups.Footnote 45 During the meetings, members of three different groups—Kedem Street Residents Group, the Arab Christian Orthodox Scouts Cadets Group, and the Muslim Women's Group—presented their wishes for “lawn,” “lots of trees and lawn,” and “a park like the Jews’ parks.”Footnote 46 These requests testify to the power of imagery imprinted on some Palestinian residents of Jewish-Israeli parks, with lawns—as Kenneth Helphand has shown—at the “core of most of Israel's city parks.”Footnote 47

The lawn, and especially the lawny hill, is a key signifier of Israeli urban parks, and a predominant mark of urban parks globally.Footnote 48 Landscape scholars have critiqued the worldwide usage of this supposed natural scheme for its flattening of local landscape dialectsFootnote 49 and for its masking of the harmful exchanges between civilizations and their environments with pastoral scenes.Footnote 50 Lawns were first introduced into the landscapes of Palestine during the 1930s at kibbutzim and private urban villas.Footnote 51 It was one layer among the evolving multilayered greening scheme of the Zionist movement,Footnote 52 which involved afforestation,Footnote 53 gardening, and agricultural cultivation.Footnote 54 Studies in the environmental history of Israel/Palestine propose that these environmental schemes were intertwined with the Zionist territorial ambitions to possess lands in Palestine and colonize them,Footnote 55 and that these schemes were at times achieved at the cost of Arab fellahins’ means of support.Footnote 56 In prestate years the forest landform scenically denoted and legally preserved Jewish land ownership;Footnote 57 the forest became a national icon, symbolizing the striking of roots in the ancient homelandFootnote 58 and the national redemption of an allegedly deteriorated land.Footnote 59 After the establishment of the State of Israel afforestation also served to conceal the ruins of many of the depopulated Palestinian villages.Footnote 60 Greening, too, became a veil hiding Palestinian pasts in urban locales; the city of Tel Aviv–Jaffa tripled its open public spaces between 1948 and 1953,Footnote 61 due to the annexation of much of the land of pre-1948 Jaffa and the surrounding villages.Footnote 62 The city's first public parks were established on these lands (fig. 3), and the parks’ designs adopted lawns and the naturalizing schemes of the English garden style.

Figure 3.

1935: The municipal borders of Tel Aviv and its neighbouring Arab municipalities;Footnote 63 1950: Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipal borders after the annexation of the Palestinian municipalities; 2010 (the date of Jaffa Slope Park's inauguration): The city's urban parks are located on former Palestinian locales. Maps’ superposition by the author.

Ha-Yarkon Park was established in 1952 on the lands of the village of Al-Shaykh Muwannis.Footnote 64 Inaugurated in 1974, this 3.5-square-kilometer lawny park also covers the lands of Jarisha, Al-Jammasin al-Gharbi, and Masʻudiya (fig. 3).Footnote 65 The moderate verdant hills of Charles Clore Park, a seaside park that has connected Jaffa and Tel Aviv since 1974, hides the ruined Jaffan neighborhood of Manshiyye. Likewise, beneath the swards of Edith Wolfson Park (1976) and Menachem Begin Park (1988) in the southeastern parts of the city are lands that were once owned and cultivated by the people of Salama village (fig. 3). The state's ideological foundations of territorial Jewish domination and supremacyFootnote 66 were spatially achieved in the Tel Aviv–Jaffa not only through warfare, but also through the transformative greening designs of everyday landscapes in parks.Footnote 67 Greening in large open spaces of Tel Aviv–Jaffa fabricated a new landscape, where rolling lawns and sinuous paths conceal and naturalize the state's acts of depopulation, appropriation, and ruination.

This interpretation of landscape semiotics was not relevant or important to those Palestinian residents who yearned for lawns that are a hallmark of Jewish neighborhood parks. In the cultural indeterminacy of Jaffa, which constantly separates between spaces and identities,Footnote 68 both a cultural absorption and a demand for an equitable distribution of a standard park amenity are sensible. But some residents who participated in the meetings voiced their urge to differentiate from the traditional sign system of greening. In the meeting with the Arab Leadership Group, there were requests for “as much orchard [pardes] as possible and as little lawn as possible” and a “grove of olives, grapes, palms.”Footnote 69 In the meeting with the Arab Scouts Cadets Group “oranges, roses, and guavas” were favored.Footnote 70 These species are not common in the design of large Israeli urban parks.Footnote 71 The “orchard” reverberates with the famed orange groves that surrounded Jaffa prior to its fall in 1948;Footnote 72 the other fruit-bearing species denote the core icons that dominated Palestinian literary and visual representations of landscape over the course of the two decades after 1948.Footnote 73

The two ideological landscape sign systems, one of pastoral lawns and one of local fruit trees, were expressed in the discourse of meetings. At times they were hyperbolized and contrasted to each other; at others their borders were unraveled. Both sign systems were entwined in the park's design in critical breaching landscape architecture expressions.

No less important are two other measurements of the design discourse: the affective and the ethical experiences. According to the municipality's documentation of the meetings a long-time resident, a Jewish gentrifier, requested “a symbol for the Nakba.”Footnote 74 The landscape architect Aliza Braudo recalled during an interview that over the course of a meeting with the Arab Leadership Group, a resident expressed the wish “to leave it all as a symbol of the Nakba.”Footnote 75 The Palestinian catastrophe is certainly not a source for elaborated landscape meaning in urban public spaces, and the presence of the term “Nakba” during discussions over design is not routine; in fact, the mere mention of the term constitutes a threat in some Jewish parts of Israeli society.Footnote 76

But the phrase “to leave it all [the waste mound] as a symbol for the Nakba” stands out also because there were no other residents with a similar vision for the site. The exceptional request may suggest that the historical, or even continuing, Palestinian trauma stems from the site and demands recognition. The phrase insinuates that an architectural representation of a landscape “as a symbol” of the city's destruction, and the Palestinian experience of loss, “the Nakba,” are more crucial than the site's environmental recovery and the supply of common park amenities to the neighborhood. Haunted by this demanding, enigmatic phrase, Braudo grappled with its denotations in our first meeting and revisited it during the second one, trying to determine whether the phrase expressed a real need or was voiced to express defiance.Footnote 77 The face-to-face encounter during the public meetings reverberated in the architect's troubled discourse, and became a haunting ethical experience for her, in which she became an addressee of the utterances of loss articulated by Palestinian Jaffans. This source of sensitivity may have later permeated the park's design.

Emmanuel Levinas argues that in a face-to-face encounter with the Other, the I undergoes an ethical experience and turns into a hostage of infinite responsibility for the Other: “[w]e name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics.”Footnote 78 In the face of the Other the I is split, experiencing inner heteronomy or a sense of the Other within the same.Footnote 79 The Other, in Levinas's words, exceeds essence: “the metaphysical other” is not the idea of the Other; “is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the same.”Footnote 80 Levinas struggled with the question of how to represent the Other and the ethical situation, because language and philosophy eventually essentialize the Other, and therefore betray him.Footnote 81 He proposed a split apparatus of signification in which the “saying” is not congruent with the essence in the “said”; “saying” is a haunted, reflexive signification that interrupts the “said,” forms “an exception” in essence, and resonates with the haunting ethical experience and the unavoidable betrayal.Footnote 82 Reading Levinas, Simon Critchley described this mode of utterance “interruption of interruption,” interruptions that are serially inserted into thematic conceptualization and into textual syntax and rhythms.Footnote 83 Levinas's theory helps us see that the discursive acknowledgement of the collective Jaffan Nakba, and the haunting experience of facing the resident who utters loss during the planning meeting, reverberate in the park's design in interrupting landscape architecture utterances.

Breaching Landscape Architecture

The structure of Jaffa Slope Park is rather clear (fig. 1). Three expansive rolling hills took the place of the flat-top waste mound and now make up the park's major features (figs. 4, 5). As the hills constantly hide parts of each other, they create a deceptive visual conception of the park's dimensions; a stratagem widely used in eighteenth-century English garden style and nineteenth-century Victorian public parks.Footnote 84 There are two layers of meaning in this design mold. On the one hand, the grassy hills directly invoke global park conventions, but on the local level, they are also in accord with the dominant greening sign system that obscures the pre-1948 Palestinian spaces and traces of their destruction within mixed cities like Tel Aviv–Jaffa.

As an art form—a poetic, or rather, poietic practice—that contains the pragmatic dimensions of activating open public spaces and urban natures,Footnote 85 landscape architecture can potentially access what Louis Althusser defined as art's capacity to differ from ideology by means of an “inner distance”: “What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of ‘seeing’, ‘perceiving’ and ‘feeling’ (which is not the form of knowing), is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes.”Footnote 86

Figure 4.

Jaffa's shoreline and urban texture in 1949; after institutional ruination and land reclamation in 1976; after the park's construction in 2012. Aerial photographs: Jaffa, 1949: P/53-7368 and 1976: MM/503-2731, Survey of Israel, Agency for Geodesy, Cadastre, Mapping and Geographic Information. All rights reserved by the Survey of Israel ©2016. Printed with Survey of Israel permission. Jaffa, 2012: ©Google, ©2012 GeoEye.

Figure 5.

Jaffa Slope Park: a palm boulevard cuts between the hills, September 5, 2011.

The ideology immersed and recreated in the lion's share of the park's design is transgressed in the landscape architecture of the historic shoreline path, which runs along the park's margins, east of the hills and main cycling artery (fig. 3).Footnote 87 According to Braudo the path stretches along Ajami's historic waterline that was gradually covered with waste from the 1970s onwards: “The historic shoreline path is almost congruent to the original water line, along which we will post debris from the site, like statues. I think we should not hide what had been there; there was a neighborhood, and there was waste. All layers should be presented. … It is right that the past will return in a tacit manner.”Footnote 88

The realistic gesture of the path assumes that similitude to a historical-geographic fact can lead to a sense of “what had been there,” the true history of the site. But the path seems to refer only to the lost geography, rather than to the active institutional destruction that caused that geographical absence and its aftermaths. Yet, the realistically drawn path escapes literality in an unexpected manner. The overlap between the path and the historic shoreline exists only in its two-dimensional representations, such as architectural drawings or aerial photography; the existing topography of the foot of Jaffa's ridge differs significantly from the original one, for the former slopes and shoreline are still buried under the waste and tons of ground debris produced during the recycling process. The new slopes are shaped as soft curvilinear spurs. Thus the path climbs and descends on top of the new slopes that raise its height far above sea level. As a result the path is uncomfortable for walking, and it does not have any particular destination or landmarks along the way. These deficiencies render it ineffective as a path for strolling, exercise, or for observation.

Paths are generally obvious to the bodies that walk through them, enabling users to move about efficiently and contemplate other things rather than the act of walking or the path's existence. This landscape expression gains a degree of obscurity that subverts the sense of predictability of paths, which characterizes most traditional schemes of urban parks, and also the rest of Jaffa Slope Park's paths. The inconvenience that the path causes is a break in the landscape architectural convention of accessibility, and a figural disturbance to the park's aesthetic sequence. These breaks heighten the consciousness of acts of landscape planning and design, as well as of performative acts such as walking, keeping balance, and seeing within constructed landscapes.

Reflexivity is the outcome of this consciousness. It is amplified when the path is abruptly blocked at its northern portion by a low barrier of perennial ruderal species (fig. 6).Footnote 89 The park's plan shows that the path descends down the Al-Ajami Mosque's slope until it joins together with the park's main cycling route (fig. 1). Yet when gardeners sowed this part of the slope with perennial species, they did not spare the path's route. The seedlings thus grew also on the path, creating a floral barrier. This enigmatic obstacle to the flow of pedestrians signals reflexively that someone has the competence to lay out a route—or to block it.

Figure 6.

Jaffa Slope Park: the ruderal plants form a barrier on the historic shoreline path, April 11, 2012.

Such introspection is amplified when the path runs through lawn surfaces, and offshoots of grass threaten to gradually cover the path (fig. 7). The city's gardeners perpetually spray and trim the rhizomes in order to halt this vegetal ambition, thereby recreating the path over and over again. This constant remaking of the path embodies the work needed to achieve a landscape template. The repeated interruptions to the path's existence by the lawn's rooting and the subsequent interruptions to the grass's expansion by its uprooting echo Levinas's concept of the reflexive utterance, which repeatedly interrupts essence after the ethical experienceFootnote 90 —an utterance that contains inner instability between traditional systems of signification and a series of interruptions to these systems. Thus an inner difference is inserted into the supposedly solid concept and experience of “a path” via the serial interruptions that question its convention. The path becomes landscape architecture that questions landscape architecture, turning a landscape scheme into “meta-landscape architecture.”Footnote 91 Jaffa Slope Park becomes that sort of meta-landscape architecture as the path restrains and troubles the traditional naturalizing greening template that typifies much of the park's grounds.

Figure 7.

Jaffa Slope Park: lawn covering the historic shoreline path, April 11, 2012.

Yet the path's landscape architecture is not only a figural disturbance. The historic shoreline path is also a political expression. As Simon Critchley argues, politics, “cannot be confined to the activity of government that maintains order, pacification and security while constantly aiming to consensus. On the contrary, politics is the manifestation of dissensus, the cultivation of an anarchic multiplicity that calls into question the authority and legitimacy of the state.”Footnote 92 Critchley further contends that when a Levinasian ethical experience occurs in a context of institutional oppression, it may ignite a political action or an aesthetic, sublimating political expression.Footnote 93 The strange phrase “to leave it all as a symbol for the Nakba” denotes both an ethical situation of sharing a trauma of loss during a public meeting, and a political act that undermines institutional spatial policies and connects their outcomes to a continuous national trauma.

James Corner argued that landscape architecture may devise a critical, political response by working “within the norms and codes of a particular practice” through creating reflective distance from repressive or erroneous prevalent landscape traditions.Footnote 94 The political cultural act ought to be historically contextualized, but to undermine historical narratives;Footnote 95 to problematize the moral legitimacy of institutional power,Footnote 96 but to be temporal.Footnote 97 Respectively, the same text, or landscape architecture utterance, can be read as either a political or an ideological utterance.Footnote 98 The historic shoreline path can be read as a political landscape utterance in the context of the traumatic historical narrative of the site and the park's timely affective discourse, but also within the context of Jaffa's cultural indeterminacy, which was reflected in the public meetings’ discourse.

The material used for the path is the actual crushed debris from the waste mound that contained the wreckage of destroyed Palestinian buildings and homes. It embodies Jaffa's historical trauma of institutional destruction, which reverberates in the resident's and the architect's phrasing: “to leave it all as a symbol for the Nakba.” On the ground, the grass's offshoots constantly pervading the path's surface (fig. 7) abide by the ideological logic of hiding Palestinian remains under a green concealer (fig. 3). Along the path the work of the gardeners, who act as the municipality's proxies, is to actively prevent the routine pattern of covering the ruined Palestinian environs with lawns. Temporarily, they expose the ruins’ disturbing presence, a trace of coercive power and experience of loss; time and again, the trimming questions the dominant Israeli park mold in Tel Aviv–Jaffa and produces a temporal inner distance inside this mold. This rare instability within a traditional Israeli landscape sign system is further intensified in an additional landscape architecture formation—the allegorical utterance—at the northern portion of the path.

As the historic shoreline path stops by the floral wall at its northern edge, it encounters an additional troubling landscape expression, contributing another layer of estrangement to the park's scheme. The newly designed steep slope under the Al-Ajami Mosque, sowed with the ruderal species, was planted in grid order with pomegranate, mulberry, and fig trees (fig. 8). This planting design seems to address the requests that were presented in the public hearings by Palestinian residents of Jaffa to use fruit trees that denote a recognized Palestinian landscape signification. Nevertheless, this landscape syntax becomes self-estranged, just like the lawn's territorial ambition that was constrained and problematized in the path. Some of the trees on the slope did not take root, but were left to stand on the ridge, fossilized relics of vitality (fig. 8). This intimacy between life and death in the same milieu alludes to Walter Benjamin's conceptualization of allegory: “[T]he allegorical physiognomy of nature-history … is present … in the form of the ruin … and in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. … That which lies here in ruins, the highly significant fragment, the remnant … pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal.”Footnote 99

The dead trees on the slope of the park in Jaffa are botanical ruins—emblems of allegory. Their presence among living fruit trees thwarts the performance of the fertile orchard, the Palestinian symbol. The allegorical utterance of the dead trees prevents a symbolic mode of memorialization, thereby yielding a rather unspecific sense of decay and loss.

Figure 8.

Jaffa Slope Park: half-dead orchard and wreckage under Al-Ajami Mosque, February 21, 2012.

Next to the vegetal ruins, some concrete pillars and spurs are laid, disengaged, right under the mosque on the slope (fig. 8). It is unknown whether these ruins were part of a former wall around the mosque or belonged to an entirely different building.Footnote 100 Nevertheless, the minaret, a key spatial symbol of Muslim identity, is destabilized in this allegorical landscape scene by the ruins lying at its foot. The cryptic view of the solid and the ruined—vegetal and architectural—signifies an unclear historicity of decay, generating a melancholic scenic experience that adds additional disturbance and fragmentation to the park's naturalizing greening mold.

The reflexive ethical, political, and allegorical landscape utterances fracture the park's overriding Israeli/Zionist landscape template. However effective they are, the green veiling formation in the park is undeniably dominant because of the massive presence of the grassy hills. This dynamism, straddling between a dominant ideological cultural form and the breaching utterances that challenge it, reinforces the notion that hegemonic cultural production is a “heterogenic, dynamic system that moves towards … [their] stabilization through the constant contestation of political-figural interruptions.”Footnote 101

Coda

Discourse analysis of Jaffa Slope Park demonstrates that the Zionist Israeli greening practices prevalent in Tel Aviv–Jaffa's public parks on sites of pre-1948 Palestinian milieus are identified as such by local residents. For some residents, Jews and Arabs, contested urban policies and traumatic experiences are significant and deserve expression in the landscape design of public spaces. The discursive interaction between residents and landscape architects enables the emotive communication of urban loss, which allows for ethical experience that may yield breaching critical landscape architecture.

In this constructed landscape architecture the Al-Ajami Mosque slope and the historic shoreline path become a figural and performative sequence of interruptions to the landscape architecture of a major seaside park in the city of Tel Aviv–Jaffa. The fragmented address of Palestinian loss and the reflexive representations of a repressive ideological landscape mold evolve into groundbreaking spatial expressions within Israeli Jewish-Arab shared urbanity. Thus, landscape architecture has the means to critically signify and subtly communicate an ethical experience and contextually politicized meanings of landscapes. This capacity of landscape architecture bears import for ethnically divided urbanities that endured historic processes of dispossession, ruination, and prolonged dereliction.

Today, the half-dead orchard, the dropped concrete beams, the flowering barrier, and part of the historic shoreline path on the mosque's slope have been replaced with an additional wing to the adjacent Hassan Arafe Arab public elementary school. The breaching landscape expressions in the park were significantly diminished but they haven't entirely disappeared.

Footnotes

I am grateful to landscape architect Alisa Braudo for generously sharing her constructive insights and extensive planning materials. This paper elaborates on a fragment of my PhD dissertation conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for which I am thankful to my instructors Professor Hannan Hever and Professor Hubert Law-Yone. My thanks go to Marilyn Reizbaum for her close reading and encouragement, and to the supportive senior and fellow members of the Jews and Cities group, especially Eli Lederhendler and Scott Ury who read the paper closely. I thank Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University, where I started developing some of these ideas as a doctoral fellow in the Jews and Cities group, and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University, where I completed this paper as a postdoctoral fellow. Thanks to Yeela Gundar for her meticulous graphic design of the cartographic data. Finally, I thank the anonymous readers and AJS Review editors for encouraging me to sharpen and clarify my ideas.

References

1. Helphand, Kenneth, Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Making of Modern Israel (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2002), 52–53 Google Scholar.

2. All photographs were taken by the author.

3. See the pioneering work of Engler, Mira, “Waste Landscapes: Permissible Metaphors in Landscape Architecture”, Landscape Journal 14, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 46–62 Google Scholar. A recent overview by Loures, Luís, “Post-Industrial Landscapes as Drivers for Urban Redevelopment: Public versus Expert Perspectives towards the Benefits and Barriers of the Reuse of Post-Industrial Sites in Urban Areas”, Habitat International 45, no. 2 (January 2015): 72–81 Google Scholar. See also Braudo, Alisa and Maoz, Ruth, “Reconnecting the Tel Aviv and Jaffa Shoreline”, Topos: The International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design 72 (2010): 74–79 Google Scholar.

4. The municipality demolished about 2,000 housing units until 1990. See Monterescu, Daniel, Jaffa Shared and Shattered: Contrived Coexistence in Israel/Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 42–43 Google Scholar, 316–17; Shaqr, Nasim Najib, Ha-kehilah ha-ʻaravit be-Yafo ʻal parashat derakhim kiyumit [The Arab community in Jaffa at an existential crossroads] (Jaffa: privately printed, 1996), 17Google Scholar.

5. Shaqr, Ha-kehilah ha-ʻaravit be-Yafo; Mazawi, André Elias and Khuri-Makhoul, Makram, “Mediniyut merḥavit be-Yafo: 1948–1990” [Spatial policy in Jaffa: 1948–1990], in ʻIr ve-’utopiah [City and utopia], ed. Luski, Haim (Tel Aviv: Israel Publishing Company, 1991)Google Scholar.

6. Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 120Google Scholar.

7. For an overview of the multifaceted field of landscape architecture, see Corner, James, “The Hermeneutic Landscape”, in Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader, ed. Swaffield, Simon (1991; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 130–31Google Scholar.

8. Corner, James, to, introduction Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 2Google Scholar (emphasis added).

9. Barnes, Trevor J. and Duncan, James E., to, introduction Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992), 6Google Scholar; Duncan, James and Duncan, Nancy, “(Re)reading the Landscape”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6, no. 2 (June 1988): 117–26Google Scholar; Mitchell, William John Thomas, to, introduction Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 5–34.

10. Cosgrove, Denis and Daniels, Stephen, introduction to The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1Google Scholar.

11. Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Brewster, Ben (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 158Google Scholar.

12. McAvin, Margaret et al. , “Landscape Architecture and Critical Inquiry”, Landscape Journal 10, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 155–72Google Scholar.

13. This emblem was debated in scholarship on Israeli-Palestinian mixed cities. See Kolodney, Ziva and Kallus, Rachel, “From Colonial to National Landscape: Producing Haifa's Cityscape”, Planning Perspectives 23, no. 3 (July 2008): 323–48Google Scholar.

14. Kadman, Noga, Be-ẓide ha-derekh u-be-shule ha-todaʻah: Deḥikat ha-kefarim ha-ʻarviyim she-hitroknu be-1948 me-ha-siaḥ ha-yisraʼeli [Erased from space and consciousness: Depopulated Palestinian villages in the Israeli-Zionist discourse] (Jerusalem: November Press, 2008), 41–42 Google Scholar, 87, 111; Zerubavel, Yael, “The Forest as a National Icon: Literature, Politics, and the Archeology of Memory”, Israel Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 60–99 Google Scholar.

15. Eleven meetings were held at the municipality's facilities in Jaffa among nine groups of residents between November 17, 2005 and April 5, 2006. The residents’ requests were documented by municipality officials and the landscape architect Alisa Braudo: Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality et al., Midron Yafo —Sikum pegishot shituf ẓibur [Jaffa's slope—Summary of public participation meetings] (2006) [digital PPT].

16. Ghanim, Hunaida, “Poetics of Catastrophe: Palestinian Poets in Israel after Nakba”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 22, no. 1 (March 2009): 35–37 Google Scholar. Ben-Zvi, Tal, Sabra: Yiẓuge ha-nakba be-’amanut falestinit be-Yisraʼel [Sabra: Representations of the Nakba in Palestinian art created in Israel] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2014), 50–56 Google Scholar, 120–45.

17. For studies of mnemonic landscape architecture, see Kolodney, Ziva and Kallus, Rachel, “‘Big’ and ‘Small’ Cityscapes: Dilemmas of Mnemonic Landscapes”, in The Right to Landscape: Contesting Landscape and Human Rights, ed. Egoz, Shelley, Makhzoumi, Jala, and Pungetti, Gloria (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 123–26Google Scholar; Mann, Barbara E. “‘An Apartment to Remember,’ Palestinian Memory in the Israeli Landscape ”, History & Memory 27, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2015): 83–115 Google Scholar; Natour, Salman and Giladi, Avner “‘Eraser’ and ‘Anti-Eraser’—Commemoration and Marginalization on the Main Street of the German Colony: The Haifa City Museum and Café Fattush”, in Haifa before and after 1948: Narratives of a Mixed City, ed. Yazbak, Mahmoud and Weiss, Yfaat (Dordrecht: IHJRRLP, 2011), 149–80Google Scholar; Monterescu, Contrived Coexistence, 90–94.

18. Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise Than Being or beyond Essence, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

19. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 6–15, 45–51.

20. Interviews were conducted by the author with Alisa Braudo (principal in Braudo-Maoz Landscape Architecture Ltd.) at the office of the firm in Ramat Gan, February 24, 2008, February 30, 2008, and March 30, 2008.

21. The terms “Palestinian” and “Arab” are used alternately throughout the paper for naming Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel. For a discussion of the histories, cultures, and politics of this group's self-identifications and naming see Hammack, Phillip L., “Narrating Hyphenated Selves: Intergroup Contact and Configurations of Identity among Young Palestinian Citizens of Israel”, International Journal of Intercultural Relations 34 (2010): 368–85Google Scholar; Rabinowitz, Dan, “Nostalgiyah mizraḥit: ’Ekh ha-Palestinim hafkhu le-‘Araviye-Yisra'el” [Oriental nostalgia: How the Palestinians became ‘Israelʼs Arabsʼ], Theʼoriyah u-bikoret 4 (Autumn 1993): 141–52Google Scholar.

22. Visits to the park and its documentation were conducted by the author between 2008 and 2014.

23. This paper will not include a study of the park's reception by its users. For a first reception study of environmental comfort in Jaffa Slope Park, see Hatuka, Tali and Saaroni, Hadas “The Need for Advocating Regional Human Comfort Design Codes for Public Spaces: A Case Study of a Mediterranean Urban Park”, Landscape Research 39, no. 3 (2014): 287–304 Google Scholar.

24. For the history of the concept, see Ghanim, “Poetics of Catastrophe,” 25–26. For a recent reconceptualization that argues that “The nakba is not only a memory; it is a continuous reality that has not stopped since 1948,” see Khoury, Elias, “Rethinking the Nakba”, Critical Inquiry 38, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 263Google Scholar.

25. For an analysis of the political and legal prohibition of the Palestinians’ return see Morris, Benny, 1948 and after: Israel and the Palestinians (1990; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 25–27 Google Scholar, 141–58, 247–56, 319–21; Golan, Arnon, Shinuy merḥavi—Toẓa̕at milhamah: Ha-shetaḥim ha-ʻaraviyim le-she‘avar be-medinat Yisra̕el, 1948–1950 [Wartime spatial changes: Former Arab territories within the State of Israel, 1948–1950] (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2001), 87Google Scholar.

26. Golan, Spatial Change, 15, 90–95.

27. Amney Athamny, “Ledovev ’et ha-kirot: Zehutan shel ha-nashim ha-falestiniyot yoshvot ha-batim ha-falestinim ba-merḥav ha-yafoʼi” [Muttering the walls: The identity of the Palestinian women inhabiting Palestinian houses in the Jaffan space] (MA thesis, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev,  2009), 87; Ariela Hezi-Ashkenazi, “Ha-’ukhlusiyah ha-̒aravit be-Yafo 1948–1979” [The Arab population in Jaffa 1948–1979] (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2012).

28. Shehadeh, Sami Abu, “Misrade ha-mimshal ha-ẓevaʼi: Soẓi'alizaẓiyah la-medinah u-le-mangenone hakhfafah” [The military rule office: Socialization to state and subordination apparatuses], Sedek 5 (July 2010): 10–19 Google Scholar.

29. Golan, Spatial Change, 15, 90–95.

30. Urban master plans 479 (1963) and 666 (1956), viewed in the Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality's GIS system: https://gisn.tel-aviv.gov.il/iview2js/index.aspx (accessed June 7, 2016).

31. For a discussion of systematic destruction of pre-1948 Palestinian urbanity by the State of Israel, see Kolodney, Ziva and Kallus, Rachel, “The Politics of Landscape (Re)Production: Haifa between Colonialism and Nation Building”, Landscape Journal 27, no. 2 (2008): 180CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rotbard, Sharon, White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Yacobi, Haim, “The Architecture of Ethnic Logic: Exploring the Meaning of the Built Environment in the ‘Mixed’ city of Lod – Israel”, Geografiska Annaler 84B (2002): 171–87Google Scholar; Yiftachel, Oren and Yacobi, Haim, “Urban Ethnocracy: Ethnicization and the Production of Space in an Israeli ‘Mixed City,’” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, no. 6 (December 2003): 673–93Google Scholar.

32. Kolodney and Kallus, “From Colonial to National Landscape,” 332.

33. Monterescu, Contrived Coexistence, 41–42.

34. About 2,000 housing units were demolished until 1990, See Monterescu, Contrived Coexistence, 42–43, 316–17; Shaqr, Ha-kehilah ha-ʻaravit be-Yafo, 17; Mazawi and Khuri-Makhoul, “Spatial Policy in Jaffa.”

35. “Midron Yafo,” January 25, 1981 (memorandum from Adam Mazor to the City Engineer), Tel Aviv–Jaffa City Engineer Department Archive, brown file of Urban Master Plan 2236–1 (documents in Israeli archives are in Hebrew). A state coasts’ master plan (no. 13) from the 2000s dismissed this scheme and designated the reclaimed land to a public park only.

36. Athamny, “Ledovev ’et ha-kirot,” 74–75.

37. On this cultural shift, see Nitzan-Shiftan, Alona, “Seizing Locality in Jerusalem”, in The End of Tradition, ed. AlSayyad, Nezar (New York: Routledge, 2003), 236Google Scholar.

38. “Midron Yafo—Taskir hashpaʻah ʻal ha-sevivah,” (1986), 19–33, Israel State Archive, Jerusalem, moch-mmi-000bikx (GL11/15621).

39. Urban master plan 2360 was validated in 1995, see Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality's GIS system: https://gisn.tel-aviv.gov.il/iview2js/index.aspx (accessed June 7, 2016).

40. Four hundred eighty-nine objections to urban master plan 2360 were handed to the Tel Aviv District Planning Committee. Many of them claimed that the plan does not prioritize or nurture the Arab community. See “Minutes of the Tel Aviv District Planning Committee,” October 12, 1988, Tel Aviv–Jaffa City Engineer Department Archive, brown file of urban master plan 2236–8.

41. Wallerstein, Sebastian and Silverman, Emily with Meishar, Naama, eds. Meẓukat ha-diyur be-kerev ha-’ukhlusiyah ha-falestinit be-Yafo: Sof ʻidan ha-dayarut ha-mugenet be-nikhse reshut ha-pituʼaḥ [Housing distress within the Palestinian community in Jaffa: The end of protected tenancy in Jaffa] (Jerusalem: Bimkom, 2009), 33–35 Google Scholar.

42. Although the ethical component is essential to this paper, I do not have adequate space to elaborate on this moral facet, which influences landscape architecture practice in the construction of the park.

43. Monterescu, Contrived Coexistence, 22, 41–45.

44. Ibid., 38–45. See also Tali Hatuka's description of Tel Aviv and Jaffa as constantly joining and separating by means of architectural design and spatial performative activities: Violent Acts and Urban Space in Contemporary Tel Aviv: Revisioning Moment (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 71–98 Google Scholar.

45. Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality et al., Summary of Public Participation Meetings (2006) [digital PPT]; interview with Alisa Braudo, Ramat Gan, February 30, 2008.

46. Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality et al., Summary of Public Meetings, 23, 13, 19 (translation by the author).

47. Helphand, Dreaming Gardens, 52–53.

48. Hunt, John Dixon and Willis, Peter, to, introduction The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620–1820 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Taylor, Hillary A., “Urban Public Park: 1840–1900: Design and Meaning”, Garden History 21, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 205Google Scholar. For an example of the adoption of the English garden style park scheme in 1869 Cairo, see Abu-Lughod, Janet, “A Tale of Two Cities: The Origins of Modern Cairo”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, no. 4 (1965): 443–44Google Scholar.

49. Czerniak, Julia, “Speculating on Size”, in Large Parks, ed. Czerniak, Julia and Hargreaves, George (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 19–34 Google Scholar; Howett, Catherine, “Systems, Signs, and Sensibilities: Sources for a New Landscape Aesthetics”, Landscape Journal 6, no. 1 (1987): 8Google Scholar; Rackham, Simon “Beyond Landscape MacArchitecture: New Languages, New Landscapes”, Landscape Review 2, no. 3 (1996): 33–44Google Scholar.

50. Herrington, Susan, On Landscapes (New York: Routledge, 2009), 33–70 Google Scholar.

51. Tal Alon-Mozes, “Tekst, tarbut u-mashmaʻut shel ha-ginah ha-ʻivrit ha-vernakularit be-ʼEreẓ Yisraʼel: Tel Aviv u-sevivatah ke-mikreh mivḥan” [Text, culture and meaning of the Hebrew vernacular garden in the land of Israel: Tel Aviv and its surroundings as a case study] (PhD diss., Technion, 2002); Enis, Ruth, “Kibbutz Ideology and Lifestyle as Reflected in the Kibbutz Gardens”, Landscape Research 18, no. 3 (February 1993): 117Google Scholar.

52. The first imagery for this scheme can be traced to Herzl's Altneuland. See Schwartz, Yigal, The Zionist Paradox: Hebrew Literature and Israeli Identity (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 59Google Scholar, 64–68, 92.

53. Liphschitz, Nili and Biger, Gideon, “Mediniyut ha-yeʼur shel ha-tenuʻah ha-ẓiyonit be-ʼEreẓ Yisra'el 1895–1948”, [The Zionist movement's afforestation policy in ʼEreẓ Yisra'el 1895–1948], Cathedra 80 (June 1996): 88–108 Google Scholar.

54. Alon-Mozes, Tal, “Landscape Architecture and Agriculture: Common Seeds and Diverging Sprigs in Israeli Practice”, Landscape Journal 28, no. 2 (September 2009): 169–71Google Scholar.

55. Novick, Tamar, “Bible, Bees and Boxes: The Creation of ‘The Land Flowing with Milk and Honey’ in Palestine, 1880–1931”, Food, Culture and Society 16, no. 2 (June 2013): 281–99Google Scholar; Tal, Alon, “Enduring Technological Optimism: Zionism's Environmental Ethic and Its Influence on Israel's Environmental History”, Environmental History 13, no. 2 (April 2008): 275–305 Google Scholar.

56. Meishar, Naama, “Fragile Guardians: Nature Reserves and Forests Facing Arab Villages”, in Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and Zionist Discourse, ed. Yacobi, Haim (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 303–25Google Scholar; Tamar Novick, “Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land, 1890–1960” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2014), 165–90.

57. Braverman, Irus, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 29–114 Google Scholar; Cohen, Shaul Ephraim, The Politics of Planting: Israeli-Palestinian Competition for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Afforestation had environmental goals as well, see Liphschitz and Biger, “Afforestation Policy.”

58. Zerubavel, “National Icon,” 60, 81–82.

59. There is an unresolved dispute regarding the essence and appearance of Palestine's landscapes prior to Zionist imagination and the Jewish settlement projects. Different comments by travelers vary from disappointment to appreciation, depending on geographical and cultural background. For an overview of travelers’ comments, see Cohen, Politics of Planting, 42–44. For a study of sustainability and modern elements in the cultural landscapes of Arabs in the mountainous Nablus area in the mid-nineteenth century, see Doumani, Beshara, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 3–4 Google Scholar.

60. Kadman, Erased from Space, 41–42, 87, 111.

61. Enis, Ruth, “On the Pioneering Work of Landscape Architects in Israel: A Historical Review”, Landscape Journal 11, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 30Google Scholar.

62. Golan, Spatial Change, 131.

63. Based on a 1935 English-language Mandatory map, accessed with the courtesy of Talia Margalit. The location of all the pre-1948 Palestinian settlements in the Tel Aviv–Jaffa area are indicated also in Zochrot's “Nakba Map”: http://zochrot.org/en/article/54772 (accessed July 10, 2016).

64. “Netiʻat ha-park ha-leʼumi me-ʻever la-Yarkon,” 5 May 1952 (memorandum by Seʻadiya Shoshani, the head of the Planting and Gardening Department in Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality), viewed on Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipality's website: http://park.co.il/he/%D7%90%D7%9C%D7%91%D7%95%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9D/ (accessed July 18, 2016). This memorandum announces a planting ceremony on May 13, 1952 “near the Shaykh-Muwannis village with presence of the prime minister” (translation by the author).

65. “Nakba Map,” http://zochrot.org/en/article/54772 (accessed July 10, 2016).

66. See Yiftahel, Oren, “‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine”, Constellations 6, no. 3 (September 1999): 364–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67. For ideology's dissemination through everyday landscapes, see Daniels and Cosgrove, introduction to The Iconography of Landscape, 1.

68. Monterescu, Contrived Coexistence, 22, 38–45, 41–45.

69. Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality at el., Summary of Public Meetings, 18 (translation by the author).

70. Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality at el., Summary of Public Meetings, 15.

71. Some of these species and the aesthetics of agricultural landscapes penetrated urban landscape architecture projects other than parks. See Alon-Mozes, “Landscape and Agriculture,” 166–80.

72. Kark, Ruth, Jaffa: A City in Evolution 1799–1917, trans. Brand, Gila (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1990), 70–72 Google Scholar.

73. Ghanim, “Poetics of Catastrophe,” 35–37; Ben-Zvi, Sabra, 50–56, 120–45.

74. Tel Aviv–Jaffa Municipality et al., Summary of Public Meetings, 15 (translation by the author).

75. Interview with the park's landscape architect, Alisa Braudo, Ramat Gan, February 24, 2008.

76. Ram, Uri, “Ways of Forgetting: Israel and the Obliterated Memory of the Palestinian Nakba”, Journal of Historical Sociology 22, no. 3 (September 2009): 366–95Google Scholar. In March 2011, after the park was already constructed, the Israeli Knesset passed the “Nakba Law” that allows the government to reduce public tax funds for institutions that support expressions of grief over the establishment of the State of Israel. See “40 amendment to the Law of the Grounds for the Budget,” http://www.knesset.gov.il/Laws/Data/BillKnesset/315/315.pdf. See also Egoz, Shelley, “Deconstructing the Hegemony of Nationalist Narratives through Landscape Architecture”, Landscape Research 33, no. 1 (January 2008): 35–39 Google Scholar.

77. Interviews with Alisa Braudo, Ramat Gan, February 24, 2008 and March 30, 2008.

78. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 44–45.

79. Ibid., 50–51.

80. Ibid., 38–39, 43–45. See also his argument that “essence is interest … egoisms struggling with each other,” Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 4.

81. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 6–7. See also Critchley, Simon, The Ethics of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), 259–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 6–15, 45–51.

83. Critchley, Ethics of Deconstruction, 127. Critchley extensively cites Jacques Derrida on that matter, ibid., 121–29.

84. Hunt, John Dixon, Gardens and the Picturesque (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 39–40 Google Scholar, 58; Taylor, “Design and Meaning,” 205.

85. Poeisis is the Greek term for a creative activity, “the actual work of making,” through which an art work is founded; see Corner, James, “Representation and Landscape”, in Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader, ed. Swaffield, Simon (1992; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 145Google Scholar.

86. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 222–23 (emphasis is original).

87. There is another landscape architecture expression that reverberates with Palestinian ruins in two of the park's squares, which are paved with broken colored tiles collected from the waste mound on the site. For an interpretation of this type of paving as an essentializing, noncritical design gesture, see Meishar, Naama, “In Search of Meta-Landscape Architecture: Jaffa Slope Park's Design and the Ethical Experience”, Journal of Landscape Architecture 14 (2012): 40–45 Google Scholar; for an interpretation of the paving as a multidirectional memory design gesture see Mann, “Apartment to Remember.”

88. Interview with Alisa Braudo, Ramat Gan, March 30, 2008.

89. Ruderal species grow in areas that have been disturbed by humans, such as on the margins of roads or fields.

90. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 6–7, 46–47; Critchley, Ethics of Deconstruction, 127, 128–29.

91. The prefix “meta-” draws on self-questioning as well as on a transgression beyond the known or the same. See Meishar, “Meta-Landscape Architecture,” 40–45.

92. Critchley, Simon, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 13Google Scholar (emphasis added).

93. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 92, 120, 127.

94. Corner, James, “Critical Thinking and Landscape Architecture”, Landscape Journal 10, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 161–62Google Scholar (emphasis added). As was mentioned in the exposition, the disciplinary discourse of political practice is limited due to reasons I will not be able to sort out here. Strangely, Corner confined critical action to the practice of landscape architects and dismissed scholars’ agency of critique of landscape architecture, see ibid., 160.

95. Hever, Hannan, “Shir politi” [Political poem], Mafteaḥ 4 (Fall 2011): 231–32Google Scholar.

96. Shenhav, Yehuda, “‘Al ha-’otonomiyut shel ha-politi” [The autonomy of the political], Theʼoriah u-bikoret 34 (Spring 2009): 185–88Google Scholar.

97. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 57–58 Google Scholar, 199; Rancière, Jacques, “Ten Theses on Politics”, Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001): 26Google Scholar.

98. Belsey, Catherine, Critical Practice (London: Routledge, 2002): 91–92 Google Scholar; Hever, “Political poem,” 235.

99. Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, introduction by George Steiner, trans. Osborne, John (1998; London: Verso, 2009), 177–78Google Scholar.

100. This upper point of the slope, with the wreckage lying atop, was left untouched during the park's construction.

101. Hever, “Political poem,” 235 (translation by the author).

Figure 0

Figure 1. Jaffa Slope Park general plan, courtesy of Braudo-Maoz Landscape Architecture Ltd. (labels added by the author).

Figure 1

Figure 2. Jaffa Slope Park: a hill and seaside promenade, September 5, 2011.2

Figure 2

Figure 3. 1935: The municipal borders of Tel Aviv and its neighbouring Arab municipalities;63 1950: Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipal borders after the annexation of the Palestinian municipalities; 2010 (the date of Jaffa Slope Park's inauguration): The city's urban parks are located on former Palestinian locales. Maps’ superposition by the author.

Figure 3

Figure 4. Jaffa's shoreline and urban texture in 1949; after institutional ruination and land reclamation in 1976; after the park's construction in 2012. Aerial photographs: Jaffa, 1949: P/53-7368 and 1976: MM/503-2731, Survey of Israel, Agency for Geodesy, Cadastre, Mapping and Geographic Information. All rights reserved by the Survey of Israel ©2016. Printed with Survey of Israel permission. Jaffa, 2012: ©Google, ©2012 GeoEye.

Figure 4

Figure 5. Jaffa Slope Park: a palm boulevard cuts between the hills, September 5, 2011.

Figure 5

Figure 6. Jaffa Slope Park: the ruderal plants form a barrier on the historic shoreline path, April 11, 2012.

Figure 6

Figure 7. Jaffa Slope Park: lawn covering the historic shoreline path, April 11, 2012.

Figure 7

Figure 8. Jaffa Slope Park: half-dead orchard and wreckage under Al-Ajami Mosque, February 21, 2012.