Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat | Tel Aviv University (original) (raw)
Publications by Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat
The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the fi... more The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the first uses settler colonialism as an analytical framework to explore structural violence and Indigenous transfer, expressed through counterinsurgency and urbicide; the second investigates practices of care and governance and their representations within a universalized discourse of humanitarianism. This article introduces a new approach, exploring historical (post)colonial architectural narratives-rooted in international discourses of humanitarian relief and development aid-to interrogate the complex settler-colonial conditions and practices of Israel's resettlement of refugees. Such narratives emphasis the materialization of resettlement, in which structural violence is culturally co-produced. The article focuses on the Khan Younis refugee resettlement project in the Gaza Strip (1983-1993), drawing on archival materials and in-depth interviews to offering 'militarized urbanism' as a novel description of the violence of resettlement. Situated at the junction between military technologies and cultural practices, 'militarized urbanism' represents the transformation of the geopolitics of colonial warfare to the colonization of the everyday, where urban and architectural knowledge are reshaped by security logics in the mediation of conflicting civilian and political agendas.
This chapter discusses the active mediating role of the camp-city's relationship in the productio... more This chapter discusses the active mediating role of the camp-city's relationship in the production of development discourse. Planned and constructed by the Israeli Public Works Department after the 1967 war, the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood was designated a permanent housing solution for Palestinian refugees from the A-Shati camp. Politically, the construction of the neighbourhood served the Israeli regime in its fight against the right of return, while allowing it to deploy the discourse of progress and urban improvement. The neighbourhood's construction was part of a larger colonial regional plan to replace Gaza as the port city and the commercial hub of the area. By referring to architecture as cultural production and attending to the forms of everyday life in the context of development, Gaza is investigated here as an arena where contradictory agendas of 'professional knowledge' in architecture and urban planning, and modernist social engineering ideas clash.
Under constant assault by Israel, Gaza looms large in our minds and media-a land in which the vio... more Under constant assault by Israel, Gaza looms large in our minds and media-a land in which the violent exercise of power seemingly excludes all other possibilities for action. Gaza is frequently examined through the prism of occupation and violence. Rooted in settler-colonial and geopolitical scholarly traditions, this prism expands our understanding of power. Yet it grants scant voice to the multiplicity of Palestinian identities and perspectives. Communicating these silenced perspectives demands a methodological shift-from the realm of abstraction to the domain of culture, including architecture and urban design. * In other words, a shift from the epistemologies of power as a relational conception to its material rendering in the design and construction of the urban environment. Michael Sorkin and Deen Sharp's edited volume, Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope, offers such a novel approach. Rather than deal in denunciation and solidarity, Sorkin and Sharp illuminate the agency of architects and urbanists working from within, utilizing Gaza's modest "as-found" resources and urban potentials to subvert oppression. While recognizing the dynamics of power and conflict, this subversion throws off the constraints of these phenomena, seeking out new possibilities in the politics of reality and representation. Specifically, the authors juxtapose the local work of architects and planners against the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM)-the tripartite planning regime initiated in the aftermath of Israel's 2014 "Operation Protective Edge" that has, as detailed by Sara Roy in the preface, systematically undermined Gaza's Indigenous economy. † In a series of essays covering twenty-two projects, Sorkin and Sharp assemble an international cadre of architects, designers, environmentalists, planners, and activists to "imagine and celebrate the spaces of steadfastness and even hope" in Gaza (p. 11). They do so subversively, leveraging a Marxist-activist approach to the explicit presentation and distribution of architecture as a means to mediate between "limits and possibilities" (p. 14), resist top-down reconstruction, and transgress disciplinary boundaries and power relations. The immediacy of their activism is effectively mirrored in the book's eclectic arrangement, which skillfully threads common interests via the various modes of intervention-thwarting, educating, remapping, and envisioning. Thwarting relates to the understanding of Gaza as a "microcosm of our time" (Baconi, p. 24), where nihilism, dehumanization, and even "critical trends of urbanization" (Sebregondi, p. 198) are tested. Under absurd conditions, argue Salem Al Qudwa (pp. 26-42) and Omar Yousef (pp. 76-84), everyday architectural practices in Gaza are laden with the meanings of modern architecture in the developing
Mediterraneanism in conflict: development and settlement of Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants in Gaza and Yamit, 2021
This article examines Israeli development in the Gaza Strip and Northern Sinai from 1972 to 1982 ... more This article examines Israeli development in the Gaza Strip and Northern Sinai from 1972 to 1982 from the perspective of architectural history. We argue that the prime objective of the Israeli occupation in this decade was economic development, not elimination; its guiding logic saw humanitarian aid as the preferred way to “resolve” the Palestinian refugee crisis. We follow how the pro-development, humanist “know how” of the architects and urban planners wrote themselves onto Gaza’s politics of space. Their scientific approach embodied in Mediterranean architecture was the solution of choice to hit two birds with one stone: end the refugee crisis by assimilating them into the Gaza strip cities, and ensure dependence on Israel by a new development plan with Yamit city at its epicentre. Mediterranean architecture expressed the gradations of vernacularity in the Israeli policy, and helped fashion a unique ideology of development based on exclusion and ethnic separation.
Working within the field of architecture in conflict zones, this article discusses two constructi... more Working within the field of architecture in conflict zones, this article discusses two construction projects that heavily relied on concrete in Gaza city to reveal a collision between concrete’s reformative capacity in processes of modernization and the Israeli occupier’s agenda of “reformation” by concrete.
Accepting frameworks promulgated by the Israeli occupation, public discourse has often debated Ga... more Accepting frameworks promulgated by the Israeli occupation, public discourse has often debated Gaza as a "problem" to be solved, treating it more like a political quandary than a concrete city. Recent scholarship on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict explicitly problematized this approach and resisted the subsumption of Gaza city into the larger geopolitical unit of the eponymous Strip. This article contributes to this new body of critical work by addressing the dispossessory dynamics stitched into Gaza's urban fabric through an episode from its urban and architectural history. It argues that everyday issues cannot be ignored when analyzing Gaza within the colonial paradigm: indeed, under colonial conditions, these everyday issues inevitably become a site of conflict. Based on archival materials and interviews with key actors involved in the Gaza Master Plan, the article discusses Gaza as a material city with urban institutions and a cast of professional actors. The planning process reveals fundamental tensions regarding the urban status of Palestinian refugees, who became captives in the clash between Palestinian nationalism and Israeli occupation as it played out in the politics of Israeli urban and regional development.
© 2 0 2 0 S p r i n g e r N a t u r e L i m i t e d . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d .
This article aims to reconceptualize the aggregate 'Palestinian refugee camps' in light of the po... more This article aims to reconceptualize the aggregate 'Palestinian refugee camps' in light of the political reality from which the refugees emerged, and take into consideration the new space that took shape, characterized by processes of destruction and dispossession of civil status. The article will focus specifically on the period 1948-1967, and examine these processes by using tools from architectural theory and history. The article contends that the architecture of the refugee camps acts as a type of unwritten rigid law, outlining the boundary between 'public' and 'private' realms -the sphere of the polis and that of the household and family 1998, The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 28) -through continuous processes of construction and deconstruction.
by Anatole Upart, Alla Vronskaya, Lily Filson, Maja Babic, Flavia Marcello, Maria Elisa Navarro Morales, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Raluca Muresan, Andreea Ion Cojocaru, ISIL EKIN CALAK, Georgios Karatzas, Ceren Katipoglu Ozmen, Caterina Cardamone, Edoardo Piccoli, Sanja Matijević Barčot, and Eliana Sousa Santos
Papers presented bring together different responses to questioning architectural history to perpl... more Papers presented bring together different responses to questioning architectural history to perplexing, competing and complementary perceptions and interpretations of the past, its geography and culture. The focus is on the multiple perceptual forms and interpretations of architecture and their entanglements regarding conditions of historicity, notions of geographical belonging, as well as concepts of cultural or political identity.
Papers by Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat
Ethnic and Racial Studies, Jan 11, 2024
Citizenship Studies, 2020
ABSTRACT This article examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the prism of urban citize... more ABSTRACT This article examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the prism of urban citizenship. It focuses on the Israeli attempt to reshape urban citizenship in Gaza by planning and constructing Sheikh Radwan, a residential neighborhood designated as a permanent quarter for the refugees inhabiting the nearby Al-Shati camp. Although Gaza’s local residents, like the refugees, were deprived of national citizenship rights, they retained the privileges and rights of urban citizenship. The economic development and modernization plan that Israel implemented in the Gaza Strip after its occupation in 1967 disrupted this differentiation between refugee and resident. Israeli programs promoted, perhaps, refugees’ demands to the city, but when urban equality was promoted by the deporter, it provoked a contradiction between the Right to the City and the Palestinian Right of Return. This top-down enactment of civic right turns into a measure of control that perplexes some of the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of urban citizenship.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space
The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the fi... more The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the first uses settler colonialism as an analytical framework to explore structural violence and Indigenous transfer, expressed through counterinsurgency and urbicide; the second investigates practices of care and governance and their representations within a universalized discourse of humanitarianism. This article introduces a new approach, exploring historical (post)colonial architectural narratives—rooted in international discourses of humanitarian relief and development aid—to interrogate the complex settler-colonial conditions and practices of Israel’s resettlement of refugees. Such narratives emphasis the materialization of resettlement, in which structural violence is culturally co-produced. The article focuses on the Khan Younis refugee resettlement project in the Gaza Strip (1983-1993), drawing on archival materials and in-depth interviews to offering ‘militarized urbanism’ as a novel...
Journal of Urban History, 2020
Working within the field of architecture in conflict zones, this article discusses two constructi... more Working within the field of architecture in conflict zones, this article discusses two construction projects that heavily relied on concrete in Gaza city to reveal a collision between concrete’s reformative capacity in processes of modernization and the Israeli occupier’s agenda of “reformation” by concrete. The Israeli-designed and constructed Sheikh Radwan neighborhood was intended to rehabilitate Palestinian refugees and was supposed to silence their demands for the right to return. The Rashad A-Shawa Cultural Centre in Gaza, by contrast, was Gazan a public project that reflected the modernization of the city and attempted to reform its people out of a belief in architecture’s role in giving shape to the Palestinians’ struggle for national self-determination. The two juxtaposed cases highlight the centrality of concrete to Gaza’s urban history but also its conflicting discourses of modernization.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2020
Accepting frameworks promulgated by the Israeli occupation, public discourse has often debated Ga... more Accepting frameworks promulgated by the Israeli occupation, public discourse has often debated Gaza as a “problem” to be solved, treating it more like a political quandary than a concrete city. Recent scholarship on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict explicitly problematized this approach and resisted the subsumption of Gaza city into the larger geopolitical unit of the eponymous Strip. This article contributes to this new body of critical work by addressing the dispossessory dynamics stitched into Gaza’s urban fabric through an episode from its urban and architectural history. It argues that everyday issues cannot be ignored when analyzing Gaza within the colonial paradigm: indeed, under colonial conditions, these everyday issues inevitably become a site of conflict. Based on archival materials and interviews with key actors involved in the Gaza Master Plan, the article discusses Gaza as a material city with urban institutions and a cast of professional actors. The planning process r...
Making Home(s) in Displacement
The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the fi... more The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the first uses settler colonialism as an analytical framework to explore structural violence and Indigenous transfer, expressed through counterinsurgency and urbicide; the second investigates practices of care and governance and their representations within a universalized discourse of humanitarianism. This article introduces a new approach, exploring historical (post)colonial architectural narratives-rooted in international discourses of humanitarian relief and development aid-to interrogate the complex settler-colonial conditions and practices of Israel's resettlement of refugees. Such narratives emphasis the materialization of resettlement, in which structural violence is culturally co-produced. The article focuses on the Khan Younis refugee resettlement project in the Gaza Strip (1983-1993), drawing on archival materials and in-depth interviews to offering 'militarized urbanism' as a novel description of the violence of resettlement. Situated at the junction between military technologies and cultural practices, 'militarized urbanism' represents the transformation of the geopolitics of colonial warfare to the colonization of the everyday, where urban and architectural knowledge are reshaped by security logics in the mediation of conflicting civilian and political agendas.
This chapter discusses the active mediating role of the camp-city's relationship in the productio... more This chapter discusses the active mediating role of the camp-city's relationship in the production of development discourse. Planned and constructed by the Israeli Public Works Department after the 1967 war, the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood was designated a permanent housing solution for Palestinian refugees from the A-Shati camp. Politically, the construction of the neighbourhood served the Israeli regime in its fight against the right of return, while allowing it to deploy the discourse of progress and urban improvement. The neighbourhood's construction was part of a larger colonial regional plan to replace Gaza as the port city and the commercial hub of the area. By referring to architecture as cultural production and attending to the forms of everyday life in the context of development, Gaza is investigated here as an arena where contradictory agendas of 'professional knowledge' in architecture and urban planning, and modernist social engineering ideas clash.
Under constant assault by Israel, Gaza looms large in our minds and media-a land in which the vio... more Under constant assault by Israel, Gaza looms large in our minds and media-a land in which the violent exercise of power seemingly excludes all other possibilities for action. Gaza is frequently examined through the prism of occupation and violence. Rooted in settler-colonial and geopolitical scholarly traditions, this prism expands our understanding of power. Yet it grants scant voice to the multiplicity of Palestinian identities and perspectives. Communicating these silenced perspectives demands a methodological shift-from the realm of abstraction to the domain of culture, including architecture and urban design. * In other words, a shift from the epistemologies of power as a relational conception to its material rendering in the design and construction of the urban environment. Michael Sorkin and Deen Sharp's edited volume, Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope, offers such a novel approach. Rather than deal in denunciation and solidarity, Sorkin and Sharp illuminate the agency of architects and urbanists working from within, utilizing Gaza's modest "as-found" resources and urban potentials to subvert oppression. While recognizing the dynamics of power and conflict, this subversion throws off the constraints of these phenomena, seeking out new possibilities in the politics of reality and representation. Specifically, the authors juxtapose the local work of architects and planners against the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM)-the tripartite planning regime initiated in the aftermath of Israel's 2014 "Operation Protective Edge" that has, as detailed by Sara Roy in the preface, systematically undermined Gaza's Indigenous economy. † In a series of essays covering twenty-two projects, Sorkin and Sharp assemble an international cadre of architects, designers, environmentalists, planners, and activists to "imagine and celebrate the spaces of steadfastness and even hope" in Gaza (p. 11). They do so subversively, leveraging a Marxist-activist approach to the explicit presentation and distribution of architecture as a means to mediate between "limits and possibilities" (p. 14), resist top-down reconstruction, and transgress disciplinary boundaries and power relations. The immediacy of their activism is effectively mirrored in the book's eclectic arrangement, which skillfully threads common interests via the various modes of intervention-thwarting, educating, remapping, and envisioning. Thwarting relates to the understanding of Gaza as a "microcosm of our time" (Baconi, p. 24), where nihilism, dehumanization, and even "critical trends of urbanization" (Sebregondi, p. 198) are tested. Under absurd conditions, argue Salem Al Qudwa (pp. 26-42) and Omar Yousef (pp. 76-84), everyday architectural practices in Gaza are laden with the meanings of modern architecture in the developing
Mediterraneanism in conflict: development and settlement of Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants in Gaza and Yamit, 2021
This article examines Israeli development in the Gaza Strip and Northern Sinai from 1972 to 1982 ... more This article examines Israeli development in the Gaza Strip and Northern Sinai from 1972 to 1982 from the perspective of architectural history. We argue that the prime objective of the Israeli occupation in this decade was economic development, not elimination; its guiding logic saw humanitarian aid as the preferred way to “resolve” the Palestinian refugee crisis. We follow how the pro-development, humanist “know how” of the architects and urban planners wrote themselves onto Gaza’s politics of space. Their scientific approach embodied in Mediterranean architecture was the solution of choice to hit two birds with one stone: end the refugee crisis by assimilating them into the Gaza strip cities, and ensure dependence on Israel by a new development plan with Yamit city at its epicentre. Mediterranean architecture expressed the gradations of vernacularity in the Israeli policy, and helped fashion a unique ideology of development based on exclusion and ethnic separation.
Working within the field of architecture in conflict zones, this article discusses two constructi... more Working within the field of architecture in conflict zones, this article discusses two construction projects that heavily relied on concrete in Gaza city to reveal a collision between concrete’s reformative capacity in processes of modernization and the Israeli occupier’s agenda of “reformation” by concrete.
Accepting frameworks promulgated by the Israeli occupation, public discourse has often debated Ga... more Accepting frameworks promulgated by the Israeli occupation, public discourse has often debated Gaza as a "problem" to be solved, treating it more like a political quandary than a concrete city. Recent scholarship on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict explicitly problematized this approach and resisted the subsumption of Gaza city into the larger geopolitical unit of the eponymous Strip. This article contributes to this new body of critical work by addressing the dispossessory dynamics stitched into Gaza's urban fabric through an episode from its urban and architectural history. It argues that everyday issues cannot be ignored when analyzing Gaza within the colonial paradigm: indeed, under colonial conditions, these everyday issues inevitably become a site of conflict. Based on archival materials and interviews with key actors involved in the Gaza Master Plan, the article discusses Gaza as a material city with urban institutions and a cast of professional actors. The planning process reveals fundamental tensions regarding the urban status of Palestinian refugees, who became captives in the clash between Palestinian nationalism and Israeli occupation as it played out in the politics of Israeli urban and regional development.
© 2 0 2 0 S p r i n g e r N a t u r e L i m i t e d . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d .
This article aims to reconceptualize the aggregate 'Palestinian refugee camps' in light of the po... more This article aims to reconceptualize the aggregate 'Palestinian refugee camps' in light of the political reality from which the refugees emerged, and take into consideration the new space that took shape, characterized by processes of destruction and dispossession of civil status. The article will focus specifically on the period 1948-1967, and examine these processes by using tools from architectural theory and history. The article contends that the architecture of the refugee camps acts as a type of unwritten rigid law, outlining the boundary between 'public' and 'private' realms -the sphere of the polis and that of the household and family 1998, The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 28) -through continuous processes of construction and deconstruction.
by Anatole Upart, Alla Vronskaya, Lily Filson, Maja Babic, Flavia Marcello, Maria Elisa Navarro Morales, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Raluca Muresan, Andreea Ion Cojocaru, ISIL EKIN CALAK, Georgios Karatzas, Ceren Katipoglu Ozmen, Caterina Cardamone, Edoardo Piccoli, Sanja Matijević Barčot, and Eliana Sousa Santos
Papers presented bring together different responses to questioning architectural history to perpl... more Papers presented bring together different responses to questioning architectural history to perplexing, competing and complementary perceptions and interpretations of the past, its geography and culture. The focus is on the multiple perceptual forms and interpretations of architecture and their entanglements regarding conditions of historicity, notions of geographical belonging, as well as concepts of cultural or political identity.
Ethnic and Racial Studies, Jan 11, 2024
Citizenship Studies, 2020
ABSTRACT This article examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the prism of urban citize... more ABSTRACT This article examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the prism of urban citizenship. It focuses on the Israeli attempt to reshape urban citizenship in Gaza by planning and constructing Sheikh Radwan, a residential neighborhood designated as a permanent quarter for the refugees inhabiting the nearby Al-Shati camp. Although Gaza’s local residents, like the refugees, were deprived of national citizenship rights, they retained the privileges and rights of urban citizenship. The economic development and modernization plan that Israel implemented in the Gaza Strip after its occupation in 1967 disrupted this differentiation between refugee and resident. Israeli programs promoted, perhaps, refugees’ demands to the city, but when urban equality was promoted by the deporter, it provoked a contradiction between the Right to the City and the Palestinian Right of Return. This top-down enactment of civic right turns into a measure of control that perplexes some of the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of urban citizenship.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space
The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the fi... more The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the first uses settler colonialism as an analytical framework to explore structural violence and Indigenous transfer, expressed through counterinsurgency and urbicide; the second investigates practices of care and governance and their representations within a universalized discourse of humanitarianism. This article introduces a new approach, exploring historical (post)colonial architectural narratives—rooted in international discourses of humanitarian relief and development aid—to interrogate the complex settler-colonial conditions and practices of Israel’s resettlement of refugees. Such narratives emphasis the materialization of resettlement, in which structural violence is culturally co-produced. The article focuses on the Khan Younis refugee resettlement project in the Gaza Strip (1983-1993), drawing on archival materials and in-depth interviews to offering ‘militarized urbanism’ as a novel...
Journal of Urban History, 2020
Working within the field of architecture in conflict zones, this article discusses two constructi... more Working within the field of architecture in conflict zones, this article discusses two construction projects that heavily relied on concrete in Gaza city to reveal a collision between concrete’s reformative capacity in processes of modernization and the Israeli occupier’s agenda of “reformation” by concrete. The Israeli-designed and constructed Sheikh Radwan neighborhood was intended to rehabilitate Palestinian refugees and was supposed to silence their demands for the right to return. The Rashad A-Shawa Cultural Centre in Gaza, by contrast, was Gazan a public project that reflected the modernization of the city and attempted to reform its people out of a belief in architecture’s role in giving shape to the Palestinians’ struggle for national self-determination. The two juxtaposed cases highlight the centrality of concrete to Gaza’s urban history but also its conflicting discourses of modernization.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2020
Accepting frameworks promulgated by the Israeli occupation, public discourse has often debated Ga... more Accepting frameworks promulgated by the Israeli occupation, public discourse has often debated Gaza as a “problem” to be solved, treating it more like a political quandary than a concrete city. Recent scholarship on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict explicitly problematized this approach and resisted the subsumption of Gaza city into the larger geopolitical unit of the eponymous Strip. This article contributes to this new body of critical work by addressing the dispossessory dynamics stitched into Gaza’s urban fabric through an episode from its urban and architectural history. It argues that everyday issues cannot be ignored when analyzing Gaza within the colonial paradigm: indeed, under colonial conditions, these everyday issues inevitably become a site of conflict. Based on archival materials and interviews with key actors involved in the Gaza Master Plan, the article discusses Gaza as a material city with urban institutions and a cast of professional actors. The planning process r...
Making Home(s) in Displacement
Culture and Conflict in Palestine/Israel
Ethnic and Racial Studies