Abstract
On May 14, 2018, residents and visitors of Tel Aviv celebrated Israel’s victory in the Eurovision Song Contest at an open-air party; the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem; and the Israeli military killed 60 and injured over 2700 Palestinians in Gaza. Israel’s dominant visual regime frames the three events of May 14 as separate, accidental, and disparate, although they all occurred on the same day within a 30-mile radius. The simultaneity and proximity of these events allow me to illuminate how they are politically entangled, and are a result of what happened 70 years prior, on May 14, 1948, which marked the establishment of Israel and the concurrent and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. May 14 serves as an entry point for the investigation of what I call “geographies of settler innocence.” Israel utilizes settler innocence as the primary organizing principle of space production. I perform a visual analysis of the geographies of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Gaza to analyze how settler innocence is embedded in the built environment of Israel to rebuild and reimagine Palestine as a national home to Jewish immigrants. The very physical landscape of Palestine has been transformed to ground Zionist meanings, identities, and histories. It is precisely in the built environment that settler innocence is cemented and I will focus on the built environment of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Sderot, the closes Israeli city to the border with Gaza, and what those spaces reveal about geographies of settler innocence.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design
KEYWORDS
Architecture, Palestine, Visuality, Indigeneity, Geography
