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New leases on life By Yotam Feldman The families who enjoy picnics near the town of Beit Sahur on afternoons in springtime aren't bothered at all by knowing what purpose the site served up until two years ago - as a parking area for Israeli tanks. Sometimes, in fact, they even seem to get a kick out of it. The fountain now gracing the center of the site in question, formerly an Israel Defense Forces camp, was erected on top of a guard post where soldiers used to keep a lookout over Beit Sahur at the start of the second intifada. Another guard post has since been transformed into a monitoring station for migratory birds, operated by the Palestine Wildlife Society. When you scramble up the climbing wall in the middle of the nearby playground, you can look out over the firing ranges where IDF soldiers once trained. In the past year, this abandoned camp has also been used for open-air movie screenings and other public events. Advertisement Long before the site was evacuated, in April 2006, the Beit Sahur municipality obtained a signed guarantee from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat that he would not turn the area into a military installation, but instead allow the local residents to use it. Open areas like this are rare in the Bethlehem area. "I pictured the place as a military fortress. I thought there must be a whole system of tunnels beneath the buildings," says Ra'ad Amad, a photographer from Beit Sahur who is eating right now with his family not far from where the guard post once stood. After the camp was evacuated, Amad was disappointed to find that there were no tunnels and that the place wasn't much different from the way he had seen it from town. The Beit Sahur camp is one of a number of former settlements and IDF bases in the West Bank and Gaza that are being put to different uses now, both public and private, by the Palestinians. Many people discovered, especially after the disengagement, that the Israeli buildings which they could not even approach before were built in some of the most attractive areas in the territories. It is therefore obvious that Palestinian families frolic among the remains of the evacuated settlement of Kadim, for example. On the way to the top of the hill where the settlement once stood, you can still see the rubble of the buildings. The Israeli-built road system and the smoothed-out areas on which the houses were built there have remained intact. Last Friday two families, from Jenin and Nablus, were enjoying a day out on top of the hill. They had parked their cars near Kadim's basketball court, which is also still intact. They recall that before the intifada, families in Jenin would go to Tiberias or the Al-Far'a refugee camp near Tubas, quite a distance away, when they wanted to spend some time outdoors. Now they have an accessible open space that's much closer to home, and where there is usually a pleasant breeze in the summer months. "I can imagine that the people here had a good life. They had nice houses, good roads," says Mu'taz Subuh, a 17-year-old high-schooler from Jenin, about the former residents of Kadim. "Before, I didn't know what the place looked like from inside. I only read about it in the newspaper." When asked what ought to be done with the area, he says he thinks it would be nice if animals would be brought there so the place could be made into a safari-like attraction. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has already discussed various plans for the evacuated settlements. A wealthy Japanese investor proposed that Kadim be turned into an international youth village; Palestinian industrialists would like to build factories there. These are nice ideas, but they won't be executed any time soon. For now, the Palestinians will have to suffice with using the place as a picnic area. The area in which the evacuated settlements are located is defined as Area C (Palestinian territory under Israeli control), and Israel does not permit the PA to build on the land. Last week, settlers tried to enter the military base in Beit Sahur and the IDF restricted entry there by the Palestinian residents. Less than a five-minute drive from Kadim are the remnants of the settlement of Ganim, but there are no visitors there, and the place looks more like an archaeological site. Few Palestinians dare to go to the other two settlements that were evacuated, Homesh and Sa-Nur, to which settlers continue to return at times, still getting into clashes with the army. Evacuated army bases in the northern West Bank have also been given new uses. Residents of the villages of Sa-Nur and Jab'a, the owners of the lands upon which the Sa-Nur Paratroops base once stood, have gone back to working a large part of the lands. On the site of a smaller base, near the town of Qabatiyah, the Palestinian landowner has set up a small factory for making blocks used in construction. The Israeli prison in the Al-Far'a refugee camp in the Jordan Rift Valley - where Palestinians claim they were once tortured - has been transformed into a community center by the Palestinian Youth Ministry, and a military post in the village of Jabal Tawil, in the Ramallah area, is now a school serving the local residents. Donald Trump in Gaza Before the disengagement, various plans were formulated concerning the future use of the settlers' houses in the Gaza Strip, but these plans were shelved when Israel decided to raze the buildings there. Mohammed Ali Al-Abbar, a real-estate tycoon from Dubai, had actually offered to buy them from Israel in order to build resorts, and even held a brief meeting with then prime minister Ariel Sharon about this. Al-Abar, who's currently playing the Donald Trump role in an Arab version of "The Apprentice" television program, reportedly offered $56 million for the settlement buildings. Most of the evacuated communities in Gaza are completely empty, while others have been turned into Hamas military camps, which most residents do not enter. One person who visited Gaza last week says that the Netzarim settlement, for example, has been completely wiped off the face of the earth and the area where it stood is now desolate. Aside from the empty streets and hothouses, he said, nothing is left. Not even the rubble of the houses. Where it is still possible to see remnants of the Israeli presence in Gaza is at sea: The breakwater opposite Netzarim was built with bits and pieces of the demolished buildings from the settlements. In the southern Gaza Strip, the situation is slightly different: Palestinian merchants are using the Kfar Darom area as a market; the Rafiah Yam settlement in the Katif Bloc is being used by Palestinian fishermen; and open areas between the settlements have been turned into Hamas military compounds, which most residents of the Strip do not enter either. Right after the evacuation, throngs of Palestinians entered the settlements and plundered and vandalized the remaining buildings - including the synagogue in Kfar Darom. The buildings in the Neve Dekalim settlement, which was the largest in the Katif Bloc, were mostly left without windows and doors. Two structures that remained were put to use, however: The settlement's local council building and school have been converted into premises for Al-Aqsa University, which was renovated and is operated by the PA. A mosque has been built nearby and Hamas guards are posted at the entrance to the campus to ensure that students do not bring in any weapons. Riyad Bazran, a lecturer of Arabic at Al-Aqsa, says in a telephone interview that he is not bothered by the fact that he is teaching in buildings that were designed and used by settlers (albeit built by Palestinians): "The most important thing is that the land is ours and we don't feel any problem returning to our land and using our buildings," he says. The new campus is indeed a significant improvement for this university, which charges relatively low tuition and attracts a large number of poor students from the southern part of the Gaza Strip. Fida Kishta, a resident of the southern Gaza Strip who began studying French at the university after the new buildings were opened, is less sanguine about the campus' past: "When I came to the university for the first time, I cried at the thought of how different [the settlers'] lives were from ours; that they had a university where they could study in safety. It was a good feeling, but it was hard for me to believe that it was happening." Two architects, Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, have been involved in a project aimed at designing new uses for abandoned sites. He is an Italian from Venice and she is a Palestinian from Beit Sahur; they met while studying in Italy and got married six years ago. Together with Israeli architect and theoretician Eyal Weizman, they established an office in Beit Sahur that prepares plans for the evacuated sites, and for those that may be evacuated in the future. A San Diego foundation for art and architectural planning is funding their project, which also involves young interns from around the world. Petti, Hilal and their guests stay in an impressive and well-designed three-story building. On the first floor, where the offices are located, four young interns are hard at work on their laptops. On the walls are regular and aerial photographs of sites in the territories, including the evacuated camp near Beit Sahur, which they can also see from the window, as well as of other places whose evacuation is not even on the distant horizon yet, such as the Psagot settlement near Ramallah. Hilal and Petti hold frequent meetings with residents living in proximity to the settlements and army camps, and also with representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). They've also interviewed settlers who told them how they would like the places they lived to be used. "When we started talking to Palestinians about the possibility of thinking of these places as belonging to them, many people were against it," says Hilal. "They said the people would never be evacuated from there. But then you talk with them about Gaza, show them that it's already happened, and they understand that it can happen for them, too, that it's not a utopia. We're interested in exactly this moment, in the smile that spreads across their face when they realize that it may really be theirs one day." Petti cites Gaza as a case where the Palestinians did not think in advance of what to do with evacuated areas. "We're starting with a plan at the point where they failed in Gaza," he explains. "No one was ready for it, no one thought about how to change the area. So why not think about how to do it in a positive way? Why not think about new uses before everything falls apart?" 'Love and hate' Petti and his co-workers are opposed to the settlement buildings being used in the same way as they were in the past, and do not want to see families moving into the settlers' houses. At the same time, they're not ruling out other approaches. "The first reaction we hear from Palestinians when you ask them what should be done with the settlements is: 'destroy everything,'" says Petti. "They tell us: I don't want to see anything left. I want a tabula rasa. I want to be done with it completely." Petti and Weizman have heard the same thing from settlers in Psagot, when asked how they would want their houses to be used should they be evacuated. But when one takes a more in-depth look at the demolition idea, Petti explains, certain problems arise. "People ask what should be done with the waste, how the land should be used afterward." Others have more principled concerns: "They tell us that they don't want to forget the occupation, that something has to be left on the ground." At the same time, Petti says he worries that the evacuated settlements which are privatized may become exclusive neighborhoods for the Palestinian elite. This creates a dual drama: "On the one hand, Palestinians ask how refugees could live in the settlements, but there's also the possibility that settlers will come and ask: 'Why shouldn't we return to our homes?'" The alternative proposed by Petti, Hilal and Weizman to the possibilities of total demolition or re-usage for the same purpose is subverting the original usage of the buildings. "In other words, finding ways in which the familiar can be made unfamiliar, changing the ideology by altering its meaning," says Weizman, who adds that sometimes the slightest changes can radically alter the meaning of a space. Naturally, the influence of the planners on privately owned Palestinian land is limited. Therefore, the firm of Petti, Hilal and Weizman is concentrating on areas that were also public before they were appropriated. They're examining different ways in which the planning of the settlements may be changed, without destroying them. One concept the trio has developed is called "unearthing." Petti: "We thought that the first thing that has to be done is to raze the surface to a depth of a few centimeters. Not the houses, which we want to leave, but the roads and fences. If the Palestinian road system is used, then there's no need for the bypass roads and the security roads; there is pedestrian access from place to place. When you start from a new surface, it's possible to imagine a new life." Indeed Hilal and Petti emphasize the importance of the moment of the Palestinians' entry into an evacuated area. "You see the feeling on their face," he notes. "It's an almost revolutionary moment in which violence is necessary. Violence against the space - against the buildings, against the architecture that was designed to kill. They feel a kind of victory. Many Palestinians have not gotten over their fears of the Israeli army bases and settlements." One Beit Sahur resident told him that he's still afraid to enter the base from which the IDF fired on his home. Hilal says that the first time she came to the camp, it was hard for her to remain indifferent. "I had to pinch myself to tell myself I was really there. This was the place from where the bright lights would shine into the city at night, and you feel from afar that it's a dangerous place because of its very proximity. The moment of entering the camp and the anger about it is important to us, it's part of our work. We're not pure planners thinking only about the most correct way to use the space. We're trying to think about the most just way. It's a process of justice and that's why it's called decolonialization." She was also impressed by the fresh vantage point that the camp offered of the town: "When I went there with Alessandro and Eyal and my daughter Tala, she said to me: 'Mom, we're at the sea,' because for her, everything that's outside of Bethlehem is sea. She thought it was a place that's outside of Bethlehem and I had a similar feeling. Inside the city, there's claustrophobia, lots of buildings and asphalt. You don't have any kind of panoramic view. [But when] you see the city there, from outside, you can see that Bethlehem is actually really pretty." The Palestinians' attitude toward the settlers' houses, notes Petti, is more complex than it appears. Many Palestinians are impressed by the construction in the settlements and attempt to imitate it when they build their own houses. "It's a complicated relationship. There are Palestinians who think that this is modernity, that this is the modern life. People who can afford it think that this is how they would like to live." When one of Hilal and Petti's students from Bir Zeit interviewed the Palestinian laborers who built Psagot, one of them said he thought there was no reason the Palestinians shouldn't live in these houses if they were ever evacuated, since, "We built these houses, why should we destroy them? We have a right to use them." "You always designate a special place for the enemy," explains Hilal as she looks out on the Har Homa settlement from the roof of her house. "You love and hate these places at the same time. I clearly remember this place and can remember the smallest details about it, because it was one of the nicest places in our area. Now it's a pile of rocks. I can't find anything nice in it."W Bookmark to del.icio.us   A staunch ally Obama to AIPAC: I'll do everything to prevent Iran from obtaining nukes. Pro-Israel Nazis German group condemns anti-Semitism, says Holocaust 'unjustifiable.'

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