Censorship or Caution? The ACSA's Gaza Journal Controversy Exposes a Field at War With Itself

Adobe Stock Images Satellite view of Gaza, Palestine.

Until now, I have avoided writing about the relationship between the conflict in Palestine in relationship to architecture. The recent battle at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), which has prospectively caved to what it saw as possible legal problems by canceling the planning of an issue of its well-respected Journal of Architecture Education (JAE), leading to the resignation of the Journal’s Board and other conflicts, brings the issue into the realm of this discipline.

The problem is that it is difficult to find something or someone to support here. The language and actions of the ACSA leadership and Board, but also of some of those seeking to open the debate in architecture about the situation in Palestine, has been, in my opinion, unproductive and reprehensible, though, given realities on the ground and in politics, understandable.

That lack of reason and measured debate is rooted in the issue. On the one hand there is a state that, until now, has been a paragon of liberal values that has sustained itself by practices against both some of its own citizens and former citizens, now excluded neighbors, which, if they do not constitute apartheid and genocide, certainly appear to me to come close. The State of Israel is doing this while supposedly operating in my name, as I am Jewish.

On the other hand, there are organizations that claim to speak for Palestinians that are corrupt, riven with religious extremism that puts even Trump’s most extreme supporters to shame, and exclusionary of who I am as a gay man. Both sides have conducted horrid acts, although Israel, as the more powerful state, “wins” only in terms of quantity of blood on its hands.

In-between is not just a society where paranoia rules (a harbinger of what is to come in this country?), but also a landscape devastated by all this violence, by decades of extractive agricultural policies and weaponized sprawl, and thus by the way this conflict has played out in urban and land policies.

It is in the latter arena that the conflict has for quite some time now been part of discussions in the field of architecture and urban planning. Here it is clear that Israel is pursuing strategies that are bad and even evil on many different levels. We can see that more clearly because this State has the power to effect its policies on the land, while Palestinians on the whole do not.

The illegal settlements, which are all eventually legalized, are not only fortresses of colonization and exclusion, but also extreme forms of sprawl destructive of fragile landscapes. The uprooting of the local inhabitants, often with violence either sanctioned or perpetrated by the State, is matched by the destruction of local architecture and its embedded traditions and treasures.

All of this has been occurring, of course, since long before the destruction of Gaza, which calls to mind the results of both Nazi and Allied bombings on cities such as Rotterdam and Warsaw during the Second World War. And then there is, of course, the erection of barriers that have become the model for Trump’s border wall. Taken together, these policies and actions constitute one of the clearest examples I know of spatial practice that realizes exclusion and environmental and social destruction.

On the other hand, there is not much Palestinian organizations have been able to do beyond dig tunnels, create camps whose temporary nature is belied by the amount of time many of them have survived because they have to, and embed themselves in the built structure in such a manner that they endanger civilians at a large scale. The violence organizations such as Hammas has not only unleashed, but also caused to happen through their actions is disgusting, criminal, and deeply disturbing because of its nature and effect.

Architecture and specifically architecture schools need to study what is going on there and develop a stance about the situation. They need to understand what Israelis are doing and how Palestinians are reacting and vice versa because of the implications the results have for the development of architecture and urban practices that can be applied elsewhere. Certainly, many architecture programs have done so until now, but engaging in such research and analysis is becoming increasingly difficult, as the cancellation of the proposed scholarly publication by the ACSA of some of this work makes clear.

Beyond that work, the issue is whether schools, faculty, students, or professionals should take a stance. That is, I believe, a question that is up to every person as a human being and a citizen.

On an institutional level, it should therefore be the result of collective debate that could result in shared opinion clearly expressed. I fear, however, that the conflict under discussion here is so deep, defined by paranoia and prejudice and, as I note above, with so little good to hang onto, that such an outcome is, in most cases, impossible.

What schools and, as a derivative, the organizations that look out for their interests, should do is to allow the debate to happen. What is most frightening about how the ACSA has acted is that it shows how scared we now all are of a government run rampant.

It is remarkable that even architecture education, which historically and ironically has been so insignificant as to escape the scrutiny that other fields have faced, is now confronted with having to making wholly unpalatable choices. I believe the organization made the wrong one, but I also understand that they felt that the current political and legal reality made them feel their course of action was one of essential self-preservation.

Resistance is necessary because I fear that we are headed to fascism in this country and in Israel—and in many other countries as well, and I am not sure how much longer I will be able to stay here. Given the futility of counter actions until now, I also feel that I live increasingly in a nostalgia, as I see so little hope for resistance.

As a young man I visited several of the quasi-utopian communities called kibbutzim that were founded by Jewish settlers in the middle of the 20^th century. They ranged from ones that were older and more bourgeois, to rough shacks near the Golan Heights where young immigrants discussed politics all night long.

Each of them represented a hopeful idea about a new kind of society made real in buildings and planning. At the time, the State of Israel seemed to me a more hopeful place that could one day come to terms with the violence and exclusion that had allowed it to emerge, atone for those acts, and welcome all to share the development of the kind of society it claimed to want to be and, again until recently, largely was for its Jewish inhabitants. It was thrilling to see what was possible, even if the Uzis were already everywhere.

I realize now that the kibbutz movement was a desert mirage. In learning from the evil urbanism and architecture that Israel is now perpetrating and that is echoing in this country, however, we should also learn from that dream, figuring out if it was so flawed in its foundations as to be merely a cautionary tale, or whether we can find within it a model of resistance and hope in this time of nightfall in America and beyond.

The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.