Date of Incident
Publication Date
Commissioned By
- Michael Sfard Law Office
Additional Funding
Collaborators
- Michael Sfard Law Office
The Palestinian village of Battir lies south of Jerusalem, close to the 1949 ‘Green Line’ which established the original borders of the state of Israel. Farmers in Battir have long cultivated an ancient terraced landscape, including a unique network of open irrigation channels dating back to the Roman era. The Battir hillsides, only a kilometre-and-a-half long, are a fragile garden in an otherwise torn landscape.
In June 2014, UNESCO—the first UN body to recognise Palestine as a member state—placed Battir on its list of World Heritage sites. The decision was implemented by an emergency process, after UNESCO found that ‘the landscape had become vulnerable under the impact of socio-cultural and geopolitical transformations’—referring to Israeli plans to erect a wall through the region. Forensic Architecture was approached by human rights lawyer Michael Sfard to undertake a survey of the area and to model the impact that the proposed wall would have on the locality.
(Sfard had earlier, in 2012, brought a petition against the construction of the wall in Battir to the Israeli High Court on behalf of Friends of the Earth Middle East, now EcoPeace Middle East.)
In January 2015, following a three-year legal battle, the Israeli High Court ruled against the state, and prohibited the construction of the wall anywhere within the area surrounding Battir. Previous petitions against the wall had only ever achieved alterations to its path—never a permanent injunction against construction.
Disrupting the politics of separation in one place could help to challenge it elsewhere, or indeed to challenge the very principle of separation altogether. If it is possible to avoid building the Wall on this site, why not everywhere? Is Palestine not in its entirety an environment endowed with cultural heritage and delicate fragile beauty?
Through this case, we learned that the common environment might be a good place from which to build a politics of sharing.
Methodology
Methodology
Sfard’s was the first petition against the wall that was not pursued on the basis of human rights—which had previously only resulted in negotiations between lawyers and the military over the ‘least invasive’ route of the wall—but rather on the basis of environmental rights. Paradoxically, the human rights of the villagers, and their political struggle against the wall, were best served by bypassing human rights and claiming the rights of the environment.
This legal strategy created an unusual coalition of Palestinian villagers, environmental NGOs, archaeologists, and even some Jewish settlers. Those settlers supported UNESCO’s determination regarding the site’s heritage value, and objected to the wall due to the nearby presence of an ancient biblical ruin, where a celebrated and partially successful Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire was believed to have taken place.
In our first case as Forensic Architecture, we contributed models of the landscape made from satellite images and on-the-ground measurement, and created both static and dynamic views of the landscape.