Good. Welcome, everybody. Good afternoon.
Thank you. I am delighted to present the speaker today, Professor Jacobi, who is Professor of Development Planning at UCL.
His research focuses on post-colonial architecture, planning and development in Israel, Palestine, the Middle East and Africa.
Spatial justice and urban health, contested urbanism,
transnational migration and informality are in the core of his research and consultancy work, teaching and activism.
He is currently studying the ways in which ideology, planning and health are entangled.
And the title of his talk Today's Israel Africa. Identity, Culture and Politics.
Professor Jacobi, welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you for the invitation and thank you for coming here.
My presentation today is very much based on my latest book that was published two years ago.
But, you know, I prepared myself for this presentation.
And luckily there are enough political events in Israel that are very much linked to what I'm going to discuss today.
So let me see if it works.
Okay. On January 2011,
the Israeli Knesset Committee for Immigration held a special meeting to discuss the impact of immigration on Israel demographic balance.
The discussion revolved around the origins of immigrants who had arrived to Israel over the past decade.
One of the speakers warned the committee members of the danger of losing control over
Israeli demography in view of the arrival of asylum seekers from various african countries.
In a quote. Oh, you know, i'll cut that paragraph.
Let me just say that right now there are 35,000 african migrants.
They make a special. They take a special taxi to El-Arish and hire a guy to the Israeli border.
Each of them pulls pulls out a cell phone to make two calls, first to their contacts in north Tel Aviv and secondly to their friends in Somalia.
This statement not only reveals the rationalising discourse that was developed in Israel in relation to the flow of African asylum seekers.
But also unexpectedly it exposes the deny geography of Israel, which borders not only with Middle Eastern countries but also with Africa.
Israel's denied geography is denied the geography as geographies are at the core of my talk today.
I intend to demonstrate that Israeli space is charged with various dimensions of Africa and Israel, as well as Israel in Africa.
However, in spite of the analogies between the two territories, the geopolitical discourse ignores the linkages.
Therefore, my main goal is to treat Africa as a conceptualising principle underlying a new interpretation of the interrelations between space,
culture and society in Israel. A fresh look at the known cartography reveals an existing land bridge between Israel and Egypt via the Sinai Peninsula,
which serves as the gateway to Africa. This passage between Israel and Africa is denied as part of the imaginative geography of Israel.
As a villa in the jungle, a well-known Hebrew expression that encapsulates the Israeli construction of identity and sense of place as being white,
European like, democratic and enlightened.
A villa that dominates a white and modern territory surrounded by walls and borders.
My attempt is to focus on this bridge as a cultural,
political and spatial intersection in which Africa's presence is significant to the Israeli context.
I would like to emphasise two main claims.
First, that Africa was and still is an ingredient of the constant reshaping of Israel self-identity as Decolonised Western project.
Secondly, both the Israel in Africa and Africa.
In Israel, perspectives are used as instruments for the demarcation of Israel's ethnic boundaries and
for the reproduction of hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion whitening and likening.
The ambivalent relationship between Israel and Africa encompasses various practices that it will discuss today, including planning,
architectural architecture, pilgrimage, settlement demarcation and fortification of geopolitical, racial and identity related boundaries.
Africa is present in Israel in its history, demography and geography.
One of the intersections that brought the Zionist project in Africa together was the plan to establish a Jewish colony in East Africa,
otherwise known as the Uganda Plan. While never realised the plan offered Africa as an alternative to Zion initially
from territorial point of view and later as a symbolically unthinkable option.
Likewise, it is agreed that the East Africa plan was used as a tactical bargaining means or another
step in failed or herzl's diplomatic efforts to legitimise the idea of Jewish nationalism.
The East Africa proposal, as phrased and designed by Lord Chamberlain,
was based on colonial perception and cultural binaries that conjoined the Jews with the European
colonisers who settlement in Africa would facilitate the region's colonisation by white people.
Many of the discussions within the Zionist movement concerning this plan accentuated the integral inclusion of the Jews within Western Europe,
thus enhancing the binary division between black Africa and white Jews.
Yet this did not prevent an antisemitic reaction within Britain and among the white
settlers in East Africa who objected to the Uganda plan since Jews were ranked as black.
The white settlers of East Africa excelled in cultivating dramatic images of a
forthcoming Jewish invasion that would transform the region into a new Jewish ghetto.
Nevertheless, the refugee colonialism strived to establish a state in a reverse mode while imperialist states established colonies,
the Jewish colonies established a state, as Alan noted.
The plan emphasised the migration geopolitics that was the core of the Uganda debate,
combining a people without land, as Zheng will, Zheng will put it, only this time with a continent without people.
After Uganda, Zionists would never again pursue philanthropic goals in general and vacant African territories in particular East Africa.
Rather than being an actual plan, was the junction of ideas and identity formulations and would continue to be so after the
establishment of the State of Israel during the sixties and the beginning of the seventies.
Israel and Africa initiated various economic partnerships, such as the trade of arms, logistic and military equipment.
African states became major consumers of Israeli weaponry industry.
Israel trained African soldiers and took part in the Cold War by assisting in the creation of intelligence networks.
In the new in the post-colonial African states.
I would suggest that these issues will be viewed from a different perspective.
Striving to look. Beyond the instrumental logic of Israeli involvement in Africa,
mainly the effort to create the barrier between and the new African countries, states and the Arab world.
This is the main explanation that you find in the literature about why Israel was intervening or extensively intervening in Africa in the sixties.
One of the main discourses concerning Israeli involvement in Africa during that
period is the common fate of the exiled Jewish people returning to its land.
Recently relieved of the colonial burden, the British mandate with the Decolonised African African people.
This was the main discourse that was very much discussed based on extensive study of documents.
I suggest that studies of Israel Africa relations totally ignore the significance of the of Israeli
involvement in Africa in the formation of Israel's only identity as a western modern white state.
From an analysis of the documents. I propose that the myth of vacant space that Africa embodied as a reflection of
aspirations became a guiding principle in the course of realising the Zionist utopia.
Israel's spatial model was formulated by architects of the Echelon Alyosha
Jones masterplan that shaped the Israeli a new colonial geographies after 48.
The success of the Zionist Territorial Territory Realisation Project was one of
the main catalysts of Israel Africa relations during the sixties and seventies.
During this period,
Israel exported to Decolonised African countries models that it used to effectively facilitate the settlement process within Israel,
such as the kibbutz and the natural outposts. Knuckles knuckle our semi military agricultural settlements.
I will not be able to go into details now, but while doing a research in the Israel State Archive,
I came across a collection of photos that depicted African youth in one of the though kibbutz
agricultural farms that were established in various African countries during the six years.
That was part of the development aid that Israel exported to Africa.
Surprisingly, I seem to recognise in the photos familiar images from my own family album,
the pioneer posture of youngsters with harvested fields in the background,
the soldierly appearance of African national recruits, Israeli agriculture guides, visiting Africa for African farmers, etc., etc.
One of the photos that you can see behind me that drew my attention.
Attention featured a group of African women sitting by tables carrying swing machines.
The stands, the perspective, the objects and the educational message of the photo strongly resemble those of my family album.
Shortly afterward, I skin a skin sorry I skin through my parents album,
containing photos taken during the first two decades that followed their immigration to Israel.
The album was packed full of pioneering photos youth dressed in uniform, dancing in the fields,
dark skinned boys on the Sea of Galilee, shore and group of girls trekking in the Galilee.
Suddenly I found the familiar photo that resembled the one from the Israeli State Archive.
The photo depicting girls of a Latino of from Iraq, girls who emigrated from Iraq,
learning to sue as part of the widening process that they had to undergo in order to become Zionist, modern and productive women.
Yet it was not just the visual similarity,
but mainly the political and cultural identical ness of the two photos one taken in the
DeSoto in 1972 and the other in Kibbutz Sol in the north of Israel two decades earlier.
That made me realise the central issue of cultural aspects of the establishment and stabilisation of Israel.
Africa relations, geostrategic considerations taking part in the Cold War and making economical profits were
not the only factors that tied Israel and African countries together during the sixties,
but also and the logical process of nationalism that produced.
Knowledge and special and speciality is based on the motivation to generate a modern national territory, identity and society.
Israel, as an architectural laboratory, provided the basis for the construction of residential, public and cultural buildings.
For immigrants, immigrant communities served as a platform for Israeli architects and planners to perform considerable work in African countries.
I'm talking about hundreds of architectural planning and development project projects.
I suggest that the expertise of Israeli architects who worked in Africa during the sixties and seventies stemmed from wider
colonial knowledge networks and at the same time served as an additional tool to the imagination of African geography,
as well as the solidification of moral justification for intervening in African state space.
As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, the ideological dimension of planning and construction in Africa and use the example,
and I would like to use the example of Lebanon and Israel in construction and civil engineering
company that illustrates how its projects in Africa were not merely economically pragmatic,
but also a means of implementing Israel's foreign policy.
Subsequently, Israeli architects whose professional biographies demonstrate my claim that Israeli
architectural knowledge in Africa intervened with wide networks of colonial planning,
knowledge, division or variation.
I mentioned in before the dominant architect during the first decade of the
state of Israel was not only materialised but also gained extensive exposure.
Sharon's Nigerian project the planning of if a university here I mean you can see the university
campus address two interrelated issues concerning the migration of colonial architectural knowledge.
First, Sharon's planning methodology, mainly the utilisation of a regional survey,
a detailed document that examined the climate, the topography, the everyday life of the indigenous population.
You can see, you know, one page from his survey here. And the infrastructure, sorry, and the indigenous population.
Population. Second, Sharon's Climatic Overview.
We was obsessed with the issue of climate. Being aware, being part of the way in which modern modern school of architecture referred to climate.
It was not just a problematic ingredient in his planning,
but also an instrument of a hierarchical categorisation of geography, culture and development.
One another example The May Brothers had also viewed Africa as a planning and architectural arena.
Their intensive involvement, mainly in the field of construction, started in 59.
Their work coincided with Israel's political interests in the continent and was supported by the Minister of Finance,
Livia Eshkol and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Golda meir.
This support was not merely symbolic or political.
The state of Israel financially guaranteed the mayor's investment in Ivory Coast and even granted them direct loans.
The brothers were private entrepreneurs,
and this was a very interesting fact to discover that the state of Israel gave loans to a private interpreter there.
They were not even Israelis. Okay. In this context, the work of Tommy Leiter's, the architect,
was involved in the design of overy of the Autoliv while in Cote d'Ivoire, which you can see here is very, very interesting.
In my view, Leiter's Golf was starting at the AA, the Architecture Association School here in London, in London.
And he was married into the mayor family and collaborated with them in Ivory Coast.
What is very interesting is that Tommy, largest of all, studying in the AA, you know, the tropical architecture.
And then he moved to work in Ivory Coast and then he moved back to Israel.
There is a clear link between the state's interest and private capital interests,
as well as the way in which the the exportation of expertise is driven by a variety of economic,
national security and identity related interest and resulted in the development of white tourism in Ivory Coast.
In light of the case, the architect who planned the leave while the migration of architectural knowledge
from London via Africa eventually landed in Israel in the early seventies,
when Formulators exported his learning experience and ideas to another unexplored land,
the occupied territories where he planned Ma'aleh Adumim as well as some other settlements.
I will not go into details, but it was very interesting to interview Tommy Leiter's of about the similarities in the way
in which his experience in Africa was relevant to planning new settlements in the West Bank.
I'm just going to be okay.
It seems that the presence of black community in Israeli space became significant in the 1980s due to immigration from Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian community in Israel numbers around 200,000 people,
most of whom were born in Ethiopia, and their immigration to Israel was initiated by the state.
Much has been written about the discrimination and racism against Ethiopian immigrants because of their skin colour.
On the part of both the establishment and the public discourse, the blood, purity,
hygiene and degree of Jewishness were and still are points of contention concerning
the simultaneous exclusion from and inclusion in the Israeli ethno national project.
This situation is reflected in the socioeconomic profile of the Ethiopian community in Israel,
70% of which are classified as being below the poverty line.
And only 50% of Ethiopian children attend kindergarten, as opposed to 95% of the general population.
The Ethiopian community is concentrated in peripheral cities, both in Israel as a whole and in the Tel Aviv metropolis.
These data are not coincidental. They are the consequence of a planning policy that serves as a mechanism of social control,
as attested by the master plan for the absorption of Ethiopian Jews,
which restricts mortgage loans to those Ethiopians who choose to settle in specific locations.
Furthermore, in 2010, certain streets in several cities were declared and they, quote, not open to grant recipients.
In order to prevent that European Jews from settling there.
I would like to emphasise the manipulative exploitation of the segregation process involving the Ethiopian population in Israel.
The first of these is the use of an institutional residential policy that aims to direct Ethiopians immigrants to frontier neighbourhoods.
Some, such as the ones that accommodate Arab residents in order to control the demographic Jewish, are balanced.
One example is the Multiscale neighbourhood in Lod,
a Jewish Arab mixed city which was established as a Jewish neighbourhood and during the last decade has gradually accumulated an Arab majority.
The development is called a neighbourhood. The Ethiopian Jewish residents who comprise comprise 29% of the neighbourhood's population.
I think today it's much more. Were intentionally settled there by the authorities in order to do this the neighbourhood.
Thus Ethiopian immigrants eventually found themselves widening the neighbourhood on one end and blackening the city on the other.
A second in simultaneous motivations was the public clamour for the dispersion of
Ethiopian Jews in order to prevent the creation of a racial and class oriented ghetto,
such as the quiet neighbourhood in the Harvard, also known as Harlem in the Israeli public discourse.
Ethiopian immigrants as the representatives of Africa and Israel serve as serve as privileged subjects for sociological,
political and spatial research.
However, the fact that North African immigrants arrived to Israel as early as the fifties is commonly ignored in this context.
The literature and discourse regarding North African immigrants often associate them with other mizrahim,
Orientals, Jews, and with the experience of being an Oriental Jew,
albeit with a special connection with North Africa as a distinct cultural unit during the period of Israel's involvement in Africa, North Africa.
And it was exactly the same years that North Africa became one of the most significant sources of immigration to Israel.
But while Israel in Africa realised its policy and familiarised the Israeli public with the continent,
North Africa and Israel became a demographic fact that required special treatment.
North African immigration to Israel as a material culture and social fabric was subjected to amendment by means of spatial policy,
among other measures.
The moral geography of Africa in Israel was required through the new Zionist space to present a normative, well organised daily life.
There was an attempt to disconnect from North Africa to turn its back on it and at the same time to transform the other into one of us.
Thus, Africa or North Africa became a source of demographic supply which was supposed to exclude the backward diaspora like whom on the one hand,
and create a new national and personal home. On the other.
The discussion on Israel's black geographies has gained momentum in the early nineties,
when African migrants workers became a daily element in the creation of an informal space in Tel Aviv.
This includes not only the mere presence of African migrant workers, but also the economical, cultural and social exchange.
The presence produces small businesses, religious and cultural institutions and community organisations.
Glitterball will be here in a few weeks time. All next week already discusses the diaspora nature of the existence of African migrant workers,
exposes the creation of hidden sites in Tel Aviv, follows the mobility of the black foreigner around the city and the metropolis.
Importantly, Sabar demonstrates through their biographies the way African migrant workers attempt to
construct the common destiny and the common experience of the African and Jewish diaspora.
This is a theme that was very much presence among the African workers, African asylum seekers who arrived to Israel in recent years.
In recent years mark a turn in the political discourse which dragged between and it was centric ideology and a commitment to universal human rights.
As I discussed elsewhere, there were two main interrelated courses of Africa and Israel in this case.
The first refers to the shifts in the Israeli authorities policy regarding African asylum seekers.
So regarding African asylum seekers.
A policy that condones surveillance practices, deportation, confinement and dispersion as a means of intimidation.
And the non policy of abandonment.
Abandonment along with a violation of the State's commitment to assist asylum seekers under the obligation of international treaties.
The second focuses on the way in which on the way, sorry, this policy is linked to the geographical imagination of Africa by Israel,
which serves as the foundation to the racialisation of Israeli urban space.
Indeed, the reimagination. Of the myth of the lodge of the mythological African jungle that I've mentioned
at the beginning is revived in the Israeli urban space among formal ballrooms,
transformed into ad hoc churches. Convince dormitories provided by refugee aid organisations,
parks that served as asylum seekers home as well as small businesses run by refugee refugees.
That compromise that that comprise a social network of Africa.
In Israel, the arrival of asylum seekers to Israel via the Egyptian border everyday redirects the discussion to the geo political level in which the
villa in the jungle is required to fortify and maintain the border in order to maintain to maintain the separation between here and there.
The initiative and the discourse about the fortified border are by no means coincidental.
Discursive.
It is linked to technologies used by Israel over the past few years in order to control the border, namely the demand to build an intelligent fence.
As you can see here between Israel and Egypt is inseparable from our geopolitically significant event,
which which took place during the summer of 2002.
The first is the establishment of the Immigration Administration that aims to prevent
foreign workers from entering Israel and to deport those who work without permit.
The second is the construction of the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank.
The demographic and geopolitical fortification of Israel provides the basis for a lively
discussion on the resemblance and the differences between Israel and South Africa.
This brings to mind one of the most controversial questions regarding politics and space in Israel.
Is Israel marching towards an apartheid policy? This continuous debate also echoes the shifts in the relation between Israel and
South Africa from the continent condemnation of the South African apartheid regime.
When Israel strengthened its ties with other African countries until the cooperation with the apartheid regime,
after the 1973 war, when most African countries have their relations with Israel severe or severe, their relations with Israel,
the way Israel Africa relations have come full circle and are currently founded on a syntheses of agricultural aid in arms trade,
which constitute a major part of the Israeli experience as an even golden core.
Indeed, its existence is due to three main interrelated reasons.
The first is Israel a hyper militaristic character.
The second is the neoliberal agenda that opens channels to promoting the interest of private capital.
And the third is the Israeli self-perception and reputation of being a democracy that operates in accordance with moral ethics.
These three reasons have turned the Israeli experience into the new object of desire for African countries.
As you can see here now, you know, the very well-covered visit of the previous minister of foreign affairs of Lieberman in Africa.
It was exposed very much in the Israeli media. But basically, if you look at the people who accompanied him,
these were representatives of Israeli companies that produce, you know, different military technologies, etc., etc.
So these three reasons have turned the Israeli experience into the new object of desire for African countries,
and they help create an economic bridge encouraged by Israeli foreign policy on the one hand, and the interest of private capital on the other.
And I think this is a very interesting marriage, if you will, and between private interest and state interest.
Today I try to demonstrate how the Israeli and Israeli project, rooted within a specific settler context that does not fit into the common historical,
political and geographical frameworks is not only an inner mechanism of territoriality.
Rather, it is a central component in the design of moral geography that shapes its foreign policies.
You can see how the relation between what happened within Israel after 48 was very
valuable to its relations with Africa after the new African state in the sixties.
Here, the Israeli project of internal geopolitical whitening,
i.e. modernisation Indonesian is the platform for its external whitening in the international sphere,
i.e. Israel as a Western giver motivated by moral mission of aid.
The presence of Africa in Israel is further accentuated in the case of African asylum seekers who have immigrated to Israel during the last few years.
Here I suggest that the function of the geopolitical border coincides with the body of knowledge that highlights the
centrality of the discourses and practices aimed at controlling contact between the black body and the white body,
as well as rationalising commercialisation of minority.
It is clearly reflected in the way in which racialisation breaches for the purification of the
social body and the protection of the collective identity against any external penetration.
Through this perspective one,
they point to other patterns of racism that are formatted and organised around social sociological signifier such as poverty,
gender and illegality, which is very relevant to the African asylum seekers that replace biological markings, namely the colour of the skin.
Today also highlighted the actual and the analogical link between Africa and Israel,
treating Africa as a geopolitical and cultural concept which allows a renewed observation of territory
and identity in Israel as a demonstrated familiar spatial in social categories such as Muslim refugees,
natural outposts, Israeli architecture, development aid or modern space are constructed here by means of or in contrast
to their utilising moral discourse and expert practices invested in knowledge,
power, relationship relations.
Despite this, despite cases which demonstrate the relevance of the discussion on Africa, expressions like this is not Africa.
This is from a demonstration Africa location. This is the name of my book in Hebrew to Africa.
So the expression like this is not Africa are routinely articulated in Hebrew when the Speaker wishes to position
Israel on the Western progressive and white section of the whole of the world geopolitical and cognitive map.
This is not. Africa epitomises the moral geography of Israel in Africa.
Israel is here while Africa is there.
The boundary between here and Africa is negatively marked by not the negation of the black, the underdeveloped who validates here by way of mirroring.
Thank you. You just.