Dalieh Civil Campaign’s Open Competition: Background Report

Dalieh Civil Campaign’s Open Competition: Background Report

Dalieh Civil Campaign’s Open Competition: Background Report

By : The Civil Campaign to Preserve the Dalieh of Beirut

The Civil Campaign to Protect the Dalieh of Raoucheh authored a competition brief to guide all participants to the competition in elaborating and proposing their entries. It is available in English and Arabic on the Campaign’s website.

In addition, the Civil Campaign authored a rich background report providing text, narratives, images, testimonies, analytical maps, and legal references about the site. It includes information about the Civil Campaign beginnings, progressive growth, and timeline of actions to date. The report comprises maps and legal documents about the zoning laws governing the Dalieh site, in addition to regulations that altered its use. It has a rich spatial and historical analysis of the socio-cultural practices within Dalieh, in relation to the urbanization of Beirut, and representations related to the place—all mapped. It includes geomorphological, biodiversity and archeology maps, and images that demonstrate the ecological and historical wealth of the site. It contains a section analyzing the planning institutions, and the governance structure overseeing the site. The full report can be downloaded here.

It is worth noting that this report formed the basis of an application by the Civil Campaign to place Dalieh on the 2016 list of endangered sites identified by the World Monuments Watch, a component of the World Monument Fund (WMF)--a private, international, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of the world’s architectural legacy and cultural and natural heritage through calling international and local attention to its importance. On 15 October 2015, the WMF announced that Dalieh had been selected as part of this list—a major achievement for the coalition, which celebrated the news through the publication of this video below, and a press conference from which we cite this excerpt. 
 

 

The successful listing of Dalieh on the World Monuments Watch: 

  • First, confirms its importance as a shared social space and as a natural heritage site of high cultural and environmental significance; hence, as a site that requires attention and protection at the international, regional and national level.
  • Second, supports the demands of civil society, and city dwellers in general, for the right to the sea, nature, and a livable environment; and constitutes, at the same time, a new incentive for concerted and integrated efforts to free Dalieh from the clutches of real estate developers and powerful group—after it was symbolically freed in the past few weeks when the popular movement groups removed the fence that surrounded it.
  • Third, has a moral significance, and adds a new dimension to its ownership. The notion of heritage is tightly linked with the notion of public good, which means that the protection of Dalieh, and other significant heritage sites in Lebanon, is a national obligation and s collective responsibility. 

We, members of the civil campaign to protect Dalieh of Roauche, are committed to our responsibilities towards our natural and cultural heritage. Starting from Dalieh of Raouche we are striving to raise awareness regarding its importance and to protect it from all dangers, including encroachments on the marine public domain and amendments to zoning regulations at the expense of the environment and our right and the right of future generations to enjoy what is collective property for all. We also take the opportunity of the listing of Dalieh on the World Monuments Watch to remind all ministries and concerned public entities of their responsibilities towards this site and the entire Lebanese coast, and the need to enact and implement laws and measures that ensure its sustainability and pubic use. We especially request as a matter of priory from: 

  • The ministry of Public Works and Transportation: to rehabilitate the site, including the fishing harbor, and remove all rubble and barbed wires that obstruct free public access. 
  • The ministry of Environment: to pursue the decree that it proposed to classify the site as a Marine Protected Area, and to push the Council of Ministers to sign and issue it. 
  • The Higher Council of Urban Planning and Beirut municipality: given their authority in urban planning and design tools, not to approve any special project proposal on the site.
  • The council of ministers: not to approve the issuance of any exceptional decree that grant site owners additional built-up areas that is not in accord with the current zoning regulations of Beirut.
  • The ministry of Culture: to work on listing the site as an archaeological and cultural heritage site of significance at the national and eastern Mediterranean level.


    Dalieh is ours, reclaim it.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412