Political infrastructure and the politics of infrastructure

Abstract

Against the background of a highly conflictive urban situation, the paper focuses on the planning and implementation of the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR). Running from the west all the way to the east of the city, the JLR traverses and connects contested territory. While Palestinians and the international community consider East Jerusalem to be part of a future Palestinian state, Israel adheres to its claim to the whole city, a unified Jerusalem. It is to that end that the JLR was implemented and, as this paper argues, it can be seen as an important governance tool that not only serves the city’s citizens and residents alike, but also works towards consolidating the Israeli authorities’ claim to the whole city. Further, the paper discusses whether infrastructure is inherently political or if there is a ‘politics of infrastructure’ at stake in Jerusalem with regards to the JLR and its wider implications for the urban fabric. The paper suggests that much can be learned from major transport infrastructure in cities, not only for contested cities such as Jerusalem, but also ordinary cities, since infrastructure is always already part of the existing and emerging political power struggles in every city.

Key words:

• urban infrastructure
• politics
• conflict
• Jerusalem

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These terms are highly politicized—Jerusalem is represented as the undividable capital of Israel that was long lost and legitimately regained by the Jewish people. Palestinians consider it their political and historical capital that was occupied by colonialist Jewish settlers in 1967 (Klein 2005).

2 The exact statement of UN Resolution 478 can be read here: http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/DDE590C6FF232007852560DF0065FDDB (last accessed 6 March 2015).

3 The state of Israel does not have a written constitution but rather 11 so-called fundamental laws that ‘are endorsed with a special position when compared to regular legislation, but since they are simple decisions of a majority of those present and voting, they can, in principle, be modified or done away with by a simple majority’ (Mahler 2011, 103).

4 This is due to two factors: firstly, Palestinians in Jerusalem were offered Israeli citizenship in 1967, but most of them refused to accept it because they considered it an acknowledgement of the Israeli claim to Jerusalem. Secondly, the Israeli authorities continue to employ certain practices that work towards a de-Palestinianization of the city. For details, see Cheshin, Hutman, and Melamed (1999).

5 This phrase was first used by Justice Aharon Barak in 1988 when Palestinian resident Mubarak Awad had lost his Jerusalem residency because he was not able to prove to the Israeli authorities that his center of life had been Jerusalem, although he had been born there. Since this ruling in 1988, the ‘center of life’ policy was applied thousands of times to force Palestinians to leave Jerusalem either to the West Bank or Gaza. It effectively renders Palestinians, mostly born and raised in Jerusalem, stateless. This policy contradicts the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. See Jefferis (2012).

6 Route no. 1 is a road that was built along the former Green Line and no-man’s land that used to divide Jerusalem.

7 See http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/circulars/ec058/15_04_Daniel.pdf (last accessed 28 November 2014).

8 https://www.google.de/maps/place/Shu%27afat,+Jerusalem/@31.8168836,35.230884,15z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x15032a1bda413655:0x83b2e0307cc22ef9 (last accessed 27 November 2014).

9 http://www.citypass.co.il/default.aspx (last accessed 27 November 2014).

10 http://www.citypass.co.il/arabic/ (last accessed 27 November 2014).

11 Connex consists of the two French companies Veolia Environment and Alstom that are in charge of the technical part of the JLR project. On the Israeli side, the Citypass Consortium, comprised of the companies Polar Investments and Harel that form the financial part of the project. For more information, see http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/jerusalem/ (last accessed 5 May 2014).

12 For a more detailed account of the legal and civil fight against the construction of the JLR, see Barghouti (2009).

13 See full report: Civic Coalition for Defending Palestinian’s Rights in Jerusalem, The Jerusalem JLR Train: Consequences and Effects (December 2009).

14 http://fugitivemomentsofcompassion.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/this-harassment-is-so-unnecessary/ (last accessed 27 November 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amina Nolte

Amina Nolte is a PhD student at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture, Department of Sociology at the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen, Germany.