Being citizens of the City of Gaza: the resettlement of the Al-Shati Refugee Camp at Sheikh Radwan, 1967-1982

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the prism of urban citizenship. It focuses on the Israeli attempt to reshape urban citizenship in Gaza by planning and constructing Sheikh Radwan, a residential neighborhood designated as a permanent quarter for the refugees inhabiting the nearby Al-Shati camp. Although Gaza’s local residents, like the refugees, were deprived of national citizenship rights, they retained the privileges and rights of urban citizenship. The economic development and modernization plan that Israel implemented in the Gaza Strip after its occupation in 1967 disrupted this differentiation between refugee and resident. Israeli programs promoted, perhaps, refugees’ demands to the city, but when urban equality was promoted by the deporter, it provoked a contradiction between the Right to the City and the Palestinian Right of Return. This top-down enactment of civic right turns into a measure of control that perplexes some of the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of urban citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• Citizenship
• Gaza
• Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• development
• Urban Planning

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the valuable material provided by our interviewees, especially by architect Rafael Lerman who shared with us his personal memories. Our special thanks to Dr. Zvi Elhyani, director of the Architecture Archive (IAA) for providing us with materials. We are grateful to the reviewers’ insightful comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Street group plan in regard to the refugee question’, extract from the proposition developed by Pinchas Eliav, Director of the UN Division in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, presented to the government 17 June 1969. ISA-mfa-UNInterOrg2-000ah1y ISA, File No.

2. ‘The refugee problem in Held Territories and propositions for their rehabilitation’, Economic assessment by Prof. Michael Bruno. ISA, File No., ISA-Privatecollections-MichaelBruno-000lb2 k.

3. ISA, File No., ISA-MOIN-InteriorPlans-0003vyl.

4. See: Dov Eizenberg’s online blog: https://sites.google.com/site/doveizenberg/(Retrieved: 03/10/2019).