Establishing roots at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport Garden: Landscapes of national identity

Abstract

With the understanding that the planning of public space is a discursive practice, this article examines the cultural meanings encoded in the design of the grounds around Israel's main airport, Ben Gurion International. Using the example of Terminal 3, the article discusses how the State of Israel leverages landscaped space as an ideological tool in the struggle for control over symbolic expressions of national identity. The design decisions here are framed in the context of the all important Zionist trope of ‘redemption’, or land reclamation in the image of Zion. The airport's ‘Seven Species Garden’ is explained as part of a widespread mythology of an autochthonous people/land bond, deeply rooted in Jewish-Israeli consciousness, which draws upon the Bible for territorial legitimacy and national identity. Finally, the Orientalist bias betrayed in the airport grounds effectively bars entry of the county's largest minority to the ‘gateway’ of Israeli national space because such references are based on ethnicity.

Keywords:

• Ben Gurion Airport
• Seven Species garden
• critical regionalism
• landscape
• Orientalism
• redemption

Notes

1. As an example of the kinds of transformations enacted upon the landscape in the decade following the creation of Israel, the draining of Lake Hula in the north was typical of the state's ambitions. The shallow lake, which was a breeding ground for malaria-spreading mosquitoes, was drained by the Jewish National Fund as part of a campaign to increase the arable land available for farming collectives. The canals that were dug to divert water away from the valley resulted in the desiccation of dozens of square kilometers of wetlands, effectively erasing an entire lake that had been documented in travel accounts and on maps since earliest records of the region.

2. Just to take one example, Park Canada (an evergreen forests created by the JNF in the wake of hostilities of 1948) reveals the traces of former Palestinian communities peeking out from beneath the thickets of the forest's undergrowth. Along with the scattered stone blocks that were once the foundations of Palestinian houses, one can still see olive and fig trees growing untended among the rows of fir planted by the JNF.

3. Dovey's notion of ‘reframing’ may be said to be synonymous with Ghazi Falah's ‘de-signification’ as a term to describe the alteration of meaning attached to a place (see Falah, 1996).

4. For a discussion of the Jewish appropriation of local Arab landscape traditions in contemporary Israeli landscape architecture, see Egoz (2008). Whereas I would like to emphasise the privileging of Jewish landscaping tropes over Arab garden motifs, Egoz (2008, p. 34) focuses on the ways in which Arab traditions are ‘both ignored and integrated into the physical and ideological building momentum of the Israeli nation’.

5. For more on the development of critical regionalism, see Tzonis and Lefaivre (1996, 2003); Frampton (1983).

6. American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) website: http://www.asla.org/awards/2005/05winners/entry_068.html

7. ASLA website.

8. ASLA website.

9. ASLA website.

10. In fact, the west-to-east progression of flora represented in the garden is only very roughly representative of the actual Israeli landscape – e.g., date palm plantations are more numerous near the Dead Sea, while wheat production tends to be concentrated southwest of Jerusalem.

11. ASLA website.

12. With the creation of the state in 1948, the JNF served as a de facto land administration department of the state, holding 90% of all land in Israel (see also Bar-Gal, 2003).

13. Ancient Desert Agriculture Systems Revived (ADASR) website: http://www.mnemotrix.com/adasr/adasr_story.html

14. Hebron, City of the Patriarchs: The Jewish Community of Hebron website: http://www.hebron.org.il/hebrew/gallery.php?id=131

15. Hebron website.