Abstract
In wartime cities become prime objects for attack and sustain different levels of destruction. The increase since the 1990s in the number and scale of violent conflicts has resulted in growing awareness of the devastating aspect of war in urban areas, which now enjoys the coinage “urbicide”. It is by far and large the outcome of the shift from research focused on the history and spatiality of armed conflicts, to a moralist-oriented approach based on the political economies and socio-cultural geographies of militarism. Yet, as portrayed in the case of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, it limits the analysis of the variety of effects of war which vary widely due to location, intensity of fighting and prevailing social, cultural and economic realities.
Highlights
Since antiquity cities have served as commercial, political, cultural and social centers, and in armed conflict they become prime objects for attack and conquest and sustain different levels of destruction and population loss
It has revived since the outbreak of civil war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the first war fought in Europe since 1945, followed by the infliction of mass terror on Western urbanized societies, which peaked in the September 2001 attack on New York; this was succeeded by the war against terrorism, the fighting in Iraq since 2003, and other contemporary violent conflicts, mainly those waged in the Middle East (Coward, 2004, 2009; Diefendorf, 1993; Glaeser & Shapiro, 2001; Graham, 2006; Robinson, Engelstoft, & Pobric, 2001; Savitch, 2015; Swanstorm, 2002)
The first time was during the First World War, following the deportation in 1917 of its Jewish community; the second was during the 1948 war, with the defeat of Arab Jaffa
Summary
Since antiquity cities have served as commercial, political, cultural and social centers, and in armed conflict they become prime objects for attack and conquest and sustain different levels of destruction and population loss. A mounting number of academic papers published since the early 2000s by various scholars use other “-cide” terms such as domicide, spatiocide and symbolic genocide to denounce Israel for its military actions against Palestinians in general, for the building of a separation wall, and for demolition of Palestinian houses and proceeding with the settlement project in territories occupied in the 1967 war (Akesson, 2014; Hanafi, 2009; Grinberg, 2009; Piquard & Swenarton, 2011; Sousa, Kemp, & Al-Zuhairi, 2014) Shaw refers to both historical and recent contexts, postulating that “...Israel’s destruction of large parts of Arab society in Palestine in 1948... With the consolidation of British rule in Palestine following the war, Tel Aviv ripened from a garden suburb to an autonomous municipality, forming a significant Jewish national, namely Zionist, symbol; it became a model modernist urban form and a fundamental constituent of Jewish national revival, as well as the bourgeois metropolis created to further commerce, industry and profit: “the First Hebrew City” (Azaryahu, 2008, p. 306; Troen, 2003, p. 89)
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