The tent: The uncanny architecture of agonism for Israel–Palestine, 1910–2011

Abstract

Mass social protest erupted in Israel in 2011 around the banner of housing, with citizens pitching hundreds of tents in urban public spaces all over the country. The tent, as a symbol of and the architecture for political action, aligned communities deeply alienated from each other – the middle class and very poor, renters and homeowners, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, Jews and Arabs-Palestinians – in a shared demand for housing. Solidarity revolving around shared bodily discomfort over the precarious dwelling situation deepened as communities faced the uncanny realisation that tents invoke the dwelling history of each of them: Ashkenazi Zionist pioneers of the 1920s credited as founders of the nation, Palestinian refugees’ facing dispossession and negotiating right of return, and Mizrahim who were marginalised and racialised in immigrant absorption camps. In 2011 protest tents materialised the competing narratives of these conflicted social groups while simultaneously serving as a shared space for political action. This paper explores the history of tent dwellings in Israel–Palestine since the 1910s as the uncanny architecture of nation building and object of shared, though conflicting, narratives of gain and loss. Architectural space emerges from this study as the ‘matter that matters’, producing a political community of conflicted groups, as proposed by Chantalle Mouffe and Bruno Latour. Mouffe and Latour identified the social role of designed spatial objects as crucial for understanding ways in which politics and space are affected by changes to the material world. This paper’s contribution expands on the architectural history of Israel–Palestine and adds to scholarship of the political meaning of architecture as a social ‘object of concern’, applicable beyond this case.