Jerusalem’s Al-Quds Street, locally known as Death Street, in the Occupied West Bank, was a major setting for clashes between the Israeli army and Palestinians during the first and second Intifadas. Beginning at the Huwwara checkpoint, it marks a point of entry to the city of Nablus. The village of Kufr Qalil, its homes and groves flanking Al-Quds Street, straddles the line between rural and urban, between Area A and Area C, between home and land.
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“We might be living on Death Street, but this house is filled with food and life.”
– Nabila Mansour, Kufr Qalil
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Nabila and her daughters cracked the hardened shells open with a rock, nibbling as they filled the large bucket with almonds. It was a sunny summer afternoon in 2016, the sound of exploding almond shells merged with the intermittent sawing of stone and banging of steel, creating a syncopated rhythm occasionally interrupted by orders from Ghassan, Nabila’s husband, to the workers and his sons. Construction was well underway on the third-floor addition to their new home, a once-improbable dream, as they, with their six children, had occupied a one-bedroom space at Ghassan’s father’s house for over fifteen years. Now, after decades of working construction jobs across the Green Line in Israel, Ghassan was finally building an apartment complex of his own. [1]
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Sitting along the edge of the Palestinian Authority–controlled Area A and the Israeli-controlled Area C, homes like Nabila and Ghassan’s risk harassment by the IDF, land confiscation, and demolition. As the number of Palestinian home demolitions rises exponentially, new illegal settlements are also proliferating. [2] With these demolitions, Israel is implementing its policy of population transfer, evicting Palestinians from the land, now no longer authorized for their use.
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At the same time, Israel has relied on a predominately male Palestinian labor force to construct its cities and settlements – many residing in rural areas of the West Bank. Where once these workers farmed the land, they are now more likely to be found working precariously in Tel Aviv, often without permits, and sleeping in worksites for weeks at a time. In fact, it is the settlement expansion itself that pushes Palestinian farmers to these construction sites, further strengthening Israel’s project to separate and control Palestinian communities.
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Ghassan and Nabila’s house manifests not only the labor of cutting, shaping, and stacking CMU and limestone, but also other material practices of care – the harvesting of wheat, the kneading of bread, the picking of almonds, the grinding of olives to extract oil. It expresses a kind of Palestinian rural collectivity that is often disrupted by Israel’s administrative violence.
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As Palestinians labor toward their temporary financial security and eventual displacement, what happens to the architectures they occupy? What happens to all the material evidence of life once the Palestinian home and its permits have been deemed invalid? More urgently, how and where can these families rebuild themselves?
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