UK, ISRAEL ARCHITECTS BLAST OCCUPATION

A group of renowned Israeli and British architects have urged fellow designers and planners from Israel and worldwide to live up to professional ethics and reject any project on the occupied Palestinian territories or face being accused of complicity in the oppression of Palestinians and occupation of their land, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on May 28.
In a statement initiated by the British organisation Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP) – a London-based independent pressure group that campaigns against the Israeli occupation – the designers called on fellow professionals “to express their concern in each and every instance of unjust action in annexing Palestinian land, and the projects to be built on them.”
The manifesto said Palestinian land has become so fragmented that a viable Palestinian State has been rendered impossible. “The map of Palestine, for the indigenous Palestinians, has shrunk from being 97% of the land in 1917 to 44 % in 1947. Today only 13% of the former Palestinian lands are being recognized by Israeli unilateral ‘convergence’ policies, and that small part is being further divided by planning and architectural devices,” it said.
The statement was signed by nearly 200 internationally-famed British and Israeli architects and academics. They include architectural historian Charles Jencks; president of the Institute of Royal British Architects Jack Pringle; American sociologist Saskia Sassen; geographer Oren Yiftachel of Ben-Gurion University as well as Israeli Zvi Efrat, who heads the architecture department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.