Camps in Mandatory Palestine

Irit Katz studies spaces that undergo radical transformations under extreme conditions. Here she explores the ad hoc architecture of camps in Palestine during British rule (1917–48), surveying its complex uses and afterlives. This research was undertaken with the support of a PMC postdoctoral fellowship in 2018, and forms part of her new book The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel–Palestine (2022). Irit Katz is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies in the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College.

From an architectural perspective, British rule over Palestine, which continued for more than three decades from 1917 until 1948, transformed the territory by creating different types of spaces, including camps. While camps are rarely seen as inventive architectural creations – and their design is often perceived as repetitive, unimaginative and detached from local realities – the British military camps, detention camps and Zionist settler camps of Mandatory Palestine were flexible spaces along a military–civilian continuum, which adapted to the ongoing geopolitical transformations of the region. They had a formative impact on how land and populations were controlled in the area and became a point of emergence for the longer spatial genealogy of camps in Israel and Palestine.

The numerous camps created in Mandatory Palestine reflect that period’s complex political reality of a contested territory torn between Jewish and Arab communities under British rule. It was also subject to contradictory political agreements: the Hussein–McMahon Correspondence (1915–16) had promised the “independence of the Arab” over the area, while the Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) strategically divided the occupied lands between colonial French and British powers, and the Balfour Declaration (1917) supported “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Although generally seen as temporary and transitory spaces, the camps created in that period of double colonialism – by British rule and Zionist settler expansion – often evolved into places central to the way the area was reshaped and managed.

The first British military camps in Palestine, which appeared as the conquering army progressed, later multiplied and expanded to serve both local and international political and military needs, responding to events such as the Jewish–Arab riots in 1921, the Palestinian Arab Revolt in 1936–39, and the Second World War. Most of the military camps in Mandatory Palestine were formed according to a standard grid layout with the use of prefabricated huts made from light materials such as timber and corrugated steel. Perhaps the best known such design was the curved Nissen hut, made from kits of steel ribs and corrugated skin that could be quickly assembled. Such prefabricated huts, transported along roads and railways, were key in larger logistical apparatuses that translated the ability to rapidly reshape spaces into expressions of territorial and colonial power.

During the Second World War, new military camps were built in Palestine to secure British assets in the Near East while functioning as the rear front for the Allied forces fighting in Iraq, Syria and North Africa. Their creation was a joint effort by military personnel, civilian professionals and around fifty thousand Arab and Jewish builders who worked together while living in temporary work camps. War shortages saw all these workers adapting and using local materials; the military chief engineer’s September 1940 report examined the creative use of mud, olive oil and cow dung for hut construction. Despite the apparent simplicity of camp huts, in 1940 British and local professionals collaborated to conduct no less than “15 experiments with clay, chopped straw, kerosene and colas” to design the new Gut Hut, a local adaptation of the imported template.

After the war, in 1947, the army in Palestine made up one-tenth of the British Empire’s armed forces, occupying around one thousand facilities, which would later provide a foundational infrastructure for Israel’s army. British military camps evolved in several other ways, as well: they were used to shelter massive waves of Jewish immigrants; they laid the foundations for new cities, such as at Rosh HaAyin; and, in Gaza, provided shelter for Palestinian refugees.

This continuity between military and civilian spheres seen in the lives and legacies of British camps was especially relevant to Zionist settler camps, which went through a significant process of militarisation. Settler colonialism was at the heart of Zionism, which saw agricultural settlement as a territorial practice, as described in a quote attributed to Zionist national hero Yosef Trumpeldor, stating that “wherever the Jewish plough cultivates its last furrow, that is where the border will run”. Temporary settler tent camps were used in the earliest stages of Zionist expansion to further “the frontier”, with Kibbutz Ein Harod, established in 1921, being one of the first settlements founded as a tent camp.

British military huts in Mahane Israel, a former British military camp converted into an immigrant camp, 1950. Photo by Zoltan Kluger. Courtesy of Zoltan Kluger /National Photo Collection of Israel, Government Press Office.

The fortified “wall and tower” outpost camps that were erected during the years of the Palestinian Arab Revolt (1936–39) were probably the most commonly constructed type of Zionist prefabricated frontier settler camps. The first was constructed in 1936 by the members of Kibbutz Tel Amal, who were attempting to gain control over land that had been purchased by the Jewish National Fund, but which could not be settled due to the Arab uprising. Tel Amal was designed to permit the hasty construction of prefabricated and fortified structures, which had to be transported and erected in six to eight hours so that its inhabitants could defend themselves immediately. The camp’s wooden walls enclosed a square area with two bastions for gun emplacements and two fences of barbed wire that protected the settlers. Inside, four shacks accommodated forty people and a prefabricated watchtower with a searchlight was erected to overlook the surrounding area. These fortified settler camps – fifty-two of which were constructed throughout the country between 1936 and 1939 and then rapidly transformed into permanent settlements – significantly changed the map of Jewish habitations in Palestine and were core to the formation of a continuous Jewish territory later acknowledged in the United Nations partition plan for Palestine. While at the beginning the British authorities supported this form of settlement and provided infrastructure and protection, their attitude changed drastically during the Palestinian Arab Revolt, and strict limitations on Jewish land purchase and settlement in Palestine and on Jewish immigration quotas were imposed by the British government’s White Paper of 1939. Although the organised illegal immigration of Jewish people to Palestine had started a year after Hitler came to power, this restriction saw the number of illegal entries soar.

Nurses play with Jewish immigrant children at the Atlit Detention Camp, 1944. Photo by Zoltan Kluger. Courtesy of Zoltan Kluger /National Photo Collection of Israel, Government Press Office.

The Atlit Detention Camp was opened in 1940 by the British to detain such men, women and children arriving to Palestine illegally until they were awarded entry certificates in line with the new quota. Two fences of barbed wire encircled the camp with armed guards patrolling between them; inside, seventy-seven numbered wooden huts with thirty-two beds in each were used for the detainees’ accommodation, while larger structures included the cookhouse and the disinfection facility. Despite the heavy security, including daily roll calls, the detainees were active in the camp, working in the communal kitchen and growing vegetables, while detained doctors and nurses worked in the camp’s hospital and nursery. After the Second World War, when Atlit and other detention camps in Palestine were filled to capacity, passengers were forcibly transferred to new designated detention camps established in Cyprus to contain the thousands of Jewish immigrants and refugees until they met the quota, including thousands of unaccompanied minors.

British military and detention camps, and Zionist settler camps, formed an initial part of the unique typology of transitory spaces that have structured Palestine and Israel over the past century. The common attributes of many of these camps – the continuity between military and civilian forms and functions, their prefabricated components and their modes of spatial adaptation – were central to their rapid creation as built instruments erected to achieve particular goals. A close examination of the spatial and material components of the many manifestations of these camps and their often contradictory purposes allows a fuller understanding of the complex meanings and functions of camps in Israel–Palestine and beyond.