ZOO, or the letter Z, just After Zionism by Malkit Shoshan

Malkit Shoshan

NAiM/Bureau 5 Europa

Malkit Shoshan

NAiM/Bureau Europa

Table of Contents 4 Introduction 6 Exhibition concept drawing 8 ZOO or the letter Z, just After Zionism Malkit Shoshan 26 Captivity David Hancocks 34 Mahmoud Baraghoud and Damien Hirst with their zebras 36 Embroidery drawings 42 Gaza Sara Roy 51 Gaza legal crossing of goods diagram, Gaza map, Gaza sections 56 Exotic Edo Amin 62 Marah Land 66 Lions 68 Animal survey table, Marah Land 70 Colophon

Introduction “Two white donkeys dyed with black stripes delighted Palestinian kids at a small Gaza zoo who had never seen a zebra in the flesh...” — (Reuters, 8 Ocober 2009) In 2012 and 2013, NAiM/Bureau Europa is presenting three programmes on the themes Architecture and Conflict, Architecture and Sickness, and Architecture and the Media. These programmes will each include an exhibition, and ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism, is the first of these. The exhibition focusses on the role of architecture in times of conflict. It shows that architecture can be used as both a constructive and a destructive force. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict demonstrates time and again how architecture — from that of the landscape to that of the settlements — is used both as a political lever and a strategy of war. The exhibition is based on the book, Atlas of the Conflict, Israel-Palestine by Malkit Shoshan. As a student of architecture in Israel, Malkit Shoshan was given an assignment to design a shopping centre on a vacant plot near Tel Aviv. When she started doing research on the location, she discovered it had been a Palestinian burial ground. This discovery formed the starting point of a decade of research into the history of Israel in relation to Palestine. Among other things, she found out that dozens of Palestinian villages could no longer be found on official maps, although they are still inhabited by more than 100,000 people. This led to the decision to map the various dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In her book Atlas of the Conflict, Israel-Palestine, Malkit Shoshan illustrates the processes and mechanisms behind the shaping of Israel-Palestine over the past century through hundreds of detailed maps. The Atlas of the Conflict is the anchor point for a new project: ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism. The story that starts on page 437 of the book has been developed into a fascinating exploration of the ideas, snapshots and associations conjured by seeing (or imagining) a white donkey, tethered with a rope and zig-zagged with beige masking tape. A white donkey, transformed into a zebra by a Palestinian zookeeper, in order to fulfill the desire of the Gazans for normality, which in 2

this case means possessing a zoo as a space for urban leisure. This reader contains essays by Malkit Shoshan, David Hancocks, Sara Roy and Edo Amin. It also includes an interview with the owners of Marah Land Zoo in Gaza: Mahmoud and Ahmed Barghoud. Shoshan herself reflects on the two words that are categorized under the letter ‘Z’ in the book’s lexicon: Zionism and zoo. She explores these seemingly unrelated themes within the context of the Gaza Strip and traces them both back to the Age of Reason, the epoch of the classification of nations and animals. Hancock, an architect and former zoo director, examines the phenomenon of the zoo and concludes that this cultural institution is unable to respond adequately to the ethical questions it raises. Roy paints a poignant picture of the current harsh living conditions in Gaza, while Amin describes how imagination and fantasy — including the conjuring of a donkey into a zebra — become powerful tools for survival in a climate of systematic oppression.

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Art Gallery BarbGAZA Wires Barriers Ramat Gan Behavioral Sink LaceBardot Brigitte Black Cage Market Tunnels 1 Captivity Shalit Carl Hagenbeck Tunnels Check Point Macrame 1 Chic Point Smuggled 1 Child Food China Smuggled 2 Critical Distance Cross Point Vets Overdose Darwin Deleuze Hediger Density Behavioral Sink Disney Jones Donkey & Jones Eagle Zebra Eden Eduard T Hall Human Zoos Education Facility Embroidery Enlightenment Erez Ethics Exotic Falcon Destruction Flight Distance Form Follow Function Garden Water Gaza H ediger Ripped Land Human Play Human Rights Dead Monkeys 2 Humphry Osmond Jail Living Conditions Jon B Calhoun Dead 1 Jones AndMonkeys Jones Location K arni Kerem Shalom Khaled Hurani Linneaus Lion London Zoo Long Ears Zebra Machsomim MacramĂŠ Man Abundant Marahland Modernism Mohamad Baraghouthi Nahal Oz Nautical Miles Nidal Baraghouthi Oasis Over Crowding Peace Personal Distance Philadelphia Zoo Pigeon Postcard Qassam R afah Zoo Under Siege Rat Refugee Park Camp Zoo Refugee Reuters Contact 1 Romanticism SPetting cience Zoo Second Death Self Preservation Sharif Waked Language Social Distance Species Habitat Overlooked Sufa Intelligence Surveillance Exposure Surveillance Camera T uk-Tuk Plastic Tunnels Utopian Universe W all Animal Display Weyburn Mental Hospital Wild Wild Animals In Captivity Woman People And Animals Woodland Park Zoo Xmalcolm Yishuv Zebra Zionism ZIONISM Zoo

ZOO

Tear Feet

Zoo as Education Facility

Zoo as Art Gallery

Zoo as Jail

ZOO or the letter Z, just After Zionism by Malkit Shoshan Nimrod 1 was searching for a quarry. He went to the forest, looking for tracks, broken branches and droppings, trying to locate the hart, which he would ideally manage to glimpse before the chase... Later, when the quarry could no longer run, it would turn and try to defend itself. Beginning at the End When asked to transform my book, Atlas of the Conflict, Israel-Palestine, into an exhibition, I decided to rewind, start where it ends, and go backwards to the beginning. But then I got stuck for a year at the conclusion: the letter Z and page number 437 2. The letter Z has only two, seemingly disconnected, entries: Zionism and zoo. Yet the two concepts are linked, both having arisen out of the passion for classification that came into being during the Age of Reason; and they each represent ideas fundamental to the nature of the conflict in IsraelPalestine. Perhaps, after all, these final entries are where it all began. The Age of Enlightenment 3 The origins of both Zionism and zoos can be traced back to two revolutionary developments that saw the light of day in the Age of Enlightenment: the classification of nature and the classification of nations. A new, obsessive interest in classifying, archiving, grouping and gathering was behind both tendencies. Zionism, the ideology that calls for the establishment of a homeland for Jewish people, emerged in Europe during the 19th century, a time that was dominated by revolutionary movements 4. A series of national uprisings, inspired by the French Revolution, had been leading to the formation of modern Europe, with new borders delineating new nation states 5. The Jews were excluded from this new reality of classified territory, with its divisions according to distinctions based on race or na6

1. Nimrod, according to the Books of Genesis and Chronicles, was the son of Cush, great-grandson of Noah and the king of Shinar. He is depicted in the Tanakh as a man of power and a mighty hunter. 2. Page 433 in the latest edition of the book 3. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, exotic peoples arrived in Europe. By the early 19th century, ethnic shows were a feature of theatre cafĂŠs. Between 1870 and WWII, many venues started specializing in ethnic performances, including the Crystal Palace, Barnum and Bailey in Madison Square, the Folies BergĂ¨res and the famous Panoptikum in Berlin. It was a time of professionalization, and exotic performances morphed into mass entertainment. Reconstructed ethnic villages, zoos, colonial and international fairs, science and spectacle merged in multiple places. Exotic peoples and physical strangeness were brought together on stage as representations of the realm of abnormality.

4. This could be compared with the current the Arab Spring 5. Tony Judt Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

tional origin. Without a place of their own in the newly remodelled Europe, they aspired to a Jewish homeland, a nation state, where they could feel safe and free. “To the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the proprietary a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival.” — Leon Pinsker (Zionist pioneer) Around the time that Zionism was gathering strength, another — seemingly unrelated — development took place: the emergence of the urban zoo. At that time, as important as nationality was the beauty of the system: science was preoccupied with classification and comparison, according to foundations laid by the likes of Linnaeus and Darwin. The first zoos, in big cities like London and Berlin, sorted animals into their families: houses of birds, reptiles, apes, and so on. The cages were highly ornamented — but aesthetically still resembled prison cells — and the various buildings, scattered pavilion-like in a garden setting, were isolated from each other. Animals were either scientifically classified objects or ornaments, or both. The Quest Before the hunt could start, an expert huntsman, accompanied by a lymer, a scent hound, would seek out the quarry. Following the clues left by tracks, broken branches and droppings he would try to locate the location of the hart as accurately as possible. Ideally, the huntsman would see it to determine its worthiness as a quarry. As Jewish activist groups searched for a potential homeland 6, they considered various alternatives: Uganda, Madagascar, Brazil and even Siberia. Young Jewish people started exploring these ideas. Pioneering groups went out into the wild to locate a setting that might furnish the raw material for the desired nation state. Almost like a divine intervention, Mark Twain published ‘The Innocents Abroad’ in 1867, his account of travelling in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. In it, he described Palestine as if it were empty: 8

6. A mix of a national, religious, and territorial state

“For about four hours we travelled down hill constantly. We followed a narrow bridle-path which traversed the beds of the mountain gorges, and when we could we got out of the way of the long trains of laden camels and asses, and when we could not we suffered the misery of being mashed up against perpendicular walls of rock and having our legs bruised by the passing freight... However, this was as good a road as we had found in Palestine, and possibly even the best, and so there was not much grumbling....”7 The young pioneers followed Mark Twin as if he were the expert huntsman. They sought to practice their national identity and redeem their father’s lands; they were anxious to create a new reputation for themselves and rise above their oppressors. A heroic move, leading to the start of a new life, seemed to be the answer. Romantically, they looked towards Palestine as the most enticing idea, as it linked the idea of a Jewish nation with its biblical saga. The Assembly Then, early on the day of the hunt, the hunting party would meet, examine the huntsman’s information and the deer’s droppings, and agree on how best to conduct the hunt. This would be a social gathering too, and breakfast would be served. Young Jewish people started arriving in Palestine, measuring, mapping and photographing the land. They created a strategy for future expansion. They believed they were redeeming a wilderness, connecting with their ancestors, and proving their courage and strength — and above all their emancipation — to those who had denied them homes in Europe. Although they were not necessarily religious, their religion became their new national ethos. It became the motivation for transforming a dream into reality. Relays and Moving The course of the hart was anticipated, and relays of dogs were positioned along it, so that fresh dogs could pursue the hart when the previous relay tired. In the next hunting phase, called also fynding, a lymer was used to track down the hart. 10

7. “Sometimes, in the glens, we came upon luxuriant orchards of figs, apricots, pomegranates, and such things, but oftener the scenery was rugged, mountainous, verdureless and forbidding. Here and there, towers were perched high up on acclivities which seemed almost inaccessible. This fashion is as old as Palestine itself and was adopted in ancient times for security against enemies. We crossed the brook which furnished David the stone that killed Goliath, and no doubt we looked upon the very ground whereon that noted battle was fought. We passed by a picturesque old gothic ruin whose stone pavements had rung to the armed heels of many a valorous Crusader, and we rode through a piece of country which we were told once knew Samson as a citizen. We staid all night with the good monks at the convent of Ramleh, and in the morning got up and galloped the horses a good part of the distance from there to Jaffa, or Joppa, for the plain was as level as a floor and free from stones, and besides this was our last march in holy Land..This was the plain of which Joshua spoke when he said, ‘Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon.’ As we drew near to Jaffa, the boys spurred up the horses and indulged in the excitement of an actual race — an experience we had hardly had since we raced on donkeys in the Azores islands.” Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1867.

The Chase This was the hunt proper. Here it was essential to keep the hounds on the track of the chosen quarry. The young pioneers built new settlements and invented some new habitation typologies like ‘wall and a tower’, ‘kibbutz’ and ‘moshav’. They had ideas about how the perfect society should be. They settled in collective groups. There was a period when they all wanted to look alike, so they dressed in khaki uniforms. Redefining their lifestyle and their environment, they planted gardens and forests. They transformed the landscape to resemble their old European homes and to camouflage the existence of Palestine. They established institutions like the Jewish National Fund to support their operation, collecting funds from Jewish communities all over the world to buy lands in Palestine as well as to spread the story of a new home for Jewish people in Palestine. They bought so much land that their settlements were no longer scattered, but formed a geographically continuous presence, delineating the desired borders of their developing nation state. The Zionist ideology became a movement, and the land of Palestine was continuously settled and transformed, as an abstract idea became reality. Baying When the hart could run no longer, it would turn and try to defend itself. It was said to be “at bay.” The hounds would now be kept from attacking, and the quarry would be killed or caged. The Modernist Zoo The zoo as a phenomenon continued evolving in the 20th century. Its development can be read retrospectively as a reflective, measurable typology of the progression of society, in terms of values, applied sciences, and aesthetics. Between and after the World Wars the study of nature and classification became less important. Most of the natural world was already classified and whatever wasn’t classified was considered problematic, even to the point of 12

requiring extermination. During this period, science was predominantly about problem solving. Vaccination became prevalent and the idea of killing germs to increase health and extend life expectancy became widespread. The physical typology of the zoo evolved as well. It became similar to an art gallery: the animals were treated almost as works of art. There were some attempts to illustrate a habitat background and occasionally to transform it into three dimensions. Carl Hagenbeck created the first cage without bars. This was the time of the rise of Modernism, of form following function; and there was a general obsessive desire to sterilize the zoo and to ensure that the exhibits were cleaned regularly. Concrete was widely used. As environmental awareness and human rights grew in importance from the mid 20th century onwards, the concept of animal rights began to gain more attention. In the 1950s, psychologist Humphrey Osmond developed the concept of socio-architectural hospital design, first used in Weyburn mental hospital in 1951, based partly on Hedigerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 8 specieshabitat work. With advances in healthcare, animals in captivity were treated for physical and mental conditions. Zoo design started simulating the original habitat 9 of the wild animal. Birth of a State In 1948, the United Nations declared Palestine to be Israel, a homeland for Jewish people. In a sense, the victory of Zionism relates to the increasing global awareness of the importance of human rights. Zionism was associated with justice (the Jewish people deserve a safe home), and the establishment of Israel was seen as an accomplishment of the international community, which had learned from the tragedies of the past. Yet ironically, the triumph of one nation (Israel) was a disaster for another (Palestine). Over 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed and about 1,000,000 Palestinians became refugees. The Israeli enterprise was superimposed on another peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s present, history, culture, and landscape. Israel was built on top of Palestine. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a conflict between two nations that throughout history have been suppressed by other peoples. While the Palestinians were oppressed at home by 14

8. Hediger described a number of standard interaction distances used in one form or another among animals. Two of these are flight distance and critical distance, used when animals of different species meet, whereas others are personal distance and social distance, observed during interactions between members of the same species. Hedigerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s biological social distance theories were used as a basis for Edward T. Hallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1966 anthropological social distance theories. 9. Jones & Jones architects, Seattle, is perhaps best known for pioneering the habitat immersion method of zoo design at Seattleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Woodland Park Zoo, but their work has also transformed design and scenic planning practices for highways, rivers, parks, forests, watersheds, and communities (wikipedia. com).

Ottoman emperors and other colonial powers, the Jews were driven from theirs, and forced to search for an alternative. After decades of war and violence over the ownership of the land, it seems that Israel and Palestine completely overlap, yet are separated by language, culture, nature, walls, observation towers and military patrols. The overlapping nations are fragmented and isolated in enclaves. While one nation, Israel, enjoys freedom of movement and the full rights of citizenship, the Palestinians are captive. For them, every aspect of life, however ordinary, requires a permit — including mobility, agriculture, and access to education, medical care and even the right to own a home. Unmaking (the deer becomes a donkey) Similar to the way in which the deer was dismembered, the donkey was painted in a careful, ritualistic manner. Transformed into a zebra, it was put in a cage. The ‘unmaking’ of an animal is an important part of the hunting ritual, you transform the animal into something else and then you share it with your partners. Captive in Gaza “Two white donkeys dyed with black stripes delighted Palestinian kids at a small Gaza zoo who had never seen a zebra in the flesh at a small Gaza zoo.” Marah Land is an improvised private zoo near Gaza City. Opened by a local family, endeavouring to live in normality, it can be considered as a symbol of ordinary urban reality, a place of leisure, in the Gaza Strip. A zoo under siege, like an exotic alien, needs to re-invent itself and its resources. About 250,000 Palestinian refugees ended up in the Gaza Strip in 1948 during Israel’s War of Independence. In the early 1950s, they were placed in camps organized by the international community through UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees). These camps were first composed of canvas tents, then mud hovels and finally small shelters measuring five by six metres. Today, there are about 1.1 million registered Palestinian refugees living in UN-built 16

refugee camps. After the establishment of Israel, Gaza was annexed to Egypt, with its population and refugees. In 1967, during the Six Days War, it was claimed by Israel together with the Sinai Peninsula. The strip and its population have been under Israeli occupation ever since. Following Israel’s evacuation of its settlements in 2005 and the rise of the Hamas to power in 2007, the Gaza Strip has been in a state of almost hermetic closure. The Gaza Strip is very dense 10, about 360 square kilometres (140 square miles) of walled territory, which is home to about 1,600,000 people. In addition to its sealed-off state, Gaza is in a constant state of violence and war. It is striking to see the scale of Israel’s destruction of Palestinian private property, mainly homes, which now appear as a sea of ruins: demolished houses, semi-collapsed structures, perforated homes and walls breached by F16 bombs, bombshells and detonators. Human Rights Watch documented the complete destruction of 189 buildings, including 11 factories, 8 warehouses and 170 residential buildings, leaving at least 971 people homeless during the operation, which began in December 2008. “These cases describe instances in which Israeli forces caused extensive destruction of homes, factories, farms and greenhouses in areas under IDF control without any evident military purpose.” — Human Rights Watch report. The siege of the strip and the ongoing state of war makes it difficult and in fact often impossible to access basic necessities such as food, medical equipment, medicine, and building materials — let alone wild animals to reside in the cages of the zoo. Cure’e At the end of the hunt, the dogs had to be rewarded with pieces of flesh from the carcass, so that they would associate their effort with reward. Gaza’s population is enclosed within a wall, fenced in by barbed wire, and monitored by observation towers and military patrols by sea, air and land. Its people rarely have contact with the outside world, which has effectively become a 18

10. Hyper violence In the early 1960s, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) acquired property in a rural area outside Poolesville, Maryland. The facility held Calhoun’s most famous experiment, the rat4 universe. In July 1968 four pairs of rats were introduced into the Utopian universe. The universe was a 2.7 m square metal pen with 1.4 m sides. Each side had four groups of vertical, wire-mesh “tunnels”. The “tunnels” gave access to nesting boxes, food hoppers, and water dispensers. There was no shortage of food or water or nesting material. There were no predators. The only adversity was the limited space. The population peaked at 80 rats, which then exhibited a variety of abnormal, often destructive behaviours; his conclusion was that space itself is a necessity. Notable conditions in the behavioural sink include hyper aggression, failure to breed and nurture young normally, infant cannibalism, increased mortality at all ages, and abnormal sexual patterns. Often, population peaks, then crashes. Actual physical disease, mental illness, and psychosomatic disorders increase. There are eating disorders. The only known counter to the effect of the behavioural sink is to reduce the frequency and intensity of social interaction.

phantom to Gazans since Israeli technology has substituted for human contact automated instruments and robots that facilitate the exchange of goods without any physical encounter. 11 When on-the-ground passages, networks and power institutes are blocked or closed, people resort to the underground and to mastering obscurity in transactions, rather than clarity and transparency. The subversive Hamas government has consolidated a network of illegal means to help improve daily life in the Gaza Strip. Underground tunnels cross borders unseen, while the black market replaces the banking system and legal trade. People’s creativity is challenged to the extreme under captivity. In the kind of reality where daily groceries must be smuggled from Egypt through illegal underground tunnels, a lion, a monkey or a tiger can be smuggled, too. “The monkeys and lions were drugged, tossed into cloth sacks and pulled through smuggling tunnels under the border between Egypt and the besieged Gaza Strip before ending up in their new homes in a dusty Gaza zoo. But to draw the crowds, what zoo manager Shadi Fayiz really wants to bring through the underground passages is an elephant. The Zoo, stocked almost entirely with smuggled animals, is a sign of Gaza’s ever-expanding tunnel industry... allowing the flow of products like cigarettes, weapons and lion cubs to continue unhindered.” However, for the family running the zoo in Gaza as a small business, smuggling exotic animals soon became prohibitively expensive. Imagine the zoo owners calculating the cost of smuggling a zebra — $25,000 — watched by a white donkey or two, leading naturally to the thought: why smuggle when you can DIY and dye? Marah Land Zoo is a flashback to the Enlightenment, when cages were almost the same size as the animal and the landscape was a two-dimensional drawing in the background. In an overcrowded environment under siege, the exotic is defined by mental creativity and physically shaped by the imagination. Marah Land’s walls are painted with Disney figures, copied from smuggled, pirated, madein-China DVDs, and with nationalist motifs that are completely decontextualized: a golden dome resembles Temple Mount but is placed 20

11. Karni Crossing, Conveyor belt. Image by UN, Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

in the desert like an oasis, and decorated with palm trees and donkeys. Gaza, an oasis, used to be the place were troops and traders had easy access to water before a long march into the desert. It was also a place of learning and scholarship, and of international trade. Nowadays, Gaza is under siege and enclosed between walls, just like a forgotten paradise 12. Its biblical beauty and its history are like a mirage that bears no relation to its current distorted mode of existence. The current reality makes its history completely unrecognizable. Zoo, or the letter Z, just After Zionism, offers, from afar, a rare glance of Gazaâ&#x20AC;&#x2030;â&#x20AC;&#x201D;â&#x20AC;&#x2030;a view almost as exotic as the zoo animals, or the concept of a zoo itself. A glimpse of territories, people, animals under siege. Zoo and Zionism are two phenomena that emerged out of the age of Reason, as an attempt to introduce a space for a new order for the world of things, life and culture. Now, more than a century later, we reflect on classification gone wrong, tearing apart territories and their inhabitants.

12. There is a strong association between the concept of Islamic gardens and paradise. The Persian word, pairidaeeza, is a combination of two words that mean â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;surrounding wallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, thus the concept of paradise is of a garden or gardens, surrounded by a wall, isolating those within and enabling them to enjoy the features established within the wall. The concept of Paradise being a garden predates Islam, Christianity and Judaism by thousands of years. Originating with the Sumerians, paradise gardens were also a feature the Babylonians reserved for their gods, introducing two of what were to become basic elements of an Islamic garden: trees and water. With its adoption by the Greeks, Paradise became associated in the Abrahamic religions with Heaven.

Captivity by David Hancocks If Damian Hirst painted donkeys to make them look like zebras (which, who knows, he might do one day), they could be worth a million dollars and elicit treatises on postmodern iconoclasm and the irony of our defeat of nature. But when a zoo director paints stripes on donkeys to dupe visitors into thinking his zoo has exotic animals, it is seen merely as sad, and far from clever or satirical. Which proves, yet again, that context is everything. However, this peculiar decision by the director of the Gaza Strip’s Marah Land Zoo in 2009, forged as it was in the tragic circumstances of today’s Palestinians, was also a marvellously weird manifestation of the deeprooted problems that have long resided in zoological parks. Their history spans a broad spectrum of disturbing events and philosophies, including the exhibition of humans from exotic cultures, a worrying enthusiasm for curiosities and rarities, for white tigers and other albinos, for the biggest and rarest, and a deeply conservative insistence on keeping ‘traditional’ zoo animals — however poorly suited for life in captivity — all typically displayed as commodities in a warehouse of nature’s oddities. The donkey painting was also yet another revelation, in a long history of zoo directors doing bad or silly things, that highlights, if only by its disrespect, the bedevilled relationship humans have with animals, and the puzzlingly paradoxical role of zoos in our societies. Perhaps the greatest failure of zoos is not only that they have done so little to expand or improve upon the generally confused perceptions that humans have of animals, but also that they have perpetuated many of these follies, and even created new ones. For at least 10,000 years, since we began our transformation from hunter-gatherers to land-owning agriculturists, our views have been perpetually (and sometimes deliberately) muddled. The great majority of humans are still a very long way from recognizing the rights of other animals. We eat, pamper, torture, worship and abuse animals. We deem them to be ‘good’ or ‘evil’ based on such considerations as whether they have large or small eyes, on whether they are nocturnal or diurnal, on how many legs they have (or do not have), 24

or if they have scales or fur — and even whether they are vocal, for if fishes had the capacity to scream people would never get away with snaring them in the mouth with barbed hooks for recreation. The arrival of monotheist religions saw the prejudices of agriculturists given official blessing. The new priests determined that human beings were specially created, had eternal souls, and were given dominion over all other animals. They invented the happily accepted notion that every living thing was created for human benefit. Not until the 18th century and the emergence of the Enlightenment do we find churches in Europe giving consideration to animal rights. The Vicar of Shiplake, in Oxford, gave the first sermon against cruelty to animals in 1772. It earned him the disgust of his congregation, who accused him of prostituting his responsibilities and showing signs of insanity. But as recently as the 19th century, Jesuit scholar Joseph Rickaby, extending the belief of earlier theologians that domestic animals were given life so their bodies would be fresh for eating until they were killed, determined that “we have no duties of charity... to the lower animals, any more than to sticks and stones.” Using similar reasoning, Pope Pius IX refused to approve an animal welfare office in the Vatican. Zoos had an opportunity to focus on combating such attitudes when, in the 1980s, the American Zoo Association asked its members to vote on the central purpose of zoos. One of the options was ‘welfare’ but, by a big margin, America’s zoo directors decided that ‘conservation’ was to be their central justification. If this had subsequently been reflected in reality, with zoos truly operating as conservation agencies, they would now look and feel quite different from zoos of the past. Zoos breeding animals for conservation would keep them away from people, in very large spaces, where they could learn to act as real wild animals, able to survive in their natural habitats. But modern zoos, like their earlier counterparts, the private menageries of the wealthy, put their main focus on displaying animals, and are paranoid about ensuring they are always visible to the patron — which today is the paying customer. The cages of the old menageries have disappeared. There are no longer bars to 25

remind visitors of jails, and the animals no longer pace flat concrete floors. Their diets are now scientifically formulated, and they have expert veterinary care. The spaces they occupy, however, though now more attractive for visitors, are often as useless as the old barren cages. Any greenery is typically out of reach, or made of plastic. The trees the animals sit and climb on are commonly made of concrete. The spaces the animals are allowed to occupy in the new zoo’s ‘green’ exhibits are generally hard or dusty corridors of packed dirt behind electrified fences. They pace these corridors, unable to interact with the living vegetation, while mothers with young children smile and say, “Look at the animals in their jungle!” As for conservation credibility, the great majority of zoos have simply interpreted ‘conservation’ to mean nothing more than ‘breeding.’ Until about the 1970s, zoos relied upon imported animals from the wild to fill their cages. That option is no longer available, so they must try to make their animals reproduce, and they find it convenient to call that conservation. If, on the other hand, welfare had been selected as their central purpose, zoos would certainly have developed as vitally different places. They would still focus on reproduction, for zoos must breed their animals simply to keep the shelves stocked. But a zoo that had welfare as its central purpose would never, for example, think of painting a donkey to make it look like a zebra. Neither would zoos with welfare uppermost in their minds restrict their animals to the pitifully small and all too often useless spaces that characterize so many of the world’s professional zoo exhibits. They would instead create spaces with the animals’ needs uppermost, and not, as today, design them principally for the visitors’ benefit, as places where bored animals cannot escape from view. Both the quality and the quantity of space for zoo animals are invariably inadequate. For some traditional zoo species this causes enormous problems. Most problematic is the fate of elephants. In 2008, Britain’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals assessed data on more than 4,500 elephants in European zoos over 45 years, comparing the animals’ life spans with those in protected reserves across Africa and Asia. They found the median life span in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park was 36 years, but for 26

African elephants in zoos it was 17. In Asian logging camps the median was 42 years, but for Asian elephants in zoos it was 19. The infant mortality rate was three times higher in zoos. Zoos derided the findings. A National Zoo spokesman in Washington DC accused the study of manipulating the statistics and of being “emotionally driven,” although one wonders, considering the source of his salary, to what extent emotion blinded his own view. The standard response to criticism about zoo elephant conditions, trotted out by many a zoo curator and persistently by the executive director of the American Zoo Association, is that zoos are the experts, that those who criticize are ignorant, and, most consistently, that keeping elephants in zoos plays a vital role by providing zoo visitors with an opportunity to see wild animals up close and thus make an emotional connection, thereby encouraging them to support conservation. They keep making this latter claim despite there being no credible evidence that it has any credibility. Indeed, the AZA has funded researchers to find evidence, but nothing of substance has been found to support their assertion, yet they persist in repeating the mantra, as if it will become true simply by saying it. One non-zoo funded study, from Melbourne’s Monash University, revealed in 2008 that after engaging in one of the world’s best and most focused free-flying raptor shows at the Healesville Sanctuary, which carries very specific and strong messages about what people can do to directly help birds of prey, more than half of the 175 visitors in the audience declared an intent to start or increase their commitment to these specific conservation actions. But in a follow-up study six months later, only three individuals had started such an action, and it was one they were aware of anyway before seeing the raptor show. Another independent study, in 2010, from Atlanta’s Emory University, examined a survey that the AZA had done on its members’ visitors, which is heralded by zoos as direct evidence that zoo visits produce long-term positive effects on people’s attitudes towards animals. The Emory University study concluded that the AZA’s methodology was faulty, and that “there remains no compelling evidence” to support such claims. 27

Even without such studies, however, one might justifiably suppose from the obvious proliferation of laughable and contradictory attitudes towards animals that are so widespread and so entrenched in societies around the world, that the many hundreds of millions who visit zoos each year are learning nothing good; all these accumulated visits have no perceived beneficial impact on public attitudes, knowledge, caring or awareness. I am a former zoo director, and in recent years I have been studying the results of research on elephants behaviour and sociality in the wild. This has convinced me that zoos cannot meet the very complex needs of these extraordinarily sociable, intelligent and vigorously active animals. Indeed, many of the traditional zoo favorites, not just elephants but also such species as bears, giraffe, rhinos, hippos, and other big animals, are not suited to life in the small and barren enclosures of urban zoos. They are not suited to entering these so-called ‘habitats’ every morning and finding nothing substantially changed week after week, where everything is predictable, with nothing natural to interact with, to destroy, to eat, to occupy them in play and exploration. They are not suited to being locked up in the equivalent of old-fashioned jails for 16 and more hours each day. They are not suited to being kept in insignificant spaces where they cannot carry out their basic behaviours or engage with their own kinds in natural numbers. There are, however, numerous species that thrive in captivity, and have a quality and duration of life that can exceed that of a wild existence: they tend to be smaller species, and though they may have unique behaviours they are sometimes not showy in form or colour, and zoos are not very excited about them. They do not fit the zoos’ self-determined panoply of charismatic mega fauna species that they deem essential to their image. Zoos are fighting hard to keep their elephants, bears and other conventional species. They want to protect their traditions, maintaining their very narrow range of the superstars of the world’s wildlife. The operations director of Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, where I was director 25 years ago, and where I tried and failed to remove the elephants to a warmer climate with more room, recently stated a central part of 28

their defence for continuing to keep elephants: “We think that by having elephants here we can tell their story. Somebody has to tell their story. And we believe strongly that seeing an animal in captivity has an enormous impact.” It is an illogical statement and reveals shoddy thinking, yet it is typical of what almost all zoos say to justify keeping elephants. Clearly, it is devoid of any factual foundation. Obviously one does not need to have live elephants to tell the story of elephants. Hardly anyone in Australia, where I live, has ever seen a living blue whale, but there is enormous public support for their conservation, and a very high expectation that the government will protect these animals from hunters. Moreover, the very restricted story that zoos such as Seattle’s can tell, when the principal players are presented on such a pitifully small and barren stage, are not behaving normally, suffer all manner of physical and psychological misery, and have completely inadequate social interactions, is a story with no validity: it carries only messages of human dominance and control. It requires but little thought to see that keeping elephants in such hopeless conditions, merely to lure visitors, is very close to painting a donkey to look like a zebra, though with far deeper and much worse consequences. There is much in zoos, however, that rests upon dominance and control. It is what attracts many people — including those who went to zoos as children, liked what they saw and decided they wanted to work in one when they grew up so they could be close to and have control over big animals such as lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! Today, our contact or knowledge of most animals is typically mediated via words and imagery, rather than from direct contact. Wild animals are usually presented as strange beings doing eccentric things to entertain or amaze us; domestic animals are commonly regarded as objects whose only purpose is to serve our needs. Modern nations typically enact laws for the care and control of domestic animals, although laws on farm animal welfare are worryingly simplistic, and are typically to protect individual creatures from extreme physical abuse. Legislation that defends wild animals, conversely, is often designed to protect wild animal territories, and does not demonstrate 29

or encourage concern for individual animal well-being. Zoos sit somewhere between these two situations. They hold and display wild animals — wild in the sense that they are not domesticated species, but not in the sense that they act as (or even could survive as) free agents in their natural habitats — but maintain and control them as if they were domesticated creatures. Visitors to zoos know that the animals they look at are not truly like their wild counterparts, but they also recognize they are not like farm animals or pets. Most zoo visitors might not recognize a donkey if it was painted to look like a zebra, few would comprehend the essential difference. How could they? Seeing a zoo elephant does not evince anything like the same ex cite-ment and wonder that is elicited from encountering wild elephants in their natural habitats. To understand and to fully comprehend wild animals they must be seen in context. Zoo visitors thus develop confused attitudes or make wrong assumptions about the animals they see in the zoo’s obviously artificial environment (even though zoos now assiduously call their enclosures ‘habitats’). The problems extend beyond aesthetics. Indeed, the elephants people see in zoos are not normal elephants; they do not behave like normal (that is, wild) elephants, and could not survive in the wild like normal elephants. For the same reasons, zoo lions are not real lions, tigers are not real tigers, and so on. Perhaps, considering our confused attitudes, whether the zoo zebra is a donkey is of little import. Of all the cultural institutions we have developed, zoological parks remain, nonetheless, the best candidates for tackling this fundamental problem. Zoos receive hundreds of millions of visitors each year (more, they like to boast, than all professional sporting events combined) from across all age groups and all social strata. Moreover, their audience arrives already focused on animals. The potential that zoos have to make connection with their visitors on animal related matters, to present new ideas, to posit new standards, to encourage new perspectives, to nurture more caring attitudes, is enormous. Yet these possibilities are ignored. Zoos do not seek a dialogue with their visitors about the important but fraught relationship between humans and non-humans. In 30

fact, they prefer their visitors not to consider such matters too deeply. The stark existential mystery about who we are and how closely related we are to all living things remains unexamined in the one place where humans and animals have their closest contacts. Zoos never speak about the terrible conditions that animals endure in factory farms. They do not express the mildest concern about the abuses that animals are regularly subject to in circuses. They raise not a whimper against the vile conditions in roadside zoos. Since marketers have soared to the top echelons of zoo management in recent years, the possibility of zoos doing anything morally courageous or tackling difficult topics is now probably extinct. The very existence of zoos poses profoundly ethical questions, but the institutions themselves remain tight-lipped about matters involving fundamental principles, and prefer to deflect questioning and criticism by wearing the cloak of conservationists who are valiantly “saving the world’s wildlife.” One can only hope that the cul-de-sac down which modern zoos seems to be travelling, perpetuating the outmoded notion that was first presented to the public as a modern idea in London’s Regent’s Park Zoo in 1828, of taking the big, diurnal, weird and cute animals from exotic habitats and putting them on public display for no good reason other than for people to gawk at — which is still at the core of every major public zoo today but dressed now in different fashion — must be near the end of its journey. Something markedly different is required if zoos are to meet their grand potential for educating their visitors, for changing public attitudes, and for becoming truly worthwhile public natural history institutions, where the thought of presenting wild animals as something less than what they really are, be it lions or elephants, zebras or donkeys, never crosses the mind of even the most flustered zoo director. David Hancocks is a zoo consultant and architect. He was formerly director of Woodland Park Zoo, Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, Melbourne Zoo and Werribee Open Range Zoo, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Animals and Architecture and A Different Nature.

British artist Damien Hirst poses for photographs in front of his work entitled ‘The Incredible Jouney’ during a photocall at Sotheby’s in London Photo: Shaun Curry Source: The Sunday Morning Herald www.smh.com.au/news

Mahmoud Baraghoud stands with one of Marah Zoo’s world famous painted donkeys. The zoos two white donkeys caused an international media frenzy when Mahmod and his brother first spent three days painting stripes onto them using black hair dye. Unable to find an animal trader to bring a real zebra through the tunnels from Egypt, the Bargote family decided to make a fake pair using white donkeys. The story was reported all over the world as a feelgood news piece and often used as an example of the Palestinian people’s resourcefulness during the siege of Gaza. source: The Telegraph www.telegraph.co.uk

Animal size Life expectancy Spectacle Habitat decore Cage size Barbwire Other fence Animal size Spectacle Life expectancy Cage size Habitat decore Barbwire

Evolution of the zooâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cage

Other fence

Spectacle Animal size Life expectancy Cage size Habitat decore

Barbwire Other fence Animal size Life expectancy Habitat decore

1. Zoo as Jail 18-19th century Enlightenment

2. Zoo as Art Gallery 20th century Modernism

3. Zoo as Education Facility 20-21st century Post modernism

Embroidery drawings

Gaza by Sara Roy “Do you know what it’s like living in Gaza?” a friend of mine asked. “It is like walking on broken glass tearing at your feet.” I was last in Gaza in August, my first trip since Israel’s war on the territory one year ago. I was overwhelmed by what I saw in a place I have known intimately for nearly a quarter of a century: a land ripped apart and scarred, the lives of its people blighted. Gaza is decaying under the weight of continued devastation, unable to function normally. The resulting void is filled with vacancy and despair that subdues even those acts of resilience and optimism that still find some expression. What struck me most was the innocence of these people, over half of them children, and the indecency and criminality of their continued punishment. The decline and disablement of Gaza’s economy and society have been deliberate, the result of state policy — consciously planned, implemented and enforced. Although Israel bears the greatest responsibility, the United States and the European Union, among others, are also culpable, as is the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. All are complicit in the ruin of this gentle place. And just as Gaza’s demise has been consciously orchestrated, so have the obstacles preventing its recovery. Gaza has a long history of subjection that assumed new dimensions after Hamas’ January 2006 electoral victory. Immediately after those elections, Israel and certain donor countries suspended contacts with the PA, which was soon followed by the suspension of direct aid and the subsequent imposition of an international financial boycott of the PA. By this time Israel had already been withholding monthly tax revenues and custom duties collected on behalf of the authority, had effectively ended Gazan employment inside Israel, and had drastically reduced Gaza’s external trade. With escalating Palestinian-Israeli violence, which led to the killing of two Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit in June 2006, Israel sealed Gaza’s borders, allowing for the entry of humanitarian goods only, which marked the beginning of the siege, now in its fourth year [as of 2010, when this 40

article was published — ed]. Shalit’s abduction precipitated a massive Israeli military assault against Gaza at the end of June, known as Operation Summer Rains, which initially targeted Gaza’s infrastructure and later focused on destabilizing the Hamas-led government through intensified strikes on PA ministries and further reductions in fuel, electricity, water delivery and sewage treatment. This near daily ground operation did not end until October 2006. In June 2007, after Hamas’ seizure of power in the Strip (which followed months of internecine violence and an attempted coup by Fatah against Hamas), and the dissolution of the national unity government, the PA effectively split in two: a de facto Hamas-led government — rejected by Israel and the West — was formed in Gaza, and the officially recognized government headed by President Mahmoud Abbas was established in the West Bank. The boycott was lifted against the West Bank PA but was intensified against Gaza. Adding to Gaza’s misery was the decision by the Israeli security cabinet on September 19, 2007, to declare the Strip an “enemy entity” controlled by a “terrorist organization.” After this decision Israel imposed further sanctions that include an almost complete ban on trade and no freedom of movement for the majority of Gazans, including the labour force. In the fall of 2008, a ban on fuel imports into Gaza was imposed. These policies have contributed to transforming Gazans from a people with political and national rights into a humanitarian problem — paupers and charity cases who are now the responsibility of the international community. Not only have key international donors, most critically the United States and European Union, participated in the sanctions regime against Gaza, they have privileged the West Bank in their programmatic work. Donor strategies now support and strengthen the fragmentation and isolation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip — an Israeli policy goal of the Oslo process — and divide Palestinians into two distinct entities, offering largesse to one side while criminalizing and depriving the other. This behaviour among key donor countries reflects a critical shift in their approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from one that opposes Israeli occupation to one that, in effect, recognizes it. This can be seen in their largely unchallenged acceptance of Israel’s settlement 41

policy and the deepening separation of the West Bank and Gaza and isolation of the latter. This shift in donor thinking can also be seen in their unwillingness to confront Israel’s de facto annexation of Palestinian lands and Israel’s reshaping of the conflict to centre on Gaza, which is now identified solely with Hamas and therefore as alien. Hence, within the annexation/alien (West Bank/Gaza Strip) paradigm, any resistance by Palestinians, be they in the West Bank or Gaza, to Israel’s repressive occupation, including attempts at meaningful economic empowerment, are now considered by Israel and certain donors to be illegitimate and unlawful. This is the context in which the sanctions regime against Gaza has been justified, a regime that has not mitigated since the end of the war. Normal trade (upon which Gaza’s tiny economy is desperately dependent) continues to be prohibited; traditional imports and exports have almost disappeared from Gaza. In fact, with certain limited exceptions, no construction materials or raw materials have been allowed to enter the Strip since June 14, 2007. Indeed, according to Amnesty International, only 41 truckloads of construction materials were allowed to enter Gaza between the end of the Israeli offensive in mid-January 2009 and December 2009, although Gaza’s industrial sector presently requires 55,000 truckloads of raw materials for essential reconstruction. Furthermore, in the year since they were banned, imports of diesel and petrol from Israel into Gaza for private or commercial use were allowed in small amounts only four times (although the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, periodically receives diesel and petrol supplies). By August 2009, 90 percent of Gaza’s total population was subject to scheduled electricity cuts of four to eight hours per day, while the remaining 10 per cent had no access to any electricity, a reality that has remained largely unchanged. Gaza’s protracted blockade has resulted in the near total collapse of the private sector. At least 95 per cent of Gaza’s industrial establishments (3,750 enterprises) were either forced to close or were destroyed in the first four years of the blockade, resulting in a loss of between 100,000 and 120,000 jobs. The remaining 5 per cent operate at 20-50 per cent of their capacity. The vast restrictions on trade have also contributed to the continued ero42

sion of Gaza’s agricultural sector, which was exacerbated by the destruction of 5,000 acres of agricultural land and 305 agricultural wells during the war. These losses also include the destruction of 140,965 olive trees, 136,217 citrus trees, 22,745 fruit trees, 10,365 date trees and 8,822 other trees. Lands previously irrigated are now dry, while effluent from sewage seeps into the groundwater and the sea, making much of the land unusable. Many attempts by Gazan farmers to replant over the past year have failed because of the depletion and contamination of the water and the high level of nitrates in the soil. Gaza’s agricultural sector has been further undermined by the buffer zone imposed by Israel on Gaza’s northern and eastern perimeters (and by Egypt on Gaza’s southern border), which contains some of the Strip’s most fertile land. The zone is officially 300 metres wide and 55 kilometres long, but according to the UN, farmers entering within 1,000 metres of the border have sometimes been fired upon by the IDF. Approximately 30-40 per cent of Gaza’s total agricultural land is contained in the buffer zone. This has effectively forced the collapse of Gaza’s agricultural sector. These profound distortions in Gaza’s economy and society will — even under the best of conditions — take decades to reverse. The economy is now largely dependent on publicsector employment, relief aid and smuggling, illustrating the growing informalization of the economy. Even before the war, the World Bank had already observed a redistribution of wealth from the formal private sector toward black market operators. There are many illustrations, but one that is particularly startling concerns changes in the banking sector. A few days after Gaza was declared an enemy entity, Israel’s banks announced their intention to end all direct transactions with Gaza-based banks and deal only with their parent institutions in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Accordingly, the Ramallah-based banks became responsible for currency transfers to their branches in the Gaza Strip. However, Israeli regulations prohibit the transfer of large amounts of currency without the approval of the Defense Ministry and other Israeli security forces. Consequently, over the past two years Gaza’s banking sector has had serious problems in meeting the cash demands of its customers. This in turn 43

has given rise to an informal banking sector, which is now controlled largely by people affiliated with the Hamas-led government, making Hamas Gaza’s key financial middleman. Consequently, moneychangers, who can easily generate capital, are now arguably stronger than the formal banking system in Gaza, which cannot. Another example of Gaza’s growing economic informality is the tunnel economy, which emerged long ago in response to the siege, providing a vital lifeline for an imprisoned population. According to local economists, around two-thirds of economic activity in Gaza is presently devoted just to smuggling goods into (but not out of) Gaza. Even this lifeline may soon be diminished, as Egypt, apparently assisted by US government engineers, has begun building an impenetrable underground steel wall along its border with Gaza in an attempt to reduce smuggling and control the movement of people. At its completion the wall will be six to seven miles long and 55 feet deep. The tunnels, which Israel tolerates in order to keep the siege intact, have also become an important source of income for the Hamas government and its affiliated enterprises, effectively weakening traditional and formal businesses and the rehabilitation of a viable business sector. In this way, the siege on Gaza has led to the slow but steady replacement of the formal business sector by a new, largely black-market sector that rejects registration, regulation or transparency and, tragically, has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. At least two new economic classes have emerged in Gaza, a phenomenon with precedents in the Oslo period: one has grown extremely wealthy from the black-market tunnel economy; the other consists of certain publicsector employees who are paid not to work (for the Hamas government) by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Hence, not only have many Gazan workers been forced to stop producing by external pressures, there is now a category of people who are being rewarded for their lack of productivity — a stark illustration of Gaza’s increasingly distorted reality. This in turn has led to economic disparities between the haves and have-nots that are enormous and visible, as seen in the almost perverse consumerism in restaurants and shops that are the domain of the wealthy. 44

Gaza’s economy is largely devoid of productive activity in favour of a desperate kind of consumption among the poor and the rich, but it is the former who are unable to meet their needs. Billions in international aid pledges have yet to materialize, so the overwhelming majority of Gazans remain impoverished. The combination of a withering private sector and stagnating economy has led to high unemployment, which ranges from 31.6 per cent in Gaza City to 44.1 per cent in Khan Younis. According to the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce, the de facto unemployment rate is closer to 65 per cent. At least 75 per cent of Gaza’s 1.5 million people now require humanitarian aid to meet their basic food needs, compared with around 30 per cent before the blockade. The UN further reports that the number of Gazans living in abject poverty — meaning those who are totally unable to feed their families — has tripled to 300,000, or approximately 20 per cent of the population. Access to adequate amounts of food continues to be a critical problem, and appears to have grown more acute after the cessation of hostilities a year ago. Internal data from September 2009 through the beginning of January 2010, for example, reveals that Israel allows Gazans no more (and at times less) than 25 per cent of needed food supplies, with levels having fallen as low as 16 per cent. During the last two weeks of January 2010, these levels declined even more. Between January 16 and January 29 an average of 24.5 trucks of food and supplies per day entered Gaza, or 171.5 trucks per week. Given that Gaza requires 400 trucks of food alone daily to sustain the population, Israel allowed in no more than 6 percent of needed food supplies during this two-week period. Because Gaza needs approximately 240,000 truckloads of food and supplies per year to “meet the needs of the population and the reconstruction effort,” according to the Palestinian Federation of Industries, current levels are, in a word, obscene. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program, “The evidence shows that the population is being sustained at the most basic or minimum humanitarian standard.” This has likely contributed to the prevalence of stunting (low height for age), an indicator of chronic malnutrition, which has been pronounced among Gaza’s children younger than 45

5, increasing from 8.2 percent in 1996 to 13.2 percent in 2006. Gaza’s agony does not end there. According to Amnesty International, 90-95 percent of the water supplied by Gaza’s aquifer is “unfit for drinking.” The majority of Gaza’s groundwater supplies are contaminated with nitrates well above the acceptable WHO standard — in some areas six times that standard — or too salinated to use. Gaza no longer has any source of regular clean water. According to one donor account, “Nowhere else in the world has such a large number of people been exposed to such high levels of nitrates for such a long period of time. There is no precedent, and no studies to help us understand what happens to people over the course of years of nitrate poisoning,” which is especially threatening to children. According to Desmond Travers, a co-author of the Goldstone Report, “If these issues are not addressed, Gaza may not even be habitable by World Health Organization norms.” It is possible that high nitrate levels have contributed to some shocking changes in the infant mortality rate (IMR) among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. IMR, widely used as an indicator of population health, has stalled among Palestinians since the 1990s and now shows signs of increasing. This is because the leading causes of infant mortality have changed from infectious and diarrheal diseases to prematurity, low birth weight and congenital malformations. These trends are alarming (and rare in the region), because infant mortality rates have been declining in almost all developing countries, including Iraq. The people of Gaza know they have been abandoned. Some told me the only time they felt hope was when they were being bombed, because at least then the world was paying attention. Gaza is now a place where poverty masquerades as livelihood and charity as business. Yet, despite attempts by Israel and the West to caricature Gaza as a terrorist haven, Gazans still resist. Perhaps what they resist most is surrender: not to Israel, not to Hamas, but to hate. So many people still speak of peace, of wanting to resolve the conflict and live a normal life. Yet, in Gaza today, this is not a reason for optimism but despair.

Postscript, February 2012 Trade Normal trade (upon which Gaza’s tiny economy is desperately dependent) continues to be prohibited despite an easing of certain restrictions, which the Israeli government announced in July 2010 following the flotilla incident several weeks before. At present, for example, consumer items and raw materials are allowed to enter Gaza except those defined as ‘dual use’—items that have a civilian and military function. While there is no longer a shortage of food (although purchasing power remains weak), all construction materials continue to be banned except those meant for international projects. In this regard, in November 2011 the Israeli government allowed for the importation of building materials for the restoration of ten private-sector factories in Gaza, which is part of a “package of gestures” agreed to by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Quartet envoy Tony Blair in February 2011. Yet, it should be remembered that during Operation Cast Lead, 1,500 factories and workshops were either destroyed or partly destroyed. Exports Exports continue to be highly restricted. For example, despite a promise in the 2005 USbrokered Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) to allow 400 truckloads of exports each day, Israel allowed farmers in Gaza to export an average of two truckloads per day (or 290 truckloads — of strawberries, flowers, peppers and tomatoes — for the whole year, that is for the period November 2010 – May 2011). Between 2 May and 27 November 27, no exports left the Strip. For the current winter export season, the best-case scenario would allow fewer than five trucks per day for the entire season or one per cent of the amount promised in the AMA agreement. Furthermore, since June 2007 not one truckload has been allowed for export to Israel or the West Bank, Gaza’s traditional markets, which historically absorbed at least 85 per cent of the territory’s exports (Currently, exports are sent only to Europe and on January 22, 2012 Israel allowed one export of furniture from Gaza to an exhibition in Jordan). According to the Israeli human rights organization, 47

GISHA, “Profitable deals that Israel is blocking include furniture orders for Palestinian Authority schools in the West Bank, citrus fruit to West Bank grocers, and textiles to Israeli companies,” clearly showing that the restrictions have little if anything to do with security and are instead directed at maintaining the separation of Gaza and the West Bank, the isolation and deprivation of Gaza, and precluding the possibility of a unified economy. Currently, about 83 per cent of Gaza’s factories remain closed or are operating at 50 per cent or less of capacity. Freedom of movement Despite some limited easing of trade restrictions, there has been virtually no change with regard to the movement of Gaza’s 1.65 million people between Gaza, Israel and the West Bank. The principal exceptions are the approximately 3,000 Palestinians per month who are allowed to travel via the Erez crossing to Israel and the West Bank. Most are considered special humanitarian cases leaving Gaza with their companions largely for medical reasons. The rest were merchants. Gazans also are able to cross into Egypt and beyond via the Rafah crossing, which is open six days per week for people (but not goods). In December 2011, an average of 650 people left Gaza daily for Egypt. The outcome has been devastating: Gaza’s formal economy has been severely undermined, incapable of supporting any kind of long-term sustainable growth. Gaza’s socioeconomic indicators are far worse today than they were prior to 2006; they are also far worse than those of the West Bank. Unemployment Today, unemployment in Gaza is conservatively estimated at 30 per cent and could easily return to the much higher levels of the past. Close to 40 per cent of Gazans live in poverty, a percentage that would be much higher without donor assistance, and over 70 per cent of Gaza’s people remain dependent on some form of humanitarian assistance. Dr. Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. This article is an edited version of Gaza: Treading on Shards, which first appeared in The Nation (online), 1 March 2010. 48

les/Transporters

ng Applications

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Livestock

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Education/Stationary

116

Entry Point for aggregates and building materials

Entry Point for Goods from Egypt

5. Kerem Shalom Crossing Point

4. Sufa Crossing Point

818

1651

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1226

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355

source: http://www.ochaopt.org/GazaCrossings.aspx?id=1010003 2015

400

January 2009 - right after the Gaza War : Karni, Kerem Shalom, Rafah Crossing

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Agricultural Raw Materials

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Vehicles/Transporters 0

Packaging Applications

Crossing Point for people

6. Rafah Crossing Point

Hygiene/Cleaning Supplies

Human Food Products

Education/Stationary

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Packaging Applications

Non-Edible Consumables

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Industrial/Electrical Applications

Hygiene/Cleaning Supplies

Human Food Products

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x100

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100

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400

142

208

461

September 2011 - Present : Kerem Shalom Crossing

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1057

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1226

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Hygiene/Cleaning Supplies

Human Food Products

Education/Stationary

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Animal Feed

Agricultural Raw Materials

January 2009 - right after the Gaza War : Karni, Kerem Shalom, Rafah Crossing

Construction 0

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Agricultural Raw Materials

x100

Vehicles/Transporters 0

Industrial/Electrical Applications

July 2007 -461right after the Battle of Gaza : Erez, Karni, Kerem Shalom, Sufa Crossing

Livestock 0

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25Non-Edible Consumables

142

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Human Food Products 208

95 Education/Stationary

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September 2011 - Present : Kerem Shalom Crossing

Packaging Applications

Non-Edible Consumables

142

208

461 1057

source: http://www.ochaopt.org/GazaCrossings.aspx?id=1010003

September 2011 - Present : Kerem Shalom Crossing

1226

Gaza, legal crossing of goods

Gaza map, 2011

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1. Erez Crossing Point Primary Crossing for workers and humanitarians

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Entry point for liquid fuels

3. Karni Primary import and exporting crossing point

4. Sufa Crossing Point

Entry Point for aggregates and building materials

m Shalom Crossing Point

oint for Goods from Egypt

Gaza typological sections, 2011

Gaza population density comparison GAZA Population density in relation to world, to Israel and to The Netherlands World: 133 P/KM2

Israel: 282 P/KM2

NL: 466 P/KM2

Gaza: 4,500 P/KM2

52 4768 p/kmÂ˛

4768 p/kmÂ˛

Exotic by Edo Amin Kids are charmed by zoos. Right in front of their eyes are animals normally foreign to our reality, animals they have only seen in books or on TV. These animals come from unfathomable distances, from across great oceans, from the twilight zone where reality meets fantasy. Are elephants real, are they really as big as a building, asks the small child. And do they have winged dragons in zoos? Let’s not get too close, in case they really breathe fire! 1.

Yoshu Chikanobu,World’s No. 1 Chiarini Great Circus Illustration

But as we grow up, we learn that exotic animals come not from a mystic wonderland, but by simple means — a ship, an airplane — and they arrive from just another continent, often Africa. So, what makes things exotic? The root of the word betrays its geographical significance: distance is what makes things exotic. The word ‘exotic’, first recorded in the 16th century, means ‘belonging to another country.’ But it originates from the Latin exoticus and in turn from the Greek exotikos ( ‘foreign’). It literally means ‘from the outside,’ from exo (‘outside’). Outside of what? And how far outside? The exotic quality of the animal is measured by its distance from the viewer. The more difficult it is to move the animal closer to us, the more exotic it becomes. And the more the viewer is limited in his or her movement, the more exotic an animal becomes. African zebras have fascinated visitors of travelling European and American circuses as far back as the 19th century. A poster for Carmo’s circus (1) shows zebras and elephants as its 54

main assets. More recently, zebras embellished the gate of the Africa-USA safari grounds in Florida, inviting visitors to ‘step into another world (2). To Americans, Africa, represented by the zebra, is the land of wonder. It is exotic to America — measurably so. Bringing a zebra from Somalia to Florida means travelling some 15,000 km. What animals were brought from that distance to your city? If you live in Gaza, a zebra is not really all that exotic, in the strict geographical, Latin sense. We might even be astonished that Gazans see zebras as exotic, because Gaza is but a couple hours drive from Africa. 2.

Africa-USA Safari

Suppose you’re in Gaza, and wanted to see a zebra in the wild. Well, those zebras in Somalia are just 3,500 km away. It’s a shorter distance than, say, driving across the USA, coast to coast. No need for much sea faring, either you could ride the zebra most of the way back, maybe a short ferry hop across the Suez Canal. Or you could drive the zebra on a truck and be back in a couple weeks. 3.

Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman painting sheep at his installation in the 1978 Venice Biennale

In terms of distance, a zebra is five times less exotic in Gaza than it is in Florida. So why is a zebra considered one of the most exotic animals in Gaza? 55

The answer is because animals can’t get into Gaza. The distance has become enormous, infinite, only occasionally bridged by illegal tunnels, themselves a surreal, exotic idea. Bringing a zebra from Africa into Gaza through the illegal tunnels costs about the same, or more, than it costs to take it to the USA, an ocean away. The distance is measured in difficulty. To paraphrase B. Traven (The Treasure of Sierra Madre), a zebra costs as much as it does because of the pain, risk, and loss of life that people suffer when bringing it in: “An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labour that went into the finding and the getting of it.” An animal doesn’t even need to be exotic to become banned. The plain and domestic — horses, donkeys, goats, cattle and chickens — are also banned entry to Gaza, and 5.

Left: Banksy, Turf War, London, 2003 Right: Banksy, Bethlehem - soldier checking a donkey’s papers.

thus rendered exotic. And in fact, it has only a year and a half since Gaza was again allowed sage, coriander, jam and halva by Israel. At the time our zebra was created, Gaza was not just blockaded on its Israeli border, but passage to Egypt was also blocked. Not just zebras and donkeys were shut in or out — people, too, could not leave, for study or even to attend a funeral. After years of blockade, many things became exotic for Gazans by virtue of being banned. Fantastic Like the word exotic, the word fantasy is rooted in the ancient Mediterranean. Phantasia in Greek means ‘appearance, image, perception, imagination,’ and phantazesthai — a combination of phantos ‘visible,’ and phainesthai ‘appear’. So fantasy is ‘picturing to oneself’. ‘Picturing to oneself’ is a definition of the core of each and every artistic act. The slight rebellious undertone of fantasy is also quite ap56

propriate here. In a famous scene in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, patients are not allowed to watch a game on TV — so they sit around the switched-off TV set, following a game only they can see, with shouting in excitement: “A hit! It’s a hit! He’s rounding first, heading for second. Here comes the throw. He’s sliding... and... he’s safe! He’s safe! Hoo-wee! Whatta game! Whatta game!” The collective make-believe is not part of their madness — it is an act of rebellion, one of the few they can get away with, and one of the last to be taken away. “Mr McMurphy, you are deliberately violating the rules!” shouts the Big Nurse in frustration. Perhaps that is why fantasy does so well here in the Middle East. Perhaps millennia of subordination to foreign emperors and crusader kings have made us appreciate the last resort of the oppressed — imagination. In the Middle East, imagination is part of the air we breathe. Exaggeration is expected, and a richness of language compensates for lack of resources. As I watch the efforts of Marah Land to provide the semblance of a zoo to its population, or the YouTube video documenting the painting a donkey into a zebra, I am reminded of my father’s stories of how, as a kid, back when radios where not available, he sat around street storytellers, throwing a Turkish grush coin into the travelling hat, hoping to hear the end of the tale. And how my sister, an artist and curator in the Jerusalem museum, has created, from camels, fantasy animals including a zebra-camel (3). Artistic But let us not fall into the trap of appreciating the aesthetics, originality and ingenuity of Marah Land, while forgetting the stark facts of its world. A gulf separates Marah Land and, say, the zoo in Jerusalem (in Hebrew, formally titled the Biblical Zoo, lest you forget whose God made a pair of zebras walk into the arc). A gulf separates a domestic animal in Gaza from its sibling in Tel Aviv, a distance measurable in restrictions and limitations, not in miles. Imagine this, if you will: what if Mahmoud Barghoud — the Gazan mural painter (yes, he does more than donkeys) who painted the Gazan zebra using masking tape and hair dye — were born not at the cursed, bombed and blockaded location, but a few kilometres away? What if 57

he was born as a Jew, at a kibbutz? What path would his artistic talents find then? A few hours drive away from Gaza, in Israeli territory, up in the Upper Galilee, there’s a kibbutz called Ma’ayan Baruch (named after Baruch Gordon, a South African Zionist). Sixty years ago, a young Israeli soldier was sent to that kibbutz for his military service. The Israeli army had ‘pioneer youth’ units then, combining military and agricultural work to settle in the land. ‘Settle’, in fact, is the actual title of this military unit. The specific soldier I’m referring to was Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman. His experience with nature, sheep and shepherding had a significant impact on his later artistic work and career. He is most known for his many

Smadar Tirosh, Zebra Camel (Jerusalem, 2001)

drawings of sheep, “drawn near the Israeli border”, Wikipedia tells us, “near the barbed wire. What strongly impacted Kadishman was the fact that even sheep are limited by international borders”. Sheep are marked by Palestinian shepherds with a spot of colour, specific to the herd. Sort of Colors, if you pardon the urban slang. Kadishman won world recognition when, in the 1978 Venice Biennale, he presented a piece of living art: a herd of live sheep with paint spots on their wool (4). On the artist’s official website, Amnon Barzel, Curator at the Venice Biennale for the Israeli Pavilion, writes: “The pain and suffering of loss, which casts doubt on the continuity of the generations, have been poured into the innumerable heads that lie before us, cut from iron. Open-mouthed, they are an expression of the great anxiety about the loss of sons, and a sharp, direct outcry to stop the wars, the genocide, the injustice which constitute the voiding of human existence and culture. Kadishman creates like a prophet at the city gates, uncompromisingly, without insinuations, but with a power of statement which 58

is most exceptional in the domain of contemporary art. An outflow of creation, by a man who has chosen life, an artist who has chosen the life of an urgent mission. In this urgency there are poetry and beauty which constitute a language. He works as he himself defines it: without alternative, without submitting to precedents and limitations. His art opens a new chapter in the presence and the position of art in the tangled texture of contemporary reality.” In the Kadishman story we have a painting method originally invented for a mundane, earthly need (counting sheep), now used to produce a fascinating art piece. I’m noting this so we don’t stigmatize Barghoud’s masking tape and hair dye. Neither should Barghoud’s naive murals bar entry to the halls of art, as another wall-painting artist, Banksy, has successfully turned striped animal into an objet d’art. In 2003, controversial graffiti artist Banksy painted stripes on sheep, turning them into striped, concentration-camp-like creatures in his ‘Turf war’ exhibition (5) — a particularly disturbing image even for this never-convenient political artist. In Bethlehem, a few hours from Gaza, Banksy sprayed an image of a soldier checking the movement permits of a donkey — symbolizing the inhumanity and stupidity of the occupation and selecting the humble animal, anti-hero of many local jokes, to again take part in art. What really separates Mahmoud Barghoud’s striped donkey from Banksy’s donkey/ striped sheep and Kadishman’s painted sheep is not artistic potential but actual barbed wires and dangerous tunnels, with dramatically different conditions on each side. On one side, relative abundance, and on the other — utter desolation. For Mahmoud Barghoud, going to study in an art academy would require exceptionally rare circumstances, while for the soldier on the other side of the hill it’s almost a banal proposition. In between, there’s the de facto separation, the obstruction of movement by military checkpoints and permits, the forced scarcity and poverty. A blockade. Edo Amin is an israeli journalist, a cartoonist and entrepreneur.

Marah Land

Zeitoun, occupied Gaza Strip (IPS) — “We haven’t had a single visit yet through Ramadan, what kind of zoo doesn’t get visitors during holidays?” asks Mahmoud Barghoud, 22, co-creator of the Marah zoo. The Marah Land zoo and children’s park lies halfway between Gaza and Deir al-Balah on the main north-south highway running Gaza’s length, waiting for customers to visit. In the peak of summer, the park gets a handful of visitors on a good day. During the month of Ramadan and since, there have been none. Of Gaza’s roughly ten scattered zoos and animal parks, the Marah zoo has gained the most fame for its creativity: in 2009, using women’s hair dye and a donkey, it created Gaza’s first ‘zebra’. But in the face of its ingenuity, the zoo has suffered financial and physical losses. “When we returned to the zoo after the Israeli war on Gaza stopped, the first thing we saw were the dead monkeys. We’d had six of different types and they were all sprawled out dead,” says Barghoud. “The lioness was dead. The two camels were dead. The two hyenas were dead. Our gazelles, the foxes, the wolves, the caribou, the deer, the ostriches... 90 per cent of our animals and birds were dead.” The zoo became an area occupied by Israeli soldiers and tanks during the 23-day Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008-09. Barghoud says the family tried twice to obtain coordination with the Israeli army to come to 60

the zoo to feed and water the animals. “We called the Red Cross to ask for coordination but they told us, ‘We can’t reach people to help them, let alone animals.’ So our animals died for want of nutrition.” Others were killed by shrapnel from the Israeli bombings, says Barghoud. “Over 80 per cent of the zoo was damaged,” says Mahmoud’s 55-year-old father, Ahmed Barghoud. “We lost around $70,000 to the war’s destruction. We tried to rebuild the zoo, but that required a lot of money, and the money we had wasn’t enough to bring in the animals that we had before.” The Barghouds say it isn’t the first time they’ve faced difficulties. “We started the zoo under siege, so we had to bring them [the animals] in through the tunnels instead of across borders,” the elder Barghoud explains, citing the lifeline of hundreds of underground routes from Egypt to Gaza. The siege on Gaza, which Israel and the international community imposed shortly after Hamas’ election in 2006, tightened severely in mid-2007. Under full-scale siege, where an extensive amount of the most basic of goods and medicines are not allowed into the Strip and humans are not allowed out for medical care, exotic animals fall low in the list of priorities. “Obviously, the tunnel route is much more expensive and less safe, so we can mostly only bring in small, fairly common animals.” Yet, the zoo did manage to acquire lions, wolves, foxes and ostriches in addition to their more common animals. “Although the lions aren’t very large, they do have to be transferred in steel cages. And other animals have died in the tunnels in their steel cages,” says Barghoud. The multi-width tunnels vary, some hosting small cars, some just large enough to stoop in. But all share the bumpy, rough ground and 61

Copycards by Khaled Hourani

dangerous electrical wires overhead which, aside from leading to the deaths of animals, have led to the deaths of tunnel workers. “Bringing animals in through the tunnels is problematic also because they usually don’t have papers. If we had a choice, we’d bring animals with good health and vaccinations via border crossings. But we don’t have that luxury,” says the elder Barghoud. The siege not only bans the animals and most things related to the agricultural and animal husbandry sectors, but also hinders professionals in all fields from acquiring advanced training outside of Gaza. “It’s a serious problem, the lack of vets knowledgeable in exotic animals,” says Barghoud. “When our ostriches got ill, they soon after died because the vet — a cow and sheep vet — gave them the wrong dosage and type of medication. The same happened with one of our hyenas and two wolves.” Barghoud cites different phone interactions with callers he thinks were Israeli intelligence agents. “Once, someone claiming to be with the Israeli army called and said if we gave them Shalit, they’d provide feed for our animals,” he says, referring to the Israeli soldier captured in 2006 at Gaza’s border while enforcing the siege and Israeli military control of Gaza. 62

“Another time we were contacted by the mayor of Ramat Gan who promised us he would send two zebras. But when he contacted us two weeks later, he demanded to know where Shalit is first.” Aside from these bribery attempts, the Barghouds say they have received outright Israeli demands to stop talking to journalists. “I want you to tell the media that you didn’t lose any animals during the war,” one Arabic speaker from Israel commanded. In such circumstances the Barghouds wanted to bring in giraffes, but even the biggest tunnels had no room for those. So they got creative. “We decided to use hair dye, something which wouldn’t hurt the animals, and turn the donkeys into zebras.” Initially, this scheme worked and children and adults alike flocked to Marah zoo to see the new ‘zebras.’ “The kids were so happy to see the zebras. And that’s what we wanted, to make them happy.” Yet now, a mere year later, there are few visitors. One of the donkey-zebras has died of natural causes, and the zoo is a sad assortment of monkeys and birds, house cats, a single sickly wolf, a few foxes, a sole lion and the remaining donkey-zebra. “Expenses are high,” explains Ahmed Barghoud. “We’ve paid over and over out of our own pockets because we don’t have the customers.” Frustrated and seeing no solution as long as Gaza is under siege, Barghoud feels there is little reason for keeping the zoo open. “I don’t want to profit from this park. My children have clothes, I have clothes, we eat. What more do we want? We do this for the children under occupation and siege, so they can play and be as children, because they need this.” IPS — Inter Press Service (2010).

Lions

Animal survey table, Marah Land Animal

Amount

Source

monkey Animal Source dog

1, 2, 3, 4

2, 3

1, 2

Amount 2, 3 Cage in relation to animal

monkey zebra tunnels

1, 2, 3, 4

dog domestic donkey

2, 3

zebra (if ) smuggled from Egypt camel $40.000 donkey domestic rabbits

1, 2

1 1, 2

camel domestic tiger

rabbits domestic ostrich tiger tunnels peafowl ostrich domestic wolf peafowl domestic goat-antelopes wolf local wild

2 1

2 2

3 2

3 3

hawk goat-antelopes domestic gazelle hawk local wild

3 3

white stork gazelle local wild

tunnels (ifmostly ) smuggled died, w $40.000 1 alive domestic alive domestic

(if ) smuggled fro $40.000 died, lack of n domestic

domestic 1 died, paint p domestic domestic 1 died, war tunnels 1 alive domestic died, war domestic tunnels died, war domestic domestic died, war local wild domestic died, war domestic local wild died, war local wild domestic died,wild war local local wild died, war local wild local wild

local wild domestic alive

fox cat domestic

fox fox tiny local wild

4 3, 4

3, 54

lion owl ? fish lion smuggled, selling for $700 fish ?

Source Status domestic

alive

cat white stork local wild

owl tiny fox 3, 4

tunnels

1, 2, 3, 4

local wild domestic alive local ? wild ?

alive ?

died, war ? smuggled,

selling 1 died,for $70 1 alive ? smuggled, 5, 6$700 selling alivefor

alive

AP : Gaza Zoo Paints Donkeys to look like Zebras CNN : Gaza’s confused Donkey 3 1 AP : Gaza Zoo Paints Donkeys to look like Zebras Al Jazeera: Gaza’s only zoo is up for sale 4 2 CNN : Gaza’s confused Donkey Al Jazeera: In Gaza, The Zoo After the War 5 3 Al Jazeera: Gaza’s only zoo is up for sale http://www.slate.com/id/2222991/ 4 6 Al Jazeera: In Gaza, The Zoo After the War http://www.independent.ie/world-news/middle-east/for-sale-gaza-zoo-where-t 5 http://www.slate.com/id/2222991/ 6 http://www.independent.ie/world-news/middle-east/for-sale-gaza-zoo-where-the t/for-sale-gaza-zoo-where-the-zebras-were-not-all-they-seemed-2053258.html 1 2

Cage in relation to animal

Status

mostly died, war 1 alive alive from Egypt

died, lack of nutrition

1 died, paint poison 1 died, war 1 alive died, war died, war died, war died, war died, war died, war died, war alive alive alive alive died, war 1 died, 1 alive alive

alive

the-zebras-were-not-all-they-seemed-2053258.html

5, 6

Quotation sources Turbervile’s Booke of hunting, 1576. Published 1908 by Clarendon Press, [Oxford University Press] in[Oxford], New York. Paris show unveils life in human zoo by Angelique Chrisafis. Mark Twain, The Unbridged, Volume 1, Ch 56, 1867. Wikipedia. Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco. Animal Liberation Blog. UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Sunday Morning Herald. The Telegraph. Gulfnews.com. IPS – Inter Press Service. Khaled Khurani copy cards. Colophon reader Editor Malkit Shoshan Essays Malkit Shoshan, Sara Roy, David Hancocks, Edo Amin Language editor Jane Szita Illustrations, maps and diagrams Malkit Shoshan with Arlene Lee, Sara van Apeldoorn, Laura van Santen Graphic design Sandra Kassenaar and Bart de Baets Special thanks to Matthijs Bouw, One Architecture, Yael Davids, Matthew Stadler, Sara Roy, David Hancocks, Edo Amin, Herman Verkerk, Khaled Khurani, Berend Strik, Rotay Club Maastricht Oost, Audax Textiel Museum Tilburg, a group of women from Chisuma, nearby Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, St. Taboka/Nyamukani, St. Share the Care, Frans Hermans, Hans and Hanneke Verheggen, Tienie Essens, Jan Kelleners, Henk and Riek Heijmans, Ger van Buggenum, Marlies Ernes. This is a publication in the context of ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism, an exhibition at NAiM/Bureau Europa, Maastricht (NL). NAiM/ Bureau Europa is made possible by the main sponsor Vesteda and by structural funding of the Province of Limburg and the Municipality of Maastricht.

Malkit Shoshan

NAiM/Bureau Europa

Malkit Shoshan

NAiM/Bureau 5 Europa