Place and displacement: Historical geographies of Israel's largest landfill

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2023.01.001Get rights and content

Highlights

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    Hiriya landfill exacerbrated the destruction of a typical Arab landscape.

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    Insisting on a technological modern solution caused infrastructural dysfunction.

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    The landscape destruction turned the environment hostile to humans and nature.

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    A combined landscape reading is crucial for understanding a tragedy of landscape.

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    Hiriya landfill contributes to understanding post-industrial sites.

Abstract

This article explores the role of space in facilitating forms of political power, as shown in the destruction of landscape in the center of Israel by the Hiriya landfill. That failed infrastructure wrecked the delicate legacies of mankind and nature, thus sealing the area’s fate as a city’s repellent dumping ground that attracted all kinds of liminal activities. After the 1948 war, which resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel, the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages and the erasure of their people’s legacy, Tel Aviv begun dumping its household waste near an Arab village, the residents of which had been expelled during the conflict. The authorities promised the local inhabitants — Jewish newcomers and refugees in the nearby transit camp, as well as local city dwellers — a new and modern compost plant, but the plant’s opening was repeatedly postponed. This article reveals the rapid changes that occurred in the early 1950s in the Hiriya area, and how insistence on a modern, technologically based solution to waste treatment, suffused with Zionist ideology, resulted in the creation of an infamous site that became a symbol for environmental, infrastructural, social and health hazards. Drawing from diverse unexplored textual and visual archival sources, including aerial photographs, historical maps, printed texts and interviews, we argue that this combined method of landscape reading is crucial for understanding such a tragedy of landscape. Our study of the Hiriya landfill points to the challenges posed by infrastructure, and contributes to future research into post-industrial sites, including landfills, quarries, airfields, mines and factories.

Section snippets

Groundwork for enduring blight

Recent studies which focus on post World War II infrastructure projects from the social sciences' and humanities' perspective, show their complex, political and aesthetic characteristics. They emphasize the infrastructures’ impingement on daily life, their linkage to progress and development, and how their failure to deliver often obscures social gaps and political agendas.13

Wasted landscapes as a political tool32

During the British Mandate period, the Tel Aviv Municipality dumped household waste in a lot next to Mikveh Israel,33

Landscape as an agent of modernity

Infrastructure projects are technological projects born of a growing urbanism and established for the benefit of town and country residents. The infrastructures established by imperialist countries in their colonies symbolized their power as occupiers, and were intended to stand out against the dilapidated local infrastructures.64

Reflections and insights

Zionism was a rescue project for a people that had suffered racism, deportation and genocide, and that aspired to resettle in the country it saw as its historic homeland. This project was based on a profound transformation of the physical and social landscape that caused the displacement of indigenous Arab people and the repopulation of the country, thereby appropriating its resources and changing its histories. It also included the oppression of weak groups in Israeli society, mainly

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank The Israel Science Foundation (ISF grant 953/18) and The Balaban-Glass Foundation for their support in this research. Many thanks to Naomi Angel, Yaacob Garb, Ora Limor, Lesley Marks, and Michal Shapira for their generous comments and suggestions on this paper. Many thanks as well to Riva Waldman-Hassin (Dan Region Association of Towns); Rivka Pershel-Gershon (the Tel Aviv–Yafo Municipality Archive); Neta Gindi Sivan (Maps Collection, Geography Department, Tel

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