Palestine’s garden walls: the deliberate destruction of Palestine’s terraced gardens
A desire is growing to mitigate the harm inflicted on the cherished terraced gardens and communities of Palestine
At almost every turn in Palestine’s central highlands, from Hebron to Nazareth, a distinctive typology of garden can be seen. This typology, however, does not resemble the space that first comes to the mind of the contemporary architect or planner when they conceive a garden: it is neither confined, nor bounded, nor principally designed for aesthetic consumption. Rather, it is a malleable space that pours over the entire landscape, moulding to the shape of its curves and hilly terrains.
It is also, in turn, a spatial order that actively restructures those terrains, dividing their slopes into a series of orderly vertical platforms and contoured steps. Planted with olive trees, fig trees and vines, these terraced gardens were once considered the defining feature of Palestine’s central hilly region. Today, they face the dual threat of colonial fragmentation and deliberate destruction. They are the residual traces of a vanishing garden landscape.
With a long history dating back to the ancient Roman era, the terraced gardens of Palestine are part of an intimate knowledge of the landscape that has been passed down through generations. They embody the long-lasting relationship between humans and nature; namely, the domestication of nature. The construction of these terraced gardens required skillful craft and laborious industry, mastering the arts and crafts of stonemasonry, plantation and irrigation. Stone was central to the building of these gardens.
Terrace walls, known as sanasel, made of intricately arranged drystones, lifted each terrace garden against the hill slope. Soil was then used to level each garden and enable its plantation with fruit trees and vegetables. Canals were dug to pass spring water to the terraces, and cisterns preserved rainwater for irrigation. Combined, these technologies constituted the crucial elements of what can be considered a holistic, yet flexible, system of terrace gardening.
It is through local community effort in the regular adjustment and maintenance of these systems that the terraced gardens could retain their permanence as the defining feature of Palestine’s landscape. In turn, the terraced gardens constituted a central influence in the organisation of social structures and relationships of these local communities. The terraces turned the terrain of the hill slopes into identifiable divisions and subdivisions where communities could cultivate according to established arrangements between them. Each household maintained a garden or, more often, a series of gardens stretching vertically across multiple terraces, each hanging above the other. The canal system distributed the shared water resources to the gardens, with periodical access to each household according to a set cycle. The efficacy of the system of terrace gardening, therefore, rested on not only the social and ecological division of space, but also of time.
The terraced gardens of central Palestine, though of a rural character, were not solely built in the vicinity of villages. In fact, most of the towns of Palestine’s central hilly region, including Hebron, Beit Sahour, Tulkarem, Ramallah and Nablus, contained vast terraced garden estates in their vicinity. In both the town and village settings, the terraced gardens were relatively remote from the spaces of dwelling and long-term habitation. This remoteness was the reason for the rise of an architectural type specific to the terraced gardens: the manateer, a type of stone tower built by farmers. Walking through the subregions of central Palestine, the roamer is destined to stumble on the ruins of those cylindrical stone structures scattered across the terraced landscape. Their architecture blended with, and at times adjoined, the stone walls of the terraced gardens.
The structures were usually small, circular in plan, with a single room and built with thick drystone walls with small indentations and a vaulted roof. These buildings served as both storage spaces and temporary residences at harvest-time. With their construction, the terraced gardens turned into sites not only of agricultural cultivation but also of loci for social gatherings, practices and rituals.
Credit:Palestine Exploration Fund Archive
The multi-layered significance of the terraced gardens is in stark contrast to how colonial administrators and planners perceived them historically and still do today. In the 1920s, CR Ashbee, the British architect in charge of planning the City of Jerusalem, ordered the construction of a belt of terraced gardens around the Old City’s historical walls. The gardens, to him, were an instrument of colonial containment employed to justify the violent destruction of Arab buildings and shops that ‘obscure large portions of the ancient walls’.
In 1945, Henry Kendall, chief British planner in Palestine, proposed turning the Mount of Olives, the hill of terraced gardens facing the eastern walls of the Old City, into a natural reserve. Along with his proposal, Kendall included a drawing, ‘the Mount of Olives viewed from the [Rockefeller] Archaeological Museum’, thus affirming his colonial gaze. For both planners, the idea was to preserve an idealised frame of the landscape removed from its inhabitants and their interests. In their colonial visions, terraced gardens emerged not as a seasonal, dynamic and holistic socio-ecological system, but as a fixed and fetishised abstraction: a still panorama.
A few years after Kendall sketched the skyline of his proposed panorama for the holy city, a much thicker colonial line was drawn that forever altered the landscape of all of Palestine and the future of its terraced gardens. The Green Line, demarcating the boundaries between Israel and the West Bank in the aftermath of 1948, sliced the connected geography of Palestine into two segregated entities. This had a detrimental impact on the typology of terraced gardens, many of which became physically cut off from the Palestinian communities that maintained them.
Israeli spatial apparatuses and colonial infrastructures have since exacerbated this state of obliteration. The Israeli separation wall, military checkpoints, hilltop settlements, and segregated highways have all been built at the expense of the Palestinian hilly landscape. The terraced gardens, once the cherished creation that coloured those hills, today appear as patches of Palestinian local memory scattered across an imposing canvas of imported concrete.
Yet there has been a renewed local effort to rediscover the history of these gardens and the role they could play in the present and future of Palestine’s landscape. While some of these attempts stem from a traditionalist reading of the past, other examples present a more critical and time-tuned approach to the interpretation of this typology. The most noteworthy of these are the efforts of the Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation which, since its establishment in 1991, has incorporated terraced gardens in several of its historical renovation projects based on substantive research and thoughtful design and implementation. In recent years, the Village Council of Battir, near Bethlehem, successfully pushed for the classification of the village’s terraced gardens as a UNESCO World Heritage Site to preserve it from Israeli expansionist schemes.
The Palestinian Museum, too, expressed a profound interest in the terraced garden type, incorporating them in the landscape of the museum gardens, designed by Lara Zureikat and completed in 2016, and hosting multiple workshops on the construction of sanasel and manateer. While there are considerable variations in the attention granted to formalistic and more socially engaged approaches to the typology of terraces in these initiatives, they all reaffirm the growing desire to re-employ the gardens to serve contemporary Palestinian visions and aspirations.
Image on front page: “Olive Field,” by Sliman Mansour (2010). Source: The Architectural Review. Photo on this page: An ancient agricultural landscape, such as that around the village of Battir, pictured here in 1892, is now reduced to scattered patches of Palestinian local memory amid tons of imported concrete. Source: The Architectural Review.
