Michal Huss - You cannot really live (or die) here: ongoing struggles over cemeteries and housing in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 1957-2020

In the summer of 2020, protests erupted in Jaffa against a plan to build a homeless shelter on the site of the ancient Al-Isaaf Muslim cemetery, and in the following year, the community mobilized to protest a wave of housing demolitions. These were the latest in a long line of actions by the Muslim community opposing the sale and demolition of Muslim cemeteries and fighting to remain in their homes in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. This paper maps these struggles over everyday spaces of living and dying from the 1950s to the present day and investigates how activists recently gained tangible achievements by framing their protests as an urban citizenship mobilization. The aim of the paper is twofold: it seeks to demonstrate the inter connections between the history of colonialism, partition, new state formation, and contemporary urban conflict; and to theorize the role of the built environment that facilitates daily life, rituals, and mourning, in shaping urban citizenship under post/coloniality. The paper builds on a participatory ‘walk-along’ ethnography, interviews with community leaders and activists, as well as archival tracing of court rulings, newspaper reports, and spatial plans. Utilizing this framework, it will show how activists invoked and reinterpreted the right-to-the-city ideas; deploying creative spatial performances and appealing to municipal governance to demand a deeper geo-temporal right-to-the-city that encompasses its religious and historical dimensions.
 
Dr Michal Huss is a Leverhulme early career fellow and assistant Professor in Human Geography at Durham University. She researches spatial in/justice and struggles over urban planning and the right to the city.