Life after Ruin The Struggles over Israel's Depopulated Arab Spaces Cambridge Middle East Studies Series

Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the landscape of Israel-Palestine was radically transformed. Breaking from conventional focus on explicit sites of violence and devastation, Noam Leshem turns critical attention to 'ordinary' spaces and places where the intricate and often intimate engagements between Jews and myriad Arab spaces takes place to this day. Leshem builds on interdisciplinary studies of space, memory, architecture and history, and exposes a rich archive of ideology, culture, political projects of state-building and identity formation. The result is a fresh look at the conflicted history of Israel-Palestine: a spatial history in which the Arab past isn't in fact separate, but inextricably linked to the Israeli present.

Introduction: tracing ruination; 1. Toward a spatial history in Israel; 2. Repopulating the emptiness: the spatiality and materiality of the overlooked; 3. Fences and defences: spaces of emergency; 4. On the road: from Salama to Kfar Shalem and back; 5. Housing complex: between Arab houses and public tenaments; 6. Sacred: the making and unmaking of a holy place; Conclusion: histories of the rough and charmless.

Noam Leshem is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Durham. He has previously taught at Royal Holloway and Birkbeck, University of London. His research is primarily concerned with the intersection of spatial, political and cultural history.