The Meeting Point – Under the Bridge (2015) – Between

Another important matter that prevented Between Green and Red from truly becoming a meeting point was the lack of Palestinian collaboration. Apart from individual Palestinians who came to the events, there was not a

representative body, such as the Musrara community administration, to participate in the organisation and distribution of the event. This has to do with the difficulty of finding a Palestinian partnership in east Jerusalem, especially for events that are supported and (partially) sponsored by the Jerusalem municipality. According to a report published by the NGO Ir Amim (City of Nations in Hebrew; 2015), the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, an area that was annexed by Israel in 1967, feel distrust towards Jerusalem municipality. This feeling is the result of a discriminatory policy towards East Jerusalem which is manifested through the confiscation of territories in favour of Jewish settlements and national parks, the separation of several east Jerusalem neighbourhoods with the construction of the wall, and minimal municipal services in education, employment, infrastructure and transportation and the absence of law enforcement. Within this context an artistic event, such as the one organised by Muslala, which is partially supported by Jerusalem municipality, can be seen as a cultural washing. The lack of collaboration from the Palestinian side meant that Muslala was unable to foresee difficulties that might influence how they carried out the event. For example, the decision to run Between Green and Red during the time of the Ramadan, so Palestinians could go to the meeting point to break their fast. Despite good intentions, Muslala did not realise that Ramadan is a holiday where families come together to feast, which explains the lack of participation from older Palestinians (Amir, 2016). As part of the self- reflective process which came as the result of leaving the Musrara neighbourhood, Muslala did not compromise on both Israeli and Palestinian collaboration in the next meeting point event in 2015.

The Meeting Point – Under the Bridge was the last attempt (to date) to revive Between Green and Red in a different location while learning from past

mistakes. It is possible to argue that The Meeting Point – Under The Bridge (2015) was a re-enactment of Between Green And Red rather than a continuation of it. The Meeting Point was detached from its original place and the context which gave it its legitimation. Yet it continued its overall aesthetics while relocating to examine its relevance. The new location shared a similar history with that of Musrara – under a bridge in the junction of the Jewish neighbourhoods Pat and Katamonim, and the Palestinian neighbourhood Beit Safafa in the south of Jerusalem. Pat and Katamonim were both distressed neighbourhoods originally populated by Arab-Jewish immigrants during the 1950s. The lack of proper infrastructure and housing led to several artistic and activist practices which I will elaborate on in the next chapter. Until today, most of its residents were from a low-medium socio-economic background. Beit Safafa had been divided into two parts between 1948 and 1967, and was reunited as part of Israeli territories after the 1967 war. Its residents – Christian and Muslim Palestinian-Arabs – are Israeli citizens. Next to the bridge that is located between these neighbourhoods, there is a bilingual school for Arab and Jewish children in Israel. In comparison to both sides of Musrara, Pat, Katamonim and Beit Safafa maintain a good neighbourly relationship and even joined together for several successful environmental campaigns to prevent the expansion of the highway route, and maintaining local nature and wildlife.

The relationships in the area prior to the arrival of Muslala, as well as the collaboration with educational, cultural and communal bodies from all the

neighbourhoods had a positive impact on the way the event was received. First, the event took place prior to Ramadan which allowed for a more diverse crowd of Israelis and Palestinians to participate. Second, the location of The Meeting Point is part of a park, which was built instead of the highway, yet this particular area was left neglected with construction and garbage waste and malicious graffiti, mostly against Arabs and the bilingual school. Similarly to Between Green and Red, the new project was part of a greater festival – this time it was the Israel Festival for Multidisciplinary Art held every summer in Jerusalem. The Meeting Point also had international partners – the architecture department in the Technical University of Berlin under the supervision of Christophe Barlieb. The working process was similar to

Between Green And Red: dozens of volunteers worked together to build the

new meeting point – a two storey wooden structure under the concrete bridge, with floors connected via a ramp and stairs. The first floor held the watermelon shack alongside other food and crafts stands, and the second floor was where people sat and danced (figures 14-15). Alongside Jewish- Arabic music and middle-eastern jam sessions and concerts, other activities took place, such as a theatre-mask workshop with the pupils from the adjacent schools, poetry reading, tours around the area, and workshops such as jewellery making, Palestinian embroidery and bookbinding.

Figure 14. Muslala, Under the Bridge, 2015. Mualala’s Facebook page (10 June 2015).

The harmonious atmosphere of The Meeting Point was able to touch many of the participants. It was mostly prominent amongst some of the Israeli- Jewish kids since The Meeting Point was their first time encountering Palestinians (Muslala, 2018: 141). On this account, I can testify to a moment where I arrived at The Meeting Point as a tutor in the education centre nearby with several other crew members and around 15 kids. The kids looked tense and did not leave our sight. After a while we had watermelon slices in one of the corners, and some of them took initiative and gave the leftovers to other participants. Every now and then they returned to us exhilarated and described their encounters to us. This moment of dissensus which the kids were experiencing, of withdrawing from their everyday environment into a new sensory reality that encounter with the other is made possible, highlights the significance of such events which, according to my former colleague Maayan Litay (Ibid: 161), opened the possibilities for them “to dream and build an ambitious project in an abandoned space even for one day”. Nevertheless, The Meeting Point demonstrates the limitations of these temporal spaces within a reality of a continuous conflict, occupation and oppression. The last meeting point event was made possible because there were no politics and revolutionary affects involved, as opposed to the

Meeting Point events that took place in Musrara neighbourhood. In Musrara

it was not only the physical contact which held the potential for political subjectivisation but also the legacy of the Black Panthers movement that was largely present in the content of the event. It exposed the contingency of the current Israeli police order by pointing out other historical moments when a different distribution of the sensible was possible. The last event of the

Meeting Point, however, maintained the element of pluralism without the

antagonism which ended with Muslala being rejected and expelled from Musrara neighbourhood. It enabled its participants, mostly Israeli-Jews, to come to contact with the culture and the physical presence of the ‘other’, i.e. the Palestinian, without the sensorial clash that challenges the distribution of the sensible from which they benefit. Returning to the theoretical framework of this chapter, the case of Muslala demonstrates some of the practical challenges concerned with practising pluralism within an antagonist society, and the delicate line between achieving agonism and (re)producing antagonism. It also illustrates the continuous navigation between consensus and dissensus, coexistence and co-resistence which galvanised the collective act. As for Muslala, The Meeting Point, was both the end of an era and the beginning of a new search for a new aesthetic community.

Figure 15. Muslala, Under the Bridge, 2015.Mualala’s Facebook page (12 June 2015).

2.3 Empty House, Kibbutz DIY (2013): The Art of