Teaching Geography Workshop 4: North Africa/Southwest Asia – Part 1: Jerusalem
JIM BINKO:
The region of North Africa/ Southwest Asia is unified by its desert climate
and by the dominance of Islam. Such regional unification is exemplified
by Geography Standard 5: That people create regions to interpret
Earth’s complexity. Remember that regions are human constructs; they
are fluid concepts, overlapping and changing over time, often defined by
multiple criteria.
As you watch the case study, identify the physical and human factors
that serve to define the region in question. Our case study is
Jerusalem, an ancient city whose history makes it sacred to Muslims,
Jews and Christians. It is a holy city whose symbolic meaning and
function illustrates Geography Standard 6: How Culture and experience
influence people’s perceptions of places and regions. All three
religions attach special significance to Jerusalem. Their competition for
this sacred space has led to volatile conflict during the past 2,000 years.
As you watch the case study, look for ways to explain why places and
regions are important to human identity and as symbols for unifying
or fragmenting society. The tragic conflict in Jerusalem provides a
compelling context for exploring Geography Standard 13: How the
forces of cooperation and conflict among people influence the
division and control of Earth’s surface.
In our classroom segment, ninth-grade teacher Ungennette Brantley
Harris helps her students better understand this difficult situation. As they
explore the plight of refugees and those living in Israel's occupied
territories, they come to see the human face of the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict. In doing so, these students gain insight into the complex claims
on this region, claims that do not lend themselves to quick and easy
resolution.
NARRATOR:
For half a century, Israelis and Palestinians have battled over Jerusalem
and a larger homeland. Helping to mediate competing claims was Dennis
B. Ross, Special Envoy for the first President Bush and then President
Clinton. As his term ended, the peace process crumbled.
DENNIS ROSS:
The intifada that began has had lots of casualties. What is so
disheartening for someone like me after having devoted so much time to
this effort is that in the year 2000, the Palestinians were, in fact, this close
to being able to achieve their aspirations. Today the gap between their
aspirations and reality is enormous.
NARRATOR:
Whatever the future, it is rooted in the historical and political geography
of the whole region. Here the culture hearth of Muslims, Christians and
Jews was controlled first by the Ottoman and then by the British Empire
in the first half of the 20th century. These were colonies without firm
borders or recent experience with self-rule. At its core, Jerusalem was
more a religious than a political center. David the king started the capital
here 3,000 years ago. And since then, nobody ever made it a capital. And
the Muslims were here for 1,500 years or something of the kind, 1,400
years.
(\man speaking Arabic\)
TRANSLATOR:
This is a very holy place for the Muslims. For centuries it has been the
first holy place after Mecca and Medina, the most holy places of the
Muslims all around the world.
NARRATOR:
For Muslims, this is where Abraham offered to sacrifice his son, and
Muhammad rose to heaven.
\Jerusalem est le centre...
TRANSLATOR:
Jerusalem is the center and the source of the faith. For the Jews, it's the
city of David. For me, it is the city in which Jesus died for us and rose
again from the dead. This is the beauty, but also the paradox and
sometimes the tragedy of Jerusalem. One city, two people, three
religions. It could thus be a wonderful sign of oneness for which the
whole world strives, a situation of peace or a sign of opposition.
NARRATOR:
As a place of religious significance, Jerusalem has few equals. But the
conflict here is more about nationalism than religion. The modern story
begins with upheaval, not in the Middle East, but in Europe. In the 1930s,
a growing number of Zionist Jews immigrated to Palestine in search of a
homeland safe from Nazi and other persecutions. They dreamed of a
Jewish state. But the Palestinians wanted their own state, too. After
World War II, the United Nations proposed dividing Palestine into a
Jewish state with slightly more than half the land and a Palestinian state
with 45%. Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to have special status under
United Nations jurisdiction. In 1948, the pace quickened. At midnight on
May 14, the British withdrew, and that was the end of the British
mandate. Upon their withdrawal, Israel proclaimed statehood.
NARRATOR:
The Jews celebrated. But the Arabs were two-thirds of the population and
owned more than half the land. They rejected the plan and began
fighting. In the war that followed, the Jews prevailed, enlarging their
territory, but only able to capture the western half of Jerusalem. They
made their first capital in Tel Aviv. Jerusalem became a divided city. The
boundary drawn between West and East Jerusalem was called the Green
Line, and that's what Highway Number One is still called today. East
Jerusalem was then part of Jordan, and it contained the Jews' holiest
sites, including their ancient Temple, destroyed by the Romans in the
year 70 C.E.
MAN:
The Western Wall faces the west of the Temple. Once the Temple was
destroyed, all that remained was the Western Wall. This place is
important for the Jewish people worldwide.
ROSS:
This is what people prayed to ever since the second Temple was
destroyed, ever since the Jewish people were dispersed.
NARRATOR:
But because it was in Jordanian East Jerusalem, the site was off-limits to
Jews until 1967. That year, Israel defeated threatening Arab armies in the
Six-Day War, and gained control over more territory. From Syria, they
took the Golan Heights. From Egypt, they captured the Sinai Peninsula
and the Gaza Strip. From Jordan, they occupied the West Bank of the
Jordan River, including the rest of Jerusalem.
ROSS:
After the Six-Day War, after the victory in '67, with the unification of
Jerusalem, one of the very first things done, by a Labor-led government,
was to make it clear that Jerusalem would never be divided again.
NARRATOR:
Israel had moved its capital to Jerusalem in 1950, but now it redrew and
expanded the city's boundaries. The areas of Arab and Jewish
neighborhoods had been clearly delineated by the Green Line, but in
1967, Israel began building Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem. They
applied the same strategy in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights.
But victory and occupation did not bring peace. Israel fought its Arab
neighbors again in 1973. They battled Lebanese militias and the
Palestine Liberation Army, or PLO, in the north. Although Israel returned
the Sinai in 1981, terror campaigns persisted through the '70s and '80s in
the West Bank and Gaza. Hoping to eventually trade land for peace,
Israel gambled on a 1993 plan negotiated in Oslo.
ROSS:
The main thing that Oslo produced was mutual recognition between
Israel and the PLO. For the PLO, recognition of Israel meant, "All right,
we are now accepting a two-state solution." For the Israelis to accept the
PLO meant that they were accepting, in effect, the PLO agenda, and they
knew the PLO agenda was statehood.
KAMAL
ABDUL FATTAH:
If you accept the idea of having a Palestinian state-- and we insist on
having a Palestinian state, you know-- we need a capital. And the only
capital that could be from a geographical point of view for what would be
a Palestinian state in the West Bank would be Jerusalem.
IRA SHARKANSKY: The basis of our claim is that we're here. There's been a Jewish majority
of the Jerusalem population since the middle of the 19th century. And
now we are 72% of the population.
NARRATOR:
MAHDI
ABDUL HADI:
But that population is still heavily concentrated in the west, reinforcing
some Arabs' hope for partition and sovereignty.
They can share functional arrangement in the city, but they cannot share
sovereignty. It has to be split, it has to be divided, between Arab
Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli sovereignty.
NARRATOR:
In 2000, President Clinton and Ambassador Ross helped Israeli and
Palestinian negotiators hammer out many details of an agreement.
Jerusalem was finally on the table. But like most Israelis, Prime Minister
Barak could not imagine a divided city. Ross argued the Palestinian case.
ROSS:
At one point, I said to him, "Mr. Prime Minister, you are the one "who
believes in the concept of separation. "Well... look at East Jerusalem,
"where you have Arab neighborhoods "that are exclusively Arab
neighborhoods, "where Israelis don't live in them, Israelis don't go to
them. "What is the logic of keeping them under your sovereignty if you
accept the concept of separation?" And the Israelis found that to be a
pretty compelling argument.
NARRATOR:
So the negotiators drew maps that would split the city along ethnic lines.
The bigger problem came with the oldest part of the city, a zone whose
importance was all out of proportion to its size.
ROSS:
The Old City is one square kilometer. Within one square kilometer there
are at least 57 holy sites, holy to three separate faiths. The area is so
small that if you spring a leak in one quarter, you have to turn off water in
the adjacent quarter. So concepts of sovereignty as they apply to the Old
City are a little bit more complicated.
NARRATOR:
At the core are the Haram al-Sharif for the Muslims, or the Temple Mount
for the Jews. These Jews are praying in front of their ancient Temple,
whose ruins lay buried behind its Western Wall. On top of those ruins are
the holy Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. In traditional real
estate terms, both sides claim the same ground. A breakthrough required
spatial imagination.
ROSS:
The Jewish Quarter extends to the wall and the Muslim Quarter
envelopes where the Haram is. And you had... the wall is here, the
Haram is up here, and the Temple would be behind where the wall was.
One Israeli negotiator actually put it quite well-- that for Israel, there was
a dead reality that was extremely important for them to be able to protect,
which was underground. It's a dead reality in the sense that nobody lives
with it every day except emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. The live
reality is what people do every day on the surface, where the Haram is.
So we were coming up with an approach that was designed to protect the
dead reality for Israel, while also governing the live reality for the
Palestinians. The Israelis in the end, again, reluctantly accepted, and
Yasser Arafat could not accept.
NARRATOR:
After Arafat's denial, the talks broke down. To Israelis, Barak failed to
deliver peace after offering unprecedented concessions. His opponent,
Ariel Sharon, unleashed Arab rage when he brought armed guards to
tour the Haram al-Sharif.
ROSS:
It was obviously something that was bound to be seen as provocative.
NARRATOR:
But Ross does not blame the intifada on Sharon. Rather, it was a failure
of Palestinians to curb the violence, and it was the ongoing Israeli
occupation.
ROSS:
I think it was the absence of real change in terms of Palestinian control,
at least in Palestinian eyes. The Israelis continued to control too many
aspects of day-to-day life for the Palestinians.
NARRATOR:
So, will there ever be peace? Not soon, according to Ross. But if it
comes, it will be based on two states, both with capitals in a divided
Jerusalem.
ROSS:
I do believe that the ideas that President Clinton put on the table will
ultimately provide the base for what will emerge as an outcome.
NARRATOR:
As teachers, you can prepare your students to monitor events as they
unfold, comparing the outcome to the plan.
GIL LATZ:
A ten-minute case study, of course, can't do justice to this difficult human
problem, steeped as it is in such extreme cultural, religious and historical
complexity.
Geography can provide useful tools to help sort out the important factors.
Here, at the center of 50 years of modern territorial conflict, are the
Palestinians, a stateless people, struggling to establish a sovereign
territory of their own, yet seemingly unwilling to unequivocally accept the
national and political legitimacy of their Israeli neighbors.
A geographer's view of the intersection of politics and culture depends on
which scale we adopt for our analysis. At one scale, we can see the way
religious values imbue particular places with sacred meaning. For
example, Judaism's Western Wall and Islam's Dome of the Rock. Who
should exercise sovereignty over sites sanctified as holy? At another
scale, we see Israel, primarily Jewish in its religious orientation, but
located in the heart of a vast Islamic world. A geographic perspective
helps us better understand the complex forces buffeting this region, and
better understanding may someday help untangle this profoundly difficult
human and territorial conflict.
SUSAN HARDWICK: This Jerusalem case study provides an excellent opportunity to talk about
the role of religion in shaping some of the world's most distinctive
landscapes.
Human geographers are fascinated by religious patterns on Earth
because religion is one of the earliest and one of the most enduring
features of culture. In the northwestern Chinese city of Lanzhou, an
overlapping tapestry of religions has shaped the urban landscape.
Once populated by a mosaic of religious and ethnic groups from China
and Tibet, this ancient rest stop along the Silk Road today is home to two
dominant groups, Han Chinese and Muslims.
On the other side of the world, in Guatemala, Mayans worship in a
Catholic church, practicing a religion forced on their ancestors by Spanish
explorers and priests. The cultural landscape here reflects a blend of the
transplanted Catholic and native Mayan religions.
There can be no question that religion today plays a crucial role in
shaping cultural and political landscapes, and will continue to shape our
world in the years to come.
BINKO:
The case study of Jerusalem provides a compelling example of a
centuries-long struggle for land within a region, a struggle intensified by
deeply rooted cultural and religious differences.
In the following lesson, our teacher, Ungennette Brantley Harris, has her
ninth-grade students address the issue of what it means to live in the
midst of such struggle. Her class has already studied the foundations and
beliefs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They have also discussed the
sources of conflict between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Now they
continue that discussion and raise the issue of what it means to be a
refugee in one's own homeland.
As they design refugee camps and propose solutions to this conflict, they
are attentive to multiple perspectives and points of view. Here, their
objective and ours is one and the same: to evaluate the impact of
multiple spatial divisions on peoples’ daily lives. By the end of
Ungennette's lesson, I think you will agree with me that her students have
a far better and more personal understanding of the consequences of
living in contested space.
HARRIS:
Well, with this Middle East unit, you know, they did do a research on the
three major religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So, you know,
they had to come up with the symbols and find out what's the differences
and what's the similarities. So they really got really involved in that,
because a lot of them, you know, go to Sunday school, so they were able
to relate back. And they had no idea that the same places that they were
studying in the Bible were these places now that we're talking about.
We've been talking about the Middle East and we've been looking at the
Israeli-Palestinian problem. Okay, why are Palestinians now refugees in
their own homeland? Why are they refugees, Sean?
SEAN:
Because they lost wars.
HARRIS:
Okay, they lost wars. What wars were those? What wars, Chris?
CHRIS:
Wars against Jewish people. Okay, against the Jewish people. Why are
now Jewish people in what was once called Palestine? Why are they
there? Why are they there, Rakisha?
HARRIS:
Because it was their homeland. It was their original homeland. Why is
that? Why do they consider it to be their original homeland? Um...
Carolyn, help her.
CAROLYN:
That was where their religion came from.
HARRIS:
Okay, they started... Their religion started there, okay, good. Once they
fought the war of 1948, then land became occupied by the Jewish
people. What are those three major occupied lands in Israel? What are
the three... Levaris?
LEVARIS:
Golan Heights. West Bank. And the Gaza Strip.
HARRIS:
And the Gaza Strip, okay. What does it mean when you say they are
occupied? Chelsea.
CHELSEA:
The Israeli soldiers guarding it.
HARRIS:
All right, the Israeli soldiers guard the borders between those places.
Now, what other people are being forced into refugee camps? Uh,
Anthony.
ANTHONY:
Afghans.
HARRIS:
The Afghans, okay.
I thought it was important, because after September 11, the kids really
did not have a grasp of what was going on in the world, and I figured that
they needed to get in touch with what was going on in the Middle East
and then we could understand better what had happened on September
11.
So the last time that we were in here, we worked on... You were
brainstorming some problems in refugee camps. You had some potential
problems that might have come up. And then you were going to come up
with some solutions to those problems. So what we're going to do today
is, we're going to get back into your group. I'm going to give you a chart
piece of paper. Once you finish getting down... I want the immediate
problem, what would be some potential problems, and how are you going
to solve those immediate problems. Then, once you finish that, you're
going to put your chart paper up on the board and someone from your
group is going to explain what you came up with. What I need you to do
now is, get into your groups. Number one, ten people to a room.
GIRL:
Very overcrowded. Yeah.
CAROLYN:
The second would be hardly no water.
GIRL:
The hygiene.
CAROLYN:
The hygiene is... If I was in a refugee camp, it would be one of my
problems. Stinks.
HARRIS:
Yeah, you guys. Once you say you're going to build, you got to come up
with... Where are you going to get the money to build?
STUDENT:
So we have to write that down under "solution." Yeah, once you decide
what it is, you sure do.
STUDENT:
Think that a fund raiser would come up with all the money to build a
building? It should, all the money they get on TV.
HARRIS:
What if nobody gives to the fund raiser? What if nobody gives any money
to the fund raiser? ~(\students talk \over each other\) Okay.
HARRIS:
It's basically more to make them start thinking. Fill-in-the-blanks or
multiple choice, that is short-term, and tomorrow, they will not remember
one thing about it. But if you ask them why, and go into more detail-"how did that happen?",…you know-- they will begin to at least start
thinking about it. They might not come up with the answer that you want
them to come up with, but they will start to think, and then you can probe
more into that.
And what's the purpose of the water filters?
BOTH:
Purify the water.
HARRIS:
Okay, make sure you say all of that, because... Okay, get water filters to
purify the water.
BOTH:
Well, it is on, like... It's in the Gaza Strip. Yeah, and this is the little thing,
right here. So they can have a pump reaching out to here, bringing their
water close to the filter system. And there you have it. And that's where
they get the water.
HARRIS:
Two minutes, two minutes. Put your final touches. We're going to start
over here, with this group here. And they'll explain what they came up
with, and then we'll just follow suit all the way around.
STUDENTS:
Our immediate problems, we only had three that we felt like were a major
problem right up front, and that was: no water, overcrowdedness, and no
resources. Like, they didn't have any natural resources, because they're
in the desert. And then, for potential problems, we had natural disasters,
curfew and economy, because they've got jobs and money, but if they, it
might, if they get put on curfew, they won't anymore, because they won't
be able to leave the camp. And then, for our solutions, we've got: take up
donations from other countries to help build wells. For food, we're going
to grow crops, and food in the wintertime, we're going to have a storage
to put that food in. And, like, to lift up their self-esteem, we're going to
give the people jobs. Some of them can be sanitation workers for littering,
some of them can be farmers for the food, some of them can clean the
houses, and some of them can be teachers, teach the kids.
HARRIS:
If you lift up their self-esteem-- I like that word-- if you do this, then maybe
the people would be willing to give a hand to improve their camp. So
that's a good thing in itself.
BOTH:
Well, for our first problem of no clean water, we decided to, like, put
pipelines. See, the women had to walk to the nearby villages to get water.
Why don't we just build pipelines so that water could be transported from
one village to another? And then we could get them water filters to clean
and purify the water. Okay. And then, for medical problems... See, we
can't solve all the medical problems that are out there, because we can't
even solve our own, so we could get them vaccinations for the medical
problems that we do know of, that we can slow down the sickness rate
just a little bit, if we could.
HARRIS:
Okay, uh, you came up with some good problems from reading those
articles, the problems that were there. And coming up with some
solutions. And I think it goes back to, one of the groups had said, if selfesteem... If you don't have any place to go and to build up your selfesteem, then I think maybe some of the other little things could fall into
place. That's good, that's real good. Now, what I want you to do now is to
get back with your groups. Then I'm going to give you a sheet of paper,
and you're going to create a better refugee camp. And you have a
requirement sheet that will go along with that map, okay? Every refugee
camp on your site map will have a small body of water near you. But
there's a lot of people in this little space. You got to think about how many
people...
GIRLS:
16 people per house. Shoot, that's a lot of people. How many refugees
do we have? 150, at present... 120, at present. And you're going to be...
Your camp will hold 250.
STUDENT:
It will hold 250, but we only have 120.
HARRIS:
You only have 120 at present, right.
HARRIS:
Now, you're going to have to cut these out. These are the things that you
will have to put in your refugee camp.
STUDENT:
Yeah, we got to have enough room to get the landfill five inches away
from them.
HARRIS:
You have enough space, I believe.
STUDENTS:
You said, "Put 15 houses on the map," right? All right, we have three
corners. I was saying, why don't you put five houses in each corner.
That's your choice. I'm saying, you have five houses in each corner, and
then, right around in the middle, in the center of the corner... Just like a
little town, you have your medical places and the bathrooms. But the
bathrooms can be a little bit farther out from the center. Well, where are
you going to put your trash?
STUDENT:
See, you got to put the trash down near the...
HARRIS:
Where are you going to put your trash? You got trash to put somewhere.
Put your bathroom closer to the landfills. Where are you going to put your
wells? The most important thing that every one of you said, water was a
problem. Where are you going to put your wells?
STUDENTS:
And the main road coming from, like, out here up through here. And, like,
off the main road, have tributaries. Okay. That's still, like, half an inch, all
right. Yeah, that's more than enough. How far does... It doesn't say how
far this has to be from the...
STUDENT:
This house is just...
HARRIS:
Okay. The bell is getting ready to ring. When we come back on Tuesday,
we'll finish up these and let us look at... See who used their space the
wisest.
HARRIS:
Geography, as most people will acknowledge, you know, is memorizing
places. That's not important, to memorize. You know, to know the country
and the capital. That's good, I guess, if you wanted to know trivial stuff.
But, you know, they need to understand place, and why is the Middle
East a volatile region right now. Why is it so conflicting right now? And
what does culture and religion have to do in an area? So if they
understand location, place, movement, human-environmental interaction,
then they can understand what geography is all about. This lesson
presents some very important geographic concepts.
JIM BNKO:
As Ungennette's students grapple with the problems posed by refugee
camps, they see in concrete and specific terms how the forces of
cooperation and conflict among people influence control of a region.
These students also explore how deeply felt cultural and religious beliefs
can affect people's perceptions of place. Ungennette's students have
gained an appreciation for the complexity of the causes and the effects of
human conflict.