 Today I want to examine how conservation is utilized as a means of the reconstruction of identity in contemporary Israeli society. Through the concept of discursive ambivalence, I want to claim that the examination of the conservation of the clock tower square in Jaffa, Israel illuminates the method through which conservation is used to nullify the historic and ideological context that allowed for the site's initial development. So this is the site that I'm going to talk about, the clock tower square in Jaffa. It is located on the border between Jaffa and Tzibib, which actually, since 1948, are one city and function today as the metropolitan center of Israel. The square was originally built at the end of the 19th century and was renovated and conserved to what it is and how you see it in this picture in recent years. So I'll give a short summary of what we can see here. Here you see a building that was first built in the 19th century as a police compound. And today it's a five-star hotel. And here, this facade that you see here was part of what was built as the governor's palace and it was destroyed in the 1948 war when Israel was founded. And in recent years, it was decided to just rebuild the left of Saddaq with the Saddaq building, reminding the passers-by that the aesthetic monumental garments have this building prior to its destruction. And in the middle you see here the clock tower, which was built in 1907 in celebration of the 25th year of the reign of the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Khamid II. So in the next few minutes, what I wanted to do was to try to deconstruct the conservation that we see here and so that we can ask what does the conservation of this site, what does it want us to remember? What do we remember about the past of this site when we walk here and maybe even more importantly, what does the conservation of this site want us to forget about this site's history? So in order to do that, I want to first briefly discuss Jaffa's symbolism in Israeli society in relation to the city of Tel Aviv, which is right nearby, as I said. So in Israeli Zionist culture, Tel Aviv is understood to be the negation of Jaffa. Tel Aviv is depicted as a modern city that was built from the sands, meaning from scratch, evolving quickly into a modern urban center characterized by its broad promenades. So here you can see the picture of Tel Aviv in the beginning of the 20th century from postcard. So as you can see, it started with a city with broad promenades, very clean, and many cultural establishments. In negation, Jaffa is depicted, and here is a picture of Jaffa roughly from the same period. Jaffa is depicted as a backward city full of poverty and crime built with narrow and filthy alleys. In this respect, the representation of Jaffa as the negation of Tel Aviv may, in fact, be understood in the wider context of the Zionist aspiration to depict itself as a national indigenous movement. The depiction of Jaffa as a degenerate city one had in hand with the attempt to depict the Palestinians as temporary residents of the land, who were not able to take care of it and were now to be relieved of this responsibility by the rightful owners of the land who are in the Zionist perspective, the Jews. Thus, while Tel Aviv symbolizes the advent of processes of modernism to the region, Jaffa symbolizes the poverty and backwardness Zionism attached to the Palestinian culture. The characterization of Tel Aviv as the negation of Jaffa is perhaps best explained through the picture that you see here, which assumed the documents, the foundation of Tel Aviv in 1909 in a lottery in which the lots of workers to become Tel Aviv were allowed into their future owners who are all assembled in the middle of the picture. In the picture, it seems self-evident that Tel Aviv, soon to become a modern, very central city in a very few years, was built in the middle of nowhere, literally replacing the sand dunes, which once dominated the landscape, which you can see in the picture. Jaffa is nowhere to be seen and ostensibly has nothing to do with this historic event. However, the story of the clock tower square reveals a different story about the relations between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. The square was first built at the end of the 19th century as a culmination of a process that began in the mid-19th century in which Jaffa developed into a modern cosmopolitan economic, cultural, and political center of Palestine. The clock tower square was built at a new monumental entrance to Jaffa that consisted of a central mosque, and you can see its minaret over here, and of course the police compound and everything else that I talked about earlier. Sorry, in this respect, the clock tower square symbolized the expeditious processes of expansion that Jaffa went through in this period, characterized by the building of new neighborhoods that were built according to modern principles, and actually Tel Aviv was first built as one of these neighborhoods of Jaffa. The clock tower square symbolized the cosmopolitan nature of the city, in which the prosperity of the city was largely due to the continuing cooperation between Palestinians and Jews. For example, many of the buildings built in the clock tower square were designed and financed by Jews living in and around the city. As I will attempt to demonstrate, the conservation plan completely ignored the modern and cosmopolitan characteristic of Jaffa. Instead, the conservation of Jaffa in general, and of the clock tower square in particular, may be seen as a culmination of a long process that overlooked the modern past of Jaffa. A most important stage in the process was the annexation of Jaffa to Tel Aviv following the 1948 war. Following the foundation of Israel and the consequent annexation of Jaffa to Tel Aviv, the clock tower square stood in the midst of the crossfire between Jews and Palestinians. That's for example, the governor's palace was bombed and destroyed. And here you can see how it looked when it was built, very monumentally, it was built in a very dominant building. And after it was bombed in 1948, and for many years after that, you can see the last remnants of that facade that were retained in the middle of the clock tower square. So the decision to retain the remains of the governor's palace in the square can be perceived as an act of the construction of heritage in and of itself. In the mid-1990s, a long process of the conservation of the clock tower square began. However, the conservation plan of the clock tower square does not focus on the historic narrative attached to it as a space symbolizing Jaffa as a modern urban center. Instead, the architect in charge of the conservation plan decided to focus on the physical function of the square as a junction between three arteries, arteries connecting Jaffa to three central cities and Palestine in the turn of the 20th century, one being the road to Jerusalem, another the road to Malus, and the third the road to Gaza. Thus, he reduced the historic function of the square into a space whose importance lies solely in its ability to connect between other spaces. In relation to the wider plans of urban regeneration of Jaffa, the conservation of the clock tower square promoted the transformation of Jaffa into a lucrative tourist destination detached from any historic narrative. According to Rodney Harrison's definition, this decision can be understood as an expression of absent heritage, symbolizing both the heritage of Jaffa as the modernized and cosmopolitan city and the heritage of the city as the symbol of the Palestinian debacle. Thus, the clock tower square came to serve as an embodiment of the ambivalence existing in Israeli identity between its aspiration to perceive itself as a society whose construction was contrary to the local Palestinian culture who at the same time bearing evidence to the past of the region as one in which there existed a thriving culture which promoted the cooperation between Palestinians and Jews. The conservation of the clock tower square which was implemented as part of a plan to resuscitate the city after years of neglect should be interpreted as a means to contend with this ambivalence. In order to understand how the decision to focus solely on the physical aspects of the clock tower square as a method to contend with ambivalence imbued in the clock tower square as a symbol of Jaffa, as the modern cosmopolitan city and as the negation of Tel Aviv, I will make use of Zygmunt Bauman's terminology of discursive ambivalence. Sorry. Bauman suggested that while modern societies attempt to create the economist social definitions that allow to differentiate between insiders and outsiders in society, there are always groups that do not adhere to this strict categorization and thus challenge the economist's perception of reality. Bauman claimed that in order to preserve the economist social structure, hegemonic groups strive to ignore and erase the presence of these groups that serve as a potential threat to their social dominance. In this vein, the focus on the physical aspects of the clock tower square was only one example of various other conservation acts which ignored the heritage of Jaffa as a modern cosmopolitan urban center. For example, for example, different science that explained the importance of the different historic buildings of the square failed to explain their significance in Jaffa's transformation into a modern cosmopolitan city at the turn of the 20th century or of the impact that cooperation between Jews and Palestinians had on the construction of the square and on the modernization of Jaffa in general. No science described the various social education and municipal functions of the various buildings nor the Jewish Palestinian corporation in designing and erecting these buildings. Thus, in order to reinforce the symbolism of the picture of the foundation of Tel Aviv, the conservation of Jaffa serves to undermine the symbolism of Jaffa as a modern city. Even when this symbolism is directly connected to the role Jews play in the processes of the modernization of Jaffa itself. Thus, the clock tower square is transformed into a space devoid of any historic, political or cultural context and nullifies the ambivalent characteristic forcing Israeli society to face the contradictions that construct its national identity. Thus, as can be understood through the quotation that you see here, which is a quotation made by the mayor of Tel Aviv in a ceremony in 2016. This transformation does not assist in helping to promote a dialogue between the conflicting narratives that construct the urban space and Israeli identity but rather further extenuated the dichotas relations between Jaffa and Tel Aviv and between the contested relations they represent. So in conclusion, I would ask professionals who contend with different aspects of heritage the presentation of this case study challenges us to continue striving to strive to find ways through which heritage may be used in order to create actual bridges between contested identity groups and society. Thank you very much. Thank you.