 Welcome everyone thank you for coming to this discussion this afternoon and thanks to the Center for Palestinian Studies who is co-presenting this event. We're here to welcome Andrew Ross back into Avery Hall and to discuss his new book, Stone Men, the Palestinians who built Israel with us. The Who Builds Your Architecture Collective. And we've hosted Andrew before to discuss questions of labor and architecture so it's nice to have you back and we'll just to discuss your work. So Andrew's latest book is a deeply researched and reported account of stone and more importantly the people who work on and with it. He tells the story of Palestinian dispossession and Israeli settler colonialism from the vantage of Palestinian stone masons. He tells the story of dispossession of land and of traditional craft how architecture style and typology are implicated in pre-Israel Zionist push into Palestinian territory and the current Israeli efforts to remove Palestinians from their land and their livelihood. He tells the story of statecraft and how the state constructs its own imaginary whether through modernist urbanism, global tourism or contemporary gentrification. Stone Men internally connects questions of architectural labor, architectural style, global trade and migration and state violence. And it's also beautifully written and is a real pleasure to read. Andrew is a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU. He's a contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation and Al Jazeera among many many others. He is the author and editor of more than 20 books including The Case for Debt Refusal, Bird on Fire, The Celebration Chronicles and many more. And The Stone Men was the winner of the Palestinian Book Award. In addition, he's an activist involved in strike debt, decolonized this place in Gulf labor which is a project that was very influential and we could say the inspiration for who builds your architecture. And in many ways Andrew just embodies the activist spirit both within and beyond academia. And so joining me is to speak with Andrew is who builds your architecture. WBIY A is a collection of architects, activists, scholars and educators. The taggle is a pressing question, who builds our architecture? To examine the links between labor, architecture and the global networks that form around building buildings. Over the years we've installed exhibitions, published essays and articles and published our own book, The Critical Field Guide which unpacks many of these kind of thorny issues and is available on our website, whobuilds.org. And we do all this in the service addressing the role architects play within the labor systems that construct the buildings that we design. Our most recent exhibition opened this past fall at the Boston Architectural College and representing WBIY today is Mabel Wilson and Lindsay Wixram-Lee from GSAP and Kadambari Bachi from Barnard. So Andrew will speak for about 20 to 30 minutes and we will have some follow-up questions and then we'll open up and we will have questions from the audience. So please join me in welcoming Andrew. Thank you so much Jordan and it's a especially gratifying to be here with who builds your architecture because I feel that this book really is part of a common project that we've all been involved in as Jordan mentioned for at least the last decade or so. That's based on research on labor and building infrastructure. You know powerful people in government and industry and in our own professions are uncomfortable with this kind of research and so they either ignore it or they try to shut it down. And in my case or in the case of the Gulf Labor Coalition which did a lot of work in Abu Dhabi, they really shut us down by denying several of us entry to the UAE in 2015. Now that summer several of us found ourselves in the West Bank. Some colleagues were making a film and they'd asked me to come and interview workers at checkpoints going across the green line to Israel and we realized we'd gone from taking testimony from migrant workers from another country or other countries in Abu Dhabi to taking testimony from migrant workers in their own land which is basically what these Palestinian workers are. So related proposition but quite different in some ways. I figured that this film is going to take a long time to make and indeed it has and so I could research and write a book in the meantime on this kind of work that might be useful and I use the term useful because it's important when you're writing a book to ask yourself is how can this be a useful book because let's face it a lot of useless books out there some of them I've written myself and I don't mean unworthy I just mean they're books that people don't use in an active way and I think we need we need to have that kind of literature and scholarship. So I did a lot of preliminary research to figure out how this could be useful and there were two reasons I came up with. One was there's not a whole lot written about Palestinian labor. Palestine watchers including scholars tend to focus on other things like land theft and dispossession, displacement, demolitions, evictions, soldier brutality, human rights violations, mass incarceration and so on and so forth all for very good reason but there's not a lot of scrutiny and attention to what Palestinians do on a daily basis to put food on the table for their families so I figured I could help fill that gap because a lot of what I do is labor research. The other reason I found was there's not a single published study of the stone industry in the West Bank of Palestine which kind of astonished me because it's the largest private sector employer and if you add in all the construction workers that work with this stone in the aggregate it's probably a larger number than the public sector payroll of the PA. It's the largest share of GDP and the largest share of exports from the occupied territories and for such a small population Palestinians are the 12th largest stone producer in the world just behind the U.S. and in front of Russia. Many of you probably know there are two natural resources that Palestinians have that Israel does not have. One is water, much of that gets siphoned off using advanced pumping technologies from Jordan Valley and from the central mountain aquifer. The other one is stone, limestone. Some of the best dolomitic limestone in the world which is also in the central mountain area and for the time being at least it's still largely under Palestinian control which makes it a hugely important national resource. Here's a map of geological deposits depending on where you live done the spine of that mountain is fine. Your stone is the best stone of course. I was quite agnostic about it in my research but I became a stone fetishist in the course of doing this research. So what happens to it? Production wise there's about 1200 firms in the industry small family firms and 75 percent of the stone ends up either inside the green line in Israel or in the settlements. What that means is tragic paradoxes that the very contents of Palestinian land are being used to build at the occupier state and also the spreading archipelago of settlements that stretch all over the West Bank. It's sometimes referred to as white oil this stone and like a lot of poor nations that have a rich natural resource there's a resource curse that comes along with it and that's and Palestine is no exception. It's not well regulated as an industry and environmentally speaking it causes a great deal of damage. Those of you visited the West Bank or probably have seen the the impact the visual impact of the strip mining in the quarries and also because it's so lightly regulated it sickenes the workforce in all sorts of ways as I discovered in the course of my research. So the stone goes from there's a there's a line of supply that the stone follows doesn't go there on a company it's also on a company there's a dual journey going on of labor that follows the stone to construction sites so I decided I was going to do interviews at every point in the chain with workers in the quarries in the factories where the stone is cut and fabricated a lot of that work is now automated in the workshops where it is finished and polished and also dressed the surface of the stone is dressed in a number of ways it's handcrafted work it's artisanal still to some degree and it there's centuries of of custom and tradition that go into that job. I also did interviews at the checkpoints going in interviews the construction sites in in Israeli cities and suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem I did interviews with workers coming back at the end of the shifts you get a different kind of interview with people coming back from their work and this is a very arduous journey these guys are getting up at three or four o'clock in the morning and not getting back really to their homes till nine o'clock at night most of them so very little time here it's really from bed to work and from work to bed very little time to spend with their families and they're in a great hurry to get home often. I also did interviews with workers who work in settlements in the West Bank and for the most of them are in villages that are very close to the settlements so as a result they are working on land and sometimes on buildings that were formerly part of their villages in fact in some cases very recently so you can imagine how difficult psychologically it is to do that kind of work. As I mentioned before the the companies are mostly small and family owned so they're under capitalized and under professionalized. There are families that have known each other for a long long time because they're based in villages so they compete with one another but they do it very carefully it's a capitalist economy but it's not a cutthroat predatory capitalist economy. There is another more well-known capitalist economy in the West Bank that is a crony capitalist circle of families very close to the Palestinian Authority who are who really perform the function of compradour capitalists at least if you're following a Marxist analysis and and they basically monopolize the flow of utilities and provisions and goods from Israel to the West Bank so they take their cut from that flow and as far as I could tell there's very little overlap between these two capitalist economies. That said we're talking about capitalism some of you might not know that Palestine's basic law forced in the wake of the Oslo Accords puts a free market economy at the very center as a principle of the economy I don't have another country in the world that actually does that so it's important to know as a result perhaps the unions trade union movement in Palestine is a very rich and fractious history but the workers union and the stone industry I find to be quite weak mostly focused on health and safety at least compared to the owner's union which is the union of stone and marble and there are all sorts of reasons for that weakness. I did a lot of interviewing in some of the new unions the new independent unions that have sprung up in Palestine fairly remote from the general trade union federation and also some new unions likewise in Israel that are independent of history which is the main trade union federation in Israel and there's a certain amount of cooperation across the green line between these unions it's not supposed to happen it's very difficult but it does occur and occasionally there are some wins here for example is the Palestinian workers in an industrial zone in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank voting for the first collective bargaining contract in a settlement and they were organized by an Israeli trade union because Palestinian trade unions can't enter the settlements and likewise there have been a few wins on the other side the green line. I interviewed a lot of owners of companies when you're doing labor research it's important not just to interview workers you should interview employers and like employers everywhere else in the world they tend to complain about the same kinds of things right the workers are too lazy they want too much money and so on and so forth but in the case of these owners they also had a lot of complaints about the constraints that are placed on their enterprise by the occupation and there are all sorts of constraints. Israel depends on this industry in a major way but so it doesn't want to shut it down but of course it will make it will make it as difficult as possible to do business as usual especially in a profitable way and so one of the examples I'll just mention is that Palestinian producers are not allowed to use explosives in the quarries which puts them at a considerable competitive disadvantage with other producers in the region dynamite can you know can shift a lot of stone in a very short space of time here they have to use this fairly primitive stone cutting machinery as a result and what can you notice about this worker no safety equipment which I find to be fairly typical and routine for all sorts of reasons and after the end of the interviews with owners typically they would invite me back to their homes for around the very warm Palestinian hospitality which can take several hours but I after a while I realized well one of the reasons for this is to showcase their wealth to me uh because they were the most a lot of them were living in fairly lavish hilltop mansions and and they were they were proud of their wealth the most of them are doing pretty well actually under the circumstances at least compared to their workers so as you can imagine a lot of the testimony I took had to do with the psychology of working for the occupier and the particular degrees of humiliation that are involved in that and masculine humiliation in particular because this is a masculine trade almost almost solely there were some women I found working in management in the firms and I interviewed them but for the most part this is a study kind of an in masculine psychology um one of them mentioned to me uh there were all sorts of efforts in their part to summarize the asymmetry of power relations on the landscape and one of them put it this way we build their houses while they demolish our homes he wanted me to be aware of the distinction between houses and homes there they were also very much aware of how their livelihoods are tossed around this colonial bargaining chips and the way this works is israel issues work permits for palestinians to come and work there on one condition well lots of conditions the main condition is that they keep the peace if any member of their family or distant member of their family steps out of line throws a stone at a soldier ends up in jail they lose their permit which is a huge blow to their livelihood so as you can imagine this is a this is a very effective form of what is thought of as economic pacification jobs for peace social control over an occupied population using labor as that instrument of control all in all however i was mostly entrusted in the resilience of these workers um you know they in spite of all the obstacles and indignities that are thrown in their paths on a daily basis they resolutely show up for work you know week after week months after months year after year they've been doing this and to me in some ways this was a reflection of the palestinian resistance doctrine or philosophy which is called sumud or steadfastness developed after the first intifada and palestinians collectively said we're not going to leave we're not going to flee anymore we're not going to become refugees anymore we're going to stay here and keep on doing what we're doing as a form of resistance everyday resistance stone masons are a big part of the research palestin palestinian craft of stone masonry is a very venerable one for centuries palestinian masons have been sought out for their venerable their superior artisanal skills every village would have a master mason who without any professional training designed and built barely complex built environments and uh this is an example I guess of what you would call today architecture without architects they built palaces they built uh hilltop villages that are much admired today this is abuin just north of romallah they built uh township cores this is uh birzate near the famous birzate university from the mid 19th century they got into the business of city building so they built yafa they built bethlehem they built khalil they built nablus hypha and for the most part they built televiv the first hebrou city um they got into the business of going further afoot and they built other uh countries in the region this is aman and jordan which they built and when the post-colonial Gulf states came calling when they embarked on their nation building drive they asked they got palestinians to come and build their states too the UAE and uh Saudi Arabia and Kuwait palestinians were the the dominant workforce before south asians were brought in as a migrant workforce so it's fair to say that palestinians have built almost every state in the region except for their own tragically and those and that that that includes israel so the second part of my book really meant that I had to delve into the historical record to answer this question who built israel and um I think it's fair to say in the public mind to give in wisdom as well of course Jewish settlers built Israel the pioneers they were unused to manual labor they learned on the job they learned how to staff the cement mixers and balance the bricks on their shoulders and and they made new Jews of themselves according to the dominant doctrine at the time which was labor Zionism now if you leave aside uh some of the Zionist mythology about this and look into the record it's a lot more marquee than that and for the longest time it was obscured by the agrarian romance of the kibbutz the communalistic kibbutz some of you might know something about the historical origins of the kibbutz it was a solution to a problem that Jewish settlers had which was how do you extract a european standard of living from a middle eastern agricultural livelihood right not obvious answer to that question and a lot of the efforts failed initially it wasn't until the kibbutz was invented so to speak as a collective resource withdrawn from the marketplace collective pooling of resources and consumption that that that subsistence livelihood was found for these settlers in the urban sector it was even more marquee a lot of the Jewish settlers were socialists so they demanded their workers rights they wanted what they called a european wage as opposed to an arab wage which was a prevailing market wage and they managed to get the european wage through subsidies from world zionist organizations that topped up the wage and that in many ways is the origin of a long pattern of subsidy from world jewelry to israel and its economy which continues to this day and of course the u.s. government kicks in a huge part of that subsidy there was a big campaign which is important a big campaign also going on called the conquest of labor campaign here i'm talking about the period between say 1910 and the late 1940s conquest of labor was this effort to uh it was basically a bycott campaign you know when we think about bycott today we think about bds right this is a very long running bycott campaign and it's a bycott of arab labor it was effort to put pressure on jewish employers and foreign employers to have uh jewish only workforces and exclude Arabs from the workforce at the time so a lot of sand and fury around it but my research showed it was only ever partially successful why because employers always preferred palestinian labor and why would they not the palestinian workers were cheaper they were better more skilled they had generations of construction experience at least in the construction industry in the region and they were also less militant in their labor politics than the jewish workers so why as an employer why wouldn't you prefer that kind of workforce but it's been an abiding preference as i argue in the book let me give you an example of this is a case study in the book about televieve which is instructive televieve as i'm sure some of you know was a jewish suburb of yafa yafa is the biggest city in palestine is the economic and cultural capital of palestine 100 000 people living there before the nakba after the nakba only 4 000 are left the stone masons of yafa use this stone which is called kurkar it's uh it's uh it's a sandstone it's not like the limestone of the central mountains uh lithified sand dunes basically and they've been using it for centuries and they dominate the labor market so when the founders of televieve come along say we want to build this suburb and their funders from world zionist organizations say we'll fund it but we only want jewish hands to build it that's a big problem because how do you do that when all the skill is in the hands of the palestinians and knowledge about this stone and its use and its craft is in the hand of palestinians so it was a little bit of labor conflict to begin with and it was clear this wasn't going to work and so employers often when there's a labor conflict they seek a technological solution in any workplace and so this is what the founding fathers of televieve did they decided to uh to find a substitute for this stone first of all they tried silicate bricks increasingly they used cement and concrete materials that could more easily be used by jewish workers and over time a cult of concrete developed in israel especially after 48 um concrete was supposed to be this tough and unyielding um material uh which reflected the the character of the new nation of israel and uh today the spread of concrete the march of concrete across the hill tops of the west bank is the the unsavory brand mark of the occupation but i tell you this story because the choice of the material the initial choice of the material was an effort to uh to exclude the the arab workers from from the workforce and in many ways uh was the kind of origin of arab jewish conflict in some ways over the decades so um at the same time as this cult of concretes going on uh after 48 there's a lot of architectural cleansing i'm sure you you've read about this uh demolition uh villages demolition of urban quarters demolition of anything that is autumn ottoman anything that is the built heritage of the region in a flight of building away flight of architecture away from the built heritage of the region in a way that owes nothing to uh to that history um that comes to a stop in 1967 the flight away from the heritage it comes not overnight you know it's like a big ship turning um but over time it does turn away and moves in the opposite direction why is that 1967 the occupation of the old city of jerusalem happens israeli authorities are now in possession of a lot of old stone that they have to preserve they can't bulldoze the old city of jerusalem they put the so-called biblical archaeologists to work they dig down they excavate until they reach a historical layer that they they they argue is corresponds to the landscape of jewish antiquity they throw away a lot of the other layers you know in violation of cultural heritage rules um because that's the layer that they're interested in so as a result israeli jews begin to look at the old stones of palestine through new eyes right they're no the old stones are no longer seen as crumbling remnants of a backward civilization that have to be demolished and thrown away they're now seen as kind of magical pathways to this landscape of jewish antiquity which is all important as it's a birthright landscape so that's mostly jerusalem jerusalem is very religious driven by this religious project going on in televy which is much more secular there's something similar happening old stones old stone and mortar buildings are being revalued and restored but not for religious reasons but for real estate purposes for market value as in most parts of the world industrial parts of the world we think of this we associate it now with gentrification there's a re-evaluation of taste and an elevation of vintage features of decor and facade for real estate purposes so that's what happens in uh is happening in televieve and especially in yafa uh where you have you know condo restorations that are going on um that also include uh you know uh arab arab vernacular architectural features the kind that would have been shunned not long before and when i started my report i call this otomania this whole uh this fever for all things otomanium um when i started reporting there in about 2015 um some of the old houses around the old city of yafa were fetching the highest real estate prices in israel which is really a mind-fuck because only a few years before these were houses that were being demolished and the rubble piling up in the beaches of yafa and lo and behold kurkar which was the stone the televivians had shunned the century before is back in hot demand can't get enough of kurkar there's not a lot of it left and workers also who can who can work with kurkar are few and far between so if you move 25 kilometers east you cross the green line you're in the west bank there's also a campaign of architectural restoration going on it's not being driven by the market and stone and mortar buildings uh traditional buildings don't yet have a lot of uh value on the real estate market they might well do but currently they don't it's being driven by uh revival of cultural heritage uh bulwarks against the palestinian bulldozer which can be just as destructive as the hebra bulldozer so-called uh there are also bulwarks against settlers seizing land if you get a building historically listed it's more difficult in some ways for the settlers to seize it and these so these are what are called palestinian facts on the ground evidence of long-standing residents which palestinians have to actually prove in some instances that they've been here for uh for decades and centuries it's also feeding into a rural revival in certain areas so i study three organizations that were doing this kind of restoration work revoc which is probably familiar to most of you in ramallah the center for cultural heritage preservation in batley hem and the old city revitalization program in jerusalem uh different locations different kinds of work but a common purpose i think and also a common techniques involved here's one example i think this is a restoration done by rewok this is jaba a village to the east of jerusalem the old core before and after as you can see quite a transformation i also interviewed a lot of workers who were implied on these restoration projects some of them are old timers like this fellow um and some of them were younger and learning on the job from the old timers now just to try and conclude um i uh as a result of the historical research my conclusion was uh that um palestinians have been an indispensable part of this workforce for a century or more we're talking about a century of labor contributions to the building of almost every fixed asset on the land between the river and the scene um there have been three major attempts to replace palestinians over the course of this century the first was the conquest of labor which i already mentioned the second was after 1948 after the nakba the importation of misrahi jews from arab countries around the region to take their place in the workforce didn't last long um and the third one was a collective punishment for the first intifada israel decided to replace the workforce by importing large numbers of migrant workers from overseas um each in their turn has only ever been partially successful and today according to my research we're at a numerical height of employment which is to say they're more west bank palestinians working in israel in the settlements than ever before and um what do you get from that this is the last uh it's an argument i put forth at the end of the book it's a very speculative argument but i thought i would throw it out there having done all this research um what rates accrue to you for a century or more of these labor contributions and what additional rights of restitution are due to you from having been fashioned into a compulsory workforce where there is really no alternative to doing this kind of work economically because of israeli's policies of under developing the palestinian economy the alternative is often a starvation wage so i use the term compulsory because we're not talking about forced labor here and we're not talking about bonded labor as we might do in the case of migrant workers in the gulf but compulsory because of the lack of an alternative so what i suggest is um this principle of political sweat equity which rests upon the idea that if you build a country that should translate into some rights in that country civil and political rights and since we're in the business now talking about you know the unitary state the one state solution uh how will these rights how do these rights claims figure into that solution if there ever is a return to the bargaining table between israelis and palestinians and i know it's very difficult to envisage at this point in time um but if there is a return to the table all of the old claims of palestinians will still be on the table rights uh for property rights uh reparations from property losses and the nakba compensation for decades of moral suffering since then and continuing losses the right of return of refugees all of these claims that you may have heard about they'll still be on the table and they are unpaid debts from the past and in my opinion at least should be repaid but that is reparative justice transitional justice is how do we get from here to somewhere else to the unitary state one state solution you need to put new claims on the table to make that transition and it's not as if the old ones have been working all that well right so i'm suggesting or speculating at the end of the book that this this uh this uh argument about political sweat equity an argument for labor-based equity um could be one of those claims not to displace the others but a supplementary claim a new one an additional one and we need more and there are more we just need to do research on it you might ask yourself well or you might ask me well how has that worked in other places in the world right because israel is not the only country uh that was built uh by enslaved and bonded and indentured workforces including this one of course um african-american and irish and chinese and mexican uh workforces populations um have to one degree or another over the years made similar kinds of claims on the basis of their labor they haven't gotten an immediate response but over time i think they're the moral force of the argument has helped to translate into full social including or fuller social inclusion and uh and citizenship and civil rights the difference is that we're i i'm been talking about populations that were brought from elsewhere whether against their will or because there were no other opportunities available to a country to build it in the case of palestine we're talking about people building in their own country and so the the moral force of this argument i think is stronger and gets magnified as a result i want to leave you with this one quote it's important to leave you with a worker's voice and words his fellow is standing in line at the checkpoint he was waiting to go over there and to the green line across the green line he said i've been building homes every day over there for 30 years in a way it's really my country too isn't it and i thought yeah that's a very elegant way concise way of putting it um and the argument i've been making uh much more elegant in a way than 25 dollar words i've been using so i wanted you to leave you with those words thank you the use of architecture like what we think was capital a architecture right um you call the building until the fat house inspired country boxes which i got that plenty um we think a lot of the java and contemporary building practices to various media that are taking over israel it's like i'm wondering um that you contrast this with a worker's walk and some of the preservationist programs so i'm wondering if you see um a confirmed way for architectural practice that is not um necessarily a source of preservationist but also not um implicated within a kind of new rules and gentrification and many of the development patterns that um you um write about them are kind of most explinted questions so um in this version i'm thinking about the profession moving forward in a different way um aside from preservation model oh well i don't it's a good question i don't know if i'm well qualified to leave uh to get guidance on it that would be more for um the experts in the room i'm in the profession um i didn't have that much truck um with the architecture but i mean i don't need colonizing architecture which is very marginal in the profession um but they did great work um and uh uh sharon rockards was a very important resource for me for those of you don't know his foot black city white city about telly b uh absolutely uh indispensable book for helping to among other things uh take apart the myth of the white city of uh uh telly and you know delve into the the politics of the border between the uh and telly the source that he needed to stay um in king i mean his personal i think so i'm trying to speak for him but as far as i understand it is that he would not he would not work on a project um that was uh either on state land well a lot of early land state land um or a project that was funded and then uh with state money um which left him with a very limited slice of business as an architect very limited in the um but i again i think by decolonizing architecture he's a bit of a liar um but i'm sure there are people here that know of others who could add to that list um might be instructor we're starting with corners um so i kind of i i wanted to go back to um i guess it was really interesting to hear your idea of the the useful book and um well but no i mean i i think it's really you know reading through some of this book i really thought it was books within books in a way this because there's so much um research and information here that that's really interesting so so one thing i did did want to kind of you know in addition to this very powerful central core argument um you know there i think that chapters that that are really approaching kind of different angles um and maybe maybe if we could just go back to the one chapter which is um human human gold uh what was the the title and the worker i think i believe that's um oh yeah quotation that was the president of the Bethlehem chamber of commerce i think it was a quote from him was it yeah and um it really struck me because that that if we could perhaps expand on and that is a kind of a quotation but but also it was interesting um and we touched on your presentation a little bit in terms of Palestinian workers but more in the kind of contemporary um you know recent histories also the guest workers yeah and other kind of migrant workers that were there building but these this really kind of almost this sort of contrast between those workers and what they were going through and then Palestinian workers and this sort of idea of his you know the description then you know saying that Palestinian workers were human gold and they could if you could expand on that yeah um i will try i it's it's a very important question because you might ask yourself from what you know about migrant workers from overseas um that uh you would figure that Israeli employers would prefer their labor um because of the circumstances under which the labor are surely they're cheaper and um and under under labor discipline in a way perhaps that even even Palestinian workers are not they do they do tend to share worksites um with the Palestinians um there's a lot of conjecture about who's paid more if anyone is paid more especially about the Chinese workers a lot of Chinese workers in Israel who are the most heavily indebted actually in terms of bonded labor I mean some of them rack out $30,000 worth of debt just to get there um usually labor under false pretenses false promises uh it's typical with migrant workers in the construction industry but maybe I could just try and answer the question directly why would why would Israeli employers prefer Palestinian workers over these migrant workers well there are a number of reasons one is the migrant workers send their wages home for the most part in form of remittances right Palestinian workers take their wages home to the West Bank but then they buy Israeli goods at Israeli prices with their wages so that's a win-win for the Israeli right there that's one of the reasons they're human goal uh another reason is a lot of them can speak some Hebrew so that's an advantage to the employer um and some of them are working for a long time with their families if they have a relationship with certain employers so that helps they also go home every night I mean they're commuters and there's a computer workforce in a way so they they're not a social burden on the state in any way shape or form as migrant workers are perceived to be increasingly even the right language really is considered and to be a sort of demographic threat especially since so many of them have our lives to do visa have gone or gone underground so they're they're they're undocumented at this point uh Palestinian's no burden on the state um and another reason which is more of a long term one not a conspiracy theory has to do with the transfer of labor off the land in the West Bank as more and more family members get inducted into wage labor in the Israeli economy their attachment to the land gets weakened over the decades really we've talked about several decades and as a result just makes it easier for settlers to take over that land and that's one of the reasons why the right wing Israelis in particular politicians are very much in favor of this policy of employing Palestinian's and are always pushing for more and more work permits because they they they think it's a great policy and it's a huge boon to settlers um so that's some of the reasons I could offer for the description yeah that's a great question and just to follow up I mean thank you so much for joining us today I think it's a pleasure to really have time to sit and think about how people are connected to buildings you know buildings seem to crop up along this timeline just for such a brief moment um and and some of the work of the school right is looking at how materials and people coalesce into architecture for a moment and then how it might be constructed so I think the way that you framed in the way that you talked today and looking at where things are extracted how the materials process who's involved I think it's um very useful to think about architecture to all of these models of economies and um I'll say habits and I really appreciate that you digging into the everything about that you know framing of um of workers every day in life getting up in the morning going here and then that continuous you know for a century thinking of how the effect of the every day you know can have on territory uh so I thought you know one question I have two questions first was how do you imagine like I guess if you have to say the usefulness or the use case for an architect to open this book and use it how would you imagine that happening you know do you imagine architecture should get closer to designing supply chains um designing the factory designing the excavation and then also maybe more about interviews the everyday life of workers and residents today you know talk about things that they wish they were doing were there other interests of jobs since now after such a long period of time the skills are very specific I'm curious if there's interest in you know I wish I was a scientist right yeah um I did always ask especially like my checkpoint interview that I did hundreds of those and various checkpoints I did always ask you know the end of the interview what's your dream it's a very open-ended question and there was the most difficult question for them to answer quite frankly took me a long time trying I still haven't figured out why I mean other than the obvious but aspirations and their dreams they very well I expect patience but some of them are quite humorous in the response you know you want to marry the boss's doctor or play for parcel on a football club others were a lot of the responses were about normality but they wanted a normal life and this this this work kept coming up and you would think well that's a low bar but actually if you're in there if you're in their position um you sing the world through you're on media's eyes and sing the rights and the mobility and the access that uh their counter parts have in the rest of the world the most most parts of the rest of all the heavily represented in the media that's what normality is and that's why they don't have they don't have the you know the privilege of being able to travel to one village from one village to another very easily or unimpeded for example and uh so that's one of the reasons why the you know normality was I think the answer to that question um there wasn't a lot of politics involved in the answers to the questions um and I didn't really probe on that I wasn't particularly interested in that interestingly when women did they come through the checkpoints and and we did uh we did manage to persuade them to talk they tended to be more politically articulate um perhaps because they were they were more educated um involved in more sort of white collar type uh employment um that said we met a lot of folks standing in line that were college educated but we're going to work in the construction industry because they just couldn't find jobs that were were meaner to in the west bank on the basis of their college education plus the rack top quite a bit of student debt in the course of uh of getting a degree so there were a lot of high educated highly educated folks also standing in line the first question is a fake one um I think I would just stick to what I said about rights because I think it's it's a it's a question and who built your architecture has asked and continues to ask this sort of swipe equity question you know how far shoot can and shoot the rights of workers go in terms of recognition but even further um and I think you may have answered in all sorts of ways you know the labor theory of property on which labor Zionism is based it's a settler colonial doctrine really that goes back to John Locke right you you work online you later you mix your labor with the soil property rights this is a very serviceable doctrine in this country for settlers labor Zionism is simply another version doesn't refer directly to Locke but the labor Zionist doctrines that are colonial doctrine is based on a labor theory property and uh and to some degree the argument I was making at the end about labor-based rights could be construed as a version of that but there's no reason why settlers should have a monopoly on the labor theory property right I mean squadron rights all over the world adverse possession rights um the landless movement in Brazil there's all sorts of examples of populations that put claims on property um through through their labor and their possession and they're not necessarily settlers and they're not settlers by most definitions so I think for me the answer to the question really just a long story short would be to open up this issue of of worker rights beyond those that pertain to you know wage labor you know wage labor alienates workers from the product that their labor limits the claims that they can make to workplace claims simply um and nothing beyond despite the fact that they produce all the surplus volume and they don't get paid the true volume of their labor so we could have a bigger conversation about that I think actually I mean it's great that you sort of ended up with um you sort of feared for that because that was related to my question and I'm just going to make a video to the state because I've been thinking about that I mean I really mean I recommend buying this it's actually on sale uh in the background but it really is incredibly precise with how tomorrow's said it's like it's multiple books I mean I mean the history is incredibly thorough the labor analysis the analysis of various construction industries um I mean it really kind of gives us a geography you know a very complex material social and political geography um you know what's going on um and it fills in you know just so many blanks about like really how does this come into being which often in media you just think oh that's just how it is but you know it's actually both by design and constructive over time um but I guess my question goes back to that issue of um you know make the dozen blown and the connection of that idea with nationalism because it seems to be citizenship and nationalism are precisely where one finds rights and when you're dispossessed or disallowed that that position and that opportunity um how do you do that um how how even even if you are mixing your sweat with the land it learned to claim property it seems like the concept of property is already exclusive in violent it's why it's you know and that the law and the nation state do a lot of work to maintain that that that integrity so how do we begin that well again very important question a big one I think it's it's important to write in eyes that any sufferer state needs uh needs to appeal to laws wherever they can find them and uh just as sufferers in this country uh you know went back to the normed yoke or they used to call it a conquest or all sorts of you know legal codes they used to um to justify their expropriation of land um one of the things Israeli state does is use is very selective about its use of optimum law optimum land a lot of time a lot of optimum land life in jethison in objective it is not particularly useful some laws which which has allowed a lot of people to make claims to the land the land wasn't like fallow they were actually using the land and recognized the robin law as was in the land right um on both sides um on both sides those who wanted to stay on their land and also those who wanted to seize it the the original motivation of the optimal land reforms was to facilitate uh tax collection of course um to imperial uh imperial mode of extraction um but um the Israeli customary law has now includes this very important perspective it's this very important law regarding underutilization of land if it can be proved or proven that um the land hasn't been uh just been fallow for three years hasn't been properly improved um it's much easier for the state to seize the land and that happens on a regular basis in the west bank it's uh it's a very good and that relates to the point I made earlier about more and more fact I saw the members getting inducted into over they're not farming anymore so the land is fallow so and under this law it can be seized um it's not simply a matter however of saying well I'm gonna make sure that all these lands you know is actually flattered and um and worked on although it has contributed into a rural revival part of the cultural heritage revival in the west bank has to do with uh you know food security and alleviating food security by generating um facilitation of local food supply in rural areas so that's our pushback and it happened it has consequences which are quite consequences. Any questions from the audience? Thank you. I think there is a mic for that. Thank you for uh with some second I know thank you for writing it with the hard work and thank you for bringing it for our attention um I have a question that portrays a little bit I think uh it's a very selfish question in response to your usefulness of the book who's going to ask the question that is useful uh for me in certain ways uh but relates to the question of this procession and the making of the climate so now the climate is out of the work and I'm fascinated by the way that you presented some of the two aspects of the book um in terms of the research about demographic contemporary research but also the historical part of the book um and as someone who's involved in my history that contemporary times has a lot to do with you talk about the challenges that exist when you're looking for the claims of the this process historically as opposed to contemporary uh commissions you know in the first part you've talked a lot about the uh all histories and being on the field and that's sort of a methodological explanation kind of faded away from the history part which I'm sure is not accidental and I love to hear you talk about the mechanisms that are could be plays um for those methodologies to not be explicit I think okay that's a different one um since I have you in the room I know I know talking about methodology in people-based work which is what I mostly do but there's There's always a historical component to the work that I do because I find, to answer the questions, you really have to take a much longer view, which is very much the case here. I could have just done the interviews and laughed at that. But I had to go into the historical record. And quite frankly, I mean, most of the sources are secondary sources. I did a few interviews with some worker families in Palestinians, some worker families in Israel, whose families have been working for generations. I mean, they've obviously survived the non-claw. They managed to save the property. So there were some oral history sources. But for the most part, they're secondary sources. And I was faced with this dilemma, was I going to go into the Israeli labor archive? And decided it probably would not work my time because a lot of this labor activity would not be documented, a lot of it is casual labor. And there were all sorts of other reasons probably why it did not be recorded and accounted for. So I could have spent a lot of time in the archives trying to do that and we were not coming out with much. That's not to say it couldn't be done or shouldn't be done. I just didn't have the, you know, I didn't even board it for me to do this project. But I'd like to see some of that work. It's a, I don't think it had really had to be done. I'm astonished. So that's about as much as I can say about the method. I mean, I have had, you know, historians who read the manuscript in my colleagues at Walkman, which is authority in that particular area, you read the manuscript and passed a muster. So, okay, good enough for Zach, good enough for me. So maybe that's, you know, it's just my, my sense of the threshold that we have to reach to get something out of there might be useful. But probably not that helpful, but it's a good show. Thanks for the talk. I mean, we had a question about the title of the book because I was both very smart and new by its own men. I believe the second word, men, had generally kind of seen ups and downs where you work much into the role of the family and the data of the life of these men in the production of that labor. And also I was really fascinated by the part where you spoke about the mass of the psychology of these workers working for the occupier and I was wondering if you're interested to find out something about how the data of the family is used on the work side of it? Yeah, I mean, I couldn't really access the household spirit, being who I am and having limited access. I couldn't, done the research without translators, I don't speak Arabic and I use colleagues, comrades from either refugee camp in Bethlehem, whom I got to know and I employed them as translators and really wanted to acknowledge them because the book couldn't have been written without them. You know, refugees know everyone. They certainly know everyone in the stone industry. Everyone had a brother or a cousin, whatnot and one thing led to another. So they were really crucial for me in getting access. But because of who I am, I really couldn't go beyond the homosocial sphere of the household and get into the business of reproductive labor. It should be done, that kind of work. And I think some accounting of reproductive labor as a household economy should also figure in this argument, if it goes any further, this argument for labor-based rights. I just, again, because of who I am, I couldn't get access to that. So it's not really in the book to some degree. We did a lot of interviews in workers' homes in villages after they come back from work. They maybe had an hour and hour and a half and we got them during that hour and hour and a half and word would get run in the village that this was going on. Something was happening in such and such a place. So other men would come in and join the conversation and it often turned into what felt like group therapy for a lot of the men in the room. And they talked about things, they might not have otherwise, it was my impression. And especially they began to talk about the health and safety challenges in the industry, which are considerable. I mean, it's very well documented in the occupational hazards and illnesses associated with working with stone. They didn't generally, they didn't work with health and safety equipment. So topics like cancer, which are very much taboo topics in this culture, in the stone village culture, we've touched upon in the course of these conversations and I can tell that these were uncommon topics to be discussed. And they are, in big tell a hospital, for example, in Bethlehem, someone told you that 80% of the cases of men in there at any one time are associated with stone industry illness. And so there's no records kept of that. So there's no documentation of that. So there was a lot of talk that revolved around these kinds of topics, which felt it wouldn't have happened on an individual basis. And I felt fortunate to be able to be a catalyst for those conversations. So they're also documented to some degree. So group masculinists, psychologists, who do things like that, I'm just out of it. Nice for you to talk today. And that's really about sustainability and sustainability. About what? Sustainability of the industry. Oh yeah. In the description, there's a couple of patterns. Yeah. So she's in the history of the industry. And also we mentioned that it's a small country, so it's very valuable, but it's very active. And we also mentioned that this is a very particular and specific. So does that mean that some of these are part of this labor? Where else will we be running out of jobs very soon? And also does that include the environmental household, associated with it? Stone industry should not be so much of a, is there a product for this? Let me see. I think we have a little bit of pollyant and stone. There's better? Okay. It's all right. Yeah, these are good questions. First of all, it's important to say that Israel has sources of industry in the way after 1967. There used to be quite a few quarries in Israel itself. No one wants to live near a quarry, the dirty industry. So to some degree, the Palestinian producers were invited to industrial art after 1967. And one of the reasons why the Israeli stone demand is the mainstay for the industry has to do with municipal ordinance that was laid down in 19, 19, I think, by the British governor of Jerusalem, Ronald Storz. He decrees that all of the buildings in Jerusalem have to be faced with Jerusalem stone. It's just a local limestone. And that's been very consequential. That Jerusalem, greater Jerusalem is spread out and not reached as far into the West Bank. All of the buildings are faced with this stone. I know it would sound sort of ideological message, but indivisibility of Jerusalem. So it's very political to start, use it to start. But because of the outsourcing of the dirty industry, and the stone is not the only one that's outsourced, all of the Jewish dirty industries are pushed across a green line into the second one, the industrial zones. It is sort of this presented in occupational hazards. I find that unsustainability is a big challenge because internationally, that is a challenge for the individual stone industry. It's not happening in the West Bank. Decolonizing architecture actually produced a very interesting report for the outsettlement authority, which recommends we use adaptive reuse of some of the quarries, which is becoming more and more a norm in a certain country. It hasn't happened so far in the West Bank. I focused a few pages in the book on efforts to recycle the slurry that is waste product of the stone industry in the building groups. An engineer I found in Yvonne who was doing this, sort of figured out a way to do this. And so I sent a few pages, hoping, you know, pushing his project in a way. But it's, yeah, it's a big challenge, and I forgot your other question. Excuse me. Well, sir, I guess one is sustainability for both the workforce as well as for the future of the industry as a quick and stable environment. Oh, right. There's a lot of sustainability supply. There's a lot of supply. That's a very good question because most of the remaining stone resources are located in area C, which for those of you who know about area A, B, and C, and the West Bank area C is a major portion of the West Bank. It's only out there is really military and civic control. It's making it very difficult for Palestinian producers to quarry there. Some of them do, on a catapult basis, are afraidies and sanctities when the soldiers are not there. They sneak in and bring their machinery in and they extract the run of the clock. It's pretty hazardous to it. And you have to bribe the soldiers also. There's a lot of bribery involved in this industry in regard to communications and relationships with the military, the Israeli military. But that's where most of the remaining stone is. It's unclear what's going to happen to it. It's still sort of up in the air. Totally under Israeli control. Who knows how much of area C would be annexed. Any aspect of the Trump peace plan was implemented. But there's a lot of conjecture. And that's the future of the industry and the tourist supply. So, I think it ended with that. I just want to comment on your question. The future is short to the plight in the Middle East. And it's protected in the North, not in the West. In the West, not in the South, but in the West. In the Middle East, but in the West. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. The examples I find of people working with throat problems were mostly not newly quarried stone, but finding old stone from demolished buildings in different parts, different villages, different parts of Israel, because they're so valuable in that. They put this as not allowed to be exploited. Right. But as one surprised you, there is an industrial substitute. You know, the passes muster architecturally and, of course, like the alfalfa, it's the artificial, synthetic pro-carve. It looks like, just to preserve the power. The ideas for the alfalfa look like the sort of coin-mediterranean village. These are the village. Hi, thank you for your talk. I had a question that I'm hoping to answer those things quite about the political sweat that we take. How does that work in relation to the life of the refugees or also in the West? They have never been so fastened and, you know, how to participate in this idea of regular activity and also how... I mean, if we think of the, like, one of the main myths of Islam is the land without people with people without lands. It wasn't very much about people not being... not being... not cultivating the land, you know, not being civilized labourers and, you know, defining people in relation to poverty as a person as a Muslim. So, I mean, how would we... how would that idea of political sweat and could we not participate in this redefining or a discursive definition of house Indians in relation to poverty in relation to land and work for the house in Hong Kong? Okay. The refugees... Well, let me say this. I've given this book talk in a number of different locations in various ways. There's a Palestinian audience, someone from the Palestinian heritage who said, my grandfather was a stonemason. Is there anyone here who corresponds to that description? That's not untypical. These are refugee families, of course. Because stonemasonry is such a central part of the culture, they all have stonemasonry and the family background. And so, it's not just the population, the landed population in gentrified territories that are discovered by these right-based claims. Although, as you probably know, there is a lot of tension between, you know, who gets this say in the rights, in the promotion and the definition of those. The refugee families do feel they're often, you know, excluded or are given secondary considerations in that regard. With respect to the second part, everyone in Israel in the occupied territories knows this story that Palestinians build Israel and everything else. Everybody knows it. It's just not officially acknowledged anymore. And is there a lot of guilt and shame among Israeli Jews about this history that their forefathers and forefathers were supposed to build this country, but maybe didn't do a lot of it, didn't do a lot of building? Difficult to say. I don't have, you know, a lot of insight into psychology or mentality that I'm describing here. But every so often there is an effort to try to get Israeli Jewish workers back into the industry. The trade unions every so often launch a campaign to do so history for the other few years. Sometimes it's hard to say that Orthodox Jewish workers which have a low workforce participation rate. But to get them back into, you know, the business and building a hallowed heart of Zionist mythology. And every time the campaign is launched, it fails in this room. Even when the wages promise are much higher than the market wage in the industry and usually are as an appetizer, a teaser to bring workers in. Usually fails. Because it's seen as Arab work and Israeli Jews don't do Arab work. They're not through Arab labor. And that's not, you know, there are equivalents in this country and in many industrialized countries when it comes to construction work, of course. But it's a very political balance that's attached to that issue in Israel for reasons that others should be obvious. Thank you. I know that there was some desire to do a stop-time commentary, but there's clearly lots of people in the audience who will think of the past question. I know there was another question here. So why don't we take one last question and Andrew can stick around for perhaps another two and we can see what the others would know about. Thanks so much for your talk. You mentioned probably capitalism when they were leader sides in particular. Was there any evidence of attempts to consolidate in the industry? And is there some new character to it as a preventive factor occurring? And how might that change arguments with relation to cooperation with settlers in the future? Yeah, that's a good question. There's a couple of firms that have managed to capitalize themselves on a scale where they can more efficiently export. The biggest one is Massa in Bethlehem and Massa Massa is the champion of the industry. He's been involved in his efforts to try to brand Jerusalem stone in certain ways. That's a big political contest over what's the name Jerusalem stone and whether it can be locally branded by a champion. The Chinese are very good at his appropriate thing. They come to Palestine and they buy our flood stone and they buy China and it's a lot of Jerusalem stone. You go to Tiananmen, which is the stone industry capital of China. Well, you can actually buy it if you go there. So there are a couple of two firms that have written about a certain threshold of scale. There's a large firm on the book that is about the city of Rawabi which is this huge Palestinian Palestinian settlement on the hill above the mall. Everyone has an opinion about Rawabi but Masha Massa was the CEO of the company and his family is very central part of the current capital is the developer there and it's a very interesting case study that he doesn't have he located some quarries actually nearby so they do use local source stone that doesn't come from the existing industry so it is more vertically integrated so that's one example where parts of the industry do over a life with one of the current capital enterprises but it's the only one that I know of so it's a special case Rawabi is a special case for those of you who don't know about it so we want to thank all of you for spending your time with us and thank you for being here after writing the book and which is for sale that initial thank you