From Paris to Gaza, from Napoleon to Trump

The operation by the military wing of Hamas, the elected representative of the people of Gaza, on October 7 had a profound impact not only in the Middle East but also around the world. Using the “Aqsa Flood” operation as justification, Israel has turned the massacres it has been carrying out for 80 years into a systematic policy of genocide. To view this genocide solely through the lens of Palestinian casualties would lead to severely flawed conclusions. This process has revealed that many concepts and values produced through various historical experiences and embraced as common values of humanity only apply selectively. The political and moral inconsistency of the developed world states has been proven by the fact that the Palestinian people are excluded from the framework of the ‘modern individual’ identity, which concepts like human rights, democracy, and the rule of law claim to address. On the other hand, the weak responses of countries that share religious, ethnic, or geographic ties with the people of Gaza have also contributed to the continuation of this genocide in full view of the world.

Immediately after being elected, U.S. President Trump announced a project related to Gaza that shifted the debate in a different direction. According to the US administration, which is focusing on evacuating Gaza and building a new city, this project can also solve the problems of the Palestinian people. When they released a visual presentation suggesting they wanted to transform Gaza into a modern Middle Eastern city like Dubai, it became clear that this was not a simple urban renewal project. According to the plan, the people of Gaza would be evacuated to certain countries, especially Egypt. It is not hard to predict that the Palestinian people, who have lived in exile for many years, would not consent to a new displacement plan. The displacement and reconstruction masked as spatial transformation in Gaza clearly aims to eliminate its cultural and social structure. Because we are witnessing the Arab identity shifting in the opposite direction of thousands of years, from the Levant region, which created once more its cultural and political texture in recent years, towards the consumption-oriented Gulf. We can say that in many parts of the world, the Arab identity has not lost its primitiveness as a form of habit but is inherent in a transformation focused on consumption with modern morality. The resistance of the Palestinian people and the Syrian struggle for freedom carry both spatial and cultural potential to oppose this artificial identity. The cities of these two peoples are home to crucial collective memories that shape social and cultural identity. The natural bond between space and cultural memory also has the potential to create symbolic tools for the Palestinians’ long-standing struggle. Cities like Gaza, Damascus, Aleppo, Amman, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Diyarbakır, and İstanbul claim a central role in the construction of identity and the codes of resistance against colonialism. On the other hand, the artificial cities of the Gulf countries have the characteristic of being the center of the new Arab identity focused on consuming both objects and values. It can be said that these two spatial focuses also have the context of constructing concepts such as freedom/slavery or home/prison.

An most critical issue shaping both the present and the future is the transfer of centrality from the ancient cities of the Middle East that have long been ravaged by a century of war, destruction, and chaos, to certain Gulf towns devoid of historical roots or cultural texture, now symbolizing urban life as enclaves for newly wealthy individuals. While this may be a new development for the Middle East, the world has seen similar examples at different times and in different places.

Napoleon appointed Haussmann as governor to solidify his power in Paris and to construct the city in a way that would preserve the existing power balance. Between 1853 and 1870, Haussmann launched a massive urban renewal project to eliminate the city’s problems and transform Paris into a modern metropolis. Through these projects, new boulevards, suburbs, squares, and parks were built, effectively recreating the city. (1) Rather than remaining a home for its residents, Paris was turned into a site of modern destruction and conflict. The endless relationship between home and space evokes the equation between freedom and resistance. Berman (2) designs modernism within a home paradigm and constructs it as an effort by humans to feel their presence in this world. However, he also suggests that while modernism may define our lives, it simultaneously introduces a new problem into our homes: the construction of a nightmare-like prison for ourselves. Once a home for the poor and the rest of the urban population, Paris soon became a prison for clashing classes. In Berman’s perspective, centers that build the cultural fabric are homes, while spaces that destroy concepts including identity are prisons. He is in favor of wholeness rather than division, of continuity rather than fragmentation. This continuity begins to show itself in space. As the city modernizes, it also ensures the modernization of the souls of those within it. Its inhabitants are in the city, but at the same time, the city is in them. Public freedoms can only be expressed freely in the city’s open, public spaces. Although Haussmann, in a sense, destroyed Paris, disrupting its social memory, he may have also, perhaps unintentionally, made the city more transparent and accessible for all its residents. Berman sees the contradictions of modernity in the new space Haussmann built through his boulevards. According to him, the city dwellers, that is, the new poor, did not leave the city when the neighborhoods they had lived in for centuries were destroyed, but on the contrary, they became visible.

The people of Gaza symbolize the individual spirit of the place that is being destroyed. The cultural and spatial structure that is being destroyed can carry its spirit through the streets with the reconstruction of Palestinian culture in the diaspora. That identity that is being tried to be made invisible in Gaza can be carried to other streets and Palestine can be rebuilt there. That is why the deportation of the people of Gaza is being tried to be done by stripping them of their identity. The aim of detaching Palestine from its uniqueness as a part of the Muslim world and the ancient East is particularly sought within the framework of the concept of “terrorism”. Gaza, which is intended to be portrayed as one of the central places of the last 30 years of Salafism and the chaos it has created, is also struggling with this shirt tailored for it in this sense.

What Napoleon and accordinly Haussmann tried to do in Paris, the US today wants to do in the cities that are the centers of the culture that shaped history, which Westerners call the Middle East. As Gazans are rendered invisible, the spirit of resistance embedded in public space spills into protests in other cities around the world and manifests itself as a distrust of the system across different layers of life. While Haussmann was transforming Paris, he did not build new soft ground roads with a humanist reflex, but Napoleon’s political face had to please the people and in the new image of Paris, the poor had been forced to give up their desire to sit at the table of the rich, even if they were no less visible. While the broader boulevards were designed to cut off insurgents during the 1845 uprisings, they also symbolized the state’s establishment of a new and rapid communication network. Today, as a result of the US and Israel’s closure regime, new forms of localization and the narrowing of Palestinians’ social worlds stand before us as obvious consequences. (3) Like Haussmann, Trump is trying to make Gaza part of Israel’s secure communications and survival network, which will allow the new consumer Arab identity and culture that has shifted to the Gulf to expand northward.

Of course, before any reconstruction, the people of Gaza are first being subjected to a devastating genocide, deep poverty, and ultimately forced migration. This also signifies the exile of a dynamic political culture. Berman’s description of the poor whose homes have been demolished in the back streets of Paris and Sennett’s[4] description of the Jews living in a ghetto in Venice can be compared in the context of Gaza for the connection between place and identity. Historically, the link between poverty and epidemics has also been a spatial one. Epidemics take root in the suburbs of cities. At the time, Venice was suffocating in the chaos produced by inequality. Although diseases affected the entire city, the real blame was placed on the Jews confined in the ghetto. People believed that syphilis spread not only through sexual contact but also by touching Jews. These decaying parts of the city’s embodied form led quickly to disconnection and fear of contact. The Palestinian people are being forced into the image of a community feared by their own kinsmen and neighboring countries, one that others are afraid to help or even touch, much like the Jews of Venice in their time.

Just as Trump wants to redesign Gaza in order to destroy the cultural identity of the people of Gaza and the political consciousness that built it, he also wants to reshape Palestinians in the minds of the humanity as the source of terror and chaos. Netanyahu’s emphasis on “radicalism” in his speech at the U.S. Congress can be seen as part of this plan. We will all see how successful the effort to position Palestine as an incompatible (terrorist) element of the long-desired “peaceful Middle East” has been. However, the deep silence and lack of reaction to Trump’s plan reveals that a process of creating consent is underway. Trump has the image of a preacher who offers a solution to the actors in the effort to turn the people of Gaza into a society afflicted with the “plague” or Gaza into a city that smells of death, and to the Jews who were once believed to have spread syphilis to Venice, and to the some states that have injected the poison of “national interest” into their veins. But it is also becoming clear that Gaza’s spirit of resistance can offer a dynamic of change for the people on the eve of a new world.

References:

[1] İdeolojilerde İktidar Mekan İlişkisi, Nusret Altundağ, Yayımlanmamış Yüksek Lisans Tezi.

[2] Berman, M. (2024). Katı Olan Her şey Buharlaşıyor. Çev. Ümit Altuğ & Bülent Peker. İletişim Yayınları

[3] Taraki, Lisa. Enclave Mıcropolıs: The Paradoxıcal Case Of Ramallah/Al-Bıreh. Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XXXVII, No. 4 (Summer 2008), Sf. 6–20.

[4] Sennett, R. (2008). Ten ve Taş; Batı Uygarlığında Beden ve Şehir. Çev. Tuncay Birkan. Metis Yayınları

M. Mücahit Sağman is a PhD student in Sociology. He has held active roles in various civil society organizations and worked as an editor for a period. He is married and the father of two children.