Abandoned Property and the Shaping of Urban Residential Space: Ramle, 1948-1963

The article examines the impact of abandoned property seized by Israel during the 1948 war in the Arab imperial city of Ramle on the creation and shaping of the residential space in Israeli Ramle. Following the city’s surrender in July 1948, only 960 of its original 20,000 Arab inhabitants remained. Businesses, factories, orchards, public buildings, and private homes, including their contents and the personal items they contained, were left ownerless. The article explores the influence of this property on the development of the Israeli city from a social, political, and cultural-historical perspective, while focusing on the process of transforming the abandoned property – a material space that was emptied of its Arab residents whose fabric of life had disintegrated – into Israeli residential neighborhoods. The article looks at patterns of temporary housing and urban planning processes, and argues that the abandoned property and Israeli residential space became inseparably linked. This connection was a primary (though not exclusive) factor in creating a hybrid city marked by ethnic, architectural, and cultural diversity, which developed in the social periphery of the center of the country. Thus, the article goes beyond the conventional discussion of abandoned property in the context of looting, dispossession, uprooting and nationalism and for the first time weaves together the social, economic, and cultural history of abandoned property into a narrative of nation-building and the emergence of Israeli urban life. This urban space was repopulated and became the setting for accelerated processes of change in its affiliations, its population, its language and its material culture. The integration of the abandoned property within the development of Ramle, a ‘small place’ whose story is still untold, illuminates the separate trajectories of the national and the local and gives the abandoned property a new dimension. As such, it can serve as a lens for understanding the changes that occurred in society, culture and planning in cities and in politics and which were been influenced by the process of its integration in the stratified Israeli space.