Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST) 13 February 2006
Like hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, Lifta was forcibly depopulated and ethnically cleansed in 1948.
In the following months, the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (F.A.S.T.) will, with your help, reconstruct the map of Lifta. F.A.S.T. invites you to help it describe the town by sending your details, narratives, drawings and photographs of Lifta. F.A.S.T. will compile the material that is send to them (by email or fax) and fill the map.
The village of Lifta, which lies just outside Jerusalem, has been abandoned since the Israeli army drove out the last of its Palestinian inhabitants in 1948. Today Lifta is more or less a ghost town while the former villagers live mainly in East Jerusalem and Ramallah. Now, however, a renovation project aims to turn Lifta into an expensive and exclusive Jewish residential area - reinventing its history in the process. While Ein Hud and Lifta are historically and spatially unique, they are both symbols of the deep complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that began not with the occupation of 1967, but with the creation of Israel in 1948.
In their analysis Reinventing Lifta, Malkit Shoshan, director of F.A.S.T. (the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory), and Eitan Bronstein, director of Zochrot, examine the ways in which planning is being used to create this fantasy heritage for Israel, at the expense of Palestinian culture.
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