Starting in the turn of the twentieth century, the Ottoman administration, and later the British and French mandatory rulers, marked the eastward shift of sand dunes along the southeastern Mediterranean coasts as an environmental concern – an expanding desert devouring fertile land. Economic “development” through the expansion of agricultural production thus required the fixation of dunes through state afforestation projects. While historians have addressed imperial campaigns of dune-afforestation before, they largely overlooked the way that these acts systematically extinguished indigenous ownership and usufruct rights, expropriated sands as state domains, and transferred these lands’ “reclamation” as concessions to colonial companies. European theories of the Fertile Crescent’s natural history justified these practices by portraying Arab agricultural and livestock cultivation methods as the historical causes for sand drift. Removing Arab populations away from coastal sand stretches was thus constructed as an ecological strategy. By exploring the environmental and legal framing of coastal sands as wastelands, deprived of ownership, and hostile to cultivation, this paper exposes the Levantine coast’s reconfiguration as a land reserve qualified solely for modern urban expansion. The paper shows that vast swaths of land and building space were injected this way into the Levantine real estate market, freeing the region’s coastal cities from their premodern boundaries to develop horizontally and vertically into expansionary-capitalistic behemoths by the middle of the twentieth century. As a result, within the formation of Middle Eastern nation-states post-WWII, the coastline became the platform for both consolidating state power and defining the conditions of statelessness, giving rise simultaneously to the most luxurious urban centers and the most miserable refugee shelters.

My paper examines how sand produces imageries and realities that both solidify and undermine power relations. Between 1967 to 1973 Israel embarked upon a massive fortification campaign in the Sinai Peninsula. It constructed a line of defence stretching from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea along the sandy embanked walls of the Suez Canal. The “Bar-Lev Line,” as it later came to be known, was designed to be the state’s ultimate barrier on a body of water that epitomized notions of imperial domination. Recounting the planning and building process of this massive fortification, this paper shows how sand was shaped to act not only as a construction material but also as a substance sustaining a political fantasy where acts of conquest are normalized. Simultaneously, however, sand’s fluidic nature – continuously ‘on the move’ between shapes, structures, and volumes – challenged the effort to regularize an occupied space. By focusing on Israel’s fortification campaign, then, the paper examines how dreams of geopolitical impregnability are formed, sustained, or dissolved. An analysis of how sand ‘acts’ is also a call to read it as a matter that matters, in the dynamic relations between people, places and things.

The paper discusses the Israeli rehabilitation and resettlement of Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip after 1967. It draws attention to the role and meaning of construction materials and construction work within Israel’s effort to extinguish the Palestinian refugee status. Concrete was the primary material used by Israel’s colonial agencies and military government to construct permanent dwellings for Palestinian refugees. Apart from its constructional qualities, cement also enabled Israeli planners to materialize a Mediterreanean aesthetic for future Gaza, one that would link the city to an imagined pre-Arab history of the region. Mediterranean architecture embodied long-percolating Zionist ideals of belonging to a de-Arabized Middle East and was carried out in accordance with Israel’s exclusive national citizenship structure. Sand, the main aggregate of cement mixture and a terrain dominating the landscape of the Strip, emerged as key to Israel’s effort. It was both plentiful and cheap within the Strip and pointed to Gaza’s Mediterranean belongness. Sand and cement thus became a source for conflict over material control between UNRWA and the Israeli military government. As archival records illustrate, Israel claimed international humanitarian aid funds for its own national development budget, thus effectively terminating the economic and the political control UNRWA exercised vis-à-vis the refugees. The politics of enlisting refugees’ basic dwelling needs to dismiss their historic rights was embodied in the everyday technocratics of concrete supply and aesthetics. Concrete and sand manifested Mediterranean architecture was thus embraced by Israeli architects as a form of colonial pacification both to end the refugee crisis by assimilating the refugees into the Gaza strip cities, and to ensure the refugees’ ongoing dependence upon Israel’s “development”.