Wounds in the Landscape

Perhaps the most common reaction when facing a quarry, especially one that is no longer active, is contemplation of the injury it has caused. An injury to the landscape and the land. We regard quarries as human-made wounds that require healing. It's not coincidental that the action taken by the government and the authorities in abandoned quarries is referred to as rehabilitation, and the foundation that is in charge of the rehabilitation of quarries, established by legislation in 1978, is called 'The Quarry Rehabilitation Fund’. According to the fund and the state, a successful quarry rehabilitation process turns the quarry into a public resource—a national garden, park, playground. The legislation that led to the establishment of the Quarry Rehabilitation Fund also stipulates that the quarry must exhaust its resources before it can be rehabilitated. For a quarry to be eligible for rehabilitation, the raw material in it, the stone in its various forms, must be depleted. Only a quarry that has nothing more to offer as a quarry can become a rehabilitated quarry.

Quarry rehabilitation isn't only concerned with healing the visual wound but also with stopping the damage that an abandoned quarry continues to inflict on its surroundings. However, these surroundings don't freeze in time either, and often, the animals and vegetation that one might imagine would return to the quarry after its rehabilitation have already been pushed away. Faced with the incessant expansion of the built-up areas in which we live—an expansion fueled by the stone, gravel, sand, and cement provided by the quarries—many rehabilitated quarries, which were once distant, are now located in densely populated areas.

Between the quarries and their surroundings, there are also other wounds—those that quarry rehabilitation as an environmental project does not seek to heal but at most to cover. These are the scars left by those who built their lives in the quarries and were forced to leave them. A visit to the national park Migdal Tzedek reveals one such wound. Between the presence of the Crusaders in the twelfth century and the Hebrew quarriers during the period of British rule in Israel, the signage at the site and the video shown on it - the interpretation presented to the visitor of the heritage embodied in the site, or its „Messaging”,' in the professional language of the Nature and Parks Authority - mention, sparingly of course, the Palestinian village that was located near the quarries, whose inhabitants were deported in 1948, and whose houses were destroyed afterward. The village, named Majdal Yaba, also known as Majdal al-Sadiq, was a large village with over 1,500 residents in the mid 1940s, just a few years before the expulsion and destruction.

The uprooting of Majdal Yaba residents in 1948, as part of the Palestinian Nakba, is likely the most significant wound that the national park in Migdal Tzedek conceals, but it is not the only one. The decades preceding the establishment of the State of Israel and the Nakba, during which a relatively prosperous Hebrew quarrying industry flourished in Migdal Tzedek, documented abundantly by the national park, were years of struggle over the stone production throughout the country. Alongside the relatively established Palestinian stone industry, repeated and varied attempts were made by Zionist leaders and entrepreneurs to "conquer the stone" across the country. 

Migdal Tzedek was the flagship of these efforts, but its quarries also relied on Palestinian workers, some of whom were from the nearby Majdal Yaba. These workers were employed at low wages and often struggled to improve the conditions of their employment. In 1948, Jewish forces expelled the residents of Majdal Yaba and destroyed the village, but the reliance of Migdal Tzedek's quarries on Palestinian workers from the surrounding areas did not cease even afterward. During the 1950s in Migdal Tzedek, and in other quarries in the vicinity, many workers from the nearby village of Kafr Qasim were employed at the quarry.

Given the reality in which their movements and work were under strict limitations, for the residents of Kafr Qasim, like for many other Palestinians in the Triangle region and Galilee regions during the period of military rule-era between 1948-1966, quarries were a relatively accessible source of income. Under the difficult economic conditions of Palestinian society in Israel under the military administration, the quarrying industry in these years, witnessed a relentless exploitation not only of Palestinian men but also of women and children. The basic conflict between the desire and necessity to make a scarce living and rebuild their ruined lives, and their daily lives as alleged enemies under a military rule, reached its extremity, perhaps, in the massacre carried out by Israeli Border Police forces against the residents of Kafr Qasim in 1956. Among the 48 massacred, whose only sin was that they were Palestinians and did not know about a curfew that was declared in their absence, were many who had returned from their work in the quarries.

Other quarries, some rehabilitated, some exposed or still active, and some entirely hidden from sight under ongoing construction, conceal other wounds. On the slopes of the Shagh'ur Valley, known in Hebrew as Beit HaKerem Valley, for example, a struggle that lasted over a decade is engraved, not only in the stones swallowed by the town of Karmiel since then, but also in words that continue to resonate and need only be listened to. From stones of these quarries,  the speaker in Mahmoud Darwish's famous and oft-slandered song, "Identity Card," from 1963, extracted bread and study books to his eight children. These quarries were "all that remained" for the residents of Shagh'ur after 1948, and they built their world within them. Indeed, every time we gaze upon a quarry we should also consider the healing of these worlds as an inseparable part of healing the wound in the landscape.