We live in difficult conditions. Sometimes, you see planning based on ethnic discrimination, where Palestinians are stuck in limited areas whilst Israelis use the larger white landscape,” said Palestinian architect and educator, Omar Yousef, referring to the land reserved for white Israelis. 

“This [discrimination] has led to a scarcity of land, resources, and investments that limit Palestinian architects to focusing on ‘smaller, everyday life projects’ instead of public buildings,” noted Yousef, who spent his early life in Silwan—a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, on the outskirts of the Old City—and has remained close to home ever since. “They are stuck in a constant battle navigating the difficult processes imposed by the authorities in Jerusalem,” he said of the fundamental constraints Palestinian architects face. 

As a practitioner and professor at Al Quds University, the largest Palestinian university located in Jerusalem, Yousef has spent the last decades exploring viable ways to practise under these constraints. Related to this, he has extensively studied the resulting architecture of necessity—”an authentic testimony to survival”—that has emerged and enabled built-environment professionals to operate in this “forced ecology” of building practices in Palestine. 

It’s been quite a journey.

“In the Israeli-controlled areas of Jerusalem, you have limited areas where Palestinians can reside,” Yousef explained. Many Palestinians who seek to build often struggle to get through the costly, time-consuming process of acquiring official permits whose legality many question anyway. “We don’t call them legal because that law is against the Palestinians. It is a discriminatory law,” he added.  

As an architect working in Palestine, you “notice that architecture gets a political meaning and becomes a tool to achieve the basics for the people—even protect the right to the city.” he said, referring to how in this context, the practice is more than just a civil activity. “When Palestinians in Jerusalem are forced to live in contained areas without enough housing and faced with the risk of being evicted from their city, they just focus on the basics. People just build to have a home and don’t care about the Israeli procedures which are Kafka-esque,” he noted. “Architecture becomes a type of resistance.” 

With a landscape shaped by demolition orders often decreed arbitrarily by the Israeli government, Palestinians have learnt to live with a continuous threat of destruction. “As architects, we consider these phases,” Yousef explained, adding, “So, we build a small unit which people can add onto according to their needs—in some cases even more floors are added to test the situation.” Living and working within these cycles, Yousef has made some fascinating observations. “Bulldozers have become a type of weapon in the ongoing urban conflict. Instead of being a constructive tool, the bulldozer has become a really effective tool for demolition,” he observed, explaining that people take the risk and build anyway because they lack other options. 

Over the years, Yousef has observed how, under such difficult economic conditions, the cost of licences and approvals to build have forced many of his clients to resist paying them. Clients sometimes ask for plans only, with no intention of seeking building licences, simply because they cannot afford to. “Once someone came to me and said, ‘I have 10,000. Should I pay for the costly building permit and not have money to invest in the house, or should I build the house? We shall see, inshallah, whatever comes’,” he recalled. “This is the attitude to architecture—it emphasises the idea that people just want the simplest solution because they are not ready to invest so much in a house that might be demolished. This is a challenge. It’s designing for uncertainty,” he said, adding emphatically, “So how does that affect your design?”

Answering his own question, Yousef explained how this uncertainty makes what he designs much more straightforward. “The client is not interested in expensive solutions,” he said. “I think even architecture which is not costly should be good. One of my solutions is always to build with local materials and see what I can do with the resources here.” 

The construction process can also be challenging. “It’s best to build around Easter and Passover because municipal inspectors are all on vacation then,” he chuckled. “Sometimes It can seem like a joke, but this is Jerusalem’s reality.” He added, “One client once told me that for him, building inspectors are more dangerous than the army because, in Jerusalem, you have a war against Palestinian housing. It is part of the geographic engineering of the city according to the Israeli municipality with its partisan pro-Israeli approach and planning.”

A long-term educator, Yousef has invested heavily in figuring out what the appropriate curriculum for design and architecture students living and learning in this context might be. 

“It’s important that we push our students to question established assumptions. When you think about the occupation, it’s not just physical or territorial; it’s also an occupation of the mind. It blocks you from imagining the future or thinking about other possibilities.” He explained how learning to question everything is critical in such a context. “Building awareness of green architecture is very important. It’s a national priority since we have a scarcity of all types of resources—financial and natural—so I try to push my students to do everything that can lessen the cost of a building and its running costs.”

“I also try to push them to reflect on their society, even its aesthetics.” He tells his students, “Don’t just copy whatever you find in magazines,” encouraging them instead to find and develop a language out of their own context. “It’s not so easy,” he acknowledged, explaining how he drills into his students what he calls “functional symbolism”. “I want the function to be good, not just beautiful or crazy buildings that don’t function on the inside. In addition, put the building in a context that creates a culture of the area,” he said. “I try to make questions of things, reinterpret them. It’s important for the coming generation to overcome the occupation of the mind, which comes from the Israeli occupation, in addition to that of traditional society, which sometimes propagates ideas which surrender to reality,” he asserted provocatively. 

In the Palestinian experience, Gaza looms large. A symbol of the Palestinian struggle, and its complexity writ large. It’s also a part of the country where Yousef, despite having a large project under construction there, cannot enter or leave easily. He has found other ways to work around this hurdle.  

“As long as Gaza is a large prison, officially, I cannot enter it,” Yousef said. So, unlike some projects clients ask him to design, Yousef and his team developed detailed construction documents and hired another company to supervise construction. He was able to enter Gaza during the first couple of months of construction, “And then they closed it down,” he said. He was undeterred. He would communicate with the supervisors via telephone. They would open their plans, and he would do the same from his end. For Yousef, it was important that the person on the other side of the line was “someone that hasn’t succumbed to the attitude of just filling space with something”. It worked because despite the emergency Gaza was under, someone had resisted adopting “the mentality which happens under occupation and scarcity of possibilities and resources”.