Cover pages from El País, October 8 and 9

This magazine has tried to cover the events that have marked our time, and so we did with the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers by the 9/11 attacks, the urbicide in the Balkan Wars, the lockdown during the pandemic, and the ongoing Ukraine conflict, which has similarly devastated cities. We have now and then tackled Israel and Palestine, commenting on the atrocious separation of communities by walls that create an apartheid regime, but Saturday the 7th of October brought a parting of the sea in the history of Israel and perhaps of the world, opening a wound that could be deeper and more dangerous than Ukraine’s.

That part of the planet is not easy to document, as we verified when we published our Atlas volume on Africa and the Middle East, for which we had assigned an article that would look at the Mediterranean Levant, but in the end found ourselves having to divide it into two, segregating Israel, because no author felt comfortable writing on architecture for the entire region. Now it happens anew, with Israeli and Arab architects and critics again reluctant to contribute to a joint coverage, forcing us to abridge the narrative of the crisis by means of some covers of one newspaper and some pages of another, and to summarize the building works being undertaken in the zone with a single example on each side: the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences by Norman Foster in Jerusalem, and the Palestinian Museum by Heneghan Peng in the West Bank town of Birzeit.

While the former well expresses the technical and scientific strength that has made Israel a prosperous and advanced country, the latter presents the millenarian culture of a nation with a history and tongue of its own. Each with an eye to the future and respect for the past, the two works embody complementary and indispensable values, showing that even in this tragic moment Israel and Palestine can communicate in the Esperanto of architecture, a common language with which to express the principles, ambitions, and hopes that we all share.