Where We're Going
1948/2048 will be a hybrid interactive and feature documentary co-created with visionary change-makers in Israel/Palestine that co-designs a transcendent future for 2048.
By partnering with organizations that use technology and design to envision a
post-segregation future, 1948/2048 will create and reflect on processes of decolonization, collaborative transformation, and the common space.
Using creative actions, Zochrot restores the memory of hundreds of Palestinian villages demolished for Israel’s creation. Following a fact-finding trip to South Africa, they organized Israel/Palestine’s first informal Truth Commission in 2013. In 2014 they released the iNakba app to allow the millions of Palestinian refugees to digitally return to their historic villages, and in 2017 they began their first research project into collaborative transformation between Israel’s Middle Eastern Jewish population and the Palestinians.
Also this year, a team of economists from across the globe will tackle one of the most difficult challenges of transformation. While checkpoints and segregation walls can be dismantled, an economy dependent on homeland security technologies, the arms trade, and cheap, precarious labor by Palestinian workers will be much harder to dismantle. They will debate, design, and outline the steps forward for a decolonized economy for Israel/Palestine.
Finally, after the government of Canada concluded its Truth and Reconciliation process with its indigenous population in 2015, a list of 94 concrete steps were called upon to step forward in transforming the country. It is in the spirit of this historic process that the country’s largest school board commissioned the “Decolonizing Our Schools” roadmap. Using this invaluable resource, our team of educators in Israel/Palestine’s only mixed and bilingual school system will create a deconlonized curriculum, in which to bring up future generations, living in a post-segregation reality.
“You don’t think your way
into a different way of acting;
you act your way into a different way of thinking.”
-Judy Vaughn
In 2009 a team of municipal planners and researchers from Israel/Palestine travelled to the Former Yugoslavia to learn how large refugee populations practically return after conflict. In 1948 seven Palestinian villages were depopulated and demolished to build Tel Aviv, Israel’s bustling metropolitan party city. Working in digital space to bypass the politically and geographically segregated reality, the team will now ask how the city can be transformed to accommodate these refugees in a future post-conflict reality.
In 2006 the Israeli army abandoned Oush Grab, a military base that also served the British and Ottoman empires. Previously used as a site of surveillance over the historic Palestinian city of Bethlehem, the base’s concrete watchtowers and barracks stood empty for the first time in centuries. In the years following, our team of architects subverted the space, transforming it into Bethlehem’s first public park, artistic space, and playground.
Towards a common dictionary
This booklet is an outcome of the “Ancient Journeys and Migrants” course at the University of Exeter, thinking together with Campus in Camps. In exploring the ancient stories and remains of those who moved through a world without maps, borders, or nation-states, it reveals the shifting attitudes to the outsider – the guest and the host – exposing how fleeting are the conventions that take shape in the here and now.
Contributors: Isshaq Al-Barbary, Jana Axamitova, Jasper Barnes, Natasha Collin, Laura Ely,Rebecca Ford, Jack Gladen, Elena Isayev, Will Knox, Tom Murrie, David Rhimes, Oscar Page,Aldous Poole, Josh Rotchelle, Diego Segatto, Thomas Southgate
Towards a practical return
Towards a common economy
Working alongside their ongoing coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Al Shabaka will bring forward a platform proposal for a common economy for a 2048 decolonized future.
Learning from the strengths and failings of previous transitional processes such as those in South Africa, Argentina, and Canada, Al Shabaka will speculate about the processes of transition that will be necessary in order to wane the Israeli economy from the arms and homeland security industry, and incorporate the Palestinian Territories into a common economy, one that evolves beyond the current captive market created by the occupation and siege on Gaza.
