Contested Landscape and the Spirit of Place, the Case of Olive Trees and Urban Neighborhood in Israel

Cultural Heritage and Cultural Landscape are a set of human products that reflect the society needs thoughts and memories. It represents and symbolizes the relationships of power and controls - out of which it has emerged - and the human processes that have transformed and continue to transform them. These transformations create new cultural landscapes that often hide the processes that have made them – political, social, cultural, ideological and economic. The purpose of this lecture is to analyze a contested geographical environment, where two cultures compete over land and its cultural heritage and therefore each of them has its own interpretations: the Jewish Zionist culture and the Arab Moslem culture. The aim is to define the landscape – its spirit and its representation - that emerges from these competitions and disputes; to characterize it; to analyze its symbols and its uses – mainly for the purpose of formation and construction of identities.