Boy who lost both arms in Israeli strike is being fit for prosthetics in Doha
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The Guardian
19 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘A cipher for crazy self-projection': why are architects so obsessed with Solomon's Temple?
No legendary building has ever inspired more conjecture about what it might have looked like than Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. It is said to have been built in c.950BC, on the mound where God created Adam, and was destroyed 400 years later by marauding Babylonians. But, beyond some inconsistent descriptions in the Bible written centuries after the temple was razed, there is no archaeological evidence that this palatial edifice ever existed. And yet, for more than two millennia, generations of architects, archaeologists and ideologues have bickered over the building's appearance. They have debated its exact height and width, speculated on the design of its columns, and battled over the precise nature of its porch. The mythic building, also known as the First Temple, has inspired everything from a Renaissance royal palace in Spain to a recent megachurch in Brazil, to the interiors of masonic lodges around the world – all built on a fantasy. 'It really draws out the batshit crazy,' says Argentinian artist Pablo Bronstein, standing in front of his monumental new drawings of what Solomon's Temple, and its contents, might have looked like. 'It has been used as a cipher for pretty much every crazy projection of power and self-delusion for 2,500 years. I find it totally fascinating – particularly as the whole thing is entirely fabricated.' Bronstein's work has long played with the provocative power of architectural image-making. He has poked fun at Britain's pseudo-Georgian housing and given us orgiastic depictions of hell, which he imagined as a showcase city strewn with garish monuments worthy of the most tasteless dictator. But the subject matter, location and (incidental) timing of his latest mischievous outing couldn't be more charged. Bronstein's speculative drawings of the holiest site in Judaism are now on display in Waddesdon Manor, an inflated French chateau built in Buckinghamshire in the 1890s as the weekend party pad of the Rothschilds – an immensely wealthy Jewish banking family who were instrumental in the creation of Israel. Baron Edmond de Rothschild – the French cousin of Baron Ferdinand, who built Waddesdon – financed a number of early settlements in Palestine and founded the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association in 1924, run by his son James, who inherited the manor. When the Balfour Declaration was written in 1917, declaring the British government's support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, it was addressed to Ferdinand's nephew, Walter Rothschild, an eccentric zoologist who liked to pose astride giant tortoises, ride a carriage drawn by zebras andwho was also a prominent Zionist leader. A permanent exhibition at Waddesdon, in a room preceding Bronstein's show, celebrates the Rothschilds' connection with Israel. It recounts the family's funding of the construction of the Knesset building, seat of the Israeli parliament, the Supreme Court building and, most recently, the National Library, designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in the shape of a swooping stone ski jump. Architectural models of these trophy buildings gleam in Perspex vitrines, like the priceless antique treasures displayed elsewhere around the house. To this lavish display of patronage in the Holy Land, Bronstein's florid drawings add an imaginary additional commission. In a brazen act of architectural cosplay, the artist has inserted himself into the minds of two contestants for a fictitious version of the Prix de Rome, a prominent prize for students of architecture in 19th-century Paris, as they compete to recreate Solomon's Temple in their own image. 'I became fascinated by the construction of Jewish identity in the 19th century,' says Bronstein, who was born in Argentina, grew up in London, and describes himself as a 'diehard atheist Jew'. Several years in the making, his new work was commissioned alongside a wider research project about Jewish country houses, and it seems to have triggered a deep curiosity and scepticism in the artist about his own cultural heritage. 'As nationalisms develop in the 19th century, particularly in Germany, Judaism begins to develop its idea of a body of people that are somehow genetically connected to the ancient Middle East,' he says. 'They start to see Jerusalem not as an abstract idea, the way that Muslims look at Mecca, but as a reconstructible place of belonging, tied to a kind of orientalist architectural fantasy.' Bronstein's mesmerising drawings depict what, if taken to extremes, this fantasy might have looked like. Painstakingly drawn in pen and ink, and beautifully coloured with layers of acrylic wash (with the help of two recent architecture graduate assistants), the images are magnificently grandiose projections of that exoticised 19th-century longing. They depict two rival designs, in precisely detailed elevations, cross-sections and facade studies, for reconstructing the temple. Both are wild mashups of architectural motifs, sampling from the richly embellished catalogue of Asian antiquity, medieval and gothic revival, baroque and art deco with promiscuous relish. On one wall is a version of the temple that Bronstein describes as 'vaudeville beaux arts', its interior glowing with the gilded razzle-dazzle of a New Orleans casino. Marvel at the spiralling Solomonic columns at the entrance, sampled from Bernini's baldacchino at St Peter's in Rome, and the illusionistic domes that hover above the Ark, influenced by Alessandro Antonelli's Mole Antonelliana in Turin, which was originally conceived as a synagogue. 'It's the temple as a sort of gin palace,' says Bronstein – an architecturally virtuosic one, nonetheless. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion On the opposite wall is a more restrained version of the temple, with interior wooden panelling that recalls the kind of synagogue you might find in Golders Green, north London – not far from where Bronstein grew up in Neasden. There are also notes of Henri Labrouste's Bibliothèque de Saint Geneviève in Paris, as well as dazzling blue lapis lazuli walls, representing the celestial realm in a medieval manner, along the lines of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the 'arch-reconstructor of historic architecture', a caption tells us. It's a heady cocktail, made no less so by the fruity facade, which depicts the heads of Moses, David and Solomon as blue-bearded gargoyles above the entrance, and a relief of God, flanked by sphinxes. 'There's a good amount of scholarship about what a temple would have actually looked like if it was built in the 10th century BC,' says Bronstein. 'And it's got nothing to do with monotheism.' He thinks it's much more likely that, had the temple been built at the time the Bible alleges, it is highly likely that it would have been a pantheistic riot, full of different representations of the divine – as is the case with a comparable structure that has survived in Ain Dara in Syria, built in 1300BC, 'which is just full of goblins, basically.' If all this wasn't enough, Bronstein has also drawn the Ark of the Covenant – depicted as a gilded medieval reliquary casket, topped with a cushion, where God is said to have rested his feet – and the temple's menorah, imagined as a twirly rococo candelabrum, whose branches emerge from a chinoiserie-style grotto. Drawings from the Waddesdon archive in a following room help to set the project in context, and show that Bronstein's flamboyant fantasies aren't so far from what was being designed by the 19th-century architects from whom he took inspiration. Alarmingly, nor are they too far off what some people are still hoping to see built in Jerusalem. The Third Temple movement continues to campaign to rebuild the original temple on Temple Mount, one of the most contested sites on the planet – known as the Haram al-Sharif in the Muslim world, site of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, two of the holiest sites in Islam. We can only hope the Third Temple fanatics don't misconstrue Bronstein's drawings as a blueprint. He began these drawings long before war erupted in the region after Hamas's attack on 7 October 2023. Has Israel's merciless bombardment of Gaza altered his position? 'The work hasn't changed,' he says. 'But the war has changed my relationship to Judaism. It made me really question the fact that we all get instinctively bullied into the idea that we have a genetic, cosmic link to the Holy Land. It's genuinely a 19th-century construct and it's total rubbish.' Pablo Bronstein: The Temple of Solomon and Its Contents is at Waddeston Manor, Buckinghamshire, until 2 November
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza
The mathematics of famine are simple in Gaza. Palestinians cannot leave, war has ended farming and Israel has banned fishing, so practically every calorie its population eats must be brought in from outside. Israel knows how much food is needed. It has been calibrating hunger in Gaza for decades, initially calculating shipments to exert pressure while avoiding starvation. 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,' a senior adviser to the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in 2006. An Israeli court ordered the release of documents showing the details of those macabre sums two years later. Cogat, the Israeli agency that still controls aid shipments to Gaza, calculated then that Palestinians needed an average minimum 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be provided through 1.836kg of food. Today, humanitarian organisations are asking for an even smaller minimum ration: 62,000 metric tonnes of dry and canned food to meet basic needs for 2.1 million people each month, or around 1kg of food per person per day. As Gaza has slid into famine this summer, Israeli officials have variously denied the existence of mass starvation, claimed without evidence that Hamas steals and hoards aid, or blamed hunger on UN distribution failures, sharing pictures of aid pallets awaiting collection inside the border. They pointed to deadly and chaotic food distributions by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US and Israeli-backed logistics startup, as proof that Palestinians had access to food. Yet data compiled and published by Israel's own government makes clear that it has been starving Gaza. Between March and June, Israel allowed just 56,000 tonnes of food to enter the territory, Cogat records show, less than a quarter of Gaza's minimum needs for that period. Even if every bag of UN flour had been collected and handed out, and the GHF had developed safe systems for equitable distribution, starvation was inevitable. Palestinians did not have enough to eat. A 'worst-case scenario' famine is now unfolding in Gaza, UN-backed food security experts said this week. Food deliveries are 'at a scale far below what is needed', amid 'drastic restrictions on the entry of supplies', the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said in a report citing Israeli figures on aid. The Famine Review Committee, an independent group of experts that scrutinises IPC alerts, said food shipments 'have been highly inadequate', and singled out the GHF. 'Our analysis of the food packages supplied by the GHF shows that their distribution plan would lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence that have been reported,' the FRC said. In March and April Gaza was under total siege, with no food entering. In mid-May Netanyahu said shipments would restart because of international pressure over a 'starvation crisis'. Just a few weeks of extra aid shipments during the ceasefire in January and February this year provided enough calories to bring Gaza back from the brink of famine, UN data shows. However, in May only a trickle of food returned, in quantities that served only to slow Gaza's descent into starvation, not stop it. Two months on, the scale of suffering has now spurred another round of international outrage, including demands from Donald Trump to get 'every ounce of food' to starving children. In response Netanyahu has promised only 'minimal' extra aid. The number of food trucks entering the territory has risen, but is still well below the minimum needed to feed Palestinians there, much less reverse a famine. Airdrops, used intermittently throughout the war, have also restarted, with France, Germany, the UK, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE among the countries announcing flights even though parachuting in food is expensive, inefficient and occasionally deadly. Last year at least 12 people drowned trying to recover food that landed in the sea, and at least five were killed when pallets fell on them. In the first 21 months of war, 104 flights supplied the equivalent of just four days of food for Gaza, Israeli data shows, for a cost running to tens of millions of dollars. Spent on trucks, the same budget would deliver much more food, but the price of these flights is not only a monetary one. They allow Israel and its allies to frame starvation as a catastrophe caused by logistics, not a crisis created by state policy. Airdrops would usually be ordered as a last resort to feed people in emergency situations where hostile armed forces or geography make road deliveries impossible. In Gaza the only obstacles to driving aid across the border are restrictions imposed by Israel, an ally of many western nations including Britain, and armed with British and US weapons. Two Israeli-based rights groups this week declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, with reports citing evidence including the weaponisation of hunger. B'tselem described an 'official and openly declared policy' of mass starvation. Israel's government knows how much food Gaza's people need to survive, and how much food goes into the territory, and in the past used that data to calculate how much food was needed to avoid starvation. The vast gap between the calories Gaza needs, and the food that has entered since March makes clear that Israeli officials are doing different maths today. They cannot pass responsibility for this human-made famine to anyone else, and nor can their allies.
The Independent
a day ago
- The Independent
Why not enough food is reaching people in Gaza even after Israel eased its blockade
International outcry over images of emaciated children and increasing reports of hunger-related deaths have pressured Israel to let more aid into the Gaza Strip. This week, Israel paused fighting in parts of Gaza and airdropped food. But aid groups and Palestinians say the changes have only been incremental and are not enough to reverse what food experts say is a ' worst-case scenario of famine' unfolding in the war-ravaged territory. The new measures have brought an uptick in the number of aid trucks entering Gaza. But almost none of it reaches U.N. warehouses for distribution. Instead, nearly all the trucks are stripped of their cargo by crowds that overwhelm them on the roads as they drive from the borders. The crowds are a mix of Palestinians desperate for food and gangs armed with knives, axes or pistols who loot the goods to then hoard or sell. Many have also been killed trying to grab the aid. Witnesses say Israeli troops often open fire on crowds around the aid trucks, and hospitals have reported hundreds killed or wounded. The Israeli military says it has only fired warning shots to control crowds or at people who approach its forces. The alternative food distribution system run by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has also been marred by violence. International airdrops of aid have resumed. But aid groups say airdrops deliver only a fraction of what trucks can supply. Also, many parcels have landed in now-inaccessible areas that Palestinians have been told to evacuate, while others have plunged into the Mediterranean Sea, forcing people to swim out to retrieve drenched bags of flour. Here's a look at why the aid isn't being distributed: A lack of trust The U.N. says that longstanding restrictions on the entry of aid have created an unpredictable environment, and that while a pause in fighting might allow more aid in, Palestinians are not confident aid will reach them. 'This has resulted in many of our convoys offloaded directly by starving, desperate people as they continue to face deep levels of hunger and are struggling to feed their families,' said Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA. 'The only way to reach a level of confidence is by having a sustained flow of aid over a period of time,' she said. Israel blocked food entirely from entering Gaza for 2 ½ months starting in March. Since it eased the blockade in late May, it allowed in a trickle of aid trucks for the U.N., about 70 a day on average, according to official Israeli figures. That is far below the 500-600 trucks a day that U.N. agencies say are needed — the amount that entered during a six-week ceasefire earlier this year. Much of the aid is stacked up just inside the border in Gaza because U.N. trucks could not pick it up. The U.N says that was because of Israeli military restrictions on its movements and because of the lawlessness in Gaza. Israel has argued that it is allowing sufficient quantities of goods into Gaza and tried to shift the blame to the U.N. 'More consistent collection and distribution by U.N. agencies and international organizations = more aid reaching those who need it most in Gaza,' the Israeli military agency in charge of aid coordination, COGAT, said in a statement this week. With the new measures this week, COGAT, says 220-270 truckloads a day were allowed into Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday, and that the U.N. was able to pick up more trucks, reducing some of the backlog at the border. Aid missions still face 'constraints' Cherevko said there have been 'minor improvements' in approvals by the Israeli military for its movements and some 'reduced waiting times' for trucks along the road. But she said the aid missions are 'still facing constraints.' Delays of military approval still mean trucks remain idle for long periods, and the military still restricts the routes that the trucks can take onto a single road, which makes it easy for people to know where the trucks are going, U.N officials say. Antoine Renard, who directs the World Food Program's operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, said Wednesday that it took nearly 12 hours to bring in 52 trucks on a 10-kilometer (6 mile) route. 'While we're doing everything that we can to actually respond to the current wave of starvation in Gaza, the conditions that we have are not sufficient to actually make sure that we can break that wave,' he said. Aid workers say the changes Israel has made in recent days are largely cosmetic. 'These are theatrics, token gestures dressed up as progress,' said Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam's policy lead for Israel and the Palestinian territories. 'Of course, a handful of trucks, a few hours of tactical pauses and raining energy bars from the sky is not going to fix irreversible harm done to an entire generation of children that have been starved and malnourished for months now,' she said. Breakdown of law and order As desperation mounts, Palestinians are risking their lives to get food, and violence is increasing, say aid workers. Muhammad Shehada, a political analyst from Gaza who is a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said aid retrieval has turned into the survival of the fittest. 'It's a Darwin dystopia, the strongest survive,' he said. A truck driver said Wednesday that he has driven food supplies four times from the Zikim crossing on Gaza's northern border. Every time, he said, crowds a kilometer long (0.6 miles) surrounded his truck and took everything on it after he passed the checkpoint at the edge of the Israeli military-controlled border zones. He said some were desperate people, while others were armed. He said that on Tuesday, for the first time, some in the crowd threatened him with knives or small arms. He spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing for his safety. Ali al-Derbashi, another truck driver, said that during one trip in July armed men shot the tires, stole everything, including the diesel and batteries and beat him. 'If people weren't starving, they wouldn't resort to this,' he said. Israel has said it has offered the U.N. armed escorts. The U.N. has refused, saying it can't be seen to be working with a party to the conflict – and pointing to the reported shootings when Israeli troops are present. Uncertainty and humiliation Israel hasn't given a timeline for how long the measures it implemented this week will continue, heightening uncertainty and urgency among Palestinians to seize the aid before it ends. Palestinians say the way it's being distributed, including being dropped from the sky, is inhumane. 'This approach is inappropriate for Palestinians, we are humiliated,' said Rida, a displaced woman. Momen Abu Etayya said he almost drowned because his son begged him to get aid that fell into the sea during an aid drop. 'I threw myself in the ocean to death just to bring him something,' he said. 'I was only able to bring him three biscuit packets'. ___
