7th October, Palestine, Geddes and some other thoughts

WhatsApp Image courtesy: May Murad

I am still here in Kitzbühel for my residency, talking with local people about their place, their work, and their relationships to land and community. It is the 7th of October, and as I walk the narrow streets wrapped in a keffiyeh-style dress, my mind drifts elsewhere—to Palestine, to the horizon of that never-ending war. The mountains around me are calm, indifferent, and yet the world feels heavy with history repeating itself.

A few days ago, a friend sent me an article in Variant discussing Patrick Geddes’s role in the years leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel. The piece prompted conversations among fellow Geddesians, many of whom agreed that the author was right to draw attention to what one might call the naïve Zionism of certain Scottish thinkers of that era, Geddes included. But to understand Geddes’s position, we must also understand where that attitude came from.

In Geddes’s case, one could argue that it was shaped, on one hand, by his Presbyterian, romantic–orientalist vision of the Holy Land as a place where Jews, Christians, and Muslims might coexist in peace; and on the other, by the political realities of his time—

• the late 19th- and early 20th-century pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire;

• the Dreyfus affair, that emblematic episode of state-sponsored antisemitism, which Geddes knew well through his friend Paul Reclus, whose book on the subject he published in 1898;

• Geddes’s relief work for the victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915–16; and

• not the least his own experiences with war through the death of of his son Alistair on the front followed by his wife Anna - which reenforced his internationalist, pacifist and multi-face convictions

A revealing comparison can be drawn with Albert Einstein, who, like Geddes, initially supported the Zionist project. Yet in 1948—sixteen years after Geddes’s death—Einstein was among the signatories of a remarkable letter to The New York Times, co-written with Hannah Arendt and other prominent Jewish intellectuals. The letter warned of the rise of Menachem Begin and his Freedom Party (Tnuat Haherut) in the newly founded state of Israel. Though Begin’s movement presented itself as nationalist and democratic, the authors argued that its ideology and methods were strikingly akin to those of the fascist parties of Europe.

They condemned the party’s reliance on violence and intimidation—both against Arabs and within the Jewish community itself. The 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin was cited as evidence of its brutality: a deliberate attack on a peaceful Arab village that left scores of civilians dead, including women and children. The signatories were appalled that Begin’s followers celebrated this atrocity as a victory rather than a tragedy. Within Jewish society, they wrote, the movement had silenced dissenters and indoctrinated youth while contributing little to constructive nation-building.

Einstein and his co-signers urged Americans to reject Begin’s appeals for support, warning that to lend moral or financial backing would be to empower an authoritarian tendency within a fragile new democracy. Their letter stands as both a moral appeal and a political warning—a plea to keep fascist ideology from taking root in the postwar Jewish state.
(The full text is available here: Einstein et al., 1948.)

Geddes had been gone sixteen years when that letter appeared, yet one feels he would have shared its sentiment. Sadly, Einstein’s warning—and that of his fellow thinkers—went largely unheeded.

Nazmi Jubeh’s essay, “Patrick Geddes: Luminary or Prophet of Demonic Planning” offers a vital entry point for considering Geddes’s relationship to Palestine, not least because it is written from a Palestinian perspective. While Jubeh is critical of Geddes, he interprets his work through the lens of a Scottish Presbyterian orientalism—a vision that sought harmony yet was inevitably entangled with colonial hierarchies. In his conclusion, Jubeh notes that Geddes’s ideas, though naïve in relation to Palestinian realities, were later weaponised against the Palestinian people by the Israeli state after 1948 and again after 1967.

Jubeh also observes that Geddes’s plan for the Great Hall of the Hebrew University was ultimately rejected because it sought to honour all the monotheistic faiths of Palestine—not Judaism alone:

“To be fair, Geddes tried very hard in his design of the main hall to insert some elements from the culture of monotheistic religions – and this may be the reason behind the rejection of the Zionist movement for the design of this hall, because they insisted that all buildings should reflect pure biblical Judaism.”

The Scottish environmental planner Graeme Purves adds useful context:

“It was the symbolism inherent in Geddes’s conception of the Great Hall which aroused the suspicion of many Zionists... Geddes claimed that the domed central hall represented ‘the great Unity which it is the glory of Israel to have first realised and taught, and which Christian and Moslem alike, despite all their hostility, have the candour to confess they have thus inherited.’”

(See Purves’s blog: A Vision of Zion.)

Thus, any discussion of Geddes and Palestine must engage with both Jubeh’s and Purves’s scholarship. Other key sources include Noah Hysler-Rubin’s Patrick Geddes and Town Planning: A Critical View (Routledge, 2011) and Diana Dolev’s Planning and Building of the Hebrew University, 1919–1948: Facing the Temple Mount (Lexington Books, 2016).

Geddes’s sympathy for Zionism must be understood in the context of his awareness of antisemitism—the pogroms, the Dreyfus affair—and of the Armenian genocide. Like Einstein, his humanism was tested by history; and like Einstein, one suspects he would have recoiled at what unfolded in 1948.

It is also worth remembering that Geddes spent years in India as Professor of Sociology and Civics, working alongside Nobel poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Bashabi Fraser, the Indian-born Scottish academic who has long championed this intercultural link, notes that Geddes’s Indian work did not conform to colonial orthodoxy but sought to respect local traditions through an internationalist lens.

I am no Geddes scholar, only a follower of his Place–Work–Folk thinking machine. Yet, in moments like these, I find myself trying to ask him what he might say now. What would he do if he were alive to see Gaza today? Could he have foreseen the decades of violence that followed 1948? The situation in Palestine is infinitely complex, and it is too easy to judge the past through a presentist lens. But from my understanding of his internationalist spirit—and from my own walks and conversations in Palestine, most recently during the Qalandiya Biennial—I can only conclude that what matters most is to sustain dialogue and friendship. This counts especially among us as artists and art activists.

Today I reached out to Gaza-born artist May Murad, my collaborator on the Walking Without Walls project at Deveron Projects. She sent me the photograph of one of her delicate drawings above and a message that simply read: “I still have hope and keep working.”

In the end, perhaps that is the truest Geddesian act: to keep working, to keep connecting, to keep tru to our places - even through despair.

Thanks are due to Bashabi Fraser, Kenny Munro, Walter Stephen, and especially Murdo MacDonald for their insights and guidance in helping me clarify my thoughts on this complex subject. Also to my PhD supervisor Jon Blackwood who encouraged me to take a greater interest in Geddes place related work.

And I thank May Murad for her enduring friendship—and for her hope.