Jerusalem’s been famous for its rubble production for over 2000 years. Two Jewish Temples have been destroyed, one by Babylonians, another by the Romans. Each time, the Jews took umbrage; each time, post-umbrage, the oppressors leveled the entire city and exiled the Jews. The Romans added to the insult, building their own city on top of the rubble, including their own temple dedicated to Jupiter.
The Jupiter temple? Emperor Constantine turned it into rubble when he decided that the Roman Empire was going to be Christian.
A few centuries later the Arabs took over. Above the rubble of three temples they built a shrine and a mosque. Remarkably, the structures remain today. This, even though the city’s been conquered twice by Crusaders and three times by Muslim dynasties. In the 20th century alone, Jerusalem has been held by the British, the Jordanians, and Israel.
Until recently, turning a building into a heap of rocks or bricks was hard work, mostly done by the owners of a place. Making rubble was an artisanal process.
Only nature could reduce whole cities to piles of stone. Lisbon was reduced to rubble by an earthquake in 1755. More recently, an earthquake in Sichuan, China made five to 11 million people homeless. Schools collapsed in the middle of the school day, killing thousands of schoolchildren.
In the age of the Anthropocene, though, humans can do the work of earthquakes. The fascists pioneered industrial rubble production. Two years before World War II, Germany and Italy carpet-bombed Guernica, Spain, on behalf of the Spanish Fascists. The Nazis blitzed London and other British cities in 1940. The Allies, though, massively expanded the scale. Great swathes of German cities were levelled. Four hundred cubic million meters of ruins were removed from the streets of Germany.
Since then, the United States has led the world in rubble production, all of it for export. In Vietnam, Serbia, and Iraq entire cities have been converted to rubble. Second only to America, Russia has manufactured heaps of rubble in Grozny, and now Ukraine. More recently, Israel’s become a leader in rubble production. According to the United Nations, 40 million tons of rubble have replaced buildings in Gaza. It’d take 15 years to clean it up, the UNWRA estimates. Raw materials for rubble production are scarce in Gaza; tent cities don't produce much when bombed. Israel’s now creating rubble in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. The United States keeps its rubble-making skills honed by bombing Syria and Yemen as well.
In Jerusalem there’s a synagogue whose name translates as The Ruin Synagogue. The first attempted synagogue was started in 1700 and destroyed in 1720, providing the name for the site, “Hurva.” A synagogue was completed a century later, assuming the name. That synagogue was destroyed in 1948 in the Battle for Jerusalem. The rubble remained until 2010, when another synagogue was built on the site.
Today’s synagogue was built after Israel took control of that part of Jerusalem. Gaza, by contrast, belongs to no one. The people who live there had wanted to live somewhere else, even before Gaza was blown apart. But no one else wants the Gazans. And now the American president is telling them, like the surliest bartender ever, “You can’t go home and you can’t stay here.”