Digital displaceability in the settler-colonial city: The case of Musrara in western Jerusalem

Abstract

This article examines the correlations between top-down digital transformations in urban space and the contemporary conditions of displaceability. Using a case study of the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem, it analyzes the construction of a digital entrepreneurial “quarter” by historicizing the spatial and material conditions within which it emerged. In contrast to the hegemonic discourse propagated by city officials and tech companies, which describes the emergence of digital innovation as a watershed moment in the socio-economic development of the city, my analysis situates this event within the structures of the Israeli settler-colonial regime, and as the latest iteration in a genealogy of displacement. The specific history of settler-colonial displacement in Musrara is constituted by the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinian community, and the construction of a no-man’s-land, an urban frontier characterized by state abandonment and absence. I show how the spatial conditions materialized by the no-man’s-land were instrumental in the social marginalization of the Mizrahi Jews who populated Musrara after 1948 and became ingrained in the development of the neighborhood till this very day. On this basis, I argue that the turning of Musrara into a digital entrepreneurial “quarter” creates conditions of displaceability, which are shaped by similar patterns of abandonment and absence and mediated by the new actors and discourses of the tech hegemony.

Keywords

digital displaceability settler colonial city digital colonialism Jerusalem urban frontier

Introduction

Governments increasingly rely on private companies to develop and run digital services, advancing new forms of governance and unprecedented privatization in urban space and life (Cardullo et al., 2019; Mattern, 2021). This state-corporate nexus is turning the city into a huge infrastructure for in-vivo experiments for prototyping technologies (Halpern et al., 2013; Tironi and Sánchez Criado, 2015; D’Ignazio et al., 2019). Not only do companies gain access to everyday city life in order to provide services, but urban infrastructure also becomes a condition of possibility for the development of technologies and harvesting big data. How are these new processes of privatization shaped on the ground, within material and historical spaces? How do they affect residents’ lives and their rights to the city? This paper investigates these questions through a case study analysis focusing on the “entrepreneurial quarter” developed in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem.

Overlooking the Old City and nestled between the eastern and western commercial districts, Musrara is a central historic neighborhood. Approximately 4500 residents live in Musrara, primarily Jewish Israelis, including descendants of the Jewish immigrants who arrived in the 1950s from Arab and North African countries (hereinafter, “Mizrahim”) and other residents drawn by the neighborhood’s prime location and its distinctive Arabic-Modernist architecture. The official size of the neighborhood is 160 Dunams; to the east it is bounded by Road 1 (#1 in the map), which follows the former armistice line, the Jerusalem Municipality (#2), Shivtei Israel Street (#3) and the commercial urban center to the west, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Me’ah She’arim (#4) to the north, and the Old City’s Walls to the south (#5). The population includes a mix of secular, foreign, and religious residents, with the religious presence growing in recent years (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Musrara Neighborhood, openstreetmap.org.

In 2017 Musrara was designated “the fifth quarter of Jerusalem”¹ for the creative class (Florida, 2003, 2017), as described by municipality officials.² Within this setting a hub for accelerating tech entrepreneurship was inaugurated in the local community center, as were related activities and infrastructures, in partnership with global companies such as Cisco and Intel. Hovering over these initiatives is a dominant discourse propagated by city officials and tech companies describing the emergence of digital innovation, in Israel and beyond, as a watershed moment in the socio-economic development of the city. In contrast, my analysis situates these developments in Musrara within historical continuity that clearly demonstrates how the presumed digital transformation continues modes of exclusion and marginalization within an ethno-national and settler-colonial urban context.

I begin with a historical overview that examines the Musrara neighborhood from 1948 by focusing on processes of urban displacement that have shaped its development to date. I conceptualize Musrara as an urban frontier (Smith, 2005), a condition that was materially constituted by the establishment of a no-man’s-land along the armistice line (The Green Line) between Israel and Jordan in 1948. The no-man’s-land was also instrumental in the symbolic mythologizing of Musrara as an urban frontier—as a space of abandonment, lawlessness and disorder—which persisted and transformed throughout different historical periods. I analyze the latest development in the neighborhood through this conceptual framing and historical context, examining how the reconfiguration of Musrara as an entrepreneurial quarter correlates and responds to enduring conditions of displacement and “displaceability.”

Urban Displacement has been defined as the forced movement of residents from their living environment and resources due to processes of development, urban renewal, gentrification and privatization (Hirsh et al., 2020; Marcuse, 1986). However, contemporary forms of displacement extend beyond physical relocation to include urban living conditions that are shaped by the distancing from or denial of rights and services. Yiftachel (2020) conceptualizes this broader condition as “displaceability”—a structural threat that makes residents susceptible to the oppressive powers of urban regimes based on the logics of land, identity, property, and capitalist development. Displaceability expands the understanding of displacement as an act to a condition that creates a spectrum of urban vulnerabilities (Tzfadia and Yiftachel 2021).

The mechanism of urban displacement functions as a central dynamic of settler-colonial logic, where the colonizers come to stay, to possess and settle the land, benefiting from opportunities to accumulate (Veracini, 2011; Wolfe, 2006). It operates through the ongoing processes of eliminating indigenous peoples and their claims to land while replacing them with a settler society and new political and spatial orders (Hugill, 2017; Porter, 2013; Veracini, 2011; Wolfe, 2006). While “replacement” is never fully achieved, suppression and displacement are continuous forms of control and management of populations. As Hugill (2017) notes, colonial relations cannot be understood as a historical past, but rather as a project of domination and hierarchical social relations that needs to be continuously re-calibrated and transformed in order to shape relations in the present.

In this regard, this structural threat of displaceability and these actual acts of displacement particularly affect indigenous communities and other marginalized groups whose rights to urban space are systematically undermined. The neighborhood of Musrara in Jerusalem provides an instructive case study for these theoretical frameworks, demonstrating how displacement and displaceability operate across multiple historical periods and spatial configurations within Israel’s settler-colonial context.

Marcelo Svirsky (2023) describes the Israeli regime’s “settlerist approach” as constituted on three elements of elimination and displacement. First, the elimination of Palestinian life and space; second, the social marginalization of Mizrahim; and third, the suffocation of shared Jewish-Arab possibilities and spaces. Western Jerusalem, and particularly the Musrara neighborhood, epitomize this layered mode of “settlerist” colonization. It clearly connects between the Palestinian expulsion and the social marginalization of the Mizrahi immigrants in progress since the 1920s with the separatist policies conducted by the Zionists in Palestine that shaped and hierarchized Jewish-Arab relations (Svirsky, 2023).

I argue that big tech interventions for advancing the digital smart city in Jerusalem should be examined within these complex entanglements which illuminate the hidden ideological approaches and practical trajectories of such projects. Promissory futures of algorithmic governance that propagate new forms of tech and data-driven citizenship are common within current discourses about the role of data in the digital “smart” city (De Lange, 2019; Hughes, 2017). In this framework, controlling the flow of information and accumulating big data on a global scale has become a major driving force for new forms of urban capitalism. The most powerful agents of these urban transformations are the “tech hegemonies”—primarily the giant US-based tech companies (Coleman, 2018; Kwet, 2019; Mouton and Burns, 2021). These global developments entail the normalizing and legitimizing of North American discourses, practices, and technologies that marginalize, or even annihilate, local alternatives in favor of a massive centralization of power and capital.³

This paper is a result of 6 months’ ethnographic study carried out mainly in 2017-2018. The fieldwork conducted in the neighborhood makes it hard to ignore how contemporary corporate-led technological initiatives, supported by municipal authorities, materialize despite the pressing realities that current residents face.⁴ These include hazardous housing infrastructure, insufficient urban services, and persistent ethnonational and religious tensions.⁵ In its current iteration, therefore, the urban frontier in Musrara is shaped by these and related struggles which are obscured and supplanted by the seductive rhetoric of technological innovation and digital transformations.

The urban frontier: A genealogy of settler-colonial displacement

The concept of the “urban frontier” is a useful critical and analytical framework for understanding the histories of displacement in Musrara, allowing one to weave together urban process of development and transformation with the particular formations of settler-colonial displacement. In Neil Smith’s (2005) seminal work on gentrification and uneven development, the frontier metaphor is employed to describe how capital reinvestment transforms “devalued” inner-city neighborhoods into profitable spaces for investment while the state provides necessary force to secure this spatial transformation. It shows how gentrification processes are justified and normalized in urban contexts through a “frontier ideology” that characterizes certain urban neighborhoods as “wild,” “dangerous,” or “abandoned” territories that need to be “conquered” or “tamed.” This symbolic mythologizing of inner-city neighborhoods as “empty spaces” obscures the displacement of existing marginalized residents as inevitable progress, a positive evolution, rather than a violent process driven by specific economic and political interests.

Smith’s articulation of a frontier ideology correlates with colonial formations of domination and dispossession, by situating the myth of “empty lands” repossessed and civilized by “gentrifiers,” “pioneers” or “settlers” within the urban context (Smith 2005; Thörn and Holgersson 2016). It resonates powerfully in Jerusalem, where urban gentrification processes intersect with broader settler-colonial dynamics. The genealogy of displacement in the case of Musrara sets the stage for understanding urban development led by global tech companies as inseparable from the ongoing, historical and current, re-calibration of the Israeli regime’s colonizing project of de-Arabization.

1948–1967: The making of an urban frontier

Musrara is one of the earliest neighborhoods to be built outside the walls of the old city by an affluent community of Arab-Palestinians in the late 19th century (Figure 2). The origin of the name “Musrara” comes from the word Srar (in Arabic, مكان الصرار) meaning an area filled with small stones, gravel, commemorating the natural gravel that dominated the area when it was first settled. It was built overlooking the Old City, with 2-3 floor arched houses with roofing tiles, narrow alleys, private gardens and stone walls. The Arab architecture holds a unique historical urban value; many of the houses are well-kept under a strict preservation standard. Musrara includes some of the city’s important Christian institutions among them the Notre Dame Hotel, the French Hospital (Saint Joseph’s), the Salesian Sisters Pilgrims’ Home, Saint Paul’s Church, and more.⁶

Figure 2.

Arab-Palestinian Musrara circa 1934–1939, photograph taken from the tower of the French Hospital, view toward Damascus Gate. From the collection of the British Mandate Jerusalemite Photo Library (Facebook).

After the forced expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and the state-led expropriation of Palestinian property, the neighborhood was divided between Israel and Jordan by the armistice line, and its Israeli side transformed from a modern, luxurious and central area of residence into a war-torn periphery. From 1948 to 1967 Musrara became a neighborhood on the fringes of a no-man’s-land (the armistice line) that divided the city between Israel and Jordan and absorbed massive waves of Mizrahim immigrating from North Africa and other Muslim countries.

The no-man’s-land in armistice lines is usually a stretch of land not owned by either side of the war or conflict, a separation between populations that prevents the continuation of violence. The demarcation of a no-man’s-land is considered temporary until permanent agreements are reached. However, this spatiotemporal construction shouldn’t be taken literally. As Leshem and Pinkerton (2016) show, the no-man’s-land directly affects spatial and political reality and penetrates the construction of everyday life. The land and lives of those communities who border it are dramatically devalued, and as such it is reshaping destinies and related political and economic realities (Leshem and Pinkerton 2016).

The analytical category of the no-man’s-land allows one to shed light on historical and spatial continuities that link early Musrara as an urban frontier to its later reshaping as an entrepreneurial quarter. When the no-man’s-land was dismantled after 19 years, following the Israeli occupation and annexation of eastern Jerusalem in 1967, its spatial consequences, or “thick margins” as Leshem and Pinkerton (2016) figuratively put it, became enmeshed in the neighborhood’s socio-spatial life. It was ingrained in the social marginalization of the Mizrahi immigrants, acted as a catalyst in the Mizrahi struggle for rights in the late 1970s, and metamorphosed into new forms of state abandonment that persisted long after the physical barrier was removed.

The massive waves of Jewish immigration to Israel during the 1950s created a surging demand for housing, and expropriated Palestinian property became a widely available resource for public housing (Elmelech and Lewin-Epstein, 1998; Ziv, 2014). The Mizrahim were settled in Palestinian houses damaged during the war, which were lacking basic infrastructure and the provision of services such as sewage treatment. The new tenants were kept at a remove from ownership rights and, as a result, from urban rights and social inclusion. During the two decades following the war Musrara became a material and symbolic urban frontier: a border that divided the city from enemy lines, and a space of abandonment, poverty and neglect that contributed to stigmatizing its population as backward and unruly.⁷ As Haim Hanegbi writes, the people of Musrara found themselves on the seamline, living “with barbed wire, mine fields, cement barriers, heaps of ruins and piles of trash… if you somehow found yourself there by mistake, incidentally hurled into this penal colony, you would make sure to get out as soon as possible” (2000: 232).

The rapid settlement of immigrants in Palestinian houses effectively ‘dispersed’ the dispossession relations to the individual level (Blomley, 2003), transforming each Jewish resident into a gatekeeper. The new residents prevented displaced persons and refugees from claiming their rights over the land and property simply by exercising their own state-granted occupancy rights. The 1950 Absentee Property Law allowed the state to expropriate Palestinian property and land in western Jerusalem (and other parts of the newly established state) while eliminating the future possibility of refugees to reclaim their ownership and right of return. In parallel, the ownership rights of the Mizrahim who were settled in Palestinian property across Israel were never regulated, making them easy prey for forced eviction with processes of urban development and gentrification (Bigon et al., 2022; Milner, 2020)⁸.

Attempts to evict the residents from the crumbling Palestinian houses in Musrara and solve the problems of poverty and distress gave rise to public-housing projects (“shikunim” in Hebrew), built in the mid-60s on open, unparcelled land. The construction of public housing projects was part of a broader governmental scheme that produced low-quality housing solutions with poor physical infrastructures built hastily during the 1950s and 60s along the armistice line to accommodate newly arrived (mostly Mizrahi) immigrants and create another defense line for the city (Hasson, 2001b). Some of the Mizrahim in Musrara moved from crumbling Palestinian houses to the newly constructed public-housing flats that included functional infrastructures such as electricity, running water and sewage. However, far from solving the problem, the public housing projects perpetuated marginality and came to represent the Mizrahim’s social discrimination and deprivation for generations to come (Hasson, 2001a; Tzfadia, 2006).

After the 1967 war and the removal of the no-man’s-land, the prices of land surged, and massive processes of redevelopment, gentrification and mass eviction began to dramatically change neighborhoods adjacent to it (Gonen, 2002; Hasson, 1993). In Musrara, the harsh living conditions acted as critical catalysts for politicization which manifested with the emergence of the Israeli Black Panthers movement, focused on the social and economic marginalization of the Mizrahi Immigrants. In an interview, Shalom Cohen, an activist in the Black Panthers movement, stated that the Mizrahi activists saw themselves as “a majority living under colonial oppression, but we are not living in a colony but on our own land” (Cohen and Shemesh, 1976).

The dramatic urban transformation that took place after the occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem was shaped by the construction of new neighborhoods, such as Ramat Eshkol (1968), in a “greater” Jerusalem. This led to a rise in land values on the seamline. However, Musrara was not a focal point for development and the residents were left with no response to their demands for equal rights and inclusion, education, and housing, among other claims (Cohen and Shemesh, 1976).

The struggle, which started in Musrara and spread to other Israeli cities, led to a pacifying agreement with the government that regulated ownership rights for Mizrahi residents living in Palestinian houses. The houses were offered to residents at subsidized prices and with easy mortgage installments. This agreement contributed to a dramatic change in the socio-economic status of the neighborhood and its population. Veteran Mizrahi immigrants including the second generation who became owners of property expropriated in 1948 profited from selling, buying, and renting flats. Musrara’s population diversified: middle class residents moved into the neighborhood, bought houses and renovated them. The neighborhood attracted artists, broadcast industry professionals (the Israeli Public Broadcasting Authority was located in the neighborhood), diplomats, and expats. The stigma of a frontier neighborhood shaped by crime and lawlessness began to decline. But this transformation was only partial. Residents who took the earlier offer and moved to public housing were not included in the deal: the shikunim and their surroundings preserved the symbolic and material qualities of an urban frontier in Musrara.

1967–2000s: From acts of displacement to conditions of displaceability

The Israeli Black Panthers turned into a mythical Mizrahi struggle and a heroic success story (Figure 3). Yet, as Shlomo Hasson writes (2001a), the Israeli Black Panthers, and the Tents movements that emerged in Jerusalem during the same years, were coerced by the state, becoming an instrument of socialization and the subjugation of peripheral groups to the status quo of state mechanisms.⁹ From the perspective of a settler-colonial critique, it was successful in that it allowed the gatekeepers in Musrara to take part in the processes of settler accumulation and, to some extent, release the Mizrahim from the burden of being internally colonized as Jewish-Arabs under the Zionist logic. In Musrara this process of coercion and settler accumulation materialized through the granting of ownership rights. However, it had other dimensions that perpetuated the neighborhood’s frontier status through new forms of state control on the one hand, and abandonment on the other.

Figure 3.

Musrara street art “Black Panthers” photo: Hagit Keysar.

The dismantlement of the no-man’s-land opened possibilities for the emergence of social, political and business relationships between residents of the two sides of the divided neighborhood. This led not only to business activities but also to festivities on the former no-man’s-land, famously known as the “joint watermelon stands,” and the cultivation of radical politics (Aharon-Gutman, 2018; Leshem and Pinkerton, 2016). This political horizon of shared Jewish-Arab possibilities worked against the Israeli settler-colonial and ethno-national logic, and was systematically suffocated by the authorities. Therefore, although the no-man’s-land was dismantled, during the 1970s the urban frontier area between East and West Jerusalem was reinforced. Musrara became an urban channel for pedestrian traffic from East Jerusalem to the western center and points of friction with the Palestinian population became a persistent source of anxiety for residents. In the 1980s they demanded the construction of a wall to separate them from their East Jerusalem neighbors. Later on, in the 1990s, the construction of Road 1, a 6-lane urban highway that follows the same route as the no-man’s-land, hardened the division between the two populations with an inner-city frontier (Pullan et al., 2007).

The earlier shift of some families to public-housing projects (shikunim) created a rift between those who stayed in Palestinian property and became owners, and those who left for what seemed at the time to be better living conditions. The majority of residents in the shikunim converted their status from renters to owners during the 70s and 80s by buying flats at subsidized prices from the public companies (“Amidar” and later “Prazot”) that originally built and managed the projects.¹⁰ However, since the shikunim were built on leased land that was never parcellated (unlike the Palestinian houses that were built on parceled land and were registered based on British and Ottoman registration deeds), the tenants were never registered as owners in official land registries.¹¹ These preconditions lead to severe consequences for the so called “owners” as a flat that is not registered in official land registries (Tabu documentation)¹² constitutes risk and uncertainty.¹³

2000s: Under the threat of collapsing infrastructure

Five decades later, the Shikunim were announced by the municipality to be “buildings at risk” due to disintegrating infrastructure that broke down a few times and caused severe damage (Figure 4). Since most of the flats were sold to the tenants, neither the public-housing company nor the state would take responsibility for the damages, and residents were left to deal with crumbling infrastructure by themselves. In one of the two buildings, (hereinafter, 16 Daniel St.), a group of relatively new owners, who had bought flats in the past two decades from the original Mizrahi residents, devised various ideas for dealing with the situation. Their most ambitious attempt, besides regularly organizing their neighbors to come up with some money for urgent repairs, was advancing a renovation and renewal project for the building in the framework of the Israeli National Plan for Earthquake Preparedness (TAMA 38/1). The main obstacle, however, was the status of unparcelled, leased land. The various plans that were devised were repeatedly denied either by contractors or the municipality and the idea was dropped after a decade of laborious work.

Figure 4.

The two Shikunim on Daniel st., and the Canada House Community center (a square building in the middle) beneath the historic houses un Musrara. Screenshot: GIS Jerusalem Municipality.

The residents’ attempts to leverage the Israeli National Plan for Earthquake Preparedness to make their building safe and habitable were systematically rejected through the rigid application of private property principles. As Margalit and Mualam (2020) demonstrate, state incentives for residential upgrades follow a strictly entrepreneurial logic dependent on land values and market actors, while ignoring structural inequalities. This situation exemplifies what Nicholas Blomley (1997: 290) critiques as the neoliberal conception of property as “an individuated relationship between an owner and a thing” rather than “a complex relational network of spatialized power.” The precarious and incomplete land registration in this case reveals how private property regimes enable forms of ongoing structural violence that not only silence protest but prevent it from even being articulated or recognized (Blomley, 2003, 2010).

Issues that concern residents in the neighborhood more broadly tend to adhere to similar patterns of marginalization.¹⁴ Claims of neglect involving sanitation were predominant among residents’ concerns: overflowing garbage bins, clogged sewage channels, and rodent infestations. Furthermore, there were requests for community policing due to security concerns regarding the daytime presence of Palestinians in the neighborhood and their use of playgrounds during evening hours.¹⁵ Overshadowing all other concerns was the issue of a public garden situated adjacent to Canada House. This space, which formerly served as the neighborhood’s green lung, underwent a “public space upgrade” project implemented by public companies functioning as operational arms of the Municipality.¹⁶ The garden’s steep topographical structure required the contractor to add iron fences along the terraces, an outcome difficult for residents to accept and digest. The prevailing perception by residents was of a complete absence of public participation processes; even the few active residents included in limited community engagement sessions testified that the residents’ comprehensive opposition had absolutely no impact on the advancement of the plan (Figure 5).¹⁷

Figure 5.

The Public garden, before and after the renovations (right photo: Alan Paris, Left photo: Hagit Keysar).

Within this setting, tech corporations have established a presence through entrepreneurial initiatives that reimagine Musrara as a “fifth quarter” of technological innovation. During the time this research was conducted, I followed two projects: The Q5—Tech Community Center, a hub for entrepreneurs established by Cisco in partnership with the Municipality on the upper floor of Musrara’s community center, “Canada House.” Another project, nested in the Q5 hub, is the “Musrarathon”—a 24-h hackathon, initiated by Intel’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program and endorsed by the Jerusalem Municipality.¹⁸

The Musrarathon was initiated with the motto: “Collaborative Renewal in the Neighborhood of Musrara, Jerusalem: Community, Technology and Place making.”¹⁹ According to the Intel lead employee, the stated rationale of this public-private partnership was to “harness community strategy to business enterprises, and in the long term opening doors for Intel to develop technological solutions for problems faced by urban communities… creating meaningful change for the community.”²⁰ Against the backdrop of Musrara’s genealogy of displacement, I analyze these corporate-led technological initiatives and their promises of community engagement and impact.

Digital displaceability and the recalibration of settler-colonial frontiers

I might need a request and approval for what I am going to tell you[…]

Our perspective says that the world is going toward a huge change on the technological level. Technology will conquer every territory in the world. Today, people are looking at the world through smart cameras, they learn through “machine learning”, they think through “artificial intelligence” … technology touches every stage in life… in Intel this is our “vision”– to create a “smart, connected, data-centric world”. Which means, a world that is totally “data-centric world”, all of it is “smart”, connected, and data-based[…]

** Translated from the Hebrew. Quotation marks indicate English in the original.

This quote is taken from my interview with Revital Bitan, Intel’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) manager in Israel, conducted during the initial phase of the Musrarathon at the “Canada House” community center.²¹ As noted, Bitan initially expressed uncertainty about participating in an unauthorized interview before ultimately consenting. Throughout our conversation, she frequently alternated between Hebrew and English when describing the transition toward a “data-centric world” built upon “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning,” and other “smart” technologies. Her linguistic code-switching to English when articulating this technological future serves not merely as description but as a reinforcement of tech hegemonic ideologies that have come to “settle” within the neighborhood.

The “Canada House” hosts various activities which include a seniors’ center and the municipal Young Adults’ Centre of the city of Jerusalem.²² The center “serves as the central headquarters for programs and projects to advance the personal, social, communal, and professional goals of Jerusalem’s young adult population.”²³ The Canada House represents a hybrid entity, anomalous within the landscape of Jerusalem’s community administrations. It simultaneously serves multiple functions: advancing an agenda for developing the city center for young residents, providing institutional space for organizations that operated there prior to the center’s establishment (such as “Musrara: the Naggar School of Art and Society”), while dedicating only a portion of its managerial-municipal agenda to addressing community needs—the latter being just one segment of the foundational mission upon which it was established.

The Q5 hub opened in the young adults’ center as part of a series of hubs created in Israel by Cisco, which make up a strategic partnership between Israel’s government and the corporation to accelerate what is described as “the country’s Digital Agenda.”²⁴ It offers a subsidized co-working space for 25 tech entrepreneurs “before or after an accelerator”²⁵ for a monthly fee of 350-450 NIS (New Israeli Shekels) . Q5’s services also include access to technology, such as Cisco’s cloud-based video conferencing system and a Device Library which is based on hardware donated by Intel. The device library lends or offers the use of 3D printers, Intel’s depth and tracking camera (RealSense),²⁶ Arduino hardware, and more tools that are available for hub members only. It also included access to meeting rooms, professional consulting, and special prices for entering closed events.²⁷ A long glass wall separated the tech community activity from the local community which comes to the center regularly. Only members of the hub could enter through the transparent door by scanning an electronic key.

The technologies developed and used in the Musrarathon and Q5 hub were advocated by the companies and other municipal stakeholders as tools for preserving cultural heritage by technological means. The Musrarathon, which was launched in the hub, followed the motto “Musrara Rebels” (in Hebrew: מוסררה בועטת), referring to the Israeli Black Panthers’ rebellious history. Its outspoken goal was to create an interactive storytelling device that would tell the “story of the neighborhood using technological platforms such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) in order to animate its past, present and future.”²⁸ About 30 volunteers participated in the event, including a high percentage of Intel employees, as well as young artists, designers, technologists, and about three veteran residents from the Black Panthers of Musrara.

During the Musrarathon, the working groups developed six distinct prototypes that reinterpreted local history through digital interfaces. These included: virtual reality headsets allowing visitors to experience Musrara from a bird’s eye perspective, incorporating aerial footage and historic photographs documenting the neighborhood during and after the 1967 war; an immersive installation utilizing Intel’s “RealSense” depth and tracking camera technology that digitally placed visitors inside the home of a local Black Panthers leader; and an interactive sculpture activated by a proximity sensor that narrates the story of Musrara’s Black Panthers movement when visitors approach, effectively transforming lived political history into consumable digital content. The chosen project was planned to be further developed, built and implemented by Intel in the upgraded public garden adjacent to the “Canada House,” with infrastructural support by the municipality.

For Intel’s CSR manager the Hackathon was instrumental for advancing the company’s vision. As she explained in interview, the company is heading towards a “smart, connected, data-centric world” for which the Musrarathon is one step forward in developing “kernels for active digital citizenship.” For Cisco, partnering with the Israeli government in building two hubs with cloud-based technologies in eastern and western Jerusalem (with the latter being Musrara’s Q5) is “helping unconnected communities integrate into the digital economy” and “promoting entrepreneurship and digital skills to build inclusive communities.”²⁹ As a node in a nation-wide network supported by Cisco (which was supposed to include the Golan and Negev peripheries), the Q5 hub was dubbed as a way of bridging ethno-national separations and tensions that define the region.

During fieldwork, I conducted interviews with both Bitan and her subordinate Nethanel Broyer, who served as the CSR coordinator for the Jerusalem region. In conversation, I inquired about the conceptual framework behind “greenhouses for active digital citizenship” and their intended objectives. Bitan offered a concise response, merely stating that the initiative aimed to “scale participation.” Broyer positioned the project as the second phase following the Musrarathon, describing it as a “technological lab for active innovation,” though he was unable to provide substantive elaboration. When pressed for details, he redirected my inquiry toward a senior representative from “Praxis,” one of Intel’s third-party contractors responsible for implementing community engagement strategy. Despite an initial encounter during the Musrarathon where this representative expressed willingness to participate in my research, subsequent attempts to establish contact were systematically rebuffed, suggesting potential gatekeeping of information regarding the initiative’s concrete objectives and implementation strategies.

Beyond innovation rhetoric: Digital colonialism in urban contexts

The vision articulated by Bitan regarding the global shift toward digitalization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning finds resonance across the street from Musrara neighborhood at the Jerusalem municipal campus. While this perspective aligns with the municipality’s strategic agenda, the integration of rapidly evolving technological innovations often exceeds the existing professional capacities of the urban administration. This recognition prompted the Jerusalem municipality to establish a specialized office that evaluates the viability of various business partnerships.³⁰ It’s main aim is fostering a technologically advanced urban environment capable of competing with major Israeli metropolitan centers such as Tel Aviv. As articulated by a senior official, their mission centers on cultivating an “ecosystem” that prioritizes creating a “business-friendly city,” ensuring “a supportive climate for businesses and continuous customer management.”³¹

While the municipality is advancing a policy of business-friendly city, the veil of vagueness surrounding the advancement of “active digital citizenship” by Intel illuminates the absence of transparency and accountability that comes with processes of urban privatization. Furthermore, big tech initiatives in Jerusalem, with the support of the municipality, should be situated within the wider context of Israel-Palestine, where Cisco and Intel play central roles in the construction of the Palestinian digital economy (Tawil-Souri and Aouragh, 2014). Under the Israeli regime, the creation of digital infrastructures in the occupied Palestinian territories is expanding the reach of surveillance and settler-colonial control and creating clear civil hierarchies between Jews and Palestinians in both side of the Green Line (Kensicki, 2019). Through the control of infrastructure and expertise, technology companies are maintaining rather than challenging Israeli measures of oppression—territorial sovereignty, economic devastation and unemployment, closures, checkpoints and settlements (Bevilacqua, 2022; Nashif and Fatafta, 2017; Tawil-Souri and Aouragh, 2014). While tech investments in Musrara are framed as urban revitalization and innovation, this dual presence illustrates how technological advancement serves as both a pacifying discourse in marginalized Israeli neighborhoods and an instrument of domination in occupied Palestinian spaces.

As Perng and Maalsen (2020) show, Hackathon events serve to extend the hegemony of the business-led, entrepreneurial developments of cities and subjectivities. In Musrara, its organization has been adapted to fit the settler-colonial topography of exclusion and inclusion in Musrara. The participants and invitees were entrepreneurs and creatives rather than the close-by neighbors. Most of the residents in Daniel 16 at the triangle of the public garden and Beit Canada (the community center and Q5 hub) told me they never heard of the Intel project. Other residents I talked to in the residents meeting said they heard about it for the first time during the meeting. A resident in Daniel 16 said he was invited but decided not to go. From his perspective, the resources invested in this project could have solved the Shikunim’s problems—“Intel used us – for them this is small money, give us the 100K and go back to Kiryat Gat.”³²

In fact, Intel’s Hackathon was particularly targeting veteran Mizrahi residents that took part in the Black Panthers movement for “telling the story of the neighborhood,” as Bitan noted in interview. Preparations toward the hackathon were organized months ahead with a carefully chosen group that was expected to reflect the mythological success of the Israeli Black Panthers movement. This was advanced while explicitly marginalizing other voices and attempts to raise troubling issues that are percolating across the street in the Shikunim.

By propagating a data-centric world that would relieve the neighborhood of “old” problems through digital innovation, the tech initiatives I observed in Musrara actually reinforce and extend the neighborhood’s most fundamental characteristic—its role as a spatio-historical frontier. In a twisted narrative, Intel’s focus on enhancing the myth of the Israeli Black Panthers is turning a blind eye to existing residents and their ordeals. The coopted story of the Mizrahi struggle, that was designed not to raise no contestations, is recruited into recalibrating Musrara as an entrepreneurial quarter, while claiming to advance “community engagement” and “cultural heritage.” The Q5 hub and the Musrarathon demonstrate reiterations of frontier ideology (Smith 2005), as the neighborhood undergoes a process of mythologization and takeover, transforming historical divisions into new forms of exclusion and displacement under the guise of progress and creativity.

These new incarnations of old forms of dominations (e.g., Bitan’s “technology will conquer every territory in the world”) have been variably termed digital colonialism (Coleman, 2018; Kwet, 2019), digital neo-colonialism (Mouton and Burns, 2021) and cyber-colonialism (Tawil-Souri and Aouragh, 2014).³³ This is where the tech hegemony is taking over the digital economy by providing proprietary software, corporate clouds, and centralized Internet services. In so doing, they are extracting big data for profit, control and surveillance, and dominating local industries by disabling small-scale competitors with a powerful network effect.³⁴ All this while concentrating power and resources in the US. While these processes are also understood as “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019), in the global south “digital colonialism” more accurately describes how digital power reinvents contemporary colonial formations and power structures.

Urban space is the locus of digital colonialism. While it is driven by global corporation, key for understanding the digital-colonial relations in the city is the role of governmental and municipal entities. As in the case of the Jerusalem Municipality and its policy of business-friendly city, governance institutions serve as intermediaries between digital technologies, urban space and private business, open the way for new markets and create support structures for their thriving (Mouton and Burns, 2021). Research on the social consequences of urban digitization and datafication have shown that displacement is extended and reshaped within new digital spaces and data regimes. Such processes are pushed forward by discourse of efficiency and speed propagated through data-driven prediction and optimization that may supplant for democratic and just processes (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2017; Halpern et al., 2013; Mattern, 2021). As Hatuka and Zur (2020) show, there is a clear connection between digitization and social gaps, where digital divides may intensify patterns of exclusion and inequality in access to the digital city.³⁵

For marginalized populations living under oppressive regimes, digital technologies are particularly grounded within local and territorial dynamics. Digital deletion and various forms of digital infrastructure destruction or confiscation are effective strategies of repressive governance, which produce a variant of digital displaceability (Morris, 2022; Tawil-Souri and Aouragh, 2014). In a similar way to forced physical displacement (such as eviction, house demolition, and distancing from rights), it is debilitating struggles and makes it difficult to reconstruct “activist spatialities when the authority being protested against governs the digital territory used for protest” (Morris, 2022: 1; Tawil-Souri and Aouragh, 2014).

The urban interventions of Intel and Cisco implement digital technologies and infrastructures as nonthreat to the Israeli settler-colonial regime—In that sense the case of Musrara is inseparable from other initiatives in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. As such, imaginations of “active digital citizenship” and “data centric world” should be understood as prototypes for enhancing colonial power through the domination of digital networks and technologies. While urban (digital or physical) infrastructures tend to sink to the background of everyday life, they play a decisive role in how a phenomenon such as a city and its inhabitants should behave and be known (Bowker and Leigh Star 2000; Mouton and Burns, 2021). Information infrastructures shape a new epistemology and ontology of exclusion, as Alison Powell (2016) notes, through the logics of algorithmic governance. The new dynamics of optimization and prediction has become a framework for citizenship, where kinds of ‘ideal’ or ‘good’ citizenship are structured based on how well people play into processes of optimization by behaving in ways that produce digital activity and data. As Powell writes, “optimization as an action valorizes data creation and increases the significance of intermediaries who can make civic actions optimal—which creates different forms of exclusion than those related to lack of access” (2016: 12).

This takeover of urban space by global corporations, particularly in the global south is turning the city into a testing ground that generates ongoing opportunities for corporate-led urban experimentation with grand scenarios (“technology will conquer…,” “data-centric world…,” “building inclusive communities”). Apparently, Cisco’s digital hubs project was stopped at a certain point without reaching its goals. The Device Library in the hub was already showing signs of obsoleteness and disuse at the time of the Musrarathon. The Q5 hub is currently inactive and the electronic lock at the middle of the long glass wall is released.

The intended outcome of the Musrarathon was to be installed in a public space, with infrastructure and permits provided by the municipality. The final result, however, materialized as an awkward-looking sculpture designed to project a 3D hologram of Shimon Levi, a veteran Black Panther who grew up in the neighborhood during the 1970s and later became a frequent tour guide sharing the history of the Israeli Black Panthers. The hologram, displaying only his head, activates when a proximity sensor detects someone approaching, and “tells the story of the neighborhood” to visitors—effectively eliminating the need to hire Levi himself as a local guide (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Shimon Levi’s hologram, the result of Intel’s Musrarathon (photo: Hagit Keysar).

Shimon Levi’s hologram, which is supposed to appear through a trapeze-shaped dark glass at the top of the sculpture, is not working. As I was told, Levi himself, who coordinates the community center’s facilities in the Canada House, cannot find the remote control and it has been off for quite a while.³⁶ If all this seems banal and insignificant to a passerby, it is at the cost of failing to realize the larger assemblages of development, profit and gain that link to such ordinary and dull scene. As Halpern et al. (2013) note, these complex technological initiatives are experimental grounds for corporations to “perfect the design of data collection and management infrastructures for any network — urban or otherwise” (2013: 290).

Musrara as an urban frontier provides invisible conduits for data-driven enterprises to materialize. It embodies the right amount of abandonment and absence for unaccountable experimentation to take shape uninterrupted. With that, settler-colonial land regimes are warped to fit the logic of the smart city and sustain spatio-historical patterns of displaceability, making it quite difficult to pinpoint the socio-material processes of digital power in complex urban environment. Big tech’s speculative enterprises, as Tironi and Sánchez-Criado note, are conducted without the need “of being actually carried out and implemented in full… opening up multiple spaces for further experimentation” with devices, resources and interventions (2015: 94, also Halpern et al., 2013). Indeed, experimentation embodies trial and error, and prototyping technologies incorporate failure, as Alberto Corsín Jiménez writes, “as a legitimate and very often empirical realization” (2014: 381).

Conclusion: Recalibrating frontiers in digital urban transformation

Digital and data-driven enterprises in the city are, indeed, so resource intensive that they tend to push to the margins “less spectacular, though still substantive and pressing problems facing cities” (Shelton and Lodato, 2019: 36). The Musrara case study demonstrates the historicity and specificities of such processes in the settler-colonial city. It brings forth a condition of “digital displaceability”—a concept that extends Yiftachel’s concept of displaceability and situates it in the realm of urban digital transformation. It describes how digital infrastructures and interventions perpetuate, recalibrate, and intensify existing patterns of marginalization and displacement in urban spaces.

In the context of the settler-colonial city, pushing pressing concerns to the margins is not simply a change of priorities—it rather continues a structural and systemic pattern of eliminating indigenous people and maintaining a “settlerist” and capitalist order. This process exemplifies how digital displaceability operates—creating conditions where technological innovation serves as justification for pushing aside ongoing state-abandonment and dangerous living conditions while establishing new exclusionary boundaries. Digital displaceability reconfigures physical frontiers into digital ones.

It was not coincidental that Musrara was chosen to be Jerusalem’s entrepreneurial quarter—as a historical urban frontier it embodied all the ingredients for a takeover. Among those were the ongoing shirking of state-responsibility to deteriorating public-housing infrastructures, while relinquishing its residents to solve their own problems with market-driven solutions. Together with the unsettled registration of lands all these elements were central for obscuring the structural logic that shapes existing residents’ troubles and “privatizes” their concerns. As long as the devastating situation of the Shikunim was shoved away from view, attention could be directed to the Mizrahi struggle as a mythological story of success—turning it into a digital project of “cultural heritage.” This complex recalibration of the frontier mapped out a new terra-nullius for young, pioneering entrepreneurship, pushing forward and enhancing a structural condition of displaceability in digital terms.

What makes Musrara such a striking exemplar of digital displaceability is a clear historical continuation in regard to the material and semiotic dimensions of an urban frontier. The first phase of the urban frontier was the state-led violent displacement and dispossession of the Arab-Palestinians and their replacement with Jewish immigrants who were forced to live on the fringes of a no man’s land. The Mizrahi populations who immigrated to Israel from Arabic countries, became both colonizers and colonized, embodying the settler-Jew as well as the native-Arab. The second phase of recalibrating the frontier took shape after the dismantlement of the no man’s land in 1967, and the rise of the Israeli Black Panthers movement. The movement gained an important status in the history of the Mizrahim in Israel, but the frontier was preserved with the suffocation of Arab-Jewish relations across the street in east Jerusalem, the cooptation of the Mizrahi struggle, and the neglect of public housing infrastructures.

The digital transformation of cities globally, and the needs of urban governing institutions to keep up with rapid economic growth, pushed for a third phase in recalibrating the frontier. This time, the mythology of the Israeli Black Panthers served in advancing a corporate takeover, with the support of governing institutions, while claiming to advance participation, community engagement and citizenship. However, rebranding Musrara as an entrepreneurial quarter was premised on turning a blind eye to the ongoing state of abandonment, neglect, and dangerous living conditions in the Shikunim. These conditions of a material and semiotic frontier, again, justified the entrance of “innovators” as “pioneers” of digital citizenship, to settle in the community center behind exclusionary glass doors.

Global digital power does not merely operate alongside settler-colonial structures—it is fundamentally embedded within and actively reinforces them. As data-driven corporate practices materialize on the ground, they are strategically facilitated by an ecosystem of private, institutional, and public actors pooling their resources. These digital interventions become deeply interlaced in residents’ lives through the perpetuation of historical patterns of marginalization and displacement. The genealogy of displacement thus becomes essential for critically understanding both the historicity of contemporary corporate interventions and how the seductive, promissory discourse of innovation actively constructs and maintains conditions of digital displaceability. This recalibration of urban frontiers into digital ones represents not simply a technological evolution but rather the latest iteration in a continuing process of settler-colonial domination—one that simultaneously obscures its own violence while advancing under the banner of progress and inclusion.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Hagit Keysar

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF 1622/18).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Hagit Keysar is a researcher and activist, a senior lecturer at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, where she currently heads the Master's program in Visual Communication.

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