Kabri Aqueduct: A Neutralized Monument
Water systems have played an important role in the national identity of Israel since its establishment in 1948. Yet Israeli governments have not treated all systems equally. Freshwater infrastructure, such as the National Water Carrier of Israel, which has been key to anchoring the Jewish-Israeli identity to its territory, is celebrated. The ruins of ancient systems, such as the Herodian Aqueduct of Caesarea Maritima, serve as important sites of tourism. Other systems, though, like the remnants of the Kabri Aqueduct, built in the early nineteenth century by the Ottomans, remain virtually unacknowledged.
To Jewish-Israeli eyes, the majority of the nation’s historic built environment is composed of unquestioned concrete facts. Anonymous, naturalized, and politically neutered, it simply is. Yet since the state’s establishment in 1948, government agencies have worked to actively construct collective national memories. As historian Yael Zerubavel argues, national historic monuments did not “naturally” emerge. They were shaped through musealizing, restoration, reconstruction, and storytelling.
What Israeli governments have excluded is as telling as what they have included. Invisibility, like monumentality, is political. Chief among the elisions has been material evidence of Arab Palestinians before 1948, which is seen as a potential threat to the national narrative. Palestinian architecture was systematically demolished. Until recently, Ottoman architecture and infrastructure have been marginalized, too. The state not only chronically neglected it, but distanced it from its connections to the region’s Palestinian past by labeling it as a relic of a foreign, conquering, imperial force, whose reign in the region was illegitimate.
Figure 1. Old aqueduct which brings water to Akka, north of Akka, unmounted stereograph, c. 1911. Unknown photographer, Underwood & Underwood collection, U.S. Library of Congress.
To Israeli-Jews, Kabri Aqueduct is known as the Aqueduct of Akko: a name that signifies the partial conservation of its physical forms while depleting it of historic meaning. But Palestinian-Israeli residents of the Galilee, the area through which it runs, know it as the Kabri Aqueduct or Channel (Arabic: قناة الكابري [Kanat al-Kabri]), which hints at past connections between the city of Akka and its hinterland.
Despite its age and significance, the ruins of the aqueduct, which ceased to function after 1948, were ignored until recently. And when Israeli authorities reference it (if at all), they call it Ottoman, like other monuments in Akka. In doing so, I argue, it has become neutralized.
A Brief History of Kabri Aqueduct
Kabri Aqueduct was constructed 1814-15 by the Ottoman semi-autonomous governor of Akka, Sulaymān Pasha al-‘Ādil (“the righteous”). From 1775 to 1841 the city of Akka (today commonly called Acre in English and Akko in Hebrew) was the capital of the Ottoman region of Akka Eyalet. Freshwater infrastructure was crucial for sovereignty due to the lack of rainfall in the summer. Controlling and directing water determined the extent to which humans could settle. The aqueduct reflected the importance of the city. It played a central role in shaping local governance and the surrounding villages.
The aqueduct system used the natural height difference between Kabri fountains and Akka to direct water. For most of its route, water was led by a subterranean pipe composed of shard, later replaced by stone components, or by an open channel covered with stone slabs. Towers along the way controlled water pressure, eased maintenance, and facilitated irrigation of adjacent fields. They also provided drinking water. In lower regions, the channel was mounted on top of arched bridges. According to historian Mustafa Abbasi, the abundant water helped develop year-round agriculture. Throughout its 133 years of operation, Ottoman rulers, followed by the Baha’is and local Palestinians, invested in the system’s maintenance and, when necessary, restoration.
Figure 2. Geometric pebble mosaic around the pool in Sulaymān Pasha’s Estate, Akka, 2016. Photograph by Adi Meyerovitch.
Near the village of al-Manshiyya (demolished in 1948), along the route of the aqueduct, about three kilometers northeast of Akka, Sulaymān Pasha built a vast estate (in ruins since 1948) which extended over approximately 208 dunams. He constructed a palace and planted flower gardens and orchard plantations. For water, he built a large and intricately decorated irrigation and swimming pool which was fed by the aqueduct. The pool was surrounded by four-meter-deep walls painted with murals, topped by a beautiful mosaic floor made of black, white, and red pebbles laid in geometric patterns (Figures 2 and 3).
Figure 3. A drinking fountain on the exterior of the pool’s wall in Sulaymān Pasha’s Estate, Akka, 2016. Photograph by Adi Meyerovitch.
Inside Akka, water diverted to underground pipes which led to several dozen fountains (Sebils) from which it was publicly distributed, pouring life into the city. The water provided not only for basic survival but was an important part of the daily Muslim ablution rituals and used at the city’s hammam (baths), which were central to Ottoman social practice.
In 1918, following the end of the First World War and the demise of the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain seized control over Palestine. Under British rule, which was authorized after 1923 by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the policies, urban plans, and built forms of Akka began to shift. The British implemented plans for urban development around the walled city while engaging in the conservation of architectural heritage to encourage tourism.
“Systematic neglect, fragmentation, and decontextualization have made the ruins . . . a neutralized monument.”
During the Mandate years, the water system continued to operate, although the British began to treat it as a historical relic. Archival documents reveal that the British Department of Antiquities (DOA), housed in Jerusalem, refused to fund maintenance, leaving the burden to Akka’s Palestinian municipality. At the same time, the DOA argued for the aqueduct’s importance as a historic monument and demanded approval for any intervention initiated by the municipality—interventions designed to enhance the well-being of the local inhabitants. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War the Haganah deliberately destroyed Kabri Aqueduct during a siege on Akka.
Figure 4. Approximated route of Kabri Aqueduct superimposed on a contemporary map of Akka with annotated water towers, 2016. Diagram by Adi Meyerovitch based on an IAA map.
What Remains
After 1948, the aqueduct was left to deteriorate and eleven of the thirteen Palestinian villages adjacent to it were erased, with the majority of their buildings razed to prevent the return of their owners. The new nation viewed the villages and their residents as direct threats to Jewish-national character.
New Jewish settlements were built on this land. Later, Jewish settlers were surprised to learn that some of these Palestinian refugees were in fact present, living nearby but in a limbo of displacement. As one resident of Kibbutz Lohamē Ha-Geta’ot, erected on the ruins of the village of al-Sumayriyya, recalls: “I was sitting in an abandoned orchard across the road, peeling a mandarin, trying to figure out how to irrigate the trees . . . [when] all of a sudden I noticed a man standing in front of me. ‘My name is Ahmad’ he said, ‘and this is my orchard’. Ahmad explained that he was a former resident and landowner in Sumayriyya before 1948, and he now lived in Akka. He guided me on how to operate an old water pump to water the orchard. Up until that day, I did not know that the orchard had living owners, it was a history lesson.”
Figure 5. The ruins of the village of Al-Sumayriyya, al-Sumayriyya, 1948. Photograph by Joseph Hass, the Joseph Hass Collection, Haifa University Library, Israel.
Material culture, whether orchards, water pumps, or aqueducts, makes powerful historic evidence. As Israeli architect Eyal Weizman argues, architecture holds the potential to resist historic negation. Evidence of the existence, and destruction, of the Palestinian villages of the Western Galilee is rare, and the relics of the aqueduct are material proof of their erasure.
Today, the surviving elements—the towers and arched bridges—penetrate the modern urban fabric of the predominantly Jewish city of Akka, which in turn seems to reject it. Both the orthogonal grid of the British Mandatory city and the suburban Israeli fabric built after 1948 ignore it. While some of these relics are now being conserved as historic monuments, much of the system continues to crumble or is already gone, and Israeli authorities have never acknowledged it as a whole.
Figure 6. Sulaymān Pasha’s palace behind the property fence of Atidot, Akka, 2016. Photograph by Adi Meyerovitch.
Changes in the treatment of the aqueduct reflect the shifting priorities of the state. The recent interest in partial conservation reflects a decrease in national anxieties. But it also mirrors the increasing importance of market forces and tourism. The national-Israeli ideology that sought to neutralize the aqueduct has succumbed to the economic promises of heritage tourism—and, as Israeli Antique Authority (IAA) conservationist Yael Fuhrmann and others note, international pressure to protect monuments that are now understood, like other Ottoman traces, to be of global significance. In 2001, the Old City of Akka was added to UNESCO’s world heritage list following a request filed by the IAA. The aqueduct was mentioned, if briefly, in the citation.
Ever since, Israel has engaged in efforts to document, survey, excavate, and conserve portions of the aqueduct. In 2007, the Ministry of Tourism commissioned the IAA to stabilize a 150-meter section of arches south of Kibbutz Lohamē Ha-Geta’ot. The University of Haifa conducted archeological excavations of an adjacent aqueduct in 2006-2009. In 2008, the Baha'i World Centre, which sits between Akka and Haifa, commissioned the IAA to survey the irrigation pool near Sulaymān Pasha’s palace (although nothing was done). In 2013, the IAA conserved two water towers at risk of collapse in a residential area of Akka. Documentation efforts by the IAA have taken place in 2009, 2011, 2014, and twice in 2010.
Yet these efforts remain fragmented. And in some respects they perpetuate the negation of the aqueduct’s significance. By separating its physicality from its history as an Ottoman system that sustained an entire region, the state continues to deplete the Kabri Aqueduct of meaning.
A Neutralized Monument
Systematic neglect, fragmentation, and decontextualization have made the ruins of the aqueduct what I call a neutralized monument. Symbolically and physically cut, edited, and sculpted to fit a mold, it has become a monument to no one.
Figure 7. Kabri Aqueduct intersecting the road between the institutional walls of Atidot (on the left) and Manof (on the right). Akka, 2016. Photograph by Adi Meyerovitch.
Histories should not be repositories of selective memory. The aqueduct is among the only physical evidence of the vibrancy of life in Akka before the Mandate, and of the Palestinian villages that once surrounded it. Kabri Aqueduct’s partial destruction and neglect parallel the dispossession of the Palestinian population. In their text about the Kafr-Qasim massacre in 1956, Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics write that “historical justice assumes that the act of recognizing and acknowledging a historical truth is itself a form of justice.”[1] Without visibility, there can be no recognition, justice, or forgiveness.
Historic monuments are constructed, embodied memories. What’s left of the defunct aqueduct must be reclaimed and allowed to stand as a memorial to a system that was a source of life for a vibrant urban community and its surrounding plantations and villages.
Author’s note: I would like to thank Sirin Amin Hassan for her help with translation.
Notes
[1] Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics, "Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans: Kufr Qasim, Fact and Echo," in Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 187.
