A Villa In The Jungle* A-state Agent LTD
Where can Brits escape the English weather and retire to a home on the Mediterranean?
With floods in Spain, housing reforms in Greece, and the hike in property prices in Portugal since Harry and Meghan purchased their house there, you might think our options are limited.
Stay calm and look no further!
A new opportunity has come onto the market in a lucrative corner of the Med with deep historical connections to the UK.
Welcome [back] to Gaza Beach.
With our generous help, Israel has cleared the way and begun infrastructure construction at prime real estate locations along the strip. Plans for luxury houses with gardens and sea views have already been drawn up by Hari Zahav Real Estate company, and the governing party, Likud, has already started to market this development. We can picture ourselves hosting luxurious garden parties here. What about you?
On Gaza Beach, real estate gets real, and dreams unfold into amazing stories.
When this opportunity comes, don’t walk away, but run towards your dreams.
This is the place for a thousand beautiful memories, but they all start with a key.
A Villa in the Jungle and on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
Contact us at the Villa In The Jungle* Real A-state agency to get your hands on these rare opportunities.
A Villa in the Jungle & Other Stories A pop-up exhibition at Collective Space shop in Brighton & Hove, UK 56 Church Rd, Brighton and Hove, Hove BN3 2FP January 11th - February 6th 2025 Instagram [from January 10th] https://www.instagram.com/a_villa_in_the_jungle/ From its offices in Brighton & Hove, UK, a Villa in the Jungle real estate Agency sells houses on Gaza’s beach. The adverts for the sale show these houses on pristine dunes facing the sea, just off the bombed and demolished neighbourhoods and refugee camps. You cannot smell the dead bodies that are buried under those ruins. If you finish reading the project description on the office window [or its website] without throwing up, you will be shown an introductory film portraying your new life there. The film collage was created from “testimonies” of settlers in their latest big houses in the Occupied West Bank taken from an Israeli real-estate developer company, Harey Zahav, which specialises in building in the West Bank and, since the invasion of Gaza, has been promoting new settlements there as well. The company's Instagram features cheerful Jewish mothers showing us around their “too big kitchens,” large garages/gaming rooms, and great outdoor spaces for the kids. These economic-colonialist Jews move there because of the rising prices of homes in Israel and the lower prices of houses in the occupied West Bank, partly because of government indirect subsidies, making up about 60% of the Jewish settlers. In comparison, the ideologist settlers account for about 40%. While they are portraying the significant advantages of living there, the film cuts into segments of the lives of Palestinians living outside the settlement walls. Halfway into the film, a Jewish mum takes us around their beautiful big garden, followed by another mum from another place and time, who just wanted a house in the countryside - the later scene is taken from Jonathan Glazer’s “Zone of Interest” and in the background is not the separation wall but Auschwitz’s fences. Like Glazer’s film, which chillingly manifests Hannah Arendt’s “Banality of Evil”, the installation film “Living the Dream” does the same thing by juxtaposing the delightful life of the settlers with the daily atrocities committed against Palestinians. Villa in the Jungle, the installation’s name, is based on depictions of Israel as a beacon of civility, modernity, and westward facing in the backward, if not primitive, Middle East. This colonial, if not White supremacist imagery, has been part of Zionism from its early days to today. The one who popularised this particular expression was Ehud Barak, the former Israel prime minister [1999-2001] from a Central-Left party, but Benjamin Netanyahu and others have used it as well. The fake estate agency's window front is identical to that of a typical real estate agency. The interior design of the shop, where the film is shown on a TV screen, embodies colonial imagery: jungle-themed picnic chairs, an oriental coffee table covered with European lace, and a 50s modernist standing lamp. Exiting the real estate office, visitors can purchase a postcard with their dream home, with proceeds going to the Gaza organisation We Are Not Numbers. The Village In The Jungle—A-state Agents was created by the British / Israeli award-winning artist Gil Mualem-Doron as part of a larger project that will be shown in London in 2025. Mualem-Doron’s work has been shown in places such as Tate Modern, Turner Contemporary, and the South Bank Centre. He has had solo exhibitions at the People’s History Museum, Worthing Museum, P21 Gallery, and Rich Mix in the UK and in museums and galleries in Brazil, Germany, Israel-Palestine, Norway, and South Africa. The exhibition A Villa In The Jungle & Other Stories will include three more parts: A photography exhibition of local pro-Palestinian protests in Brighton & Hove, including photos from Brighton Pride Queer for Palestine intervention and Na’amod actions. Na’amod is a movement of Jews in the UK seeking to end our community’s support for Israel's occupation and apartheid, and to mobilise it in the struggle for freedom, equality and justice for all Palestinians and Israelis: www.Naamod.org.uk The Know Their Names project - about eight thousand ribbons with the names and ages of children who were killed in Gaza since October 7th. The ribbons used in processions and demonstrations in Brighton will be shown as part of a room installation. We Art Not Numbers [WANN] works from the Gazan group formed in 2014. Through powerful storytelling, WANN inspires positive political and social change, advancing the Palestinian quest for self-determination, human rights, justice, and peace. WANN empowers emerging Palestinian writers to bring the people and places behind news statistics to life, humanising the Palestinian experience. WANN provides the world with direct access to Palestinian narratives without restriction and without foreign intermediaries speaking on their behalf. It amplifies the Palestinian perspective that historically has been suppressed in the mainstream media. To learn more about WANN work, please visit: https://wearenotnumbers.org/ The exhibition is produced by Molly Stone and supported by the Na'aamod [Brighton], Brighton Trust and Unison.
* "A Villa in the Jungle": the self proclaimed imagery of Zionism The “villa in the jungle” reflects a core Israeli understanding of its place in the Middle East. At the heart of the idea lies a deep-seated fear about the place of Israel in the Middle East. As Berman Lazar mentioned, “The metaphor recalls a pioneering homesteader who hacks down a small clearing in a dangerous forest, creating a precarious island of order with the trappings of civilisation while threats lurk in the shadows beyond.” This metaphor, though often framed as a security necessity, also reflects a colonial mindset that has shaped Israel’s policies toward Palestinians. The vision of Israel as a "villa in the jungle" can be traced back to early Zionist thinkers like Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky and has been perpetuated by Israeli leaders such as Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu. This metaphor underscores Israel’s settler-colonial practices and its ongoing struggle to balance military power with diplomatic efforts in the context of its occupation of Palestinian territories. Herzl and Jabotinsky: The Founding Vision The roots of the "villa in the jungle" metaphor lie in the early Zionist movement. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, saw the establishment of a Jewish state as a way to insert European civilisation into the Middle East, which he saw as “backward” and “chaotic.”: “We should form there a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia,” he wrote in The Jewish State, “an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a more radical Zionist, further developed this idea. He framed the creation of Israel as the establishment of a “villa in the jungle,” where Jews would build a modern, Western-oriented society in an Arab-majority region. For Jabotinsky, the “jungle” represented the surrounding Arab world, which he saw as hostile and unprepared for modernity (Jabotinsky, 1923). His "Iron Wall" doctrine, which called for strong military defence and the imposition of Jewish control over Palestinian land, laid the foundation for the aggressive security policies later adopted by Israeli leaders like Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu. Ehud Barak: Military Strength and the Iron Wall Ehud Barak, who served as Israel's Prime Minister between 1999 and 2001), was the prominent Israeli figure to popularise the idea of the Villa in the Jungle. In a speech he gave in 1996 as foreign minister to Jewish community leaders in St. Louis, he said, “The dreams and aspirations of many in the Arab world have not changed. We still live in a modern and prosperous villa in the middle of the jungle, a place where different laws prevail. No hope for those who cannot defend themselves and no mercy for the weak.” He repeated this phrase in 2006 when he was defence minister. In a speech at a military base, he said, “We are not living in West Europe nor North America; we are in a tough region, and Israel is indeed a ‘villa in a jungle’ surrounded by adversarial forces”. Haaretz columnist Akiva Eldar highlighted this phrase as implying that “animals in the jungle understand only brute force, and no negotiation can occur with savages. The only way to survive in such a hostile environment is by building fences, insulating at home, and fuck the neighbours. They can kill each other and die of hunger. We ‘sober up’ from Yaser Arafat, Oslo agreement, Camp-David and any peaceful solution”. The idea has inescapable colonialist undertones, and Barak has been criticised for the impolitic description of Israel’s neighbours. In artistic depictions from the colonial period in Africa, the jungle — a loaded concept, not a scientific designation — represents the limits of Europe’s ability to impose order and thus to make sense of their surroundings. The jungle, as with other metaphors used by Zionists to describe Palestine, such as barren land [Shmama], Tabula Rasa, wasteland, and desert, reflects their home culture and its relationship with the colonial Other. This approach, rooted in Jabotinsky’s ideas, emphasised the use of military power to protect Israel and force Arab neighbours to accept its existence. While he pursued some peace initiatives, Barak’s reliance on military force to achieve security mirrored the logic of a “village in the jungle” where Israel must remain strong to survive amidst a hostile environment (Shlaim, 2000). Barak’s security policies, including the construction of the West Bank Wall and the continued expansion of settlements, reinforced Israel’s settler-colonial project and deepened Israel's control over Palestinian territories, preventing the realisation of a Palestinian state. Benjamin Netanyahu: Security and Settlement Expansion During a tour of the Israel-Jordan border in 2016, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “In the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence surrounding it… They’ll say to me, ‘That’s what you want to do, to defend the villa?’ The answer is yes. ‘Will we surround all of Israel with fences and obstacles?’ The answer is yes. In the environment we live in, we must defend ourselves from the predators.” Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister, has embraced the rhetoric of Israel as a “villa” under siege, surrounded by a “jungle” of threats from Palestinian militants, Hezbollah, and Iran. Netanyahu’s policies have prioritised military security and territorial expansion, including the continued construction of settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Much of these settlements consist of villas and farms that maximise the occupied land given only to Jews and which are subsidised to be much more affordable than detached or semi-detached houses in Israel itself. Netanyahu’s approach has solidified Israel’s settler-colonial practices of ethnic cleansing and Apartheid in the West Bank and genocidal tactics in the Gaza Strip since the murderous Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Colonialism and the Legacy of a “Villa in the Jungle” The metaphor of Israel as a "villa in the jungle" embodies the colonial logic that has underpinned Israeli policy since its inception. The early Zionist vision of a Jewish state in Palestine was shaped by European colonial ideals, where settlers sought to impose their civilisation on an indigenous population. But this imposition, from land grabs, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, apartheid policies and recently, what can be considered as genocide - is what the villa’s walls are made of. Considerably, it has been the colonial mindset and practices, if not a deliberate strategy, from which the jungle around that “villa” came into being. As Israel is increasingly isolated internationally, with its extremist, fanatical, messianic, supremacist government, the villa is rapidly transforming into a fortress - having all the hallmarks of Masada, where an extremist Jewish group rebelling against the Romans in the 1st Century, eventually committed mass suicide.