Please send letters for the website, clearly marked FORUM, to Julia Dawson at: julia.dawson@emap.com or The Architectural Review, Greater London House, Hampstead Road, London NW1 7EJ, England. NO HISTORIC OR SOCIAL CONSCIENCE? SIR: There is no doubting the UNESCO World Heritage status of Tel Aviv as a major ‘White City’ – designed by Bauhaus-educated German-Jewish architects. The city was proudly declared by Benny Elon, Israel’s Tourism Minister, ‘one of the greatest symbols and successes of Zionism’. Perhaps he escaped the irony of the Heritage application being made in 2003 against the background of the Israeli army carrying out massive orgies of destruction, in a lethal collective punishment, set off by ‘targeted’ killings and their suicidal revenge attacks, using part-British tanks and Caterpillar bulldozers in historic ‘would-be heritage’ cities in the Occupied West Bank – Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus and Ramallah – affecting centuries-old houses and public buildings and casbahs, gems of Arab, Crusader and colonial architecture, apart from the devastation to people’s lives. This policy of wiping out a people’s history started in 1947-48 with the destruction of over 400 Palestinian villages and even whole beautiful cities like Ramle, Lod, Haifa and Ashkelon, leaving only remnants. Today the obscene Apartheid Wall and settler-only highways are ripping apart the West Bank and Gaza, demolishing Palestinian houses, fields of fruit and olive trees, with total disregard for the people, the precious biblical landscape and environment, ecology and agriculture, while settlements expand exponentially. Do the Israeli architects and planners who design the illegal Western-style settler towns and cities, while Palestinians are squeezed into unsustainable ‘bantustanettes’, have any historic or social consciences? Yours etc Abe Hayeem Edgware, Middlesex, UK