Building a 'New Middle East': The State of Israel and an Israeli Planning Team in the Rebuilding of Qazvin, Iran

On the First of September 1962 a 7.1 Richter scale earthquake shuttered Iran's rural province of Qazvin, causing casualties of over 10,000 people. For the Israeli agriculture minister, Moshe Dayan, it could not have come in a worse time. He was supposed to arrive in the middle of September for meetings with his Iranian counterpart and the Shah to discuss Israel's offer to consult for the Shah's "White Revolution". The meeting had to be postponed due to the natural disaster, yet Dayan saw the destruction of hundreds of villages as an opportunity. He believed it was contingent for Israel to become much more involved in Iran's modernization project. In rebuilding the region he presumed Israel could demonstrate its know-how in planning and development, which would lead to stronger relations between the states and many future projects.
Ten days later two Israeli experts, one of them an architect, arrived at Qazvin at the expense of the State of Israel. Soon after, they met with the Iranian minister in charge of the region's reconstruction who approved their plans for rebuilding the villages on spot. The Israeli team started to build villages immediately. This pilot project led to a UN financed plan in which Israel sent a multi-disciplinary team of experts, architects among them, to prepare a comprehensive regional plan for the devastated area. The team modeled the Qazvin plan after a regional development plan recently completed in Israel, in which almost all team members took part.
Based on interviews with team members, state archival materials and contemporary newspapers' articles, this paper explores the project of planning and rebuilding Qazvin rural region by the Israeli team. It reveals that Israeli architects fully assimilated Israel's vision, a vision it shared with the Shah, to create a new and different Middle East – more modern, more Western, less Arab. Although the architects used a high modernist planning method created for Israel’s internal colonization, they did adjust their practice to locale and more importantly to the locals. Nonetheless the State of Israel was not only assisting the Shah's "mission civilicatrice" in Iran's rural region, it was also staking a foothold in Iran through architecture, using the architects as agents.