Hollow
Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation,
By Eyal Weizman, the dissident
Israeli architect.
Published by Verso and available
from Bookmarks, the socialist
bookshop, for £19.99. Phone 020 7637 1848 or go to www.bookmarks.uk.com
August 24th 2007
Dissident architect Eyal Weizman interview explains the
mechanics of Israel's occupation of Palestine to Anindya
Bhattacharyya
The setting the occupied West Bank, 1999. A group of
Israeli settlers complain that their mobile phone
reception cuts out on a bend in a road from Jerusalem to
their settlements. The mobile phone company Orange agrees
to put up an antenna on a hill overlooking the bend. The
hill happens to be owned by Palestinian farmers, but
since mobile phone reception is a "security
issue", the mast construction can go ahead without
the farmers' permission.
Other companies agree to supply electricity and water to
the construction site on the hill.
In May 2001 an Israeli security guard moves on to the
site and connects his cabin to the water and electricity
mains. Then his wife and children move in with him.
In March 2002 five more families join him to create the
settler outpost of Migron. The Israeli ministry for
construction and housing builds a nursery, while
donations from abroad build a synagogue.
By mid-2006 Migron is a fully fledged illegal settlement
comprising 60 trailers on a hilltop around the antenna,
overlooking the Palestinian lands below.
This blow-by-blow account of just one example of the
ongoing Israeli colonisation of Palestine appears in the
opening pages of a fascinating new book by Eyal Weizman,
the dissident Israeli architect. Called Hollow Land:
Israel's Architecture of Occupation, it is an
extraordinarily detailed account of exactly how the
occupation works in practice, focusing on the physical
organisation of space and the political dynamics that
shape it. The 300 page book is packed with fascinating
diagrams and photographs that shed a revealing light on
almost every aspect of the occupation.
It explains the way that housing projects in Jerusalem
are clad with a specific kind of stone to give the houses
a "Biblical" look, and the use of one-way
mirrors at border posts in the West Bank. Eyal Weizman
started work on the book in 2001 when he was commissioned
by B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, to
help document how Palestinian rights were being violated
through the planning of Israeli settlements in the West
Bank. This work was later turned into an exhibition and
book called A Civilian Occupation. The Israeli
Association of Architects commissioned the project - only
to prevent the exhibition from being shown and then
destroy 5,000 copies of the book.
Today Eyal Weizman lives and works in London as director
of the Centre for Architectural Research at Goldsmiths
College. His students work on a variety of similar
projects that combine architectural and political
analysis, including studies of Dubai, Beirut and United
Nations protectorates in the former Yugoslavia. I asked
Eyal what had prompted him to write the book - and what
the significance was of its subtitle referring to the
"architecture of occupation".
"As I was working, it seemed to me more and more
that the entire occupation, the entire formation of the
terrain itself, could be thought of in the same way as
you think of the structure of a building," he says.
"This first occurred to me while reading the Oslo
Accords of 1993. The partition of the territory put
forward there is not two dimensional but three
dimensional - it partitions a volume, rather than a land,
giving Palestinians some bits of land while maintaining
the subterranean water reservoirs and airspace for
Israel. "As soon as you imagine geopolitics
operating in a volume like that, architecture comes into
play."
This analogy led him to consider how architectural
analysis could be applied to a military and political
situation: "For instance, what's the most basic
analytic tool you use if you're an architecture student
and you want to understand a building? You draw a
cross-section through it. "In fact, the book Hollow
Land is structured as a cross-section through the entire
Occupied Territories. The first chapter is about the
underground water reservoirs. "Then it looks at the
archaeology, then the valleys, the hills and finally the
airspace. It's a series of episodes that make up a
volume, layer by layer, chapter by chapter. "So you
can think of the entire occupation as if it was some kind
of complex building, such as an airport or a shopping
mall, with security corridors inbound and outbound, and
movement through it."
This focus on the material organisation of Israel's
encroachment into the West Bank might sound rather dry -
but in fact Hollow Land's relentless and patient
accumulation of details throws the human
catastrophe of the occupation into even starker light.
One particularly chilling section of the book discusses
Israeli military techniques for sending assassination
squads into the dense urban sprawl of Palestinian
settlements. Rather than use the alleyways and paths of
the settlement - and risk ambush - the Israeli soldiers
simply blast their way in a straight line through to
their target. They cut holes in the walls of residential
buildings and literally march straight through people's
living rooms. To train the occupation troops the Israelis
have built a fake Palestinian settlement in the Negev
desert - whose buildings are ready equipped with holes
cuts into their walls. The US has now started building
similar fake villages to train its troops for the
occupation of Iraq.
Hollow Land does not just document the shape of the
Israeli occupation - it also looks into the dynamics that
created that shape in the first place. "It's about
the way in which politics, culture and other formative
forces register themselves in the organisational form of
the landscape," says Eyal.
"The idea is that you look at a piece of
architecture, or any piece of design, and study it as a
consequence of conflicts, forces, practices and so on. So
form becomes a kind of diagram of the forces that create
it - process is frozen into form." One example of
this is the Migron settlement described at the beginning
of the book, which arises out of the interplay of a whole
host of actors - Israeli settlers, mobile phone
companies, utility firms, state institutions, the army
and so on. Eyal is keen to stress how "settlements
emerge out of organisational chaos". The very nature
of the occupation is one of "uncoordinated
coordination", where the government allows degrees
of freedom to rough elements and then denies its
involvement. He says this is characterised by
"micro-processes that become wheels in larger
processes".
The wall : A key example of this is the construction of
the "separation wall" in the Occupied
Territories - a huge barrier designed to wall off the
Palestinians into tiny enclaves while annexing vast
portions of the West Bank for Israel. The wall is
fiercely controversial even within Israel, and its
precise route is constantly being contested. As a result
the wall snakes through the West Bank in a curiously
fluid manner, sometimes swinging out east to take in an
illegal Israeli settlement, at other times being pushed
back west again. "The trick is to understand how the
wall is flexible without justifying it as benign - it's a
dangerous flexibility!" says Eyal. "But what
the course of the wall registers the most is opposition
to
it - the constant petitions of Israeli NGOs to the
Israeli high court of justice and the weekly
demonstrations by Israeli human rights groups, for
instance." In a striking analogy, Eyal suggests that
the space of possible routes of the wall maps the
spectrum of official Israeli politics - the doves seeking
a wall to as close to Israel's pre-1967 borders as
possible, the hawks wanting to push the wall out towards
Jordan. The wall's route reflects the dynamic between
these two forces. But for Eyal the problem is that fierce
battles over the precise route of the wall can fail to
challenge the wall's very existence. "These
micro-political acts of resistance are paradoxical
because by pursuing the lesser evil they allow the
greater evil of the wall to exist and function," he
says. "The opposition to the wall becomes part of
what designs it - it becomes complicit in the wall."
Eyal argues that this paradox is part of a larger pattern
whereby the occupation has absorbed and incorporated the
views of the human rights organisations and NGOs at work
in the Occupied Territories. Human rights "In some
cases human rights organisations end up influencing the
design plans for checkpoints," he notes. "They
end up sustaining the occupation. They go to the military
and plead for certain things. Governance always needs
carrots and sticks - it operates not just on the basis of
threats, but by absorbing the opposition into a governing
system." One example of this is the fact that
Palestinians in Gaza are dependent on food aid from
international donors. "If humanitarian organisations
did not feed Palestinians in Gaza there would be a crisis
- some 1.8 million Palestinians live off international
aid," he says. "Consequently a significant part
of Israeli intelligence is to monitor the levels of
hunger in Gaza and keep it just at the level that the
world will tolerate. This level changes - a level of
hunger that would not have been tolerated in the 1990s is
tolerated now."
Eyal is aware that this might sound
"anti-humanitarian" but he insists he is not
suggesting that NGOs should simply down tools and leave
the Palestinians to their fate. Rather it's a matter of a
clear sighted acknowledgement that even the best
intentioned and most benign of humanitarian organisations
operating in the Occupied Territories is to a certain
extent complicit, and, to a certain extent, part of the
problem. Ultimately Eyal says he is pessimistic over the
current prospects for Palestinians. He believes the
madness and terror of the occupation stem out of the
paradoxes of trying to partition the land in the first
place into separate "Israeli" and
"Palestinian" territories. "You have to
understand the idea that guides the Israeli occupation,
which is how to resolve the paradox of maintaining
overall control while ensuring separation," he says.
"It's very different from other kinds of colonial
geography - for instance, the 'bantustans' in apartheid
South Africa were special designated zones, but with
Israel and Palestine you get overlapping claims over the
same sites woven together into mutually exclusive
separate networks that try to never cross." This
pattern of settlements and camps arranged in space,
connected by bridges and tunnels, has a long history.
"This is something you get from the very first
attempt to divide Israel and Palestine," Eyal notes.
"If you look at plans from the 1920s and 1930s
prepared for the League of Nations during the mandate
period by diplomats and mapmakers, you'll see that nobody
could find a line that separates Israel from Palestine -
it was always a matter of building bridges or tunnels
over or under the other's territory to maintain
continuity. "So my critique throughout the book is
against the politics of
partition. I want to show how paradoxical partition is -
and that it just cannot operate physically."
Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation by Eyal
Weizman is
published by Verso and available from Bookmarks, the
socialist
bookshop, for £19.99.
Phone 020 7637 1848 or go to www.bookmarks.uk.com
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