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A Review of Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land:
Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
by Ron Jacobs
 The recent assumption of control in Gaza by Hamas may be more illusory than US media has represented it as. As Eyal Weizman makes clear in is fascinating and detailed book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso 2007), there are innumerable and often invisible security apparatus set up across the region that ensure almost absolute control of the region’s surface, airspace and subterranean acreage by the IDF and other Israeli security forces.
The book, which takes the idea of an architecture of oppression written about by Mike Davis in his book City of Quartz and applies it to the paranoid security regime of Tel Aviv, is a tale of the intentional construction of a suburban security state. It is a state that provides an illusory reality of swimming pools and ranch housing for the occupiers and an increasingly barren, crowded life for the occupied.
Weizman is the Director of the
Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College of the
University of London, so he knows about architecture. His work with
various NGOs and human rights groups in Palestine has given him the
opportunity to observe Israel’s ongoing campaign to disconnect (if not
eradicate) the Palestinians from their land. As his book makes clear,
this campaign is not accidental, nor is it something that only began
because of the armed struggle waged by Palestinians against Tel Aviv’s
occupation. It is, in fact and deed, part and parcel of the Israeli
project from its inception. Furthermore, this campaign has been waged
in the military and architectural sphere in collusion with Israel’s
imperial cohorts — primarily the United States and Britain.
By
banning certain materials and the construction of abodes by certain
elements of the existing population of Palestine, the Israelis have
been able to not only push Palestinians from their ancestral lands,
they have also been able to borrow their aesthetic methods to construct
a Jerusalem and Israel that looks like a television version of the Old
Testament. Meanwhile, in the Occupied Territories, the settlers have
built (with millions of dollars worth of government monies) suburban
subdivisions with walls that block out the villages and camps around
them. At the same time, these suburban settlements serve a role similar
to the US Army forts of the Old West. In other words, they provide
surveillance points and advance groupings of troops to keep the
occupied indigenous people under control.
It is this juncture of
civilian architecture and military strategy that provides some of the
most interesting aspects of Weizman’s work. A reader of US mainstream
newspapers probably assumes that the Jewish settlers that set up their
tents and trailers in the middle of a crossroads used primarily by
Palestinians are acting alone and against the wishes of the Israeli
government and military. Indeed, some folks probably even find these
settlers lives to be slightly romantic, like the settlers of the Native
American territories of North America. Yet, as Weizman, makes clear,
things are not necessarily as they seem. In fact, many of these
settlements are begun where they are precisely because their presence
serves a uniquely military purpose. Which brings us back to those US
Army forts set up across so-called Indian Territory in the American Old
West. These settlements are as much military outposts as they are
living spaces. They are not innocent developments made just for people
who want to live in peace in the land of their religion.
Because
of their situation under occupation, the Palestinians find themselves
in a double bind. In order for them to maintain a hope of return, they
must maintain their refugee status as defined by the United Nations. In
order to do this, they must not build anything that can be considered
permanent. Consequently, there is never a sense of permanence in Gaza
and the West Bank. On the other hand, this temporariness allows Israel
to take continuous “security measures” whose main purpose is to
permanently expand the borders of the Israeli state. This was seen
during the Oslo negotiations of the 1990s when settlers and the
military continued to grab land while the negotiations continued. It is
also present in the never-ending incursions into Gaza and the West Bank
by the Israeli military (despite the supposed withdrawal from Gaza in
2006.) Regarding those incursions, the Israeli Knesset is currently
debating a bill that would declare Gaza a foreign entity. If passed,
this law would allow the Israeli military to do whatever it wants to
Gaza and its inhabitants and not owe them a shekel for reparations.
Under the current status, Tel Aviv is supposed to pay the owners of the
homes they destroy. Of course, this doesn’t happen too often , nor does
Gaza have true independence. Yet, this bill would make everything
Israel does legal (and without any legal repercussions), just like the
expulsions of Jews carried out by the Nazis and the arrests of
undocumented immigrants in the United States.
In what can only
be termed a postmodern attempt to control all dimensions of space, the
Israelis have constructed a multilevel system of roads, checkpoints and
walls in and around the Occupied Territories. These roads are
restricted to Israeli traffic and provide the travelers with a means to
get from one settlement to another without ever having to see a
Palestinian. Meanwhile, the construction of the so-called Apartheid
Wall (by its detractors) often prevents Palestinians from tending their
crops and visiting their family that happen to be on the other side of
the Israeli-constructed barrier. Of course, in order to build the wall,
the Israelis found it necessary to destroy any houses and fields that
lay in the path they had determined for its construction. It is a path,
by the way, that continually shifts according to the needs of the
Israeli military and various commercial enterprises hoping to develop
certain areas not currently on the Israeli side.
In addition to
the Wall, the Palestinians find themselves waiting hours at roving
checkpoints set up by the Israeli military, often for no apparent
reason other than to remind the Palestinians of the Israeli’s control.
Since the Palestinians can not use the Israeli roads, tunnels are dug
under the roads so they can get from one point to another without
setting foot on the road. Tunnels have also been dug by the
Palestinians for the express purpose of getting past Israeli security.
It is these tunnels that the Israelis destroy houses in Gaza to find.
So. like the NLF forces in Vietnam during the US war on their country,
the Palestinians have also turned to a subterranean network to wage
their resistance. This has furthered the perception of a
multidimensional battle–the postmodern conception of space referred to
above.
Regarding postmodernism, Weizman points out that the
Israeli theorists behind much of the recent construction in Israel and
the Territories are students of such postmodern thinkers like Gilles
Deleuze and Guy Debord, whose concepts of non-linearity and critiques
of postcolonialism have been turned on their head by the Israeli
military and used to overcome the asymmetry of the Palestinian
resistance and to reinforce the occupation of Palestinian lands. In
short, the military has taken some of the principles of these social
and cultural critics and reworked them to serve their needs.
Weizman’s
text is a dense, yet readable work. While a familiarity with the
Israeli occupation and its history is useful to one’s understanding of
his claims, it is not essential. Nor is it necessary for the reader to
be well-grounded in architectural theory. Fascinating in its detail and
often alarmingly straightforward in its conclusions, Hollow Land lays
bare the intelligent brutality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine
and its architectural engineering. Furthermore, it reveals the nature
of that occupation — a nature that can best be described by borrowing
the title of a book written by Hannah Arendt about another type of
engineering. What Weizman details within these pages is nothing less
than a modern day example of what Arendt so aptly called “the banality
of evil.”
Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew:A
History of the Weather Underground. His most recent novel Short Order
Frame Up is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at
rjacobs3625@charter.net.
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