Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman
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without permits, and populated before and regardless of sewerage systems being installed and connected. This sewage runs from the hills to the valleys, simply following the force of gravity and topography, through and across any of the boundaries that may be put in front of it. The topography of the West Bank guarantees that all raw sewage from hilltop settlements will pass down a valley next to a Palestinian town or village14 and that, mixing with Palestinian sewage, travelling along the same open valleys, it will eventually end up in Israeli territory. Instead of fresh water flowing in the specially conceived water pipes installed under the Wall, Israel absorbs large quantities of raw sewage from all across the West Bank. The closures and barriers of the recent Intifada thus created the very condition against which they sought to fortify. The accumulated dirt within the walled-off Palestinian areas confirmed the hygienic phobia of Zionism. Blurring the literal with the metaphorical, the piles of dirt and sewage affirmed a common national-territorial imagination that sees the presence of Palestinians as a ‘defiled’ substance within the ‘Israeli’ landscape, or as ‘matter out of place,’ to use Mary Douglas’s words, in whose book, Purity and Danger, dirt is defined and understood in terms of transgression of boundaries.15 By inducing dirt and raw sewage, Israel could go on demanding the further application of its hygienic practices of separation and segregation. The legitimacy of these acts is defined as an immediate reaction to its own violation. The result is an ever-radicalizing feedback loop, by which sewage marks the point of collision between the two meanings – a metaphorical political notion concerned with the health of the state, and the literal physical sensation of abjection. The politics of separation has thus accelerated the emergence of a physiognomy of a carved up and compartmentalized landscape of discrete units, pulled apart by sharp contours, and woven together by the flow of sewage. At points where the separation walls are so high that they create the illusion of complete separation, the thin path of foamy dark waters flowing across and under it, remains the last remnant of a shared ecosystem.
Sewage flowing down Shiloh Valley in the West Bank.
Sewage is also used as a tool in the hands of government agents. As part of the state effort to dislocate the Bedouin tribe of Jahalin, camped on the lower slopes of a mountain onto which the settlement-town of Ma’ale Adumim is now expanding, the military civil administration disconnected one of the settlement’s sewage pipes, flooding large areas within and around the Bedouin camp with streams and ponds of polluted matter, forcing it to relocate.16
Only half of Gaza Strip residents are actually connected to the central functioning sewerage system. Raw sewage flows overground the length of some Palestinian refugee camps, pouring out onto the sand dunes that surround them or directly onto Gaza’s beaches. When sewage overflows and ‘private shit’, from under the ground, invades the public realm, it becomes a private hazard but also a political asset.17 In some places, efforts by UN departments to replace existing systems of infrastructure with permanent underground plumbing have been rejected. The raw sewage affirms the refugee camp’s state of temporariness and with it the urgency of claim for return.
For Israel, the same sewage continuously affirms another preconception – the connection between pollution and terror. At the beginning of 2005, Avi Dichter, then head of the GSS – Israel’s General Security Service (Shin Bet) – and now a government minister explained to the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) Security and Foreign Relations Committee: ‘From the level of the satellites’ the rectangular grid of streets in the Gaza refugee camp of Jebalia ‘looks like that of Manhattan, only when you get nearer to it, one notices that the large pool at its centre is not the lake in Central Park, but a huge pool of sewage.’18 Indeed, in the eyes of generations of Israeli security officials, the refugee camps are seen not only as the locus of resistance, but the very condition responsible for its perpetuation. Accordingly, if sewage breeds terrorism, these Palestinian spaces must be disinfected.
Indeed, in his only commitment to release Palestinian money held by Israel to fund Palestinian public services since the outbreak of the Intifada, in 2003 Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allocated funds in order to pre-empt a hygiene crisis, hoping the money would be used to construct a few sewage treatment facilities near Palestinian cities. His actions echo the confession of Jerusalem’s long-standing mayor Teddy Kollek: ‘For Jewish Jerusalem I did something in the past twenty-five years. For East Jerusalem? Zilch! … Yes, we installed a sewage system for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that they would catch it, so we installed sewerage and a water system.’19 He further remembered: ‘When modern sewage and drainage systems were finally installed the unbearable stench that was prevalent in east Jerusalem before the [1967] war was finally eliminated …’20
The Jewish neighbourhood of Shmuel Hanavi, early 1970s. Image courtesy of the archive of the Israeli Project (IP), Zvi Efrat and Zvi Elhyani.
Jerusalem: Petrifying the Holy City
On 27 June 1967, twenty days after the Israeli Army completed the occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem, the unity government of Levi Eshkol annexed almost 70 square kilometres of land and incorporated approximately 69,000 Palestinians within the newly expanded boundaries of the previously western Israeli municipality of Jerusalem.1 The new delimitations were designed by a military committee with the aim of redrawing the state’s 1949 borders, prior to any evacuation of occupied territories that might have been forced on Israel by international agreement. The outline attempted to include empty areas for the city’s expansion and to exclude, as far as it was possible, areas densely populated with Palestinians.2 The new boundaries sought to ‘unite’ within a single metropolitan area the western Israeli city, the Old City, the rest of the previously Jordanian-administered city, 28 Palestinian villages, their fields, orchards, and tracts of desert, into a single ‘holy’, ‘eternal’ and ‘indivisible’ Jewish capital. Years later, Mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek (who served in this post on behalf of the Labor party between 1965 and 1993) would say of the incongruousness captured within these borders: ‘Jerusalem is, most likely, the only contemporary capital that pays drought compensation to farmers in villages within its boundaries …’3
The following year a new urban masterplan for the city outlined in drawings and verbal instructions the guiding principles of development and ‘unification’ of the urban ensemble now called Jerusalem. The ‘first and cardinal principle [of the 1968 masterplan] was to ensure [Jerusalem’s] unification … to build the city in a manner that would prevent the possibility of its being repartitioned’.4 Following this masterplan and a series of subsequent masterplans, amendments and updates during the forty years of Israeli occupation, twelve remote and homogenous Jewish ‘neighbourhoods’ were established in the occupied areas incorporated into the city. They were laid out to complete a belt of built fabric that enveloped and bisected the Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages annexed to the city. Industrial zones were located beyond the new neighbourhoods on the fringes of the municipal area, keeping West Bank Palestinians who provided the city with a cheap and ‘flexible’ labor force (until Palestinian labor was almost completely barred from the beginning of the second Intifada in the autumn of 2000) out of the city itself. An outer, second circle of settlements – termed by Israeli planners the ‘organic’ or ‘second wall’, composed of a string of dormitory suburbs – was established beyond the municipal boundaries, extending the city’s metropolitan reach even further. It is around this ‘second, organic wall’ that the concrete Separation Wall now meanders. An ever-expanding network of roads and infrastructure was constructed to weave together the disparate shards of this dispersed urban geography. ‘Greater Jerusalem’ became thus a sprawling metropolis reaching the outskirts of Ramallah in the north, Bethlehem in