Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman
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point. In a daring and radical manifestation of the region’s vertical schizophrenia he proposed a stack of horizontal sovereign borders. The first would have passed under the paving stones of the compound. There the border between Arab Al-Quds and Israeli Jerusalem would, at the most contested point on earth, flip from the horizontal to the vertical. Palestinians would gain sovereignty over the platform of the Haram al-Sharif, the mosque of Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. Under the paving of this platform would be a layer of 150 centimeter deep UN zone. This zone will be uninhabited but will function to separate the parties. Israeli sovereignty would comprise the volume below this layer to include the Wailing Wall and the sacred ‘depth of the mount’, where the Temple is presumed to have existed, extending further down to the centre of the earth. Furthermore, the airspace over the site, just like that over the entire heavenly city would remain in Israeli sovereignty. This startling proposal of stacking sovereign volumes in layers, earned it, as Gilead Sher lightheartedly told me, its nickname – the Arkansas ‘Big Mac’. Since Israeli sovereignty would extend over the entire area around the compound, Barak, who claimed, for the purposes of negotiation, that he was only ‘willing to consider the proposal’ but in effect fully embraced it, suggested ‘a bridge or a tunnel, through which whoever wants to pray in Al-Aqsa could access the compound’. This special pedestrian bridge would have connected the Palestinian areas east of the Old City with the religious compound, otherwise isolated in a three-dimensional ‘wrap’ of Israeli sovereignty in all directions. The bridge, on which Palestinians would have received full sovereignty, was to have itself spanned a section of the Mount of Olives and the ancient Jewish cemetery there on which Israeli sovereignty would be internationally recognized. The Palestinians, long suspicious of Israel’s presence under their mosques, wary of Israel’s presence in the airspace over them and unreceptive to the idea of their capital woven together with bridges, flatly rejected the plan. Arafat, somewhat bemused, asked Clinton whether he would have accepted ‘a foreign sovereignty under the paving of Washington DC’. Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian minister and chief negotiator in Camp David dryly summed up Palestinian demands that ‘Haram al-Sharif … must be handed over to the Palestinians – over, under and to the sides, geographically and topographically’.
Israeli Defence Force outpost at the Rafah Salient, circa 1969, IP.
Fortifications: The Architecture of Ariel Sharon
Although the 1949 cease-fire lines became the internationally recognized political borders of Israel, they were seen by many in the Israeli military as indefensible.1 Since neither Israel nor the Arab states which signed the 1949 cease-fire agreements believed that the new lines would mark a permanent international border and since both had territorial ambitions and military plans beyond them, these lines never hardened into physically fortified borders of substance; in some places they were marked by a shallow ditch, in others by a flimsy fence. After the 1967 war, the new cease-fire lines – marked by the Suez Canal, the Jordan River and the Syrian Golan Heights – were perceived as a completion of sorts: the creation of a territorial form that resonated with the phantasmagorical Zionist dream of the ‘complete land of Israel’.2 These new boundaries were also thought to form the strategic enclosure that would buttress the defence of the state. Yet the Occupied Territories, twice the size of pre-war Israel, grew large in the national imagination. A creeping agoraphobia led to frenzied and varied attempts at studying and domesticating these territories from within and efforts to fortify their edges against counter-attack from the outside. The debates around these issues within the Israeli military and government were the first to define the terms, form and the practices of the occupation thereafter. This chapter will follow the debate around the construction (1967–73) and fall (1973) of Israel’s fortification along the Suez Canal. Following military debates and battle analysis, it attempts to trace a process of ‘civilianization’ whereby ideas and organizational systems were transferred from a military to a civilian domain, resulting, in the late 1970s, in the translation of a military occupation into a civilian one.
Shortly after the 1967 war, two Israeli generals of the Labor movement started engaging in attempts to fortify different fronts of the 1967 Occupied Territories. The systems conceived by Yigal Allon (Minister of Agriculture and Director of the government Settlements Committee) and Chief of Staff Chaim Bar Lev, were products of a similar territorial doctrine – one that sought to establish a line of defence along the outermost edge of the territories. The Allon plan, the first draft of which was presented to the government a few weeks after the end of the war, advocated the redrawing of state borders along the main topographical feature of the region, the Great Rift Valley, the deep tectonic crack that formed the eastern edge of the territories occupied by Israel. Allon proposed to annex a strip following the length of the rift, which extended from the Golan Heights in the north, through the Jordan Valley down to the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh. This strip would generate, according to Allon, ‘maximum security and maximum territory for Israel with a minimum number of Arabs’.3 The fact that this strip was sparsely populated was due to the fact that during the war, wanting to secure its new borderlines, the Israeli military evacuated and destroyed the Palestinian villages of the Jordan Valley (except the city of Jericho), the Syrian towns and villages of the Golan Heights and all Egyptian citizens but the Bedouin in the Sinai. On this generally arid and now sparsely populated strip, remote from Israeli population centres, Allon proposed to establish a string of agricultural Kibbutz and Moshav settlements, as well as several paramilitary outposts of the NAHAL Corps – the settlements arm of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).4 Although never officially endorsed by the government, the Allon plan was gradually put into effect during the first decade of the Israeli occupation under Labor administrations. The settlements in the Jordan Valley in the far eastern edge of the West Bank were to fortify this border along the Jordan River. Their establishment was perceived as the regeneration of Labor Zionism and the revival of its agricultural pioneering spirit. Agriculture in this arid landscape, sustained by over-extraction of water from the mountain aquifer, was seen, according to the common Zionist slogan, as an attempt to ‘make the desert bloom’.5 The Jordan Valley was conceived as a hybrid military/civilian defensive zone, split by four parallel roads that strung together military bases and agricultural settlements. In the event of an armoured invasion from the east, the valley’s cultivated fields would be flooded, and the settlements hardened into fortified positions that would allow the military to organize and channel invading forces into designated zones of Israeli fire. Moreover, the inhabitation of the area by a civilian population, rather than military bases, was to demonstrate, according to Allon, Israel’s political resolve to annex this frontier zone.
Construction of the Bar Lev Line, circa 1971. Film stills, IDF film unit, IP.
The Bar Lev Line was the military counterpart of the Allon plan, attempting to achieve with military strongholds what the Allon plan sought to achieve with a combination of civilian and military ones. Fearing international pressure and a possible replay of the 1956 Suez Crisis, when the US administration forced Israel (as well as France and Britain) to retreat from the areas they had occupied in Egypt, Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan did not want the IDF to reach the Suez Canal at all during the 1967 war. The IDF gained the canal regardless during the third day of the war, out of its own tactical inertia. Immediately after the war, Dayan advocated a retreat from the canal. Following the advice of Allon, however, Dayan’s chief political rival, Prime Minister Levy Eshkol, and later Golda Meir, wanted to keep the canal under Israeli control, and close it to all shipping, in order to pressure the Egyptian government into signing a peace treaty on Israel’s terms. Dayan, on the other hand, did not want an agreement at all, and thought that a tactical retreat from the canal would allow Israel to permanently hold