The outpost of Antenna Hill. Note antenna at centre of the outpost. Milutin Labudovic for Peace Now, 2002.

      An upsurge in the establishment of outposts has always been an indication of what settlers suspected to be ‘impending territorial compromises’. Such activity is intended to sabotage prospects of political progress, and secure as much land as possible for the Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories, in case partial withdrawals are to be carried out. After returning from negotiations with the Palestinian Authority and the Clinton administration at the Wye Plantation in Maryland in October 1998, Ariel Sharon, then Foreign Minister, rushed settlers ‘to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can … because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don’t grab will go to them.’⁶ In recent years, many outposts have been constructed in an attempt to influence the path of Israel’s Separation Wall that, at the time of writing in 2006, is carving a circuitous route through the West Bank, the logic being that by seeding the terrain with ‘anchor points’ in strategic places, state planners would reroute the Wall around them in order to include them on the ‘Israeli’ side. Outposts thus mark some of the most contested frontiers of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Often, rarely beyond their teens, the so-called ‘youth of the hill’ reject their parents’ settler–suburban culture for a sense of the wild frontier, one equally influenced by the myth of rough and rugged Western heroes as with the Israeli myth of the pioneering Zionist settlers of the early twentieth century. The armed outpost settlers often clash with local Palestinian farmers, violently drive them off their fields and steal their produce. In retaliation, armed Palestinian militants often attack outposts. Other outposts are then established as ‘punitive measures’ near locations where settlers have been killed.

      Outposts have thus become the focus for political and diplomatic squabbles. Local and international peace organizations engage in direct actions against outpost expansion. In 2004 several Israeli peace activists managed to steal five trailers from Migron, provocatively placing them in front of the Ministry of Defence building in Tel Aviv, demonstrating that evacuation could be carried out if the will to do it exists.⁷ Human rights lawyers petitioned the Israeli High Court of Justice with a string of legal challenges against the outposts, the most recent of which, against Migron, is still pending.⁸ As international pressure mounts, Israeli governments announce (usually with great fanfare) their decision to enforce Israeli law and evacuate a number of outposts. Occasionally, clashes occur between government and settler forces: thousands of policemen battle with thousands of settlers, who travel for the televised fight from across the frontier. Often, however, a compromise is reached: the trailers are reattached to trucks, and relocated to another Palestinian hilltop.

      Against the geography of stable, static places, and the balance across linear and fixed sovereign borders, frontiers are deep, shifting, fragmented and elastic territories. Temporary lines of engagement, marked by makeshift boundaries, are not limited to the edges of political space but exist throughout its depth. Distinctions between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ cannot be clearly marked. In fact, the straighter, more geometrical and more abstract official colonial borders across the ‘New Worlds’ tended to be, the more the territories of effective control were fragmented and dynamic and thus unchartable by any conventional mapping technique.⁹ The Occupied Palestinian Territories could be seen as such a frontier zone. However, in relation to the dimensions of ancient empires – ‘optimal’, by several accounts, at forty days’ horse travel from one end to the other – within the 5,655 square kilometres of the West Bank, the 2.5 million Palestinians and 500,000 Jewish settlers seem to inhabit the head of a pin. On it, as Sharon Rotbard mentioned, ‘the most explosive ingredients of our time, all modern utopias and all ancient beliefs [are contained] simultaneously and instantaneously, bubbling side by side with no precautions’.¹⁰ These territories have become the battlefield on which various agents of state power and independent actors confront each other, meeting local and international resistance. The mundane elements of planning and architecture have become tactical tools and the means of dispossession. Under Israel’s regime of ‘erratic occupation’, Palestinian life, property and political rights are constantly violated not only by the frequent actions of the Israeli military, but by a process in which their environment is unpredictably and continuously refashioned, tightening around them like a noose.

      Accounts of colonialism tend to concentrate on the way systems of governance and control are translated into the organization of space, according to underlying principles of rational organization, classification, procedure and rules of administration. What the above scenario demonstrates, however, is that in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the organization of geographical space cannot simply be understood as the preserve of the Israeli government executive power alone, but rather one diffused among a multiplicity of – often non-state – actors. The spatial organization of the Occupied Territories is a reflection not only of an ordered process of planning and implementation, but, and increasingly so, of ‘structured chaos’, in which the – often deliberate – selective absence of government intervention promotes an unregulated process of violent dispossession. The actors operating within this frontier – young settlers, the Israeli military, the cellular network provider and other capitalist corporations, human rights and political activists, armed resistance, humanitarian and legal experts, government ministries, foreign governments, ‘supportive’ communities overseas, state planners, the media, the Israeli High Court of Justice – with the differences and contradictions of their aims, all play their part in the diffused and anarchic, albeit collective authorship of its spaces. Because elastic geographies respond to a multiple and diffused rather than a single source of power, their architecture cannot be understood as the material embodiment of a unified political will or as the product of a single ideology. Rather, the organization of the Occupied Territories should be seen as a kind of ‘political plastic’, or as a diagram of the relation between all the forces that shaped it.¹¹

      The architecture of the frontier could not be said to be simply ‘political’ but rather ‘politics in matter’.

      This book is an investigation of the transformation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1967. It looks at the ways in which the different forms of Israeli rule inscribed themselves in space, analysing the geographical, territorial, urban and architectural conceptions and the interrelated practices that form and sustain them. In doing so, it provides an image of the very essence of Israeli occupation, its origin, evolution and the various ways by which it functions.

      It