Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman
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of its present spatiality, but by probing the various structures of territorial occupation. The following chapters form an ‘archival probe’,12 investigating the history and modus operandi of the various spatial mechanisms that have sustained – and continue to sustain – the occupation’s regime and practices of control. This forensic study of the spaces of occupation reveals how overt instruments of control, as well as seemingly mundane structures, are pregnant with intense historical, political meaning. Cladding and roofing details, stone quarries, street and highway illumination schemes, the ambiguous architecture of housing, the form of settlements, the construction of fortifications and means of enclosure, the spatial mechanisms of circulation control and flow management, mapping techniques and methods of observations, legal tactics for land annexation, the physical organization of crisis and disaster zones, highly developed weapons technologies and complex theories of military manoeuvres – all are invariably described as indexes for the political rationalities, institutional conflicts and range of expertise that formed them.
Architecture is employed in this book in two distinct ways. On the one hand, the book deals with the architecture of the structures that sustain the occupation and the complicity of architects in designing them. It seeks to read the politics of Israeli architecture in the way social, economic, national and strategic forces solidify into the organization, form and ornamentation of homes, infrastructure and settlements. On the other hand, architecture is employed as a conceptual way of understanding political issues as constructed realities. As the subtitle of this book – Israel’s Architecture of Occupation – implies, the occupation is seen to have architectural properties, in that its territories are understood as an architectural ‘construction’, which outline the ways in which it is conceived, understood, organized and operated. The architects in this book are therefore military men, militants, politicians, political and other activists. I shall return to this latter meaning in the last section of this introduction.
Elastic geography
As the foundational narrative of Migron demonstrates, the frontiers of the Occupied Territories are not rigid and fixed at all; rather, they are elastic, and in constant transformation. The linear border, a cartographic imaginary inherited from the military and political spatiality of the nation state has splintered into a multitude of temporary, transportable, deployable and removable border-synonyms – ‘separation walls’, ‘barriers’, ‘blockades’, ‘closures’, ‘road blocks’, ‘checkpoints’, ‘sterile areas’, ‘special security zones’, ‘closed military areas’ and ‘killing zones’ – that shrink and expand the territory at will. These borders are dynamic, constantly shifting, ebbing and flowing; they creep along, stealthily surrounding Palestinian villages and roads. They may even errupt into Palestinian living rooms, bursting in through the house walls. The anarchic geography of the frontier is an evolving image of transformation, which is remade and rearranged with every political development or decision. Outposts and settlements might be evacuated and removed, yet new ones are founded and expand. The location of military checkpoints is constantly changing, blocking and modulating Palestinian traffic in ever-differing ways. Mobile military bases create the bridgeheads that maintain the logistics of ever-changing operations. The Israeli military makes incursions into Palestinian towns and refugee camps, occupies them and then withdraws. The Separation Wall, merely one of multiple barriers, is constantly rerouted, its path registering like a seismograph the political and legal battles surrounding it. Where territories appear to be hermetically sealed in by Israeli walls and fences, Palestinian tunnels are dug underneath them. Elastic territories could thus not be understood as benign environments: highly elastic political space is often more dangerous and deadly than a static, rigid one.
The dynamic morphology of the frontier resembles an incessant sea dotted with multiplying archipelagos of externally alienated and internally homogenous ethno-national enclaves – under a blanket of aerial Israeli surveillance. In this unique territorial ecosystem, various other zones – those of political piracy, of ‘humanitarian’ crisis, of barbaric violence, of full citizenship, ‘weak citizenship’, or no citizenship at all – exist adjacent to, within or over each other.
The elastic nature of the frontier does not imply that Israeli trailers, homes, roads or indeed the concrete wall are in themselves soft or yielding but that the continuous spatial reorganization of the political borders they mark out responds to and reflects political and military conflicts. The various inhabitants of this frontier do not operate within the fixed envelopes of space – space is not the background for their actions, an abstract grid on which events take place – but rather the medium that each of their actions seeks to challenge, transform or appropriate. Moreover, in this context the relation of space to action could not be understood as that of a rigid container to ‘soft’ performance. Political action is fully absorbed in the organization, transformation, erasure and subversion of space. Individual actions, geared by the effect of the media, can sometimes be more effective than Israeli government action.13 Although it often appears as if the frontier’s elastic nature is shaped by one side only – following the course of colonialist expansion – the agency of the colonized makes itself manifest in its success in holding steadfastly to its ground in the face of considerable odds, not only through political violence, but in the occasional piece of skilful diplomacy and the mobilization of international opinion. Indeed, the space of the colonizer may as well shrink as frontiers are decolonized.
In the meantime, the erratic and unpredictable nature of the frontier is exploited by the government. Chaos has its peculiar structural advantages. It supports one of Israel’s foremost strategies of obfuscation: the promotion of complexity – geographical, legal or linguistic. Sometimes, following a terminology pioneered by Henry Kissinger, this strategy is openly referred to as ‘constructive blurring’.14 This strategy seeks simultaneously to obfuscate and naturalize the facts of domination. Across the frontiers of the West Bank it is undertaken by simultaneously unleashing processes that would create conditions too complex and illogical to make any territorial solution in the form of partition possible (many of the settlements were indeed constructed with the aim of creating an ‘irresolvable geography’), while pretending that it is only the Israeli government that has the know-how to resolve the very complexity it created.
One of the most important strategies of obfuscation is terminological. The unique richness of settlement terminology in Hebrew was employed after 1967 in order to blur the border between Israel and the areas it occupied, and functioned as a kind of sophisticated semantic laundering. The controversial Hebrew term hitnahlut – a term with biblical roots describing the dwelling on national patrimony – is generally understood by the Israeli public to refer to those settlements of the national-messianic right, built in Gaza and the West Bank mountain range near Palestinian cities. In the popular grammar of occupation, settlements created by the centre-left Labor governments are referred to and seen more empathically as agrarian Yeshuvim (a generic Hebrew term for Jewish settlements within Israel) of the ‘Kibbutz’ and ‘Moshav’ type, as ‘suburbs’, ‘towns’ or, if within the boundaries of expanded Jerusalem, as ‘neighbourhoods’ (Shhunot). Semantic distinctions are also made between ‘legal’ settlements and ‘illegal’ outposts, although the latter are often the first stage in the development of the former in an enterprise that is illegal in its entirety. For the Israeli public, each of the above terms carries a different moral code. Large suburban settlements such as Ariel, Emanuel, Qiriat Arba and Ma’ale Adumim were officially declared ‘towns’ (Arim) in an exceptional process, long before their population had reached the demographical threshold of 20,000 required within the recognized borders of Israel ‘proper’.15 This was done in an attempt to naturalize these settlements in Israeli discourse, make their existence fact, their geographical location unclear, and keep them away from the negotiation table.16 Indeed, accordingly, most Israelis still see the Jewish neighbourhoods of occupied Jerusalem and the large towns of the West Bank, not as settlements, but as ‘legitimate’ places of residence. Within this book all residential construction beyond the 1949 borders of the Green Line are referred to as ‘settlements’ – which in this context should be understood as ‘colonies’.
In fact, despite the complexity of the legal, territorial and built realities that sustain the occupation, the conflict