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CounterPunch
February
14, 2003
A Civilian Occupation
The
Politics of Israeli Architecture
By ADAM ENGEL
A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of
Israeli Architecture
Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman
February 12 --March 30, 2003
Storefront for Art and Architecture
97 Kenmare Street, New York, NY 10012
info@storefrontnews.org
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"A Civilian Occupation: The Politics
of Israeli Architecture, was originally commissioned by the Israel
Association of United Architects (IAUA) for the International
Union of Architect's Congress in Berlin in July, 2002. After
the catalog was completed, the IAUA withdrew their support of
the project, cancelled the exhibition and banned the catalog...Bringing
together investigations by Israeli architects, scholars, photographers
and journalists addressing the political role of architecture
and planning in Israel, this project supplements prevalent historical
and political analysis of the conflict with a detailed description
of its physical transformations. Architecture is presented as
a political issue --the material product of politics itself --illustrating
the spatial dimensions of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.."
--"A Civilian Occupation: The politics
of Israeli Architecture," Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman
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The curator of Storefront for Art and
Architecture, Sarah Herder, found out about Segal and Weizman's
work and the wrath it incurred in the mainstream media, and invited
them to exhibit. "We used the natural design of the building
to the exhibit's advantage. Gallery becomes the "found past,"
said Herda. "This exhibit at Storefront is the first public
presentation of this work. Later in the year they'll be exhibiting
in Berlin."
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The topography of the West Bank is easily
identified as three long strips of land running from north to
south. The most eastern strip, and the lowest in elevation, is
the sparsely populated Jordan Valley. To the west rise the high
and steep mountains of Judea and Samaria along whose main ridge
large Palestinian cities are located. Further west are the green
and fertile slopes of Judea and Samaria. Here, moderate topography,
arable soil, an abundance of water and a view overlooking the
coastal plain make this region the West Bank's 'Area of High
Demand.' It is in this strip that most Palestinian villages and
Jewish settlements are located...In a strange and almost perfect
correlation between latitude, political ideology and urban form,
each topographical strip became an arena for different phases
of the settlement project, promoted by politicians with various
agendas, inhabited by settlers of different ideologies in different
settlement typologies. --KW
Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin
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The narrow hallways of the gallery turn
at sharp angles toward the unexpected, like the highways that
cut through the West Bank. I got there early, when few people
had arrived. Soon the place was packed. Another metaphor for
the verticality of space that is the essence of the exhibit,
a space in which maps are to architecture as blueprints of the
gallery would be to the exhibit and its observers. --AE, 2/12/03
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"Since the 1967 war, when Israel
occupied the West Bank and the Gaza strip, a colossal project
of strategic, territorial and architectural planning has lain
at the heart of the Israeli--Palestinian conflict...The landscape
and the built environment became the arena of conflict. Jewish
settlements --state-sponsored islands of 'territorial and personal
democracy', manifestations of the Zionist pioneering ethos --were
placed on hilltops overlooking the dense and rapidly changing
fabric of the Palestinian cities and villages. 'First' and 'Third'
Worlds spread out in a fragmented patchwork: a territorial ecosystem
of externally alienated, internally homogenized enclaves located
next to, within, above or below each other...A new understanding
of territory had to be developed to govern the West Bank. The
Occupied Territories were no longer seen as a two-dimensional
surface, but as a large three dimensional volume, layered with
strategic, religious and political strata...From 1967 to the
present day, Israeli technocrats, ideologues and generals have
been drawing maps of the West Bank. Map-making became a national
obsession. Whatever the nature of Palestinian spatiality, it
was subordinated to Israeli cartography. Whatever was un-named
ceased to exist. Scores of scattered buildings and small villages
disappeared from the map, and were never connected to basic services...It
was only by introducing the vertical dimension, through schemes
of over--and under-passes, that linkage could be achieved between
settlements and Israel, between Gaza and the West Bank. These
solutions did not reject the map as a geopolitical tool. Instead,
they superimposed discontinuous maps over each other...The horizon
became a political boundary, separating the air from the ground.
At the same time, another boundary --dividing the crust of the
ground from the earth under it --has appeared. In the West Bank,
the sub-terrain and the air have come to be seen as separated
from, rather than continuous and organic to, the surface of the
earth." --Eyal Weizman, "The
Politics of Verticality," OpenDemocracy.net
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Slide show on a wall projecting images
of projection: one society literally projecting their architecture
upon another. Artifacts are neat for excavations, but really
it's the buildings that define, for us, cultures of the past.
The ruins in three dimensions. --AE, 2/12/03
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"We work and live in Israel. We
care about architecture and we care about Israel." --Rafi
Segal, 2/12/03
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"Mountains play a special part in
Zionist holiness. The settlers' surge into the folded terrain
of the West Bank and up to its summits combines imperatives of
politics and spirituality. As the political climate in Israel
changed, the reconstruction of Zionist identity began. The settlements
started a long and steady climb to the mountains, where isolated
dormitory communities were scattered on barren hilltops; without
agricultural hinterlands, they cultivated nothing but "holiness"
on their land. The settlements of the mountain strip, built during
the late 1970s and early 1980s, shifted the expansion stimulus
from agricultural pioneering to mysticism and transcendentalism.
These settlements were promoted mainly by Gush Emunim (The Block
of Faith), a national-religious organization that was fusing
"Biblical" messianism, a belief in the "Land of
Israel", with a political thinking that allowed for no territorial
concessions...The climb from the plains to the hills coincided
with the development of a feeling of acting according to a divine
plan. It promised the 'regeneration of the soul' and the achievement
of 'personal and national renewal', imbued in a mystic quality
of the heights." --Eyal Weizman, "The Politics of Verticality,"
OpenDemocracy.net
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Most disturbing about conquest through
architecture is that it's so damn real. Concrete, pardon the
pun. Not myth or religion or literature of other forms of rhetoric.
Can't kill yourself smashing your car into an idea. --AE, 2/12/03
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"Is this like something from Virilio?
The Architecture of War?" --AE, 2/12/03
"This is the architecture of conflict."
--Rafi Segal, 2/12/03
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"Many different types of settlements
perch atop the hills of the West Bank, providing islands of biblical
identity that are also strategic vantage points. High ground
offers three strategic assets: greater tactical strength, self-protection,
and a wider view. This principle is as long as military history
itself. The Crusaders' castles, some built not far from the location
of today's settlements, operated through "the reinforcement
of strength already provided by nature". These series of
mountaintop fortresses were military instruments for the territorial
domination of the Latin kingdom. The Jewish settlements in the
West Bank are not very different. Not only places of residence,
they create a large-scale network of "civilian fortification"
which is part of the army's regional plan of defense, generating
tactical territorial surveillance. A simple act of domesticity,
a single family home shrouded in the cosmetic facade of red tiles
and green lawns, conforms to the aims of territorial control.
But unlike the fortresses and military camps of previous periods,
the settlements are sometimes without fortifications. Up until
recently, only a few settlements agreed to be surrounded by walls
or fences. They argued that they must form a continuity with
the holy landscape; that it is the Palestinians who need to be
fenced in. Rather than the conclusive division between two nations
across a boundary line, the organization of the West Bank's particular
terrain has created multiple separations, provisional boundaries,
which relate to each other through surveillance and control.
This intensification of power could be achieved in this form
only because of the particularity of the terrain. The mountain
settlements are the last gesture in the urbanization of enclaves.
They perfect the politics of separation, seclusion and control,
placing them as the end-condition of contemporary urban and architectural
formations such as 'New Urbanism', suburban enclave neighborhoods
or gated communities. The most ubiquitous of architectural typologies
is exposed as terrifying within the topography of the West Bank."
---Eyal Weizman, "The
Politics of Verticality," OpenDemocracy.net
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"The use of Civilian architects
for military purposes is unethical. When an architect works for
the military, he knows he's designing for military use. When
he thinks he's designing for civilian use, but it is used to
enforce a military agenda, it's wrong." --Rafi Segal, 2/12/03
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Patches of Palestinian populated areas
like cancers on a white wall. Melanoma. Must be burned from the
skin. "Panoptical organization," they call it. In the
long Hall, the "main strip" of the exhibit, are the
bulk of photographs, mostly aerial views, of mountaintop settlements.
Chevrolet Bible. Fast Food frontier. What's going on, what are
they thinking? And the roads cutting the land cutting communities
from other communities, cutting the "First World" from
the "Third." ---AE, 2/12/03
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"I think it's important to have
a young generation involved. It's crucial to Israel and to the
project. The book is all done by Israeli architects, photographers,
designers and writers." --Rafi Segal, 2/12/03
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Settlements dot the mountains adjoined
by roads resembling the "signs" in Peru with their
curves and bends in the middle of nowhere like signs to something
high above and indifferent. --AE, 2/12/03
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A new generation of settlers, "youth
of the hills" rejected suburban culture for frontier life-style
complete with horse-back transportation. Fort Apache. --AE, 2/12/03
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Some Aerial Shots:
Sa'nva, Jenin Region, 2002 Supposed to
be an artists' colony for Russian immigrant artists. Located
between Nablus and Jenin. Deserted with the outbreak of intifada.
Five ultra orthodox families moved in, only one of which remains.
Security requires a platoon or airborne infantry.
Asa 'el, Hebron Region, 2002 four bachelors
and one married couple secluded plan to worship and "live
close to the land." The Eastern Ring Road off Hebron Mountain
blocks Palestinian expansion toward the east.
Derech Ha'avot (Hebrew: the way of pariahs)
outpost Home of Ani Gawitzman.
Ma'ale Edummim, Greater Jerusalem, 2002
Biggest settlement city in West Bank. Established 1977. Population,
25,000. Emerged out of an archeological site planned as permanent
settlement by Thomas Lietersdorf. The design of Ma'ale Edummim
set the standard for building mountain settlements and has won
many design awards in Israel.
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"Do Israelis know about all this?"
--AE, 2/12/03
"Israelis don't know enough, but
that's no excuse. When was the last time we heard that? 'I didn't
know.'" ---Rafi Segal, 2/12/03
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"One of the most crucial issues
in the Israeli--Palestinian conflict takes place below the surface:
about eighty per cent of the Mountain Aquifer, the region's largest
reservoir, is located under the West Bank. Yet this massive resource
supplies approximately forty per cent of Israel's agricultural
waters and almost fifty per cent of its drinking waters. Indeed,
it is the main source for its large coastal urban center. Indeed,
it is the main source for its large coastal urban center...The
latitudinal co-ordinates affirm the nature of the substance.
When sewage overflows and private shit, from under the ground,
invades the public realm of the street, it becomes simultaneously
a private hazard and a public asset --to be used as a tool by
the authorities." --Eyal Weizman, "The
Politics of Verticality," OpenDemocracy.net
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"It's a serious ethical issue:
using civilian architects to promote the political agenda of
State." ---Rafi Segal, 2/12/03
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Nothing "holy" here. No mountain
oases. More like trailer parks, or at best gated -extremely gated
--middle class communities. --AE, 2/12/03
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"In a quest for biblical archaeology,
Israel has attempted to resurrect the subterranean fragments
of ancient civilization to testify for its present-day rights
above ground. The quest for 'Biblical Archaeology' attempts to
match traces of Bronze Age ruins with Biblical narratives. Modern
Israel tried to fashion itself as the successor of ancient Israel,
and to construct a new national identity rooted in the depths
of the ground. These material traces took on immense importance,
as an alibi for the Jewish return. Against the tendency of Biblical
Archaeologists to short-circuit history and celebrate a phantasmagoria
of great Biblical events and destructions, a newly emergent Archaeology,
advocated in both Palestinian and Israeli universities, has started
digging the more recent, upper historical layers of the Arab
and Ottoman periods. These archaeologists have worked to uncover
the evolution of the daily life of the "people without history"
as long-term processes, featuring gradual cultural and social
changes. --Eyal Weizman, "The
Politics of Verticality," OpenDemocracy.net
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Exhibit winding jarring like the settlements
themselves. --AE, 2/12/03
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"From the struggles over Haram al-Sharif
(the Temple Mount) to the historic stone with which all Greater
Jerusalem is now clad, Jerusalem is an intense case study of
the politics of verticality...Charles Warren, a captain in the
Royal Engineers, was in 1876 one of the first archaeologists
to excavate the tunnels and subterranean chambers under the Temple
Mount. He recorded no conclusive ruins of the Temple, but a substance
of completely different nature: 'The passage is four feet wide,
with smooth sides, and the sewage was from five to six feet deep,
so that if we had fallen in there was no chance of our escaping
with our lives. I, however, determined to trace out this passage,
and for this purpose got a few old planks and made a perilous
voyage on the sewage to a distance of 12 feet... Finding the
excessive danger of the planks, I procured three old doors...
The sewage was not water, and not was not mud; it was just in
such a state that a door would not float, but yet if left for
a minute or two would not sink very deep... we laid the first
door on the sewage, then one in front of it, taking care to keep
ourselves each on a door; then taking up the hinder of the three
it was passed to the front, and so we moved on. The sewage in
some places was more liquid than in others, but in every case
it sucked in the doors so that we had much difficulty in getting
the hinder ones up...' If that Indiana Jones-type description
was correct, what Clinton and the negotiating teams hadn't realized
was that the Temple Mount sat atop a network of ancient ducts
and cisterns filled with generations of Jerusalem's sewage. ---Eyal
Weizman, "The Politics of Verticality,"
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New world. Not the old-fashioned two-dimensional
map world, but a world of ancient sewers running under ruins
under "modern" buildings that will one day be ruins
and the jet-fighters overhead wise to it all. --AE, 2/12/03
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"A bewildering network of bypass
roads weave over and under one another, attempting to separate
the Israeli and Palestinian communities. And the future could
be wilder --a 48-kilometre viaduct between Gaza and the West
Bank... The Israeli settlements in the West Bank are dormitory
suburbs, reliant on roads connecting them with the urban centers
of Israel proper. So-called 'bypass' roads were a feature of
the Oslo accord. The Israeli government was allowed (with specially
allocated American money) to construct a network of fast, wide
security roads that bypass Arab towns and connect the settlements
to Israel...The bypass roads, some still in the process of paving,
would become a massive system of twenty-nine highways spanning
four hundred and fifty kilometers. They allow four hundred thousand
Jews living in land occupied in 1967 to have freedom of movement.
About three million Palestinians are left locked into isolated
enclaves...These roads make any attempt to detach the West Bank
from Israel proper almost impossible. They demonstrate the alienation
of the settlers from the surrounding landscape. But if the settlements
themselves are hard to attack, Palestinian militants have identified
the roads as the soft point where settlers can be hurt. Attacking
civilian vehicles and military patrols traveling along the roads,
they attempt to cut these slim economic lifelines." -Eyal
Weizman, "The Politics of Verticality,"
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"Half the settlements are unoccupied."
--Rafi Segal, 2/12/03
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We're not dead yet. We can still observe
such things and...what, talk about them? Read illicit books,
attend illicit exhibits, secretly disagree with the State the
State the State. The state of things the State created and maintains.-AE,
2/12/03
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"What is most important is to see.
Look at the photographs. They tell you all you need to know about
the architecture, the politics of the West Bank." --Rafi
Segal, 2/12/03
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"Airspace is a discrete dimension
absent from political maps. But it is a space of utmost importance
--cluttered with civilian and military airways, allowing a vantage
observational point on the terrain under it, denying that position
to others...Occupation of the skies gives Israel a presence across
the whole spectrum of the electromagnetic field, and enables
total observation. The airspace became primarily a place to 'see'
from, offering the Israeli Air Force an observational vantage
point for policing airwaves alive with electromagnetic signals
--from the visible to the radio and radar frequencies of the
electromagnetic spectrum. ...The West Bank must currently be
the most intensively observed and photographed terrain in the
world. In a 'vacuum-cleaner' approach to intelligence gathering,
sensors aboard unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), aerial reconnaissance
jets, early warning Hawkeye planes, and even an Earth-Observation
Image Satellite, snatch most signals out of the air. Every floor
in every house, every car, every telephone call or radio transmission,
even the smallest event that occurs on the terrain, can thus
be monitored, policed or destroyed from the air...Most missions
are built up in the air, where satellite, reconnaissance plane
and helicopter gunship complete each other's task. As the attack
helicopter is on its way to the suspected area, live intelligence
about the target's location, intentions and destructive potential
is transferred as radio and image data --Eyal Weizman, "The
Politics of Verticality,"
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Who was the asshole who called architecture
"frozen music?" --AE, 2/12/03
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"Most people, even Israelis, think
in terms of horizontal space, grabbing more land. It is far more
complex than that. It is what you see here. These "modern"
settlements with the real architecture of the land, the Palestinian
architecture as background." --Rafi Segal, 2/12/03
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"The Apache gunship, equipped with
a sophisticated electro-optical array of precise target acquisition
technology, traveling fast and low, detects, identifies and acquires
the target, then fires a Hellfire missile into most often a Palestinian's
vehicle. At other times, ultra-violet paint splashed by collaborators
on the roof of a car marks the target for the pilot to destroy....The
aerial policing and execution of Palestinians within their cities
was made possible by the integration of these technological advances.
And the act of their liquidation is now subject only to will....If
the horrific potential of iron bombing already exhausted the
imagination, in this next step of warfare, armies could target
individuals within a battlefield or civilians in an urban warfare.
Summary executions can be carried out after short meetings between
army generals and politicians working their way down 'wanted'
men lists. This kind of aerial warfare is so personal as to set
a new horizon for the horror of war." --Eyal Weizman, "The
Politics of Verticality," OpenDemocracy.net
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There are no Palestinians or Israelis
in the photographs. Who could see them if there were, in these
mostly aerial shots? Just clear focus on ersatz suburban "settlements"
and trailer park communities and in the distance the older stuff,
passe, history's unshaven calluses, where the cancer grows for
a while, until treated --AE, 2/12/03
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"If living a top a mountain brings
you closer to god, what about flying in an airplane, or hanging
out at the observation deck of the Empire State building?"
--AE, 2/12/03
"I don't know." --Rafi Segal,
2/12/03
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"People must know how the politics
work in architecture. We have writers, artists, architects, scholars
working on this project. This is what is happening in the West
Bank." --Rafi Segal, 2/12/03
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If you live in Manhattan, go to the Storefront
for Art and Architecture on 97 Kenmare Street and experience
this exhibit. If you don't live in Manhattan, get yourself there
before March 30th and experience this exhibit. --AE, 2/12/03
Adam Engel
can be reached at asengel@attglobal.net
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