Occupation by Architectture

 The Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has charted urban planning and architectural significance of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. He asks rhetorically whether architecture can be a crime against humanity

The Jewish settlements are typically located on top of a hill like a fortress with vision. They live at the top of the landscape, while Palestinians living in the bottom of the valleys and on the hillsides. Here is example. Palestinian beduin camp below the settlement Maale Adumimin.
Ammar Awad

While the crisis in Gaza is a highly intensive political and military showdown, the slow and gradual Israeli annexation of land in the West Bank has been a reality for decades. And in this process has architecture played a key role in Israel's occupation policy.

Together, it made ​​Gaza, the West Bank and Israel to a surreal 3D landscape of strategic military planning and architectural interventions that are both moving horizontally through the city, and above and below ground level.

The Israeli architect Eyal Weizman published his work in analyzing the Israeli settlements in the West Bank in favor of road-map for peace. He tried to make an objective exploration of the violations of international conventions, he believed took place.

Originally, his work was a winning project selected by the Israeli Architects as the national contribution to Berlin's Architecture Biennale. The winning project turned out to be so controversial that the union withdrew all support and canceled the catalog, which already was printed in 5,000 copies.

But that did not Weizman in publishing it anyway under the title A Civilian Occupation.

Put succinctly, Weizman want to show how architecture and planning can be a very potent tool to violate human rights.


Architecture as a military strategy

 
If architecture and planning perceived as neutral, it becomes an excuse to exercise territorial power. With Weizmans mappings loses architecture finally his innocence as a discipline. You throw like Weizman a critical look at the Israeli architecture in the occupied territories adds new - spatial - dimensions to the understanding of the conflict.

Settlements’ gradual transformation of the landscape in the West Bank expresses in a political brawl and fault lines that epitomizes the protracted conflict. They express the territorial conflict ultimate goal: the intake and homely release of land with historical and religious significance for both parties.

The Israeli settlements are an extensive network of observation posts in the form of settlements on the hill, which monitors the Palestinian agricultural land and infrastructure. The colonization is practically vertical.

Architecture and planning are Weizmans interpretation thus a military strategic tool. Open nature of the conflict - with endless negotiations - has created space for a parallel development, where both parties are trying to assert itself and increase its presence outside the official negotiation room.

The controversial Weizmans work is not just criticism of its settlement policy. It is he not alone. Both internally in Israel and from Israel's allies in the United States and the EU are vociferous in their criticism of Israeli settlement policies from many different opposition groups.


The structure will have explosive

 
The controversial Weizmans controversy is the exposure of the scheme, the settlement policy occurs. His thorough documentation of the radical changes in the landscape that is the consequence of dispersed urbanization and gradually fluid boundaries between Israeli and Palestinian territory and creation of infrastructure, such as the security barrier that cuts through the landscape.

The settlements are typically located on top of a hill or mountain. The Israeli settlements live and the top of the landscape while living Palestinians in the bottom of the valleys and on the hillsides. Settlements are often interconnected by roads in the form of bridges exclusively for Jews. They rise above the road that runs in the valleys. The buildings are organized in a spiral around the mountain top with the public functions in the center. The buildings form united front against the surrounding landscape, so each house almost works as a watch tower, which can survey the surrounding landscape.

The buildings are typically positioned so that they can monitor the important trade routes and roads for Palestinians. Settlements establish a unique spatial hierarchy and control of resources and limiting Palestinian movement.

Architecture is in this perspective is anything but innocent and edifying. It is a direct way to maintain a visual and spatial order as part of a political conflict over territory and security.

In the book Hollow Land Weizman gives a detailed description of how the Israeli government is trying to circumvent the obligations that came after the signing of the first Oslo agreement in 1993, the politically tense situation meant that the agreement under Weizman made ​​it hard for the Jewish settlers to obtain official permission from the Israeli government to establish new settlements.

It was still in the government's interest that the settlers continued their work, and therefore they were new roads in the gradual annexation of the West Bank.

Example, Weizman mention is from 1999, when a group of Jewish settlers complained about poor mobile connection on Road 60, which goes from Jerusalem to the northern West Bank settlements.


There was a mobile telephone mast ...
Telecom company Orange agreed to erect a cell tower on a nearby hilltop that the Israelis had been named Migron after a biblical town, one suspect is buried in the ground at that particular point. Previous attempts to occupy the terrain was failed and the area is now cultivated with olive and fig trees of Palestinian farmers from the village of Ein Yabrud.

Since the Israeli military sees the construction of a cell tower as a security issue, they believe to have the right to build it without the permission of the landowners.

As part of the creation of mobile mast was electricity and water supply in Migron and a private security guard hired to guard the site and subsequent mast.

Security protection switch families moved a year later to Migron - and slowly grew a small town up, switched on the electricity and water supply network, the military helped to secure. Not long after built child care centers and a synagogue.

For Weizman is a clear example of how administrative and political-strategic approaches pushes the settlers' territorialisation through and under the guise of planning and legislation. Israel intake of landscape and sophisticated ways to exercise control, and their way of disciplining Palestinian actions through the settlements' potential monitoring is done with reference to a group of French philosophers, as we include the most progressive voices in the social critique of civilization, power and oppression etc., including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

With the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Deleuze in his hand performs the Israeli security forces military operations in the West Bank that has been the public to open their eyes. There is a striking overlap between the texts studied in all sorts of schools of architecture and the texts used at military academies.

Military Academy The studies in French deconstruction have led to widespread use of sophisticated philosophical concepts of space. The power is not only power in the traditional sense, visible and repressive. It finds other ways to dominate and occupy a territory.

Army sets the standard

 
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is the organization that devises and implements the difficult military operations. In the article "Art of War" shows Weizman is considerable overlap between the philosophical texts taught in military academies and schools of architecture. The Israeli defense, according to Weizman strongly influenced by concomitant philosophy. He cites a general in the Israeli security forces Aviv Kokhavi, as saying that the attack on Nablus in 2002, about 60 miles north of Jerusalem, was inverse geometry (reverse geometry - explanation follows below, ed.). Kokhavi, who has a degree in philosophy from the Hebrew University, explains the attack in a philosophical term which refers to "a reorganization of the urban syntax or landscape through a series of micro-tactical actions'.

Weizman demonstrates how the military has cynically taken over the language and - to some extent - thinking from prominent philosophers Gilles Deleuze who, Félix Guattari, Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault.

Especially the philosophical duo Deleuze and Guattari's work is central to the Israeli army's articulation of the conflict. Central and difficult passages and concepts of the two thinkers can be freely used to analyze and understand the complex spatial and political constraints.

An example is Deleuze and Guattari's concept of war machines. War machines are characterized by diffuse organizations made up of small groups that can be split or joined as appropriate. In Deleuze and Guattari is a key concept in the critical creative thinking, and not a deliberate instrument of oppression.

Postmodern War

Deleuze and Guattari's concepts permits according to Weizman military personnel to explain and understand the paradigms of the traditional trades for, and get a head start and military ascendancy over the enemy. It enables them to simply act in ways that they otherwise could not.

The security forces are using the term 'to smooth out space', which is borrowed from Deleuze.

They use the term when referring to a military operation in an area of the West Bank, as if there were no boundaries or barriers. The Palestinian territories are not 'smooth'. They are the opposite: It is filled with fences, barbed wire, thick eight-meter high walls, ditches, roadblocks divides the space into many small units. The Israeli security forces 'use of the concept of the smooth space led to the perceived urban warfare as a spatial problem that could be solved by "travel through walls'. A solution that connects theory and practice, and in all its brutal simplicity assume that Israel's security forces completely ignores the traditional infrastructure such as roads and open spaces.

Rather than blow up the way from the house through the walls, through the living room, bedrooms, children's rooms, kitchens. As a worm eats its way through the city and thus do not give the Palestinians any benefit from their attempts to contain and control the urban space.

Welcome to the post-modern form of warfare in which the spatial dominance in the form of architecture, infrastructure and urban planning is leveraging an agenda with a clear political strategic aim.