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.

Albert Gjedde, The two-state solution is the ultimate apartheid, Politiken 142107

It does not appear that there is a two-state solution in sight for Israel and Palestine.

This is because it has long since gone up for most people in the region, the two-state solution is the ultimate form of apartheid that no one in the two populations really want or can live with. It is politicians who invented the theory of the creation of two or more States to be rid of people across history, economy and culture.

The fiction of a multi-state solution was the South African apartheid controlled problem. Although the white population and especially the Afrikaans-speaking residents originally may have wanted to live in splendid isolation in their own country, without interference from black, brown, yellow or ungodly people, they brought great economic boom of the 60s and 70s to a need for still more labor, as the white in reality could not be without.

A distinction is made here between the fanciful theory of apartheid, segregation, which could never move from theory to practice, and the various references to the theory, which took the form of a notion of diversity. It was intended to justify the many abuses that belief differences between people invited to. The theory of separation can not be used when all stakeholders insist on having access to the entire area, which they believe to be associated with.

The black and colored and Indian people in South Africa did not want to have to settle for the limits and geographical handouts and barren lands in the form of 'homelands' as they would belong according to multiple stateless meaning of fiction about the total separation that had long since changed to a claim diversity. The total separation was possibly the original target of apartheid in South Africa, but no one wanted to practice the target met, and no one was able to implement it, just as is currently the case in Israel-Palestine.

Of course there are major differences between the situation at that time in South Africa and present-day situation in Israel-Palestine, but the similarities are so many that it should be considered whether the South African population's final rejection of the fiction of apartheid in 1994 could be an inspiration to those in power in Israel-Palestine, now that the two-state solution is about to its ultimate defeat.

The close cooperation between Israel and South African Defence Forces in the 70s and 80s were important to the way in which those in power at the time handled the armed conflict with the opponents of the regimes, but it has also been very important to the particular degree of ruthlessness that we looks in the current war in Israel-Palestine.

Israel and South Africa felt increasingly isolated from the international community because of world opinion stamping of the two countries as colonial powers. For Israel was opposed not only by the Palestinians but the entire Arab world.

It recalled the situation in South Africa, and the two countries responded by arming themselves to the teeth. Although Israel officially distanced itself from the theory of apartheid,  threats from the environment inspired to cooperation on nuclear power and drones and other military hardware. The two countries' soldiers moved freely among each other, and a larger number of white South Africans stayed for a long time in Israel, where they contributed to the military and technological developments.

The conflict in South Africa was not religiously inspired to its foundations, but numerically reminded the relative strengths of the 11 different language groups and peoples on the situation in the Middle East in a wider sense. In South Africa discrepancies between the groups had the same key of ethnic, economic and cultural elements that are present in Israel-Palestine today. In South Africa the conflict only ended when Hendrik Verwoerds increasingly clear sighted successors gradually realized that a democratic unitary state solution was the only way, which ultimately would give all parties the prospect of peace and a decent future. How this insight arose, is the topic of Hermann Giliomees informative and immediately captivating book, "The Last African Leaders (The last Boer leaders) from 2012.

The unitary state solution demanded a showdown with the nationalists who used apartheid theory as a tool for nationalistic dominance, which of course was basically a perversion of apartheid. The theory was conceived in worldly ideologues ivory towers, with amazing performances of separate but equal nations in separate countries. Apartheid evolved contrary to a completely different system of guarded labor camps to which the peoples of slave laborers were referred when they are not working for those in power. The U.S. Southern ideal of 'separate but equal' was in practice for 'Separate and Unequal' in South Africa, as it has now also become in Israel-Palestine.

In South Africa, apartheid was introduced as a practice consisting of four points: 1) a ban on sex between whites and non-whites, 2) separate homes, schools and public facilities, 3) separate electoral lists for blacks and Indians in the white areas, and 4) more or less independent dormitories in the form of 'homelands' for blacks when they were not on forced labor for the whites.

The author of the original Apartheid theory was the sociologist and politician Hendrik Verwoerd, who originally were not of South African origin and therefore were not really was a Boer. He was born in Holland by the Dutch missionary parents, and he grew up in South Africa and elsewhere in southern Africa with the convert's unyielding and uncompromising enthusiasm for a theory of apartheid, which was not developed and not needed to be realized, either by himself, his family, the other white or the other peoples of South Africa. When Verwoerd was assassinated in 1966 in circumstances that are still partially unresolved, the attitude even among influential residents was that "the country is not much longer able to keep to Verwoerd" (Schalk Pienaar). By Verwoerds death the nearly 30-year scheme were sown for a unitary state solution, the result we have been able to enjoy for two decades.

The following year Verwoerds death in 1966, I visited for the first time South Africa as a guest of residents, both in the more extreme northeast (then Transvaal) and the more pragmatic southwest (Boland and Kapstad). To my surprise, it was obvious that the two sites had no real desire or opportunity to practice the spirit of the theory of apartheid, however much talk to the contrary. The country's economy had become dependent on non-white workers.

In the two ends of the country families, instead of two versions of the same unitary state solution, practiced a more extreme one in the north and a less obvious in the south, where the so-called Cape nationalists eventually had a strong desire to get rid of Verwoerd, but neither Verwoerds more pragmatic successors or the white population as a whole wanted to give access to any part of South Africa, as in Israel-Palestine today.

In the vast plains of central South Africa, which goes by the name Karoo, there was and is the vast sheep farms and other farms, which was the base for countless families of black farm workers who lived in small cottages around the white owners headquarters. Here fifty families with father, mother and children served a single family of people who would not otherwise have an opportunity for an abundant life if they had to care them selves for their animals and soils. The owners praise apartheid without ever wonder about the paradox of a lifestyle that was based on diversity rather than separation.

The paradox in the state woke the black elite and the group of educated South Africans still called 'colored' that does not have pejorative meaning in South Africa. The black elite and the colored middle class, using all legal and illegal political means, worked against the administrative division of the country and its citizens, while the vast majority of black suffering the daily pursuit of a meaningless apartheid bureaucracy that was the theory leftover, and the effect was only to give the white both in the bag and the sack.

When I came back in 2012 to the rainbow nation, as Desmond Tutu has called South Africa after 1994 the miracle was a fact from Pretoria and Johannesburg over the Knysna to Cape Town and Stellenbosch, despite the many problems that still need to be resolved. It functions as it is also expressed in a postscript by crime writer Deon Meyer, who is the only living Afrikaans-writing author with worldwide distribution.

A major problem that Meyer repeatedly returns to in his books, is the question of identity in a rainbow nation. In many ways, South Africa has a European flavor and a European practice, particularly in the southwestern parts of the country. Embossed and practice comes from the must-dominated apartheid controlled administration; it is not necessarily a mark or a practice that most of South Africa wants to understand and receive, but half of the mixed population in the province of Western Cape speak Afrikaans daily.

In Israel, there is similarly good reasons a European flair, a practice which originated from immigrants from Europe. Not all citizens of an Israeli-Palestinian united state may wish to take this character and this practice. What is the identity of the community after all? What to call the united state? Which language should be spoken? All this gives the reality itself, because people in rainbow nations just do not have choose. In addition to South Africa, there are other successful rainbow nations such as Canada and the U.S., and there would have been many others whose victors after World War I had not been so anxious to break so many successful communities.

It was the black elite in South Africa, which was the main force behind the opposition to apartheid and the peaceful revolution, and it is still the black elite, who have to get used to the responsibility of every citizen in the country. It is also the Israeli and Palestinian elites who must assume responsibility for all citizens of the united state. The responsibility will not be lifted by raising walls and manning checkpoints because those on both sides of the wall are not 'separate but equal'.

On the contrary, it is the aforementioned perversion of a nebulous and meaningless apartheid ideal. Apartheid was an unworkable idea of ​​separation, which in practice was implemented as a misanthropic principle of diversity, which is used to make life miserable for the people who the affluent middle class on one hand still can not do without, and which areas the selfsame affluent middle class still does not want to give up when the toast speeches ended, the sermons are held, and everyday life has arrived.

In South Africa, it was the more pragmatic Cape nationalists, who realized that it did not work in the long run, and they chose to engage with the ANC's Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela who, after generations in exile, isolation and imprisonment nevertheless was able to participate in the unique and charismatic balance between the different ethnic communities and political factions.

The fall of the USSR played a role, because they were supporters of the ANC and the South African Communist Party. It also played a role that whites were significantly minorities and especially the Boers didn’t believe to have any place to go if they were to lose a civil war, but it was vital the good will and the ability to influence their followers, which was characteristic of the individual influential players.

Completely the same conditions do not apply in Israel-Palestine, but the dependence on a pointless and humiliating practice which is equally divided in its conception of apartheid as it was in South Africa, is the same. Everyday requirements for workers who are forced to move in a united state, but without having access to the same state’s amenities, are the same as in South Africa before 1994. This begs the question: Where to find the influential players with the willingness and ability to think about ordinary people's living conditions?

History is full of examples of leaders who in some inscrutable way find a peaceful way out of a hitherto unresolved conflict. This was Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and FW de Klerk, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu in South Africa, and this is perhaps Mohammad Javad Zarif and Hassan Rouhani in Iran, particularly when good will is impervious to ordinary people's difficulties in everyday life, which are characterized by sanctions and lack of daily necessities.

In Israel-Palestine, we need players who will carry out the democratic united state, if sprouts after all, in a small way can be found in the emerging economic and security cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian authorities, who until recently was about to present itself to places like East Jerusalem and Ramallah.

As members of the Semitic language group Israelis and Palestinians have much more in terms of culture and ethnicity than was the case with the ethnic groups in South Africa, and all three major religions are practiced both in Israel and Palestine, despite vociferous claims to the contrary. May the South African example inspire a new miracle in the Middle East.