air, green areas, and natural reserves, or because the military needs live fire training areas (always next to Palestinian places), or because there are archaeological sites under these Palestinian areas, or, most effectively, to restrict access to underground water. It is the perceived separation between these layers that makes the politics of vertical apartheid so effective and resilient, and moreover an attractive model for other countries that seek form of population control
Delamination
Even the so-called ‘peace plans’, which still seemed ‘in the cards’ (and the subject of hopes or fears) until several years ago, relied on the overall logic of the politics of vertical separation. Whether in the framework of the one, two, or three state solutions (the latter refers to Gaza and the West Bank as two separate states), every Israeli proposal for a ‘final status arrangement’ demands that Israel retain control of airspace, borders, and subsoil. Even some versions of the ‘single state solution’, now experiencing an improbable revival, not with the domain of the ‘radical left’ but in some mainstream right-wing and settler circles, relies on the deepening of the politics of verticality. In this form, it expresses itself as the confederation of two unequal national systems, each with its own parliament, layered within an overall sovereign, monetary, and spatial envelope dominated by Israel.18
Given the architecture of Israel’s settler colonialism, the decolonization of Palestine will require not ever more ‘creative’ volumetric arrangements and complicated lines of three-dimensional partition, but rather, the fundamental ‘delamination’ of Israel’s vertical apartheid. Political delamination would need to pry apart and flatten the inflated structure – the overlapping jurisdictions, separate legal systems, and modes of topographic and architectural separation – as well as acknowledge a common (not a singular or unified) history that includes the Nakba. The only ethical future is for the 13 million people between the Jordan and the sea to have citizenship, freedom to move and live wherever they want, historical recognition, and modes of restitution. This could be achieved in the context of three, two or one state, certainly not one of an ongoing colonization and occupation.
A good place to start might be the equitable management of the fragile, finite, and common ecology and shared natural resources. The vulnerability of the politics of vertical apartheid lies in its totality and all-encompassing logic, and we might be able to find ways to delink the layers. All empires eventually collapse and few could grasp the internal or external causes that led to their demise, even when the agents of their destruction were right around the corner or already at the threshold of perception.
While Israel, and indeed the world, treats Palestine as a laboratory for military and political control, activists in Palestine continuously innovate new modes of civil society resistance. When agents of separation try to compartmentalize things vertically and horizontally, what is needed is the construction of collectivity between the people coming from the different zones into which Palestine has been fragmented, from the diaspora, from anti-apartheid Israeli activists, and with international solidarity. But in a situation of structural violence and inequality, mere cohabitation can become counterproductive, as it tends to support the status quo. Co-resistance – civil society actions that oppose and seek to terminate Israel’s regime of domination – is small but kicking, and it manifests itself in inclusive, unarmed struggle: civil and human rights work, solidarity campaigns, exposures, and demonstrations. The lines of solidarity that are formed there around these small but committed communities of practice are the nuclei around which a new politics could one day be constructed. From previous anti-colonial struggles we have already learned that the society that will replace the colonial present will be defined by the sort of anti-colonial struggle it conducted.
One of the most effective forms of civil action to have emerged in recent years is articulated in the call by Palestinian civil society for economic and cultural boycott of Israel. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement has already created widening circles of solidarity and is seen by the Israeli government, as noted above, as an existential threat to its economy, international standing, and ongoing domination.19 That a movement calling for boycott is fundamental to engendering solidarity might seem a paradoxical proposition, but this form of activism should not be understood as one of negative agency, of blockage and separation. When it blocks non-democratic platforms, it opens (or should increasingly open) the possibility for new democratic ones to emerge, and it currently enjoys growing support from international Palestinian and Israeli activists. BDS activism also develops a global dimension because it must also oppose the very Western governments that offer unparalleled diplomatic, financial, and military support to Israel and try to criminalize this very act of civil solidarity and support.
Architecture also has a place in the struggle. Throughout the past decade, I have had the opportunity to participate in several initiatives that mobilize architecture as a means of civil co-resistance across the spectrum of actions that the disciple can offer, from analysis to proposition. One such attempt was undertaken with an architectural studio named Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency or DAAR, which I co-founded in Beit Sahour, Palestine together with my friends Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. DAAR is affiliated with dozens of architects in Palestine and internationally and works on architectural propositions for the transformation and reuse of Israel’s colonial infrastructure – settlements and military bases – for aims other than what they were built for: primarily for collective functions and public institutions. It also works on pedagogical initiatives and architectural proposals in refugee camps and in the sites, often marked by no more than a few old stones, that refugees were displaced from.20
Another project is Forensic Architecture. It mobilizes architectural tools and techniques to engage with the production of evidence of state violence in Palestine (and increasingly worldwide), and presents this evidence in political and judicial forums that include international courts and human rights and environmental reports.21 Architectural investigations are urgent and essential given the role architecture plays in Israel’s regime of domination – exposing the nature of the system in terms of both mapping the growth of Jewish settlements and demonstrating the ways in which Palestinian built-up areas have increasingly become the target for destruction.
Out of all those born in this land, Jewish Israelis like me are those most privileged by the regime. Unlike most Palestinians, we are able to travel through Palestine and outside it, and are afforded greater latitude of expression and access to information. Being Israeli in this space, we cannot avoid a degree of collusion, even when we confront the regime, even when we migrate away, as I did. Unable to escape our privileges, we can choose to use them against the regime that granted them to us with the ultimate aim to undo them. In any case, and in whatever form it might take, we engage in civil co-resistance not because we are certain of what might bring down this regime of domination, but because it is the only way to live here and there, in Palestine and the diaspora.
Migron. Milutin Labudovic for Peace Now, 2002.
Introduction: Frontier Architecture
Robinson believed that if he looked at it hard enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future.1
Patrick Keiller (London)
The duality of intelligence and stupidity has been part of the Zionist project from the beginning.2
Mourid Barghouti
‘Nu’a nu’a sof.’3
Yeshayahu Gavish
(‘Move,
