tend to concentrate on the way systems of governance and control are translated into the organization of space, according to underlying principles of rational organization, classification, procedure and rules of administration. What the above scenario demonstrates, however, is that in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the organization of geographical space cannot simply be understood as the preserve of the Israeli government executive power alone, but rather one diffused among a multiplicity of – often non-state – actors. The spatial organization of the Occupied Territories is a reflection not only of an ordered process of planning and implementation, but, and increasingly so, of ‘structured chaos’, in which the – often deliberate – selective absence of government intervention promotes an unregulated process of violent dispossession. The actors operating within this frontier – young settlers, the Israeli military, the cellular network provider and other capitalist corporations, human rights and political activists, armed resistance, humanitarian and legal experts, government ministries, foreign governments, ‘supportive’ communities overseas, state planners, the media, the Israeli High Court of Justice – with the differences and contradictions of their aims, all play their part in the diffused and anarchic, albeit collective authorship of its spaces. Because elastic geographies respond to a multiple and diffused rather than a single source of power, their architecture cannot be understood as the material embodiment of a unified political will or as the product of a single ideology. Rather, the organization of the Occupied Territories should be seen as a kind of ‘political plastic’, or as a diagram of the relation between all the forces that shaped it.11
The architecture of the frontier could not be said to be simply ‘political’ but rather ‘politics in matter’.
This book is an investigation of the transformation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1967. It looks at the ways in which the different forms of Israeli rule inscribed themselves in space, analysing the geographical, territorial, urban and architectural conceptions and the interrelated practices that form and sustain them. In doing so, it provides an image of the very essence of Israeli occupation, its origin, evolution and the various ways by which it functions.
It does so not by offering a comprehensive history of the four decades of Israeli domination, nor by drawing a detailed portrait 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
