complex and illogical to make any territorial solution in the form of partition possible (many of the settlements were indeed constructed with the aim of creating an ‘irresolvable geography’), while pretending that it is only the Israeli government that has the know-how to resolve the very complexity it created.
One of the most important strategies of obfuscation is terminological. The unique richness of settlement terminology in Hebrew was employed after 1967 in order to blur the border between Israel and the areas it occupied, and functioned as a kind of sophisticated semantic laundering. The controversial Hebrew term hitnahlut – a term with biblical roots describing the dwelling on national patrimony – is generally understood by the Israeli public to refer to those settlements of the national-messianic right, built in Gaza and the West Bank mountain range near Palestinian cities. In the popular grammar of occupation, settlements created by the centre-left Labor governments are referred to and seen more empathically as agrarian Yeshuvim (a generic Hebrew term for Jewish settlements within Israel) of the ‘Kibbutz’ and ‘Moshav’ type, as ‘suburbs’, ‘towns’ or, if within the boundaries of expanded Jerusalem, as ‘neighbourhoods’ (Shhunot). Semantic distinctions are also made between ‘legal’ settlements and ‘illegal’ outposts, although the latter are often the first stage in the development of the former in an enterprise that is illegal in its entirety. For the Israeli public, each of the above terms carries a different moral code. Large suburban settlements such as Ariel, Emanuel, Qiriat Arba and Ma’ale Adumim were officially declared ‘towns’ (Arim) in an exceptional process, long before their population had reached the demographical threshold of 20,000 required within the recognized borders of Israel ‘proper’.15 This was done in an attempt to naturalize these settlements in Israeli discourse, make their existence fact, their geographical location unclear, and keep them away from the negotiation table.16 Indeed, accordingly, most Israelis still see the Jewish neighbourhoods of occupied Jerusalem and the large towns of the West Bank, not as settlements, but as ‘legitimate’ places of residence. Within this book all residential construction beyond the 1949 borders of the Green Line are referred to as ‘settlements’ – which in this context should be understood as ‘colonies’.
In fact, despite the complexity of the legal, territorial and built realities that sustain the occupation, the conflict over Palestine has been a relatively straightforward process of colonization, dispossession, resistance and suppression. The Israeli critical writer Ilan Pappe explains: ‘generations of Israeli and pro-Israeli scholars, very much like their state’s diplomats, have hidden behind the cloak of complexity in order to fend off any criticism of their quite obviously brutal treatment of the Palestinians … [repeating] the Israeli message: This is a complicated issue that would be better left to the Israelis to deal with …’17 The attempt to place issues regarding conflict resolution in the domain of experts, beyond the reach of the general public, has been one of Israel’s most important propaganda techniques. This book asks not only that we examine the complexity of the occupation and the sophisticated brutality of its mechanisms of control, but that we simultaneously see through them.
Laboratory
Although this book is largely framed between 1967 and the present, and primarily within the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it does not seek to claim that the spatial injustices of the conflict started only after the Six Day War of June 1967, and that the extent of the present injustices are confined to the 1967 occupied territories. Nor does it underestimate the century-old process of Zionist colonization, land-grab and dispossession that preceded it. It suggests though that any adequate address of the injustices and suffering of the conflict must begin by ending Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories and the daily suffering inflicted in its name. Focusing on the occupation itself, furthermore, allows Israel’s spatial strategies to be investigated in their most brutal and intense manifestation, as within a ‘laboratory of the extreme’. The technologies of control that enable Israel’s continued colonization of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are located at the end of an evolutionary chain of techniques of colonization, occupation and governance developed throughout the history of Zionist settlement. Furthermore, every change in the geography of the occupation has been undertaken with the techniques and technologies of the time and in exchange with other developments worldwide. The main surge of the colonization of the West Bank in the 1980s coincided with the Reagan-era flight of the American middle classes and their fortification behind protective walls – both formations setting themselves against the poverty and violence they have themselves produced. Perfecting the politics of fear, separation, seclusion and visual control, the settlements, checkpoints, walls and other security measures are also the last gesture in the hardening of enclaves, and the physical and virtual extension of borders in the context of the more recent global ‘war on terror’. The architecture of Israeli occupation could thus be seen as an accelerator and an acceleration of other global political processes, a worst-case scenario of capitalist globalization and its spatial fall-out. The extended significance of this ‘laboratory’ lies in the fact that the techniques of domination, as well as the techniques of resistance to them, have expanded and multiplied across what critical geographer Derek Gregory called the ‘colonial present’,18 and beyond – into the metropolitan centres of global cities.
Indeed, beyond their physical reality, the territories of Israel/Palestine have constituted a schematic description of a conceptual system whose properties have been used to understand other geopolitical problems. The ‘Intifada’ unfolding in Iraq is a part of an imaginary geography that Makram Khoury-Machool called the ‘Palestinization of Iraq’.19 Yet, if the Iraqi resistance is perceived to have been ‘Palestinized’, the American military has been ‘Israelized’. Furthermore, both the American and Israeli militaries have adopted counter-insurgency tactics that increasingly resemble the guerrilla methods of their enemies. When the wall around the American Green Zone in Baghdad looks as if it had been built from left-over components of the West Bank Wall; when ‘temporary closures’ are imposed on entire Iraqi towns and villages and reinforced with earth dykes and barbed wire; when larger regions are carved up by road blocks and checkpoints; when the homes of suspected terrorists are destroyed, and ‘targeted assassinations’ are introduced into a new global militarized geography – it is because the separate conflicts now generally collected under the heading of the ‘war on terror’ are the backdrop to the formation of complex ‘institutional ecologies’ that allow the exchange of technologies, mechanisms, doctrines, and spatial strategies between various militaries and the organizations that they confront, as well as between the civilian and the military domains.
The politics of separation
Each of the spatial technologies and practices to which the following chapters are dedicated is both a system of colonial control and a means of separation. Israeli domination in the West Bank and Gaza always shifted between selective physical presence and absence, the former dealing with Israel’s territorial and the latter with its demographic strategy – aiming to gain land without the people living in it. It thus operated by imposing a complex compartmentalized system of spatial exclusion that at every scale is divided into two. The logic of ‘separation’ (or, to use the more familiar Afrikaans word, ‘apartheid’) between Israelis and Palestinians within the Occupied Territories has been extended, on the larger, national scale, to that of ‘partition’. At times, the politics of separation/partition has been dressed up as a formula for a peaceful settlement, at others as a bureaucratic-territorial arrangement of governance, and most recently as a means of unilaterally imposed domination, oppression and fragmentation of the Palestinian people and their land.
The Oslo Accords of the 1990s left the Israeli military in control of the interstices of an archipelago of about two hundred separate zones of Palestinian restricted autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. The military governed the area by modulating flows of different types between these enclaves (money, waste, water, traffic). During the second Intifada, the Oslo lines of partition further hardened into mechanisms of control. The military checkpoints and the Wall, slipping seamlessly into this geography, have become not only brutal means
