In the fall of 2001, when the world was still rubbing its eyes in disbelief at the disastrous consequences of unresolved conflicts in the Arab world, Silvio Berlusconi made a suggestion that caused a sensation. The Italian premier proclaimed that he would like to send out an army to guard the border between Israel and Palestine. This offer, which the cavaliere wisely chose not to repeat, was widely regarded as just another diversionary tactic, designed to win over both his countrymen as well as Muslims both at home and abroad. It was a generous gesture that didn\'t cost him anything and gambled on people\'s ignorance of the actual situation.

In reality, of course, the border between Israel and Palestine is far too complex for a handful of Italian soldiers to stand watch over. Irreconcilable territorial claims on each side, often backed by intractable, mythologized attempts at legitimization, have to be weighed carefully if any kind of settlement is ever to be reached. Questions also arise concerning the use of the terrain and of the existing infrastructure. On closer observation, one notices that even the handling of information about the border is subject to politics. Israeli politics, that is, for only Israel has the access capabilities enabling it to unilaterally manipulate this »border data«.

To mark the conclusion of his directorship at the Stuttgart Künstlerhaus, Fareed Armaly - who showed his own maps of the infrastructure of the Palestinian territories in his documenta installation »From/To« - invited Israeli architect Rafi Segal to report on a project dealing with the same region and the same border, but from the Israeli side. Together with his partner Eyal Weizman, Segal spent eleven months working out a documentation of the Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Their work went on to win the competition for the Best Israeli Contribution at the UIA World Congress of Architecture at the end of July in Berlin. At the last minute, however, the Israel Association of United Architects (IAUA) got cold feet and retracted the project.

These events caused quite a stir in Israel - while in Germany, they went virtually unnoticed. The IAUA confiscated the five thousand copies of the catalogue that had already been printed and refused any further distribution – at least under the seal of the IAUA. The daily paper »Ha\'aretz« spoke of an outright case of political censorship. It looked for a while as though Segal and Weizman would even be banned from the architects\' association. However, while a three-quarters majority of the members had endorsed the withdrawal of the project, some colleagues have now taken up a more protective stance on behalf of the two controversial architects. A new edition of the catalogue is soon to be published in English – without the IAUA. It will carry the telling title »A Civilian Occupation«.

Rafi Segal began his talk in Stuttgart by describing the exhibition product for the UIA Congress. Two cubic rooms formed the basis of the plan. One, white and open and dubbed »Laboratory«, would present the architects\' blueprints: in theory, on paper and on screen. The other, black and closed, the »Black Box«, would show the impact of the blueprints on the real-life situation. This latter would include photos of the settlements as well as aerial views that Segal and Weizman had obtained from the Israeli human rights organization B\'Tselem, together with an exceptionally detailed map of the West Bank ¹.

The catalogue presents 96 pages of the most in-depth coverage to date of the history, form and function of the settlements, going back to the first defended agricultural outposts in the Jordan Valley in the decade following the Six-Day War. By contrast with these first outposts, the later settlements are straightforward dormitory towns without walls or towers. They are always situated on hillsides or along ridges and are connected with the Israeli coastal plain by means of their own closely guarded road network. While the fundamentalist Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) built the first settlements on their own initiative, at the latest since the changeover to the Likud government in 1977, Israel has been pursuing an active settlement policy. At that time, Ariel Sharon had already formulated the goals of this policy: in analogy to the Zionists\' conquest of land in mid-century, which ultimately led to the founding of the nation of Israel, he strove for a Jewish majority population in »Judea and Samaria«, as Israel likes to refer to the West Bank. Back then, his intentions already included efforts to make life difficult for the Palestinians in every conceivable way. This would hopefully induce them to »transfer«, a euphemism used openly these days to refer to measures to drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank.

Today, this goal, which Sharon hoped to have achieved by the turn of the century, is still far in the distance. But the figures quoted by Segal/Weizman and B\'Tselem prove quite conclusively that the Israeli nation has never given up on its settlement policy, even under the Labor government and during the peace talks. From the time the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 until the second Intifada broke out in 2000, the Jewish population of the West Bank (not counting East Jerusalem) doubled, from 100,000 to almost 200,000, which corresponds to around ten percent of the nation\'s inhabitants. The most dramatic increase took place under Ehud Barak, even while he was negotiating with the Palestinians over trading »land against peace«. But by then the settlement policy had long become a foregone conclusion. Instead of making enemies in his own camp, Barak launched a campaign to discredit Arafat as a partner in negotiations.

But the settlements do not merely represent the conquest of land in violation of international law. At the core of the study carried out by Segal and Weizman is an exacting analysis of the topography, overall layout and architectonic form of the individual settlements, which differ in their details but all follow the same common matrix with regards to their critical parameters. Depending on the individual characteristics of the terrain, two or more concentric ring streets surround the highest point in the center. The houses in the outer and inner rings are staggered in such a way as to afford an unimpeded view of the surroundings from the houses\' large picture windows.

Brochures designed to attract new settlers praise this view as an outlook on an idyllic pastoral landscape, often calling in biblical references to underline the message. Segal sees instead an analogy to Jeremy Bentham\'s Panopticon, a »machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad«, as Michel Foucault writes in »Discipline and Punish«. The round building that Bentham designed in 1787, suitable for use as a prison, hospital, poorhouse, school or workplace, consisted of a central tower and a cylindrical shell. »In the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen« ². For Segal und Weizman the settlements are also machines for monitoring the Palestinian territories. This can be deduced from their topographical positioning alone.

Like medieval castles, the settlements are clustered around the major Palestinian cities and along the main traffic routes through the valleys. The »bypass roads«, which connect the settlements on higher ground, often intersect these older routes, forcing the Palestinians to take absurd detours. The perfidious aspect of the settlement policy is that the settlers themselves are not necessarily even aware of their function in the Israeli military\'s overall strategy. In particular new citizens coming from the region of the former USSR encounter a tight residential market in Tel Aviv and the coast, with a shortage of sites on which to build and high prices for land. The state-subsidized settlements on annexed development sites, frequently equipped with gardens and swimming pools, are no doubt an attractive alternative for these »Soviets«. Once settled there, and with the frequent news of suicide bombings always at the back of their minds, they would certainly not hesitate to inform the Israeli soldiers that escort their children to school every day of any suspicious activities in the valley outside their windows.

In the course of their research, Segal and Weizman\'s appeals for information were not always welcomed. In some cases they had to threaten a court order to induce the authorities to hand over documents to which they, as citizens of the nation of Israel, should automatically have been granted access. Seen in this light, the fact that IAUA chairman Uri Zerubavel is now alleging that the team\'s work is politics and has nothing to do with architecture seems like desperate back-pedaling, with the intention of belittling their both profound and potentially explosive study. Because if there\'s one thing that »A Civilian Occupation« demonstrates perfectly clearly, it\'s that whoever is involved in planning settlements in the West Bank cannot claim that this kind of project is just all a part of an architect\'s »apolitical« day\'s work. Rather, the architect perforce becomes an accomplice to a cynical political strategy that patently disregards human rights.

At any rate, many of the major Israeli architectural firms making up the IAUA have designed settlements, and in Segal\'s view this is the reason behind the association\'s change of heart. While the results of the study were already long known in Israel, these architectural firms feared that widespread publicity would cause them to be pilloried before the world at large. But Segal and Weizman are not interested in pointing a finger at those involved; nor do they have a quick solution at hand. Their aim was to break the silence and to pose the question of how much responsibility should be attributed to the architects. This aim has obviously been achieved: »It raised a debate«, remarked Segal.

Meanwhile, there have been further developments on the West Bank. Since 2000 over 100 mobile home parks have been set up - the centers of future settlements - and some of these are situated well into the interior of the Palestinian territories. The roads connecting these new settlements with the Israeli coast are transforming the West Bank into a patchwork of smaller and smaller islands. If one were to try to draw a map of the current border, it would be as convoluted as a mid-altitude contour line winding through a rugged mountainous landscape. But this would only be a horizontal projection of the border, while in reality it\'s the third dimension that plays the decisive role between Israel and Palestine, as Eyal Weizman explains in his in-depth essay »The Politics of Verticality« ³.

The conflict between Israel and Palestine begins deep in the earth and extends upward high into the airspace. In Weizman\'s view, projects such as a 48-kilometer transit route between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or 40 tunnels in Jerusalem alone, dreamed up by planners as a way for Israelis and Palestinians to avoid altogether the necessity to come face-to-face, are hardly compatible with a geographically defined national border. Not to mention the fact that over half of Israel\'s water supply is located under the West Bank. Although this resource was put under the charge of the Palestinian Authority in 1995 - at least in theory - it is actually governed today by the half-Israeli, half-Palestine »Joint Water Committee«. In practice this means that the Palestinians have to obtain approval from the Israeli side for every new well that they build, while conversely the Jewish West Bank settlements, which use more than a third of the water, can act independently of the committee. The battle for water has culminated in absurd guerilla warfare, with the Palestinian authorities preferring to route wastewater above ground through the rivers into Israel than to operate the water treatment plants sponsored by the UNO, various European countries or nongovernmental organizations.

The subsoil is also the setting for an even more fundamental confrontation. The young state of Israel is obsessed with archaeology, and Bronze-Age finds here serve not only to deepen scientific knowledge, but are often enough enlisted to legitimize territorial claims, especially in the West Bank. The parallels between current and biblical events fire up the religious fervor of the settlers and replace the real topography with a kind of fantasy landscape. For example, a brochure on the Shilo settlement refers explicitly to the division of land between the twelve tribes of Israel described in the Book of Joshua. One should mention in defense of Israeli archeologists that there are of course serious scientists among them who, together with their Palestinian colleagues, are working on the exploration of more recent segments of history.

On the whole, the settlements are an especially revealing symbol of the problematic nature of Jewish-Israeli identity. Silhouetted in glaring floodlight by night, these conglomerates of cloned dwellings crouch on the hills of the West Bank like foreign bodies, unable to enter into real contact with the terrain and the history of the land. Their inhabitants are not united by any kind of common, stable identity. Many have arrived in Israel only recently from the vast expanses of Russia, or, as in the case of the ultra-orthodox Emanuel settlement, have been recruited from Brooklyn.

Working vertically in the opposite direction, the border problems reach on up into the airspace, over which Israel made sure to maintain control in the peace talks. The Israeli air force flew more than 5,000 missions over the West Bank in 2001, almost 15 a day. The military regularly carries out reconnaissance with the help of airplanes, unmanned drones and satellites, and targets suspicious persons with its lethal state-of-the-art missiles, without apparent need to justify its actions before any court or international tribunal.

In pondering Rafi Segal\'s statements and Eyal Weizman\'s analyses, one is reminded more of apartheid than of a border between two sovereign states: a biased separation of people into first- and second-class citizens according to ethnic and religious criteria. Since Israel has not only failed to take any steps toward dismantling the settlements, but on the contrary is constantly building new ones, the border is becoming so complicated that the very thought of a demarcation line similar to the Berlin Wall seems absolutely inconceivable. But this is precisely what Israel began to build last year: a 360-kilometer-long, eight-meter-high wall, which incorporates ten percent of the West Bank into Israeli territory and encloses 70,000 Palestinians who do not have Israeli citizenship, separating them from their own land ⁴. And it seems to be working out well so far: the politics of foregone conclusions blocks the way back and ultimately stifles the critics, since they are no longer able to keep up with the rapid pace of events ⁵.

1 http://www.btselem.org
2 Michel Foucault, \"Discipline and Punish - The Birth of the Prison\" (Random House, New York, 1979), translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, 1977, pp. 201-202.
3 Outline of the planned book at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/issue.jsp?debateId=45&id=2
4 Matthew Brubacher: »Mauern gegen den Frieden. Israel zieht neue Grenzen«, in: Le monde diplomatique, 15 November 2002, p. 18.
5 Moshe Zuckermann: »Eine Mauer wird errichtet – Israel ist an einem Scheideweg angelangt«, Das Parlament. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, No. 35–36/2./9. 9. 2002; on the Internet under: http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb10/frieden/regionen/Israel/mauer.html

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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