[tadamon-l] Palestine: the Architecture of Apartheid

[Tadamon!]

* Palestine: the Architecture of Apartheid Interview with journalist Jon Elmer.

by David Parker.

http://tadamon.resist.ca/post/1821

In the 2007 publication "Hollow Land", Eyal Weizman, the Israeli-born, 
London-based architect, reconceptualized geopolitics in the Occupied 
Territories. The political space created by Israeli apartheid is a web of 
total domination and control over Palestinians. The architecture and urban 
planning inside the territories demonstrate a late-modern colonial 
occupation. Israel owns the subterranean aquifers beneath Gaza and the 
West Bank, controls the airspace above, and has weaved a web of Israeli 
only settlements, highways, and security perimeters throughout the West 
Bank, while turning Gaza into an open-air prison.

According to Weizman, the natural and built features of the landscape 
function as weapons and ammunition for the conflict. The Occupied 
Territories have become a series of layers and territories, each 
manipulated by the Israeli authorities. Borders are porous for Israelis 
but solid for Palestinians. Checkpoints are a source of humiliation.

The political power of Israel re-inscribes relationships of force in the 
organization of the built environment. Contemporary urban warfare in the 
West Bank and Gaza is a constant destruction and construction of space. At 
the root of the warfare lies Israeli racism and colonialism.

Lines of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza can change overnight. 
Borders are flexible for the daily incursions of Israeli forces who 
inflict torture without sullying their home soil. Palestinian homes are a 
potential theater of war. Palestinian houses are demolished, their farms 
destroyed and confiscated.

Weizman depicts the Israeli settlements inside the West Bank as built 
according to a military design of concentric circles, fences, searchlights 
and patrol roads. In his lecture at the Canadian Center for Architecture 
in 2007, he refers to them as "optical matrices radiating out from a 
proliferation of look-out points/settlements scattered across the 
landscape." The psychological effects are calculated; fear is used to 
induce flight and displace the indigenous Palestinian population from 
their land; a tactic carried out since the 1948 Nakba, Arabic for 
'catastrophe'.

Jon Elmer is a Canadian journalist who has covered recent events in Palestine.


Jon Elmer: It's important to understand the patterns of the 
Israel-Palestine conflict have been repeated throughout the last 200 years 
in any nationalist conflict where indigenous populations were separated 
from settler populations. In North America, we called them reserves or 
reservations, the Afrikaners in South Africa called them Bantustans, and 
in Nazi-occupied Europe they were called ghettos. Sharon, Olmert and the 
Likudniks prefer to call them "cantons".

What's interesting about the situation in Israel and Palestine is that the 
ghettoization of the Palestinians has become legitimized. It's actually 
become a national tract, in other words the Palestinian state will 
actually be the ghettos. In the Gaza Strip there is an open-air prison 
that has been put under media scrutiny for the last year and a half, but 
which has existed for the last 20 years.

Immediately following the first Palestinian intifada or uprising in 1987, 
the creation of the open-air ghetto in Gaza has been on the agenda. It 
started with checkpoints outside the Gaza strip, proceeding over the years 
with the creation of a separation wall such as the one in the West Bank. 
The wall was created ostensibly for the protection of the Israeli settler 
population that was living an opulent life within the Gaza strip until 
2005 when there was the "disengagement" from the Gaza strip.

For someone sitting in the Gaza Strip, if you look up at any moment you 
can see a radio controlled drone flying over taking pictures, Apache 
helicopters are not uncommon, neither are F-16 fighters. If one looks out 
over the sea, which you can at any point in the Gaza Strip, you would see 
sophisticated 21st century Israeli naval vessels, fully loaded and 
patrolling the coast and often firing into the coast. You have a situation 
where people who are university-aged have never left the Gaza strip to see 
their family, never left to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. This 
is a ghetto population, an imprisoned population.

It's not a cliché to say it's an open-air prison. People are not traveling 
into and out of the territory. The siege that the United Nations has 
described as "shocking and shameful" has led to a caloric intake drop of 
50 percent for Palestinians. There's no energy, no water, and the lack of 
power and lack of oil and gas make it so that the secondary and tertiary 
things that require energy are not running. Sewage is not running, water 
doesn't run. Choices are being made in hospitals to decide who will get 
the gauze and who will not.

The siege is total. There are no commercial gas stations open. There's no 
cars on the road. There are people pooling their gas and giving it to the 
Red Cross. You have people literally taking flour off their shelves and 
taking it down to the baker to bake bread.

The control is total around the border. In fact, as described by Jennifer 
Lowenstein, an astute observer in the United States who has visited Gaza 
regularly, in many ways it is worse than an open-air prison in Gaza. In a 
prison, the walls and gates are closed and the sniper towers are facing 
out. If someone was to escape from the prison, the sniper towers would be 
used to cut someone down as they left the prison. In the Gaza strip the 
towers, the artillery, the aircraft and naval vessels are all facing in to 
the prison and the attacks come into the prison.

There's entire buffer zones around the walls in Gaza. People don.t even 
come close to the wall. This concept of going up to the wall to 
spray-paint "Free Palestine" is an absurdity, you'll be shot dead whether 
you're a twelve-year old school girl as we saw in Raffah a number of times 
during the Intifada, or whether you're attempting to go and pick 
strawberries, as we've seen families being wiped out when they go out to 
pick strawberries in the field.

What's most shocking is the normalization of this ghetto prison lifestyle. 
It's important to note for the future of the conflict that the Gaza Strip 
is actually a model for the West Bank. As a reporter who has worked both 
in Gaza and the West Bank I can tell you that in comparison to Gaza, the 
West Bank is opulent. Gaza's population is overwhelmingly refugees packed 
into refugee camps. It gives squalor a new name.

If you ask a Palestinian what they want the world to know about their 
living conditions, people will say "just come and live here for one day." 
If you stand in the Gaza strip and look around, everything is perfectly 
clear. It's only when the conflict is obfuscated and confused here in 
North America that we have such lack of movement and such a normalization 
of the way the Palestinians live.

David Parker: Let's speak about the West Bank. According to the 
philosopher Michel Foucault's concept of the Panopticon, the architecture 
of the modern prison constructs an all-seeing eye of the watch-guard, the 
controlling force that sees into every corner, eliminating privacy and 
human dignity. Eyal Weizman has applied this concept to the settlements in 
the West Bank. They exist on top of hills as secure fortresses, the 
windows of the settler homes look outward and downward into the valleys 
below where the Palestinian villages are located, separated from the 
settlements by a wide depth barrier. The settlements are designed to 
control the valleys and and the psychology of the Palestinians.

What is it like living near Israeli settlements in the West Bank?

Jon Elmer: The settlements are just one part of the Panopticon equation. 
You also have over 500 military checkpoints and obstacles, constant 
military presence, daily incursions into the villages. On an average day 
there will be 5 to 10 military incursions into West Bank villages. The 
settler apparatus continues to expand: there are now 235 settlements, 125 
of them official. Half a million Israelis are living in the West Bank with 
super nationality, super rights. They access their own highways, their own 
roads, their own military protection, water systems, and control the 
highest of the hillsides, effectively controlling the valleys.

The settlers are not simply families who moved out to pursue a biblical 
calling. By and large they are economic settlers. There's no doubt that 
the settlements are geopolitical, placed on key highways and key aquifers. 
This is the way the state of Israel has been built since day one.

In 2003, when I was in the West Bank as a journalist, it made sense to 
travel on settler only roads. Because it might take 2 days to travel 75 
kilometers from Jenin in the north to Jerusalem, but by hopping on a 
settler road you get there in an hour. These are the realities of daily 
life in the West Bank.

Speaking with some of these settlers on occasion while hitchhiking and 
asking questions about their lifestyle, I found many were in opposition to 
the apartheid wall [the 750 kilometer separation wall that weaves in and 
out of Palestinian territory and expands the state of Israel] because they 
see it as cutting into their proverbial living room. Palestinians are seen 
as a temporary nuisance and they can be pushed off into their own state, 
into Jordan or elsewhere. This has been the settlement project since the 
beginning of Israel. Like lego bricks, Israel is building settlements and 
connecting them as part of a long term project.

Some settlers believe the bible has pushed them back to their land. There 
is a pioneering spirit myth among settlers. But actually the settlements 
are massive state infrastructure projects. They're bulldozed and built in 
a massive, one-fell-swoop style. They're not building trailer park hill 
tops, they're building major cities, which sometimes takes a few years to 
connect to settlement blocks that are ultimately connected through 
security roads and buffer zones.

The fence, which you see in Gaza and the West Bank, doesn't demarcate a 
border, it demarcates a buffer zone. Palestinians are in danger if they 
come anywhere near the buffer zone. This control is enforced through a 
paramilitary regime. The dispossession is carried out through army and 
military means. What's going on is a massive project, a collaboration 
between the state and the settler movement to continually expand the state 
of Israel while the world negotiates some sort of peace process.

It's important to understand the role the settlers play. These are not 
back-to-the-land, pioneering people. They are there to colonize the land, 
and wherever possible to displace the Palestinians.

* Jon Elmer is a Canadian freelance writer and photojournalist 
specializing in the Middle East. He has researched and reported from the 
West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2003, 2005 and 2007.

* David Parker is the news coordinator at CKDU campus-community radio in 
Halifax, Nova Scotia. This interview is also available as part of an audio 
documentary available on-line.

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