http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=2745&ed=168&edid=168
This Week in Palestine, No 123, April 2009 Architecture as a Tool of Occupation to Serve a Military Agenda By Abe Hayeem
Israel’s horrific onslaught on Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009 grabbed the world’s attention as whole swathes of Gaza’s housing, infrastructure, agriculture, and public buildings were levelled by Israeli bombardment from the air and tanks and bulldozers on the ground. Hundreds of civilians were killed and thousands injured.
While all this was going on, Israel continued the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, which has gone on unabated since 1967. The building frenzy continues irrespective of agreements to stop, which have been made over the decades - Madrid, Oslo, the Road Map, Annapolis. Today 200 exclusively Jewish settlements that house some 450,000 Israelis are dotted across the Occupied Territories: approximately 250,000 settlers live in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem. Those that were “disengaged” from Gaza in 2005 have been settled on both sides of the Green Line.
Since last year alone more than 8,000 homes have been built throughout the West Bank and in the heart of annexed East Jerusalem, the intended capital of a Palestinian State, which is being intensively “Judaised.” Extremist religious settlers are literally taking over Palestinian homes with impunity in East Jerusalem, Silwan, Sheikh Jarrah, and Hebron. Militant religious seminaries, the cause of recent riots, are now moving into the heart of Arab neighbourhoods in the Israeli mixed cities of Jaffa, Acre, Lod, and Ramle. Bedouin “unrecognised villages” in the Negev are being bulldozed to make way for Jewish settlements and ranches funded by the Jewish National Fund. The latest report from Settlement Watch, carried out by the undeterred Peace Now organisation, has shown that a further 73,000 housing units are being planned and projected, which, if built (with no objections by the US), will double the illegal settler population.
Creating the physical reality of Israeli and Zionist aims and policies of settlement requires the expertise of architects, planners, economists, and other professionals. The most significant aspect of Israeli architecture is its political dimension. This was explicitly presented in a study done by Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman as Israel’s exhibition entry to the International Union of Architects Conference in 2002 in Berlin. When the Israel Association of United Architects (IAUA) saw the catalogue of the exhibition, entitled “A Civilian Occupation,” it reacted with fury and ordered its withdrawal. Israeli architects refuse to accept that their actions are political even though they have carried out the government’s agenda of planning, development, and expansion prior to and since the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948.
Esther Zandberg wrote in Haaretz, “The Israeli community of architects very piously follows a total separation between ‘pure’ professionalism and ‘dirty’ politics.” The IAUA has claimed to “represent its members in regard to their profession and not in regard to the political aspect.” But as the catalogue authors state, “Planning decisions do not generally stem from economic or ecological considerations, but are meant to serve strategic national goals. The clearest expression of the conflict is the process of change, adaptation, construction and erasure of the open landscape and the built-up surroundings. The singular topographic conditions [in the West Bank] dictate the points of friction, and the terrain becomes a field of battle on which themes of power, control, and resistance are played out.”
Even before the insidious meandering and illegal Apartheid Wall began swallowing up whole towns, agricultural land, and aquifers within the West Bank, the policy has been to merge towns and settlements on either side of Green Line into contiguous urban blocs. The line of the Wall now encompasses whole Israeli settlements, many kilometres west of the Green Line, and will now encircle Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel. Palestinians stranded east of the new Wall become, in effect, non-citizens in their own homes in the “Seam Zone.” Their homes are sequestered and destroyed if in the way of a new road or the new Wall Route. We now see the battle for the route of the wall played out in Bil’in, Jayyous, and Na’alin, with demonstrations that are suppressed with the utmost brutality by the IDF, with no qualms in directly attacking the villagers and their houses. The settlements such as Zufim, which are designed by Israeli architects, are built on forcibly stolen Palestinian land. There have been no protests against this by the representative Israeli professional associations, only complete defensiveness. It is Israeli peace activist groups, such as Peace Now, BIMKOM (Planners for Planning Rights), FAST (Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory), and ICAHD (Israeli Committee against House Demolitions), that challenge the status quo, house demolitions, and land expropriation.
The illegal settlements and towns in the West Bank, built in circular rings of houses and roads on hilltops, create a dominating presence overlooking Palestinian villages and towns, with the highways that slice through the valleys and demolish any houses and agricultural land that may exist in their path. As Gideon Levy points out, “From everywhere you can spot the settlement on the hilltop, looming, threatening, dreadfully colonial. The breaching of international law that explicitly prohibits the transfer of civilian population into occupied territory - an act considered a war crime by the Fourth Geneva Convention - is overlooked by Israel.”
In an interview, Thomas M. Leitersdorf, the Israeli architect who trained at London’s Architectural Association, describes how he designed Ma’ale Adumim directly next to Jericho at the end of the desert, the farthest conceivable place, as ordered by the Ministerial Committee for Settlement then headed by Ariel Sharon. “The strategy in Judea and Samaria at the time was to ‘capture ground’: you capture as much area as possible by placing a few people on many hills. The underlying political idea stated that the farther inside the Occupied Territories you place settlers, the more territory Israel would have when the time came to set the permanent international borders - because we were already there.” While admiring the beauty of Arab villages, he said practicalities and ministerial requirements made it difficult to emulate them. The incongruous trademark of red-pitched roofed houses and villas, sold at hugely reduced prices to attract the middle classes and Russian immigrants, pepper the biblical landscape. “As to the politics of Jews and Arabs I cannot contribute because I am very weak on politics. To tell you that an architect influences politics? He doesn’t. The whole story of Judea and Samaria could have been different, but this is on levels that are neither in your hands nor in mine.”
The Israeli enterprise in colonising and controlling the Occupied Territories is brilliantly described in Eyal Weizman’s book, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, in which he exposes the surrealistic world of domination and control with the underlying intent of total transfer of the indigenous Palestinian population. The whole occupation enterprise itself is seen as a deconstructed architectural entity - spatial analogies in three or four dimensions - an extension of Weizman’s earlier thesis of the politics of verticality, http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-politicsverticalityissue.jsp , in which a sophisticated military machine, in complicity with architects, planners, engineers, politicians, government, and the whole construction industry achieves its political aims. Control of the West Bank has been the unwavering objective of Israel’s military, intelligence, and political elites since the end of the 1967 Six-Day War.
The philosophy and psychology of separation is applied in several dimensions. The military tactics of “grabbing every hilltop” as a dual civilian/military strategy to set up settlements “in depth,” made Ariel Sharon the chief architect of the Occupied Territories and the settlers instruments and “civilianised” agents of security for the state. The geology and archaeology below ground is employed to emphasise Israel’s biblical justification for “re-establishing” the state from the Jordan to the Sea. While surveillance by air uses satellite “aerial photometry” and mapping of infra-red technology, on the ground, the methodology of separation and the whole communications and transport infrastructure with the fortified hilltop design of the settlements dominates, monitors, and ultimately crowds out and fragments the Palestinian population in the West Bank. “A complex fabric of laws, regulations, and military orders” turns Israel’s land seizures “into a de-facto project of annexation.” All the separate tracts of “state land” throughout the West Bank create “a non-contiguous archipelago of thousands of separate islands.” The aim is to fragment what is left for a Palestinian state that is, in effect, a series of cantons controlled by checkpoints, separate roads, and walls - “the matrix of control.”
If the Palestinians can’t be transferred, they must be made invisible, or totally controlled in all the minutiae of their lives, whether in Zone A, B, or C, or even to pass from one border (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, the Green Line) to another.
Thus the matrix of settler-only roads, going through tunnels or bridges and by-passing checkpoints, allows the settlers to travel over the whole West Bank landscape “without seeing an Arab.” “Israel’s conception of security … includes a complex territorial, institutional and architectural apparatus, conceived in order to manage the circulation of Palestinians through Israeli space.” The system of identity cards, surveillance by one-way mirrors and special permits to move between their own towns and cities, from, to, and between zones, the checkpoints (fixed and moveable) - some, for example Kalandia, designed like airport terminals - make the South African Apartheid pass system look benign. The cruelty and sadism is emphasised in the details such as the design of the turnstiles, made deliberately narrower than the recommended width for public buildings in order to facilitate body searches and slow down the movement of Palestinians.
The Wall - “particularly associated with the word ‘apartheid,’ although even at the height of its barbarity, the South African regime never erected such a barrier” - the ultimate in the philosophy of separation, is now made excruciatingly real. Even if it may not be “designed” by architects, it has its own “elastic” architecture, with the possibility of being moved by reluctant High Court decisions, persistent peaceful resistance of local villagers and activists, as in Bil’in, or even by settlers wanting to be included on the “Israeli side.” In fact, Israeli architects have commented ruefully that they could at least have produced a better design for it, and some actually were drafted to beautify or camouflage the landscape around it.
It was to challenge the participation of Israeli architects and planners in building these illegal projects that Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine was formed, attracting members and support from building professionals around the world. A website ( http://apjp.org ) was set up to inform and campaign against prominent settlement projects and targeted divestment action against the Wall and against companies such as Caterpillar and Veolia. A petition placed in The Times in February 2006, and signed by scores of international architects and planners, many world famous, including prominent Israeli architects and NGO representatives, led to a discussion of the issue at three council meetings of the International Union of Architects (UIA) ( http://apjp.org/signatories /).
The petition focused on three projects: Silwan, Lifta, and E1. In Silwan, 88 Palestinian homes are under threat of demolition. This is part of a development for El Ad, the extreme Israeli settler movement, on illegally annexed Palestinian property, to re-discover the “City of David.” The demolition orders that were put on hold are now being viciously activated by the Jerusalem Municipality, even more so after US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton condemned them as “unhelpful.” The E1 Plan expands the largest illegal settlement, Ma’ale Adumim, to link it with metropolitan Jerusalem; it will dissect the northern and southern West Bank, destroying the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state. This too is now being implemented, with a scheme for 3,500 houses and a police headquarters that has already been completed. In Lifta, the ruins of a Palestinian village near Deir Yassin were to be converted into a Jewish-only real estate development, to the exclusion of the original Palestinian inhabitants, some of whom lived nearby, and erasing their heritage and memory. Alternative plans are being proposed by FAST and the Lifta community, who still live nearby or in exile around the world.
An attempt to submit a motion to the major UIA Conference in Turin in July 2008 to censure Israel for its breaches of international law and the UIA Code of ethics caused an anxious flurry amongst the Israeli contingent, but was not put through for lack of time and a lack of support from the members of the Council. As reported in Ynetnews:
“The Israeli association was extremely worried by the proposal, fearing it would eventually be adopted by the congress. This means Israeli architects won’t be able to attend all of the organization’s activities worldwide, including conventions and competitions, and cooperate with UN institutions. This will definitely place a black stain on Israeli architects,” he said. “It will harm our international ties and our ability to work abroad.” Meanwhile a UIA sub-committee has been set up to report on ethical standards of member architects.
Nevertheless the action, as before, sparked off another debate on ethics in the architectural press, where supporters of Israel quoted all the world’s other countries that should have been picked on instead, such as China. Yet there is a difference between architects building for personal glory in dubious regimes abroad and Israeli architects who act in total complicity with their own government and its military in the 40 years of brutal occupation, in serial contravention of international law and UN resolutions. If Israel maintains that it is a Western-style democracy and acts as if it is a part of Europe, it mustn’t complain if it is held accountable by those concerned about its behaviour, which impacts right across the Middle East. It is important to uphold ethical, professional, and moral standards in a key profession, which is meant to benefit all society and humanity, wherever it operates. It is now up to the UIA to strengthen its professional codes with human rights as a key factor in its constitution.
Apart from a few honourable exceptions, Israeli architects never seem to examine their actions critically. There is little self-examination or moral stocktaking, particularly among its veterans, who have never seen the national conflict as involving themselves. As Weizman says “The use of civilian architects for military purposes is unethical. When an architect works for the military, he knows he is designing for military use. When he thinks he’s designing for civilian use, but his work is used to enforce a military agenda, it’s wrong.”
Abe Hayeem is an Iraqi Jewish architect living and working in the UK. He is the chair of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (www.apjp.com ).
References “Land Grab,” B’Tselem Report, May 2002, www.btselem.org .
Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, Verso Press, 2003.
Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: The Architecture of Occupation, Verso Press, 2007. Eyal Weizman, “The Politics of Verticality,” 2002, www.opendemocracy.net .