West Bank Settlement and the Transformation of the Zionist Housing Ethos from Shelter to Act of Violence Yael Allweil

13 West Bank Settlement and the Transformation of the Zionist Housing Ethos from Shelter to Act of Violence Yael Allweil In March 2011 West Bank settlers of Itamar formed by these people, and great efforts were invested an outpost to the settlement in response to the in forming a state-citizen contract via mass provi- murder of a settler family in their home. Settlers sion of public housing.2 Providing housing for each established this outpost with simple, rectangular, citizen fulfills the right of each Jew to the ancestral plywood structures as symbols for dwellings, homeland and serves as the material condition for meant as an explicit response to the murder by accumulating future citizens and forming an inde- way of erecting housing. Prime Minister Benjamin pendent polity. The interrelation of national home Netanyahu responded to the murder with the and individual house is therefore a central attribute memorable statement ‘the [Palestinians] kill – we of Zionism as ideology and – since statehood – as build’. Within hours Netanyahu’s government a regime.3 announced the construction of 675 new housing units in Itamar, a 675 percent increase. The plan, The historiography of Israel-Palestine is deeply approved in 2013, includes legalising the 137 focused on violence and conflict as objects of housing units built without permit in Itamar since inquiry, neglecting the relationship between 1984 and issuing permits for 538 more units within violence and settlement.4 Historians identify 1929 a proper plan.1 While framed to negate ‘us’ from as ‘year zero’ for the continuing violent struggle ‘them’, Netanyahu’s kill-build declaration places over Palestine, while the two iconic Zionist housing citizen housing on a par with violence and trans- and settlement types – the kibbutz and the Hebrew forms violence in the home to violence by the home. City – were formed some 20 years earlier in 1909 This declaration makes a profound and explicit and 1910.5 Accounts of Israel-Palestine view archi- statement by which citizen housing is a retaliatory tecture and planning as ‘the continuation of war by act in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, other means,’ namely as means exercised after an act of violence rather than shelter. overt violence has receded.6 Yet the formation of key Zionist settlement frameworks prior to the erup- Netanyahu’s statement departs from Israel’s tion of violence marks a historiographical gap that Zionist housing project posited on an ethos of shelter. necessitates re-evaluation of the conflict and calls The collective national home was conceived as into question the taken-for-granted assumption of shelter from Jewish persecution granted to nations cause and effect, marking settlement as an act of and individuals, posited as the raison d’etre of the response and retaliation to violence in the Israeli- State of Israel. Zionism’s attempt to materialise a Palestinian conflict. national home, where none existed for millennia, involved connecting subjects with a homeland in Meanwhile, significant studies of Israel-Palestine order to form a sovereign political entity legitimated within spatial disciplines have privileged the analysis 19 Spaces of Conflict | Autumn / Winter 2016 | 13–36 14 of geographies of violence over historical accounts, in the movement’s self-narration to pinpoint change making a statement on ‘the landscape as histor- in settlement strategy and ideology. When and how ical montage’ that challenges the historical dictum has Israel’s regime come to identify citizen housing of chronology-as-causality.7 Noted is Weizman’s as acts of violence in a national conflict, as reflected argument for the significance of geographical prin- in Netanyahu’s statement quoted above? Why ciples – parallels between varieties of historical would the Israeli state transform a housing ethos contexts that differ in many respects but hold similar of shelter to one of national violence? What does spatial patterns – as key objects for architectural the deep divide between housing as violence and analysis transcending the historical.8 Moreover, housing as shelter mean for Israeli society at large? unlike the underlying assumption in literature on the This article aims to (1) examine these questions settlement project, violence was neither the goal using detailed architectural history of early settle- nor the practice of early settlers. Findings ques- ment and the pivotal change in settlement practices tion the well-accepted argument that settlements and (2) contribute to our theoretical understanding were designed as military posts in an offensive of spatial violence by reconceptualising ‘conflict’ project of territorial domination,9 indicating instead and ‘violence’ as two analytical and discursive cate- that settlers attempted to transform the West Bank gories with different political consequences. from military zone to civilian homeland in defiance of state insistence that only construction for military Violence, conflict, and housing: theoretical purposes was justifiable under international law.10 inquiry This dynamic characterised the settlement project, The use of violence is increasingly understood starting with the first civilian resettlement of Gush spatially in the context of national conflict, as in Etzion, involving two opposing parties – state and Paul Farmer’s framework of ‘structural violence’.13 settlers – now largely discussed as one. While The Israel-Palestine case has been significant, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Abba Eben with architectural studies on the implications of resisted resettlement and declared it in the UN a walls, checkpoints, and barriers to movement by military post, the returnees declared they ‘came Michael Sorkin, Eyal Weizman, Derek Gregory and here as citizens in every sense’.11 others.14 Violence in dwelling environments has been the subject of a number of important studies, Gideon Aran, who has studied Gush Emunim since among them Teresa Caldeira’s study of the ‘talk of the early 1970s, identified deep transformations in crime’ and its contribution to ‘solutions’ like gating settler narratives and self-written historiography, and urban segregation of the Brazilian city.15 Eyal stating that ‘informants [have] forgotten and denied Weizman’s studies demonstrate the deep entan- facts for a number of reasons, honest and less glement of civilian and military practices in Israeli honest’.12 Aran chose to publish his original study housing, producing civilian-cum-military settle- based on ideas expressed in interviews in the ments.16 ‘Suburban red-roofed single family homes 1970s and 80s, rather than updating the data for replaced the tank as the basic battle unit; houses current settler ideas, as he has found the forgotten were deployed in formation across a theatre of facts cardinal for understanding the movement. My operations to occupy hills, to encircle an enemy, or own focus in this article on the early formation of to cut its communication lines’, writes Weizman.17 Gush Emunim ideology in settlement form takes a Erez Tzfadia, Haim Yacobi and Oren Yiftachel point similar approach. Therefore, in attempting to locate to the inherent opacity between the civilian and the pivotal moment of change, I look for the change the military when it comes to political geography in 15 housing both within and outside the ‘green line’.18 number of architectural studies have also identified the private-domestic space of housing as the Conflict is the object of study most commonly site for continuous struggle over the identity of identified for Israel-Palestine,19 understood by nation and citizens, including John Archer’s study scholars and the public alike in normative terms as of the roots of American-dream suburban housing, undesirable and in need of ‘solving’.20 Liberal thought Becky Nicolaides’s on blue-collar suburbs, and usually reads societies of conflict as deviant: ‘path- Diane Harris’s study of the construction of race in ological or deemed to the expression of irrational American post-war housing.26 forces’, politically underdeveloped, and ‘on the way to becoming a proper polity’.21 However, scholars The idea of agonism draws attention to an impor- of subaltern studies as well as scholars advocating tant element within conflict beyond social interaction, for ‘South-South relations’ have pointed to the deep what Mouffe calls ‘the object of agonism’ over which fallacies of the liberal-developmental perspective conflict is waged and polity is formed. This object, for the production of knowledge on these societies for Mouffe, is not an obstacle to harmony but the and political society at large.22 very thing around which political society is forged.27 Mouffe’s work is complemented by Bruno Latour’s Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonism has identified work on the social significance of objects.28 This conflict as central to the very formation of a polity. article proposes housing as the object of conflict for For her, agonism, a conflict that cannot be resolved, Israel-Palestine and places significant focus on the suggests a productive role for conflict in assembling object at stake in conflict. Rather than the site or a society, based on the object upon which the irre- means of violent conflict, I identify housing as the solvable conflict is waged. This object thereby forms object around which conflict revolves, not merely a polity out of conflicted social actors by ‘bringing situated in dwelling spaces but rather enacted them together because it divides them’.23 From by and directed

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