BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV THE FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

SECTIONSCAPING In Search for Non-Modern Landscape An Israeli-Palestinian Case Study

REQUIREMENTS FOR THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE THE MASTER OF ARTS DEGREE (M.A.)

ALON MATOS UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF Prof. HAIM YACOBI

06/2018

S E C T I O N S C A P I N G

In Search for Non-Modern Landscape

An Israeli–Palestinian Case Study

Figure 1: Nachum Gutman, 1934, illustration for the song "On the Beach" from "Children's Songs" by Anda Amir Pinkerfeld

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Thanks to my parents, nothing would have happened without them

Thanks to Prof. Haim Yacobi for the guidance, support, patience and good spirit

Thanks to all the friends I met along this path

Special thanks to Prof. Ayala Ronel and Arch. Eytan Mann for their inputs and support

Thanks to all my teachers who taught me the landscape, and caught me in love with it

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CONTENT

ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………… i PROLOGUE …………………………………………………………………… ii SUMMARY …………………………………………………………………… iii INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………… 1 Imperial Landscape 1 Holy Landscape 5 THEORY …………………………………………………………………… 11 Modern Constitution 11 Non-modern Constitution 17 METHODOLOGY …………………………………………………………………… 24 Sectionscaping 24 CASE STUDY …………………………………………………………………… 31 Hybrid Landscape 31 Research Question 34 1. LANDSCAPE …………………………………………………………………… 39 MATRIX Structural Flows 39 Landscape Folds 41 Landscape Texture 49 Modern Folds 53 2. ZIONIST FLOW …………………………………………………………………… 60 The Modern Point of View 60 A White Mirror 66 Modern Dreams 70 Landscape Regime 77 3. WESTERN …………………………………………………………………… 82 LANDSCAPE Territorial Imagination 82 A Two-Faced Landscape 90 A Modern Past 94 4. EASTERN …………………………………………………………………… 101 LANDSCAPE Networking The Frontier 101 Hollow-Holy Landscape 107 Modern Landscaping 111 The Modern Wall 117 DISCUSSION …………………………………………………………………… 126 EPILOGUE …………………………………………………………………… 135 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………… 136

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PROLOGUE

"All the dreamers and all the visionary gathered here and began to dream: they dreamed of a land, they dreamed a people, they dreamed a language. Some love themselves so much that they are sure they are the dream. Some pity themselves to a point that they claim to be the dream. There are those who lie and say that their lie is it, there are those who deceive and say that their falsehood is it. Some yearn for themselves and say that longing for themselves is longing for it, and that longing is the dream. There are those who are an old picture on the wall, and they say that the picture is the dream, and there are ghosts who claim that they are its spirit, and there are deceased who claim that they are his corpse. There are cemeteries that claim to be where it is buried, there are airways that claim it flows in them. There are those who roast sacrifice on the hearth and say it's the fire.

Maybe it was the messiah and it just has not come yet, and perhaps even if it procrastinates, it will come. And here is the dream."

(Moti Kirshenbaum (director) reads text written by Amos Keinan (1981) "to thy country, and to thy homeland", In To the Cisterns. A documentary TV show. Israel Television, IBA. Part 1, 00:

00-01: 50)

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ABSTRACT

This research deals with the landscape around us, the way we observe it and take part in the practice of shaping it. It deals with the landscape’s structure as a political expression of a cultural structure, and the dualism embodied in it as both imagination and reality. The critical reading tradition that I follow sees the landscape as a representation through which power flows and shapes our consciousness, as well as our real space. The landscape is a geopolitical concept that represents the structure of the modern order, whether in its classic definitions or in its critical reading, it is characterized with the demand for blind loyalty towards its images (Mitchell, 1994a).

Against the background of the contemporary structural-cultural transition to the age of networks, the point of view I will present observe landscape as a Matrix, seeks to offer a non-modern perspective of the landscape, the Israeli-Palestinian case in particular (Latour, 1993). Landscape, as a descriptive concept, expresses today in many discourses - technological, economic, cultural and social - networked structures with textural properties such as hybridity, flexibility, stratification, multiplicity, variability, and movement. In the spatial field, however, a theory that systematically adopts these attributes has not yet spread to the 'original' landscape, which itself inspires structural images of networks. Sectionscaping, then, will be offered here as a technical and conceptual methodology to explore the hybrid landscape, represent it and practice a point of view that enables a reconstruction of the non-modern love of the landscape.

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SUMMARY

In the Introduction Chapter of this study I will explain the separation that underlies the modern landscape, between human culture (the observer) and natural space (the observed). It is a dichotomy that defines each separately and independently from the other, while uniting them within its invented modern culture. W.J. T. Mitchell, whose reading I will follow, explains that this is a constitutive observation of the secular modern order that eliminates the existence of a divine force while defining new power relations between modern humans and the environment (Mitchell 1994a:10-11). Mitchell connects the modern landscape to the movement of Western imperialism, while revealing the illusions embodied within its narrative - the emancipation of humanity versus nature and vice versa, the naturalization of the idea that they are separated, and uniting them unilaterally under modern culture (Mitchell 1994a:13). The modern landscape preserves vagueness that allows imperialism to exercise its idealized power – Landscape is both the painting genre and the real space, both perception and representation, both contemplation and action (Mitchell 1994a:8). But Mitchell's intention is not only to criticize and expose the rough facts behind the landscape, but to examine the framework that constitutes these facts (Mitchell 1994a:6-7). He challenges the conventions of modern landscape, and proposes to understand it as a medium of political expression, a vast network of cultural codes, a body of symbolic forms that encode meaning and values to the physical and sensory dimensions of the landscape itself (Mitchell 1994a:13-14).

In the theoretical chapter, I will link this observation of Mitchell to the ideas of Bruno Latour about modern project, explaining how the landscape is an expression of the modern purifying structure of separations in general. Purification relates to the way we moderns construct the world in our imagination, define and understand it, characterize our identity and those around us, perceive time, and organize the space within which we dwell (Latour, 1993:10-12). Nevertheless, Latour's theory teaches that as far as we want to separate and detach, to sort and put in order, things are always connected, stratified, multiplied, in-between, and in constant motion. Social separations, personal and interpersonal, and also territorial - exist but in our

iii modern imagination (Latour, 1993:3-5). The development of critical thought; the network society that has developed since the end of the 20th century; the world of flows and imaginations of the global village; the expanding border discourse; and the growing network research - all challenge the modern imagination and the structures of its order (Latour, 1993:130-132). Following Latour's proposal for the establishment of a non-modern order, which recognizes the delusion of modern separations and seeks to reveal their composition (Latour, 1993:138-142), I would like to examine the possibility for a non-modern landscape. The landscape, I will show, embodies hybrid properties that precede the modern ones which were imposed upon it. By reconstructing it as a matrix, I aim to contribute to the search for a new imagination of a landscape of flows and folds.

To demonstrate my arguments, I propose 'sectionscaping', as a methodology based on cross-sectional cuts inspired by the descriptive technique familiar from architectural drawings. The section offers a point of view that crosses the space and looks at it from within, through its layers, inviting to look at the depth of the landscape. As I will present in the methodological chapter, the properties of the cross-section as a technical method supplement the non-modern landscape, but more than that, represent a non-modern form of observation. Further to that, the case Study I will use, the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, embodies in its geopolitical characters a hybrid space that resists the persistent application of the modern point of view. It is a convenient field for examining the relationship between modern reasons of separations, and the folding character of the networked landscape.

In the research chapters I will first characterize the Israeli-Palestinian landscape as a matrix of layers, a texture of flows, mutual movements that combine geology, climate and botany, both natural and man-made, along with culture and politics, premodern as modern. In this matrix, I will show, binarity does not exist, power relations are reciprocal, and instead of a- symmetric separations the landscape changes, flows, bends, or curves. In this framework, I would like to include the Zionist flow as a landscape movement, part of the matrix, characterized by an imperial point of view from which it derives its power and its practices for shaping the landscape, both imagined and real. The Israeli point of view imagines it is detached from the landscape, trapped in colonial dreams as it longs to unite with it, thus realizing the modern paradox, I suggest, preventing Zionists from turning back into indigenous people. iv

Following the movement of the Zionist flow, its representations and practices, I will define its point of view as modern, and connect it to its types of occupation, characterizing the penetration, expansion and consolidation of the imperial landscape into the hybrid landscape. In the following research chapters, I will show how the Zionist imagination is stretched between a gaze westward towards a modern white future detached from the place, and a gaze eastward towards a mythical Jewish local past. These vectors combine in the landscape, shaping the Israeli habitus, and the modern paradox that dominates the Israeli-Palestinian landscape. The paradoxical attitude, I suggest, is embodied in the separation between the western landscape of the Israeli territory and the eastern landscape of the occupied territories. They are both controlled by modern practices of purification, while their unity under the Israeli modern state occupation depends on their separation. The separation wall between the two landscapes, as I will suggest, is a monumental representation of the modern paradoxical point of view in its Zionist variation, a grandiose image of the contemporary management methods of the imperial landscape, and a conceptual expression of the vision regime of the Israeli landscape. I will argue that imperialism does not begin or end with the land or the indigenous, but rather by adapting the colonial way of looking, and by maintaining its sight within the walls of its imagination.

To summarize the work, in the final discussion I will return to the relationship between the flowing movement of the landscape and the purifying imagination of separations, and to the non- modern possibility offered by sectionscaping observation - to see the landscape from aside, with all of its width, height and depth - an observation that celebrates multiplicity and marvels at the complexity; that is curious about movement and open to the eternal change embodied within the landscape, recognizing the divine beauty of the whole.

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INTRODUCTION

Imperial Landscape

In my reading of landscape I observe it simultaneously as an image and reality, following the reading of W.J.T Mitchell, an important scholar of visual culture studies. He explores images and the structures of power they reflect and project, while shaping false conceptions of reality.

Mitchell (1992) has coined the phrase 'The Pictorial Turn', to define the modern cultural change from the textual to the visual. Beyond the symbolic and conceptual interpretations, Mitchell is interested in the social practices that establish the meaning of images and their place within culture. His insights reflect a confluence between his early attraction to the poetics of romantic visual imagination, and his later Marxist critique, which views images as an ideological apparatus and a source of power. Mitchell finds a deep polarity in the approach of people to images – on one side 'Iconophilia' (adoration of images which brings to idolatrous worship) and on the other ‘Iconophobia’ (fear and suspicion which expressed in deconstructing disgust). He suggests the concept of 'Metapicture' - a meta-category of self-aware images whose subjects are the representations themselves, a reflexive action that activates real power over its viewers and their reality (Abramson 2009a:8).

Mitchell is a key advocate of 'landscape critique', a discourse which reads landscape as a modern structural image and reality shaped by power. The concept of landscape in modern tradition is often represented by the genre of landscape painting, which in some respects has taken ownership over it. Mitchell, an art historian and image theoretician, observes space using landscape painting as a frame. Modern landscape painting emerged around the 16th-17th century as a western, European and modern form, he reviews. It formed 'a new way of seeing', claiming that it had discovered the appreciation of natural beauty and liberated it from god

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(Mitchell, 1994a:7-8). From an art history perspective, the genre of landscape painting is viewed as a modern form representing the modern liberation of 'nature', both as an esthetic as well as a scientific category, as part of the construction of ‘modern society'. The 'discovery' of landscape has been described as the moment of modern enlightenment, in between a dark medieval view and a modern humanist perspective (Mitchell, 1994a:11). Landscape painting, in its view over space, epitomized a 'natural language' of a cultural unity constructed by nature (within the frame) and modern society (the observers), by defining a separation between them. This distinction of modern landscape is the point of view that underlies the perception of modern space, and is responsible for shaping the modern order and its imperial expansion (Mitchell, 1994a:17-18).

Landscape, as a spatial concept, exists in many different cultures, but particularly and historically it is associated with European Imperialism (Mitchell 1994a:5). The standard picturesque landscape painting places the observer in a protected shaded spot, with screens on the sides, which provide a hiding place and arouse curiosity about the view in the center of the picture. This is a point of view of an animal that scans the landscape as a strategic field of expansion, forcing the viewer to play the role of a predator, and the landscape and its habitants to the role of prey (Mitchell 1994a:16). Imperialism, fundamental to the modern project, conceived itself as an expansion of landscape and a progressive development in history, spreading 'culture' and 'civilization' into a 'natural' space, in a process which it narrated as

'natural' (Mitchell, 1994a:17). Masking its interests, imperial landscape combined the modern view over nature with gaining possession over space, separating it in order to take control over it (Mitchell 1994a:10). Framing an imagination of separation between 'humans' and 'nature', imperialism also separated 'the moderns' from the wild indigenous of the landscape. 'The Others' were placed within the conventions of modern landscape painting, taking part in its 'natural' beauty set, an erotic representation that is open to the imperial gaze and its colonial and national manipulations. (Mitchell, 1994a:22-24) (For the picture Mitchell presents as an example for this notion, see figure 2).

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Figure 2: J.A. Gilfillan, 'A Native Council of War' (1853), the Hocken Library, Dunedin, New Zealand. The Maori war council has been placed within the serpentine "line of beauty" - considered by many as 'the iconic form of visual curiosity, of access to the varieties of the visual experience' (Mitchell, 1994a:22-23)

While characterizing the conventions of imperial landscape painting, Mitchell also challenges them, revealing the violent imagination and violent blindness they represent.

Analyzing European landscape representations prior to the 16th century, Mitchell challenges the historical purification of landscape as a modern painting phenomena. The transitions, or developments, in the articulation of the ways in which modern landscape has presented itself throughout historical shifts - from ancient to modern, from classic to romantic, from Christian to secular, from realism to conceptualism – are all parts of a continuous search for a pure and transparent representation of nature (Mitchell, 1994a:13). He also extends the term landscape across its geographical boundaries, challenging the notion that landscape is a uniquely western

European art. Mitchell weaves a net of influences between European landscapes and those of

- 3 - different civilizations, raising fundamental questions about the Eurocentric bias of landscape discourse and its myths of origin (Mitchell, 1994a:8-9). Finally, he challenges the imperial assumption that the landscape takes on significance only under the modern gaze. The placement of the indigenous in their 'natural' state, as part of the landscape, forces upon them the modern imperial order that separates 'nature' in order to invent modern culture. The native though, is not only a passive field for colonization, Mitchell argues,, but a vital expansive form of life that has its own landscape ambitions, its own sense of place, cultural and spatial conventions, and its own point of view (Mitchell, 1994a:27) (Mitchell finds representation of the indigenous observation over landscape, in a Maori statue figure out of a New Zealand landscape painting, see figure 3).

Figure 3: Augustus Earle, 'Distant View of the Bay of Islands, New Zealand' (ca. 1827), the Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia. Mitchell sees the Maori statue as an indication of the existence of the indigenous practice of stopping still just to look over landscape, and giving it meaning. (Mitchell 1994:25)

Imperial landscape reflects a modern powerful point of view, which is both asymmetrical and violent, regarding itself as free of superstitions or conventions, and claiming to be different and essentially superior to everything that preceded or is external to 'us'. 'The evil eye', as Mitchell

- 4 - calls this point of view, projects itself over space, and shapes a 'sacred silent language' of modern separations, which play a role in a process of 'emancipating' and then 'naturalizing' space, intending to eventually be 'unified' with it, for its own purposes (Mitchell, 1994a:8-9).

Landscape produces violence and oppression, while masking itself as pastoral. It conceals the actual basis of its values in a modern paradoxical argument – after taking god out of the equation, landscape naturalizes its conventions, while conventionalizing its nature. It is a natural image mediated by culture, which is both represented and presented space. It is a signifier and a signified, a frame and what a frame contains, a real place and its simulacrum, a package and the commodity inside the package (Mitchell 1994a:5).

Holy Landscape

'Holy Landscape' is a term suggested by Mitchell as an image of pureness that drives the

Israeli occupation, going deeper in exposing the complex power which imperial landscape holds in Israel-Palestine (Mitchell, 2000). The logic of the concept, he claims, was expressed in different imperial landscapes – in Kosovo, Ireland, The Americas, South Africa, and innumerable other 'promised lands' – they all carry it with varying degrees of ferocity and religious fervor. However, 'Holy Landscape' is certainly tied to the specific geographical place of Jerusalem, and its hinterlands. In Zionism, as in Christian imagination and in modernism,

'Holy Landscape' refers to the 'Promised land', the pastoral surroundings of the holy city of

Jerusalem. This spatial concept evokes images of paradise, and milk-and-honey, a blessed land that made whole, unified in peace and harmony' (Mitchell, 2000:193-194). Being a central territory to the three great religions of The Book, the real-land that carries this image stood out along its history as an arena for imperial and local struggles, as is still the case today. The Holy

Land is sacred with blood, of several millennia of conquests, crusades, and holy wars. It is an

- 5 - image of a blessed site that lies under a curse, as this mystical image still generates the landscape in the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and still, Mitchell argues, this image serves as an impenetrable barrier to peace, as it was for centuries (Mitchell, 2000:206).

Since the 19th century, the Holy Landscape has been revealed strictly as part of a strategy of conquest and appropriation of territory under the cover of a modern moral crusade, and a national liberation (Mitchell, 2000:217-218). While naturalizing power relations in the shadows of its pureness, Zionist landscape is busy purifying and erasing history and legibility, in its shaping of a national home (Mitchell, 2000: 194). It has become a place where symbolic, imaginary, and real violence, implode on an actual social space, making it into a holy territory.

'Territory' reminds Mitchell of the word 'terror', in its use to enforce boundaries with violence and fear (Mitchell, 2000:206-207) The Israeli-Palestinian landscape is a territory under conflict between two mediums of spatial organization - one of traditional collections and organic topographic curves; the other of modern geometric shapes and separating lines. This collision shapes a landscape full of divisions and asymmetric separations, between controlled 'passive' landscape that is 'observed', and the controlling eye of modern architecture (Mitchell demonstrates this critical landscape-reading in figure 4). Mitchell argues against Zionism that when territory becomes the site of terror, it is not enough to drive out its indigenous people, but the very landscape must be purged of their traces, their claims, their history, their 'idols', which indicate their claim over it. Zionist iconoclasm has little to do with Jewish religious piety or moral disapproval of idolaters, but it refers to national landscape as one of the greatest 'Idols' which beset human's minds (Mitchell, 2000:205). He suggests to contain the idolatry of holy landscape under the rule of the second biblical commandment, 'Do not make yourself an idol', expressing the severity of the modern-Zionist landscape performance over space. It has a

- 6 - perverse logic, he states, of turning itself from the gift of god into an obscene idol that demands human sacrifice (Mitchell, 2000:193-194).

Figure 4: Jean Mohr, 'Israel: Settlement of Ramot near Jerusalem' (1979), From Edward Said and Mohr, 'after the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (Ney York, 1985) p. 73. The Israeli building on the right serves as the "side screen" of the landscape photograph, reminds to Mitchell a watchtower or fortress. Its polyhedral design expresses a kind of modernist organicism that serves to heighten the picturesque sentimentalizing of the village (Mitchell 1994:28)

Mitchell argues that the concept of landscape that dominates the discourse of western art history is one that resolutely focused on 'visual and pictorial representation', on 'the scenic, picturesque, and superficial face presented by natural terrain'. It’s a reduction to what can be seen from a distant point of view, a prospect that dominates, frames, and codifies landscape

(Mitchell, 2000:197). Mitchell reads the imperial landscape in terms of 'a surface model', rather than 'depth models' that are constructed as 'an excavation below our conventional sight-level to recover the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath the surface'. Landscape is a net of images, representations, and stereotypes, which while often demonstrate false and superficial ideas, they have considerable power to mobilize political passions. Although landscape, and particularly

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'Holy Landscape', is related to the past, drawing his inspiration from imaginary memories, it is not really about remembering but all about forgetting, Mitchell declares. The surface of landscape holds remarkable capacity to open up false depths, selective memories, and self- serving-myth, while erasing and rendering invisible the rival myths, creating icons of national and imperial destiny, shaping the idol of landscape (Mitchell 2000:195-196).

Mitchell conceptualizes Holy Landscape with 'a thick-less surface' that covers the land, a sign for the amnesia and erasure of its deeper layers, veiling history with the 'natural beauty' of the view. He claims that the appreciation of landscape as an aesthetic object cannot be an occasion for complacency or untroubled contemplation; rather landscape must be the focus of a historical, political, and aesthetic alertness to the violence and evil written on the land, projected there by the gazing eye of imperial landscape (Mitchell 1994a:28-30). Thinking about the politics of landscape could not be conducted in an aesthetic vacuum, politics has to engage in complex dialectical negotiations with landscape, questions its form, its affects, and sensibility with cultural formations (Mitchell 2000:199). However, he doubts the power of critical historical analysis, and its arguments, to disenchant or dethrone modern idolatry images. No one has ever been argued out of an ideology or persuaded by reason to give up an idol, he states

(Mitchell, 2000:196). The field of landscape criticism, Mitchell states as one of its main advocates, went beyond the history of painting to include poetry, fiction, travel literature, landscape gardening and more. While exposing the complexes of modern landscape, its critique had emptied it from its illusive content, making it empty and boring as life (Mitchell, 1994a:5-

6). Landscape critique, he asserts, is an expression of the loss of innocence about landscape, but somehow, it doesn’t succeed to reconstruct a revised landscape instead. Although we admit that landscape is 'nothing but a bag of tricks, a bunch of conventions and stereotypes', using

Mitchell’s words, we still manage to call it a 'natural medium' (Mitchell, 1994a:17). Frustrated from the loss that produces no fruit except emptiness, he suggests that imaginations of landscape - 8 - have 'to divulge their own hollowness' and 'vomit up the human sacrifices they have demanded'.

Instead of striking the idols of landscape and smashing them, his conceptual suggestion is 'to tap them', 'to make them sound and resonate', 'working through the idols'. (Mitchells 2000:196).

Mitchell supports Palestinian national claims, but while doing so, he detects problems with the long exposure of the landscape of

Palestine to the modern order of seeing, and its implications of violence. A modern territorial perspective dictates the ways in which Palestine is being grasped, framed, hedged about, shaped, controlled, surveilled from every possible perspective, reducing it to the shallow status of landscape national ownership, he claims (Mitchell, 2000:207).

Mitchell draws an option for working-class solidarity which has agency within the landscape itself, a resistance to the Figure 5: Poster of resistance to urban renewal in old Jaffa. The destruction made by modernization, its text is bi-lingual and signed by Jews and Arabs, prompting Mitchell to divert the equation of struggle from Israeli- modern ideas and development Palestinian to that of landscape loyalists against the work of the modern landscaping (Mitchell 2000:207). (demonstrating the vision of the ideal solidarity of landscape unity over all its inhabitants Mitchell brings the poster in figure 5). He suggests a unity of landscape in the face of the modern separations, questioning its national identities, questioning the relations between the modern practices of sovereignty and the hybrid nature of landscape, including its inhabitants. Landscape, Mitchell believes, can yet reconstruct itself from a means of modern possession into a means of reconciliation among all its inhabitants. Israeli-Palestinian territory has to be understood as 'a work of landscape art in - 9 - progress', it has to continue and ask 'what vision of this land can be imagined, what geographical poetry can be recited over it, to heal, repair, unite, understand, and commemorate this place'.

Landscape is 'a passage', he suggests, comparative and global, imaginary and symbolic, as well as a real entity (Mitchell, 2000:220-221).

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THEORY

Modern Constitution

As a theoretical frame for this work, I will use the text 'We have never been Modern'

(1993), by the French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist of science, Bruno Latour

(Latour 1993). Latour’s interest in society, science, and technology has led him to produce a conceptual and practical reconstructing point of view over modernity and the contemporary cultural situation. His approach challenges the modern division of subject/object, and he focuses on connecting rather than separating them. Latour is one of the primary developers of Actor

Network Theory (ANT), central to an understanding of networked structures through a reconstructionist approach. He argues that technology, society, nature and so on are tangles of networks to be learned. The actors taking part in the networks, both subjects and objects, are varied in kind, and have an active effect over our real world (Hubbard 2006:141-147).

Although Latour’s writing has continued since 'We have never been Modern', that was first published in 1991 (translated to English in 1993), is still a foundational text. His anthropological reading of modern science produced a subversive structural understanding of the modern existence, which fits Mitchell's ideas about the imperial and holy landscape. Latour presents an intensive political text which spans modernity, exposes its imagination, and questions its future in the era of networks. In the contemporary discourse of ANT, landscape is widely being used to express textures and character of networks - technological, social, economic, or urban. I use his notion of 'modern constitution', and follow his ideas for a 'non- modern' one, to reflect over the landscape that Mitchell examined, the Israeli-Palestinian in particular. I will suggest the ‘non-modern constitution’ as frame to read this landscape, with its

- 11 - geopolitical weight, both theoretical and practical, exploring an option of reconstructing 'non- modern landscape'.

In his extensive anthropological research, Latour presents a mechanism of two polarized practices, which he recognizes as the fundamental structure of modern conceptual existence -

'translation' vs. 'purification'. His analysis is both conceptual and theoretical, but also practical and reconstructive. These two practices, with the complex asymmetrical relations between them, are what makes modernity ambitious and powerful, he claims (Latour, 1993:37). The work of translation mixes things and creates hybrid ideas and forms, while the work of purification defines things, and puts them in order, in separated territories (Latour, 1993:10). Put simply,

'translation' is about connecting while 'purification' is about making separations. The pair are interdependent – purification uses the hybrid forms as a resource for its work, while unordered connections are being encouraged by the intrusive work of defining. Leaning on each other, both practices are fundamental in shaping the modern project, but being contradicting practices, they cannot be seen as a whole. This is the modern paradox, Latour suggests - a dual work whose denial is fundamental to its existence, to modern culture, to its thinking, creation and being

(Latour 1993:11).

The contradicting work of the two practices, and its denial, are fixed tightly in what

Latour calls – 'the modern constitution'. The constitution protects itself by hiding its paradoxical essence in modern thinking, shaping structure of stable dichotomies, which are asymmetric in its point of view (Latour, 1993:13). Modernity defines and reproduces dichotomies while ignoring their illusiveness, such as 'nature' and 'society', 'subjects' and 'objects', 'past' and 'future',

'us' and 'them', 'mind' and 'soul', 'me' and 'the other' and so on. Modernity uses purifying separations, pushing thing into definitions, from which it derives its rules. Shaped by mediated resources, and challenged by their existence, modernity denies its hybrid parts. This paradoxical

- 12 - relationship is evident in Latour’s example of the division that distinguishes the judiciary from the executive branch of a government – they must be separate although both are actually shaped in multiple links, intersecting influences, in continual negotiations between judges, politicians, and other actor networks which are involved (Latour, 1993:13-14). Dichotomies guarantee the constitution’s stability, and this is the importance of separations: they shape a safe and understandable modern space, even if it is imagined.

Figure 6: Modern Constitution dichotomies (Latour 1993:11)

Latour defines two main dichotomies: the first dichotomy between human culture and nonhuman nature; and the second dichotomy between the purified products of modern separations and the hybrid connections of networks, which are still in disorder (Latour, 1993:11)

(for schematic description of the double separation see figure 6). The second dichotomy, between cultural pure forms and hybrids networks, was already defined with the constitutional separation between the two modern practices. The first dichotomy, which corresponds to

Mitchell's definition of a modern landscape, separates the natural world from social humanity, and follows the same complex paradoxical character - while modern existence and order depends on their separation, they never are and cannot be separated (Latour, 1993:13). On one - 13 - side of the first dichotomy are human beings, which hold the power to construct society and freely determine their own destiny. On the other is nature, which has already existed, we are only discovering its secrets (Latour, 1993:30). The human side of the first dichotomy, the side of the subjects, is represented in political power; the other side, the one of things, is represented by scientific power – as if each side is independent (Latour 1993:29). With the understanding that the modern concept of nature, on one hand, is constructed for society’s use; and that society, on the other, does not exists without it, the modern paradox starts to be heard. Modernity, Latour analyses, allows nature to intervene with society, the one that shaped its transcendent character; while it allows society to be the only actor in its political field, held together by the mobilization of nature and its resources for the benefit of modernity. Latour argues that people are not separate from things, there is no pure social force, and no pure natural mechanism, apart from the modern purifying imagination (Latour, 1993:32-33). Shaped together under the same modern acts of purification, nature and society share the same modern oppression, which pushes out of site all contradicting forms.

Like the imperial landscape, modern constitution is what gives the modern project its power to expand without limits, shaping 'new worlds' for its needs, doing the same to its 'old world' from the inside, while constantly justifying it all (Latour, 1993:38). And like Mitchell,

Latour extends his separating mechanism to explain the continuous division between 'us' - modern westerners - and 'them' - all other cultures (Latour, 1993:12). He labels those collectives of 'them' as 'cultures-natures', representing a mixture between humans and nature, blending also the gods which went out of the modern imaginary (Latour, 1993:37). Premoderns are 'monists', in the sense of holding a unifying point of view that allows multiplicities to coexist. Latour quotes the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who described 'native' as

'a being of tying threads', joining the physical with the social and mental. When something changes in one of these spheres, the others are modified as well, in unexpected and unpredictable - 14 - forms. Premoderns, Latour argues, managed the mixture of the divine, the human and the natural using concepts, rather than definitions (Latour, 1993:42).

Figure 7: The two Great Divides (Latour 1993:99)

This is something moderns cannot accept as part of their cultural sphere, although in practice, they perform it as well - everything is actually mediated, translated, part of a matrix of networks (Latour, 1993:37). This total way of seeing things, and of being, is unknown to modernity, incomprehensible for modern people, and problematic for modern regimes, as it keeps threatening the imagined and safe order of divisions, and the rule of modernity (Latour,

1993:38). Colonial power accused 'them' of working under irrational laws and practices that kept them behind, and when faced with the modern mechanism - 'they' become 'premodern', in contrast (ibid 1993:39) (for schematic description of the separation 'us' and 'them' see figure 7).

Moderns have two problematic options when dealing with natives - the hybrid people are supposed to be incorporated either into modern society, or into nature. The first option demands

- 15 - total obedience to the constitution, while the second takes one away from human rights (Latour,

1993:131). By working on emptying, sweeping, and cleaning the arena of 'society-nature', colonialism was supposed to re-incorporate these humans 'back' into culture, and bless them with modern liberalism, while feeding the insatiable structures of modernity and its capital.

Although they are required to translate themselves into modernity, premoderns cannot be seen as elements of 'real society', so long as they are incapable of carefully hiding any representation of hybridity. The constitution allows for an accelerated socialization of 'them', but demands that they refrain from any process of translating, which they naturally cannot stop doing (Latour,

1993:42).

Latour contends that the development of critical thinking has arrived to a point where it cannot explain the truth any more, truth is gone, and everything is fake. Nature, society, politics, economy, god – are all found in everything, and cannot be purified. The capacity of frameworks to maintain hybrids in their place, lacks the power to carry the current proliferation of forms in the era of information and networks. Widening hybridity into endless combinations - first through colonialism and now again with the work of contemporary technology and the world of flows - questions modernity’s ability to swallow its own unacceptable networked creations

(Latour, 1993:6). It appears that the contemporary overflow of multiplying hybrids can no longer be kept in place. The modern constitution is collapsing under its own weight (Latour, 1993:49), and the tortuous relations of modernity with the former colonial world are about to be transformed (Latour, 1993:11). The move forward from modernity is inevitable and cannot be ordered as modernity wants, as hybrid forms are gaining power. Networks, which started spreading widely in the late 20th century, are changing our world, in the influential scale of

Christianity (Latour, 1993:71). The development of modern thinking, together with the emergence of non-modern forms, have enabled us to see the complex paradox of the modern constitution by which we live. In the current situation, the contradictions of the modern world - 16 - are being exposed by too many (Latour, 1993:130-131). The absorbance of the modern constitution is uncovered, and the choice not to see its contradictions renders one purposely blind - a moral choice.

A Non-Modern Constitution

Latour proclaims that exposing the paradoxical character of modernity, emptying it from its power, will end modernity, whose imagined state of separation had actually never existed

(Latour, 1993:12). He suggests modern thinking should concentrate on learning from the hybrid forms, rather than attempt to put them in order. He classifies four points of view developed by modernity to explain things, which by the law of constitution do not, and cannot, work together, although they are a good start for observing non-modern landscape. One is the actual nature of things, their external reality; another is the social bond, which includes politics and power; a third point of view deals with signification and meaning, including narratives; and a fourth focuses on the depth of being (Latour 1993:88-89). Latour wishes to have the option to construct all four together, claiming that they in fact work together furtively. He draws an option of continuity between those four points of view, suggesting to shed light on the work of translation, thus constructing a new constitution in which things can simultaneously be real as nature, narrated as discourse, collective as society, existential as being (Latour 1993:90). For moderns, although everything happens in between these categories, although everything is mediated, translated, part of a network - it is as if this place does not exist (Latour, 1993:37). Giving this place a presence is something unavoidable, but still one can choose to continue and work the constitution, ignoring what has to be seen now, defending the colonizing work of modernity; or

- one can choose to observe both hands, what it allows and what it forbids, practicing both

- 17 - mediation and purification. In the last case though, Latour points out, one will cease to be wholly modern (Latour, 1993:11).

Modernity holds many versions, yet all its definitions point in one way or another to the passage of time (Latour, 1993:10). Latour uses an allegory, in which the past is pushed forward by bulldozers. This allegory represents the asymmetrical power that works over time as well as space, pushing towards a ‘civilized future’ (Latour 1993:130). Modernity embraces its future eternity on one hand, its temporary past on the other, while in the middle it mixes between the two, as if no one sees (Latour, 1993:74). Modernity understands progress as a systematic change of revolutionary brakes, and temporality puts the time which elapsed between past revolutions order in (Latour, 1993:72). Revolutions are used to explain development as a way of liberation from the past and its old rule, while the anthropological view of Latour constructs history as a crisscrossed process. He accepts revolutions as times of mediators' emergence, but points out that a revolution is a modern act of emergency, needed for tearing people away from the past

(Latour, 1993:130), yet also for terrifying them from change (Latour, 1993:35). Latour's historical view, which he presents throughout his anthropologic writing, has a continuous and progressive flow, shaped by a multiplicity of paths and connections (Latour, 1993:73). He views history as a result of coincidental meetings, a long process characterized by unpredictable introductions of hybrids (Latour, 1993:69-70). Non-moderns are not obliged to maintain modern temporality, as it offers no good explanation about the past, and its future is no longer so promising (Latour, 1993:74). If indeed the work of purification can no longer be separated from the work of translation, and hybrid forms will be free from the threat of definition, than it is all only a continuation of history. It is the way forward, not through 'revolutions', but under long and stretched practices of reconstructing (Latour, 1993:48).

- 18 -

Latour suggests a reconstructive point of view, which he distinguishes from critical thinking and its three approaches – naturalization, socialization and deconstruction (Latour,

1993:6). He suggests to reconstruct what we understand as modernism, under the hybrid understanding of networks, of crossing separations between forms, of observing them as much as possible as they are – as ties of connections and as a whole. In contrast to modern thinking that had always taken a side in the dichotomy, Latour suggests to reestablished symmetry under the asymmetrical order of the constitution – between society and nature, between ‘us’ and

‘them’, between collectives (Latour, 1993:130).

By assigning power to hybrid forms Latour does not ask to neglect the co-production of sciences and society, or other form of purifications. His inclusive concept accepts the existence of an imagined purification, as a particular case of the work of mediation, without the secrecy of the mediators (Latour, 1993:134). Modernity, with its hybrids located in the dark, holds thousands of connections which perform a topology that is not yet seen. Liberating things from the need to be defined, freeing them to move from side to side of the modern dichotomies, or to be at the same time on both sides, mixing other dichotomies, or bringing up something which wasn't defined yet, all give room to the option of existing in the middle, which can give some relief to modern tensions and dichotomies – 'us' and 'them', or 'global' and 'local', for example

(Latour, 1993:116). The question of place in a world of flows will be opened again, economies will be affected, and our political networks of power will have to adjust (Latour, 1993:122).

Culture will keep on regulating the proliferation of hybrids, but will reorient its attitude, by giving hybrid existence both representation and official approval (Latour, 1993:12). In the last decade of the 20th century, Latour had predicted a slowdown in cultural and political production, and a change in the encouraging effect purification has over translations, since when the first will moderate, so will the other (Latour, 1993:130).

- 19 -

The non-modern constitution suggested by Latour, holds four main characteristics: First

- continuity between modern dichotomies. Nature and Society, as one of the great ones, share spaces of hybridity in between them. The continued situation is used for establishing an axis of tensions instead of separation. Along it every hybridity can take its position, shaping a continuous unit. Latour maintains that in this condition of non-separation, every concept, every institution, and every practice that interferes with the character of the whole, will be deemed dangerous, harmful, and immoral. Second characteristic – the reshaping of modern dichotomies into distinctions, which are much less absolute. Latour seeks to keep some of modernity’s qualities – the understanding of nature and things as objectively transcendent, together with the subjective immanent power of humanity to shape itself – without obligation to binarity. Contrary to what the modern constitution claims, it can continue to be produced, with translation work as a central part. Latour does not reject the modern ideas of objective nonhumans or free societies.

Moreover, he expresses the important of distinctions in keeping low the 'wild and uncontrollable character of networks' (Latour, 1993:140).

A third characteristic of the non-modern constitution is the option to choose to combine multiple associations freely without confronting a choice of a side or order, without being assigned a specific definition of identity. It is the ability to be both 'a thing' and 'one', to choose

'archaized' with 'modernized', some 'local' and a bit 'global', 'cultural' and 'universal', 'natural' and 'social' - or any other positions in the matrix. It is the neo-liberation of a complex identity, which was moved from structural society and the politics of identities, to the hybrid existence.

Everything, then, can have a place without being positioned, excluded, or included (Latour,

1993:141). The fourth and last characteristic is the art of regulating hybrids without purifying them. It is a challenging characteristic, dealing with power and ethics, as its measures are flexible and yet unknown. Power structures will have to be extended in a way that will also

- 20 - include those who are not pure moderns. By directing non-moderns to examine modern democracy again, Latour undermines one of the pillars of modernity (Latour, 1993:142).

While for years the modern constitution explained everything, it never gained a profound learning of the work of mediators (Latour, 1993:46-47). The world of hybrid connections is where Latour suggests to focus the attention of representation, to adapt it as the field of non- modern research. Hybrids are not something modernity doesn’t know, as it keeps blending them; they are all around, all over the items in the news, everything is blended while we attempt to explain them under the rules of modern reason (Latour, 1993:1-3). The work of non-moderns is to study hybridity, to reconstruct it under the non-modern constitution, in the shape of networks.

Representing the multiple connections of things is the practice of 'retying the threads of our existence'. The double separation, Latour claims, is what should be tied again - between humans and what is not, between culture and hybrid forms (Latour, 1993:13), between the exact knowledge and the exercise of power, between nature and culture (Latour, 1993:3), and between

'us' westerners, and 'them', all the rest (Latour, 1993:99-100). Latour connects between them all since reconstructing the ties of one is effective or even necessary for the other (Latour,

1993:101). The work of the non-modern researcher is 'To retie the Gordian knot', Latour declares

(Latour, 1993:3). The intricate knot, dedicated to the gods by the ancient king Midas, is used as an allegory of the matrix of our networks, a whole which has to be reconstructed, after it was cut in two, in one sharp strike with the sword of the great imperialist, Alexander of Macedonia.

In the non-modern constitution, modern dichotomies become 'directions', in a way that reminds Latour of the distance between east and west, where everything is spread in the middle

(Latour, 1993:85). Representing the mediators, Latour ascribes to the forms of modern

'directions' of "Nature" and "Subject/Society" the horizontal axis. The position of things along it represents the measure of relation to each of the horizontal poles, as in a graph. It's no longer

- 21 -

Figure 8: Hybrid representation - between the poles of the X axis, with additional properties on the Y axis. (Latour 1993:86) has to take place on either side of the dichotomous system, but it can take its real natural place somewhere along the axis between them (for a schematic representation of hybrid forms see figure 8). But this reference of direction remains one-dimensional if only a horizontal character of things is represented. Classifying the entire set of entities along a single line will be reductive

(Latour, 1993:85). The mediators need a vertical axis as well, as the option to hold more measures, dimensions, qualities or properties along an additional (see figure 8) (Latour,

1993:50-51). Even when moving along it freely, the modern horizontal directions are not enough to describe hybridity, and latitude information is needed (Latour, 1993:88). Such images, says

Latour, will make it possible to deploy a representation of both the modern constitution and its - 22 - practice, while exploring non-modern existence (Latour, 1993:85). He calls this representation of the hybrid texture of things a map, showing the space between east and west, which he names the mediated sphere (Latour, 1993:86). Maps, however, cannot represent latitude. The section,

I suggest here, suits those requirements better, as a tool for representing hybrids, together with the frames of purifications, observing the mixture of things, learning its connections and relations, representing a cut through the texture of things, through landscape.

- 23 -

METHODOLOGY

Sectionscaping

In 'sectionscaping' I refer, first, to the traditional architectural technique of drawing cross

'sections', which together with 'plans' and 'elevations' form the standard modern set of technical construction drawings. The section's horizontal gaze reveals a side-view of the building, after

'cutting' across it vertically along a marked line (For an example of the architectural set - plan, elevation and section – along with the section-line that crosses the plan, see figure 9). It uncovers hidden views of inner voids, exposes the vertical dimension of the space, and helps understand the building’s structure. Yet the plan is the dominant architectural drawing type, representing an overview which provides a wide understanding of the ordering of the floor plane. Sections are mostly perceived as an additional tool, relating specifically to the line they follow across the plan, limited to it, as if they provide ‘thinner’ information. But sections has the character of a scheme, expressing principles of spatial connections and main structural relations. By sharing their horizontal point of view with people, architectural sections are also effective in mediating human vision. Their use of symbols of both subjects (people) and objects (trees etc.) enables sections to provide the viewer with a sense of scale and a feeling of presence within the representation.

Sectional representations are also common in other disciplines of spatial design, such as technical drawing of landscape architecture, urban design and infrastructure planning.

Typically, as the scale of the represented space increases, the use of sections mostly decreases.

Nevertheless, large-scale spatial sections are used in geology, for example, as tools to expose underground information, study formation processes of land and learn its structure. In other disciplines, such as botany, sections are used in niche studies in the disciplinary periphery, following its inter-relations to geography. In archeology, sections not only cross space but also - 24 - time, representing a methodology of excavations that expose actual sections of layers of time.

Sections are also used in contexts of surveys, where they may signify statistical figures such as calculated ratios or samples, or population data. Sections can signify divisions of texts in typography, as well as in some other fields, or the position of an instrumental group within an orchestra. In music, it is also a description of a complete but not independent musical idea. And finally, in different fields, sections are used in their fundamental act of cutting, such as in anatomy and surgery operations, where the section is both a practice and a representation.

Figure 9: Andrea Palladio, Villa Capra (La Rotonda), Vicenza, 1566. Set of drawings, Source: Archweb: https://www.archweb.it/

Sections were widely used during the Renaissance, in various fields such as anatomy, mechanics, architecture and geography. With the growing interest in science, the section was an instrument to describe and understand inner hidden data of structures. During this period, architectural sections, plans and elevations became the hegemonic set of professional architecture drawing. In 1519, Renaissance masters Raffaello Sanzio and Baldassarre

Castiglione used a section in a letter to Pope Leo X for describing the remains of ancient Rome.

Their letter placed the format of the section in the context of a critical debate around the character of technical drawing, between orthogonal projections and perspectives. While

- 25 - perspective was increasingly used in Renaissance drawings, it was criticized as an illusion which reformatted the object in order to imitate human vision, thus making it irrelevant as a technical tool. Raffaello argued that projected view communicates informative data directly, making it relevant for practical and scientific use (Evans 2000:381).

Yet as mentioned earlier, the primary tool in architectural drawing continues to be the plan. It provides an overview which communicates information efficiently, but does not reflect a horizontal point of view. In this respect the plan is similar to the overview provided by the map, which is more relevant to the geographic scale of the landscape. The section, with its projected side view, differs from both the perspectival view of landscape painting, as well as from the flattening point of view of the map, which was used as a central imperialist type of representation. Maps were highly developed and used in early modernity, and in the context of the rise of scientific thought they were perceived to be authentic representations of space (Harley

1988:299-300). While modern cartography perceives maps as a measured tool which technically and accurately describes space, critical thinking sees the map as a powerful intermediary representation of modern space (Harley 1988:277). Maps are interpreted as semiotic instruments which use graphic language and symbols to indicate space. As an iconographic tool, the map is not only a language but also an object with meaning, intentions and influence (Harley 1988:278).

Critical scholars (Harley, 1988; Anderson, 1991; Benvenisty, 2001) viewed maps as instruments of imperial power, used as tools for exploring the new worlds, conquering territory, and controlling land and population. Maps were instrumental in the spread of capitalism since early modernity, providing the initial means for defining ground plots and indicating ownerships and land values (Harley 1988:284-285). Maps were also central to de-Colonizing processes of dividing land into territories of imagined national collectives and modern states (Anderson

1991:163-186). The map, as a representation of cartographic knowledge and expertise, holds

- 26 - the power of shaping the land and is used as a mental and practical tool of control (Foucault,

1977:141-149(. Cartographic control is a dominant authoritative source, not only because it determines the span of the ruled territory, but also because it unfolds the hegemonic order - sociological, economic and political (Giddens, 1981:1-25). Critical thinking finds the map, like the landscape drawing, to be a deceptive representation that shapes false consciousness of space.

It deconstruct the mechanisms behind mapping, and the modern order which maps enforce onto space (Harley 2011: 7-8).

I argue that sections, unlike maps, are convenient for representing the non-modern landscape. Sections differ from maps because they represent the retinal characters of the landscape - its continuity, flexible transformability, and its texture. Moreover, they can display different layers of the landscape in a single representation. Thus, they can represent not only the connections along a cross-section, but also the relations between the various networks that make up landscape, functioning as a geographical graph. Such images were used in the 19th century creating informative representations of scientific research data, and revealing relations between the different components of the 'natural' landscape (Bunkse, 1981) (for examples see figures

10&11). I argue that it is possible to adopt this technique and develop it into the geopolitical field, by adding layers from the field of human geography to the section of the matrix, which will add to the space its political dimensions. Contemporary geopolitical sections can cross any computerized data with geographic anchoring, representing its hybrid nature. I suggest that when 'natural' and 'human' geographies will be represented together on the same graph, the non- modern landscape will be represented.

- 27 -

Figures 10: Justus Perthes, Heights above Sea Level, c1855. The cross-sections provide a comparative view of mountain ranges.

Figure 11: Alexander von Humboldt, c1805, Mount Chimborazo, Geography of Plants in Tropical Countries, Paris. The section shows the relations between flora and topographic height

- 28 -

In the first chapter I will base my arguments on geopolitical cross sections made through different layers of the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, and observed in relation to their modern mapping. By crossing from the Mediterranean Sea to The Jordan River and The Dead Sea, I will try to characterize some of the non-modern features of the landscape. The sections will be based on reliable information, but rather than demonstrating professional Big Data technical skills, they will be schematic representations of it. Sectionscaping methodology can develop a variety of techniques for cutting layers of quantitative information but in order for it to be implemented in greater depth, more information and higher technical skills are required than performed here.

In addition to geographic data, I will also use professional literature in the various fields I cross, in order to deepen the gaze into the hybrid landscape and try to characterize something of its texture, movement, and inseparable connection with its human inhabitants.

The cross-section is not presented here only as a technical methodology, which crosses layers of geographic information and produces graphic sections, but also as a conceptual one.

After crossing the overview of modern mapping, in the following three chapters I will continue to cross Zionist landscape representations, different in their techniques but sharing the same modern separating point of view. Paintings and photographs of the Zionist landscape throughout its development in the past 150 years will be analyzed. I will follow the development of the

Zionist modern view of the landscape, and examine what has changed in it, and what remained permanent. A parallel observation of the development of the Israeli architectural landscape, will allow me to connect the modern view with the Zionist landscape, on both sides of the Green

Line. Finally, the geopolitical landscape, which embodies the power relations in space, will serve as another crossed layer of the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, representing it all together as a modern landscape stream within the matrix of non-modern landscape.

In order to do so, I will use significant representations of the Zionist landscape, as reflected in the Israeli literature, cutting between the fields of art history, the history of

- 29 - architecture and the geopolitical history of Zionist territorial expansion. The use of secondary sources in the study of Israeli observation of the landscape not only emphasizes its representational character, but also fits the character of the modern landscape as an imagined landscape that captures its viewers. The sections I propose are not merely products of a technical or conceptual methodology for exposing the non-modern features of the landscape, but also provide a theoretical point of view, liberated from imperial images. While modern images capture the viewers on both sides of the separations they shape, their cross-cutting allows us to observe them 'from the side', understand what is hidden behind them, and see some of them together, with their relations exposed. Theoretically, this is a non-modern perspective - one that is free to cross the various images of the landscape, without sanctify them as complete reality.

I call this observation sectionscaping, and it is explicitly committed to the non-modern constitution. As a practice of shaping representations, it is determined by the imagination of the person who shapes it, but as a non-modern image it is free from the need to conceal this, and is even obliged to reveal it. Adding to 'section' the suffix 'scape' emphasizes the affinity of sectionscaping for the continuous character of the landscape. This suffix is used today to represent the shift from binary to spatial reason in different fields, such as in border studies, suggesting 'borderscapes' as a fold, so to speak, in geopolitical space (Brambilla 2014). Further adding the suffix 'ing' is meant to emphasize sectionscaping’s interest in the changes of landscape through time and movement, and also relates to the notion of action, or practice, both also related to the changes within contemporary actors-networks structures. A similar use is demonstrated, for example, in the transition from 'border' to 'bordering' (Newman 2006). While in different fields 'landscape' is currently used to describe network structures, sectionscaping is proposed here as a methodology, but more than that as a type of observation, that seeks to reconstruct the 'original' landscape with its hybrid features, using a non-modern point of view in search for a non-modern landscape.

- 30 -

CASE STUDY

Hybrid Landscape

The Israeli-Palestinian landscape is a meeting place. It is located where the geological plate of Africa meets those of Euro-Asia, where the desert climate meets the temperate

Mediterranean one, where botanical, zoological and human flows from the south and north join in constructing the landscape. The long and narrow shape of this land has made this geographic unit a corridor, along which flora, fauna and human beings move, bringing together forms form different places. This narrow corridor is delimited by the Mediterranean Sea on its western side and the Dead Sea on the east, with mountains in between. Its cross section is shaped as an asymmetric fold: in its center, the ridge and its peak, the central mountain avenue; on the west the coastal plain strip, the sea, and beyond; and on the east the Jordan Valley rift, which folds upwards and eastwards to the Jordanian mountains and deserts. Crossing this section, one passes different geographic regions in a short distance and encounters edges of typical flows that are very close to each other. This landscape, a frontier for all its layers, is characterized by wide varieties of forms and of connections between them, it is a hybrid landscape by nature.

Historically, this land stretched along the Fertile Crescent Belt, between three well defined political and cultural regions: Egypt on the south - the land of the Nile River;

Mesopotamia on the north-east, where the civilizations of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers grew; and the land of Chits, 'Asia Minor', on the north-west (Shavit 1982:13). According to modern human geography, those were the places where the foundations of (modern) human civilization were laid in the late 4th and early 3rd millennia BC (Prawer 1982:7). The great kingdoms of this part of the world succeeded in shaping organized regimes and societies, with ambitions for expansion (Aharoni 1987; 7). Contemporary Israel-Palestine, together with Syria, formed an

- 31 - intermediate zone between those civilizations. Although this area did not have periods of long political independence, it was part of the regional early development of indicators of civilization

- such as the development of an alphabet, agriculture, early urbanism, monotheism, and more.

This territory was strategically important, since it was an economic, military, and political frontier, crossed by major trading routes. This position greatly affected the history of the place, characterized by cultural influences from both north and south, and by long periods of occupation by exterior forces (Aharoni, 1987 7-8).

The western shore provided the link to the islands of Mediterranean Sea, and to the rising centers of Athene and then Rome (Shavit 1982:8). The coastal area was influenced by outer forces, rather than developing a strong distinct local shipping culture. From the east side, the desert was also an influential factor, as nomadic societies met agricultural societies along this frontier, in an ongoing confrontation (Aharoni 1987; 8). And in the middle was the city of

Jerusalem, the heavenly and earthly, shaped through the centuries to become a powerful geopolitical image. For thousands of years it exists in hearts and minds of people all around the earth. People pray and dream for it, imagine and draw it, perform pilgrimages, fight and die for it, making this frontier landscape into a center (Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994(1):20-21) (Figure 12 presents a scheme of the main flow directions folding through the geopolitical corridor of Israel-

Palestine).

Historically, the land was divided, more than once, into distinct political or administrative units, or was part of wider political or cultural frames (Shavit 1982; 12). Zionist historiography views the Land of Israel as 'the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of

Books' (As stated in the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel). The Jews, who had

- 32 - been scattered over the years throughout the world, had preserved a collective identity and the memory of Jerusalem for two thousand years. Throughout the years, the Jewish Diaspora had suffered continuous attacks, resulting in massive injuries and killings due to its identity, and towards the 20th century secular Jewish national ideas were developed to address this (Ben

Arieh and Bartal 1983:258). Zionism envisioned the reunification of the people and the establishment of a national home in the ancient homeland. The Zionist project has been since to re-conquer the Promised Land, bringing with it a modern point of view, seeking to reshape the landscape into its own modern image. The Zionist movement is working to sever and reconnect the past, while ignoring the continuity of history and the Palestinians who have become the indigenous people of the land. Despite the efforts of Zionist historiography, the long chronicles of this landscape are the history of all its ethnic groups, clans, castes, peoples, languages, regimes, kingdoms, empires and cultures which have acted in this area, side by side and replacing each other. It holds strong connections to the history of external powers, flowing from nearby or from a distance, folding and tangling together the local with the regional and the global

(Shavit 1982:12).

Figure 12: The scheme presents the regional vector of the Fertile Crescent (relatively north-south), along with the vectors of the sea (from the west) and the Arabian Desert (from the east). In the middle, the center of Jerusalem is marked. - 33 -

Research Question

The typical Israeli-Palestinian cross section begins at the

Mediterranean Sea in the west with a shallow coastal plain, which rises to the east, up the hills, to the main mountain ridge of the land. Altitudes rise from sea-level up to 800~1000m in the central ridge, with peaks of 1,019m (Tall 'Asur) its north, and

1020m (Halhul) in its south. East of the main watershed, the section drops down steeply, to the Jordan rift and the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea, around 430m below sea level. This is a typical geomorphologic section of the geo-political unit comprising the Holy Land, and I will use it as a basis for the case study I present here: Sectionscaping Israeli-Palestinian landscape (The topographic map in figure 13 represents the landscape structure). The longitudinal structure of the land gives its cross section a representative validity (The five topographic sections that cross the map, S1-S5, are shown in Figure 14). Figure 13: The landscape structure is expressed by the variable colors of the Different sections produce different local cuts, and the sections topographic map. differ especially towards their edges. Moreover, it is customary to divide the sections of this land into two main geographic variants – northern, crossing Samaria Mountains (S4-S5), and southern, crossing Judea (S1-S2). But schematically, no matter where we cut, this is the typical west-east cross-section of the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, and it holds a large variety of meeting and connecting forms, along a narrow and compressed geography, between its different layers, and through time.

- 34 -

Figure 14: The five lines show different sections, but they share the same schematic 'fold'. Based on Google Earth, elevation profiles. Modern geography identifies the relations and connections between the various landscape networks - ground, climate, botany, etc. - and characterizes landscape units as territories where those flows of landscape generally overlap. Landscapes of this land are represented by the volumes of "The New Israel Guide" (Ben-Yosef (ed.), 2012), as can be seen in figure 15: the Sharon Coastal plain (8) and the Judea Coastal Plain (9) on the west, followed by the Judea Lowlands (10) , the Judea (11) and Samaria (7) Mountain ridges in the center, the

Judea Desert (13), and the Jordan River and Dead Sea valley in the east. Modern spatial perception occupies the landscape by dividing it into climatic zones, flora and fauna areas, plots of ownership, national territories, statistical areas, land uses etc. It explains the complexity of the landscape using maps, focusing on how things are separated from each other, rather than on - 35 - the ways they connect, relate to each other and have continuous textures. The modern separation of geography into landscape units therefore misses the folding nature of the landscape. The modern logic of the map defines what is 'outside' in contrast to what is 'inside', its regime is the modern constitution of Latour, and its source of power lies in its paradoxical modern point of view.

Cutting across the landscape exposes possibilities of seeing beyond the conceptual, as well as concrete, imperial surface. It allows us to see all the landscape layers together, to observe the relations between them, and to reconstruct the depth of the landscape. Sectionscaping will be practiced here in order to represent a non-modern landscape, understood as a multi- networked structure, a unity made of relations and connections, which is textured, and characterized by continuous movement. In revealing the gaps between the modern divisive logic and the non-modern networked reconstruction, I am interested particularly in the political question of separating Israeli-

Palestinian landscape. Whether it is a separating border between two states, or a separating wall that allows the Israeli occupation to protect its territory while continuing its control over the West Figure 15: The map of volumes of "The New Israel Guide" (Ben-Yosef (ed.), 2012). Source: Kotar virtual Bank - splitting the land is the hegemonic suggested solution to library, www.kotar.co.il/. the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. From the left and from the right sides of the political map, separation represents the modern reasoning, whereas the landscape actually flows.

In my act of Sectionscaping the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, I will cross the imagined separation, observe its practices of realization, and question its power to separate what I call 'the eastern' and 'western' landscapes and to shape a modern Israeli unity instead of the one of the - 36 - matrix (Figure 16 presents the cross sections of the topographical folds (S1-S5) parallel to the cross sections cutting through the landscape units, demonstrating the gap between modern reason and the fluid landscape. This representation is accompanied by 4 sets of sections cutting across the geopolitical separations of modern time (47', 49', 67', and 95'), realizing the modern order).

Figure 16

- 37 -

Figure 17: UN Palestine Plan of Figure 18: Palestine Index of Villages and Figure 19: The route of the security Partition. 1947. Source: Israel Settlements, with marking of The Green Line. fence, with The Green Line and State Archives, ISA-Collections- 1949. Source: Israel State Archives, ISA- territories A, B & C. 2005. Source: Maps-000be3q. Collections-Maps-00059xr. Ministry of Defence.

Figure 20: Main tectonic creases in Israel-Palestine Figure 21: Map of the tectonic plates in the Middle East (Mazor & (Mazor & Taitel-Goldman, 2012:303). Taitel-Goldman, 2012:303). - 38 -

1. LANDSCAPE MATRIX

Structural Flows Geologic flows gave this land its longitudinal structure which stretches along a south-north axis, and its character as a place of geological convergence. This local structure was shaped mainly by three regional geological phenomena: the withdrawal of the ancient Tethys Ocean; the cresting of the Syrian Arc geological ridge (see figure 20), and the Dead Sea Transform (see figure 21) (Ankor 1987:3-9). The earth’s crust is made of magma that burst or flowed up from under the ground, cooled down and turned into igneous rock, forming tectonic plates that continue to move. Pushed by currents flowing underneath, these tectonic plates rise and fall, collapse, break, and move with the subterranean currents. On the surface, climatic factors - water, wind, and sun - erode the land that rises in a long continuous process, filling the drainage basins and riverbeds with alluvium, and formatting the section of the landscape as we know it.

Landscape is shaped in a mutual interaction process between geological and climatic flows, and it does not cease to move. Even though the gap between human and geological times creates an illusion of stability, landscape is made of flows.

Climate forces and the Earth interact and influence one another - while climate flows shape the topography, they are also being shaped by it. Climate in Israel-Palestine differs according to the location of a place along the north-south axis, its distance from the

Mediterranean Sea along the east-west axis, and its topographical height (Fein, Segev and Lavie

2007:190-197). These interconnections continue to flow into the other networks of the landscape, passing their movement on to the other networks of space. Thus, the water regime is shaped by the currents of the climate and the earth, while it designs the ground by force of erosion. The water circulation and the soil layers are closely related to the structure of the section, while they continue layering it. The structure of the fold creates conditions for the other

- 39 - streams to flow – botanical, zoological, human – all are connected, joined in shaping a matrix of influences, performing the landscape (Figure 22 presents the set of sections S1-S5 cutting through maps of geology, soil, vegetation, main uses, and density of human settlements. One can identify the relations between the various landscape networks across the sections, demonstrating the changing nature of the landscape from the coast, through the mountains to the valley). No matter which geo-political network is crosses, the section will present a frozen moment of continuous movement, trapped within the fold of the landscape. I will call this complex array of connections and relations 'the matrix' of the landscape. I will refer to the movements of its currents as 'flows', and use the word ‘folds’ to describe their forms of meetings or changing.

Figure 22 - 40 -

Figure 23: Geologic map. Figure 24: Map of soils. Figure 25: Map of flora. Figure 26: Map of population Source: "The New Atlas of Source: "The New Atlas of Source: "The New Atlas of density. Source: The Outreach Israel". 2012:34-35. Survey Israel". 2012:39. Survey of Israel". 2012:34-35. Survey Center. Harvard University. of Israel and the Hebrew Israel and the Hebrew of Israel and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. University of Jerusalem. University of Jerusalem. Landscape Folds

In this landscape on the edge of the desert, water is crucial in managing human activity. Israeli-

Palestinian landscape represents a fundamental and long struggle between the fertile and the barren lands, between the cultivated land and the desert. The Israeli-Palestinian climate is classified as bordering Mediterranean climate (Csa) and arid climate (BWk), with a semi-arid climate strip in between (BSh) (for the classification map see figure 27). Mediterranean climate dominates the coastal areas of the land, folding up and east over the mountainous ridge. Arid climate characterizes the southern and eastern parts of the land. The narrow strip of semi-arid climate connects the center of the land with the deserts on its southern outskirts and beyond the watershed to the east, forming an intermediating climatic category (Goldreich 2003:12).

- 41 -

The division of the Israeli-Palestinian climate into

distinct zones should not be taken for granted, since these

climate types merge. It is a climate frontier landscape, where

Mediterranean climate is influenced by the arid and vice versa,

shaping local typical climates. Israeli-Palestinian

Mediterranean climate is not similar to the Greek, Italian or

Spanish Mediterranean climates, although they have similar

common key characteristics. On a local scale, the mountains

and shores of the land have relatively different conditions,

while both are classified as Mediterranean. The same problem

applies to areas classified as having desert climate - these

climatic definitions are undermined by the differences and

variations on both global and local scales, and they are also

subject to cultural bias, with its political implications Figure 27: Koppen climatic classification of Israel (Goldreich (Goldreich 2003:12). 2003:12).

In comparison to Europe, this land was traditionally mapped as 'hot' and only in the end of the 19th century it was first classified as 'subtropical', and later on as 'Mediterranean'

(Goldreich 2003:12). The threshold of the desert was determined on the 200 mm line in 1918, considering climatic and botanical factors, and assuming that it is not possible to grow grain crops without artificial irrigation under this line, which is flexible and varies from year to year.

Since 1931, when Zionist researchers started collecting meteorological information, the line of aridity is determined by the multi-annual mean line, with a range of 15-18 km in each direction.

This line, which is marked on the official state atlases, cannot be clearly identified on the landscape itself, but a gradual change of landscape is felt (Weizman, 2015:10-12). Marking an intermediate zone fails to express the continuous nature of climate variability. Additional - 42 - mapping of more detailed climate parameters, such as temperatures and precipitation – adds more information but the territorial graphic logic is still limited by the gap between modern reason and its representational techniques, and the fluid nature of the landscape (Figure 28 presents the set of the sections S1-S5 cutting through maps of climate parameters. It is possible to identify the relations between climate and geology, as expressed in topographical sections.

Together they shape the fold of the landscape, an array of continuous and variable currents rather than a series of binary transitions).

Figure 28

- 43 -

Figure 29: Average Rainy Days per Figure 30: Average Annual Figure 31: Average Annual Year (over 25 mm). 1981-2010. Source: Precipitation 1981-2010. Source: Israel Temperature. Source: Israel Israel Meteorological Service Meteorological Service Meteorological Service

The separation between the fertile and the nomadic lands was always flexible, never fixed, and they have always invaded each other (Shavit 1982:14). Because of their proximity, sudden fluctuations such as cycles of drought or years of increased rainfall are of great importance to the human environment. These changes were so significant that they were interpreted in theological terms by the peoples of the region in ancient history, including the forefathers of the Jews. This is the spiritual background of the Zionist reference to settling on this frontier as an act of 'flowering of the wilderness' by modern development, and the 'repression of the desert', which became part of the national ethos (Weizman, 2015:22-23). The use of modern irrigation technologies and systems, the development of modern agricultural techniques and methods, and the Jewish settlement and afforestation - are all perceived as means of pushing the desert, including the displacement of its nomad indigenous people on behalf of the modern order. Even modernity does not believe in the lines that it has set, or rather - it imagines their

- 44 - existence, but does not refrain from crossing them. Modern imagination perceives itself as separate from the landscape, but it is nevertheless entangled with it, folding its political power through landscape networks, believing it is stronger than the forces of the matrix.

In his book "The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev

Desert", Eyal Weizman shows how the modern mechanism of pushing the Bedouin people from their land had developed into a legal argument, that intermingles with the climatic issues of the desert’s borderline. The State of Israel exercises its sovereignty by making aggressive political use of this seamline between climate zones, in order to confiscate Bedouin land. Weizman, an original and popular voice in the discourse of landscape criticism today, observes the desert borderline along its long path from north Africa to central Asia, showing the phenomenon of interactions between its unstable climatic conditions and political violence (Weizman, 2015:18).

Weizman demonstrates his arguments using a case study from the southern desert frontier of

Israel-Palestine, but the principles he presents explain Zionist activity also in the arid eastern side of the cross-section. Many of the 8,000 Bedouins living in the Jordan Valley are refugees from the 1948 war. Most of the land uses in the area in which they live are designated nature reserves, military fire zones or agricultural fields used by the 37 Jewish settlements in the Joedan

Valley. While traditional water sources are dwindling due to over-pumping for irrigating the modern agricultural fields, the army restricts the movement of the Bedouins and their herds, in an effort to maintain the sterility of the eastern frontier (Weizman 2015:15). Weizman links colonial and national rule, along with the modern development they had brought, to global and local climatic changes, and to the evolution of zones of violence. He views climate, like the other currents of the landscape, as a political layer. He shows how the frontier landscape does not change along lengthened lines, but rather through a web of influences, a flow of modern forces and its paradoxical powerful imagination.

- 45 -

In his article "Liberalism and the Art of Separation", Michael Walzer suggests to think of modern liberalism as a certain way of drawing the map of the social and political world

(Walzer 1984). The old preliberal map showed a largely undifferentiated land mass, with rivers and mountains, cities and towns, but not many borderlines. Walzer argues that liberal theorists preach and practice an art of separating, drawing lines, marking off different realms, and creating the sociopolitical map with which we are familiar. The most famous 'wall' of liberalism is between the church and state, and this separation has built the unity of liberal order, but there are many others. Liberalism is a world of walls, and each one wishes to create new liberty

(Walzer 1984:315). With Walzer’s ideas in mind, Latour's theory of the paradox of the modern point of view resonates with liberalism, and the modern state it sustains. While the liberal imagination of separation scratches lines upon the landscape – spatial, social, economic, political or cultural - the landscape continues to flow, taking with it the liberal power.

For Bernard Cache, in his book "Earth moves: the furnishing of territories", the description of this complex contradicting system involves solving the problematic nature of the modern image in the era of New Media (Cache 1995). The image Cache seeks to create does not use formal or abstract models, it is not an imitation of an external object, but seeks to distance itself from the absolute distinction between 'interior' and 'exterior' and the stability it wishes to create. Change and movement, he argues, precede the stable image of an object and its borders, landscape in our case (In figure 32, Cache presents a schema which demonstrates the continuity that interests him). Change and movement prevent space from being completely controlled, and allow for the creation of infinite variants, shaping the texture of the landscape. Instead of the stable image, Cache suggests the term 'inflection' to describe the folded character of the landscape. Inflection is the weight of all the 'vectors' that run through a point, describing the fold of space (In Image 33, he presents schemas to illustrate these concepts) (Cache, 1995:12).

Architecture, in his eyes, is the art of setting 'frames', and the architectural quality in things is - 46 - the way in which they are framed. But the framing also changes, he reminds us, like the currents and according to force relations and folding tendencies. The earth, and its frames, are not the fixed gravitational space which is defined by axes and coordinates, but a flexible and continuous set of folds. Thus, with the help of Cache, the matrix of landscape, including its modern flows, can be understood as the labyrinth from Deleuze's 'fold' (Deleuze 1991:227). Its continuity will refer, then, to the movement of the Baroque toward infinity, shaped by multiple folds (which are not parts), and having a texture that can be imagined as folds of fabric, or of the patterns of marble, or magma bodies that flow into one another (Deleuze, 1991: 228). Like the landscape,

'the fold' flows through 'the coils of matter' as much as through 'the folds in the soul', and can be represented, then, by the allegory of The Baroque House, with its schematic section presented by Deleuze (see figure 34) (Deleuze 1991:229).

Figures 32: A scheme section of the city of Lausanne, which represents the theoretical question posed by Cache – how does the mountain plateau above the city connect to the sea plain below it? With the background of the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, the local question is echoed - how does the desert connect to the Mediterranean? Or how does the mountain become a plain? (Cache, 1995:6).

- 47 -

Figures 33: The schemas represent the idea of abstract spatial vectors that 'nails down a multiplicity of concrete values, such that the historical succession of vectors appears as a sort of repetition' (Cache, 1995:12-13). The point of inflection 'designates a pure event of curvature' (Cache, 1995:17), which allows the contiguity between the vectors, and the deployment of space of 'transistance from one identity to another' (Cache, 1995:14).

Figure 34: The diagram describes 'a closed, private room', draped with a 'cloth diversified by folds', above 'common rooms' with 'few small openings (the five senses)' - through which the streams fold inwards and upwards.

- 48 -

Landscape Texture

Climatic classification, which separates Mediterranean from arid climate, with semi-arid climate in between, is related with vegetation distribution. There is an overlap between climatic currents and botanical variety, in the way they fold (or unfold) from 'Mediterranean' into 'arid'.

The location of Israel-Palestine as a climatic frontier brings together also different phytogeographic areas (Zohari 1995:203). Phytogeographic regions indicate the general characteristics of their flora, matching them with general climatic areas that correspond with geographic continuity (Zohari 1995:203). It is a systematic division of landscapes, defined not only by their flora but also by climate, soil, and agriculture, expressing a multi-relational character (Zohari 1955:90). The first division of the land into phytogeographic regions was made in 1931-32. This comprehensive work of geographical analysis was part of the continuous

European research of the Holy Land since the 19th century (Zohari 1955:82). Similar to the division into climatic areas, it represents the flattening modern point of view, which is challenged by similar problems of representing the flowing botanical nature.

Three main phytogeographic regions come together along the Israeli-Palestinian landscape – Mediterranean, Irano-Turanian, and Saharan-Arabian. Each of these is characterized by typical species of flora, but also includes some connecting-species that are typical to its edges, some bi-regional species that characterize two adjacent regions, as well as some multi-regionals species. Some species found in a phytogeographic region are typical of another region, and the various relationships between the different types along the cross section express its fluid nature. A fourth phytogeographic region represented in the vegetation of the land is the Sudanese region. Representatives of this type of plants had penetrated the area from the south along the eastern rift, enhancing the botanical hybrid nature of this land (Wiesel, Pollak and Cohen 1978:12-14) (for the phytogeographic regions see figure 35). The Israeli-Palestinian

- 49 - landscape has a rich and diverse variety of flora compared with other landscapes, as a result of its location and shape. The long history of changes in the flora along geologic time, and its connections with human activity, makes this diversity even richer (Zohari 1955:79-81). This landscape offers a wide variety of habitats across its narrow and changing cross section, so that the various vegetation is densely packed, creating encounters, transitions and mixings, as it folds from side to side of the section.

The habitat is the wide ensemble of factors affecting

an organism, and it usually functions as a complex set of

interrelated conditions. Plant habitats are affected by

different factors, and they in turn influence each other in an

entanglement of mutual relations, which makes it hard to

distinguish between them. Such influences include climatic

conditions – temperature, humidity, precipitation, light,

wind, etc.; soil conditions – its chemical ingredients,

physical structure, texture and other characters; topographic

conditions – altitude, texture, slope inclination, geodynamic

character, etc.; and biotic conditions – competition with

other plants, activity of insects, fungus, and other animals.

Moreover, human conditions also influence habitats,

including urban and rural settlements, agriculture and Figure 35: Map of the phytogeographic ropes in Israel (Wiesel 1984). Source: Kotar virtual library, www.kotar.co.il/. grazing patterns, land development, movement across the landscape, wars, etc. (Zohari 1955:113-114). The landscape texture, then, is an expression of the variety of relationships that exist in space, its multilayered character, connecting the various networks into a complex tissue - the matrix - a fabric of relationships and connections, on varying scales, continuous and variable and in constant motion, which requires an infinite Big- - 50 -

Data buffer in order to describe it. Each player in this complex tissue exists within the landscape, between a large number of conditions, vertical arrays and horizontal vectors that operate in different directions, moving from 'outside' towards the actor and from 'inside' towards the networks, in a relationship that blurs their differences, so that the 'inside' and the 'outside' are the same whole master rhizome, with folds between them.

Different habitats hold different plant combinations, sharing sets of species, as if there were social connections between species that share a habitat. These are not organized connections, nor collaborations or distribution roles. Such elements typify human habitats, as do imagination, ideas, ideologies and power relations, particularly the asymmetrical modern ones. These are elements that shape human habitat in the modern imagination, which is reflected in its representations, flowing back to the landscape with the imperial point of view. Modern botany defines vegetative societies by the main species that characterize them, and by the participation of secondary species that differ from one habitat to another. Phytosociology studies plant associations, their composition, definition, distribution, conditions, and evolution, setting them in a systematic order. Vegetation holds symbiotic connections and mostly commensality relations. The ability of a group of plants to share a habitat is determined by their ecological needs. The ability of a growing species to exist, to breed and to reach necessary resources depends, among other things, on its ecological adaptation to its neighboring plants.

Combinations of species that share a habitat can coexist when their ecological requirements do not overlap, or when they use different strategies for resource utilization. However, such a balance is theoretical, since it is constantly challenged in the face of changes caused by time, varying conditions, and human interventions (Zohari 1955:291-293).

The texture of vegetation is essentially dynamic: flora tends to scatter and spread out, widen its habitats, affecting other habitats. The wind, animals, and water transport its fruits,

- 51 - seeds, spores etc., sometimes over far distances. Ecological conditions, as well as compatibility and distribution mechanisms, determine the dispersion of plants. Throughout the evolutionary process, distribution mechanisms of plants have intertwined with the forces of landscape (Zohari

1955;3-16). The current distribution of species is shaped by a long historical process of change, and by its encounter with current conditions (Zohari 1955:43). While in geologic and pre- historic times, climate changes were the main reason for botanical changes, later human activities became the major influence. Long processes of agricultural practice, the felling of trees, grazing and fires, have meant that human intervention has changed the botanic landscape over the years (Wiesel, Pollak and Cohen 1978: 12-14).

The Israeli-Palestinian landscape has many areas of terraced slopes, used for agriculture

(mostly growing trees such as olives, figs, almonds, and pomegranates), and cultivated valleys

(mostly used for growing vegetable crops), which have long interacted with the 'natural' vegetation. Israeli-Palestinian flora has a rich variety of uncultivated species, in comparison to cultivated plants. This diverse mixture is a result of the location of the land on the Fertile

Crescent. This is where ancient agriculture has developed since the Neolith era (~10,000 years ago), domesticating some edible plants which are still dominant in contemporary production of food. These include wheat, oatmeal, barley, and species of peas, lentils, beetroot, carrot, cabbage, leeks, eggplant, watermelon, olives, dates, almonds, plums, etc. Wild progenitors of domestic plants have been systemically identified and classified, sometimes as independent species or subspecies, and the relatively short evolution process has kept them closely related to their contemporary counterparts. While some are alien species that cannot breed, others can reproduce hybrids of wild and domestic plants. This is useful for the enrichment of the genes of civilized plants, applied by modern scientific research and agricultural development (Alon

1990:25-28). Humans were significant in shaping botanic landscapes, and in turn used them for their survival and wellbeing - food, medicine, agriculture, industry and so on. Around half of - 52 - the botanical cover of this land is domesticated, and more than 20% of its 'natural' flora is related to domesticated forms (Zohari 1955:465-466). Because civilization is entangled with flora in multilateral connections, (Zohari 1955:470-471), one cannot separate them or determine the vegetation’s 'natural' state.

Modern Folds

The term ‘succession’ expresses the processes of plant association. Most of these processes are secondary, and this indicates that they develop in existing habitats that have lost their equilibrium due to interior or exterior changes. Modern botanical studies conceive of such processes as stages of development toward their 'climax'. The climax is the final stage of the successional development column, which has the most 'mesophilic' species the climate can support, usually the biggest and most durable species. In habitats where human intervention is intense, or where there are other restraints caused by ecological parameters or conditions, a climax cannot be achieved. Rather, in such cases a steady 'sub-climax' may exist, so long as its limiting conditions remain stable (Zohari 1955:299-303). According to the modern botanical research of the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, the mountains were covered in the distant past by the climax of Mediterranean woodlands and forests. The modern botanical narrative tells us that continuous grazing has transformed it into a 'sub-climax' condition, suppressing the vegetation, reducing edible species and encouraging the proliferation of those who were resistant to grazing.

In places where these processes stopped, the vegetation has regrown.

In addition to grazing, Ancient Mountain terraced agriculture, we have been told, took part in transforming the forests and woodlands, while at times of low human activity the 'natural' botanical climax was renewed (Zohari1955:26-30). Patterns of vegetation renewal, however, are influenced by local conditions, and their previous state cannot be entirely reconstructed.

Renewal therefore allows for the consolidation of trees and shrub sprouts, causing changes to - 53 - vegetation types and compositions, including ruler species and forms, and the density of the botanical landscape (Wiesel, Pollak and Cohen 1978:26-28). The concept of natural vegetation and its conservation or reconstruction is therefore contradictory, as is the modern paradox. It seeks to protect a 'natural' state that actually does not exist; it aims to prevent human influences although this consists an intervention; It protects 'nature' and keeps people away from it by making laws and defining land uses and territories in which it is protected and used; it separates nature from humans while they are actually inseparable.

The first comprehensive masterplan for the State of Israel was made in the early 1950s, and one of 'the five planning arms' that it outlines is the National Plan for Afforestation and

Conservation of the Landscape (Sharon, 1951:6) (see figure 36). It has designated areas for afforestation 'on the slopes of the mountains and hills, which are currently desolated as a result of neglect and erosion of the land for many generations'. In places with 'special natural qualities', and 'whose agricultural value is low', protected areas were also marked. Nature, according to the national plan, includes the planted landscape, the preserved landscape, as well as 'places of great historical, archaeological and architectural value' (Sharon, 1951:7). The agricultural areas are presented in the Agricultural Plan, which was considered an 'intensive development area', and linked to the national water plan (and the plan for the deployment of settlements) (see figure

37). Although agriculture and landscape were planed separately, together they spread over most of the country's territory, and constitute 'the natural, fertile and green background' in which the urban communities will be located - with their different sizes, industrial areas and transportation centers (Sharon, 1951:6-7) (see figure 38). Preservation of nature concepts may stand prima facie against development concepts, but they share, I argue, the same modern point of view over landscape, functioning as opposing arms of the same landscape regime. Both observe the landscape from afar, flattening it out, with the illusive perspective of landscape painting, or

- 54 - through the top view of the plan - divided only by the location of the boundaries that separate the landscape from the human.

Figure 36: the National Plan for Figure 37: the Agricultural Plan Figure 38: Population distribution Afforestation and Conservation of the (Sharon, 1951:14) plan (Sharon, 1951:17) Landscape (Sharon, 1951:6) From a Zionist point of view, 'Green Landscape' is perceived as a cultural value, a developed flora of undisturbed nature, in contrast to the primitive landscape, which was damaged by people and became arid. Mitchell quotes Schama, who reminisces about the time he participated as a child in a tree planting program in Israel. The view of the forest was perceived, according to his testimony, as 'more beautiful than a hill denuded by grazing flocks of goats and sheep' (Schama, 1995:5-6 in Mitchell, 2000:195). Forests were planted in order to

- 55 - contrast the desert landscape, and to represent the modern flowering of the wilderness, a manifestation of the modern Zionist drive to redeem the land (Barnir1998:87-88). The Israeli project of planting trees, which was originated during the British Mandate period for ecological, economic and occupational reasons, gave afforestation an additional national content, by designing domesticated and orderly landscapes as part of shaping a modern national territory and identity. Less than a year after the establishment of the State of Israel, on the day of 'Tu-

Bishvat', the Jewish festive day of trees, a forest in memory of those who fell in the battles of

48', the Israeli War of Independence, was planted along the narrow passage from the coastal area to the mountainous road to Jerusalem (Barnir1998: 91-94). According to the Jewish

National Fund, the main organization that forestall the land, over the years more than 240 million trees were planted over about 228,000 acre of the Israeli territory, mostly along its frontiers

(http://www.kkl.org.il/afforestaion-in-israel/). The forests are mostly dedicated to the memory of those who fell in Israel's wars, to central figures in the Zionist ethos, to the commemoration of Jewish communities that had perished in the Holocaust, and to donors who acquired the land.

The forest, a collection of trees, symbolically connects the individual to the public and the nation, and the planting symbolizes the national partnership and participation (Barnir1998:87-

88).

The vast majority of the trees in the forests of the 'Jewish National Fund' are coniferous, headed by the Jerusalem Pine (Pinus halepensis), which was found to be durable, cheap and easy to maintain. This species is mainly found in the western part of the Mediterranean Sea, and in

Israel-Palestine there are only several small groves whose source is not in modern planting.

Although it does not represent the 'natural' vegetation, the Zionist enterprise has turned the pine into part of the Israeli landscape. The reason for this may be that its European appearance satisfied the minds of decision-makers. Over the years it has been claimed that its broad dispersal poses a threat to the development of the 'natural' vegetation because its etheric dry leaves cover - 56 - the ground and cause allelopathy - the prevention of other vegetation from growing. The forests, however, not only inhibit the regeneration of 'natural' vegetation, but also prevent the renewal of Palestinian memory that has been erased from the landscape. Critical reading of the foresting practices points out that the forests cover dozens of ruined Palestinian villages and remainders of the life fabric of the Arabs who had lived on the landscape before the 1948 war. The forests, therefor, gave a visual answer to the historical question of the return of the Jews to an empty land, depicting the ruins of the villages as ancient ruins, turning them into romantic objects within the landscape, and embedding them in Zionist story-telling. The afforestation process has created a new identity for the landscape, and the erasure of Palestinian memory perpetuates the

Jewish national presence in its territory, and assimilates it into the landscape (Barnir 1998:95-

96).

The paradoxes evident in Zionist botany, though, are even more complex than those of

European modern botany, because the primitive landscape also serves Zionism as a reminder of its own imagined memory. The Zionist gaze looks forward to the green climax of an imagined

'natural' landscape, while also looking back at an imagined biblical landscape, where shepherds, terraces, the Seven Species, and mountain villages were part of the ancient Jewish landscape.

The figures of the Arab shepherds thus embody the rule of the Children of Israel, and the cultivation of the agricultural terraces serves as a reminder to the ancient Israelis that flourished the Promised Land (Mitchell, 1994a:27 and Mitchell, 2000:212). While the Zionist landscaping works on one hand to develop the landscape, 'urbanize' or 'naturalize' it, developing or protecting it, building or planting, on the other hand it holds on to the native landscape as a pastoral reminder of its biblical legitimacy over the land. Mitchell suggests, cynically, that the Occupied

Territories are kept by Israel as a 'nature reserve', a type of a theme park shaped around the biblical image (Mitchell 2000:72-74). The landscape, therefore, contain a cruel paradox: the very things that make it biblical or pastoral are shaped by the Palestinians, the people whom the - 57 -

Zionists wants to dispossess (Weizman, 2017:176). The additional paradox that the Zionist point of view holds, is therefore positioned between the 'green' and the 'biblical' landscapes. It is a duplication of the time dimension which controls the mythical image of the 'holy landscape', perceiving it as both a place of origin and as a horizon for the utopian view of the future (Mitchell

2000:213). The present in the middle, Mitchell goes on to argue, is somehow absent from this time dichotomy. The present is the 'third dimension' of the Israeli identity, the space which is in between, a space of wandering, of eternal exile and trial, a promise of an indigenous land that will forever be in a state of fulfillment (Mitchell 2000:213).

Figure 39: Source: Google Earth Following Mitchell, I will suggest reading the separation of the land as the Modern-

Zionist contemporary solution to the paradox of its two directions of landscape imagination in the face of hybrid reality and landscape resistance. Observing a satellite image along the winding line of the Separation Wall (or fence) (see figure 28) exposes the flexibility of the landscape in the face of modern power and its paradoxical points of views. On both sides of the line, the landscape has evolved differently. On the western side of the ‘green line’, 'inside' the Israeli

- 58 - territory, the vegetation is more developed than on it eastern side, the 'outside' of the mountains of the occupied territories. On one side lies the green modern and organized space, which I will call 'The Western Landscape'. On the other - the frontier of the bare biblical imagination, which

I will call 'The Eastern Landscape'. In between them, The Separation Wall allows these two to exist side by side, prevents them from mixing, and forces the fold between the Mediterranean and the arid landscapes to become a modern separating line.

- 59 -

2. ZIONIST FLOW

The Modern Point of View

Modern imagination spread in the eastern Mediterranean, with the growing interest of European powers in it during the 19th century, as the Ottoman Empire got weaker. Ottoman modern reforms since the mid-19th century had improved personal security, governing order, economic growth and urbanization, but European intervention had accelerated these developments. During the 19th century, the population of the land had grown from 300,000~400,000 to about

700,000~750,000 before the First World War. Varied flows of western immigrants, mostly

Christian and Jewish, had increased the population, influencing the development of an urban landscape as much as the rural one. During the 19th century, the cities of Palestine underwent processes of growth that had increasingly led to their expansion beyond their walls, and to the development of residential neighborhoods with modern European character in their hinterlands

(for an example see figure 40) (Ben Arieh and Bartal 1983:67-71). Messianic or nationalist

Christian and Jewish immigrants, seeking to return to work the sacred land, had established agricultural settlements, flowing modern landscape also deeper within the holy land (for an example see figure 41) (Porat and Shavit1998:7-8).

Figure 40: The German Colony in Jaffa (former The American Figure 41: Sarona, the German Templer Colony, 1937, Carl Colony). The European architectural style is evident, and its Kuebler. European settlers brought modern forms of farming, representation in a postcard (1930s) illustrates the as well as modern spatial planning. transcription of the modern landscape and presents the dualism of the landscape - real and imaginary. Source: unknown. - 60 -

Figure 42: The mosque of Omar, Jerusalem. 1839. Figure 43: Gymnasia Herzliya, postcard from the 1930s. Lithography. By David Roberts, a Scottish painter and Established in 1909. Designed by Arch Yosef Barsky, with the traveler, one of the leaders of English Orientalism. influence of Boris Schatz from Bezalel Academy. The building combines European and Muslim elements, with archaeological influences that wish to refer to the Temple. During this period, interest in the Holy Landscape and its imagination flourished in

Europe, drawing attention and research, taking part in the western academic project, mixing

science with theology and mythology, and performing an oriental point of view that was

practiced and embodied in the landscape (Ben Arieh and Bartal 1983:11-13) (for an example for

an oriental landscape drawing see figure 42). In Jerusalem, different European building styles

had enriched the city’s landscape with roof tiles, onion-shaped cupolas, and monumental public

buildings influenced by crusader architecture, that had joined the Ottoman mosques and

minarets (Karmi-Melamed and Price 2011:11). The port city of Jaffa had grown, and established

its role as the cosmopolitan gate to Jerusalem from the west. On its hinterlands the neighborhood

'Ahuzat-Bayit' was established in 1909, which later became Tel Aviv – 'the first Jewish city'.

European and Ottoman ornamental influences were incorporated into the local architecture,

shaping the cosmopolitan character of the main cities. Eclectic architecture was visible also in

the new suburban neighborhoods. A mixture of romanticism with art deco was used to decorate

and refine building facades, sometimes hinting at the origin of the settlers. The Jewish

architecture also incorporated biblical allegories in European style, as an experiment of

inventing an old/new Jewish local architectural language (for an example see figure 43) (Efrat

2004:55).

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Modern ideas of the time were the source for the rising new Jewish national movement in Europe. The Zionist movement later determined the powerful modern flow of this land (Porat and Shavit 1998:7-8). The Zionist movement operated within the tension between two polarized historiographic streams - the capitalist flow of the colonies and the socialist flow of the laborers.

Capitalism arrived earlier and was wider in scope, using private fortune to gain ownership of the land. Those immigrants (First 'Aliya'), which were mostly organized in advance of their immigration, had shaped their settlements on the frontiers using the agricultural European typology of a 'colony' ('Moshava') (see figure 32). The socialist flow (Second 'Aliya') advocated communal settlements designed for the working class, and although it was smaller at that time, it grew to have a mythical influence that was central in shaping the Zionist landscape (Ben Arieh and Bartal 1983:258). Although the historic-geographic imagination of the Holy Land had spread east across the section of the land, crossing the Jordan River to the mountains beyond,

Jewish settlements were established mostly in the western and northern parts of the land. In

1917, by the end of the First World War, 44 Jewish agricultural settlements where spread in the landscape, in addition to the growing Jewish neighborhoods outside the walls of the cities, drawing the map of the pioneer Zionist outposts. These places clung to the landscape on the waves of modern flows, indicating the geographic and visionary directions of the Zionist stream

(Ben Arieh and Bartal 1983:274).

Like the ideas of the Zionist movement, Israeli art is rooted in modern European ideas from the 19th century. Jewish artists that had shaped their artistic path in Europe immigrated to

Palestine where they laid the course of Israeli art. The main institution in which arts and crafts were taught, 'Bezalel', was established in 1905 in Jerusalem. It was inspired by a European worldview as well as by the local landscape, making a direct affinity between art and national ideas (Zalmona 2010:13). Art was used as an ideological tool, shaping images for people with no national identity or territory, representing a dream that wished to reattach them to their holy - 62 - land (Zalmona 2010:19). 'Bezalel'-style design was an experiment in blending ornamental botanic curviness in the spirit of Art Nouveau with calligraphic Muslim ornamentation, curly and intangible, and with Hebrew writing. It shaped an ideal and sentimental atmosphere, imagining a harmony of a pure Garden of Eden, where figures bathe in pure nature. It combined archeological motives with biblical scenes and secular artifacts, in order to bridge between east and west, past and present, and to teach us the imperial point of view over the landscape (for an example see figure 44) (Zalmona 2010:34 ).

The artifacts that were shaped in the workshops at 'Bezalel' displayed an imagination that combined myths, collective memories and dreams, bonded together by fantasies and passion.

This imagination typified Zionist visual arts, as well as its architecture, literature, music, poetry and dance - all wishing to translate history and create a new Jewish identity in the holy land

(Zalmona 2010:32). Affinity to representations referring to the ancient cultures of 'the Fertile

Crescent' was a major force in Zionist art, especially in its early period. It was an effort to

Figure 44: Poster of the Company for the promotion of melt time and cast it into a new image of Jewish Tourism to the holyland. Ze'ev Raban. 1929. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. collective identity. The ancient landscape was the place where the Jewish people had consolidated under an independent sovereignty twice in the distant past, and linking the reborn present with a heroic past integrated them together to a unified national future (Zalmona 2010: 28).

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Oriental images influenced modern art during the late 19th and early 20th centuries all over Europe. European painters and photographers had visited the holy land and the images they produced were saturated with a sense of holiness and a longing for the fantastic, rich, sensual and passionate east (Zalmona 2010: 30). Paradoxically, attraction to the exotic had integrated rejection by the European eye and superiority of the modern culture (Said, 1978). Employing a double point of view, orientalism observed 'the east' as inferior, primitive, violent, unmoral and undeveloped, in contrast to the ways in which modern western culture perceived itself. This modern binary point of view sharpened western identity by contrasting it with 'the others', while imagining itself to be more enlightened. Zionism was a local case of this imperial imagination, much more complex than the classic European orientalism. The east is the place where the

Jewish people came from and where they wish to return and construct their new identity; however, the east also expresses 'otherness'. For Zionism, the imagination of the east - its history, landscapes and inhabitants - is both 'here' and 'there'. The eastern landscape is an object to unite with, while also being alien and hostile, representing an ambition that refuses to be fully conquered (Zalmona 2010:42-43).

The imperial structure of the Zionist view of the landscape continued to reproduce itself as it stayed informed by streams of thought coming from west. During the 1920s, Jewish painters who were in Europe or in the United States during the First World War, had returned to Israel and expressed in their work the influence of western modern art (Zalmona 2010: 51). Their drawings reflect a search for authentic reality, expressing a desire for erotic orientalism, unlike the old mythological one (Zalmona 2010: 49). Outlines of the land became a central theme in

Israeli painting, using modern shapes and keeping a modern gaze. Arab indigenous people had replaced the mythic biblical characters, representing passion, physical force and vividness that connected them with the landscape, a model to be simultaneously followed for shaping the new

Jew, as well as rejected (Zalmona 2010: 69). The description of the people of the land was - 64 - dualistic - on the one hand, it reflected an admiration of the east's harmony with nature, but on the other, the oriental stereotype was perceived as primitive (Zalmona 2010: 54). Landscape painting showed an erotic dimension, in the curves of the hills, its elements, its figures and their actions, representing the desire to unite with the fertile landscape, to 'know' it and redeem it from the pastoral pre-modern laziness (for an example see figure 45) (Zalmona 2010: 75-76).

Figure 45: Nachum Gutman. "Siesta". 1926. Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

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A White Mirror

With the intensification of the polarization between the Jewish and Palestinian communities during the British Mandate period, a white filter was placed over the paradoxical gaze of imperial landscape. In the 1930s, the figure of 'the Arab' as an enemy replaced its observation as an orientalist object, and eastern elements were removed from the Zionist imagination of the landscape. Zionist culture distilled its separated identity as modernist, detached from the local landscape, and determined to conquer it and turn it into a western landscape (Zalmona 2010:92).

The images of local Arabs were replaced by Jewish pioneers. The farmer and the builder, the communal-agricultural life of the 'kibbutz' villages and the developing urban landscape - became sources of admiration and enthusiasm. The belief in creating a new Jew, and repairing the Jewish exilic body through the national modern work of the landscape, had replaced the paradoxical mainstream imagination that had sought to see itself in 'the other' (Zalmona 2010: 52). The modernist landscape ignored the existence of Palestinian landscape, by taking it out of the frame, reproducing images of an enlightened pioneering landscape, and developing the Zionist imagination as what I call "white mirror"

Photography and graphic design flourished, and were committed to the national project, displaying the image of 'the new Jew' that occupies the landscape 'with a hoe and a gun' (for example see figure 46). Such works were mostly commissioned by Zionist institutions, with the intention of expressing their worldview and political structures, and the landscape they wished to promote. Many of the images from that time are associated with themes such as agricultural work, a momentum of building, the flowering of the wilderness, which were values of the Labor movements (for example see figure 47). These images were integrated into representations of the fresh modern international urban landscape of Tel Aviv and the new rural settlements, moving away from the gloomy alleys of Jerusalem and the ancient mountains around it

- 66 -

(Zalmona 2010:107-109). Local symbols of the east continued to exist in Israeli art, but it no longer celebrated the exotic place that had fascinated Jewish artists earlier; rather, it reflected the oriental view, that depicted the local landscape as lifeless and abandoned (Zalmona

2010:98). This gloomy landscape characterized the renewed Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, linking the spatial streams to the geography of the mountains (Zalmon 2010:102).

Figure 46: Otte (Otto) Wallisch, Figure 47: Youth dancing at 'Kibbutz' Ein Harod. 1936. Zolṭan Ḳluger.Source: The 1930s, JNF poster, Tel Aviv Museum National Photo Collection (Israel), D31-034 of Art. Following the international agreements that were signed at the end of the First World

War, the establishment of borders became a typical practice of modern power in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. The borders of the British mandate were shaped initially with the

Sykes-Picot agreements (1916), followed by further documents, statements, and territorial divisions, which defined the grounds for the Zionist-Palestinian struggle. The British recognition of the right of the Jewish people to establish a national home in Palestine (the 1917

Balfour Declaration) did not define its borders (Porat and Shavit 1998:149) but with the intensification of the struggle between the Jewish and Palestinian movements, a potential geographic separation became the mainstream solution to the coalesced landscape, while bi- national ideas were marginalized (Porat and Shavit 1998:33). A series of committees of inquiry

- 67 - set during the Mandate period had recommended the partition of the land, and British regulations on the purchase of land had promoted partition in practice. The separation suggestions of all

British and international committees were generally similar. The Peel Committee (1937), the

Woodhead Committee (1938), the Morison-Grady Committee (1946), the resolution of the special UN committee UNSCOP (1947) – all designated most of the coastal plain areas to the

Jewish state and the mountains to the Palestinian state, while Jerusalem was kept as an international territory (Porat and Shavit 1998:46-48).

From 1922 to 1945 the population had grown from 700,000 to 1,800,000: the Palestinian population had doubled, while the Jewish population had increased tenfold, and British Mandate

Palestine had become a scene of struggle over the landscape (Porat and Shavit 1998:11). The areas of Jewish settlement were linked to the political territories that were suggested, emphasizing the importance of spreading the Zionist networks. In the days of the British

Mandate, the Zionist movement gained recognition for its claims for a national home in

Palestine. Its declared goals were to develop and consolidate a self-governing Jewish society, with modern cultural and educational systems, and to widen its economic and territorial foundations in order to achieve a Jewish majority on as much land as possible. The Zionist movement focused on the organization of settling projects, as part of its national-social character, involving also strong private activities. It incorporated different parties and individuals with various agendas, uniting them under its organized activity of structuring the

'national home' (Porat and Shavit 1998:153-155).

In the late 1920s, only 20% of the Jewish population in Mandatory Palestine lived in agricultural localities. They operated modern agricultural methods, developing species, using water technologies, processing and transporting their products, making the cultivated land 3 times more profitable than the traditional farming methods, which continued to be practiced by

- 68 - most of the Arab farmers. The Zionist Labor movements made an effort to position the Jewish rural settling in the forefront of its imagination (Porat and Shavit 1998:180). Agricultural life

'within' the landscape symbolized more than any other image the homecoming of the Jewish people, the renewed national consolidation, and the shaping of a new Jew in an old/new landscape. Zionist rural settlements were built using modern social and economic planning, which included ideological and professional considerations, aimed at shaping utopian agricultural communities. Two main types of agricultural settlement typologies were developed in the days of British Mandate – a collective form (the 'Kibbutz'), and a cooperative one (the

'Moshav'). The process of shaping the Zionist countryside continued to be influenced by contemporary ideas from Europe, combining design ideas from the British Garden City with the

International style developed in Germany between the two world wars, as well as other influences.

The architecture of the Zionist landscape carried many contradictory messages, although it wished to reflect modern pureness. It combined functional modernism with romantic and ideological universalism, which bears classicist influences, integrated with minimalist design.

The winds blowing in Europe after the First World War carried the message of establishing a new world on the ruins of the Old World, and they blew also in Zionist Palestine. Not very different from the oriental gaze, the new design included utopian elements that sought to combine a return to a pure Garden of Eden, seeking the nature before it was corrupted and entrenched in the walls of culture, together with the construction of a new Tower of Babylon, a vision of a temple of enlightened science. The role of planning was to instill those imaginations into reality, to shape a place for the daily fulfillment of a Jewish laborers’ society. The planned layout of the settlements and their geometric architecture embodied an affinity to the various ideological Zionist streams, and these typologies have developed over the years in light of technological, socio-economic ideas and political changes, but fundamentally, they represent a - 69 - utopian approach, a white dream that sought to realize itself (for example see figure 48) (Hayutin and Hayutin 2010).

Figure 48: An aerial photograph of 'Moshav' Nahalal. Utopian planning of Richard Kaufman which embodies social and economic perceptions.

Modern Dreams

Shaping the map of the distribution of the Jewish settlements was bound by British regulations, local land ownerships, their locations and prices, and to Zionist strategic aspirations (Porat and

Sharvit 1998:103). While national capital was invested in large areas purchased mostly in the periphery of the land to serve national purposes, private funding was mostly invested for profit in the central plains. Land demand in the central and western parts of the landscape had grown with time, marking the capitalist urban vector of the central coastal plains. Jewish settlements

- 70 - continued to be more numerous in the plains and valleys of the northern regions than in the inner parts of the central mountains and the southern desert area. Although the Jewish population and the number of settlements have grown rapidly between the two World Wars, the main geographic distribution of the Jewish settlement continued to develop mostly in those directions

(see figure 49) (Porat and Sharvit1998:157-160 ).

Figure 49: The comparative mapping between the development of Jewish and Palestinian settlement during the British Mandate embodies the gaps in the growth rate and marks the areas of Jewish expansion, especially in the western part of the country. Source: Shoshan, M. 2012. "Atlas of The Conflict: Israel-Palestine". 010 Publishers.

Despite the goal of spatial expansion, most of the Jewish immigrants that arrived in the

1930s had settled in the cities and engaged with urban and industrial activities in Jerusalem,

Haifa, and Tel Aviv (Porat and Sharvit 1998:163). Jerusalem had expanded, its population grew by tens of thousands of inhabitants, and modern neighborhoods were built, including infrastructure and public buildings. As the British administrative center, the city was planned to be clean, healthy and modern (Zalmona 2010:38). The British administration had initiated five

- 71 - masterplans for Jerusalem, which directed the city’s development. Additional building in the old city as well as in the green belt around it were prohibited, ensuring its preservation and continuity as a holy hub. Architecture in Jerusalem was therefore directed to face the memory of the city, while unfolding in it a modern spirit and principles. Height regulations preserved the skyline of the city and its views. Planning regulations required all exterior walls to be clad in local stone, which tied the new buildings to the place and its past (Karmi and Price 2011:19-22).

On the other side, Tel-Aviv, 'the first Jewish city' next to Jaffa, was determined in the days of the Mandate as central for Zionist networks, services, trade, handicraft and industry, and since then it had a key role in shaping models of Zionist urban white landscapes (Porat and

Shavit 1998:163). Its population had doubled by the mid-1920s and had continued to grow dramatically through the 1930s. Since its establishment it was developed as ‘a blank slate', where modern architecture could be free from memories. Tel Aviv grew out of Jaffa, a central port city, but its inhabitants ignored Jaffa and imagined their city as non-contextual, devoid of local building tradition influences (Karmi and Price 2011:22-24). The modern architecture of the international style had spread with the increase in construction, and was a popular style that unfolded in some local properties. It was woven from imagination with no local or historical context, but was identified with social and humanistic ideas that fitted both Zionist ideology and local conditions, blending them together, looking toward the future, directing its gaze to the west

(The ideas embodied in the architecture of the "White City" were reproduced in many photographs of the period. for example see figure 50) (Karmi and Price 2011:7-9).

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Figure 50: Borochov Street in Tel Aviv, a view from east to west, with the Mediterranean that marks the horizon. 1938. Kluger Zoltán. Source: Israel State Archives, ISA-Collections-ZKlugerPhotos-000y0ay Ada Karmi-Melamed, winner of the Israel Prize for Architecture, analyzes the international style architecture, also called ‘White City’ architecture, at the beginning of the book she wrote together with Dan Price, "Architecture in Palestine during the British Mandate,

1917-1948". She describes it as free from topography and landscape, referring to the skyline as a border parallel to ground which continues the straight-angel geometric shapes of the architecture. Unlike the organic and folded local architecture, modern planning was focused on zoning regulations, patterns of land use, density, and relations between private and public spaces

(Karmi-Melamed and Price 2011:23). The Tel Aviv municipality had initiated a city masterplan, planned by British architect Patrick Geddes, which became the platform for the development of the modern city. This plan was central in shaping the city’s landscape, and it also influenced urban development in other Jewish cities all over the land. The urban architecture of Tel Aviv, - 73 - with its connections to 'garden city' principles, followed a pattern of separate buildings, unlike the continuous street facade formed by urban blocks. Most buildings had similar volumes and a shared style. A grid layout of repetitive blocks was surrounded by a hierarchy of streets, with open edges. (Karmi-Melamed and Price 2011:22-24). ‘White City’ architecture, Karmi-

Melamed adds, holds a fluent dimension that shifts outside of the architectural frame, into the landscape around it. Balconies, windows, openings and shaded areas in the facades, as well as open ground floors, are intermediate spaces. They modify the flat modern facade with its strict separation between inside and outside, and connect the interiors with the outdoor views (Karmi-

Melamed and Price 2011:25-28).

Modern architecture was ideologically universal and independent of place, but modern architecture in Palestine was nevertheless also shaped by reality. Local conditions such as unsophisticated industrial technologies and lack of materials, together with local history and politics, produced a local functionalist variant of modern architecture (Karmi-Melamed and

Price 2011:2425-). A close look at the development of international style architecture in

Palestine between the two world wars finds a diversity of influences. Its performance was complex and challenged the clearness of the pure vision of the international imagination (Karmi-

Melamed and Price 2011:79-). As a case study of the modern project, ‘White City’ Zionist architecture presents the bias of a universal dream on the frontier of the modern empire. It is peripheral, has no pure style, solid models or mega-theories, but rather is a modern cultural form displaying its adaptability to local conditions, or - showing disorder (Efrat 2004:30). It represents a western vector, the direction of the gaze unfortunately planted in place, it is a conception, a desire and a source of inspiration. Its dissonance with the field does not prevent it from continually allowing the Israeli landscape to imagine itself as pure and white, although this architecture is actually sooty and dirty with plaster peeling off its facades. This gap is what the

- 74 - image of the ‘White City’ seeks to camouflage, what makes it function as the fountainhead of the modern landscape regime, a promise that can never be realized.

In his book "A City with a Concept", Nathan Marom connects the pure imagination of the city that 'arose from the sand' with the concepts that have accompanied its planning processes

(Marom 2009). Like the modern imagination, the modern planning concepts produce 'invisible structures in space', 'conceptual structures', before they are realized. Modern planning shapes distinguishing principles, delimits spaces, catalogues social groups, sets boundaries, creates hierarchies, and determines what is inside and what remains outside (Marom2009: 11). And like the landscape, planning has spatial effects that involve not only imaginations and actual development, but also people (experts, professionals and politicians) and participants, the

"planned" residents of the city (which are affected by the plans, react to them in their daily urban lives, sometimes oppose them, and sometimes are also able to influence them) . Marom points out that one of the main goals of planning in Tel Aviv is to ensure that this original imagined modernist purity will be preserved, and will continue to be renewed in the future (Marom

2009:14). Marom reviews plans designed for the city chronologically and identified concepts that have persisted through changing styles. He notes that some basic assumptions have not changed throughout its history: the city must be planned; everything that is not planned in the city is faulty; and everything that is damaged in the city can be repaired with planning. These assumptions had created a basic distinction between the ‘White City’, which refers to the 'new' and planned northern Tel Aviv, and the the ‘Black City’ consisting of its southern parts, which were marked by lack of planning or 'bad planning' (Marom 2009:20). This distinction is sharpened in the relations of Tel Aviv to Jaffa on its south, from which it grew north, turned its back on it, but then returned and swallowed it after the 1948 war when the authorities of the two cities were united (Marom2009: 18).

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Figure 51: The image on the cover of the book shows the lawns of Charles Clore Park in Tel Aviv, which grow on the ruins of the Jaffa neighborhood of Manshiyeh. After its Arab residents disappeared in 1948, the neighborhood remained partially destroyed and Jewish immigrants settled there. It gradually became a "slum", and was then completely abolished by a modern planning practice solution in 1978. A museum for the Jewish National Military Organization was established on the ruins of one of the houses, in the image of a glass box appearing to grow from the ruins (Architecture: Amnon Niv, Amnon Schwartz, Danny Schwartz). The direction of the view in the photograph places Tel Aviv's city towers in the background, leaving Jaffa behind and outside the frame. On the back cover, the opposite angle of the image appears, in which Jaffa is seen in the distance, as a local contrast against the modern city.

Sharon Rotbard, who had coined these concepts in his book "White City, Black City," shows how the ‘White City’ of Tel Aviv had built itself and its image as a modern contrast to the ‘Black City’, which is formed itself against the white (Rotbard 2005:119-122(. The relations between the two cities are contained, he argues, that is, they cannot be separated because they define and shape each other, just as the relations between Israelis and Palestinians (Rotbard

2005:126). Rotbard views Tel Aviv as a central expression of the Zionist idea, its moral core, its goal and its alibi. Tel Aviv, and not Jerusalem, is the true Zion because it represents the normalization of the Jewish people, a work that meets the formula "a land without a people for a people without a land" (Rotbard, 2005:85). The White City is a parable of modern Zionism and its politics, the most practical translation of the story that turned the Jews into whites

(Rotbard, 2005:88) (the cover of Rotbard's book represents some of his ideas, see figure 51).

Moreover, its history not only sheds light on the true nature and colors of modern architecture in general and Israeli in particular, not only shows how architecture has changed the land’s geography, but also how imagined historiography can do this repeatedly (Rotbard 2005:21-22).

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Rotbard follows the renaissance of the image of the ‘White City' since the 1980s, and its integration into the neoliberal processes that have taken place in the city and the state along the

1990s (Rotbard 2005:28-33). The ‘white dream’ continues to resonate with the preservation of the modern myth, transcribing it into contemporary images of skyscrapers of 'A World City' above the small houses of 'The White City', and maybe furthermore I suggest, serving the national image of 'The High-Tech Nation' that surfs on the waves of the world of flows, barely touching the landscape. Observing it from within the image, Israelis are convinced that they are a modern legitimate success.

Landscape Regime

In 1909, the neighborhood 'Ahuzat Bayit' was established as a suburb of Jaffa, which aspired to urban independence in the name of Zionist ideas. The Photographer Avraham Soskin documented the early days of Tel Aviv in many famous pictures, first and foremost the historic lottery of the first plots for the establishment of the new neighborhood (see figure 52). The photograph glorifies the Zionist vision in its realization, a representation that has shaped the image of the modern city that has been 'created from the sands', 'from the foam of the waves and the clouds' (Rotbard 2005:78). The plot numbers were written, as the myth goes, on seashells collected on the beach, and the group of women and men, dressed in European style, were photographed between the dunes. From the angle which Soskin chose, the city of Jaffa, its neighborhoods and its orchards are invisible. Rather, by showing only an empty space, the photo imparted to the next generations the purist viewpoint that dominated the imagination of the city's pioneers (Rotbard 2005:83-85). Viewing the landscape from a chosen angle, or alternatively viewing it through white filters, mirrors and screens, is the form of modern regime that the

Zionist force exercises over its citizens. The visual regime takes on different forms and styles,

- 77 - but it is careful to keep its viewers within the frame, trapped in the images that purify their view of the landscape and of their identity. While the oriental gaze sees the 'other' landscape as its reflection, the modernist gaze finds ways to simply not see it.

Figure 52 :The lottery plot at Tel Aviv's first neighborhood. 1909. Photo: Avraham Soskin. Source: JNF Photo Archive, D753-322.

Until the 1950s, Israeli painting was dominated by a conformist stream which perceived the landscape as a setting for socio-political Zionist activity, but at the same time a non- conformist stream that saw landscape as an aesthetic field was developed. Conceptual modernism saw art as a field engaged in an interior dialogue and self-reflection, and not as a political tool (Zalmona 2010:193). The western vectors continued to draw art and culture towards abstraction and aesthetic interpretation of the landscape. Universal trends represented a civic worldview that is interested in the individual and his or her motives and temperament as the crux of the matter. Modern abstract art did not take an interest in questions that are not purely - 78 - artistic, such as those relating to a social or national agenda, rather it advocated the making of art for its own sake (Zalmona 2010:131 ). It sought to be contemporary and to express the artist’s groundbreaking talent, imagination, and unique perception of reality, which is devoid of an obligation to express a public essence. In contrast to conservatism and nationalism, the influence of Universalist trends over visual arts in Israel has grown over the years to create a formality based mainly on forms and colors and less on loyalty to the representation of reality. The purist modernist trend sought to maintain a discourse with abstract western art, and despite being criticized by the realist stream, it became a central shaping approach of Israeli culture over the years (Zalmona 2010:163).

In the history of Israeli art, the 'New Horizons' art movement marked the international modernist spirit and its crystallization from the 1950s to become the hegemonic Israeli point of view that preserved the abstraction of the landscape as a central Israeli visual style. Artist Joseph

Zaritsky, who is considered the founding father of Israeli modernism, painted the landscape in abstract splashes of color, creating shapes that look like a glittering rug devoid of perspectival depth, whose real forms can only be imagined. The free, independent, abstract and exuberant translation of the landscape expressed Zaritsky's belief in the autonomy of the art work, a distinctly modernist belief (Zalmona 2010:88). In a series of paintings from the 1940s, he explored the roof sights of Tel Aviv, presenting the city as a rhythmic outline and an organized patterns in a modern geometric order, against the backdrop of the mountains on the horizon to the east, painted in free, soft organic shapes. The historiography of Israeli art finds this view free of the bonds of the oriental eroticism of the landscape, and of the romantic Zionist pathos that saw nature and culture as a dichotomous opposition (Zalmona 2010:164). The city and the landscape are painted with the same color density, creating a continuity that bursts out of the frame. Some of the paintings show the landscape through framed windows, and in some Zaritsky himself appears as an observer and a painter of the landscape, emphasizing the painter's gaze - 79 - and his personal interpretation, looking at the landscape through a formal blur (for example see figure 53) (Zalmona, 2010:165-167).

Figure 53: "While Painting". 1940. Joseph Zaritsky. Figure 54: "Tzuba". 1973. Joseph Zaritsky.

The activities of artist from the ‘lyrical abstraction ’ stream were centered in Tel Aviv, and continued to establish its international vector. However, a series of paintings of the

Jerusalem Mountains, painted by Zaritsky in the 1970s, represents the blindness that modern abstraction imposes on the landscape (Abramson 2009b:281). Zaritsky painted the landscape around Kibbutz Tzuba, which was built on the lands of a Palestinian village that was abandoned in 1948, even drawing its name from it. The destroyed village houses and terraced orchards create an unusual scenery stand out in the landscape but they are not represented in the painting, with its semi-abstract colored compositions, celebrating the painter's voyage into nature and the open-air painting. The refined formal harmonies and shapes was criticized as making the ruins of the village transparent (Zalmona, 2010:174) (see figure 54). In the early 1990s, Israeli artist

Larry Abramson observed the same landscape, looked at it critically, and put his finger on the blindness of Zaritsky's modernist painting. He claimed that lyrical abstraction had allowed

Israelis to be blind to the morally challenging reality of the Palestinian expulsion, as well as to other social issues. This art of camouflage allows them to be both Zionists and modernists, enlightened members of the Universalist modernist community of progress, and righteous occupiers of the landscape. Zaritsky's beautiful watercolors represent the Zionist dream of a - 80 - beautiful landscape with no historical depth. It is the ultimate western visionary regime over landscape, a non-political filter that enables the erasure of Arab identity from the occupied landscape and imagines it as an aesthetic object. It is a view that masks all these layers of memory in the landscape, covering it no less than afforestation, archeology, and cartography that had taught the Israelis to know their landscape (Abramson 2009b:281) (From this critical view, Abramson responded to Zaritsky in a series of works of his own, see figure 55).

Figure 55: The series includes paintings by Abramson in Tzuba, which he dipped on newspaper pages while the paint was still fresh. The mutual blurring of landscape painting and political news represents his criticism. Larry Abramson. 1995.

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3. WESTERN LANDSCAPE

Territorial Imagination

Although the 1948 war, its results and the establishment of the state of Israel had a drastic impact on the Israeli landscape, they did not have immediate implications on the deep structure of Israeli culture. Abstract painting has not yet emerged as a central stream, and the events only strengthened the central institutionalized cultural mainstream and the uncritical representations created in its modern light (Zalmona 2010:134 ). Zionist propaganda included photo albums, posters and film clips describing the Israeli way of life and its landscapes, combining figures and state enterprises, representing the conquest of nature and land as central values. The images of the Zionist utopia - pioneers plowing virgin soil under the blazing sun, building Israeli cities, singing in public or dancing folk dances - were embedded in the collective memory (Zalmona

2010:144). After the establishment of the state of Israel, the dislike of oriental references was intensified, and it was also directed towards Jewish immigrants that had arrived from Arab countries (Zalmona 2010:134 ).The mainstream Israeli artistic and cultural flows continued to reproduce representations that shaped the Zionist connection to the landscape by working it and putting it in order. In contrast to western individualist modernism, the social realism that had developed under the Labor Movement focused on Israeli collective identity and territory, while blurring the individual imagination (Zalmona 2010:144-145 ).

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the symbolic landscape of the kibbutz and the collective village life had continued to represent perfection and beauty, radiating health, power, optimism and harmony with nature (Zalmona 2010:148). Israeli painting was supported by landscape design activities, and together they reshaped the landscape as a natural reality, turning ideology into an ‘objective truth’ (Zalmona 2010:143) (for example see figure 56). The young state invested considerable energy in shaping national symbols and in constructing spatial Israeli

- 82 - myths that linked the landscape to national redemption (Zalmona 2010:150). The Zionist narrative and the stories of the bible were intertwined in the imagination of the young people and engraved on the landscape, in a national process of socialization that included lessons and trips organized by the schools and youth movements, a practice which began before the establishment of the state (Abramson 2009b:277-278).

Figure 56: Yochanan Simon. 1954. "Youth in a kibbutz". mural, Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 2006, the mural was transferred to Israel and reconstructed in the dining room in Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. The painting illustrates the dualism of the landscape. The real one, shaped in the activities of the members of the national labor movement, alongside the represented one, replicating and disseminating the imagination of the Zionist landscape.

Since the 19th century up until the establishment of the state of Israel, Jewish settling in

Palestine was managed under the imagination of a frontier. Modern flows encouraged Jewish pioneers with national ideas to establish outposts, multiplying the colonial networks, ingraining and expanding, deepening in the ground. Zionism, a modern Imperial flow, looks at the landscape with an asymmetric point of view, which embodies its fundamental paradox – it wishes to merge with the landscape while separating itself from it, establishing a new landscape on top of the existing one. This point of view encourages and justifies the development of the frontier networks, a spatial spread of the 'interior' Zionist landscape within the 'outside' native

- 83 - landscape, creating it step by step and field by field, stronger than the holes in between, flexibly changing its shape according to the changing conditions (Efrat 2004:238 ). The opportunity to fill the holes in the network was given to Zionism upon the establishment of the state of Israel and its territorial imagination. The young state faced the challenge of conquering the entire landscape, within the borders shaped after 1948 war.

As a result of the 48' war - war of Independence for the Jews, and the catastrophe

('Nakba') for the Palestinians - the Palestinian community was ceased to exist as socio-political entity in Palestine. In the territory that became the state of Israel, 370 of 450 villages and urban neighborhoods where abandoned. Urban Palestinian life which was mostly centered in the western part of the land was destroyed almost completely, and the natives who left their land had become refugees. In Jaffa, for instance, a community of 70-80 thousand people had shrunk to 3,000-4,000 inhabitants. Half of the Arab population was uprooted from its land, 700,000 were evacuated, making room for a similar number of incoming Jewish immigrants (Efrat,

2004:515). The numbers I listed here are derived from Zionist historiographical sources, yet I assume that Palestinian historiography counts higher numbers. But the Zionist-based figures are high enough to understand the extent of the crisis that the Palestinian society had experienced in the Nakba, and the radical changes that its landscape had experienced.

Until the middle of 1949 most of the deserted Palestinian settlements were ruined, and the few left intact were occupied by Jewish immigrants. Arabic agricultural fields were taken over by Jewish settlements, and new villages were established on them (see figure 57). Around

870,000 acre of deserted land was declared as national property by the Israeli state, which passed it to the use of Jewish settling organizations (Efrat, 2004:515). The question of the right of Arab refugees to return was deferred by emergency regulations and later was practically blocked by the new landscaping practices. A radical change of the landscape was initiated - in the

- 84 - composition of the population, ownership of the land and its division, all part of Israeli terroritorization (Efrat2004:515 ). The end of the British mandate rule, the 1948 war and its consequences, the rapid process of population exchanges, expropriation and nationalization of

90% of the land, the use of emergency laws, international support and assistance – all shaped the opportunity and legitimacy for (re)constructing the landscape within its new borders (Efrat

2004:992). Now that the Palestinian inhabitants had been largely driven out of the landscape and a modern Jewish state was established, the process of making it Israeli territory could continue.

Figure 57: The comparative mapping before and after the 48' war reveals the dramatic population exchange. Source: Shoshan, M. 2012. "Atlas of The Conflict: Israel-Palestine". 010 Publishers.

After the war, the meaning of 'conquest of the land' shifted to an expression referring to the planning and execution of national infrastructure. The landscape became a field of long-term physical planning and development for the growing Jewish population (Efrat 2004:827 ). The

- 85 - national territory underwent construction projects on a state scale, shaped by multi-disciplinary professionals, and guided by a vision which was made explicit in the first national masterplan

(Sharon Plan, 1951). Israel’s Sharon Master Plan was the first plan to provide an overview of the entire country. It aimed to organize and reshape the country’s geographic patterns, as well as its patterns of urbanization, socialization, and employment. The plan was guided by a total planning ambition which was both institutional and modern, and was contrived in a synthetic and structural process of assimilation, or re-assimilation (Efrat 2004:991).

The master plan had 5 categories –

agriculture, industry, transportation, parks and

forests, and new localities (for compilation see

figures 58). Its planners, architect Arieh Sharon and

his team, were trusted with the urgent national

mission of outlining settlement and housing

solutions for the large waves of incoming Jewish

immigrants. In addition, they were to plan

settlements along the frontiers of the state in order

to stabilize its borders, as well as to prevent the

abandonment of territories and the return of

Palestinian refugees to their lands (Efrat, 2004:993).

The plan outlined a temporary network of

immigrants’ camps and semi-civilian posts. It

indicated the locations of new villages and the

colonization of deserted Arab villages and

neighborhoods. It drew a hierarchy of settlements

Figure 58: Map of the national plan (Sharon 1950:27) – villages , rural centers, medium and large cities . - 86 -

Within a decade, the Israel Master Plan had developed from a conceptual document to a mega- project which included tens of cities, hundreds of villages; vast amounts of land were allocated for foresting, national parks and nature reserves; planned infrastructure included roads, electricity and water networks, seaports and factories (Efrat 2004:994-995 ).

Most of the Jewish immigrants that arrived during the early days of the state had settled in the cities, as was the case before Israel was established. In 1949, two thirds of the Jewish population lived in the three largest cities – Tel Aviv and Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea and

Jerusalem in the mountains. The small cities and rural centers where also expanded, and the old colonies on the coastal plains underwent urbanization processes (Efrat 2004:684). The master plan aimed to change the 'colonized pattern' in which 82% of the Jewish population inhabited the Mediterranean shores, and to spread it across the land (Efrat 2004:993 ). In order to accomplish this goal, a major spatial planning effort was made to divert the settlement and political weight from the cities to the rural areas, from the center to the periphery (Efrat

2004:992).

During the early years of Zionism, pioneering models of agricultural settlements and collective systems of manufacturing, organizing, and marketing of agricultural products were invented and developed. The city was presented as an antithesis to the new Zionist project of building a homeland (Efrat 2004:992). This approach had continued after the establishment of the state with the promotion of agricultural settlements. The agricultural production of

Palestinian villages that had remained intact within Israel had collapsed following the war. In addition, commercial relations with neighboring Arab countries that had supplied much of the agricultural products prior to the war were disconnected. As a result, new agricultural settlements were needed. They were established because of strategic and ideological motives, but they were also intended to supply the population with the missing agricultural produce (Efrat

- 87 -

2004:683). Frontier strategies continued to be practiced along the Israeli borders, dictating the position of new villages and cities (Efrat 2004:238 ). The landscape in the national periphery, as well as in the urban peripheries, was developed in order to house the new Jewish immigrants, mostly from Arab countries. The external national-military frontiers reiterated the internal

Israeli socio-ethnic boundaries. It signified the social polarization enhanced by the goal of population distribution and rooted in the Israeli physical and social landscape (Efrat2004:242 ).

Israeli landscaping continued to suggest models of modern spatial typologies, prototype villages and housing forms, schemes that could be reproduced, modulated, and spread. Models were used as technical tools, but they were also powerful symbols, essential in developing a language of Israeli landscape, which fitted the national project of replacing indigenous textures with universal structures (For aerial photography of a new neighborhood illustrating this, see figure 59) (Efrat 2004:308). The brutalist architecture of the early state expressed the direction taken by modern architecture in Europe toward concrete practice, which aims to be an organizing force in society. The transition from 'white' to 'gray' architecture indicated a shift from an aesthetic humanistic paradigm, to an industrial post-humanistic approach, characterized by repetitively, serial production, replication, propaganda and mass distribution. These spelled out the entirety and generalness of modernity, in contrast to the humanistic approach that highlighted the autonomy of the art and the artist and placed the subject in the center (Efrat

2004:61-63). The residential block, which has a prominent place in the Israeli architectural landscape both as an instrument and as an idea, is an icon of this technical and cultural modernization. It’s simple shape seems neutral and detached, whereas in reality this is a political and ideological object. For the political left, it is the realization of the proletariat Marxist vision.

For the right, it is the distinct creation of a ‘science’ of manufacturing, efficiency and profitability (Efrat 2004:169 ). Its dominant use in post-war Europe, as tool for constructing a new world, influenced housing construction in the newly declared state of Israel. Centralized - 88 - planning, seriality, standardization, terse forms and ergonomic efficiency were all used in developing the residential block as a solution for the new state’s problems of immigration flows and nation construction. The hegemony of the block in the Israeli landscape was a distinct sign of a regime that had centralized control over land resources, infrastructure, planning, legislation, manufacturing and building methods, as well as propaganda and means of population engineering (Efrat 2004:170-171 ).

Figure 59: Ramat Yosef neighborhood, Bat Yam city. 50's. Architect Itzhak Perlstein. Source: Bat Yam Municipality Archives. In his introduction to the book "The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture, 1948-

1973", Zvi Efrat suggests that the Israeli architectural discourse views the Zionist project as an optimal experimental field for modern architecture, and conversely, modern architecture is the natural expression and illustration of the Zionist body (Efrat, 2004:56 ). In this seminal book he critically examines the state’s perception of the Israeli project as an architectural structure, in

- 89 - which relations between vision and program, ideology and strategy, politics and geography are closely regulated (Efrat 2004:25 ). Israeli architecture from the first two decades of the state, including private and institutional construction, dwellings and public buildings, represents a social hegemony, that had managed to dictate a regime of ‘good taste’, to operate a mechanism of planned culture and to produce a new national surface (Efrat 2004:26-28 ). Zionist space, or landscape, is always a cultural construction and a social institution. It is an invented shelter, a different place, whether real and heterotopic or imagined and utopic, situated or projected, mundane or exemplary, erotic or exotic (Efrat, 2004:41-42 ).

Continuing its pre-war frontier strategy, Israeli landscaping is moved by an anxiety from emptiness, compulsively involved in creating borders and regulations, by-passes and detours, entry certificates and arrangements, (Efrat 2004:30 ). The ongoing preoccupation with borders, evident in countless plans and maps, is also present in the landscape. Efrat argues that the compulsive rejection of permanent state boarders has led to the preservation of a frontier consciousness, which is present in any shape, material and object worthy of the name ‘Israeli’

(Efrat 2004:30 ). Whether in the physical, cultural or social landscapes, there is a reciprocity between territorial borders and the construction of Israeli national identity. As argued by

Adriana Kemp, Israeli borders are a phenomena which brings together geo-politics, sociology and politics; a metaphor for the ways in which the nation experiences its spatial position and its relation to 'others' within it (Quoted in Efrat, 2004:237 ).

A Two-Faced Landscape

Modern nationalism entails a close connection between collective identity and territorial delimitation. Building borders is part of the making of the state and the construction of national identity. In the Western geo-political imagination, borders mark the external while confirming

- 90 - internal homogeneity, and shaping a unified and domesticized order of territorial and social sovereignty. Socio-political theory assigns borders with a dual role - they separate 'here' and

'there' while also separating 'us' and 'them'. This separation formulates the homogeneous imagination employed by Eurocentric thought in relation to the modern state, which views the territory as 'the homeland' (Kemp 2000:16-17 ). The purifying modern imagination of the bordered landscape ignores its hybrid and flowing nature. The image of separation serves as a mechanism to project state power over space. The dividing border, drawn from within, is one of the mechanisms by which the social and political order is preserved. It serves as a political tool for shaping the modern national imagination (Shenhav 2005a:90-81). Israeli spatial and architectural concepts and imaginations display no pure styles, stable models or mega-theories.

Rather, they are a modern cultural form, based on adaptability to local conditions. The landscape created by the visionary Israeli project of territorialization was a multi-channeled creation in its structure and details (Efrat 2004:26-28 ). Just as its architecture does not accomplish the utopian vision, so too the Zionist project cannot fulfill its imagination regardless of reality (Efrat

2004:30).

Israeli sociologist Yehuda Shenhav shows how Israeli nationalism integrates the modern constitution into Latour's analysis, intensifying the dual use of the two modern practices of purification and hybridization. He argues that modern nationalism is an expression of the paradoxical logic of the modern constitution, adhering to the principle of separation while not actually fulfilling it. This dual characteristic operated within the state itself by its various mechanisms, no less than on its external borders, as part of the internal politics of it identity. It is not only 'outward' looking, but also 'inward' into society, and its processes of formatting a modern Jewish nation, which began with early Zionism, is an ongoing process, still in motion

(Shenhav, 2005b:9). Shenhav focuses on the local paradox whereby secular Zionism finds it difficult to extricate itself from its binds to Judaism (Shenhav, 2005a:84). While the secular - 91 - vector draws the Israeli landscape westwards, toward pure modernity, the religious vector draws it eastwards, toward the past that connects the people with the land, and this paradox is evident in different fields - social, political, economic, and certainly geographical.

Israeli sociologist Adriana Kemp points to this modern Israeli practice of Israel in its dual point of view over its borders - a territorial and a spatial approach, which are contradictory, but practiced simultaneously. Like the dual face of Janus, an image used by Kemp, this paradoxical approach creates a complex and ambivalent relationship between the Israeli borders and collective Israeli identity (Kemp 2000:25). While Israel ruled over the western part of the landscape since 1948, the eastern parts of the land, where the historical Jewish connection with the land is buried, remained outside the borders of the state. In its early years, the state sought to present the border in the Israeli public consciousness as an issue that was more controversial than the struggle with its neighboring states - it discussed the incomplete nature of the collective identity and its essence (Kemp 2000:15). The border was the subject of national rituals that sanctified the settlement of the frontier on one hand, and on the other hand it was presented as an artificial, ambivalent scar, never complete (Kemp 2000:18 ). According to Kemp, the double language expresses the tension between the state’s space and the physical and symbolic space in which the nation imagines itself, exposing its problematic significance as a component of collective identity (Kemp 2000:36 ).

David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, insisted on keeping the Israeli borders flexible, and refused to specify them in the state’s declaration of independence. The outcome of the 1948 war; the large Palestinian refugee population; the refusal of Arab states to recognize the state of Israel; and the occupation of areas which were not planned to be part of Israeli territory in the UN resolution of 1947 – all dictated not only the location of the borders, but also their character as armistice lines rather than international borders, lines of neither peace nor war

- 92 -

(Kemp 2000:18 ). The opportunity to conquer the entire land up to the Jordan River was missed in the 1948 war, and the eastern border between Israel and the state of Jordan was determined under the status-quo which was achieved at the end of the war. The Green Line, Israel’s eastern border, was drawn following the armies’ positions. The result was a 360 km curved and winding line with no natural justification, crossing land ownerships, passing close to main roads, separating Palestinians from each other, sometimes crossing villages, splitting the coastal plains in the west from the eastern mountains, and the habitus of Israelis from its core (Efrat 2004:238 ).

The spatial character of the borders was partly shaped by repeated efforts of Palestinian refugees to cross the border into Israeli territory. These infiltrations, by individuals a well as by organized groups that had economic or political motivations, undermined the state’s attempts to establish its presence in the border areas and to prevent a possible withdrawal to the UN

Separation Resolution lines of 29.11.47 (Kemp 2000:19 ). In contrast to the Palestinian infiltrations, Israeli military forces overtly crossed the borders and practiced military raid operations deep inside Jordanian territory. Crossing the borders into the 'exterior' landscape became an Israeli myth of heroism and connection to the land, symbolizing the mystification of space and the exoticization of the border (Kemp 2000:24 ). The state of Israel dealt with its borders in a dual way - on one hand, through its civilian mechanisms, it fortified them and sought to frame them clearly; on the other hand, through its military frameworks, it shaped them as a mythical frontier. In the first decade of the state, then, the border was determined in the collective consciousness as a story of vagueness and ambiguity, a site that expresses the incompatibility between the political space of the state and the cultural space of the nation

(Kemp 2000:13 ).

The double movement that characterizes the Israeli border – simultaneously portrayed as a blocking wall and a permeable frontier - is part of the process of shaping Israeli identity,

- 93 - and clearly expresses the paradoxical complexity of the Israeli modern perspective over the landscape and over itself (Kemp 2000:24 ). The Israeli ‘borderline disorder’ is a modern phenomenon in its fundamental paradox– on one hand a territorial language, defining the border as a separation tool which allows for the unification of its interior space; on the other hand a spatial language, which defines the border and its surrounding as a frontier, a binary space, were inside and outside are disarrayed. This dual practice shapes the landscape by unilateral actions.

Landscaping the national space is a continues and endless process, the Israeli totem, with the border as the taboo. This consciousness does not explain the territorial change that took place in the wake of the 1967 war, nor the war itself, but Kemp suggests that it can explain the fixation of Israel's territorial ambiguity after the war (Kemp 2000:36 ).

A Modern Past

The two central modern streams of Israeli art saw the landscape as a substance in the design of an Israeli scenery, or as an artistic object. In contrast to these movements and despite the rejection of the oriental image by modernism since the 1930s, major Israeli artists had continued to search for archaic and Mesopotamian sources of inspiration, using a modern formal rather than figurative approach. These cultural currents were not bounded by well-defined boundaries.

They overlapped and intermingled, even within the same image, both shaping the Israeli landscape, united by their modern gaze (Zalmona 2010:131 ) (for example see figure 60). Even during the 1940s, images from the East continued to mark the cultural alternative that could eliminate the connection between the ‘new Jews’ and the Diaspora, by reconnecting them with the ancient past of the land. Ancient references allowed to overlook the image of the Arab as a connecting link to the past, as someone who preserved something of the Jewish ancient existence, and as a model for local identity. Instead, a model of spatial ‘Israelism’ was proposed,

- 94 - that bridged West and East by connecting to a primal and enigmatic world of ancient myths and gods. Young Jews born in Israel, as well as immigrants who wished to become rooted, saw the narrowing of the definition of the 'new Jew' to the geographical context of the land as the essence of Zionism (Zalmona 2010:118). Although criticized for sanctifying physical space, this movement, which was called ‘the Canaanites’ or the ‘New Hebrews’, continued to exist alongside the main streams of the Israeli landscape (Zalmona 2010:63 ).

Figure 60: Avraham Melnikov. 1934. "The Roaring Lion". A Figure 61: Yitzhak Danziger. 1939. "Nimrod". The Israel memorial to those killed in the battle of Tel Hai, made of Museum, Jerusalem. local stone and sculpted in a figurative style inspired by Assyrian reliefs, roaring eastward. The sculpture is considered a milestone in Canaanite art, and one of the first Israeli commemorative monuments. Yitzhak Danziger, who was a central artist of this movement, created the sculpture of

'Nimrod' in 1939 (see figure 61). This iconic sculpture had become a marker for the intersection of different threads of content that defined the space of identity of the ‘New Hebrews’ (Zalmona

2010:118). Nimrod is a biblical figure symbolizing royalty and power, which is connected with

- 95 - the ancient pagan world rather than with the sequence of Jewish heroism. The sculpted shape, features and body, and the stone from which it was carved, emphasized its connection with the local landscape. Danziger had shaped a Hebrew idol or a contemporary archeological remnant, describing his work on the sculpture as 'carving himself into the landscape' (Zalmona 2010:120-

123). The sculptor rejected the Israeli institutional modernist worldview, offering a local romantic existential alternative (Zalmona 2010:125). However, this stream nevertheless preserved the Zionist yearning for the ancient place, from which it derived the historical right to the land (Zalmona 2010:142).

Danziger and the 'New Hebrews' movement, or the 'Canaanites', called for a separation from Judaism and Diasporic history, and instead promoted an emotional and ideological identification with Eastern cultures, and the development of an attachment to the landscape rather than a wish to cover the country in 'a dress of concrete and cement' (Zalmona 2010:127 ).

The Canaanite approach challenged the Zionist hegemony that was based on Judaism, but because of its subversive position, it did not gain political power. Although this charismatic minority was politically repressed, historically, Zionist leaders have always had a touch of

Canaanite-ism. This spatial stream found a political home in the Revisionist right, which held an aggressive position advocating an uncompromising stand against the Palestinians' right to the land. Although the Canaanites were criticized for sanctifying physical space, their approach continued to exist alongside the main streams of the Israeli landscape (Zalmona 2010:63 ). The modern view of the eastern landscape remains legitimate in the Israeli discourse as long as it preserves the Zionist paradoxical framework of a Jewish-democracy, and continues to maintain a wall of separation between Jews and Palestinians, marking the boundaries of identity and acting as a reminder of the Jewish connection to the place through the past (Zalmona 2010:142 ).

- 96 -

The Israeli passion to dig and expose remains of the past that could tie the new state to its place, were particularly strong in the early days of the state. Israeli archeologists continued the work of western archeologists that had been digging in the Holy Land since the 19th century.

However, their motives were national motives, rather than religious. Excavations involved tourism and academia, but also raised security issues and political problems. Israeli archeology was used as a political tool and a main element of developing Israeli national identity, together with other landscaping practices, to confirm the Zionist right to the land. Contemporary landscape is conceived, in this point of view, as a layer that covers the Israelite biblical landscape that lies underneath (Weizman 2017:57-58). The special attention given to Jewish ruins in Israeli landscaping does not neglect the archeology of other cultures, provided they do not threaten the

Israeli narrative, and are assumed to have touristic value as well. Sites that carry the memory of the Palestinian past were rarely excavated, nor preserved or restored (Efrat 2004:486-487). The

Palestinian ruins of 1948 slid smoothly into the role of historical ruins that decorate the landscape with romantic orientalism. The ruin was seen as the natural state of Arabic architecture, and it became one of the building blocks of the landscape of the Israeli homeland, even within the 1948 borders (Rotbard 2005:239).

The ruins scattered in the Israeli landscape are viewed as symbolizing an ancient age in which humans were part of the harmonious cycle of nature. They give the landscape its layer of antiquity, folding time into the mythological and ideological presence of the landscape that wants to be known - both in the erotic and in the intellectual senses (Abramson 2009:279). But although the ruin is called by the Israelis in its Arabic name, H'irbe (Horva in Hebrew), the cultural affiliation of this name was not associated with the memory of the Palestinian destruction. Even when it is known that those are ruins of a village from few decades ago, the romantic image had distanced the typical Israeli viewer from the act of raping the landscape, let alone understanding the Palestinian Nakba. This symbolic memory remains transparent in the - 97 - hegemonic image of the ruin and of the landscape. The Palestinian ruins are testimonies to the violence of Zionist landscaping and its struggles of rewriting history and reshaping reality (Efrat

2004:485). The blind love of the landscape prevents Israelis from seeing the villages and agricultural groves of the expelled Palestinian population. The Israeli visual regime sought to construct the gaze and control the consciousness, which became a tangible political reality in the Israeli landscape (Abramson 2009:279).

After the 1948 war, Palestinian villages and urban neighborhoods that were left under

Israeli rule, had undergone either destruction or reuse and appropriation. Forests were planted or new Jewish settlements were built over some of the ruins. Jewish immigrants were settled in many of the abandoned Arab neighborhoods that remained intact (Efrat, 2004:515). Such neighborhoods often turned into slums and were seen as places of crime, prostitution, and neglect. In some cases this led to their later destruction, and to the reuse of the land for planting a public garden or building new housing blocks, which sometimes continued to fold the sorrow of the place back into the landscape, in the form of modernized slums (Rotbard, 2005:208-

213,225-231). A contrasting type of spatial view perceived local Arabic architecture with enchanted fascination, and indigenous structures were subject to a trend of gentrification. Social elites working in academia and civil services, as well as the artistic-bohemian avant-garde, adopted this trend by appropriating local textures, both rural and urban (Efrat2004:437 ). This phenomenon is widespread in the former Palestinian neighborhoods of west Jerusalem, in some of the mountain villages of the hinterlands that were not destroyed, in Old Jaffa and its neighborhoods that became the oriental suburb of Tel Aviv, and in other places. The affection of the Israeli elites for Palestinian property and romantic landscape is reflected in the longing for an ‘authentic localism’ that had accompanied Zionism throughout its history, despite its modernistic cultural vision (Efrat2004:437 ).

- 98 -

Apart from some foreign influences that inspired the attempts to consolidate a national architecture of the Israeli project from the early years of the state, other architectural currents continued to try and grasp 'the spirit of the place'. Local Arabic architecture was a central reference, viewed as a symbol of pictorial rawness or of an understanding of the conditions of the land and its resources. An appreciation of this architectural response to climate, landscape, topography and local materials was interwoven with an enchantment from the indigenous views and vernacular structures (Erat 2004:437). However, Efrat points out that the attempts to localize the new Israeli architecture before 1967 were minor and experimental. Only after the 1967 war, when the Old City of Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories of the mountains were united with the western Israeli landscape, it became a common fashion (Erat 2004:437).

Figure 62: Gilo Neighborhood, Jerusalem. Late 1970s. Arch. Salo Hershman

The oriental gaze was aroused by the national exhilaration over the unification of the land, the ecstatic celebrations of the victory over the Arab enemy, and the return to the mountainous land of the Patriarchs which was the source of inspiration for the Palestinian - 99 - landscape. All of these had encouraged the influence of the oriental gaze over the Israeli landscape. The Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem was restored after the 1967 war, challenging the modern trends of Israeli architecture. Its preservation and reconstruction served as a model for future Israeli architecture, building the vision of a united Jerusalem with new

Jewish neighborhoods around the Old City. The architecture of the neighborhoods that were built on the occupied land of East Jerusalem and the villages in its rural hinterlands, marked a sharp shift in Israeli architecture, from ‘pious’ modernism that sanctified the New, to a devotion to post-1967 values of romanticism that worshipped the Old, and opened a new frontier (Efrat

2004:490) (for example see figure 62).

- 100 -

4. EASTERN LANDSCAPE

Networking the Frontier

The project of building Greater Jerusalem aimed to make the Occupied Territories in the eastern part of the city part of the holy capital. The planning, management, form and style of the new neighborhoods all shaped a visual language that tried to obscure the occupation in a haze of romanticism. It was supposed to determine new facts on the ground, naturalize territorial demands and support national narratives of belonging, while sabotaging the Palestinian narrative and expansion potential. The new neighborhoods’ architecture was based on modernist urban planning principles, but it was committed to ‘oriental’ aesthetics. Ideas of a 'local architectural language' reaffirmed the British regulation that required to clad new buildings with 'local' stone, inorder to give them an authentic appearance and to unite the city with visual values (Weizman

2017:42). The ethics and aesthetics of modern architecture had shifted from an embodiment of a utopian solidarity of a Labor-led society, to the liberal pluralism of a consumption culture.

Modern architecture that was previously devoid of symbols and metaphors and used bare materials and basic shapes, endorsing the autonomy of spatial units and the efficiency of plans, had now adorned itself in an attempt 'to fit' the landscape. Sentimentalism and neo-eclecticism, displaying symbols of antiquity and rootedness, had spread in the landscape even before western

'post-modernism' became a dominant reference. From the use of Brutalism as a style that deals with questions of shadows and light, it turned into a brutal practice which served as a mechanism of taking over locality (Efrat 2004:935-936). Israeli architectural culture had always been locked in a paradox of desires – on one hand it wished to mimic the local stereotype of Arabic style (representing a re-connection to the landscape and its past), and on the other it wished to define itself as a sharply opposed movement (representing Zionist modernity and progress). This

- 101 - paradoxical point of view not only challenged Israeli identity, but also reinforced the viewing of Palestinian landscape an eternal romantic image of backwardness. Oddly, this point of view fails to see not only the violation of human rights, but also the modernization processes of the

Arabic village, its complex development from an agrarian to a semi-urban type of dwelling, its abandonment of stone in favor of concrete, and ironically – the Israeli architectural influences.

In Israeli culture, the Palestinian landscape remains pre-modern - still occupied by the Israeli oriental gaze (Weizman 2017:64-65).

Under Israeli power, the landscape of East Jerusalem was processed in order to unite it with the western parts of the city and create a unified capital city. At the same time, it is kept separated, representing the Israeli occupation mechanism (Weizman 2017:40-41). Jerusalem is a central case that displays some of the main properties of the unification/separation practices of the western and eastern Israeli-Palestinian landscapes. Unlike the rest of the West Bank

Occupied Territories though, the Israeli government had annexed east Jerusalem a few days after the war had ended. By so doing, villages and hinterlands were added to the city, shaping Greater

Jerusalem in the middle of the entire land. Inside its new expanded municipal borders, the metropolis of Jerusalem was supposed to be the Jewish eternal holy basin. A new city masterplan was prepared in 1969, and its main principle was to prevent an option for a future re-division of the city. New Jewish neighborhoods were constructed between and around the Palestinian neighborhoods and villages that has been added to the city’s municipal borders. They were intended to wrap the city with a belt of Jewish inhabitants, surrounded by an additional outer belt of settlements that were planned as bedroom suburbs of the city, enlarging its grasp on the surrounding mountains (Weizman 2017:40-41).

Israeli urban planning in Jerusalem was supposed to preserve a demographic balance between Jews and Palestinians in the city, and to maintain the Jewish majority (Weizman

- 102 -

2017:70). The construction of new Jewish neighborhoods and settlements prevented Palestinian urbanization, limited its future expansion and interrupted its spatial continuity (Weizman

2017:72-73). Planning limitations serve as administrative excuses for an impossible reality in which Palestinians in East Jerusalem struggle to obtain building permits. Having no other choice they build mostly illegally, thereby exposing their houses to demolition (Weizman 2017:71).

The new Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem are connected to West Jerusalem and its center by a road system and public transportation infrastructures, while the Palestinian neighborhoods, which are underdeveloped and suffer from neglect, are viewed as ‘remnants’ of an 'authentic' landscape. The landscape of East Jerusalem is shaped by this entanglement of 'external'-'internal' relationships, preserving a separation between the new Jewish landscapes and the underdeveloped Palestinians areas. These practices produce a different landscape in East

Jerusalem then that of West Jerusalem, keeping the two parts of the city separated under the unity of the Israeli regime (Weizman 2017:40-41 ).

In his book "Hollow Landscape", Eyal Weizman follows the Israeli expansion in the

Occupied Territories by means of military strategies and the settlements project (Weizman

2017). He exposes methods of appropriation of on the landscape, reviews 'Israel's architecture of the occupation' and characterizes it, already in the title of the introduction, as 'an architecture of a frontier' (Weizman 2017:9). The cease-fire lines established after the 1967 war were considered by Israel as supplying the complementary territory required to match the state’s form with the identity and imagination of 'Greater Israel' - the holy land, although they were not accepted officially and internationally as its borders. In the discourse of defense, the new borders were perceived as a framework for the fortification of the state, and the Israeli presence in the

Occupied Territories was perceived as a strategic mission (Weizman 2017:79). Settlement activities in the first decade after the war were concentrated along the eastern part of the

Occupied Territories in the Jordan Valley, which was considered to be a strategic line of defense - 103 - for the state (Weizman 2017:80). However, models of spatial strategy subsequently led to the thickening of the Jewish presence on the mountains as well. Civilian settlement of the Occupied

Territories was therefore perceived as defensive action, and discussions about the settlements’ locations employed a military language, representing the intra-Zionist struggle between the territorial strategy and the spatial one (Weizman 2017:84-85).

The frontier myth, which was central before the 1948 war, persevered in the language of strategic depth, proposing to break the old border between the western and eastern landscapes by developing a decentralized and dynamic defense system, based on deep-seated outposts

(Weizman 2017:84-85) (for a view of outpost see figure 63). In the first stage, military installations were deployed on the mountains, and later they became blueprints for civilian occupation in the form of the settlements (Weizman 2017:89). The early pioneering enterprises were informal and flexible, and aimed to begin by ensuring a presence (Weizman 2017:110).

Since then, the settlements were developed as a network on the mountain ranges, forming clusters that are connected to Israel within the Green Line by a high-capacity road network. The network of settlements spreads across the Palestinian landscape, enveloping the Arab clusters, and splitting them with Israeli transit corridors (Weizman 2017:108-109). Like the expansion of

Zionist settlement prior to the establishment of the State, in the 1930s and 1940s in the western parts of the country, the layout of the settlement network exemplifies a modern strategic move of expansion within a complex movement involving a variety of forces, with different variants of Israeli imagination. The responsibility for shaping the settlement movement in the Occupied

Territories lies with many different agents and organizations, representing contradictions rather than cohesive strategic values. The settlement enterprise, especially in its early stages, can be characterized by organizational disorder, flexibility and improvisation, which were essentially

- 104 - different from the all-encompassing planning that took place in western Israel territory

(Weizman 2017:115 ).

Figure 63: A settlement outpost in the landscape of the Occupied Territories. Source: unknown. One of the central organizations working to develop the settlement enterprise from its inception was 'Gush Emunim', a non-parliamentary organization that advocated a new and strong type of national-religious Zionism. Its people wanted to tie different threads of Zionism, to reconnect pioneering and militarism, and to mix nationalism with religious messianic beliefs.

They sought to liberate the spatial feelings that had been suppressed by secular modernism. In their imagination they saw the rebirth of a complete and eternal Israel, across the entire Israeli-

Palestinian section. The effective tactic of 'Gush-Emunim', which is also known from previous settlement days, was settlement without government permits, placing facts on the ground in order to gain legitimacy later (Weizman 2017:118 ). They operated between the corridors of government, dictating political agendas and priorities, shaping the geography of the occupation through interaction between political agents and various ideological factors, often contradictory

(Weizman 2017:121 ).

- 105 -

In contrast to the messianic ideas that religious-Zionism promotes, secular-territorial vectors within Israeli society call for a renunciation of the Occupied Territories, and for the establishment of a clear modern border for the state and for Israeli identity. The formation of the 'Shalom-A'hshav' (Peace-Now) movement represents a left-wing flow that developed in the

1980s in Western Israel, advocating the advancement of territorial and security agreements in order to achieve peace in exchange for the partition of the land (Weizman 2017:105-106).

However, Israeli governments have gradually learned to manage the chaos of the settlements, while encouraging and actively engaging in it (Weizman 2017:124). Over the years, Israeli policy toward the settlement of the Occupied Territories has undergone changes due to the spatial nature of the settlement enterprise, but all Israeli governments with different political orientations have actively contributed to its strengthening, development and expansion

(Weizman 2017:158 ). With the replacement in 1979 of the hegemony of Labor parties by right- wing revisionists, a strategy was designed to make the settlement enterprise official and controlled by the state (Weizman 2017:141).

The Israeli government therefore initiated a large-scale mapping and land registration project, to identify public lands over which Israel could claim ownership. Every parcel of land whose Palestinian ownership could not be proven, as well as any private land whose Palestinian owners could not prove is in use, was declared state land and expropriated in favor of settlements. The expropriation of the land was based on old laws dating back to the days of the

Ottoman Empire, which in the past sought to encourage the cultivation of the land by its owners

(Weizman 2017:149-150). It resulted mainly in the expropriations of higher topographic areas, which are rockier and so less cultivated. This method of land seizure became a general practice and repressed concepts of 'enlightened colonialism' that sought to develop Palestinian agriculture instead of suppressing it. The high areas occupied by the state and settlements were extraterritorial, annexed in practice, while the unincorporated territory remained under military - 106 - order. As a result, most of the settlements were established at high points, so that the colonization of the mountainous regions created a vertical separation between two parallel ethno-national geographies, twisted together, constantly interlaced and rubbed together (Weizman 2017:149-

152). This 'vertical' Territorial separation is supported by a legal division that has separated the laws of ruling over the Palestinians from the Jewish ones, thus separating the space into two intertwined landscapes (Weizman 2017:155).

Hollow-Holy Landscape

In contrast to the religious-ideological settlement movement that characterized 'Gush Emunim', since the 1980s the mountain settlements have developed as part of an Israeli middle-class suburbanization process. These settlements in the Occupied Territories offered their residents a high quality of life at an affordable price, not far from the main urban centers. Economic trends of supply and demand accompanied the Israeli policy that encouraged settlements, and their architectural character reflects the array of forces that were at work for their suburban design

(Weizman 2017:158). The early Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories were developed mainly in the eastern Jordan Valley after 1967. These were agricultural settlements that followed the Zionist-modernist types of the early 20th century. However, since the 1970s most of the new settlements had taken the form of semi-urban-rural suburbs (for the view of this typology see figure 64). Today, most of the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories are not agricultural, but rather are based on a new Israeli model of a 'community settlement', designed to develop Jewish localities in the mountainous areas, not only in Judea and Samaria but also in the northern Galilee and the southern Negev (Weizman 2017:162 ).

- 107 -

Figure 64: Ma'aleh Adumim, east of Jerusalem. The landscape in the suburban typology of the settlements serves as a sign of quality of life. Photo: Flash 90.

The suburban layout of the typical mountain settlements follows the topographical lines

that surround the tops of the ridges. Infrastructures are organized the along these lines, as well

as the housing plots that are distributed in a repetitive rhythm, spreading small private homes

over the landscape (Weizman 2017:169). The houses in these communities were built either by

governmental development companies, or by commercial contractors on a private basis.

Housing has created a mountainous Israeli suburban landscape characterized by stylistic

uniformity. It is shaped by the duplication of a relatively small variety of villas with a garden,

or alternatively by privately constructed villas that used the 'Build Your Own Home'

governmental scheme which encouraged the building of dream private homes on a small plot of

land. In each of these types of houses, the red tiled roofs became a symbol that cannot be missed,

signifying the foreignness of the Israeli landscape that spreads as a colonial network on the

frontier of the Palestinian landscape (Weizman 2017:163 ). The landscape of the mountains is a

- 108 - key element in the design of the settlements. On one hand, they serve strategically as panoptical observatories, and on the other hand, the commanding views over landscape that many windows have, were designed to be seen as an oriental background and as a sign of the 'quality of life'

(Weizman 2017:171 ).

The views over the pastoral landscape are inseparable from the traditional colonial perspective, and the admiration of the landscape is inseparable from the essence of the Israeli settlements on the mountains. The aesthetics had joined the biblical national metaphors of ideological settlement, which transforms the Palestinian landscape into an imaginary mythical geography, set at the center of a national religious ceremony. Together they transform the landscape into the backdrop required by the very essence of the settlement enterprise (Weizman

2017:174). The landscape that the settlers see in practice - the daily life of the Palestinians under occupation - is camouflaged by the asymmetric filters of the modern gaze, which shape the power of modern imagination that allows one to observe the landscape without really seeing it.

The very things that turn the landscape into biblical and pastoral (traditional indigenous settlement patterns, traditional agriculture processing in the form of terraces, olive groves, stone buildings and sheep herding) depend on the presence of the Palestinians, the ones that the Jewish settlement enterprise seeks to dispose of (Weizman 2017:176).

The settlement enterprise had developed with hardly any governmental constraints throughout the 1980s and 1990s, increasing the number of Jewish settlers rapidly. In 1984,

35,000 Israelis lived in the Occupied Territories in 102 settlements; in 1992, about 100,000 lived in 123 settlements; and in the following decade, during the Oslo Peace Process, the Jewish population had doubled and reached 200,000 settlers, although the number of settlements did not increase. In the early 2000s, despite the Second Palestinian Intifada, the Jewish population

- 109 - continued to grow beyond the Green Line and in 2006 it had reached 268,000 (Weizman

2017:160) (for illustration of settlement expansion on maps see figure 65).

Figure 65: The comparative mapping express the expansion of the settlement enterprise in the Occupied Territories. Source: Shoshan, M. 2012. "Atlas of The Conflict: Israel-Palestine". 010 Publishers.

The Israeli flow in the Occupied Territories is a continuation of the modern occupation process that the Zionist movement operates in the Israeli-Palestinian landscape even before

1967, and even before 1948 (Weizman 2017:160). As I showed, the network of settlements that had spread around the eastern mountainous landscape of the Occupied Territories used the same imperial gaze that had guided the Zionist settlements in western Israel during the British

Mandate, with a similar modern expansionist flow. I find that both of them had evolved from various forces in a networked movement from the inside out, under the purifying modern gaze which sanctifies the landscape, religious or secular, looking west or east. Although they represent different variants of the Zionist flow, the imagination of modern separation has served

- 110 - both as a central practice. The main difference between them, I claim, lies neither in the different periods in which they have developed, nor in the different types of central government, or in their different styles, but rather in their varying historical contexts. While 'the western landscape' took advantage of the ethnic purification of the Nakba in 1948, the Palestinian Nachsa of 1967 did not include a massive evacuation of the indigenous population. 'The eastern landscape' is therefore characterized by higher resistance to the occupation by the landscape and its inhabitants, along with more intensive purification operations.

After 1948, 'the western landscape' had allowed for the development of a territorial imagination, while 'the eastern landscape' was fixed within the imagination of the occupied frontier. The continued resistance of the landscape to the occupation after 1967 exposed, I understand, the boundaries of separation on the surface. Over time, it necessitated the inclusion of purification techniques, their expansion in horizontal geography and into vertical geography, revealing the hollowness of the 'pure' imagination of the Holy Land.

Modern Landscaping

The Israeli concept of national security has always included a territorial apparatus, which employs inner segregation in order to control the land. Until 1966, within the boundaries of western Israel, Palestinians were under military rule, and checkpoints around and within their communities prevented them from travelling from place to place without a special permit

(Weizman 2017:182). This policy of ‘safety closures’ around the Israeli Arab population was removed on the eve of the 1967 war. Freedom of movement was also applied in the Occupied

Territories in the beginning. The 'Open Bridges' policy was intended to allow Palestinians to move between the western and eastern parts of the State of Israel, and even eastwards across the

Jordan River into the Kingdom of Jordan. However, with the prolongation of the occupation,

- 111 - and with the intensification of the Palestinian resistance, multiple restrictions were placed on the movement of the Palestinians. Since the 1980s, physical boundaries were constructed for defense, control, and appropriation of the Occupied Territories. They were developed to form an institutional, architectural, bureaucratic and legal apparatus, backed by the Zionist point of view of cultural and social separation (Weizman 2017:182).

The initial refusal of residents of most of the settlements to separate their localities from the landscape by the construction of physical boundaries around them, as if these are not already effectively in place, reflects the asymmetric complexity of the Israeli perspective. The enclosure of the settlements may indicate that they no longer have territorial demands beyond their borders, in addition to emphasizing the alienation of the settlements from the landscape and even representing fear of the Palestinians outside. The visual supervision facilitated by their elevated position, their architectural form, and even their powerful method of illumination at night - seemed at first to be sufficient to make a distinction without an aggressive display of the colonizing aspect of the settlement enterprise. However, reality has necessitated the establishment of peripheral defense systems in most of the settlements, which are equipped with electronic devices that include cameras and sensors, expanding both the ability to protect the settlements and the role of the surveying eye (Weizman 2017:172 ).

In the 1990s, following the Oslo Accords, the border discourse returned to public consciousness in a manner reminiscent of the pre-1967 discourse, bringing together parallel and even conflicting views regarding the contours of the national landscape (Kemp2000:13 ). The return of the border to the public consciousness is striking in comparison to the denial of the

Green Line, who was removed into the Israeli geographic subconscious by the attempts to obscure its traces, both physically and mentally, since the occupation of the Territories in 1967.

Adriana Kemp recognizes that since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the border has returned to

- 112 - the twofold discussion - territorial (as a dividing line) and spatial (in order to shape a "new

Middle East"). While the discourse of separation attempts to instill modernist concepts in a space that is not modern, the transnational discourse seeks to place the discussion in the world of neoliberal flows (Kemp 2000:26). The Oslo

Accords, which authorized the establishment of a Palestinian Authority, divided the

Occupied Territories into three separate areas, whose intertwined character was a result of the Israeli strategy of deploying the settlement network. Area A included the large concentrations of Palestinian population and was transferred to the full control of the

Palestinian Authority; Area B was transferred to civilian administration by the PA while

Israel retained its control over security; and

Area C, including all Israeli settlements, remained under full Israeli control (see figure

66). Since then, Israeli sovereignty is expressed in its ability to block, filter and regulate movement in the Occupied

Territories and from them 'outwards', and Figure 66: The route of the security fence according to a government decision (in red). 2005. Includes: The Green Line (in hence the closure policy has been improved Purple), Area A (Brown), Area B (Yellow), Area C (White). Ministry of Defense. and then normalized (Weizman 2017:183).

The occupation has become a system of shutters, opening and closing in the form of checkpoints. The bureaucratic infrastructure of the Oslo process sought to replace the occupation - 113 - with management, enabling the Israeli occupation forces to retain control through the regulation of a variety of channels: labor, goods, energy, water, sewage and waste (Weizman 2017:183-

184). There is a difference between a border and an obstacle - while the first separates between a sovereign inside and a foreign outside, the second manages traffic along a continuous territory

(Weizman 2017:220). Israel had contrived a system of closers and traffic regulations which fragmented the Palestinian tissue of life, almost paralyzing its economy. A vast set of instruments – constant and ad-hoc barriers, fixed or temporary – shaped the geographic, social and economic landscapes (Weizman 2017:188). The conflict had spread this technique also inward, into western Israel territory - guards and guarded gates were located all over Israeli cities in public places (Weizman 2017:198).

The growing number of barriers that were raised in the Occupied Territories had also increased the separation between Israeli and Palestinian communities within Israel. The practice of separation had deepened not only in the geography, but also in the social landscape (Weizman

2017:198). The project of managing the Occupied Territories involved a split between Israeli and Palestinian jurisdiction, shaping an archipelago of isolated territories, scattered and perforated. This system of security had crashed the Palestinian economy and extinguished any possibility for a local effective regime. According to the UN Humanitarian Office, the system of barriers is the main cause of the humanitarian crises in the Occupied Territories (Weizman

2000:201). The Palestinian Authority, with its 'parliament' and elected 'government' mask a reality of political division and social chaos. Armed organizations as well as humanitarian organizations supply services and resources which sometimes completely replace the bureaucratic systems of the Palestinian Authority (Weizman 2000:202). The illusion that after the Oslo Accords the Israeli policy of separation will turn the Palestinians into modern political subjects, has actually turned them into objects in need of humanitarian aid (Weizman

2017:203). - 114 -

The lack of continuity between the Palestinian territories has produced some three- dimensional solutions, integrating bridges and tunnels, which Weitzman calls 'The Vertical

Politics' (Weizman 2017:228). A vertical separation of infrastructures is meant to prevent frictions between Palestinians and Israelis. Spatially separated traffic systems complement the vision of the Separation Wall, cutting through Palestinian territories, with no need to evacuate

Jewish settlers. The road systems pass over, under or next to each other, keeping Israelis and

Palestinians disconnected physically and visually (Weizman 2000:230-231). After fragmenting the surface, the politics of the section have allowed the continuation and development of the politics of separation. Within the eastern landscape, two separate but congruent territorial networks are interwoven, attempting to double a single territorial reality. The higher network is the land of Israeli settlements, with its modern and developed neighborhoods that are connected by highways, while the lower one is the land of the Palestinians, with their densely constructed villages and urban fabrics, which are connected by improvised passages (Weizman 2017:232-

233). Mitchell's 'holy landscape' became a 'hollow landscape' in Weizmann's view, in which the sacred image exposes its emptiness - one can carve into it and bridge over it, separate some parts and connect others, do whatever it takes to own it, as if there is no sanctity in the landscape, or within its inhabitants, a strange way, I would say, to practice the love to the landscape (For the cover of Weizmann's book, which illustrates these ideas, see figure 67).

In the eyes of sectionscaping, the separation apparatus of the Israeli occupation in 'the eastern landscape' is not very different from the one that was shaped in 'the western Israeli landscape'. While the frontier in the Occupied Territories is governed by military techniques, the territory within the Green Line is controlled by planning, and both are controlled by the arms of the Israeli state. In the Occupied Territories, I argue, the apparatus allows for the continued existence of the mythical mythological imagination, while within the Green Line it allows for the continued existence of the imagination of the ordered modern national landscape - which is - 115 - not less mythical and sacred. Both are managed, following the theory of Latour, by a series of purifications that order the landscape of the flows, identifying the Israeli landscape with its variants as imperial, occupying and modern.

Figure 67: Cover of the book "hollow land" (hebrew edition). 2017. Babel Publishing. The images illustrates the 'politics of verticality', which extends to all the layers of the landscape - geological, historical, infrastructure, topographic, archeological and more. In order to characterize the Israeli landscape as modern par excellence, I suggest to compare it with the Dutch landscape, which displays one of the founding imaginations of the modern order, and its landscape. In both cases there are an actual image and actual reality, both are national projects, and in both of them shaping the territory is interwoven with the shaping of identity by sophisticated arrangements of separations. A comparison between them will not be realized in this framework, but its conceptual basis is apparent - the modern landscape, both

Dutch and Israeli, places walls, canals and dams in a movement that purports to purify the territory and manage the currents of the matrix of landscape. In this case it will also be necessary to investigate the Dutch currents that are still flowing around the world, but on the surface, the essential difference between them is that - while the Dutch landscape separates streams of water from the land, the Israeli landscape separates the Palestinians from the Israelis. Reading

Mitchell's Holy Landscape, the comparative argument can also be extended to the theological field - so I would suggest examining both of them as spatial representations of modern hubris,

- 116 - which imagines that it can leave God out of the equation and control the currents of the landscape forever.

The Modern Wall

The Separation Wall is an ensemble of ditches, sensors, fences and concrete walls designated differently by different viewers. It is the most prominent and discussed barrier from the many that were drawn in the Occupied Territories for separating Israelis from Palestinians.

Since the resistance wave of the 2000 Intifada, this structure was developed by Israel in an effort to stop terror attacks by isolating the eastern landscape from the western (Weizman 2017:187).

Some of the obstacles are aimed to control Palestinian traffic within the occupied territories, between the fragments of Palestinian territories, while the wall is meant to supervise movement from the mountains of the Occupied Territories into Israeli territory on the plains (for The Wall view see figure 68) (Weizman 2017:192 ).

The Separation Wall is the most prominent, and highly mentioned on the media, in the architecture of the Israeli occupation (Weizman, 2017:187). In the eyes of sectionscaping, I suggest, the wall is a grandiose representation of contemporary modern purification methods, a central expression of the modern form of power and practice, as a physical barrier in the field, but also as a conceptual representation of its point of view over the landscape. The wall is brutally honest piece of Israeli landscape art (Mitchell 2006:591), the prominent piece between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, I would say, performing a contemporary type of modern fold, from the civilized land to the desert frontier. It regulates, I argue, the existence of the two landscapes side by side under Israeli rule. On one hand it allows the existence of a democratic state within the landscape that looks westwards and imagines itself as a legitimate modern state, with its planned and organized territory. On the other hand it encloses the

- 117 - landscape of the Jewish state that looks eastwards, toward a mythical representation of its past, fixed in an inertia of movement of the occupied frontier. It represents, I suggest, the current spatial solution to the constitutive paradox of the State of Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state. The wall, actually, is both a territorial and spatial object, and it is intended to enable these two contradictory movements to coexist.

Figure 68: The Separation Wall, crosses the landscape. Source: http://blogs.oregonstate.edu

The wall is actually not only a tool of separation but also a means of control and surveillance, expressing the accumulated experience Israel has gained in managing the flows of

Palestinians (Weizman 2017:197-198 ). Its construction began in 2002 and proceeded in stages, some were planned while others were already under constructions. While practically enclosing land into the 'western landscape', the wall was presented as a temporary solution for an emergency, a technique which served the Zionist enterprise all along, within its territory as much

- 118 - as on the frontier (Weizman 2017:220 ). Because it was originally approved as a concept without a detailed plan, many actors with different interests were involved in shaping it (Weizman

2017:207), and therefore I understand it as a networked creation.

The wall is a material embodiment in the landscape of the state ideology, but its curves, deformations, stretches and enclosures are evidence of a multitude of conflicts of different types

– technical, legal, and political, interlinking different fields – territory, water, demography, archaeology, real estate. Settler organizations have used their influence to manipulate its course, in order to encircle Israeli settlements as much as possible within the western side of the wall.

As a result, in many places the wall is built to the east of the Green Line, even when this entails cutting off the fabric of Palestinian life and its economy. Palestinians were separated from their cultivated land, from their water resources, relatives, friends and work places, resorts and universities (Weizman 2017:216). Resistance on the ground and in the courts has succeeded in several cases to influence its course, although this was limited to the local scale only. The direct resistance to the wall focuses mostly on the damage to local Palestinian landscape, rather than on the actual practice of separating the landscape (Weizman 2017:208).

The army had preferred to construct fences rather than walls, because they can be seen through and shot through if needed. But where the wall passes through urban tissue with no tactical depth, or where there is a danger of direct shooting into Israel, a concrete wall was built, and this became the representative image of the separation project (Weizman 2017:211). Beyond its role of shaping the landscape and its flows, the wall shapes an iconography of a colossal border by its massive physical presence in front of Palestinian as well as Israeli eyes.

The politics of separation, embodied most visibly by the wall, are much supported in Israeli public opinion, because the wall represents the successful management of the flows of terrorism from the Occupied Territories into Israeli territory (Weizman 2017:208). It is the dam

- 119 - of the Israeli landscape, and just as the Dutch people believe they will be able to manage the rising water forever, so do Israelis; both imagine that they have no other choice. The wall sustains the illusion that its winding path can make the relations between the eastern and western landscapes manageable and stable, while hiding the violent reality of the colonial frontier, a reality which is shaped by the wall itself (Weizman 2017:228 ). On the Palestinian side, it is both an actual barrier as well as the massive representation of Israeli oppression. The image of the wall also serves to mobilize international support for resistance to the occupation.

Photographs of concrete walls and barbed wires crossing the pastoral landscape are much more threatening than the suburban images of the settlements with their red tiled roofs (Weizman

2017:218) (for an example for 'art of resistance' on the wall see figure 69).

In his article "Christo's Gates and

Gilo's Wall", Mitchell argues that the wall, which Israelis ironically call ‘the fence’, represents the violent practice of destruction, coupling the brutal architecture of the occupation in slashing the landscape

(Mitchell 2006:590). Mitchell discusses the phenomena of 'walls' and 'gates', as conceptual symbols for practices of landscape construction, and in particular as moderns means of managing landscape purification. Walls, he suggests, are the things we build around ourselves to obstruct Figure 69: Graffiti on the wall. Artist: Banksy the view, and gates are the holes we punch in those obstructions to allow ourselves and others to pass, visually and bodily (Mitchell 2006:587). Landscape aesthetics, he argues, maintain a - 120 - deep tradition of alternating between a stable structure and a facade of motion and dynamism, between artificial and natural, between planning and control to limitless randomness (Mitchell

2006:594), and it seems that the brutality of the wall that seeks to manage the currents of the landscape embodies a crude variation of this perception. Unashamed of its brutality, the wall exposes Israeli landscape aesthetics on the surface (Mitchell 2006:591). As a modern imagination, it certain of its power to capture the viewers, each trapped in the appropriate angle without seeing beyond, in an attempt to order the landscape. While the wall is intended to control the Palestinians, sectionscaping the Zionist landscape indicates that the power is also working to the other side - for the Israelis, I suggest, the wall conceals what is happening behind it, what it produces, and thus it is an embodiment of contemporary modern image.

Mitchell observes a landscape scene that was painted on a section of the Separation Wall that passes on the outskirts of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo (see figure 70). The wall here was designed to protect the residents of Gilo from Palestinian snipers from the village of Beit

Jala across the valley. The painting reveals the hidden role of the wall, as a screen of illusion for

Israeli eyes (Mitchell 2006:591). The municipal authorities had decided to 'soften' the wall by commissioning an 'artistic copy of the hidden landscape' to be painted on the side facing the

Jewish neighborhood. The concrete wall was hidden by a kitsch image of the village behind it, empty of inhabitants, painted in pastoral style using an oriental point of view. Seen from the side, the real landscape is exposed as a densely populated area. The wall from the Palestinian side looks like a scar in the landscape, a border that cuts across space (Mitchell 2006:590). The painting, then, turns out to be an attempt to camouflage the separation through an imaginary landscape, exposing one of its central modern functions, as understood here by sectionscaping.

Beyond being an actual barrier on the field, it is a barrier to the view that expose the Israeli blind observation regime. The occupation it represents does not start or end with the landscape and its

Palestinian natives, I can say, but with the Israelis. - 121 -

Figure 70: The wall in Gilo. Source: unknown The Separation wall, as I read here, allows 'the western landscape' to exist as if it is closed and protected territory, a modern national home for the Jewish people, a legitimate and legal Western state which is part of the family of nations, while concealing its violent side behind images, representations, filters, screens, mirrors and walls. I assume, quite confidently, that since violence broke out in the late 1980s during the First Intifada and the subsequent Oslo

Accords, the average Israeli has stopped crossing the Green Line. The wall has established in the national consciousness a separation from 'the eastern frontier landscape'. The landscape of the occupied territories is seen by the average Israeli through media images, state propaganda or the socialization mechanisms of the Israeli habitus, and these mostly turn their gaze inwards.

On the left and on the right sides of the political map, Israeli does not see the landscape beyond the wall, each side for its own reasons. Those who do cross the wall, I suggest, will don the appropriate imperial glasses, trapped in the Oriental imagination of the Holy Land or in the - 122 - military imagination of a security zone. The wall, I argue, claims to control not only the

Palestinian gaze, but also the Israeli one, with its main variants united under the modern constitution.

When Mitchell asks: 'What do pictures want?' (Mitchell 2005), he establishes his investigation on the assumption that images have the power to seduce and influence human beings, to play an active part as actors within the network of theories, to act as living things, and as such they have minds and desires of their own (Abramson 2009b:276). When asking what powers images have, the answer is usually focused on the producers or consumers. The picture is treated as an expression of the creators’ desires, or as a mechanism for eliciting the desires of the beholder. Using an actors-networks theory, Mitchell suggests shifting the location of the images, asking what do the pictures themselves want (Mitchell 2005:28). Images, he argues, display both physical and virtual bodies, they speak to us, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, or they look back at us, presenting not just a surface but a face that truly faces the beholder (Mitchell 2005:30).

Mitchell is aware of the oddity of attributing power to images, which can be objectionable in the way it can be interpreted as a disclaimer of their creators. He is also aware that the question may seem like a tasteless appropriation of an inquiry that is properly reserved for other people, particularly those classes of people who have been the objects of discrimination, victimized by prejudicial images (Mitchell 2005:29). He understands that it involves a subjectivizing of images, 'a dubious personification of inanimate objects, that it flirts with regressive, superstitious attitudes toward images' (Mitchell 2005:28). Furthermore, it might return us to practices like totemism, fetishism, idolatry and animism, which are regarded by modernism with suspicion as primitive, psychotic, or childish (Mitchell 2005:29). And yet he

- 123 - wishes to experiment with a retinal understanding of the images, in our case the Separation Wall, as well as the landscape.

Following Mitchell, Larry Abramson suggests understanding the wall as "the outstanding 'totem' of Israeli-Palestine landscape" (Abramson 2009b:284). Asking 'What does landscape want?' he refers to Mitchell’s discussion of critical approaches to images. The totemism, like the landscape, Mitchell quotes from Levi-Strauss, 'covers relations, post ideologically, between two series, one 'natural', the other 'cultural'. The totem, then, is an ideological instrument by which cultures naturalize themselves and ground themselves in the land (Mitchell 2005:101), much like landscape. It is a communal medium that concerns people themselves, an interactive symbolic space in which members of the tribe and their relatives bind themselves together in a common destiny. The totem is 'a grass-root communal medium', 'a symbolic space for kinfolk to interact and bond in common destiny' (Abramson 2009b:284). As a critical framework, Mitchell contends, the totem addresses the value of images as a game between friends and relatives. 'It allows the image to assume a social, conversational, and dialectical relationship with the beholder’ (Mitchell 2005:106).

Abramson suggests adapting this reading of images to the landscape and to the massive

Separation Wall, understanding it as 'the outstanding landscape totem' of Israel-Palestine today

, 'a brutal violation of the landscape' (Abramson 2009b:284-285). The wall then, I continue the suggestion, is deeply rooted within the Israeli landscape, within the social fabric, within its identity. It is a brutal image of the modern imagination, I suggest, in which the Israelis are held.

It defines the boundaries of the Israeli habitus, and characterizes the gates that it had locked around itself. Thus, the Great Wall became the conceptual wall surrounding Israeli identity, seeking to hold onto the landscape without including the Palestinians, by constructing safe passages. It is an expression of the Zionist perspective on the landscape, performing throughout

- 124 - different periods and different styles, wearing different faces. Paradoxically, I argue, this is the wall that keeps the Israelis within a colonial state, while enclosing the Palestinians in a native state, which they long for. Sadly, the great separation between Israelis and Palestinians seems to be increasing, and it seems that it will continue to do so, as long as the modern Israeli regime will continues to control the illusive view, the images, and the imagination of the modern landscape.

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DISCUSSION

In the beginning of this study I expressed my interest in the paradoxical relationship between the flow of the landscape and its separation. Using Latour’s theory to explain both, and to connect them to the field of the modern landscape in general, I was able to relate to the Israeli-

Palestinian landscape in particular. The connection between the theory and the field allowed me to characterize the modern perspective on the landscape with its dual point of view and its practice of landscaping. This led me to reflect on the possibility of a non-modern landscape, and to examine the cross-section as a methodological and conceptual basis for the practice of a non- modern point of view. Sectionscaping was proposed here as a research method and moreover as a way of observing the landscape and its representations, skipping between points of views, taking care not to be captured by them, watching them from the side and considering one against the other, trying to see between them, behind or in front of them, examining their movement across geography and over time. In the research, I suggested to apply this method of observation to the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, crossing it from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, focusing on the paradoxical separation between what I called 'the western landscape' - the Israeli coastal plains - and 'the eastern landscape' - the frontier of the Occupied Territories on the mountains.

Sectionscaping the Israeli-Palestinian landscape has been useful in several ways. First, I used it in order to characterize the landscape as a matrix, as an array of networks and layers of connections and relations, where flows meet in constant movement, forming the texture of the landscape. I used it to define the Israeli landscape as a spatial movement that despite imagining its separate/unified relations with the landscape, in fact it partakes in its network structure.

Second, it helped me define the Zionist point of view as modern, characterize the paradox that is carries in relation to the landscape, and connect it with the movements of its formation, - 126 - expansion and occupation. Third, I characterized the two geographical and conceptual vectors of this landscape, western and eastern, and its coexistence on both sides of the Green Line, different variations of the rule of the imperial modern gaze. Finally, I returned to the dominant element of this hybrid landscape today, the Separation Wall, reading it as the brutal expression of the paradoxical Israeli perspective and its practice of landscaping. I found it to be an extreme representation of the Israeli visual regime, which captures the modern observer not only behind screens and filters of separation, but also if necessary, behind walls.

In his book 'We Have Never Been Modern', written in the early 1990s with the development of the network society and the neoliberal world of flows, Latour predicted that soon the modern paradox will no longer be hidden or regulated, the modern imagination will lose its power, and will have to fold over (Latour, 1993:130-131). However, reality has proven that the western world continues to practice its purification practices. In particular, the Zionist power maintains its practices of occupation by setting boundaries in the center of Israeli geo- political culture. Moreover, it seems to have developed more advanced techniques and more radical variants to cope with the changing reality. The project of the massive Separation Wall and the concept of 'the management of flows' currently serve to regulate, for most Israelis, I claim, the gap between the pure image of a modern Zionist state and the reality that prevails underneath it and behind the wall, knocking on its gates. Managing the two landscapes allows the Israeli imagination to continue to exist, to develop westwards while holding the landscape to the east, preserving the imperial gaze trapped behind the modern walls.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to determine that modernity can indeed divide the landscape. We know that it always remains connected although it looks separated. We see the western grasp over the eastern landscape, and the reciprocal but asymmetrical flow between them. When I formulated the research question asking how the plain becomes a mountain, I

- 127 - assumed that the landscape could not be divided. I intended to study its folding nature and to understand some of the characteristics of the non-modern landscape. Within the landscape networks and between them, as I have shown, there are multiple mutual connections that shape the landscape, in which the Zionist power combines both its imagination and the reality it shapes.

Within the non-modern matrix, the power of this modern flow exists and enables it to shape the landscape, but with limited force. Within these interrelationships, modern ideas and images have been successful in using the power of the point of view to expand into the landscape of consciousness as well as into the physical one. In its movement, this modern point of view demonstrates a virtuoso ability to shape the imagined reality of 'us' and of the 'others'. It appears to create order, shape a stable and secure territory, protect the rights of its citizens, provide them with welfare services and liberate them. It seemingly allows them to imagine themselves as enlightened and humanistic, to buy and produce, and to feel that they are citizens of a modern legitimate nation. The paradox of modernity, however, ceaselessly appears on the surface and threatens the purity of imagination. From the beginning of Zionism until today, it has encountered the resistance of the landscape to surrender to its blind love and be fully conquered.

Although more than a century has passed, and the landscape has developed and changed, the tension between the colonial stream and the Palestinians continues, but it has not yet succeeded in challenging the limits of the Zionist imagination.

I understand the tension between the hybrid qualities of the landscape and the modern

Zionist structures, to be a political question relating to the changing cultural constructions as modernity folds into the network age. This fold represents a dramatic structural transition equivalent in its significance, according to Latour, to the spread of Christianity beginning 2000 years ago (Latour, 1993:71). According to Mitchell, contemporary images reproduce themselves to become more widespread than in the modern past, dictating public opinion even more than

- 128 - texts, that have similarly represented dramatic cultural folds from the invention of writing to the printing press (Mitchell, 1992). The current study has focused on landscape representations of the Israeli-Palestinian case, but did not elaborate on its contemporary images, nor on their distribution and interpretation across the networks. Nevertheless, it might provide a glimpse into our tightening relationship with images, and a warning against their power.

Contemporary neoliberal imagination draws its inspiration from the world of flows and the network society. It continues to occupy the landscape with filtered representations that capture us in a fashionably designed reality, shaping us and the spaces within which we imagine we are acting. The widening discourse of networks studies since the 1990s reveals that the expansion of power within the matrix is accumulating at an exponential rate, but it is not more democratic as expected (Barabási, 2006). With the shattered dream of the global village and the imagination of a borderless world, it becomes obvious that the borders proliferating, entrenching and gaining power, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian landscape. While the critical project continues to expose the power mechanisms that shape our imagination, it seems unable to penetrate into the flows of imaginary communities, to shatter the imperial images, and to complete its ideological mission. The political culture continues to blind the observer using images that are designed to conceal the complex, uncertain reality that is hidden behind the walls of power, and what it takes to sustain it. Exposure, it seems, does not necessarily lead to an abandonment of the colonizing representations, but rather to finding explanations that continue to sustain the modern habitus, while the paradox continues.

Beyond representing the landscape as a matrix, the methodological practice of sectionscaping has allowed me to characterize the Israeli landscape as a flow that despite its aspirations, is inseparable from the landscape. The attempt to integrate this modern landscape within the hybrid one, however, is insufficient for creating a non-modern landscape. According

- 129 - to Latour, the non-modern constitution must adhere to continuity over separations, distinctions over binary splits, multiplicity over flattening, and finally, its most ambiguous characteristic is the regulation of hybrids without trying to purify them (Latour, 1993:140-142).

Even if one can argue for the realization of some of these characteristics in the Zionist apparatus of landscape management, it continues to maintain ethnic and landscape purification practices, vertical and horizontal, that distort the landscape and preserve it colonial state. I find that representing the Israeli landscape as a flow signifies an important non-modern feature that

Zionism should consider. The modern landscape is constantly on the move, meaning that it responds to the landscape outside it and changes its character in relation to it. The landscape changes, and in the same way that it moves toward the erection of its walls, it can also theoretically move in the reverse direction of moderation. Recession, according to Latour, is the key to moderating the opposing responses of hybrids to purification processes (Latour,

1993:130). Moreover, and this is crucially important, the Zionist landscape movement also marks the almost inevitable possibility of its expected end. While landscape is eternal, at least in terms of billions of years, the modern flow will pass, or more accurately– it will fold.

Latour argues that the exposure of the modern paradox will naturally abolish the modern constitution, but in order to establish a non-modern constitution, while dismantling the modern structure the hybrid option should be represented as an alternative (Latour, 1993:46-47). As modernity has spread through its structural point of view, non-modernity will need to formulate a networked point of view. The hybrid representations won't only disintegrate the modern imagination but will also form a new imagination in which modern practice is not eliminated but contained (Latour, 1993:134).

I do not know if I have managed to create such an image in the course of this dissertation, perhaps at least a fragile one. This research is particularly lacking in sectionscaping the

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Palestinian landscape, which counters the Israeli landscape but together they shape the Israeli-

Palestinian landscape. It was an ambitious attempt to try and represent it in this limited framework, and from my point of view as an Israeli, it would have been also naive to think that

I could represent it symmetrically. A parallel representation of the Israeli and Palestinian landscapes would have illuminated the reciprocal relationships between them, since they are already developing in relation to each other's power for over a hundred years. Placing them together across the Israeli-Palestinian section represents the continuous overlap that exists between them. The Israeli-Palestinian landscape is really an entirety, but absorbed with modernity, which is evident when each of them is placed on the opposite sides of the hyphen.

The non-modern landscape, as I imagine it, will be able to accommodate both, to observe their narratives, to distinguish between them, but not to separate or hide them from each other, accepting the landscape with its multiplicity with no need for its purified surface.

Imagining a common Israeli-Palestinian landscape, today as in the past, is a dreamed only the extreme political left has sustained, while the political right continues to promote a solution of orientalist purification that deprives Palestinians from their rights. The Israeli-

Palestinian public has not been exposed to non-modern images of hybridity, but rather to representations of opposing power struggles of control and resistance. The images of

'coexistence' that are incorporated here and there in the Israeli landscape do not usually really represent partnership, rather they are structured images that do not provide a satisfying answer to the symmetry required by a non-modern constitution. In contemporary Israel, those who try to break through the walls of the Israeli point of view regime are demonized and delegitimized by the state. From the other side, representations produced by the Palestinian resistance are constructed against the power, and therefore in many ways, are its negative images. Now it is easier to understand Mitchell's call for a change in the relations of power, and a shift from an

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Israeli-Palestinian struggle to the struggle of the landscape against modernity (Mitchell,

2000:207).

As I have shown, it is the point of view that separates Israelis from the landscape. A non- modern alternative point of view should be able to devote itself to the folds of the landscape, learning to work with it instead of against it, recognizing its challenging implications for Israeli identity and Zionism. Then the citizens of the landscape will be given the right to be its native people, not as conquerors or indigenous, but as part of it together with all its inhabitants. The

Jewish eye has sought to return after 2000 years, but implementing the power of its blind desire for the landscape has prevented an examination and development of the possibility of loving it otherwise. If the Israeli landscape were to stand to King Salomon’s trial today, the wisest man on earth would have known this love is false, identifying the division of the landscape as evidence of the alienation of the Zionist flow from the place.

The Zionist spilled blood does indeed unite it with the landscape, but it bears witness to the anguish of love and not to its existence. In this sense, I agree with Larry Abramson's question

'What does the landscape ask?' and his answer – to love it blindly. The power of the modern landscape lies, as noted, in its important representations and in the absolute commitment that they seek. In order to topple the modern separation between the Israelis and the landscape, a distinction (but not a separation) must be drawn between the layers of the state and of geography, which are perceived as one together with national identity.

The development of a non-modern landscape can therefore be combined to the development of a new form of liberating 'neo-liberal love' of the landscape, one that does not have to conquer or own it in an imperialist, national or capitalist way, but one that draws its inspiration and power relations from the flows of the landscape, submits to its movement and seeks to move with it, refraining from imposing itself on the landscape. Love is an image in

- 132 - itself, a feeling imbued with modernity, which taught us to how to practice it blindly. But it can also teach us non-modern love by distributing its hybrid representations. The love sectionscaping offers is based on the abundance of the landscape as opposed to homogeneity, relishing its complexity rather than its purity, the variety it offers and the many encounters it holds, excited by its continuous movement, its texture that is rediscovered in every step, its capacity to moderate the modern anxiety from instability and uncertainty. It is an observation that suggests completely different power relations between humans and what surrounds them - instead of shaping it in the form of our fantasy, we can be sensitive to its folds, look at them and respond softly, choosing our own path instead of insisting on changing the landscape itself.

The Zionist landscape is structured on a 2,000-year-old memory, a vison of a past that seeks to re-realize itself, and this is the possible reason for its fear from the Palestinian memory and its primordial fear of the power of Palestinian landscape, since it is familiar with the power of imagination. But while it tries to control the flows of the landscape by cutting and pasting, modern practice has no real control over the movement of Palestinian memory. The Palestinians cling to the place, passing the refugee status from one generation to the next, keeping the keys to the doors of their homes in Jaffa. All this testifies to the power of Palestinian imagination that counters that of the Israelis, sliding from the mountains to the Israeli coastal plain.

The Palestinian landscape cannot be separated from the Israeli one, they act in relation to each other according to the paradoxical dichotomous fold of modern power, without realizing that they are one and the same. The physical separation of the landscape has no power to separate them in the consciousness. Observing the section allows one to see, theoretically, the narratives overlapping. The landscape is the same landscape, the images are the same images, and what separates them is only the point of view. Here, again, I tend to agree with Abramson, who proposes the landscape as a meeting place, where the joint presence can allow, if one chooses,

- 133 - to be separated from the external imperial images of the landscape, and to enjoy the wide range of emotions and meanings that it holds. To sum up, I summarize my study with a conceptual proposal, which is still primary and ambiguous, and may not be particularly academic - to fold the Israeli-Palestinian landscape toward a non-modern future, I suggest going back to the landscape, loving it not from the detached modern point of view but from within the hybrid landscape itself, as part of it.

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EPILOGUE

אל בורות המים الى آبار المياه To the cisterns

מאהבתי من حبي Out of my love הלכתי אל בורות המים ذهبت الى آبار المياه I went to the cisterns בדרכי מדבר في طرق صحراوية Through desert paths בארץ לא זרועה في بالد غير مزروعة Through unsown land מאהבתי من حبي Out of my love שכחתי עיר ובית نسيت المدينة والمنزل I forgot my city and home ובעקבותיך - - And in your wake وتتبعت خطاك - Followed wildly בנהיה פרועה - باستمرار جامح To cisterns, to cisterns אל בורות המים, אל בורות המים إلى آبار المياه، إلى آبار المياه To the spring gushing within the אל המעיין אשר פועם בהר إلى الينبوع الذي ينبض في الجبل mountain שם אהבתי תמצא עדין هناك حبي ال يزال يجد There my love will still find מי מבוע مياه نبع Spring water מי תהום مياه جوفية Ground water ומי נהר ومياه نهر And river water

רק אהבתי فقط حبي Only my love נתנה לי צל בקיץ Has shaded me in summer منحني ظ اال في الصيف And in the terrible sand storm ובסערת החול הנוראה وفي العاصفة الرملية الرهيبة רק אהבתי Only my love فقط حبي بنى لي مدينة ومنز ًال Has built me a city and a home בנתה לי עיר ובית هو حياتي، وهو She is my life, and she היא חיי, והיא موتي على مدار الساعة Is my death each hour מותי מדי שעה There is the fig שם התאנה هناك شجرة التين وهناك شتالت الزيتون And here are the olive seedlings ושם שתילי הזית And the wonderful pomegranate ופריחת הרימונים המופלאה وأزهار ال ُر ّمان ال ُمدهشة blossoms שם אהבתי هناك حبي ,There, my love השיכורה ולא מיין السكران وليس بالخمر Drunk but not from wine את עיניה תעצום לאט לאט يُغمض عينيه رويدًا رويدًا Will slowly close her eyes

אל בורות המים, אל בורות המים إلى آبار المياه، إلى آبار المياه To cisterns, to cisterns אל המעיין אשר פועם בהר إلى الينبوع الذي ينبض في الجبل To the spring gushing within the שם אהבתי תמצא עדין هناك حبي ال يزال يجد mountain مياه نبع There my love will still find מי מבוע Spring water מי תהום مياه جوفية Ground water ומי נהר ومياه نهر And river water

נעמי שמר نعومي شيمر Neomi Shemer (Translated by Yael Padan) (Translated byA laa Shulhut, editing by Guy Ron-Gilboa(

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אבסטרקט

המחקר עוסק בנוף שסביבנו, בדרכי ההתבוננות שלנו עליו, ובאופן בו אנחנו לוקחים חלק בעיצובו. הוא עוסק במבנה של הנוף, כביטוי פוליטי של מבנה תרבותי, והכפילות שמגולמת בו כדמיון וכמציאות כאחד. אני צועד בעקבות מסורת הקריאה הביקורתית של הנוף, שרואה בנוף מערך של ייצוגים דרכם הכוח זורם ומעצב את התודעה שלנו, כמו גם את העולם הממשי. הנוף הוא קונספט גיאוגרפי-פוליטי שמייצג את הסדר המודרני, בין אם כדימוי הקלאסי שלו או בקריאה הביקורתית שלו, ומאופיין בדרישה לנאמנות עיוורת לדימויים שלו )מיטשל 1994a(. על רקע התנועה התרבותית-מבנית העכשווית לעבר עידן הרשתות, נקודת המבט שאציג רואה את הנוף כמטריקס, מציעה פרספקטיבה לא-מודרנית על הנוף, בפרט זה הישראלי-פלסטיני )לאטור 1993(. נוף, כקונספט תיאורי, מביע כיום בשדות רבים – טכנולוגיים, כלכליים, תרבותיים וחברתיים – מבנים רשתיים בעלי טקסטורה ומאפיינים כגון היברידיות, גמישות, ריבוד, ריבוי, השתנות ותנועה. בשדה המרחבי, אבל, לא התפשטה עדיין תיאוריה כוללת שמאמצת את התכונות האלה אל הנוף המקורי, שבעצמו מהווה מקור השראה לביטוין. סֶקְשֶ נְסְקֶ יְיפִּ ינְג מוצע כאן, אם כך, כמתודולוגיה טכנית ורעיונית לשיטוט בנוף ההיברידי, לייצוג שלו, ולתרגל נקודת מבט שמאפשרת צמיחה מחודשת של אהבה לנוף, אהבה לא-מודרנית.

תקציר

בפרק הפתיחה של המחקר אסביר את ההפרדה שיושבת בבסיס הנוף המודרני, בין התרבות האנושית )הצופה( לבין הטבע )הנצפה(. זוהי דיכוטומיה שמעניקה לשניהם עצמאות, בזמן שהיא מאחדת אותם תחת הדמיון של התרבות המודרנית. וו.ג'י.טי מיטשל, שבעקבות הקריאה שלו אני צועד, מסביר שזוהי ההתבוננות המכוננת של הסדר המודרני החילוני שמבטל את קיומו של כוח אלוהי בזמן שהוא מגדיר יחסי כוח חדשים בין האנושות המודרנית וסביבתה )1994a:10-11 Mitchell(. מיטשל קושר את הנוף המודרני לתנועה של האימפריאליזם המערבי תוך שהוא חושף את האשליה שמגולמת בו – שחרור האנושות כנגד הטבע ולהיפך, הטמעת הרעיון שהם מופרדים, ואיחוד חד-צדדי ופרדוקסלי שלהם תחת התרבות המודרנית )Mitchell 1994a:13(. הנוף המודרני משמר עמימות שמאפשרת לאימפריאליזם לממש את כוחו האידיאלי - נוף הוא גם ז'אנר אומנותי וגם המרחב האמיתי, גם תפיסה וגם הייצוג שלה, גם התבוננות וגם פעולה )1994a:8 Mitchell(. אבל כוונתו של מיטשל היא לא רק לבקר ולחשוף את העובדות הגסות שמאחורי הנוף, אלא לבחון את המסגרת שמהווה את העובדות הללו )Mitchell 1994a:6-7(. הוא קורא תיגר על המוסכמות של הנוף המודרני, ומציע להבין אותו כמדיום של ביטוי פוליטי, רשת ענפה של קודים תרבותיים, גוף של צורות סמליות המקודדות משמעות וערכים לממדים הפיזיים והחושיים של הנוף עצמו )Mitchell 1994a:13-14(. בפרק התיאורטי, אקשור בין ההתבוננות של מיטשל לרעיונותיו של ברונו לאטור על הפרויקט המודרני, שמסבירים כיצד הנוף הוא ביטוי למבנה התרבותי המודרני כלל, שמבוסס על טיהור בעזרת הפרדות. הטיהור מתייחס לאופן שבו אנו המודרניים בונים את העולם בדמיוננו, מגדירים ומבינים אותו, מאפיינים את הזהות שלנו ושל הסובבים אותנו, תופסים את הזמן ומארגנים את המרחב בתוכו אנו חיים )Latour, 1993: 10-12(. אף על פי כן, התיאוריה של לאטור מלמדת שככל שאנו רוצים להפריד ולנתק, למיין ולסדר, הדברים נשארים קשורים תמיד, מרובדים, מרובים, נמצאים בין לבין, ובתנועה מתמדת. הפרדות חברתיות, אישיות ובין- אישיות, וגם טריטוריאליות - קיימות אך בדמיון המודרני שלנו )Latour, 1993: 3-5(. התפתחות המחשבה הביקורתית; 'חברת הרשת' שהתפתחה מאז סוף המאה ה 20-; 'עולם הזרמים' והדמיון של 'הכפר הגלובלי'; שיח הגבולות המתרחב; ומחקר הרשתות שהולך וגדל - כל אלה מאתגרים את הדמיון המודרני ואת מבני הסדר שלו )Latour, 1993: 130-132(. בעקבות הצעתו של לאטור לכינונו של סדר לא מודרני, שמכיר באשליה של ההפרדות המודרניות ומבקש לחשוף את המורכבות שלהן )Latour, 1993: 138-142(, אני רוצה לבחון את האפשרות לקיומו של נוף לא-מודרני. הנוף, כפי שאראה, מגלם מאפיינים היברידיים שקודמים לתכונות המודרניות שנכפו עליו. רקימתו מחדש כמטריצה תורמת, כך אני מבין, לחיפוש אחר דמיון חדש של נוף של זרמים וקיפולים.

כדי להדגים את הטיעונים שלי, אני מציע את סֶקְשֶ נְסְקֶ יְיפִּ ינְג, מתודולוגיה המבוססת על חתכים, בהשראת הטכניקה התיאורית המוכרת מהשדה האדריכלי. החתך מציע נקודת מבט שחוצה את המרחב ומביטה בו פנימה, דרך שכבותיו, מזמינה להסתכל אל עומק הנוף. כפי שאציג בפרק המתודולוגי, המאפיינים של החתך מאפשרים פיתוחן של מתודות טכניות מחקריות, אך יותר מזה, היא מייצגת צורת התבוננות לא-מודרנית. נוסף על כך, מקרה הבוחן שבו אשתמש, הנוף הישראלי-פלסטיני, מגלם בתכונותיו מרחב היברידי המתנגד ליישום האימפריאלי של נקודת המבט המודרנית. זהו שדה נוח לבחינת הקשר בין ההיגיון המודרני של הפרדות, לבין אופיו המתקפל של הנוף הרשתי.

בפרקי המחקר, אני אאפיין, ראשית, את הנוף הישראלי-פלסטיני כמטריצה של שכבות, מרקם של זרמים, תנועות הדדיות המשלבות גיאולוגיה, אקלים ובוטניקה, הן טבעיות והן מעשה ידי אדם, יחד עם התרבות והפוליטיקה, מודרנית כמו פרה-מודרנית. במטריצה הזו, כך אראה, בינריות אינה קיימת, יחסי הכוח הם הדדיים, ובמקום הפרדות סימטריות או א-סימטריות הנוף משתנה, זורם, מתכופף או מתעקל. במסגרת זו אני אבקש לכלול את הזרימה הציונית כתנועת נוף המאופיינת בנקודת מבט אימפריאלית ממנה היא שואבת את כוחה ואת פעולות עיצוב הנוף שלה, הדמיוני והממשי כאחד. נקודת המבט הישראלית מדמיינת עצמה מנותקת מהנוף, לכודה בחלומות קולוניאליים, בזמן שהיא בעצם משתוקקת להתאחד אתו. בכך, היא מממשת את הפרדוקס המודרני שמונע מהציונים, כך אני מציע, לחזור להיות בני הארץ. בהמשך המחקר אנוע בעקבות תנועת הזרם הציוני, ייצוגיו ומעשיו, אגדיר את נקודת המבט שלו כמודרנית ואקשור אותה לצורות הכיבוש שלה, למאפייני החדירה, ההתרחבות וההתבססות של הנוף האימפריאלי בנוף ההיברידי. אני אראה כיצד הדמיון הציוני נמתח בין מבט מערבה, לכיוון עתיד מודרניסטי טהור ומנותק מן המקום, לבין מבט מזרחה, לכיוון עבר יהודי מיתולוגי מקומי. ווקטורים אלה משתלבים בנוף, מעצבים את ההביטוס הישראלי, ואת הפרדוקס המודרני השולט בנוף הישראלי-פלסטיני. הגישה הפרדוקסלית, כך אני מציע, מגולמת בהפרדה בין הנוף המערבי של הטריטוריה הישראלית לבין הנוף המזרחי של השטחים הכבושים. הנופים מוחזקים בנפרד ונשלטים על ידי טכניקות טיהור שונות, אך הם שניהם וריאציות של המבט המודרני, ואחדותן תחת הכיבוש הישראלי תלויה בהפרדתן. את חומת ההפרדה בין שני הנופים אציע לקרוא כייצוג מונומנטלי של נקודת המבט הפרדוקסלית בצורתה הציונית, דימוי גרנדיוזי של שיטות הניהול העכשוויות של הנוף האימפריאלי, וביטוי קונספטואלי של משטר הראייה של הנוף הישראלי. אני אטען שהאימפריאליזם אינו מתחיל או מסתיים בכיבוש הארץ או הילידים שלה, אלא בהטמעת צורת ההתבוננות הקולוניאלית, ושמירה על מבטה לכוד בתוך קירות הדמיון המודרני.

כדי לסכם את העבודה, בדיון הסופי אחזור אל הקשר בין התנועה הזורמת של הנוף לבין הדמיון המטהר של ההפרדות, ולאפשרות הלא-מודרנית המוצעת על ידי סֶקְשֶ נְסְקֶ יְיפִּ ינְג - לראות את הנוף מהצד, על כל רוחבו, גובהו ועומקו, נקודת מבט שחוגגת את הריבוי ומפלא על המורכבות, סקרנית לגבי התנועה ופתוחה לשינויים הנצחיים המתגלמים בנוף, מכירים ביופי האלוהי של השלם.

אוניברסיטת בן- גוריון בנגב הפקולטה למדעי הרוח והחברה המחלקה לפוליטיקה וממשל

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מאת: אלון מטוס בהנחיית: פרופ' חיים יעקובי

י"א תמוז ה'תשע"ח 24.06.2018