Crossing into Gaza at Erez you must pass through two long, bleak corridors. You reach the end of one, turn and face another. Walls rise on your left and right, thin metal sheeting above. When I passed through in April of 2006 it was barren; Gaza was shut. I followed four grey surfaces which stretched to the horizon.

I took only one picture on my way out the next day. Now the picture seems odd, nondescript. Greyed, of course. The passage no longer appears walled in, but carved out, the earth hollowed and burrowing forward. The emptiness gives it a certain surreal quality, a separateness. Always, when I hear the word “extra-territoriality”, I think back to these long grey tunnels. A vacuum, yes, but with an undeniable presence like the transparent boundaries of a fishbowl, the hidden presence of the world from which this space feels curiously absent, extracted.

This passageway is an architecture of immobilization, a structure that has the most immediate determinations in mind: to buffer, contain and channel an incoming threat, to filter like a sieve the potentialities of this thin portal. But embedded within these concerns is a whole set of relations that typify the way in which Israelis and Palestinians interact.

The corridors mimic each other. As you reach the end of the first and find the second they are different but the same, as if two architects chose to build the same structure without coordinating their measurements. Approaching the exit on the Israeli side, you are corralled into rows behind turnstiles before entering into a little isolation booth with automated doors. The Palestinian exit features only a window in the side of the wall that opens into a small room with two bored officials. Yet both ends hold the same promise of re-entry, return. There is life again on the edges, and between the techno-panic of the Israeli border machines and the informal curiosity of the Palestinian officials it's possible to chart the boundaries of power and paranoia.

For I had already, obviously, been vetted by the Israelis. I had passed my baggage and my bodies through their detectors, against their wands, beneath their cameras. What was left for the Palestinians to check, to buffer, contain and channel? They still built the corridor, though. They checked my passport, asked my business, and a man opened a small gate for me to pass through. But what did it matter? There was nothing they could do and so I was nothing to be feared.

2

In the introduction to his book, Hollow Land,¹ Eyal Weizman tells the story of the founding of Migron, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. First, settlers claimed that the hill, which was owned and cultivated by Palestinians, was the site of the ancient biblical town Migron -- hence the name of the later settlement -- but archaeological digs found nothing old enough. In 1999, well after the signing of the Oslo accords, they convinced the military to build a cellphone antenna on the site. Communications could be considered a security issue and, if desired, the Israeli military could confiscate the land without asking permission. He goes on:

“Because of the delay in the mast’s construction, in May 2001 settlers erected a fake antenna and received military permission to hire a 24-hour on-site private security guard to watch over it. The guard moved into a trailer at the foot of the mast, and fenced off the surrounding hilltop; soon afterwards, his wife and children moved in and connected their home to the water and electricity supplies already there [for the construction of the antenna]. On 3 March 2002, five additional families joined them, and the outpost of Migron formally came into being. The outpost grew steadily. Since families were already living onsite, the Israeli Ministry for Construction and Housing built a nursery, while some donations from abroad paid for the construction of a synagogue. Migron is currently the biggest of the 103 outposts scattered throughout the West Bank. By mid-2006 it comprised around 60 trailers and containers housing more than 42 families: approximately 150 people perched on the hilltop around a cellular antenna.” (p. 2)

It is an appropriate beginning, because it illustrates the way in which the settlement movement both relied on and took advantage of the state’s power. Later, Weizman also covers the state’s reliance on the settlers’ capacity to breach legal boundaries. But his ambition is greater. While saturated with the empirical data he’s collected through his fieldwork with B’Tselem,² his work is heavily inspired by post-structuralist thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. Weizman is dedicated to approaching the politics of space as both a form of power and a conceptual method for understanding political issues.

As a result, he locates his subjects within their own narratives, whether of space, security or theology. His sweep is broad, covering everything from city planning and architectural aesthetics to urban warfare doctrine, but his terrain is narrow: what he calls the “collective authorship” (p. 5) of the occupied territories, a frontier that is fashioned and refashioned as a result of the political struggles taking place. Embedded within these “elastic geographies” (p. 5) is both an articulation and sedimentation of ongoing conflicts, and it becomes possible, looking through his eyes, to unearth the very identities which give birth to these spatial practices -- whether that is the construction of a settlement, the negotiation of sovereignty, or the sense of ownership.

For Weizman, “the two political/geographic concepts of Israel and Palestine refer to and overlap across the very same place,” (pp. 15-6) and while this has a certain dull obviousness to it, he unpacks it bit by bit, presenting a mental mapping of the insecurity of the frontier, the application of power against a fear of unraveling from within.

3

The very first time I visited Jerusalem’s Old City my father sat me down overlooking the Western Wall and Ha’ram as-Sharif. He told me, “this is probably the most contested piece of land in the world today.” I didn’t understand much about land at the time. My world was unbounded, courtesy of a blue American passport.

I learned quickly.

This was East Jerusalem with a capital “E” for Palestinian. Across the road was West Jerusalem with a capital “W” for Israeli. We flew into Ben Gurion airport, which was in Israel, because we needed Israeli permission to enter Palestine, which was Palestinian territory but Israeli-controlled, whatever that meant. We stayed in Bethlehem, which was in the “West Bank” or “Palestine” or the “occupied Palestinian territories”. The Jews called it Judea and Samaria, the area’s biblical names, because Israel-today is, for them, the same thing as Israel-then. But many of them are secular, which means they don’t believe in the Bible with a capital “B” for God, but in the bible with a small “b” for historical record.

I came from a city named Fort Collins, where the capitals “F” and “C” stood for pronoun. Of course, now I realize that the capitals “F” and “C” stood for American -- not the native kind. They stood for control of the river and the prairies at the foot of the mountains. But when my father sat me down and told me this small piece of land in Jerusalem was contested, I didn’t realize what it meant.

In the U.S., there is a place called the Four Corners, where the borders of four states meet at a single point and tourists come to straddle them all at once. It’s a silly exercise because the point is so arbitrary. I suspect the main attraction is its sense of absurdity. Located in the middle of the desert, surrounded by open space with unregulated movement across the borders, it’s a place that only really exists on a map. But this was enough to erect a monument to mark its location -- and people come. The point has bearing, meaning, attraction. It’s alive in their minds, in a way that the Navajo Nation and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe -- both of which are not part of the “Four” but also share jurisdictional boundaries on the spot -- are not.

In Jerusalem you can move East to West by crossing a street, and the lines on a map take shape in the structures around you. The buildings in the West rise just a little taller, their faces unbroken by architectural flourishes, their shapes blockier. They are clad in the stone common in Jerusalem, but they are built with a different aesthetic in mind: a triumphant modernist functionality combined with the stone’s earthy, jagged texture. The lines on the map find expression in these structures. They embody a living struggle, whereas the Four Corners only ignores its own struggle. But both places rely on the claims made by an imagined geography, claims of rights and powers and belonging.

The story of this “Jerusalem” stone is one of the first subjects Weizman tackles. Not long after the British entered the city in 1917, they sought to remake its appearance, to reinforce in built form its mythological significance. A British city engineer, William H. Mclean, drew up a redevelopment plan that recommended all new structures within the Old City be covered with the distinctive stone. Overcrowding and ad-hoc construction had flourished thanks to a flood of war refugees, but the area surrounding the Old City walls was to be cleared and replaced with a park. “Set in the centre of this green parkland, the Old City was to be presented as a precious rock, an exhibition-piece of living biblical archaeology.” (p. 29) This British museum would rely on the city’s population to act as bustling statues in their display -- if they could afford it:

“Although the stone regulation attempted to reinforce an image of orientalized locality, it had also made the cost of new construction prohibitive to all but the rich, the British authorities, and large overseas organizations; paradoxically, therefore, by pricing out the local population of Jerusalem, it delocalized the city with its own supposed vernacular crafts and architecture.” (p. 30)

Israel found its own source of power within these stones. After conquering the city in 1967, the stone regulations were extended in full to the city’s periphery, where they reinforced Israel’s “unification” of Jerusalem by visually incorporating the new hilltop suburbs and settlements. Wherever it went, the stone was to proclaim Jerusalem, binding the periphery to its center and entrenching the new “facts on the ground.” But it was to proclaim a particular Jerusalem: an ancient Jerusalem.

Taken over in the late 1960s, the city was exposed to a wave of young Israeli architects who abandoned the functionalism of modern architecture and sought to invest national sentiment in the built environment. The city’s 1968 masterplan claimed the Jerusalem stone carried “emotional messages that stimulate other sensations embedded in our collective memory, producing strong associations to the ancient holy city of Jerusalem.” (p. 28) Weizman exposes the contradictions at the heart of Israeli architectural practice in the city. While it took inspiration from the Palestinian buildings as “fossilized forms of biblical authenticity,” (p. 28) it did so precisely in order to displace and inhabit those forms, to disavow them as a contemporary phenomenon.

I fear this disavowal is not uniquely Israeli nor the rectified mistake of a forty-years-ago racism -- we white Americans were, after all, still fighting for our right to put black people in the back of the bus. No, we’re still doing it -- not just the Israelis -- still calling on the past to hide the present, plumbing for history in that gold dome that appears behind every newscaster “reporting from Jerusalem.” For it’s a part of our language of the conflict, an appeal to our collective imaginary: this is that Jerusalem!

Because this conflict is ancient, right? Popular wisdom again and again trots out these “timeless” hatreds as some kind of explanation, that tiresome abnegation of knowledge that claims Jews and Muslims have always been fighting, a sort of faith in the wisdom of ignorance. And I wonder sometimes if this conflict doesn’t play the role of an atavistic throwback for us, today’s misery played out as an expression of our own triumph over the past. For we have always wanted this conflict to speak to us about ourselves, and as the tragedy of the conflict mounts, the “cycle of violence” spinning out of control, we can sit back and enjoy -- a distant temporal conquest transposed over the spatial expression of contemporary struggle.

4

For those familiar with Israeli occupation, the system of movement control is a well-worn tale. It is the method of life, the pieces that stitch together the plot. Whether it is the commanding territorial embrace of the settlements, the Wall’s illusion of impenetrability or the atomizing regulation and inspection at the checkpoints, Palestinian territory is marked by separation, obstruction and detour. To be mobile is to negotiate an indeterminate obstacle, at once disintegrating and reforming.

For Weizman, this system is one of observation and disguise. Settlements were designed to follow a hill’s topography along concentric circles, the living spaces facing outwards to provide a maximum view of the surrounding hillsides. While the designers only intended a nice view, Wiezman draws parallels with Foucault’s concept of the “Panopticon”, in which constant observation instills self-discipline in its subject. The outward gaze of the settlements extends “visual control in the state project of pacification… [designed] to help turn the occupied territory into an optical matrix radiating out from a proliferation of lookout points/settlements scattered across the landscape.” (p. 132)

In the architecture of the Allenby bridge terminal, however, Weizman finds “a diagram of the new power relations articulated throughout the Oslo process.” (p. 141) A Palestinian customs agent receives the traveler’s identity card, but quickly passes it on to Israeli agents hidden behind one-way mirrors. He calls this the “split sovereign” and the “one-way mirror”, conceptual technologies which both disguise and extend power:

“Unlike the one-way mirrors we become accustomed to seeing in almost every police station, detention facility and control room worldwide, the one-way mirror system of the terminal/camp of Allenby Bridge was more than the mere apparatus of control -- it functioned also as an international border of sorts. In fact, not only did the mirror demarcate a border, but in its positioning and function it created a new conceptual border to the concept of sovereignty. It is in this context that one-way mirrors have become important components in the redesigning of sovereignty across the frontiers of the ‘war on terror’, enabling, for example, the United States’ ‘politics of deniability’ (almost Clintonian in style) that allows US agents to engage in torture without resorting to physical contact. The process which the Bush administration calls ‘extraordinary rendition’ was conceived in order to bypass the outlawing of ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners in US custody’ by turning terrorist suspects over to foreign governments that do engage in torture. The one-way mirror behind which US agents and behavioural science consultants observe and perhaps even guide the process of torture in Saudi Arabian, Moroccan or Syrian prisons has effectively become an extension of US borders, acting as the physical and optical medium across which a previously unified sovereignty has now been split.” (p. 144)

Weizman goes on to talk about the incorporation of ostensibly humanitarian principles in the construction of new terminals, all part of an attempt to make the occupation appear benign. Later, when discussing the Wall, he speaks about the way in which the “the frontier continually remolds itself to absorb and accommodate opposition, which gradually becomes part of its discourse and contributes to its efficiency.” (p. 175)

He’s trying to chart the illusion of Israeli departure, of control that is exercised on the margins -- not only territorial margins but also those of the imagination which claim that one may disappear behind the mirror and still project power. But Oslo collapsed, its negotiations and its logic, and I find it doubtful that many Palestinians were ever fooled. Weizman acknowledges this at the end of his chapter on checkpoints, but fails to read that back into his analysis.

It may be excused, because Weizman is speaking about the imagination of Israelis -- not Palestinians -- the illusion that Israel can separate from the West Bank by isolating and marginalizing it. The territory is transformed into a space of unidirectional transgression, a vulnerable, available place to operationalize security.

But Weizman misses the central feature of this instability. It is not merely an adaptive strategy, but is itself a control and containment apparatus. He comes close to recognizing this:

“What the temporary ‘state of emergency’ is to time, this elasticity became to space. According to this principle the Israeli planning system has learned to use ever-developing and fast-transforming security threats to erect temporary security measures that can be explained at every stage as an ad hoc reaction, but which finally add up to comprise and embody a coherent strategic reality.” (p. 173)

His conceptualization of this “elasticity” is additive. The measures accumulate in built form. But this perpetual mobility -- whether found in the flying checkpoints, the proliferation and removal of roadblocks, or even the cyclical capture, detainment and release of prisoners -- doesn’t only produce structures of control. It functions as its own strategy of pacification.

The very concept of planning is disrupted. Any visitor to Palestine who has been well-disciplined by the rhythms of the clock and the numbers of its hours will find time enormously frustrating. Economic investments are destroyed by a spike in closures or a blockade on goods. Permits are issued but then passage is denied. Gates scheduled to open at eight o’clock are opened at eleven. Territorial control becomes a prelude to subjecting time to the destruction of displacement. Amira Hass spoke about this in an interview back in 2003:

“It is not only the grab, the robbery of land, but you have a robbery of time. Palestinians’ time has been robbed in the last thirteen years, because you have to wait for a permit and you don’t get it, then you have to wait again. Then you waste time waiting at the checkpoint, then you waste time in submitting another request for a permit, then you waste time trying to go through all kinds of small, dangerous bypass roads. And time is a means of production. Time is so precious for one’s development, internal development, community development; and this has been grabbed by the pass system. This very important means of life for every person, not just Palestinian, has been robbed of them. Sometimes I think it’s more precious than land, because land you can get back one way or the other. The lost time, you will never get back.”³

This robbery of time is extended to the spatial realm. Land is confiscated and contested, closed and opened. The ever-encroaching expansion of the settlements is halted and resumed. These bureaucratic, territorial and temporal dislocations expose Palestinians to a life of uncertainty, caught between the struggle against an enemy that capitulates and immediately reappears, and the desire to assemble a national home astride an ever-shifting and broken landscape.

5

But assemble they do: national, religious, familial geographies of resistance and community. In spite of their debilitating effect, the furious pace of transition and transformation in the spatial patterns of control only testifies to their impotence and the desperate frustrations of Israeli control.

Looking back through Weizman’s book, it is striking to see how thoroughly lost we have become within the production of invasion and invisibility. Weizman makes only a couple of brief references to the broader philosophical discussions on space, society and control from which he draws much of his inspiration. But needless to say, Israel is not alone. It has become one of the largest defense exporters in the world, specializing in their pioneering -- and battle-tested -- technologies of control, eagerly sought in the U.S. and the U.K. to turn public spaces into targets of paranoia.

An AP story recently reported on an Israeli company that is designing a computer program for prisons to recognize whether a dog’s bark indicates an escaped prisoner.⁴ Palestinian software developers are apparently flourishing, succeeding under closure where other businesses fail.⁵ In Jenin, Tony Blair’s adopted laboratory, Israeli-Palestinians are being allowed entry on condition that they subject themselves to a security “interview” upon returning.⁶ Gaza is shut and every day Palestinians across the West Bank are captured and imprisoned.

Selective entrance, penetration and reintegration; an economy that can only survive by transcending place: the contradictions of Palestinian space can be overwhelming. Perhaps nothing in Weizman’s book speaks so powerfully about this twin production of invasion and invisibility as the following passage on religious Israeli settlers’ conception of the territory they’ve conquered:

“A cyclical process of landscape interpretation is thus set in motion: the sites defined by the military as a threat are understood as components of a biblical panorama. The stone houses of Palestinian villages, the olive terraces and the dust roads are read as cultural-historical signifiers. A gap opens between what the military and the government want settlers to see (sites of national strategic importance and human objects of state control); what the settlers think they see (a pastoral biblical landscape and its figures); and what settlers really do see -- the daily life of Palestinians and their poverty under occupation. Within this panorama lies a cruel paradox: the very thing that renders the landscape ‘biblical’ or ‘pastoral’ -- its traditional habitation and cultivation in terraces, olive orchards, stone buildings and the presence of livestock -- is produced by the Palestinians, the very people whom the settlers would like to displace. Like a theatrical set, the panorama is seen as an edited landscape put together by individual stagehands who must step off the set as the lights come on … This … has been best demonstrated by Sa’adia Mandel, the head of the architecture department in Ariel College in the West Bank, who claimed that his architecture students watching out of their classroom windows ‘see the Arab villages, but don’t notice them. They look and they don’t see. And I say this positively.’” (pp. 136-7)

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¹ Page numbers without source refer to Weizman, Eyal, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso (2007)

² Eyal Weizman was jointly responsible for B’Tselem’s 2002 report, Land Grab, among other works.

³ Interview with Harry Kreisler for Conversations with History at the Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, 24 Oct 2003, Retrieved on 28 Dec 2007

⁴ “Computer helps jailers understand dogs”, Beth Marlowe, AP, 19 May 2008, Retrieved on 29 May 2008

⁵ “Palestinians pin hopes of economic recovery on high-tech companies”, AP, Ha’aretz, Retrieved on 29 May 2008

⁶ “Israel lets Arab Israelis into W.Bank city”, Wael al-Ahmed, Reuters, Retrieved on 2 June 2008