How does one claim a space as their own? By what measurement can one make a claim to land? The small sliver of land in the middle east referred to some as Israel and others as Palestine hosts a centuries old conflict of entitlement to land and space. This desirable, small slice of land has perhaps one of the murkiest histories of any other land in the world. It’s not clear who was there first, who belongs there currently, and why it has been impossible for it to be shared. The land has gone through many different hands of ownership. But, Israel is currently the Jewish state, a land provided to the Jewish people by a United Nations coalition in 1948 in order to organize a fragmented diaspora, where members of the faith face global persecution. However, beyond the international legal action that defines the land as the Jewish state of Israel, ancient religious scriptures trace the Jewish heritage back to that very land. Therefore, the claim to land faces the dichotomy of modern legal practices and ancient religious records. And the Jewish people are not the only one’s who have legitimate claims to the land. The modern day land of Israel also has religious ties to the origins of Islam and the land has been widely populated by Muslim Arabs for centuries. Since the foundation of Israel in the mid 20th century, the area has been a war zone of conflict between Arabs and Jewish settlers. Intifadas, or large-scale guerrilla uprisings, have occurred numerous times in the past 30 years, with peace accords having little to no effect on the violence. Without any room for peace and cohabitation, the resulting conflict has lead to obstructions of the Palestinian people’s rights to space and mobility. Through the architecture imposed onto the land, a divisive nature has developed between cultures and legally segregated zones. In a close examination of the built environment, I suggest that walls and other structures of separation manifested through fences, security checkpoints, and transportation networks, play an integral role in the physical demarcation of land and act as a subversion to notions of public and private space.
Part I: Defining the Wall
Historically, a wall has been a symbol of the boundary of sovereignty, creating a clear indication of land ownership. However, it is simultaneously a tool of division and xenophobia. A wall is not merely an indication of the limits to land, but also a tool for keeping others out of one’s space. In Israel, walls and fences are the primary tools utilized to maintain segregation between Israelis and Palestinians. Since the turn of the millennium, Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza have been walled or fenced in to their territory. The barriers were built with the original intention to quell violence, however, the walls have only increased conflict between Israel and Palestine. In the film 5 Broken Cameras, director Emad Burnat documented the erection of a fence line between his Palestinian village and the Israeli border, an area which later became the primary zone for Palestinian resistance and confrontation. Despite peaceful protests occurring on the Palestinian side of the fence, Israeli soldiers are seen firing across the boundary and throwing smoke and gas grenades at the protestors throughout the film (Burnat). This interaction, amongst many other instances of Palestinian suppression across border lines, raises questions about the true purpose and meaning of the fenced barrier. The focus goes towards the entity that constructed the barrier initially, the Israeli military. By shooting and hurtling explosive projectiles across the barrier, the Israelis extend their force across the boundary lines, symbolically extending their sovereignty. The line of separation loses it’s meaning as a barrier of religious difference and land demarcation and becomes a facade for violence. Burnat’s film specifically highlights the Israeli's forceful encroachments onto Palestinian lands, showcasing the cost of resistance and the gradual divestment of autonomy. In practice, the fence line that divides Israel from Palestine is not a mitigation of violence, but an incendiary in the conflict, creating a hyper-aggressive state of surveillance and policing that allows for incremental advances of Israeli power across the border.
An Israeli soldier approaches Palestinian protestors at the border fence. Still image from 5 Broken Cameras.
While the Israeli military aims to contain Palestinians through a continuous border line between territories, building permits and legislation have not always authorized a dividing structure to be erected along the border. In 2012, the Israeli army intended to build a wall around a historic railroad line that runs directly on the Israeli / Palestinian border at the village of Battir, but was denied the right to do so after international lobbying efforts deemed the construction illegal. The wall would have been situated on critical Palestinian farm land that has historically served its community for centuries. The special landscape features man-made terraces that are used by local farmers to grow crops and the intervention of the wall intended to remove at least two terraces from the farmers’ autonomy. With an investigation performed by research group, Forensic Architecture, the village of Battir and its surrounding area became a UNESCO world heritage site in 2014 and the wall was denied permission to be built in 2015 by Israeli courts (Weizman, Forensic Architecture). While this was a win for Palestinian freedom, the fight against the wall in Battir is merely microscopic within the view of Israeli containment efforts in the West Bank and their aim to suppress Palestinian land occupation and spatial mobility. Despite wide-spread protests against walls and fences between Israel and Palestine, hundreds of miles of concrete walls and wire fences have been constructed in recent years under Israel’s “segregation policy”, which intends to “separate Jews from Palestinians everywhere across the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea” (Weizman xii). This Israeli ideology of physical separation and division has created a religious apartheid within the region.
When we think of walls, we think of them as a two sided device that clearly indicates two separate entities. But, within the Israel / Palestine conflict, the walls lose their two-sided, binary nature due to the fragmented zoning of the West Bank. The West Bank is made up of what are effectively shards of Israeli and Palestinian land. These shards represent incisions into Palestinian territory and the suppression of Palestinian mobility is manifested through more abstract forms of architecture such as settler developments, security check points, and highway systems. Architect and activist, Eyal Weizman, calls Israeli settler developments, “the living wall”, a term coined to describe the use of Israeli citizens and residences to enshroud Palestinians (Weizman, Al Jazeera). These settlements are satellite neighborhoods considered to be a part of Israeli occupied Jerusalem. However, these settlements are often miles outside of the city and lack direct connection and religious lineage to the historic capital. Ultimately, these developments disregard clear land distinctions between Israel and Palestine, creating fractured Jewish and Palestinian communities. In Weizman’s research, he finds Israeli settlements to be commonly found on top of hills in Palestinian territories, acting as a form of surveillance and dominant overwatch over Palestinian communities within the valleys (Weizman, Al Jazeera). Roadways and major highways connect the Jewish settlements together and are exclusively used by Israelis. These roads, often elevated above the ground, interrupt the Palestinian landscape and expand Israeli mobility across both sides of Israeli and Palestinian zones. While roads streamline Israeli mobility, Palestinians face a different reality. Israeli operated security checkpoints throughout Palestinian territories slows and restricts passage of Palestinians between settlements. The turnstiles and narrow walkways of the checkpoints reduce the Palestinians to conditions that cattle might experience when being herded from place to place. Even the number of border crossings allowed by the Israeli military fluctuates with political instability; minimizing the amount of crossings during periods of conflict as a tactic to withhold critical resources from citizens in the West Bank and Gaza. This disparity of transportation, mobility, and autonomy between Israelis and Palestinians showcases an unequal segregation of people and an indirect intrusion of Israeli settlers into territories of the West Bank. The satellite Israeli settlements and the infrastructure connecting them illustrates a wall-like, architecture of separation that aims to expand land occupation through abstract measures.
A 3-D rendering of fragmented zoning in the West Bank. Image from The Architecture of Violence by Eyal Weizman and Al Jazeera.
Part II: Mixed Use
How do Israelis and Palestinians ascribe meaning to the walls and structures that separate them? While the Israelis and Palestinians ultimately share the same walls, they use them for different purposes. Standing on either side of the wall, the Israelis and the Palestinians have identical views, but differing interpretations of the concrete structure in front of them. The Israelis see the wall as a tool for separation: it is there to keep them safe and keep out Palestinians from their land. Military watch towers are installed seamlessly along the wall, marking a panoptic vision over the Palestinian “other”. For Israelis, form follows function, and the wall is merely a tool. But, for Palestinians, the wall is viewed in a very different light. Palestinians express themselves through the wall, using it as a medium for change. Because of their forced submission to the Israeli military that constructed the walls, the Palestinians re-purpose them as a canvas in their fight for freedom. The Palestinian side of the walls surrounding the West Bank and Gaza are commonly found adorned with artwork, usually with political messages and images illustrated with colorful ornament. Public art has always been an instrument for change in social and political movements around the world and for Palestinians art plays a critical role in their ability to counter Israel’s position of power. Effectively, the Palestinians transformed a signal of privatization into a platform for public forum.
Israel’s suppression of mass communications technology such as television, radio, and newspapers in Palestinian territories resulted in graffiti becoming one of the dominant ways of communicating on a public scale (Rolston 46). Walls across Palestinian territories became enveloped with political artwork during the first intifada of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Artworks alerted citizens of boycotts and protests taking place, while honoring martyrs caught in the cross fire of violent resistance. Noticing the effectiveness of the graffiti, the Israeli military campaigned against the public messaging, often destroying, covering, and removing the messages shortly after they were painted. But as the conflict escalated and violent skirmishes between the military and local Palestinian militias grew, the graffiti also became more extreme. Graphic representations of Israelis being brutally murdered and cries for violent extremism became the center point for artwork on display on the walls. Artwork criticizing the Palestinian governing body increased as peace became a dwindling outcome and internal divisions were beginning to form. As the Palestinian population was dividing, so was the artwork. Parts of the walls would be sectioned off to represent different political factions and “each faction would mark a section of the wall ‘private’ in order to publicize their intention to use the space and to warn the other faction against ‘hijacking’ it” (Rolston 47). Soon, the artwork began to be policed even by Palestinian authorities, a form of self-censorship amongst the already present Israeli suppression. As Palestinian politics changed with the rise of Hamas in Gaza, public artworks across the territory lost their diversity of expression under the authoritarian rule. Hamas re-defined the use of public art and utilized murals to specify moral codes, codifying the people with conservative Islamic rhetoric through the medium of art. What was once a medium of resistance, freedom, and anti-censorship ironically grew into a highly regulated mode of communication.
Murals of resistance in Gaza. Images by Bill Rolston.
As the conflict between Israel and Palestine heightened, the relevance of the public artworks became more prominent. But as the conflict rose and the artworks evolved, the Palestinian interpretation of the wall changed as well. During the first and second intifadas, the walls represented exclusion and injustice, but simultaneously freedom and community. The decadent walls gave Palestinians the opportunity to re-distribute power amongst themselves in a guerilla-like movement against their oppressor. As time went on, the walls became more detached from Israeli occupation and yet again represented a loss of control, only now from within. However, the Palestinian re-purposing of the architectural form subsequently turned barriers into beacons of expression, a crucial communications tool for resistance, and a canvas for subverting the notion of a wall as a signal for private space.
Part III: Walled Warfare
While the Israeli military utilized walls to create a barrier between the Jewish state and Palestine, they also broke through walls in order to fulfill their operations in tactical urban warfare against the Palestinians during the Intifadas. In order to infiltrate Palestinian villages and cities that were booby trapped and prepared for invasion, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) understood that they needed to disturb Palestinians understanding of public and private space. This initial disruption began well before military combat operations commenced. On any given night in Palestinian territory, IDF brigades would infiltrate unsuspecting villages and towns, going house by house to perform security checks on innocent civilians. Doing so would momentarily take families out of their homes, while soldiers gathered intel on the family members and searched the premises for weapons. Photographs would be taken of each family member and a documentation of the architectural plan was kept on record for future reference in combat (Stein 58). This invasion of privacy and terrorizing tactic ultimately displayed the Israeli’s command over Palestinian rights to space on both a physical and psychological level.
Through these preliminary invasions of terror, the IDF planted the seed of inverting private and public space. In Operation Defensive Shield, the military’s invasion of Nablus continued this approach by implementing the concepts of “swarming” and “infestation” into the battlefield, which included moving through domestic space in order to “turn inside to outside and private domains to thoroughfares” (Weizman 186). It was too dangerous for the military to enter combat on the streets of Nablus, where guerrilla fighters would have the upper hand hiding in private buildings and alleys. Instead of combatting the militias head-on, the IDF decided to adopt the Palestinian guerrilla practices as their own and operate in fragmented, non-linear networks throughout the city. Avoiding the open streets, IDF soldiers traversed domestic space through the “walking through walls” method of attack. Soldiers would break through residential walls with a sledge hammer or small explosives, entering the residences of unsuspecting and often innocent Palestinian civilians. Doing so, the private Palestinian homes were opened up to the public theater of war, negating the upper hand gained by Palestinian militias utilizing private space as their defensive and offensive vantage points. As Israeli soldiers overtook the city and closed in on the final group of insurgents in the center of the city, the IDF deployed combat bulldozers as an enhanced and efficient method of breaking through walls. The bulldozers pierced massive holes in the sides of buildings for squads of infantry to navigate through, often times demolishing buildings in order to create entirely new passages for unexpected incisive attacks. The invasion of Nablus concluded when “IDF officers ordered giant D9 Caterpillar bulldozers to start destroying the camp, burying its defenders and remaining civilians in the rubble” (Weizman 202). Through the strategic destruction of walls, the Israeli military was able to turn the city of Nablus completely upside down, removing all private spaces and exposing all Palestinians to the battle. In cities, the density of urban space increases the notion of publicity and visibility. But, urban warfare favors those that occupy the private spaces, as it is a shielded enclave that is out of view and often integrated amongst civilian, domestic lifestyles. Therefore, the military’s innovative obsession with breaking through walls and operating amongst and within domestic domains undermines urban fabric and blurs private and public spheres.
An IDF soldier breaking through a residential wall and a map of the IDF’s networks of non-linear “swarming” in Nablus. Images from Hollow Land.
Part IV: Negative Space | Between Walls
What takes place in the space between the walls? The space in between may refer to the “sterile areas” at the border walls, a “no man’s land” of unused space between the wall and Israeli / Palestinian land, usually lined with barbed wire fencing. But, the space in between also refers to a place where the wall is neutralized, when factions from either side come together. The infamous image of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat shaking hands at the first Oslo Peace Accord in 1993 is, perhaps, the most symbolic representation of the space in between. Mediated by US President Bill Clinton, Rabin and Arafat were able to put aside their differences, break down the barriers between them, and sign a peace deal that would allow for Palestinian self-governing and the removal of IDF troops from parts of the West Bank and Gaza. Or, so they thought. Oslo Accord I only had a life-span of 5 years and soon after those 5 years were up, the second Intifada broke out. Since then, nearly 300 miles of barriers have been built and peace has never been reached. The image of Rabin, Arafat, and Clinton is a false promise of peace. While the walls that separate Israel from Palestine only expanded after the accord, the image of the two dignitaries shaking hands brought hope that they might one day be broken down. But, the Oslo Accords were only the beginning of a continuous, vicious cycle of broken treaties and violent insurgency. The space in between the walls, the grey area between violence and peace, operates within fine margins. Unfortunately, there is little room for cohabitation. But, what if the walls were truly broken down? What if the land of Israel / Palestine became grey? A non-country, quasi-state of sorts. Jerusalem was never intended to be occupied by a singular entity. Historically, too much has occurred in and around that city for it to be claimed by one and remain a singularity. For it to fulfill its original destiny as a cultural crossroads and for the promise of Rabin and Arafat’s handshake to be realized, Jerusalem and the land of Israel must be architecturally re-configured for open passage and open habitation for all.
The original queries surrounding how space is claimed remains unanswered and inconclusive as the Israel / Palestine conflict proves to continually detach itself from any form of traditional notions to definitive space. Ultimately, the demarcation of land via barriers of separation and the aerial gaze of imaginary border lines exhibits a hierarchical habitation on top of the earth, rather than one that resides within it. This top-down approach remains lofted and isolated from the essential foundations of and within the planet. Our current mode of building as separation on a social and environmental level lacks engagement with the earth that sustains us. The land engages us, but arguably, our architecture neither engages us nor the land. This asymmetric relationship across all entities fosters space for inequitable organization. The future of building requires less walls, in both the material and abstract understandings of the word, in order to reconnect with the original principles and systems of life.
We don’t live on earth, we live with earth.
The infamous image of Rabin and Arafat shaking hands at Oslo Accord I.
Citations:
Burnat, Emad. 5 Broken Cameras. Kino Lorber, 2011. Kanopy.
Rolston, Bill. “Messages of Allegiance and Defiance: The Murals of Gaza.” Race & Class Vol. 55: 40–61.
Stein, Rebecca L. “GoPro Occupation: Networked Cameras, Israeli Military Rule, and the Digital Promise.” Current Anthropology Vol. 58: 56–63.
Weizman, Eyal. “Israel: The Architecture of Violence.” Conflict News | Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera, September 2, 2014. https://www.aljazeera.com/program/episode/2014/9/2/israethe-architecture-of-violence.
Weizman, Eyal. “Stopping the Wall in Battir.” Forensic Architecture, April 1, 2015. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-wall-in-battir.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land. London, United Kingdom: VERSO Books, 2017.