Despite the siege, Hamas has not surrendered. Its hold of the strip and its influence over Gazans has only been strengthened. It has resisted the siege with continuous armed action. Constant skirmishes have escalated into three devastating Israeli attacks in 2008–9, 2012 and 2014. Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of dense civilian neighbourhoods during these ‘wars’ has killed over 4,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. In addition, the constant bombardment has ruined most of the remaining infrastructure, destroyed or damaged close to 150,000 buildings, and driven half a million Gazans from their homes – a number only slightly exceeding that of the Jewish population the state helped house in the West Bank and Jerusalem over the same period.12 The built environment – and its destruction and construction – is, as I have already written in Hollow Land, more than just a backdrop of this conflict. Rather, it is the means by which domination takes shape.
Stratigraphic Separation
The policy of separation does not only divide Jews and Palestinians but also creates divisions between Palestinians. Physical barriers now cut apart the three main districts occupied in 1967 – Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank – and separate them from the Palestinians in Israel. The Gaza siege is enacted through a perimeter barrier composed of a system of roads, concrete walls and fencings similar to that of the more famous West Bank wall. It is built on the internationally recognized border of 1949, but extends inwards into a no-go area that extends up to 1500 metres from the border. Anyone entering this zone could be shot and killed.
The 708 kilometres of the West Bank wall cut between villages and their fields, effectively annexing 10 per cent of the territory for the use of the settlements. It also cuts Jerusalem apart from the West Bank. The eastern part of Jerusalem has been physically annexed to Israel but its Palestinian population was granted only ‘permanent residency’ – an oxymoronic term because this residency can be revoked at any time, and Israeli authorities use any excuse to revoke it whenever possible. Divided from all the rest are the million and a half Palestinians who live within Israel, where they have Israeli citizenship but not equal rights. Completely barred from entering Palestine are the four and a half million Palestinians, mainly refugees but also migrants, living outside the country.
In the West Bank, separation has grown increasingly complex. The Oslo Accords splintered the territory into areas A, B, and C, with areas A and B enjoying some degree of civilian administration, and area C (some 61 per cent of the total area, with about 200,000 to 300,000 Palestinians) remaining under the direct control the military’s ‘Civil Administration’, which forbids all Palestinian construction and development.
Not only has architecture been weaponized in this conflict, but the system itself can be said to have an architectural form. What is this architecture of control and how does it work? In the early 2000s when I started my research into the formation of this territorial system, I approached the challenge as every architect might approach an analysis of a complex building: I drew a cross section through it. An architectural cross section cuts through the visible layers of a building – facades, internal walls, floors – to expose the structures, systems, and infrastructure that run through them – columns, beams, air ducts, plumbing, electricity or information systems – as well as the relation between floors and rooms.
The section revealed the depth of Israel’s colonial project, because, like a building, the ‘architectural project’ of the occupation was arranged in layers. The Oslo Accords of the mid 1990s – which promised an incremental pathway to reconciliation but ended up providing the skeleton of the existing geographical system of domination and control – divided the territory into three principle political floors: the surface, landlocked pockets which were handed over to Palestinian control; the subsoil, including water and mineral resources; and the airspace above Palestinian areas, which was left in Israeli hands, primarily those of its air force.
But territorial stratifications get even more complicated. Israel’s primary legal apparatus for land grab: an Ottoman land code from the mid-nineteenth century conceived to encourage agricultural cultivation after a great series of droughts and famines across the empire by promising farmers permanent tenure over any land they cultivated and threatening to take land away if they didn’t. A contemporary reading of the logic of this law helped the state take legal control over all uncultivated lands, which were located primarily on the barren hilltops leaving only the lower cultivated valleys in Palestinian hands. In these hilltops, also important for territorial control, Israel could now ‘legally’ implant the settlement. This meant that the two national populations became intertwined and intermingled everywhere across the terrain.
This fragmentation into settlement hilltop islands over Palestinian valley enclaves necessitated a further degree of three-dimensional complexity: a mesh of separated roadways that could connect islands to islands and enclaves to enclaves. This completely divided the movements of Jews and Palestinians in three dimensions without the two ever crossing, or crossing only minimally.
A Jewish-only road network, the ‘apartheid roads’ started connecting the hilltop settlements with bridges that span over Palestinian fields and with tunnels that burrow underneath Palestinian towns. This type of infrastructure has in recent decades been greatly extended and currently comprises a full third of the total length of roadways in the West Bank.13 In the last decade, as armed confrontations in the West Bank subsided, some military checkpoints were removed, allowing Palestinians freer movement between their villages and towns. But this movement was undertaken on a separate and tattered road network that, whenever crossing the Jewish network of highways, bows and bores underneath them. While the Jewish road network leads everywhere to Israel, the Palestinian road network is truncated on all sides by walls, checkpoints, and military zones.
Every Palestinian town and village has thus been fully enveloped by Israeli space in three dimensions. If Palestinians want to drive out of their enclaves, they encounter a fence, a wall, or an Israeli checkpoint. If they want to dig a well they need Israeli permission to pierce into its subterranean volumes, and face sanctions if they don’t. If they want to fly – a question that is largely theoretical given that they are not permitted an air force nor a national airline – they need Israel’s permission to enter into the airspace over their very roofs.
In Gaza, this three-dimensional partition organizes the frontlines of the armed struggle. Enclosed on the surface and unable to face the Israeli air force that continuously hovers above, Palestinian military efforts move in two directions along the vertical axis: they have retreated into the subsoil, where there are underground command centers, cross-border tunnels, and rocket-launching sites; and into the airspace through which these rockets travel.
If this system of volumetric separation were to be described in terms of a building, it would most closely resemble an airport with separate inbound and outbound corridors, splintering infrastructural ductworks, multiple passport control points, and security checks that direct some passengers on hustle-free paths through luxury shops to anywhere in the world, and others toward long queues, invasive security checks, and detention rooms that are sometimes separated from the luxury shops merely by a single floor or wall. Following this metaphor, Gaza would be the largest of the detention rooms. From it, those incarcerated might be able to see the people shopping on the other side, but are invisible to them (while being hypervisible to their security forces). The more these detainees try to resist or break out, the less provisions, water, and electricity these security people allow in.
I have previously called this layered political structure ‘the politics of verticality’.14 Throughout the last decade, this evolving and elastic territorial architecture has hardened into a permanent mechanism of separation and control. Verticality has become a form of apartheid. The word should in fact be synonymous with it.
Other layers of separation could be revealed by extending the section line downward across different geological layers. A section through these layers exposes the political logic of Israeli apartheid in the same way that seismological cracks help geologists examine hidden layers of rock. Recently, some scientists have proposed that our geological era should be referred to as the Anthropocene, a time in which humans have become the dominant