Laboratory
Although this book is largely framed between 1967 and the present, and primarily within the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it does not seek to claim that the spatial injustices of the conflict started only after the Six Day War of June 1967, and that the extent of the present injustices are confined to the 1967 occupied territories. Nor does it underestimate the century-old process of Zionist colonization, land-grab and dispossession that preceded it. It suggests though that any adequate address of the injustices and suffering of the conflict must begin by ending Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories and the daily suffering inflicted in its name. Focusing on the occupation itself, furthermore, allows Israel’s spatial strategies to be investigated in their most brutal and intense manifestation, as within a ‘laboratory of the extreme’. The technologies of control that enable Israel’s continued colonization of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are located at the end of an evolutionary chain of techniques of colonization, occupation and governance developed throughout the history of Zionist settlement. Furthermore, every change in the geography of the occupation has been undertaken with the techniques and technologies of the time and in exchange with other developments worldwide. The main surge of the colonization of the West Bank in the 1980s coincided with the Reagan-era flight of the American middle classes and their fortification behind protective walls – both formations setting themselves against the poverty and violence they have themselves produced. Perfecting the politics of fear, separation, seclusion and visual control, the settlements, checkpoints, walls and other security measures are also the last gesture in the hardening of enclaves, and the physical and virtual extension of borders in the context of the more recent global ‘war on terror’. The architecture of Israeli occupation could thus be seen as an accelerator and an acceleration of other global political processes, a worst-case scenario of capitalist globalization and its spatial fall-out. The extended significance of this ‘laboratory’ lies in the fact that the techniques of domination, as well as the techniques of resistance to them, have expanded and multiplied across what critical geographer Derek Gregory called the ‘colonial present’,18 and beyond – into the metropolitan centres of global cities.
Indeed, beyond their physical reality, the territories of Israel/Palestine have constituted a schematic description of a conceptual system whose properties have been used to understand other geopolitical problems. The ‘Intifada’ unfolding in Iraq is a part of an imaginary geography that Makram Khoury-Machool called the ‘Palestinization of Iraq’.19 Yet, if the Iraqi resistance is perceived to have been ‘Palestinized’, the American military has been ‘Israelized’. Furthermore, both the American and Israeli militaries have adopted counter-insurgency tactics that increasingly resemble the guerrilla methods of their enemies. When the wall around the American Green Zone in Baghdad looks as if it had been built from left-over components of the West Bank Wall; when ‘temporary closures’ are imposed on entire Iraqi towns and villages and reinforced with earth dykes and barbed wire; when larger regions are carved up by road blocks and checkpoints; when the homes of suspected terrorists are destroyed, and ‘targeted assassinations’ are introduced into a new global militarized geography – it is because the separate conflicts now generally collected under the heading of the ‘war on terror’ are the backdrop to the formation of complex ‘institutional ecologies’ that allow the exchange of technologies, mechanisms, doctrines, and spatial strategies between various militaries and the organizations that they confront, as well as between the civilian and the military domains.
The politics of separation
Each of the spatial technologies and practices to which the following chapters are dedicated is both a system of colonial control and a means of separation. Israeli domination in the West Bank and Gaza always shifted between selective physical presence and absence, the former dealing with Israel’s territorial and the latter with its demographic strategy – aiming to gain land without the people living in it. It thus operated by imposing a complex compartmentalized system of spatial exclusion that at every scale is divided into two. The logic of ‘separation’ (or, to use the more familiar Afrikaans word, ‘apartheid’) between Israelis and Palestinians within the Occupied Territories has been extended, on the larger, national scale, to that of ‘partition’. At times, the politics of separation/partition has been dressed up as a formula for a peaceful settlement, at others as a bureaucratic-territorial arrangement of governance, and most recently as a means of unilaterally imposed domination, oppression and fragmentation of the Palestinian people and their land.
The Oslo Accords of the 1990s left the Israeli military in control of the interstices of an archipelago of about two hundred separate zones of Palestinian restricted autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. The military governed the area by modulating flows of different types between these enclaves (money, waste, water, traffic). During the second Intifada, the Oslo lines of partition further hardened into mechanisms of control. The military checkpoints and the Wall, slipping seamlessly into this geography, have become not only brutal means of segregation but active sensors within Israel’s network of surveillance, registering all the Palestinians passing through them. The process of partial decolonization, which was recently embodied in the evacuation of the ground surface of Gaza and the building of the Wall in the West Bank, is indicative of an attempt to replace one system of domination with another. If the former system of domination relied upon Israeli territorial presence within Palestinian areas and the direct governing of the occupied populations, the latter seeks to control the Palestinians from beyond the envelopes of their walled-off spaces, by selectively opening and shutting the different enclosures, and by relying on the strike capacity of the Air Force over Palestinian areas. In this territorial ‘arrangement’ the principle of separation has turned ninety degrees as well, with Israelis and Palestinians separated vertically, occupying different spatial layers. This process of ‘distanciation’, which saw the reduction in Israeli direct territorial presence on Palestinian territories and with it a degree of responsibility for the Palestinian population, resulted in a radical increase in the level of violence, with the period since the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip being the most devastating to Palestinian life and welfare since the beginning of the occupation.20
This conflation of separation/partition with security, violence and control is not surprising when we realize that it was largely Israeli military officers, serving or retired, that conducted territorial negotiations during all the Israel/Palestine peace (or partition) processes. Israel’s logic of ‘peacemaking’ throughout the conflict was the monopoly of its war-makers. In the hands of Israeli generals, the territorial discourse of partition blurred the distinctions between war and peace.21 Partition plans were presented as peace plans, while settlement masterplans, prepared by or submitted to Israeli governments, were also partition plans (planners placed settlements in those parts of the territories they wanted the government to annex).
The proposed Palestinian link road leaving the Gaza Strip. Illustration: Eyal Weizman, 2002.
The politics of verticality
By 2006 the separation between Israeli and Palestinian areas in the Occupied Territories was not articulated on the surface of the terrain alone. Palestinians had been forced into a territorial patchwork of sealed islands around their cities, towns and villages, within a larger space controlled by Israel. Areas under Palestinian control included only the 200 fragments of land surface, but Israel controlled all the area around