The various borders of the conflict have accordingly manifested themselves as different topographical latitudes. Settlement master-planners aimed to achieve territorial control in the West Bank by constructing settlements on the high summits of the mountainous terrain. Across this fragmented geography the different Israeli settlements were woven together by lines of infrastructure routed through three-dimensional space: roads connecting Israeli settlements are raised on extended bridges spanning Palestinian routes and lands, or dive into tunnels beneath them, while narrow Palestinian underpasses are usually bored under Israeli multi-laned highways.
Palestinian militants have themselves discovered that Israeli walls and barriers can be easily bypassed in three dimensions. People and explosives are routinely smuggled in tunnels dug beneath the walls of Gaza, while home-made rockets are launched through the airspace above them. When the Wall’s construction is complete, tunnels will no doubt be dug under it through the bedrock of the West Bank mountains.
In 2002, Ron Pundak, known as the ‘architect’ of the Oslo Process, explained to me that a three-dimensional matrix of roads and tunnels is the only practical way to divide and thereafter sustain the fragmented division of an otherwise ‘indivisible territory’.22 In the July 2000 negotiations in Camp David, President Clinton’s outline for the partition of Jerusalem was based on the territorial/demographic status quo in declaring that whatever part of the city is inhabited by Jews will be Israeli and whatever part is inhabited by Palestinians will belong to the Palestinian state. According to Clinton’s principles of partition, 64 kilometres of walls would have fragmented the city into two archipelago systems along national lines. Forty bridges and tunnels would have accordingly woven together these isolated neighbourhood-enclaves.23 Clinton’s principle of partition also meant that some buildings in the Old City would be vertically divided between the two states, with the ground floor and the basement being entered from the Muslim Quarter and used by Palestinian shop-owners belonging to the Palestinian state, and the upper floors being entered from the direction of the Jewish Quarter, used by Jews belonging to the Jewish state. Clinton also sincerely believed that three-dimensional borders could resolve the problem of partitioning the Temple Mount from Haram al-Sharif (for all others – the very same place). According to this plan Palestinians would control the surface of the Haram al-Sharif, the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque on top of it, while Israeli sovereignty would extend to the ‘depth of the ground’ underneath, where the temples were presumed to have lain. In an interview, Gilead Sher, Israel’s chief negotiator at Camp David (and a divorce lawyer) explained it to me as a simple negotiation and ‘bridging’ technique: the swelling of the ‘cake’ to be partitioned (from a surface to a volume) will make each side feel that it has got more and done well out of the arrangement.24
Previously still, according to the Oslo Accords, the two main, estranged Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, 47 kilometres apart as the crow flies, should similarly have been connected into a single political unit.25 In an interview given to the London Daily Telegraph, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained the problem to his British interviewer by an analogy: ‘You connected two states separated by water with a tunnel; we have the problem of connecting two entities separated by land …’26 In the imagination of its engineers, the so-called ‘safe passage’ would become a Palestinian bridge in Palestinian jurisdiction spanning Israeli territory. This massive viaduct would support six lanes of motorway, two railway lines, high-voltage electricity cables and water and oil pipes. Over the past twelve years since the issue was first raised in the context of the Oslo process, thousands of hours of talks, dozens of professional committees and joint planning sessions, hundreds of plans, publications and declarations have been dedicated to the issue. Speculations included a bewildering variety of other possible solutions: sunken highways, tunnels and more elevated roads. At times, the political debate got entangled in the question of who should be on top: Israel preferred, naturally, that the Palestinian sovereign road should run under Israeli territory, in a tunnel or a ditch, while Palestinians preferred the alternative of an elevated bridge.27 In 2005 the World Bank announced its support for plans drawn up by the RAND Corporation that adopted the model of an elevated Palestinian bridge spanning Israel between Gaza and the West Bank.28
In fact, similar territorial ‘solutions’ in three dimensions were a feature of each and every historical or contemporary partition plan for Palestine, and were outlined in the context of a series of partition plans prepared throughout the period of the British Mandate (1919–1948). Unable to carve out of Palestine a contiguous Jewish state, the map-makers of the 1947 United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) presented an outline for two states, each of which was comprised of three elongated territorial bodies entangled with the other’s three sections and connected at their corners. In these corners – the ‘kissing points’ – where the border between the supposed territories of Israel and Palestine changed from a single-dimensional line to a non-dimensional point – planners proposed to embrace fully the third dimension, and maintain connections between the fragments of Israeli and Palestinian territories via tunnels or bridges.29
These massive infrastructural systems, drawing provisional borders through sovereign three-dimensional spaces, are the physical infrastructure of a unique type of political space, one desperately struggling to separate the inseparable, by attempting to multiply a single territorial reality and create two insular national geographies that occupy the same space, but crashing, as Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti remarkably put it, ‘three dimensions into six: three Israeli and three Palestinian’.30 Throughout this process the territory of Palestine emerged as a hologramatized ‘hollow land’ that seemed spawned of the imaginary world of seventeenth-century British astronomer Edmund Halley, or the nineteenth-century novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, who themselves foresaw a hollow earth inhabited in layers.31 With it, the imaginary spaces of conflict have seemingly fully adopted the scale of a building, resembling a complex architectural construction, perhaps an airport, with its separate inbound and outbound levels, security corridors and many checkpoints. Cut apart and enclosed by its many barriers, gutted by underground tunnels, threaded together by overpasses and bombed from its militarized skies, the hollow land emerges as the physical embodiment of the many and varied attempts to partition it.
The organization of this book follows the different strata of this vertical construction of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Starting in the deep aquifers of the West Bank, it progresses through its buried archaeology and then across its folded topographical surface to the militarized airspace above. Each chapter, describing different spatial practices and technologies of control and separation, focuses on a particular period in the history of the occupation. In this way, the succession of episodes following the development of Israel’s technologies of domination and Palestinian resistance to them also charts a tragic process of cumulatively radicalizing violence.
However, with the technology and infrastructure deemed necessary for the physical segregation of Israelis from Palestinians, it appears that the vertical politics of separation and the logic of partition have been fully exhausted. The untenable territorial legal and sovereign knot created by the politics of separation/partition indicates a fundamental problem: although hundreds of proposals prepared by well-meaning cartographers from the period of the British mandate to the present have attempted to find a borderline and a geopolitical design along which Israel could be separated from Palestine, this path has repeatedly proven itself politically and geographically fleeting. The two political/geographic concepts of Israel and Palestine refer to and overlap across the very same place. The over-complex and clearly unsustainable practices and technologies that any designed territorial ‘solution’ for separation inexorably requires demonstrate this spatial paradox and beg us to consider whether the political road to partition is the right one to take.
The Tunnel Road, Daniel Bauer, 2002.