The Politics of Verticality The West Bank as an Architectural Construction By Eyal Weizman Episode 1: INTRODUCTION Since the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza strip, a colossal project of strategic, territorial and architectural planning has lain at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The landscape and the built environment became the arena of conflict. Jewish settlements – state-sponsored islands of ‘territorial and personal democracy’, manifestations of the Zionist pioneering ethos – were placed on hilltops overlooking the dense and rapidly changing fabric of the Palestinian cities and villages. ‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds spread out in a fragmented patchwork: a territorial ecosystem of externally alienated, internally homogenised enclaves located next to, within, above or below each other. The border seized to be a single continuous line and broke up into a series of separate makeshift boundaries, internal checkpoints and security apparatuses. The total fragmentation of the terrain on plan demanded for the design of continuity across the territorial section. Israeli roads and infrastructure thereafter connected settlements while spanning over Palestinian lands or diving underneath them. Along these same lines, Ariel Sharon’s most recent plan proposes a Palestinian State on a few estranged territorial enclaves “connected by tunnels and bridges”, while further insisting that Israel would retain sovereignty on the water aquifers underneath Palestinian areas and on the airspace and electromagnetic fields above them. Indeed, a new way of imagining territory was developed for the West Bank. The region was no longer seen as a two-dimensional surface of a single territory, but as a large three-dimensional volume, containing a layered series of ethnic, political and strategic territories. Separate security corridors, infrastructure, and underground resources were thus woven into an Escher-like space that struggled to multiply a single territorial reality. What was first described by Meron Benvenisti as crashing “three-dimensional space into six dimensions – three Jewish and three Arab” became the complete physical partitioning of the West Bank into two separate but overlapping national geographies in volume across territorial cross sections, rather than on a planar surface. The process that split a single territory into a series of territories is the ‘Politics of Verticality’. Beginning as a set of ideas, policies, projects and regulations proposed by Israeli state-technocrats, generals, archaeologists, planners and road engineers since the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank, it has by now become the common practise of exercising territorial control as well as the

dimension within which territorial solutions are sought. Settlement Masterplanners like Matityahu Drobles and Ariel Sharon aimed to generate territorial control from high points. Former US president Bill Clinton sincerely believed in a vertical solution to the problem of partitioning the Temple Mount. Ron Pundak, the ‘architect’ of the Oslo Accords, described solutions for partitioning the West Bank by a three-dimensional matrix of roads and tunnels as the only practical way to divide an undividable territory. And Gilead Sher, Israeli chief negotiator at Camp David (and a divorce lawyer) explained it to me as a simple negotiation and bridging technique – a seeming of enlarging of the ‘cake’ to be partitioned so that each side feels he got more. Episode 2. MAPS Territories are governed by the production and dissemination of knowledge as much as they are governed by military force. Maps have always been principal tools in the understanding and governing of territories. The history of their making relates to marking of property ownership, political sovereignty and power. But maps are two-dimensional. Attempting to represent reality on two-dimensional surfaces, they go beyond mirroring it and shape the very reality they seek to represent. As much as describing the world, they create it. Geo-politics is a flat discourse. It largely ignores the vertical dimension and tends to look across rather than cut through the landscape. This was the cartographic imagination inherited from the military and political spatialities of the modern state. Since both politics and law perceive the terrain and other spaces only through the tools available to them – two dimensional maps and plans – borders are drawn as lines on surfaces but assume that the space they refer to is extended simultaneously in two directions – above and below the charted surface. From 1967 to the present day, Israeli technocrats, ideologues and generals have been drawing maps of the West Bank, to the extent that map-making became a national obsession. This preoccupation with an ever-more-complete unveiling of the terrain was nourished by the expansionist ambitions of policy makers. Knowledge of the land and ambitions to possess it became intertwined. Information, politically selective, transferred onto maps started to influence the organisation of the terrain itself to fit what was drawn on paper. Whatever the nature of Palestinian spatiality, it was subordinated to Israeli cartography. Whatever was un-named on the map ceased to exist as a part of the political realm. Scores of scattered buildings and small villages were not named or erased from the maps, thus never recognised as settlements or local authorities, and were therefore never serviced by basic infrastructure, nor taken into consideration within any masterplan.

Hand in hand with the consolidation of the occupation, different solutions sought the partition of the West Bank along ever-different boundaries. These boundaries, stretched as lines along ever-new ‘essential national interests’, were marked nowhere but on the paper of different scale plans. The inability and unwillingness to transfer lines on plans to facts on the ground did not deter the obsessive engagement with the search for the optimal line – across both sides of which Israelis and Palestinians could be separated. As time went by, the plans became more complex, their borders, traced with ever-thinner pencils, demanding ever more advanced technologies of separation. Each period produced its own partition plans that reflected its ideology and security paranoia. The very fact that there was always a plan in existence regarding how to end the occupation, or at least regarding how to reach a final status arrangement, allowed the occupation to be seen as a temporary condition. And this temporality – the time in-between the present and the point in time in the future when the plan would be implemented – was well used to establish new facts on the ground, making the present plan outdated and demanding a newer and more complex one still. Allon Plan 1967 In the triumphant mood following the 1967 Six-Day War, the Labor Governments of Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir urged the continuation of Israeli expansion by reviving the pioneering ethos of the Zionist frontier. Yigal Allon a Kibbutz member and prominent minister, was appointed to determine the nature of the proposed settlement project. With the aim of creating "maximum security and maximum territory for Israel with a minimum number of Arabs", his plan advocated establishing a permanent security border by settling the sparsely populated Jordan Valley with a series of agricultural and paramilitary settlements. The Jordan Valley was to be eventually annexed to Israel, leaving the mountain ridge densely populated by Palestinians (58% of the West Bank) confederated with Jordan. Drobles Settlement Plan, 1977-78 The Drobles Plan, published early after the Likud party came to power in 1977 by the head of the Jewish Agency’s Settlement Division, was an act of defiance against the Allon Plan. Reversing its strategy, the plan set out to establish Israeli settlements in areas of the West Bank that were heavily populated by Arabs. Drobles's masterplan defined the settlement blocs of the Mountain ridge, locating them primarily around Palestinian cities and on the roads between them. The aim was to disallow the formation of continuous Palestinian territory that would allow for a Palestinian State to emerge.

Sharon Plan, 1981 When Ariel Sharon, then minister of agriculture, became the minister in charge of settlements, he published his plan delineating Israeli interests in the West Bank. His plan conceded isolated territories to Palestinian self-rule, while aiming to annex the rest. It seems today that Sharon, as Prime Minister, is attempting to revive his 20-year-old plan and offer sovereignty to the Palestinians around the same enclaves. Oslo Agreement, 1993-1999 The Oslo plans were a result of a process of gradual transfer of territory from Israeli rule to Palestinian limited authority. The plan creates a territorial labyrinth that holds Palestinians in dozens of isolated enclaves with contiguity for Israelis only. Today the Oslo plans are practically no longer relevant as Israel assumed control of most of the West Bank. Beilin Abu-Mazen Plan Conceived during secret negotiations in October 1995 and signed four days before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Beilin – Abu-Mazen plan was the first directly negotiated attempt to set the final borders of Israel and Palestine. The plan envisaged the creation of a demilitarised Palestinian state with its capital al-Quds (Jerusalem) on 95.5% of the West Bank. The tragic time of the release of the document made it immediately irrelevant while the return of the Likud to power a year later discarded of it altogether. Barak/Clinton Plan at Camp David Barak’s offer at Camp David during the summer of 2000 was an attempt to determine the final status borders of both Israeli and the Palestinian states. It aimed to annex to Israel about 80% of settlers within large settlement blocs adjacent to the green line (in about 6 to 9 percent of the West Bank's territory). In addition, it aimed to maintain temporary Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley. It is debatable whether the borders proposed in Damp David would allow for a viable Palestinian state. Sharon plan 2002 The current plan of Ariel Sharon proposed Palestinian sovereignty on isolated island and pockets of land that describe about 45% of the West Bank. In regards to contiguity he offered an “area that would allow the Palestinians to travel from [the enclave of] Jenin to [the enclave of] Hebron without passing any Israeli roadblocks… on a combination of tunnels and bridges”. If the territorial conflict of the West Bank cannot be solved on plan, why can Palestine not be tunnelled under or at times span over Israeli territory? In both the Oslo and the Camp David peace proposals, the intertwined patchwork of territories made it impossible to draw a feasible continuous boundary between Israelis and Palestinians without dismantling settlements. Israeli governments were always reluctant to do that.

Thus it was only by introducing the vertical dimension, in schemes of over- and under-passes, that linkage could be achieved between settlements and Israel, for Jews between Gaza and the West Bank for the Palestinians. These solutions did not reject the map as a geopolitical tool. Instead, they superimposed discontinuous maps over each other. Furthermore since Israel retained control of the subterrain and air over and under Palestinian areas international borders turned to the horizontal dimension. The horizon became a political boundary, separating the air from the ground. At the same time, another boundary – dividing the crust of the ground from the earth under it – has appeared. In the West Bank, the sub-terrain and the air have come to be seen as separated from, rather than continuous and organic to, the surface of the earth. Traditional international borders are political tools dividing the land on plans and maps; their geometric form, following principles of property laws, could be described as vertical planes extending from the centre of the earth to the height of the sky. The departure from a planar division of a territory to the creation of three-dimensional boundaries across sovereign bulks defines anew the relationship between sovereignty and space. The ‘Politics of Verticality’ entails the re-visioning of existing cartographic techniques. It creates a territorial hologram in which political acts of manipulation and multiplication transform a two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional volume. THE SUBTERRAIN The subterranean spaces of the West Bank are inhabited by underground aquifers, archaeological sites, and infrastructure systems, as well as sacredness hidden from view. The underground has been transformed into a conflict zone, whose undercurrents affect the patterns of inhabitation of the terrain above. Episode 3. Deep Water One of the most crucial issues in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict takes place below the surface: about 80 per cent of the Mountain Aquifer, the region’s largest reservoir, are located under the West Bank. Yet this massive resource supplies approximately 40 percent of Israel’s agricultural waters and almost 50 percent of its drinking waters. Indeed, it is the main source for its large coastal urban centre. During the Oslo and Camp David negotiations, Israel insisted on keeping control of the underground resources in any permanent resolution. A new form of subterranean sovereignty, which erodes the basics of national sovereignty, is first

mentioned in the Oslo Interim Accord. The 1995 Accord transferred responsibility for the water sector from Israel’s civil administration to the Palestinian Authority. But in practice, the scope of Israeli control of this sector did not change. A Joint Water Committee (JWC) was set up to oversee and approve every new water and sewage project in the West Bank. The Committee is comprised in equal number of representatives of Israel and of the Palestinian Authority. All its decisions are made by consensus. No mechanism is established to settle disputes where a consensus cannot be attained. This might seem a sensible compromise. But through the Committee, Israel can veto any request by the Palestinian representatives to drill a new well or to obtain the additions stipulated in the water agreement. However, the Israeli settlements in the West Bank have access to pumping wells, which do not need JWC permission. They represent approximately 10 per cent of the West Bank population, and use some 37 per cent of this West Bank water, leaving the remaining 63 per cent for the 1.9 million Palestinians. The ‘politics of verticality’ is mirrored by the depth to which water pumps are allowed to descend. Israeli Pumps may reach the waters of the common aquifers whilst Palestinian pumps are allowed to extend much lower merely into pockets of local wells caught within the rock formations. MORE FROM BTSELEM Episode 4. The Politics of Shit In what present leader of the National Religious party, Ephi Eitam called: ‘the Water Intifadah’ the time since the recent hostilities began has seen the total outbreak of sewage systems in the West Bank. Using the strong topography as trajectories, the valleys became routs for a new kind of ‘chemical-biological’ warfare. In it settlements and Palestinian villages started to launch and absorb huge quantities of sewage that contaminate their water sources as well as seeping into the mountain aquifer. Sewage is used as a political weapon when dislocated from the under to the over ground. When shit invisibly occupies a position underground it is merely sewage – running through a technically complex system of public plumbing. But let it only break loose over the surface and sewage becomes shit again. The latitudinal co-ordinates affirm the nature of the substance. When sewage overflows and private shit, from under the ground, invades the public realm of the street, it becomes simultaneously a private hazard and a public asset – to be used as a tool at the hand of the authorities. Non-existent or disintegrating underground pipes allows the sewage – by now

shit – to flow over-ground the length of some Palestinian refugee camps. This visible shit is used to propagate to the day-visiting official or the humanitarian delegate for an inhumane state of permanent neglect, the everlasting problem of the refugees, “a consequence of the yet unresolved conflict”. Efforts by different NGOs and UN departments to repair this system of infrastructure with permanent underground plumbing have often been rejected by the Palestinian Authority. They can allow no real improvement or investment in infrastructure until the refugee camps are considered permanent settlements. Sewage flows out of Hebron mixing domestic with industrial remains and flowing down Hebron River to the outskirts of Be’er Sheva passing by a number of ‘unrecognised’ Bedouin villages. Most of the sewage created by the settlement of Ariel flows into a stream at the western entrance to the settlement, passing few meters away from a pumping station supplying the domestic water of the Palestinian town of Salfit, seeping into the soil and mixing with the spring water. The sewage of Qalqilya and Tul-Qarem in the western part of the west bank flow underneath the separation fence and into Israel proper. In the only commitment to release money to fund Palestinian public services since the breakout of the Intifadah, now Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allocated funds to pre-empt this unconventional ammunition and fund few sewage farms near Palestinian cities. His actions echo the confession of a past major of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek: “For Jewish Jerusalem I did something in the past twenty-five years. For [Palestinian] East Jerusalem? Nothing!… Yes, we installed a sewerage system for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that they would catch it, so we installed sewerage and a water system...”

LOOK AT REFERENCE FROM EINAT ENVIRONMENT Episode 5: EXCAVATING SACREDNESS ARCHAEOLOGY UNDER FIRE When the Zionists first arrived in Palestine late in the nineteenth century, the land they found was strangely unfamiliar; different from the one they consumed in texts photographs and etchings. Reaching the map co-ordinates of the site did not bring them THERE. The search had to continue and thus split in opposite directions along the vertical axis: above, in a metaphysical sense and below as archaeological excavations. That the ground was further inhabited by the Arabs and marked with the traces of their lives complicated things even further. The existing terrain started to be seen

in as a protective wrap, under which the historical longed-for landscape was hidden. Archaeology attempted to peel this visible layer and expose the historical landscape concealed underneath. Only a few metres below the surface, a palimpsest made of five thousand year-old debris, traces of cultures and narratives of wars and destruction was arranged chronologically in layers compressed with stone and by soil. Biblical archaeology Biblical Archaeology as a scientific discipline was initiated by William Foxwell Albright’s excavation works in Palestine in the early 1920's. Archaeology was seen as a sub-discipline in biblical research, a tool for the provision of objective external evidence that will prove the originality of ancient traditions. Biblical Archaeology attempted to match traces of Bronze Age material ruins with Biblical narratives. This legacy suited modern Israel well. In its early days the state attempted to fashion itself as the successor of ancient Israel, and to construct a new national identity rooted in the depths of the ground. Material traces took on immense importance, as an alibi for the Jewish return. But differing from the American branch of biblical archaeology, the Israeli one was secular, working to create a secular ‘fundamentalism’ that saw the bible both as a document in need of verification and as a source that can be relied upon as evidence. If the land to be ‘inherited’ was indeed located under the surface, then the whole subterranean volume became a national monument, from which an ancient civilisation could be politically resurrected to testify for the right of present-day Israel. At the centre of this activity, quickly its very symbol, was Yig’al Yadin, the former military chief of staff turned archaeologist. Seeking to supply Israeli society with historical parallels to the struggles of Zionism, he focused his digging on the periods of the biblical occupation and settlement of the Israelites in Canaan, on ancient wars and on monumental building and fortification works carried out by the kings of Israel. In his methodology weapons were studied more then any other ingredients of life. Even the excavation works were conceived as inherently military: sites were located after an observation from detailed maps and aerial photographs, excavation camp were regimented by military discipline, and transportation was relying on military vehicles and helicopters. After the six days war archaeological sites and data became more easily available. The mountains of the West Bank are where most sites of biblical significance are located. Most organised archives of archaeology and antiquity: the East Jerusalem based Rockefeller Museum, the American school for Oriental

Research, the French Ecole Biblic with their collections and libraries came under Israeli control. The settlement project of the West Bank was based on an attempt to anchor new claims to ancient ones. Some settlements were constructed adjacent to or over sites suspected of having a Hebrew past. Making the historical context explicit allowed for the re-organisation of the surface, creating an apparent continuum of Jewish inhabitation. Settlements even recycled history by adopting the names of Biblical sites, making public claim to genealogical roots. The visible landscape and the buried one were describing two different maps in slippage over each other. Tel Rumeida Perhaps the most literal example occurred in the city of Hebron. The settlement of Tel Rumeida was built in the middle of a Palestinian neighbourhood on stilts, on top of a recently excavated Bronze Age site. As the sub-terrain erupted onto the surface, the previous Israeli minister of defence, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, seized the Palestinian land, declaring it an archaeological site. Soon after, he allowed a group of settlers to build an elevated cement roof over the heart of the archaeological site and put up a settlement composed of seven mobile homes, perching over the newly revealed historical alibi. After several shooting attacks in the vicinity of their homes, Ben-Eliezer authorised the walling off of the site and the replacement of the mobile homes with new bullet-proof structures. When does the past end? What is antiquity – and therefore worthy of excavation – is determined through Israel’s legal mechanisms. Meron Benvenisti writes: “Israeli historians, geographers, and archaeologists did not have a difficult job in sanitising the landscape and ridding it of the identity of its former inhabitants because the British authorities had be quested to them a valuable legacy: the definition of ‘antiquity’ as ‘any construction or any product of human activity before the year 1700 AD’ … it reflects the view prevalent in Britain during the twenties, according to which an object was considered an antiquity only if it had been produced before the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Meanwhile, new thinking had evolved in Britain regarding the question of when the “past” ends. The conclusion reached was ‘that the past continues right up to the present,’ and thus all human activity that found expression in the creation of physical objects was entitled to respectful treatment.”

ANALYSE BENVENISTI… Every imposition of political reading on the landscape emphasises some facts while ignoring those that hold the conditions for its transformation or destruction. Bronze Age, Second Temple ruins and even crusader archaeology are perceived as having a positive political message in line with the aims of the State of Israel. These are therefore excavated, maintained and presented as national sites to the Israeli public. More recent Muslim history is dismissed as a period of stagnation, discarded as ‘too new’ and is at best left alone to rot and crumble. An archaeological mound is structured as a palimpsest of historical strata. The practice of Israeli biblical archaeology saw the upper layers discarded and turn to rubble while the lower ones preserved. Against the tendency of Biblical Archaeologists to short-circuit history and celebrate a phantasmagoria of great Biblical events and destructions, a newly emergent Archaeology, advocated in both Palestinian and Israeli universities, started digging the more recent, upper historical layers of the Arab and Ottoman periods. Lying beneath the surface other histories awaited their political use. The horizontal survey and the study of historical processes pushed aside the deep digging of the single mound. This archaeology is working to uncover the evolution of the daily life of the “people without history” as long-term processes, featuring gradual cultural and social changes. This could be the basis for an emerging Palestinian national archaeology. Interviews with archaeologists Conducted by Mira Asseo for the documentary film version of the “Politics of Verticality’ Prof. Adam Zartal Chairman of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Haifa “I found the original Israelite altar that the Bible described in Mount Eval [a mountaintop near Nablus] … even the remains of animal bones are consistent with the scripture... If a central event such as this could be proven to have occurred, what follows is that considerable sections of the Bible must also be based on historical events."

Dr Hamdan Taha

Director-general of the Palestinian ministry for archaeology

“The settlers ignore the scientific truth about excavations, distorting even the archeological findings: in Shilo they pretended to have found the tabernacles…”

“They can find the chicken bone my grandfather ate fifty years ago and say it was a young calf for ancient sacrifice”

Doron Zarvi

a settler and a tour guide for the West Bank

“Palestinian deliberately seek Jewish archaeology in order to sabotage it, they destroy ancient walls and synagogues to claim we have never been here before.”

Dr. Shulamit Geva

Israeli archaeologists

“Biblical archaeology in the West Bank is a communal rape… settlers used archaeology as tool to say what they want and thus legitimize claims over the land… this archaeology provided settlements with a foundational authority. Settlements often bear the names of ancient towns and sometimes attempt to echo their architectural styles.”

Dr. Itzik Magen Israeli archaeologist “On April 2002 during a military operation in Nablus, an officer approached me to ask whether tanks could take specific path without running over places of archaeological and historical value… I recommended some paths over others.” Archaeological architecture The 1967 war marks a stylistic transition in Israeli architecture. The wave of nationalistic sentiment that followed the ‘liberation’ and unification of Jerusalem, together with the surveying of abundance archaeological sites in the West Bank were incorporated over night into a new mode of architectural production. The practise of archaeology was extruded into a new building style. In the 1950s and 1960s state-sponsored housing developments reflected the socialist ethos in the austere white-block model of European Modernism. But as Zvi Efrat claims, when the six-day war wound-up, national taste was radically transformed. The focus of architectural inspiration shifted from European Brutalizm to Jerusalemite Orientalism. The ‘organic’ structures of the oriental old city of Jerusalem were reproduced in endless light and material studies, in charcoal drawings and in archaeology albums. Then, without the rhetorical manifestos that announce the immanent emergence of a new avant-guard, new neighbourhoods, especially in and around Jerusalem, started boasting arches and domes (most often reproduced in prefabricated concrete) colonnades and courtyards, within ‘old city like’ clusters of buildings clad with a veneer of slated Jerusalem stone. Concrete skeletons were wrapped with layers embodying series of references varying from the biblical to the oriental, crusader Arab and even mandatory style, used separately or all together.

It was this architectural postmodernism ‘avant les lettres’, that reflected the confusion of a newly inaugurated national-religious identity. Episode 6: JERUSALEM The vertical Schizophrenia of the Temple Mount Subterranean Jerusalem is at least as complex as its terrain. Nowhere is this truer than of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. The ascent of the present Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in 2000 and the bloodshed during the Intifadah that followed were not unique. The Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif has often been the focal point of the conflict. The Haram al-Sharif compound is located over a filled-in, flattened-out summit on which the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located. The mount is supported by retaining walls, one of which is the Western Wall, whose southern edge is known as the Wailing Wall. The Western Wall is part of the outermost wall of what used to define the edge of the Second Temple compound. Most archaeologists believe that the Wailing Wall was a retaining wall supporting the earth on which the Second Temple stood at roughly the same latitude as today’s mosques. But the Israeli delegation at Camp David negotiations argued that the Wailing Wall was built originally as a free-standing wall, behind which (and not over which) stood the Second Temple. What follows is that the remains of the Temple are to be found underneath the mosques and that was separated Jewish most holi site from the Muslim mosques is a vertical distance of a mere 10 meters. That vertical separation into the above and below was the source of the debate that followed. Since East Jerusalem was occupied in 1967, the Muslim religious authority (the Wakf) has charged that Israel is trying to undermine the compound foundations in order to topple the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and to clear the way for the establishment of the Third Jewish Temple. Jewish groups contend that the Wakf’s extensive work in the subterranean chambers under the mosques is designed to rid the mountain of ancient Israelites remnants, and that the large-scale earth works conducted in the process destabilise the mountain and have generated cracks in the retaining wall of the mount. On 24 September 1996, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wanting to demonstrate his control off all layers of the city, ordered the opening of a subterranean archaeological tunnel running along the foundation of the Western Wall, alongside the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount compound. The opening of the ‘Western Wall Tunnel’ was wrongly perceived as an attempt at subterranean sabotage. But Palestinian the sentiments were fuelled by memories of a similar event that in December 1991 saw another excavated tunnel under the Harram collapsing and opening a big hole in the floor of the Mosque of Atman ben-Afan.

Israel’s chief negotiator at Camp David, Gilead Sher told how, during the failed summit on 17 July 2000 in the presence of the whole Israeli delegation, Barak declared: “We shall stand united in front of the whole world, if it becomes apparent that an agreement wasn’t reached over the issue of our sovereignty over the First and Second Temples. It is the Archemedic point of our universe, the anchor of the Zionist effort… we are at the moment of truth.” The two delegations laid claim to the same plot of land. Neither side was willing to give it up. In attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, intense spatial contortions were drawn on variously scaled plans and sections of the compound. The most original bridging proposal at Camp David came from former US president Bill Clinton. After the inevitable crisis, Clinton dictated his proposal to the negotiating parties. It was a daring and radical manifestation of the region’s vertical schizophrenia, according to which the border between Arab East and Jewish West Jerusalem would, at the most contested point on earth, flip from the horizontal to the vertical – giving the Palestinians sovereignty on top of the Mount while maintaining Israeli sovereignty below the surface, over the Wailing Wall and the airspace above it. The horizontal border would have passed underneath the paving of the Haram al-Sharif, so that a few centimetres under the worshippers in the Mosque of al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, the Israeli underground would be dug up for remnants of the ancient Temple, believed to be “in the depth of the mount”. In order to allow free access to the Muslim compound, now isolated in a three-dimensional sovereign wrap by Israel, Barak, embracing the proposal, suggested “a bridge or a tunnel, through which whoever wants to pray in al-Aqsa could access the compound”. But the Palestinians, long suspicious of Israel’s presence under their mosques, have flatly rejected the plan. They claimed (partly bemused) that “‘Haram al-Sharif … must be handed over to the Palestinians – over, under and to the sides, geographically and topographically.” Regarding the truth about the remnants of the Temple in the depth of the mount there are few and varied scholarly studies and opinions. But, Charles Warren, a captain in the Royal Engineers that was in 1876 one of the first archaeologists to excavate the tunnels and subterranean chambers under the Haram/ Temple Mount, recorded no conclusive ruins of the Temple, but a substance of completely different nature: “The passage is four feet wide, with smooth sides, and the sewage was from five to six feet deep, so that if we had fallen in there was no chance of our escaping

with our lives. I, however, determined to trace out this passage, and for this purpose got a few old planks and made a perilous voyage on the sewage to a distance of 12 feet... The sewage was not water, and not mud; it was just in such a state that a door would not float, but yet if left for a minute or two would not sink very deep…” If that Indiana Jones-type description was correct, what Clinton and the negotiating teams hadn’t realised was that the Temple Mount sat atop a network of ancient ducts and cisterns filled with generations of Jerusalem’s sewage. Episode 7. Storrs’ Stare of Medusa The Jerusalem Stone by-law

Jerusalem is literally a city built upon rock. From that rock, cutting soft but drying hard, has for three thousand years been quarried the clear white stone, weathering blue-grey or amber-yellow with time, whose solid walls, barrel vaulting and pointed arches have preserved through the centuries a hallowed and immemorial tradition. Sir Ronald Storrs, Acting Military Administrator of Palestine (November 1918 to March 1919) and Military Governor of Jerusalem (December 1917 to July 1920) 3A. The external walls of all buildings shall be constructed of stone unless the approval in writing of the Jerusalem District Building and Town Planning Commission has been first obtained. Jerusalem Town-Planning Ordinance, 1936

ADD FROM PALESTINE COMPLETE BOOK Perhaps Jerusalem’s best-known by-law is the one enacted in 1918 by the first British military governor of the city, Sir Ronald Storrs, soon after he started his term in office. The first urban by-law of the British mandate in Palestine required square, dressed natural stone – Jerusalem stone – for the facades and visible external walls of all new buildings constructed in the city. This historicist by-law, later confirmed by the Jerusalem District Building and Town Planning Commission in 1936, determined the image of Jerusalem more than any other law, by-law or programme devised by the authorities over the subsequent 80 years. Storrs was the officer in commanded of the battle for Jerusalem in General Allenby’s army. So deep was his admiration for Jerusalem, fuelled by romantic and religious zeal, that whilst fighting the Ottoman army, and subsequently taking

Jerusalem off their hands, he issued an order according to which during the battle none any of Jerusalem’s buildings must be destroyed. Storrs’ aim was to protect the holy city as he imagined it, and repel all threats to its “hallowed and immemorial tradition”. During the time of his rather peaceful reign the city’s growing poverty on the one hand and its rapid expansion on the other, threatened to overrun its image much more than the potential destruction of war. Whilst enacting the by-law demanding for the stone finish, Storrs sought to regulate the city’s appearance, to resists time and change, and could not have realised that whilst dressing Jerusalem in a single architectural uniform, he in effect created the conditions for its excessive expansion, self-replication, and sprawl as a single entity. In the context of contemporary Jerusalem, the stone does more than just fulfill an aesthetic agenda of preservation – it defines visually the geographic limits of Jerusalem and more importantly – since Jerusalem is a holy city – marks the extent of the its holiness. The idea of Jerusalem as the City of God, and thus as a holy place is entrenched in Judeo-Christian belief. In their Diaspora, Jews started yearning for a city that became in their imagination increasingly disassociated from the reality of the physical site. Jerusalem itself became holy rather than a place containing holy sites. If the city itself is holy than, in the contemporary context, the totality of its buildings, roads, vegetation, infrastructure, neighborhoods, parking garages, shops and workshops is holy. A special holy status is reserved for the ground. And if the ground is holy, its relocation as stones from the horizontal (earth) to the vertical (walls), from the quarries to the façades of buildings, transfers holiness further. As Jerusalem’s ground paving of stone climbs up to wrap its façades, the new ‘ground topography’ of holiness is extended. When the city itself is holy, and when its boundaries are constantly being negotiated, redefined, and redrawn holiness becomes a planning issue. Shortly after the Occupation of the eastern, Arab part of the city, the municipal boundaries of Israeli Jerusalem were expended to include the Palestinian populated eastern parts as well as large empty areas around and far beyond them (The municipal area of Jerusalem grew from 33.5 square kilometres in 1952 to 108 square kilometres in 1967). These ‘new territories’ annexed to the city, designed as ‘reserves’ for future Israeli expansions, were required to comply to Storrs’ by-law – their buildings to be clad in stone, preserving the traditional and familiar Jerusalem look – turning suburban neighbourhoods, placed on remote and historically insignificant sites far from the historical centre, to ‘Jerusalem’, and participating thus in the city’s sacredness. The holy status felt psychologically and defined visually in the stone, places every remote and newly

built suburb well within the boundaries of ‘the eternally unified capital of the Jewish people’. Like the Gaze of Medusa, Storrs’ law petrified new constructions into stone in new neighbourhoods, suburbs and settlements: shopping malls, kindergartens, community centres, synagogues, office buildings, electrical relay station, sports halls and housing were covered in stone, and as far as the stone façades were extended, the holiness of Jerusalem sprawled. Jerusalem did not grow and develop naturally. The expansion of Jewish neighbourhoods after the 1967 war into Arab lands to the north and the east, were designed to ensure the impossibility of a geographical re-division of the city into two distinct parts, Arab-Palestinian and Jewish. The fact that the new hilltop neighbourhoods were located according to this political and strategic logic, rather than according urban logic, has created a disaster on a colossal scale. The new neighbourhoods demanded an ever-increasing paving of roads and an expensive network of infrastructure while their placement in remote locations left large empty areas between them and the historical city centre.

The new suburban hilltop neighbourhoods built beyond the 1967 lines, on areas annexed to the city, are located farthest away from the centre and describe the outermost circle. Nonetheless, the stone regulations that apply there are as strict as those demanded for in the city centre. The symbolic centre has relocated to the periphery, leaving vast gaps in the urban fabric in-between. The relocation of the centre to the periphery was not only a symbolic move – the city inhabitants themselves, wary of the congested, multicultural and disputed city centre, opted for the ethnic, cultural and social homogeneity of the periphery. Approximately 200,000 Jewish people migrated within Jerusalem between 1990 to 1997, more than a half of them from the centre of the western city to the new periphery. These in-town migrants, seeking the aura of Jerusalem in its suburbs, have transplanted its holiness along with its stone. The 1955 masterplan grants an important concession and incentive: Unlike other claddings, the stone, sometimes as thick as 25 centimetres, is allowed to project outside of the building envelope, thus occupying, on occasions where the building line corresponds with that of the street, public ground. The law acknowledges the fact that this cladding performs an important public function, and since public signs are meant to occupy public ground, the stone was allowed ‘to invade’ the street. (In that respect it is worth noting that architects building in Jerusalem found creative variations for the use of stone cladding, most notably Ram Karmi, then the architect of the ministry of housing, advocated the use of stone cladding vertically rather than horizontally – exposing the fact the building is clad in stone and not built in it.) The extension of the city’s ‘holiness’ to the new suburbs was conceived as part of an Israeli attempt to generate widespread public acceptance of the newly

annexed territories, otherwise viewed as a political and urban burden. Whatever is called Jerusalem, by name and by the use of stone, lies at the heart of the Israeli consensus that ‘Jerusalem shall not be re-divided’. The cladding of buildings in stone is an architectural ritual whose repetition attempts to fabricate a collective memory serving a nationalistic agenda. Jerusalem, as a name, as an idea and as a city, has strong grips over the mind of its inhabitants. A city that was always perceived as an idea rather than a concrete earthly reality has no boundaries besides those in the mind. The stone cladding functions thus to connect the transformed geographical reality of Jerusalem with the ephemeral idea of the heavenly city. This political-conscious use of geographical identity relies heavily on stone as a signifier to call forth the image of a mystic past. The public acceptance of the expansion of Jerusalem is made possible by the replication of its ‘character’ and ‘feel’. The spectator is left incapable of drawing the boundary between the city and its idea, between its earthly geographical reality and a sense of sanctification and renewed holiness epitomised in the salvation of the ground. Although originally conceived to protect and preserve an aesthetic status quo, Storrs’ stone by-law was extended by Israeli policy makers beyond the performance of mere aesthetic purposes. By visually defining the geographic limits of the city and marking the extent of its holiness, it has been made into a politically manipulative and colonising architectural device. THE TERRAIN More then anything else, The Israeli-Palestinian is defined by where and how one builds. The terrain dictates the nature, intensity and focal points of confrontation. On the other hand, the conflict manifests itself most clearly in the adaptation, construction and obliteration of landscape and built environment. Planning decisions are often made not according to criteria of economical sustainability, ecology or efficiency of services, but to serve strategic and national agendas. The West Bank is a landscape of extreme topographical variation, ranging from four hundred and forty metres below sea level at the shores of the Dead Sea, to about one thousand metres in the high summits of Samaria. Settlements occupy the high ground, while Palestinian villages occupy the fertile valley in between. This topographical difference defines the relationship between Jewish and Palestinian settlements in terms of strategy, economy and ecology. The politics of verticality is exemplified across the folded surface of the terrain – in which the mountainous region has influenced the forms the territorial conflict has produced. (The following episodes 8-10 were researched together with Rafi Segal and form the basis for our joint article: the Mountain, published in ‘A Civilian Occupation’,

Babel and Verso press, and 2003) The Geometry of Occupation It is in forms drawn on plans, masterplans, maps, and aerial photographs that material organisation can be measured against the abuse of power. The strategic and political realities of the West Bank exhibit particular geometrical characteristics that can be reconstructed across the map from zero to three dimensions in Points, Lines, Surfaces and Volumes. Point In what has by now become a famous syllogism, Lenin once described strategy as “the choice of points where force is to be applied”. Points have no dimension nor size, but a position on the X/Y axis of the plane and on the Z-axis for its latitude. The fact that the word a ‘point on the ground’, and sometime simply ‘a point’ (Nekuda) means in Hebrew – a settlement is indicative of a built-culture that consider the positioning of a settlement, rather than its composition, as its essential goal. In this respect it is not surprising that the settlers-movement main monthly newsletter is called ‘Nekuda’ (point) New ‘illegal’ outposts throughout the West Bank are named by their latitude as marked on topographical maps (‘point 888’). They are ‘facts on the ground’ set in the belief that the location strategy that knits them together will transform the settlement project from a collection of isolated points in an Arab area to a continuous Jewish terrain. The point on the ground is sometimes an observation point at others a point of contact, even a point in negotiation. Line The path of a line is a track made by the dynamic push of a moving point. It is a vector of movement – the dynamic counterpart to the static point. The path of the line is a response to momentary balance of several forces and influences. The more forces there are in the vicinity of the line, the more complex its path will be. When the force field contains intense and powerful contradiction the line can no longer maintain its graphic coherence and is shredded into fragments and discontinuous vectors. The distribution of settlement-points across the surface of the West Bank called for complex set of lines to connect them (roads) and others to protect them (barriers). The latter are concretised by a series of long and interlocking

mechanisms: barbed wire, ditches, dykes and checkpoints. The relation between the length of a border and the surface of the territory is an indication to the amount of ‘security’. Long borders imply a lot of security. As security stretches itself thin along a border, when the border is everywhere security is everywhere.

The distribution of settlement-points is designed to render impossible the path of any potential continuous border between Israel and the occupied territories. It is precisely at the point when the border seized to be a single continuous line and multiplied into a series of separate and boundaries that it turned from an object into a condition. Beyond its complexity and length it is the temporal flexible changing and adaptable nature of the barrier/border that renders it most effective in terms of the occupation. All the fences, dykes, ditches and check points are easily deployable and removable, quickly put up and dismantled, making temporary curfews and closures, surprise check points and lightning operations. They shrink and stretch the territory in seemingly unpredictable ways. In spring 2002 all that remained of the territory under Palestinian control was the interior of Arafat’s office all the while army bulldozers were chipping away at the building. The situation of total temporal flexibility is what allows ‘facts’ to go on being put on the ground, for settlements to go on with their natural expansion, for the doting of the terrain with new outposts, and for its carving with new security roads. Adi Offir noted that it is the temporary/ permanent state of conflict (and the flexible nature of the frontier) that makes the occupation permanent. The temporality of the different barrier-lines allowed them to create the sort of situation that could not be tolerated were they perceived permanent. Surface The outline boundary of a settlement is the result of the fast collision between a point and the surface of the terrain. Internal motivations to organise an ideal society accommodate external influences such as surface conditions, topography, slope, as well as political and strategic forces. Settlement forms are thus the material embodiment of a matrix of forces. The distribution of settlements forms across the terrain creates a patchwork that envelops the territorial body of the West Bank like a camouflage. It represents the attempt of a state to blur and complicate its edges, to break the limitation of formal coherence on territorial politics. Volume The positioning of Jewish settlements in and around Palestinian settlements

carved the West Bank up into patchwork composed of hundreds of alienated national pockets and islands. The collapse of the idea of continuous surface necessitated the resort to the volume as the site of political and strategic manipulations. Episode 8: From the plains to the hills (and back again) The settlement project in the West Bank is a culmination of Zionism’s journey from the plains to the hills. That journey attempted to resolve the paradox of early Zionist spatiality – which, while seeking the return to the ‘Promised Land’, reversed the settlement geography of Biblical times. Braudel’s observation that “the mountains are as a rule a world apart from civilisations, which are urban and lowland achievement” suited the ancient geography of Israel well. The mountains of Judea became the breeding ground for an isolated form of monotheism; meanwhile the plains, inhabited by the Phoenician Philistines, the “invaders from the seas”, gave birth to an integrated and progressive culture, set apart from the isolation of the mountain, close to the international road system and the seaports. Migrating into Israel in the twentieth century, the Zionist movement, now itself an “invader from the seas”, and dominated by a modern, pragmatic socialism, settled mainly along the coastal plains and fertile northern valleys, which suited its ideology of agricultural cultivation well. This spatial pattern would dominate the Israeli landscape until the political reversal of 1977, in which the hawkish Likud party replaced Labour in power for the first time. The “civilian occupation” of the West Bank was a process that began in the deep, arid Jordan valley during its first ten years of Israeli rule under Labour governments (1967-1977). Fifteen agricultural villages were constructed under the Allon Plan that emphasised “maximum security and maximum territory for Israel with a minimum number of Arabs”. As the political climate in Israel changed, the reconstruction of Zionist identity began. The settlements started a long and steady climb to the mountains, where isolated dormitory communities were scattered on barren hilltops; without agricultural hinterlands, they cultivated nothing but “holiness” on their land. The settlements of the mountain strip, built during the late 1970s and early 1980s, shifted the expansion stimulus from agricultural pioneering to mysticism and transcendentalism. These settlements were promoted mainly by Gush Emunim (The Block of Faith), a national-religious organisation that was fusing “Biblical” messianism, a belief in the “Land of Israel”, with a political thinking that allowed for no territorial concessions. The climb from the plains to the hills coincided with the development of a feeling

of acting according to a divine plan. It promised the “regeneration of the soul” and the achievement of “personal and national renewal”, imbued in a mystic quality of the heights. Ephi Eitam, the retired general who is now the popular leader of the National Religious party, recently opposed any dismantling of these mountain settlements in these terms: “Whoever proposes that we return to the plains, to our basest part, to the sands, the secular, and that we leave in foreign hands the sacred summits, proposes a senseless thing”. Beyond the hard core of extremists inhabiting the mountain ridge of the West Bank, the majority of settlers built their home in the western slopes near the 1967 border. They went in search of a better quality of life, settling in green suburbs that belong to the greater metropolitan regions of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. What drew them there was the rhetoric of “living standards”, “quality of life”, “fresh air” and “open view”. “All you can dream of” for a very affordable price – this pitch has a special appeal to first-time buyers. Settlers benefit from substantial government subsidies; for the price of a small flat in Tel Aviv, they can buy their own red-roofed houses and gardens. Episode 9: Vertical planning Matityahu Drobles was appointed head of the Jewish Agency’s Land Settlement Division in 1978. Shortly after, he issued The Master Plan for the Development of Settlements in Judea and Samaria. In this master plan he urges the government to … Conduct a race against time… now [when peace with Egypt seemed imminent] is the most suitable time to start with wide and encompassing rush of settlements, mainly on the mountain ranges of Judea and Samaria… The thing must be done first and foremost by creating facts on the ground, therefore state land and uncultivated land must be taken immediately in order to settle the areas between the concentration of [Palestinian] population and around it… being cut apart by Jewish settlements, the minority [sic] population will find it hard to create unification and territorial continuity. The Drobles master plan outlined possible locations for scores of new settlements. It aimed to achieve its political objectives through the re-organisation of space. Relying heavily on the topography, Drobles proposed new high-volume traffic arteries to connect the Israeli heartland to the West Bank and beyond. These roads would be stretched along the large west-draining valleys; for their security, new settlement blocks should be placed on the hilltops along the route. He also proposed settlements on the summits surrounding the large Palestinian cities, and around the roads connecting them to each other. This strategic territorial arrangement has been brought into use recently during the Israeli Army’s invasion of Palestinian cities and villages. Some of the settlements assisted the IDF in different tasks, mainly as places for the army to organise, re-fuel and re-deploy.

The hilltops lent themselves easily to state seizure. In the absence of an ordered land registry in time of Jordanian rule, Israel was able legally to capture whatever land was not cultivated. Palestinian cultivated lands are found mainly in the valleys, where the agriculturally suitable alluvial soil erodes down from the limestone slopes of the West Bank highlands. The barren summits were left empty. The Israeli government launched a large-scale project of topographical and land use mapping. The terrain was charted and mathematised, slope gradients were calculated, the extent of un-cultivated land marked. The result, summed up in dry numbers, left about thirty-eight per cent of the West Bank under Israeli control, isolated in discontinuous islands around summits. That land was then made available for settlement. Episode 10: Community Settlements The “Community Settlement” is a new type of settlement developed in the early 1980s for the West Bank. It is in effect a closed members’ club, with a long admission process and a monitoring mechanism that regulates everything from religious observance to ideological rigour, even the form and outdoor use of homes. Settlements function as dormitory suburbs for small groups of Israelis who travel to work in the large Israeli cities. The hilltop environment, isolated, with wide views, and hard to reach, lent itself to the development of this newly conceived utopia. In the formal processes, which base mountain settlements on topographical conditions, the laws of erosion had been absorbed into the practice of urban design. The mountain settlement is typified by a principle of concentric arrangement, with roads laid out in rings following the topographical lines around the summit. The ‘ideal’ arrangement for a small settlement is a circle. But in reality the particular layout of each depends on site morphology and the extent of available state land. Each is divided into equal, repetitive lots for small private red roofed homes. The public functions are generally located within the innermost ring, on the higher ground. The community settlements create cul-de-sac envelopes, closed off to their surroundings, promoting a mythic communal coherence in a shared formal identity. It is a claustrophobic layout, expressing a social vision that facilitates the intimate management of the lives of the inhabitants. Episode 11: Optical Urbanism

High ground offers three strategic assets: greater tactical strength, self-protection, and a wider view. This principle is as long as military history itself. The Crusaders’ castles, some built not far from the location of today’s settlements, operated through ‘the reinforcement of strength already provided by nature’. These series of mountaintop fortresses were military instruments for the territorial domination of the Latin kingdom. The Jewish settlements in the West Bank are not very different. Not only places of residence, they create a large-scale network of ‘civilian fortification’ which is part of the army’s regional plan of defence, generating tactical territorial surveillance. A simple act of domesticity, a single-family home shrouded in the cosmetic facade of red tiles and green lawns, conforms to the aims of territorial control. But unlike the fortresses and military camps of previous periods, the settlements are sometimes without fortifications. Up until recently, only a few settlements agreed to be surrounded by walls or fences. They argued that they must form continuity with the holy landscape; that it is the Palestinians who need to be fenced in. During the recent days of Intifadah, many settlements were attacked and debate returned over the effect of fences. Extremist settlers claimed that protection could be exercised solely through the power of vision, rendering the material protection of a fortified wall redundant and even obstructive. Indeed, the form of the mountain settlements is constructed according to a geometric system that unites the effectiveness of sight with spatial order, producing ‘panoptic fortresses’, generating gazes to many different ends. Control – in the overlooking of Arab town and villages; strategy – in the overlooking of main traffic arteries; self-defence – in the overlooking of the immediate surroundings and approach roads. Settlements could be seen as urban optical devices for surveillance and the exercise of power. In 1984 the Ministry of Housing published guidance for new construction in the mountain region, advising: “Turning openings in the direction of the view is usually identical with turning them in the direction of the slope … [the optimal view depends on] the positioning of the buildings and on the distances between them, on the density, the gradient of the slope and the vegetation”. That principle applies most easily to the outer ring of homes. The inner rings are positioned in front of the gaps between the homes of the first ring. This arrangement of the homes around summits, outward looking, imposes on the dwellers axial visibility (and lateral invisibility), oriented in two directions: inward and outward.

Discussing the interior of each building, the guidance recommends the orientation of the sleeping rooms towards the inner public spaces and the living rooms towards the distant view. The inward-oriented gaze protects the soft cores of the settlements, the outward-oriented one surveys the landscape below. Vision dictated the discipline and mode of design on every level, even down to the precise positioning of windows: as if, following Paul Virilio, “the function of arms and the function of the eye were indefinitely identified as one and the same”. Seeking safety in vision, Jewish settlements are intensely illuminated. At night, from a distance they are visible as brilliant white streaks of light. From within them, the artificial light shines so brightly as to confuse diurnal rhythms. This is in stark contrast to Palestinian cities: seeking their safety in invisibility, they employ blackouts as a routine of protection from aerial attacks. In his verdict in support of the “legality” of settlement, Israeli High Court Justice Vitkon argued, “One does not have to be an expert in military and security affairs to understand that terrorist elements operate more easily in an area populated only by an indifferent population or one that supports the enemy, as opposed to an area in which there are persons who are likely to observe them and inform the authorities about any suspicious movement. Among them no refuge, assistance, or equipment will be provided to terrorists. The matter is simple, and details are unnecessary.” The settlers come to the high places for the “regeneration of the soul”.But in placing them across the landscape, the Israeli government is drafting its civilian population alongside the agencies of state power, to inspect and control the Palestinians. Knowingly or not, settlers’ eyes, seeking a completely different view, are being ‘hijacked’ for strategic and geopolitical aims. Episode 12: The paradox of double vision The journey into the mountains, seeking to re-establish the relation between terrain and sacred text, was a work of tracing the location of “biblical” sites, and constructing settlements adjacent to them. Settlers turned “topography” into “sceneography”, forming an exegetical landscape with a mesh of scriptural signification that must be “read”, not just “viewed”. For example, a settlement located near the Palestinian city of Nablus advertises itself thus: Shilo spreads up the hills overlooking Tel Shilo, where over three thousand years ago the children of Israel gathered to erect the Tabernacle and to divide by lot the Land of Israel into tribal portions… this ancient spiritual centre has retained its power as the focus of modern day Shilo. Rather than being a resource for agricultural or industrial cultivation, the landscape establishes the link with religious-national myths. The view of the

landscape does not evoke solemn contemplation, but becomes an active staring, part of an ecstatic ritual: “it causes me excitement that I cannot even talk about in modesty,” says Menora Katzover, wife of a prominent settlers’ leader, about the view of the Shomron mountains. Another sales brochure, published for member recruitment in Brooklyn and advertising the ultra orthodox settlement of Emanuel, evokes the pastoral: “The city of Emanuel, situated 440 metres above sea level, has a magnificent view of the coastal plain and the Judean Mountains. The hilly landscape is dotted by green olive orchards and enjoys a pastoral calm.” There is a paradox in this description. The very thing that renders the landscape ‘biblical’ – traditional inhabitation, cultivation in terraces, olive orchards and stone buildings – is made by the Arabs whom the settlers come to replace. The people who cultivate the “green olive orchards” and render the landscape biblical are themselves excluded from the panorama. It is only when it comes to the roads that the brochure mentions Arabs, and that only by way of exclusion. “A motored system is being developed that will make it possible to travel quickly and safely to the Tel Aviv area and to Jerusalem on modern throughways, bypassing Arab towns” (emphasis in the original). The gaze that can see a “pastoral, biblical landscape” will not register what it doesn’t want to see – the Palestinians. State strategy established vision as a mean of control, and uses the eyes of settlers for this purpose. The settlers celebrate the panorama as a sublime resource, but one that can be edited. The sight-lines from the settlements serve two contradictory agendas simultaneously. The Emanuel brochure continues, “Indeed new Jewish life flourishes in these hills of the Shomron, and the nights are illuminated by lights of Jewish settlements on all sides. In the centre of all this wonderful bustling activity, Emanuel, a Torah city, is coming into existence.” From a hilltop at night, a settler can lift his eyes to see only the blaze of other settlements, perched at a similar height atop the summits around. At night, settlers could avoid the sight of Arab towns and villages, and feel that they have truly arrived “as the people without land – to the land without people”. (This famous slogan is attributed to Israel Zangwill, one of the early Zionists who arrived to Palestine before the British mandate, and described the land to which Eastern European Zionism was headed as desolate and forsaken.) Latitude thus becomes more than merely relative position on the folded surface of the terrain. It functions to establish literally parallel geographies of ‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds, inhabiting two distinct planes, in the startling and unprecedented

proximity that only the vertical dimension of the mountains could provide. Rather than the conclusive division between two nations across a boundary line, the organisation of the West Bank’s particular terrain has created multiple separations, provisional boundaries, which relate to each other through surveillance and control. This intensification of power could be achieved in this form only because of the particularity of the terrain. The mountain settlements are the last gesture in the urbanisation of enclaves. They perfect the politics of separation, seclusion and control, placing them as the end-condition of contemporary urban and architectural formations such as ‘New Urbanism’, suburban enclave neighbourhoods or gated communities. The most ubiquitous of architectural typologies is exposed as terrifying within the topography of the West Bank. Land Grab This is based on a text published in Land Garb, Yehezkel Lein with Eyal Weizman, Jerusalem: B’tselem, may 2002 Since it took control of the Occupied Territories, Israel has developed a complex legal and bureaucratic mechanism enabling the transfer of tens of thousands of acres of land to its control, for the establishment of new settlements and the expansion of existing ones. Using these methods, Israel has seized control of over 46.8 percent of the West Bank. Humanitarian law obliges the occupying power to protect the property of residents of the occupied area. However, an occupying power may take temporary possession of privately owned land for its temporary military needs. Such seizure is by definition temporary; accordingly, the occupying power does not acquire property rights in the requisitioned land and buildings, and is not entitled to sell them further to others. On the basis of this permission, Israeli military commanders issued dozens of orders between 1968-1979 for the requisition of private land in the West Bank and the establishment of ‘temporary’ settlements on them. The argument that the settlements serve military needs could be adopted under Labor governments which considered primarily the strategic function of settlements. But it was right-wing circles such as Gush Emunim, that considered this argument as unacceptable, and saw settlements in the context of a religious vision. Neither Gush Emunim nor certain sections of the Likud-led government were willing to excuse the establishment of the settlements on temporary security grounds. The need to cope with the increasing number of High Court of Justice petitions, combined with the potential that the court might thwart the establishment of a settlement, led to pressure on the government from the settlers and right-wing parties to find ways to enable land to be seized more easily and without having to

consider them as para-military or temporary. The method was finally found with the manipulative use of the Ottoman Land Law of 1858. By this method, approximately forty percent of the area of the West Bank was declared “state land,” and approximately ninety percent of all settlements were established on it. The use of "state land" for the establishment and expansion of settlements, unlike the use of private lands seized under the pretext of "temporary military needs," enabled the High Court to avoid the issue. Petitions filed by Palestinians against the process of declaring land as state land and against the existence of the Appeals Committee were rejected by the Court, which affirmed the legality of mechanisms. The Ottoman Land Law defines as Miri lands situated close to places of agricultural settlement and suitable for cultivation. A person may secure ownership of such land by holding and working it for ten consecutive years. If a landowner of this type fails completely to farm the land for three consecutive years the sovereign may take possession of it. This Ottoman Land Law was absorbed into future British and Jordanian legislation and continued to exist as a reflection of local tradition until the time of the Israeli occupation. In December 1979 the executive arm of Israeli control of the occupied territories – the Civil Administration – initiated a systematic project to map all areas under cultivation, using periodic aerial photographs and site visits by experts. Sometimes experts were flown in by helicopter to count the number of rings on a chopped tree trunk, and establish the age of the orchard. The borders of ‘state land’, including about 40% of the West bank are tortuous, non-contiguous islands and pockets of land located mainly around mountain summits. In an order issued in 1996, the commander of IDF forces in the West Bank declared all areas of the settlements including all the state lands around them that form a part of settlements’ regional councils “closed military zone,” He immediately added that this provision does not apply on Israelis. The definition of “Israeli” offers a revealing insight of the system of separation created by the settlements. An Israeli accordingly is ”a resident of Israel, a person whose place of residence is in the region and who is an Israeli citizen or was eligible to immigrate to Israel in accordance with the Law of Return … as well as a person who is not a resident of the region and who holds a valid entry visa to Israel.” This strange definition of “Israeli” citizenship creates a situation in which entrance to about 40% of the West Bank is permitted to Israeli citizens, Jews from anywhere in the world and any person who enters Israel as a tourist, while local Palestinian residents are excluded from their own lands.

Ariel Ariel, is an urban settlement located west of Nablus.

It was established on August 1978 as a forward military outlook outpost named Haris. The position of the point was fixed by then Minister of Agriculture Ariel Sharon seeking to create a seed for a larger settlement along the Trans-Samaria Highway for strategic purposes. The settlement was later re-named in gratitude of Sharon’s efforts and commitment. Today the urban form of Ariel is an elongated arc – about five thousands meters long, and only five hundred meters wide. For a suburb and in pure planning terms this layout seems bizarre – it maximises vehicular traffic and impedes the ability of inhabitants to walk to the service centre. If not for the serving its inhabitants, other considerations have been instrumental in determining the form of the settlement: The municipal boundaries of Ariel are convoluted and jagged. Land cultivated by Palestinians (mostly olive groves) which Israel was unable to declare ‘state land’ exists inside the settlement in scores of islands and peninsulas of Palestinian ownership within the area of jurisdiction. It is only within these boundaries that city-planners could fulfil their political and strategic agenda. The incremental growth diagram of Ariel offers a graphic account of the chronological development of the town. The intention of the planners was to maximise the length of the settlement along the east-west axis, by means of extending wedges to either extreme of the area of jurisdiction, and then gradually filling the open spaces between them. Ariel’s built fabric is indeed stretched long and thin so as to create a wedge across the north-south axis. This separates the Palestinian town of Salfit from the villages: Haris (2,600), Kifl Haris (2,700), Qira (900) and Marda (1,900) that are located to its north and rely on it for their economy. Besides that, Ariel arcs southwards in order to envelop the built fabric of Salfit and prevent it from growing northwards, which is the only direction it could really grow. This is ‘negative planning’ – a mode of design that aims to inflict material damage rather than improve or develop economical possibilities – it aims to limit Palestinian economy, reduce its living space in order to encourage residence to leave the area thus reducing the perceived demographic threat. When Planners seize seeking benefit to society as the result of their of development, when they make particular design decision that are explicitly meant at disturbance, suppression, aggression or racism - a crime is been committed. It is up to international law to find the tools and means to deal with these crimes of design. Episode 13: PLSV: AERIEL SHARON EPISODE 13.5 URBAN WARFARE

Episode 14: Tunnels and Bridges The Israeli settlements in the West Bank are dormitory suburbs, reliant on roads connecting them with the urban centres of Israel proper. So-called ‘bypass’ roads were a feature of the Oslo accord. The Israeli government was allowed (with specially allocated American money) to construct a network of fast, wide security roads that bypass Arab towns and connect the settlements to Israel. The bypass roads, some still in the process of paving, would become a massive system of twenty-nine highways spanning four hundred and fifty kilometres. They allow four hundred thousand Jews living on land occupied in 1967 to have freedom of movement while about three million Palestinians are left locked into isolated enclaves. These roads make any attempt to detach the West Bank from Israel proper almost impossible. If settlements themselves are difficult to attack, Palestinian militants have identified the roads as the soft point where settlers can be hurt. Although most of by-pass roads are ‘security roads’ with broad shoulders cleansed out of structures or vegetation, Palestinians attacks are most effective on civilian vehicles and military patrols travelling along the roads. The bypass roads attempt to separate Israeli traffic networks from Palestinian ones, preferably without allowing them ever to cross. They emphasise the overlapping of two separate geographies that inhabit the same landscape. At points where the networks do cross, a makeshift separation is created. Most often, small dust roads are dug for Palestinians under the fast, wide highways on which Israeli vans and military vehicles rush between settlements. Some more grandiose Israeli projects have proposed highways to bypass Palestinian towns in three dimensions. The Tunnel Road, for example, connects Jerusalem with the southern settlements of Gush Etzion and further, to the Jewish neighbourhoods of Hebron. To accomplish this, it has to perform a double contortion: stretched up as a bridge spanning over a Palestinian cultivated valley, it then dives into a tunnel under the Palestinian Bethlehem suburb of Bet Jallah. Meron Benvenisti writes: “And indeed the person travelling on the longest bridge in the country and penetrating the earth in the longest tunnel may ignore the fact that over his head there is a whole Palestinian town and that on his way from the housing projects [of the Jerusalem neighbourhood] of Gilo to the housing projects of the city of Efrat and Etzion (settlement) block he does not come across any Arab.”

Both the valley that the road spans over, and the city it dives under, are areas handed over to limited Palestinian sovereignty under the Oslo accord The physical separation is mirrored in a political one. The ‘border’ stretches along a horizontal line. The city is under Palestinian limited sovereignty; the road below it is within Israeli jurisdiction. In the West Bank, bridges are no longer just devices engineered to overcome a natural boundary or connect impossible points. Rather, they become the boundary itself, separating the two national groups across the vertical dimension. Benvenisti continues: “…The bridge and tunnels are not the real engineering wonder: the road managed to crash the three dimensional space into six dimensions – three Jewish and three Arabs – and the points of frictions between the world of the Jews to the world of the Arab continue to bring up sparks of fire”. This type of a division was first proposed in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. At two locations within this plan, the ‘kissing points’, where the territories of Israel and Palestine were to cross and the single-dimensional boundary – a line – was to become a non-dimensional point, a bridge-over-tunnel design was proposed as the solution for the maintenance of territorial contiguity. It was precisely at places where the border was reduced from a single dimension into non-that solutions had to depart from the two dimensional plan and adopt a three dimensional approach. The present demographical dispersal today is even more complex. The Camp David proposals for the partition of Jerusalem necessitate several of these “kissing points” between separate Israeli and Palestinian neighbourhoods. According to the Clinton plan, Jerusalem would have had 64 kilometres of walls and 40 sovereign bridges and tunnels spanning over alien sovereignty connecting the enclaves to each other. But it requires intense effort from government legal experts, as there are almost no precedents for property and bilateral law in three dimensions. The connection of Gaza and the West Bank – the two estranged Palestinian territories – that according to the Oslo accord are to form a single political unit – poses a similar problem only on a larger scale. The distance between them is forty-seven kilometres as the crow flies. The so called ‘safe passage’ might still well be the same as proposed throughout all peace negotiations – a Palestinian route including six motor lanes, two railway lines, high-voltage electricity cables and an oil pipe that will connect the two enclaves across Israeli territory. Israeli and Palestinian engineers proposed a bewildering variety of possible solutions to that engineering fit. A tunnel, a ditch, a land road cut off from the landscape with dykes on either side, a viaduct…

The political debate turned very quickly to the question of ‘who’s on top’. Avoiding the integrative solution of a land road, Israel asked for the Palestinian sovereign road to run through a seven-metre deep ditch. While the Palestinians naturally preferred a bridge. They would hold sovereignty over the road, Israel’s sovereignty would extend to the under-part of the viaduct and its columns, with the thermodynamic join acting as an international border. THE AIR Episode 15: The Political Horizon Airspace is a discrete dimension that is absents from maps. Although invisible, the architecture of the air, defined for its X/Y co-ordinates by a projection onto the surface of the terrain and by a barometer for its Z, is highly organised and ordered, parcelled off into a series of invisible volumes and connected by aerial corridors. Complete control over the West Bank’s airspace is exercised by Israel, and although in Camp David the concept of a Palestinian state was agreed upon, Israel still maintain its demand for sovereignty on the airspace above it in the context of a final resolution. The severing of the bulk of airspace from the ground is predicated on it being a space of outmost importance – one cluttered with civilian and military airways, allowing a vantage observational point on the terrain under it, while denying that position from others. The height to which the sovereign space of a country extends to has been debated extensively in different UN committees, and was finally set as the maximum height that a jet powered plane reached – a height defined in Garry Powers’ famous U2 reconnaissance flight at about 60,000 over the Soviet Union, and at which he was downed by an SA-2 heat guided missile near Sverdlovsk on the 1st of May 1960. That latitudinal datum became thereafter the sovereign ceiling over which ‘free space’ begins. Under it ranging from between 18,000 to 60,000 feet is the 'Positive Controlled Airspace' – a band, in which most commercial airliners travel, regulated by a series of national air traffic ground control. The first attempt to apply sovereignty on the airspace dates back to 23 April 1784, when balloons were forbidden to fly without a license over Paris. But it was the first appearance of ‘flying machines’ late in the 19th century, that caught the attention of Futurist writers, who imagined air traffic to inaugurates a new era of world wide transportation, a world served by the ‘total mobilisation' of speed and of universal character. “We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed… Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed” exclaimed F. T. Marinetti, in The Futurist Manifesto

of 1909. They proposed the ‘freedom of the air’; analogous to Grotius’s ‘freedom of the seas,’ according to which aircraft should be as free to fly the ‘international skies’ as ships cruise the high seas. But the analogy with freedom of the high seas was rejected for airspace following the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, were after the first world war the potential devastation of air power was first realised. Dramatised further for the Americans by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, the vulnerability of the sky prompted them to further protect this new geo-political soft belly. Article 1 of the 1944 Chicago Convention, lead to the confirmation of national control of airspace, reaffirming the sovereignty of each country above its territory, thereby turning international airspace into hundreds of "no entry" zones. It was only two years after the first space launches in 1957 that the concept of ‘open skies’ was finally accepted for outer space. In that context it is important to remember the words of the Indian delegate to the committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in march 1962: "My delegation cannot contemplate any prospect other then that outer space should be a kind of warless world, where all military concepts of this earth should be totally inapplicable. There should be only one governing concept, that of humanity and sovereignty of mankind" Episode 16: The partition of the Skies Trying to by-pass international law that affirms the continuity between the ground and the sky, a new definition of bilateral boundaries in airspace had to be invented in the context of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The sovereign ceiling of the emerging Palestinian State was proposed to be significantly lowered to include only the realm of architectural construction, leaving the upper layers in Israeli control. Israel would thus overhang Palestine forming a balcony that overlooks and controls the house’s back yard. Flying safety and not of sovereignty demand that Palestinian and Israelis will have to share the air space with joint sovereignty. Bahrain and Qatar are sharing their air space and regulate transport in this tight area together. The Israeli claim for sovereignty in Palestinian airspace started with the wordings of the Oslo Accord. In the clauses concerning the electromagnetic sphere and airspace it states that ‘All aviation activity or usage of the airspace… shall require prior approval of Israel’. During the negotiations for permanent status in Camp David Israel demanded the ‘use of the airspace and electromagnetic space and their supervision’. This demand affirmed that Israel sought sovereignty over Palestine and meant that through the control of the electromagnetic spectrum Israel could regulate radio frequencies in both states. During the Oslo years Israel indeed allocated radio frequencies to the Palestinian Authority, but these

were usually ‘bad frequencies’ in which reception was interrupted. That situation promptly started a new ‘War of the airwaves – the imminent breakdown of public order in the air – where the domination of the most powerful transmitters prevailed. Palestinian radio and taxi broadcasting routinely trespassed into Israeli radio frequencies. With the control of the skies Israel wanted to use Palestinian airspace as a training grounds for its Air Force and as the site of technological supremacy exercised by overhead sensors and air power. In return the Palestinians were offered a special aerial corridor running through Israeli airspace between Gaza and he West Bank. Episode 17: The Storm The break out of hostilities in the recent Intifadah introduced the airspace for the first time as the site of war with the Palestinians. “Do we want to transfer the war to the sky? To rockets [fired on Israeli cities] and anti-aircraft missiles?” Exclaimed Shimon Peres when questioned whether Israel should fortify unilaterally behind a protected border on land. But it was too late as the war of the skies has already broken out. Besides the latest invasion of Israel into Palestinian areas on land, the actual day-to-day policing of the Occupied Territories is done primarily from the air. The Israeli army opted for a tactics of precise action based on accurate intelligence, obtained from the air. Occupation of the skies gives Israel a presence across the whole spectrum of the electromagnetic field, and enables total observation. The airspace became primarily a place to ‘see’ from, offering the Israeli Air Force an observational vantage point for policing airwaves alive with electromagnetic signals – from the visible to radio and radar frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. The West Bank must currently be the most intensively observed and photographed terrain in the world. With a ‘vacuum cleaner’ approach to intelligence gathering, sensors aboard unmanned air vehicles (UAV's), aerial reconnaissance jets, early warning Hawkeye planes and even on-board the newly launched earth-observation spy Satellite Ofek 5 – snatch most signals out of the air. Every floor in every house, every car, and every telephone call or radio transmission, even the smallest event that occurs in the terrain can thus be monitored, policed or destroyed from the air. Since the beginning of the resent hostilities the Israeli Air Force has put thousands of flight hours, gathered piles of information through its complex network of different Airborne reconnaissance platforms and put it at the disposal of different intelligence agencies. The air was harvested for steady streams of information, managed in the parallel simultaneity of war rooms under a multiplicity of command and control screens. During the recent military's urban warfare operations in the West Bank, UAVs and unmanned balloons provide real-time data and video to ground forces

commanders, while attack helicopters such as the AH-64A Apache directed anti-tank fire toward specific targets like delivering a missile through a window where Palestinians snipers are hiding. Based on this precise intelligence, a near absolute knowledge of the terrain and of movement of persons in it, coupled with the ability to administer precise destruction, Israel has been able to wage a new kind of warfare, as ‘surgical’ killings administered from above. During 2001 alone the Israeli Air Force conducted 5,130 sorties over the West Bank and Gaza in the context of the conflict. Out of which 600 flight hours in assault helicopters, firing 500 missiles at Palestinian targets, with about a third of them achieving the 79 aerial "targeted killings," in which Palestinian militants were liquidated. ‘Targeted killings’ are large-scale operations involving hundreds of specialists from different security apparatuses. The Shabak (Internal Intelligence Services) passes on the dossier of a potential target to the military with a recommendation for liquidation. The military launches the operation with high-latitude UAV reconnaissance sorties, maintaining continuous eye contact with the target until the conclusion of the operation. When information regarding the target’s behaviour patters and travel routes is crossed referred with HUMINT from the ground, the liquidation’s date time and location is put forward by the military to a special ministerial committee for approval. The operation relies on a total integration between different command and control aerial platforms. In it the UAV, the manned reconnaissance planes and the helicopter gunships are integrated as one synergetic system to complete each other’s tasks. As the attack helicopter is on its way to the operation area, live intelligence about the target’s location, direction and speed is transferred as radio and image data between the platforms from the top down. The Apaches gunship, equipped with a sophisticated electro-optical array of precise target acquisition technology, travelling high overground, detect, identify and acquire the target (Sometimes, ultra-violet paint splashed by collaborators on the roof of a car marks the target for the pilot to destroy), then awaits the final “incrimination” of the intelligence officers which momentarily borrow his electronic perspective. With the final approval of the chief of Air Force, two Hellfire missiles are fired into what most often is a Palestinian vehicle. The assassination of Palestinian militants within their cities was made possible by technological advances and the ability to achieve rapidly integrative systems. Beyond the hardware of the aerial platforms, it is the soft technological application of information and communications technology that allows for the synergetic integration of military equipment. This integration relies on the control of the airways and the electromagnetic spectrums, thus making essential the possession of total control of the airspace. With the presence and availability of

this technology, acts of personal liquidation became subjected only to will. If the potential of iron bombing to horrify the imagination has already been exhausted, this next step of warfare, in which armies could target individuals within a battlefield or civilians in precise urban warfare, when summary executions are carried out after short meetings between army generals and politicians working their way down ‘wanted’ men lists, makes warfare an almost personal matter, and sets with it - a new horizon of horror. Epilogue ‘The Politics of Verticality’ attempt to provide both a political critic of architecture and an architectural critic of politics. The former looks at the way in which, fixated by and responding to the paranoid drive for separation and segregation, architecture and planning appropriated the landscape to become a tool of domination and control. The latter describes how, attempting to base national authentications on the production of imaginary geographies, the idea of ‘territory’ was multiplied into a series of physical and metaphorical ‘territories’ and organised in a multi-layered construction. The political deployment of aesthetic categories relating to landscape, archaeology, architecture and cartography turned the West Bank into a theoretically constructed artifice. What may seem at first glance as a pastoral natural landscape, for the possession of which the conflict is waged, is in effect an artificial arrangement of a totally synthetic environment, as designed as any built environment. In it, all ‘natural’ elements like steams and mountains, forest orchards, rocks and ruins function not as the things being fought for but as the weapons and ammunition of the conflict – sometimes even as the subject who wages the very war itself. With the technologies and infrastructure required for the physical segregation of Israelis from Palestinians along complex volumetric borders, it furthermore seemed as if this most complex geo-political problem of the Middle East has gone through a scale-shift and took on architectural dimensions. The West Bank appears to have been re-assembled in a way resembling a complex building together with separate enclaves, observation points, security corridors, lines of infrastructure and archaeological diggings, intertwined in a spatially impossible, Escher like manner. Like in an archaeological site, these elements of the landscape become evidences through which the political process can be investigated. The volumetric technologies of separation might well be geometrically creative and theoretically “interesting” but in essence they are the very familiar and

traditional absolute and hermetic borders, here disguised within the Trojan horse of spatial radicalism. Although, and perhaps because borders and the technologies necessary to maintain them have become so incredibly complex – that the politics of separation has completely and utterly collapsed as a viable alternative. It was the impulse to base identity in territory that lead to the inevitable violence embedded in the contradiction of a territorial overlap. Against the endless search for the form and mechanisms of ‘perfect’ separation, comes the realisation that a viable solution does not lay within the realm of design. The different formal variations on partition plans – the ‘design solution’ to the conflict – are incapable to answer the aspirations of two states grounded in territorial based ethnic and religious identities. Furthermore, considering current facts on the ground, the two state solution has become utterly unfeasible, non-viable and simply unjust. If we dare look at the ‘Holly Land’ as a densely inhabited environment of quite modest proportions (it barely exceeds the metropolitan), one that needs to address some very urgent problems of infrastructure, environment, transport and housing as well as those of citizenship and rights, we realise that the partition path is the wrong one to take. The essential condition for the practice of equitable straightforward planning and development is not a further play of identity-politics on space – but the formation of a single democratic, equitable, non-discriminatory and non-ethnic state across the complete borders of Israel and Palestine. Bibliography Ariel Sharon with David Chanoff, Warrior, The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon, New York:

Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Jeff Halper, The Matrix of Control, http://www.icahd.org/eng/ Sharon Rotbard, Tower and Stockade. In Rafi Segal Eyal Weizman eds., A Civilian Occupation, Tel Aviv and London, Babel Press and Verso Press, 2003 Adriana Kemp, Border Space and National Identity in Israel, in Yehuda Shenhav, ed., Theory and Criticism, Space, Land, Home, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, Spring 2000, P.282, Hebrew. Masterplan for Jewish Settlements in the West Bank Through the Year 2010 and Masterplan for Settlement for Judea and Samaria, Development Plan for the Region for 1983-1986, Ministry of Agriculture and the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization, Jerusalem, 1983

Eyal Weizman, The Politics of Verticality, www.opendemocracy.net, 2002 Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, ‘The Mountain’, in A Civilian Occupation, Babel Press and Verso Press, Tel Aviv and London: 2003 Steve Graham, Urbicide in Jeninwww.opendemocracy.net, 2002 Stefano Boeri, Border Syndrome, in Anselm Franke, Eyal Weizman, Stefano Boeri, Rafi Segal, Territories, Berlin: KW and Walther Keoing, 2003 Yehezkel Lein, Eyal Weizman, Land Grab, Jerusalem: B’Tselem, May 2002 http://www.btselem.org/English/Publications/Summaries/Land_Grab_Map.asp Dror Etkes, Settlemet Watch, Peace Now, 2003 http://www.peacenow.org.il/English Yehezkel Lein, Behind the Barrier, Jerusalem: B’Tselem, 2003 http://www.btselem.org/Download/2003_Behind_The_Barrier_Eng.doc