Acclaimed exploration of the political space created by Israel's colonial occupation. From the tunnels of Gaza to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of Palestinian towns, villages and roads into an artifice where all natural and built features serve military ends. Weizman traces the development of this strategy, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualization of military defence during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to the contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations. Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.
Оглавление
Eyal Weizman. Hollow Land
Hollow Land. Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Frontier Architecture
Interlude – 1967
1. Jerusalem: Petrifying the Holy City
2. Fortifications: The Architecture of Ariel Sharon
3. Settlements: Battle for the Hilltops
4. Settlements: Optical Urbanism
5. Checkpoints: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror
6. The Wall: Barrier Archipelagos and the Impossible Politics of Separation
7. Urban Warfare: Walking Through Walls
8. Evacuations: De-Colonizing Architecture
9. Targeted Assassinations: The Airborne Occupation
Postscript
Notes
Index
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New Edition
EYAL WEIZMAN
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The political geology of Palestine starts in the deep subterranean aquifers, buried under layers of aggregate soil and rock. The partition and use of the waters of this interconnected set of underground lakes, most of it under the West Bank, reflects the extent of inequality exercised on the surface. The Oslo Accords allocated 80 per cent of this resource for the benefit of Israel. As a result, average water consumption in Israel is more than four times that of the West Bank and Gaza. In recent decades, over-extraction of groundwater from Gaza’s sole aquifer led to its permanent salinization, destroying the strip’s single water source.15
Another geological stratum is archaeology. The buried remains of the land’s historical occupants should be the subject of impartial scientific study. But the settler colonial logic of the Zionist project uses archaeology to construct an alibi for the Jewish ‘return’ and the claim that its indigenous rights are more fundamental and prior to those of all others. In this book, I have outlined the way ideologically motivated archaeology across Palestine, aimed at the remains of its biblical past, has discarded other archaeological strata (especially the long succession of Muslim periods from the seventh to the twentieth century) and organized the mode of occupation on the surface right above them. One excavation, which began in 2008, powerfully embodies this logic. It took place right under Silwan, a small Palestinian neighbourhood just outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls. Promoted by settler associations and starting without proper permits, it searched for elements of ‘King David’s era’ Jerusalem by boring tunnels through a hillside beneath homes in the neighbourhood, without informing the residents or securing their consent and refusing to stop despite their explicit protests and several attempts to halt it in court.
