A hollow land .. the dynamics of Israeli settlement and the disruption of the Palestinian geography in preparation for its swallowing

An in-depth critical study of Israeli architecture and urban planning within the Occupied Palestinian Territories is doubly important, in the context of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Chaitanya’s frantic desire to annex settlements in the West Bank.

The book, published for the first time in 2007 by the Israeli architect and writer Eyal Weizmann, titled “A Hollow Land .. The Architecture of the Israeli Occupation”, and its transfer to Arabic, the Syrian translator Basil Watafa 10 years after its publication, consists of 9 chapters, which are an “archival spoiler” that delves into the history of The mode of operation of the various mechanisms that have established – and are still – the occupation regime and its practices of control.

The book focuses on settlement dynamics within the context of the militarization of Israeli society, in which aspects of life seem like living in a large military barracks governed by security considerations, comparing the settlements to each other and their bypass roads in the West Bank, which are similar to feudal fortresses in ancient Europe.

The author explains the role of “architecture” and its contribution to laying out the structures and components of the occupation in its parts and details in Jerusalem, indicating that the engineers are politicians, and along with them are military, experts and other activists, all of whom have contributed to “the engineering of the occupation.”

The roots of possession and dominance

The book begins with a small chapter on Israeli settlement measures after the Oslo era in the West Bank and elsewhere, stressing that the occupation is fully exploiting geography for its benefit, and transforming Palestinian life into islands closed by borders and barriers.

The author shows that the logic of separation or “apartheid” within the occupied Palestinian territories greatly exceeded the logic of partition at the national level, and formed a synthesis aimed at excluding and eliminating everything related to the historical heritage and the geographical and demographic landscape of the Palestinians

The book presents an investigation of the transformation that has occurred in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, examines the means that have entrenched the presence of Israeli laws in their various forms in the spatial space, and analyzes geographical, regional, civil and architectural perceptions as well as the practices that established and strengthened their structure.

From this section, the book paints a picture of the nature of the Israeli occupation, its roots and its development, and the various mechanisms by which it operates, according to the presentation presented by the journalist Mahmoud Al-Fattafta to Al-Jazeera Net earlier.

The author reveals the historical and political connotations generated by the disgraceful means of Israeli control over the Palestinian lands. In this context, he analyzes the implications, dimensions and results of the details of the settlement model, the ambiguous architecture of houses, the construction of fortifications and siege methods, local mechanisms to control financial circulation and control of liquidity, map techniques and means of surveillance, legal tactics for annexing lands, advanced and high-tech weapons, and the theories of complex military maneuvers. These are all indications of political mentality, institutional conflicts, and the level of expertise established by the Israeli occupation.

The book notes that although political sovereignty is traditionally represented in state control over the land space, the airspace over the Palestinian territories is the most effective political arena, as Israel insisted in all political negotiations on retaining control of the airspace over the Palestinian areas.

It deals with the Israeli strategic path, starting from the influence of archeology on city planning, reformulating the concept of defense by Ariel Sharon during the 1973 war, then through planning settlements and their architectural forms, up to the Israeli discourse and the implementation of urban warfare and assassinations directed from the air.

In Chapter Five, “Checkpoints,” the author discusses what he calls “split sovereignty,” describing the sovereignty granted to the Palestinian Authority as extremely fragile and subject to full Israeli security control.

In Chapter Six, he discusses the archipelago of barriers and dividing walls that have gnawed the Palestinian lands and entrenched Israeli expansion, and talks about the wondrous roads that connect the remaining Palestinian lands and allow for the continuous expansion of settlements.

As for the seventh chapter, “Urban War,” the book discusses the term “walking through walls,” talking about the entry of Israeli military forces into the camps, which represent a shelter for resistance fighters by opening walls and penetrating homes, while chapter eight talks about “evacuations” about the challenge of the Gaza Strip. Which Israel was keen – before withdrawing from it – to ensure the possibility of entry and occupation, if necessary. In the last chapter, the author discusses the occupation methods from the air, which include the assassinations of resistance fighters on the ground.

Petrification and the means of abstraction

In a chapter on Jerusalem titled “Jerusalem … The Stone of the Holy City”, the book states that after the occupation of the city in 1967, a comprehensive plan was drawn up, which included drawings and verbal instructions aimed at ensuring the unity of Jerusalem and building the city in a way that deters any possibility of its re-division.

He points out that this plan resulted, over 40 years of occupation, in building 12 separate Jewish neighborhoods that are homogeneous with the occupied areas included in the city, and they were built to complete a belt of architectural fabric that encircles the Palestinian neighborhoods and villages attached to the city and bisects them in half.

The author states that industrial zones have been established outside the new neighborhoods on the margins of the local area, thus keeping the Palestinians of the West Bank – a resource for cheap and “obedient” labor – away from the city itself. He explains that the basic principles of planning and architecture in Jerusalem represented the tactics and means of dispossession, adding that in light of the “arbitrariness” that characterizes the Israeli occupation regime, “the lives, property and political rights of Jerusalemites are not subject to permanent violence as a result of the repeated actions of the Israeli army; but also.” As a result of narrowing the screws on them in the process of reshaping their vital field in a permanent and unpredictable manner. “

This thinking was demonstrated in Weizmann’s analysis of dozens of maps and pictures of Israeli plans that thwarted the possibility of an independent or practically viable Palestinian state. Engineers, planners, politicians and the Israeli army have been involved in developing policies related to both small and large. From electricity, sewage, water, roads and trade companies, and to implement them by all means, and if necessary, through policies of killing and displacement

Blinding and destruction

The author considers that the cultural aspect played an additional important role in the Israeli colonization process of this city, represented in the attempt to “rehabilitate” the occupied and annexed areas, and modify its strange appearance in the eyes of Israeli Jews to a familiar home.

He says, “Architecture embodied a visual language that was taken as a means to obscure the facts of the occupation, and to support the demands of territorial expansion in an attempt to reinforce national narratives about belonging, in parallel with narrowing other narratives, or even blocking them altogether.”

At length, the book discusses the theory of “planned destruction” through the most prominent example: It is the implementation of the Israeli occupation on June 10, 1967, the first qualitative local change operation in the occupied territories, when the entire Mughrabi neighborhood was demolished, and the army carried out this demolition operation without a declared governmental order.

It shows that, two months after the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, the entire Old City was declared an archaeological site in which construction is prohibited for the purpose of conducting the archaeological survey, which did not constitute a pretext for an Israeli “return” occupying the Palestinian lands alone; Rather, it is a “footstep” of a genuine historical right that could be developed into a model based on the hands of Israeli architects.

According to the author, the Israeli biblical archaeologists “worked to bend the neck of history by marginalizing the discoveries in the upper and later classes, dating back to the Islamic and Ottoman eras during excavations, and in museums as well, as they deliberately dismiss them as representations of passive historical stages, and are discarded under the pretext of It is too recent, or left to decompose and blight. ”

Relay and bomb

This act (twisting the neck of history) was represented by the use of biblical archeology to legitimize the claim that local Palestinian architecture is Jewish in origin, and it justified the definition of “family” as a “authentic” local culture that the new Palestinian arrivals took advantage of, and distorted its features.

The book argues that in their endeavors to establish demographic and geographical standards within the comprehensive plans, planners and architects in the Jerusalem municipality have contributed – along with those working for their benefit – in a national policy based on forced displacement, which is considered a crime according to international law, and is implicitly referred to in Israeli circles as Silent Relay. “

He clarifies that the task, which was placed upon the shoulders of the Israeli architects and designers within the local borders of the city, was not to build houses and work on developing the new “national style” only. But also in preserving the “population balance”, the rate of which was within the borders that were redrawn during the 1967 war; 3 Jews to one Palestinian.

According to Weizmann, the Israeli planners sought to group two separate and overlapping geographical locations, according to principles that prevent direct intersection or direct meeting between settlers and Palestinians. Areas for settlers at the top are spread out over the hills that are carefully selected and connected by good modern roads, and other areas for Palestinians are crowded, consisting of cities, towns and villages below the hills and in the foothills of the mountains, valleys and depressions.

Accordingly, the settlements form barriers between the Palestinians and the Jerusalemites as well in the populated mountainous areas from the east and the west, and their fragmentation through traffic movement eastwards towards Israel and the west and vice versa, and the necessary broad roads protected from the army and the settlements established near them overlooking these roads, which intersect with Old Palestinian roads; This will result in a number of isolated Palestinian communities around the major cities, connected to each other under full Israeli supervision.