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Reviewed by:
  • Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
  • Joel Beinin
Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, by Eyal Weizman. London: Verso, 2007. 318 pp. $34.95.

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation examines how “the different forms of Israeli rule” over the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 “inscribed themselves in space” (p. 5). To accomplish this purpose, Eyal Weizman uses the term architecture in two ways. In its first meaning, he describes in detail the planning, construction, physical, and political attributes of several of the built structures of the occupation and the roles of the Israeli architects who designed them. The structures analyzed include the Jewish Quarter of [End Page 136] the old city of Jerusalem, the settlements, the separation barrier, the checkpoint at Qalandia, the border crossing at the Allenby Bridge, and the Rafah Terminal. The separation barrier is arguably Israel’s most egregious violation of international law in the course of over forty years of occupation, since an International Court of Justice ruling determined that it is illegal. Yet Israeli architects protested against being excluded from participating in the design process. Weizman also employs architecture “as a conceptual way of understanding political issues as constructed realities” (p. 6).

Each of the chapters examines a structure or related set of structures and the way they enforce Israel’s domination of the Palestinians through the control of physical space. The chapters are self-contained essays; most of them contain fascinating detail that is little known outside Israel. Among the best is the chapter on Israel’s targeted assassinations in the Gaza Strip beginning in 2003. It is an incisive, albeit depressing, discussion of the politics and technology of what Weizman terms “the airborne occupation” and the extension of the occupation along a vertical axis. Underscoring the relevance of this issue to current developments beyond Israel/Palestine, Weizman traces the use of aerial bombardment of rebellious “natives” to the tenure of Winston Churchill as Britain’s Minister of War and Air in the 1920s. Churchill enthusiastically promoted “aerially enforced colonization” in Somaliland and Iraq.

The structure of Hollow Land does not permit Weizman to offer a comprehensive history of the occupation, and he acknowledges that this is not his objective. Surprisingly, there is still no fully satisfactory narrative of this kind. Gershom Gorenberg’s, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 (New York: Times Books, 2006), while based on good historical research on the first decade of the settlement project, is ultimately flawed and problematic (for my review see “When Doves Cry,” The Nation, April 17, 2006). Weizman, although he is a more consistent critic of the Israeli occupation than Gorenberg, adopts the same fundamental thesis: that there was no “master plan” guiding the settlement project in its early years. Rather, “the colonization of the mountain district of the West Bank . . . emerged out of a series of fundamental crises and conflicts” (p. 87). Both Labor and Likud governments from 1967 to 1981 made no clear decision on the extent of the settlement project but instead acquiesced to the militants who established “facts on the ground.” However, unlike Gorenberg, Weizman acknowledges that, “[t]he indecision of these governments was often in fact structural” (p. 93). Consequently, not to decide meant, in fact, to decide in favor of expanding the settlement project.

Given Weizman’s ambiguity about the extent to which there was a structural logic behind the settlement project until the second Likud government [End Page 137] was installed in 1981, the notion of using architecture to understand political issues as constructed realities is somewhat confusing in this case. Architecture implies forethought, a precise plan, and its implementation. If those processes did not govern the settlement project before 1981, by which point its main contours were established, than something else must have been at work. I would suggest it was the historical logic of Zionism as a colonial settlement project from its inception. As Dalia Karpel’s recent film The Diaries of Yossef Nachmani makes clear, settling everywhere it was possible to do so and using all legal and often illegal tools to do it was the life blood of labor Zionism in the...

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