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The Israeli occupation authorities ’attempt to seize the homes of the residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem and grant them to Jewish settlers was nothing but a new episode in the series of swallowing Palestinian lands that has been practiced by the occupation authorities for more than seven decades.
However, the matter goes far beyond the mere mere acquisition of land to being a step in a comprehensive Israeli plan to tighten control over the Palestinians and impose isolation on them through settlements, which are, in essence, a means of fragmenting and isolating Palestinian cities, killing any seeds of resistance and ensuring full control of the occupiers.
On the morning of September 12, 2005, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip woke up to the news of the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces, after a 38-year existence [1], leaving behind more than 6000 dunums of the Strip's lands that were usurped by the occupation, on which 21 Jewish settlements were built The Palestinians have been dispossessed of their land and shared by them for four decades That construction, which carried a greater meaning than being a deaf stone, was the eye of the military occupation. In addition to the weapon, there is a settler’s body and a house that he carries, who occupy the land and exercise control that makes it easier for the weapon to carry out its function.
The withdrawal ended, and on the rubble of 3000 settlement buildings destroyed by his forces, the Palestinians raised thousands of banners and banners bearing pictures of martyrs and leaders, demanding that what remains of this abandoned Zionist construction be burned, as how does a Palestinian live in a house built by his persecuting force and tormented by the kinds of torment? On the other hand, "Benjamin Netanyahu" shared the Palestinians' vision, but for various reasons, as he saw the inevitability of destroying what remained of the settlements; “To avoid the ideologically destructive images in which Palestinians dance on the roofs of these buildings and convert their synagogues into mosques.” [2]
Between the two positions - the Palestinian and the Israeli - the US government appeared in its opinion, proposing that the occupation government hand over the settlement buildings and the remaining agricultural and industrial assets to the Palestinians, in order to revive the economic situation of the sector [3], in line with America's neoliberal agenda to urbanize the Middle East and turn it into a modern liberal society. Which was accepted by the Israeli government, so it offered these assets and buildings for sale to the Palestinians, or given them to them in exchange for the homes they were forced to leave during the Nakba, but the Palestinians considered accepting this a betrayal of the cause and acknowledging the loss of the right to return to their homes that had been made in demanding blood.
Regarding this ongoing debate, the architect and writer "Eyal Weizmann" argues in his book "A Hollow Land .. The Architecture of the Israeli Occupation" that architecture is one of the direct means of the occupation, as "buildings have an effective role in the exposure of political drama." The architectural elements, based on them, were considered organisms [a] vibrant with life, and to purify them from evil, the architects will have to burn them, "which, according to the Secretary-General of the Palestinian Ministry of Planning," Jihad al-Wazir ", will lead to a purification emancipation from the remnants of the occupation [4].
With this different understanding of the architecture of the occupation, the Palestinians rejected even the idea of destroying settlement villas, which were presented by "Javier Solana," the European Union's foreign policy coordinator, and replacing them in favor of tall buildings to house refugees [5]; So as not to turn temporary housing into permanent buildings that undermine the right of return that is demanded and sought by every Palestinian who abandoned his home in 1948.
On the other hand, the occupation has always seen in the camps an environment that incites resistance, as well as its structure that hinders the disclosure of what is happening with it, which prompted Ariel Sharon, during his leadership of the southern front in the early seventies, to destroy the Shati, Jabalia and Rafah refugee camps in order to displace them, And the consequent need for new homes, which will force the government to set up programs for their resettlement, which means dismantling the camp’s structure in favor of an occupational engineering that contributes to placing it under the eyes without alleys and hideouts that are difficult to detect, and this is the most pivotal role played by the settlements, which put a hand in hand. Our awareness of the occupation is at the heart of the urbanization.
"Ariel Sharon" (Reuters)
This engineering ideology of domination, on the part of the occupation, prompted "Eyal Weizmann" to try to analyze its manifestations in the Palestinian reality, between the stone isolation of Jerusalem from the Palestinians, settlements, the apartheid wall, crossing points, wall wars, and other engineering mechanisms, in an attempt to understand the political purpose And military ones on the ground, because the Zionist architect, according to Weizmann, is a military and political activist, and not just an impartial competence that provides civil services. This is the instrumental truth of the occupation’s engineering, as the man says, but the question is: How does this tool work?
On the twenty-seventh of June 1967, and a few days after the Israeli army completed its control of the eastern part of Jerusalem, the occupation government headed by Levi Eshkol hastened to occupy about 70 square kilometers of land and annex it within the administrative borders of occupied West Jerusalem [6], At the time, the Military Committee designed the architectural plans in a pre-emptive step, in anticipation of any withdrawal process imposed by an international resolution, with the aim of annexing the largest number of vacant areas to the borders of the alleged Israeli authority over Jerusalem [2].
Indeed, in the following year, a comprehensive plan was drawn up, based on reuniting Jerusalem and ensuring its unity under Israeli sovereignty and building it in a way that deters any possibility of re-dividing it [7], which led - in conjunction with other construction plans - to build twelve Jewish neighborhoods, over a period of forty General, in which these neighborhoods maintain their distancing and homogeneity at the same time, forming a belt of the architectural fabric that encloses the Palestinian neighborhoods and villages and divides them into two parts, in addition to the industrial cities that were built outside these neighborhoods to maintain the isolation of Palestinian workers, coming from the West Bank, far from Jerusalem.
Add to this a ring of second settlements, called the Second Wall, which were built outside the local boundaries of Jerusalem;
In order for the settlement tide to intensify and Greater Jerusalem would become a sprawling city, isolating the Palestinians from their cultural centers there, and at the same time separating the north and south of the West Bank, forming a settlement outpost containing three quarters of the settlers in the lands occupied since 1967 [2].
The problem that the architects faced did not stop at speeding up construction and providing the infrastructure for settlements and so on, but the cultural problem also appeared, as how can the occupied areas be rehabilitated, so that the settlers gain a familiar position in the hearts of the settlers, so that they appear as organic parts of the promised Israeli capital in Jerusalem?
Here came the role of architecture that provided "a visual language that served as a means to obscure the realities of the occupation and to support the demands of territorial expansion" [2].
This situation has led to “the emergence of an Israeli architectural style that is completely at odds with the building method in Arab villages. In Israeli areas, architects and city planners strive to develop a national architectural style” [8]. A special chapter of the 1968 plan was devoted to discussing the decree of the military governor of Jerusalem in The period of the British mandate, "Ronald Storrs," and the judge to use different types of limestone, later known as Jerusalem stone, was a material for building the outer walls of Jewish homes, in a way that unifies the architectural characteristic of the different buildings and shows them as organic parts of the city’s architecture.
The aforementioned plan stipulated that the visual imprint that the stone gives "has a value that includes the sentimental messages it carries, which stimulates other feelings that reside in our collective memory, and creates - in the context of the new architecture - strong ties with the holy city of Jerusalem, the incipient [7]]. From this standpoint, Jewish religious justifications and archaeological "architectural" claims were used as pretexts for acquiring land - claiming that it contained sacred relics - in addition to what the limestone itself contained - as "Storrs" [9] conceived - from the biblical legacy of Jerusalem, which means the city. Built on stone.
The purpose of this law, which was re-approved, with amendments allowing the apparent confinement of the building instead of building it entirely with stones, was to reinforce the oriental symbolism of the place, which, according to Weizmann [8], summarizes the Israeli domination of the building culture in the occupied lands.
This places the danger on the Palestinian national identity in Jerusalem in the long run, through this engineering apartheid that racially isolates the Palestinians and denies them their rights in their historic city.
Eyal Weizmann refers to the limestone wall surrounding the concrete building, which is used to stone the exterior of Jerusalem (communication sites)
This engineering separation was evident in the demographic strategy for the occupation in Jerusalem. The city engineer, Elinwar Barzaki, said of the policy that the Israeli government is following when it intends to deal with the problem of population density: “There is a government decision to maintain the ratio between the Arab population and the Jewish population in the city at a rate of 28% of the Arabs and 72% of the Jews. The issue, whereby the mentioned ratios are achieved, is through the potential of housing ”[10].
This policy was implemented, according to Weizmann, through the manipulation of urban plans, using one of two policies, or both: encouraging the construction of homes in Jewish neighborhoods, and limiting the expansion of Palestinian homes, in order to counter the rapid demographic growth of the Palestinians. The results of these policies emerge when comparing the size of building permits issued to each of the two parties. The share of the Jews reached 1,500 annual permits, which contributed to establishing 90,000 housing units for Jews on the eastern side of occupied Jerusalem, in exchange for only 100 annual permits for Palestinians who own land [11].
Moreover, the establishment of new Jewish neighborhoods / settlements was considered - in essence - “a counter-measure to the Palestinian urban movement, and those neighborhoods and settlements were planned in such a way as to form wedges between Palestinian neighborhoods and villages, limiting the possibility of their expansion, and dividing Palestinian urban continuity,” as is the case in The Ramat Eshkol neighborhood and the French Hill neighborhood, which form “an extended arc separating the Palestinian neighborhood of Shuafat from the Palestinian Old City and from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and all these areas formed a connected urban area,” so that the basic function of the settlements would emerge later, in Jerusalem and elsewhere, as a means of preventing the city. In addition to making life in it more difficult for the Palestinians, [8] in addition to facilitating security monitoring, geographic expansion, and gaining as much land as possible, regardless of its contradiction with international resolutions.
“The first morning in Ramallah. I got out of bed and ran to the window to open it. I pointed with my finger to Jabal al-Tawil, which overlooks Ramallah and al-Bireh, and asked him: What are these elegant houses, Abu Hazem?” He replied: They are a settlement.
[Murid Barghouti, I saw Ramallah]
In 1999, some settlers filed a complaint with the Zionist army complaining about the poor reception on their cell phones while they were passing on the highway linking Jerusalem and the settlements in the northern West Bank. An antenna to receive the signal in the aforementioned area, at the top of the hill overlooking the road, which is the very summit that was a settlement project that was unsuccessful.
This hill planted with figs and olives belonged to Palestinian farmers from the villages of Ein Yabroud and Cyrenaica, but it seemed to the occupying forces at the time that the establishment of the antenna in the Migron outpost, as it will be called, was a matter of national security, and then it could seize the land belonging to farmers without the consent of its owner, which is What actually happened was followed by the Israeli Electricity Company feeding the hill with electricity, and linking the National Water Company to it with the water irrigation system, under the pretext of supporting construction operations.
The delay in building the antenna prompted the settlers to install a fake antenna in May 2001, and then they brought a guard for him to stay in a trailer under the mast. The guard brought his wife and children to stay with him. Ten months later, five other families accompanied the alleged guard’s family. As a justification for the Ministry of Housing and Construction to participate in the cake, it built a nursery for the resident families, and donations were collected to build a synagogue, to turn the antenna mast into the largest outpost, out of 103 outposts spread across the West Bank, which include about 60 trailers and 42 families [12], And she obtains an official permit to turn into the entire Bunyan settlement [13].
Migron outpost (Reuters)
Did you notice anything? This is the plastic geography - in the words of Weizmann - by which the occupation authorities are expanding on the lands of the West Bank and formerly Gaza, bypassing the 1948 and 1967 borders and the Security Council resolutions on settlement, and everything that would impede their expansion on the land of Palestine. Outposts made up of mobile vehicles and camps quickly turn into settlements gradually, in a way that transforms the West Bank, which was coherent after the Nakba, into an archipelago - isolated islands - due to settlement and the separation wall, which is an implementation of the policy announced by former Israeli Prime Minister "Sharon" of Before: “I settle where I can” [2].
Settlements, as an architectural tool, therefore, constitute a very important military and political purpose for the occupation, and for this reason their presence is overwhelmingly concentrated in the heights of the hills, a site for which a religious pretext was formulated claiming that the plains are the unfortunate regions of the world and that the highlands are the sacred peaks that should not be left behind. In the hands of strangers [14]. This argument that served the primary purpose of ascending the hills to the settlements, as explained by "Weizmann", to be a revealing eye of the Palestinian valleys beneath them, to tighten complete control, which is highlighted by the design of the settlement houses, as each house represents a circular focal point, similar to a "goal ticket." For the soldiers during the war [C], each house - together with the settlement group - forms a large eye that reveals the valleys and what is going on in them.
In addition, the apartheid wall, which the occupation forces are building around their settlements, in addition to the barbed wire, roadblocks, road networks, bridges and tunnels that are exclusively open to Jews, have contributed to achieving severe separation between the two sides and extending complete military control, with a huge architectural arm, over the valleys. The Palestinian occupation forces use the settlements as direct methods in the event of attacks on villages and camps, and the architectural unification of the organization, with its red brick roofs, helped to distinguish between the settlement and the village in the event that the occupation intentionally bombed the villages.
Settlement represents - being an engineering act - another goal of the occupation, according to the plan of "Yigal Allon", who was an Israeli minister after the setback, which stipulated the inevitability of separating the West Bank from Jordan from the east, and providing the maximum amount of land and the minimum number of Arabs. Although this perception was not presented as an official project of the Israeli government at the time, his project remained the basis of the settlement policy in the occupied territories, and a main working paper in the government's discussions on the territories, settlement issues, and others [15].
As a result, the settlements were always strategic sites rather than sites of residence. They were even presented to the Israeli public, shocked by the 1973 war, as a defense system that contributes to protecting the state from invasion, and as a precautionary measure to prevent war with conventional weapons. Sharon, an expert in Rotating public opinion and exploiting public fear. That point was good when he said: "If we do not start to settle in Judea and Samaria - the West Bank - then Jordanian artillery shells will prolong us." [2]
Faced with this crisis reality, the Palestinians have come to live on isolated and closed islands, where the lands under Palestinian rule include nearly 200 scattered parcels, while Israel controls the surrounding areas in addition to its control over the groundwater reserves, and its control over the atmosphere that envelops these areas. 16], and with the enactment of the policy of traffic checkpoints - after the Oslo agreement - on the borders of the occupied lands, the settlement tended to empty the Palestinian land of its contents in favor of its settlements.
"Weizmann" states that one of the most intense battles of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that which is taking place under the surface of the earth, as more than 80% of the mountainous groundwater reserve lies under the lands of the West Bank;
Which tends the occupation to seize the land to facilitate the seizure of its interior, so approximately 83% of the water available annually in these areas goes to the benefit of Israeli cities and settlements, as its giant pumps are able to draw Palestinian groundwater for its own benefit.
This is how the situation became, then;
Control over the surface of the land under the Zionist occupation, and occupational control also over the atmosphere of the lands under the Palestinian Authority, in addition to the policy of ports and checkpoints that tighten the grip on movement and movement, with settlement policies that tighten the screws on the lands of the West Bank, surrounding it and isolating it by building the separation wall, in addition to the seizure On ground water.
This is how the engineering architecture shaped the mechanisms of acute control of the occupation, but did the matter end here?
"Can you imagine the horror of the experience of a five-year-old child in front of four, six, twelve soldiers, their faces painted black, pointing their machine guns in every direction, and their appearance, with the antennas protruding from the bags on their backs, looked closer to Giant strange insects break into the wall after detonating it?
[Aisha, a Palestinian woman, in an interview with the Palestine Monitor]
On April 1, 2002, the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank was on a date with a military incursion by the occupation forces as part of the Ariel Sharon's government’s plan to invade the West Bank in what was called Operation Defensive Shield, which was prepared and trained on - according to the confessions of the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army "Moshe Ya'alon" long ago - in anticipation of any future Palestinian commandos operations, as the Israeli operation aimed to eliminate Palestinian resistance groups, but the occurrence of the Netanya Hotel commando operation hastened its implementation.
The two-week invasion resulted in the death of dozens of camp residents, as well as hundreds. The occupation forces, in turn, suffered heavy losses, while the camp was almost completely destroyed [17].
This massacre, which met with widespread international condemnation and drew the world's attention to the crimes of the occupation, was one of the imperatives of its army in developing smarter alternatives to urban warfare.
According to "Weizmann", the invasion of Jenin was based on a variety of theoretical theses belonging to the French post-structuralist school in the fields of architecture and urban engineering, after which the occupation army approved a set of different war tactics for camp wars, from which the US army later benefited in its invasion of Iraq. . These tactics are based on an unconventional military strategy known as "anthill."
The same strategy was used in the storming of Balata camp in Nablus in the same year. Aviv Kochavi, commander of the parachute battalion that fought the storming, explains his plan, saying: “The Palestinians had prepared the scene of the fighting in light of their expectations that we would adhere to the logic that they had previously set for the course of events… meaning that we would enter into old-fashioned mechanical formations, with compact lines and crowded lines adapted to The engineering organization of the road network ... However, we will completely isolate the camp in broad daylight in order to create the impression that we will carry out a systematic attack, and then we implement a maneuver in which the swarms are simultaneously drawn from each direction across the different dimensions of the enclave ... So our movements through the buildings push the rebels to move to the streets and alleys where We can catch them. "[19]
This was how the new attack was: Soldiers would move inside civilian homes, not through the roads, by storming homes and gathering behind walls, and then burning or detonating them in a way that allowed them to pass through them, and the apartments and rooms would turn into a combat maneuver field, through which the occupation soldiers would tighten their control over the camp from The inside before the fedayeen surprised them with their snipers and ambushes from the outside.
A model of gaps in walls (Reuters)
Weizmann, in an interview with one of the soldiers, called "Gil Fishbein", recounts the battle strategy, writing by the soldier: "We never left the buildings, and we completely advanced between the houses, and we made a dozen roads from outside the camp to its center. We were all inside. Palestinian homes, none of us were in the streets, and we barely ventured out. Our sleeping dormitories and our headquarters were inside these buildings, even carts were placed in an area that we dug inside the houses. ”[2]
In another conversation with Weizmann, Kochavi explains himself as a description of the attack that highlights the convergence of military theory and practice of it through visualization and engineering execution, saying: “This is the space you are looking at and this room that you look at is nothing but your own interpretation of them ... The question is: How do you explain the alley? Do you interpret it as a place, as every architect does, designated for walking, or do you interpret it as a place where walking is prohibited? This only depends on the interpretation, and we interpreted the alley as a place through which walking is prohibited, the door as a place through which traffic is prohibited, and the window as a place A site through which it is forbidden to look, because the weapons are waiting for us in the alley, and the mine is waiting for us behind the doors. "
"Kochavi" saw that the Palestinians would confront them with classicism, and he does not want to adhere to this interpretation, but rather wants to surprise them, saying: "This is the essence of the war, I need to win and I need to get out from an unexpected place ... So we chose the way to walk through walls like a worm. Which cleaves the road with its mouth: we appear in certain places, then disappear. Moving through the walls is a mechanical solution that links theory and practice.
With this surprising mechanism, in addition to the other classic mechanism that relies on sweeping, demolishing and emptying roads from their ambushes and homes from their sites, the occupation was able to use architecture once again to shift the balance of the conflict in its favor in the West Bank, which it faced inversely in the Gaza Strip, when it turned it into the largest laboratory in the West Bank. The world has experienced assassinations carried out from the air, so that the resistance was transformed from the surface of the earth to its interior through tunnels in another architectural maneuver for the hollow land, but it did not obtain the governmental support or the war facilities and the international blindness that the occupation receives in all its crimes.
In the end, the two hands do not seem to be one, not even close, as the occupation imposed wide control through several methods and sophisticated tactics, which prolongs the conflict until a time God knows.
But the most important thing in this regard is that the architectural policies of the occupation are also revealing to us an aspect of the nature of the Israeli political system coming from the colonial eras, which does not hesitate to employ anything, including architecture, in order to achieve its imperial and expansionist goals.
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Margins:
A- Organisms are microorganisms.
B. Apartheid is the system of apartheid through which the white minority ruled in South Africa from 1948 until the system was abolished between the years 1990-1993.
C- Goal ticket is a military term used for the arc area that a soldier covers with his weapon in his field, and which is a triangle with a circular base.
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Sources:
Watch: This is how the occupation withdrew from Gaza in 2005
Eyal Weizmann, Hollow Land .. The Architecture of the Israeli Occupation.
Natan Gutman and Shlomo Shamir, Rice: There Is No Place for the Wholesale Destribution of Settlersm Homes in Gaza Strip During Evacuation.
Gerg Myre, Homes of Israeli Settlers Pose a New Set of Anxieities
Aluf Benn, Pullout Still Poses Rubble Trouble.
This is how Israel established the occupation apparatus in 1967
Avia Hashimoshoni, Yoseph Schweid and Zion Hashimoshon, Masterplan for the city of Jerusalem.
Eyal Weizmann, Jerusalem Demographic Architecture.
Storrs Orientations p44.
Elter Felner, A Policy of Discrimination (Jerusalem: B'tselem, 1995)
Nathan Marom, The Planning Deadlock: Planning Policies, Land Regularization, Building Permits and House Demolition in East Jerusalem.
Talia Sasson, A Interim Legal Opinion Submitted to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on the Subject of Illegal Outposts in West Bank.
The settlement outpost "Migron" is transformed into a settlement.
Ari Shavit, A Leader Awaits a Signal.
Allon Plan, the Palestinian Encyclopedia.
A Hollow Land: Architecture at the Service of the Occupation
Pictures and video: The 2002 Jenin massacre: 58 martyrs for 55 Israeli dead and fierce battles in just 12 days