Ariel Sharon and the Geometry of Occupation

Strategic Points, Flexible Lines, Tense Surfaces, Political Volumes Agoraphobia

The 1967 war changed the geopolitical balance of the Middle East. Israel more than tripled the territory under its control, the IDF [Israel Defence Force] was deployed on the Suez Canal, along the Jordan River and on the Golan Heights.

The dramatic landscapes of the Sinai Desert and holy sites of the West Bank fed directly into the Israeli mythic imagination. An unparalleled condition of economic prosperity begun, due at least in part to cheap labour drawn from an occupied Palestinian population of more than one million.

The claustrophobia that dominated all aspects of Israel’s pre-1967 existence, whose borders were defined by then Foreign Minister Abba Eban as no less than the “Auschwitz lines”, vanished in a national sense of euphoria. But national anxieties like personal ones never vanish and their object can only be gradually replaced, thus the Occupied Territories grew in the national imagination too large to hold, control and effectively protect from the dangers waiting “outside”.

A creeping agoraphobia, fed by an obsessive scanning of the contents of the new territories from within and by an anxious looking over and across it, meant that the edge had to fortified.

In the project of deliniation and fortification that ensued, two geometric models of defence confronted each other: linear fortification and the matrix of strong points placed in depth. These models started as military terms and both were implemented in the fortification of the Sinai, where, during the War of Attrition of 1970-71, the edge was under constant attack. But, as many things Israeli, these models later turned into civilian planning concepts and influenced the nature and distribution of settlement throughout the West Bank.

Two men of the Labour movement, Haim Bar-Lev and Yigal Allon, were put in charge of fortifying the edges of the Occupied Territories on the two different fronts. Haim Bar-Lev, then IDF Chief of Staff, devised a series of linear fortification along the cease-fire line with Egypt on the Suez Canal, while Yigal Allon, a previous Chief of Staff and then the Minister of Agriculture, devised and implemented the Allon Plan, calling for the establishment of a security border with Jordan composed of a series of paramilitary agricultural outposts stretched along a 10 km wide strip along the Jordan Valley thereafter termed the Iron Valley. Both plans were products of the same doctrine that called for the creation of linear defences along the outer edges of the territory. It so happened that in both cases the edge was marked by a water line. The Allon plan was the civilian version of the Bar Lev line; the latter was composed of military strongholds and the former of co-operative agricultural settlements .

The Bar-Lev Line was an immense constructional and technical undertaking demanding the shuffling of huge quantities of sand from across the desert to the bank of the Canal. It was a thin line of artificial landscape composed of hardened sand ramps, deep trenches and fortified positions (called Ma’ozim in Hebrew) that overlooked the Egyptian positions from a mere 300 meters.

Ariel Sharon, a young and popular general serving as the Chief of Southern Command, noticeable for breaking traditional military ranks, and unlike the rest of the General Staff, abandoning Labour for the political right, dared to challenge the logic behind the creation of the Bar Lev Line. He claimed that the army “cannot win a defensive battle on an outer line… “ and proposed that the IDF should “fight a defensive battle the way it should be fought – not on forward line but in depth” Sharon argued that the Ma’ozim offered static targets to the Egyptian artillery and should therefore be abandoned. Instead a mobile, point-based defence in depth, should be constructed. More specifically, he proposed and later started the construction of a series of strong points (Ta’ozim in Hebrew) spread out further in depth on the mountain summits that dominated the canal plain.

Before long the entire zone was enveloped in another frenzy of construction, the mountain outposts were constructed and fortified as command and long-range surveillance points, and a network of high-volume military roads was paved to connect them.

But then, at the first opportunity, Sharon was dismissed by the angered Bar-Lev while his plan was only partially implemented.

The principle of linear defence in line is to prohibit (or inhibit) the enemy from gaining any foothold beyond it. Along this principle the assertion of the commander of the Wehrmacht defences along the Atlantic, Erwin Rommel, that the only chance to stop an invasion force was to beat the Allies at the water's edge can be understood . But as the Germans knew well, when the line is breached even at one location, much like a leaking glass of water, it is rendered immediately useless.

A defence based on a network of points in depth relies on a matrix where the strong points act as nodes connected by physical and electro-magnetic links: roads and electronic communications. Each point can connect and communicate with any other, and each point can overlook, and whenever necessary, covers each other with fire-support, thus creating an interlocking fortified surface.

This network principle relies on a high level of mobility, and uses dynamic patrols to move constantly and unexpectedly between the different points. In an attack this form of organization is flexile: It can adapt to the fall of one point by forming new connections across the matrix.

The geography of nodes in a matrix cannot be conventionally measured in distance, because for nodes distance is not a measurable absolute but a relative figure that is defined by the speed and reliability of the connection, i.e.: the point is relevant in relation to what it can see, how fast and how secure can one travel between it and any other point at any given moment.

In 1973 the Bar Lev line looked steadfast. Moshe Dayan, then Minister of Defence, claimed "It would take the American and Soviet engineer corps together to break through [it]”. The Russian proposed a tactical nuclear explosion, but on the 6th of October 1973, it took two Egyptian armies only few hours to break through and overrun this formidable line. Surprisingly, the line did not surrender to fire but to water: British-made high pressure water cannons used the water of the canal to melt the artificial landscape allowing the Egyptians to position some 100,000 heavily armoured troops on its eastern, previously Israeli controlled, side. Two days later, on the 8th of October, the day of most bitter defeat in IDF history, when waves of charging Israeli armoured counter offensives broke against the dug in Egyptian armies, the day Moshe Dayan famously proclaimed that the “Third Temple was falling”, a shift of national consciousness occurred and a process began that forced Labour four years later, for the first time in the history of the state, out of Government.

The Yom Kippur War ended with an unprecedented public outrage. While the heads of the General Staff and of Labour leadership were rolling, Sharon, the general who devised the defence strategy that deterred the Egyptians from progressing deeper into the Sinai and later lead the successful Israeli counter-crossing of the canal onto African soil and encircled the 3rd Egyptian army, was, correctly or not, perceived publicly as the man who saved the nation.

The Suez Canal was the place where Israel’s territorial ambitions and fears consolidated into physical form, and where the state’s future spatial practices were tested out. The debate around the construction and fall of the Suez Canal’s fortification and the trauma of the canal campaign, deeply etched in the national consciousness, were endlessly replayed, just as lost wars are forever re-fought, this time on the hills of the West Bank.
Strategic Points

With the rise of the Likud to power in the 1977 election, Ariel Sharon, the new Minister of Agriculture, took over the ministerial committee in charge of settlements.

This was an important task in an administration of politicians that got accustomed to an permanent role in the political opposition and were never previously given any operative positions. Without delay, Sharon devised a new location strategy for settlements in order to turn the West Bank into a defensible frontier and consolidate Israeli control of the territories. Now reacting against the second of Labour defensive lines, the Allon Plan for a line of settlements along the Jordan River, Sharon, seeking to implement the lessons of the Sinai campaign claimed that: “ …a thin line of settlements along the Jordan would not provide a viable defence unless the high terrain behind it was also fortified….” Consequently, he proposed to establish “other settlements on the high terrain… [and] several east-west roads along strategic axes, together with the settlements necessary to guard them.“

Switching roles, Labour – which historically conducted its state-building policies almost entirely through the construction of settlements – was unable or unwilling to revitalise its energies for the settlements of the West Bank and did not do much beyond construction of neighbourhoods around Jerusalem and a thin line of rural settlements along the Jordan River. It was Sharon, the Labourite turn Likudnik, and Gush Emmunim, the national religious and somewhat messianic organization, that saw in the depth of the West Bank a sacred territory and a defensible frontier across whose depth a matrix of settlement could be constructed.

In a famous syllogism, Lenin once described strategy as “the choice of points where force is to be applied” . Points have no dimension or size; they are mere co-ordinates on the X/Y axis of the plane and on the Z-axis of latitude. The location strategy of points means a close reading of the terrain and an a decision with the precision of acupancture regarding where military force should be concentrated. The fact that the word a ‘point on the ground’, and sometimes simply ‘a point’ [Nekuda] means in Hebrew a settlement is indicative of a planning culture that consider the positioning of a settlement, rather than its composition, as its essential essence and strategic asset.

When the line of the border and the territorial extent of the surface become less strategically important, the political order itself ceases to be line based – dependent on a homogeneous territorial state sovereignty – and becomes increasingly point based – dependent on a network system of important nodal points. In the latter, an understanding of borders as lines gives way to a frontier like arrangement, composed of a series of disconnected and estranged points across a surface.

Sharon imagined the national territory as a permeable mythical and military frontier, a border without a line, that blurs the distinctions between a political “inside” and “outside” – or borrowing the words of the Israeli sociologist Adriana Kemp, blurring the difference between “the political space of the state and the cultural space of the nation” a difference that is “ hidden by the hyphenated concept of “nation-state”.”
The Sharon Plan

Settlements as autonomous and separate points on a matrix meant that a reliable communication between them had to be established.

In 1982 Sharon published his masterplan . In it he outlined the locations of more than a hundred settlement points, placed on strategic summits, and marked the paths for a new network of high-volume traffic arteries connecting between them and further into the Israeli heartland.

Sharon saw in the formation of continuous Jewish habitation a way towards the annexation of the areas vital for Israel’s security. These areas were drawn onto the plan in the shape of the letter H, and the plan became later known as the H plan. On this plan the areas important for Israel’s security were drawn as two parallel north-south lines along two strips of land: one along the Green Line deliniating the West Bank from the west, and another along the Jordan Valley, accepting the presence of the Allon plan to deliniate the territories from the east. These strips were connected in between by few east west arteries with the main one going through Jerusalem, thus closing a [very] proximate H. The rest, some 40% of the West Bank, separate enclaves around Palestinian cities and towns, were to revert to some yet undefined form of Palestinian self-management.

The position of settlements was to make this plan a reality. Relying on their own weapons, ammunition and military contingency plans, the settlements were to form a network of ‘civilian fortifications’ integrated into the IDF’s overall system of defence, serving strategic imperative by overlooking main traffic arteries and road junctions in their region.

The positioning of settlements on the high ground offered three strategic assets: greater tactical strength, self-protection, and a wider view.

The role of settlements as observation and control points promoted a particular layout for their urbanity. The (sub)urban layout of a mountain settlement is concentric; its roads are stretched in rings following the topographical lines closing a complete circuit around the summit. The outward facing arrangement of homes orients the view towards the surrounding landscape in which “national interests” camouflaged themselves as picturesque parts of the panorama. The logic of this geometric order is to produce ‘panoptic fortresses’ –optical devices on an urban scale, laid out to generate observation, spatially and temporally, all round.

Soon enough, another of the construction frenzies that are indicative of the fact that Sharon is in a position close to executive power had began. The “Biblical” heartland of the West Bank became overlaid by the two symbiotic and synergetic instruments of security: the settlement observation point and the serpentine road network, the latter being the prime device for serving the former, the former overlooking and protecting the latter.

Sharon realized the double potential of an emerging messianic-religious impulses to settle a mythological landscape and the desire of the middle classes to push outside of congested city centres to populate his matrix of points with civilian communities. Unlike Labour’s agricultural settlements of the Kibbutz and the Moshav, the new ‘Community Settlements’ were in effect dormitory suburbs of closely knit social groups composed mainly of professional middle classes of national-religious convictions. The fact that work had to be sought outside settlements made them rely on the roads to connect them with the employment centres in the metropolitan areas around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, within Israel proper.

Similar to the way that the American suburbs developed as an offspring of pacified WW II construction technology, and especially around the system of interstate highways, developed to serve the integrated industry of the American war economy, Israeli suburbia made perfect use of the system laid out for mobile defence in depth. The massive system of 50 highways together with a modern matrix of infrastructure became effective instruments of development – merging the needs of a sprawling suburbia with those national security and political ambitions for pushing ever more people into the West Bank.

Now building for civilian communities, Sharon and his engineers, already experts in military defence works, had to become urbanists. Sharon did not mind much and “Personally got tremendous satisfaction seeing how everything was moving forward, how drawings on a map were every day becoming more of a reality on the ground.” His planning decisions, however, were not made according to professional planning criteria of economical sustainability, ecology or efficiency of services, but as ways of executing a strategic agenda through spatial manipulations. Planning under Sharon shed off any shred of pretence to facilitate the social and economical improvement of an abstract ‘public’ and landed itself fully as the executive arm of the strategic and geopolitical agenda of the Israeli State.

Architecture and planning were thus used as the continuation of war by other means. Just like the tank, the gun and the bulldozer, building matter and infrastructure were used to achieve tactical and strategic aims. It was an urban warfare in which urbanity provided not the theatre of war but its very weapons and ammunition. It was a war in which a civilian population was drafted, knowingly or not, to supervise vital national interests as plain clothes security personnel.

But in the geo-political reality of the 1980s, after the terms of the peace agreement with Egypt were fulfilled, after the first Intifadah began in 1987, and more so after the drying out of military assistance to the Arab states with the collapse of the Eastern Block, the “danger” that the state faced was less perceived to be connected to a conventional attack of Arab armour from the “outside” and instead turned to face the “dangers” that lay with a disgruntled and restless Palestinian population located already “inside”. The centres and headquarters of popular resistance were deep within the Palestinian towns and cities and especially within the winding and impenetrable fabric of the refugee camps. The way to contain these urban threats, from a planner’s perspective, was by using more of the weapon of counter urbanity – or more precisely, counter sub-urbanity.

Thus beyond them being forward positions in the defence of the state from an invasion, the settlements had to perform the role of civilian control. This aim was achieved by knitting them together form a continuous built fabric of homes, industrial zones, infrastructure and roads that acted as wedges separating between the different centres of Palestinian populations, here bisecting a Palestinian traffic artery, there bending to surround a town. Severing Palestinian spatial continuity was seen as a means to separate the Palestinian population into small, manageable islands that could be easily controlled, disallowing the consolidation of real metropolitan built centres, that finally might act to allow a viable territorial-political entity to form.

Jeff Halper called the contemporary consequence of this strategic texture “the Matrix of Control” .

Within this matrix the inhabitation of nodal points acts as on/off valves to allow/disallow movement, replacing the necessity for direct presence within Palestinian cities.

Currently there are about 150 Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, housing about 400,000 Israeli Settlers. More than 200,000 of these are in the West Bank and about 190,000 are in the occupied parts of Jerusalem. The built fabric of settlements occupy only some 2% of the land but their strategic presence paralyses, the whole Palestinian terrain.

The Battle for the Hilltops

Instead of implementing his 1980s plan gradually, Sharon, fearing the reversal of his spatial practices, believed it was important “…to secure a presence first and only then to build the settlements up” . He acted to immediately lay out the entire skeleton of the project– and seeded the area with small outposts, some hardly more than footholds, composed of tents or mobile homes.

The contemporary scenes of “removal” and “repositioning” of the “illegal” outposts that are parts of Israel’s duties in the context of the American sponsored road map can be seen in the context of Sharon’s location strategy. The so-called ‘Battle for the Hilltops’ that started the illegal setting of new outposts began in 1995 when Ariel Sharon, leading the opposition to the Oslo accords at the time when Rabin Government stopped issuing permits for new settlements, urged young ideological and religious settlers to "move, run and grab as many hilltops as possible” replace the suburban culture of the settlements with a renewed sense of frontier in order to “enlarge the [Jewish] settlements”. In that fashion more than 100 ‘temporary’ outposts with a total population of about 1000 were set up on the remaining strategic hilltops, aiming to gain hold of the areas necessary to challenge any proposal for territorial compromise, or at least change the borders, if they had to be set, to Israel’s advantage.

The policy of dismantling carried out today is not less revealing than that of settling, as Sharon already admitted, he aims to remove only those outposts which are not of strategically important.

As a gifted military planner Sharon knows how to organise the environment in different strategic fashions: as an instrument of aggression, of defence or of control. It is not surprising that Sharon came to prominence again, this time as the Prime Minister, at the moment when security and territorial planning fused together, when, with the construction of the barrier/border, the final round of territorial manoeuvres in the Israeli/Palestinian history appears to be taking place.
The Barrier

Points and lines are synergetic systems. 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 protects them (barriers). The latter are concretised by a series of long and interlocking mechanisms: barbed wire, ditches, dykes and checkpoints.

What the Sharon Government refers to as the “Separation Fence” and foreign media call “the Wall” is in effect a complex barrier composed of a sequence of fortifications measuring between 35 and 100 meters in width that is in the process of being constructed through the West Bank. It is designed to separate the Jewish settlements and their supportive infrastructure from the Palestinian population centres in the West Bank.

The main component of the barrier is a touch sensitive, “smart”, three meters high electronic fence, placed on 150 cm deep concrete foundation and toped with barbed wire, day and night video cameras and some small radars. Stretched along the east side of the fence (facing the bulk of the West Bank) are a patrol road, a trench three meters deep and two barbed wire fences. West of it (towards Israel proper) are a footprint trace road, a patrol road suitable for armoured vehicles and some more barbed wire fences.

At some places, when the barrier nears a Palestinian town, the operationally-required see-through fence solidifies into an 8-meter high bullet-proof wall, and watchtowers with firing posts are placed at intervals of few hundred meters along it. Other positions utilize enhanced natural barriers, like 50 meters high artificial cliffs cut into the mountain rock. Seven control gates for Israelis and nine for Palestinians are planned in order to allow people in and out of the caged area and some twenty-six “agricultural gates” will serve Palestinian farmers whose lands are on the other side.

The barrier is constructed from north to south in several separate phases. The first stage, about 145 Kilometres along the northern third of the West Bank, became operational on July 2003. The area of the central phase is currently extensively mapped from the air, and around ten planning offices are labouring over alternative paths. Large tracks of land were already seized for “temporary military needs” while uncertainties regarding the path of the barrier still exist.

In November 2000, a little more than a month after the Intifadah began, then Prime Minister Ehud Barak approved a plan to establish a linear barrier along the Green Line composed of a series of ditches and dykes to prevent the passage of motor vehicles into Israel.

Labour, supporting the idea of unilateral separation along a fortified line, has since lost two elections. On the other side of the political spectrum, Sharon, not wanting to be seen as the person who sets a line through the heart of the Land of Israel, insisted up to two days prior to his announcement of the construction of the barrier that “the idea [to build the barrier] is populist.” However, on April 14 2002, the Sharon Government “surrendered” to popular demands and decided to establish a permanent barrier “to prevent the uncontrolled entry of Palestinians from the West Bank into Israel”. What started as the brainchild of the left was continuously revised and “improved” by the Sharon Government. The materiality of the barrier was expanded into a monumental fortification system at a per-kilometre of about $2 M and its length, now with deep meandering folds, has been extended more than three times the original length. The line Sharon has in mind is very different than Labour’s, it is to be a feat of great geometrical complexity and technical undertaking that will finally make use of all the settlement points he had positioned.
Flexible Line

If the direction and path of a line is the sum total of the force field of pressures applied on it, the barrier can offer the clearest diagram of the idea of pressure moulded into form. The built and planed paths of the barrier line are responses to momentary balance of several forces and influences.

As the path of the barrier “snakes” southwards, it goes through a process in which political pressures echo each other, and under the principle of “positive feedback” make more radical twists and turns, pushing ever-deeper east of the Green Line. When the barrier nears their region, settlement councils start applying their political leverage for the path to “loop around” and swallow them into the western (Israeli) “inside”. Appearing to be wary of settlers’ pressure, but more probably using it as an excuse to perform what was planed in advance, the government seeks to include as large a number of settlement points as possible and leave as few Palestinians as possible within the Israeli side of the barrier.

A particularly strong outcry came from the settlement of Alfei-Menashe, a relatively wealthy suburban community. According to the first phase northern path, authorized on June 2002, this settlement found itself left “outside”. The local panic of being “abandoned” mediated through political pressures and ultimatums of right-wing ministers managed to cause a revision of the path and the stretching out of a long loop aimed to incorporate the settlement back “inside”. As a result, the Palestinian towns of Qalqiliya and Habla, normally few hundred meters apart, found themselves surrounded on all sides by the barrier’s extension, and connection between them is now a corridor 20 km long.

The path of the barrier was complicated by a series of other external influences: Following the pressure of ministers from religious parties, the path of the Jerusalem envelope (the Jerusalem Metropolitan part of the barrier) was stretched a few hundred meters southwards to incorporate an old archaeological site believed to be the biblical era tomb of Rachel . Ten other archaeological sites, including one complete Egyptian city, were discovered during the digging works along another part of the barrier and in some cases the path stretched to include them in.

The desire to match the path of the barrier with sub-surface interests meant the incorporation of the extraction points of the Mountain Aquifer while the desire to serve Israel’s aerial interests meant the taking over of areas located closely under the landing paths of international flights. Besides that, inner political pressures and foreign diplomatic constraints were capable of shifting the path here and there or cancelling whole parts of it altogether.

It seems that the only consideration absent from the vectors of push and pull are those relating to the human rights and daily life of the Palestinian residents of the area. Along the whole length of the built and proposed paths, Palestinian villagers will be cut away from their farmland and water sources. The human right organization B’Tselem estimated that the barrier would negatively affect the livelihood of at least 210,000 Palestinians, and further irreversibly damage the economical prospects of a Palestinian state.

The central phase of the barrier path, now under planning and revision, is far more strategically and politically sensitive than the built up northern part. In this phase the barrier must go through the densely populated regions close to the metropolitan regions of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It is the region where the largest numbers of settlers are located, built densities are high, and settlement real estate is relatively expensive. With Israeli pro-capita GDP 20 times that of Palestinians, the economic disparity between the two groups is higher then between any two other neighbouring populations. In the central region, where upper middle class suburbs crowd against villages cultivating in middle-age technology, the economical contrast is much more extreme and adds a social, and in case of burglaries, criminal dimension to the idea of separation. It is not yet clear what path the barrier will take through this region – none of the maps published as speculations by the many organizations monitoring the construction of the barrier are similar, and the government itself revises its plans as pressure mounts and ebbs.

The Initial path released by the government had a deep fold, stretched out in order to incorporate the settlement-city of Ariel to the Israeli side, splicing the West Bank, in that location, in two.

But, unlike during the construction of the northern part, the central phase did not catch the Palestinians off guard, and together with Israeli peace organizations they finally managed to put the barrier and its path on the international agenda. Across the world, leaders propose re-routings or demand cancellations in every meeting with an Israeli official . Condoleezza Rice expressed the particular concern of the American administration with the loop designed to encapsulate Ariel, Sharon responded that the barrier will go ahead as planed, the Government has authorised a budget of almost $200M, but the path of the barrier is still unclear. The mounting diplomatic pressures, and especially the American one, may mean that the barrier construction in the central zone will be delayed (or radically pushed back to the Green Line) until after an initial territorial phase of a political agreement between Israel, the Palestinians and the US will be reached.
Pockets and Islands

The more forces there are in the vicinity of a line, the more complex its path is. When the force field around it contains intense contradictions the line can no longer maintain its graphic coherence and shreds into fragments and discontinuous vectors.

If completed anywhere close to present predictions, the barrier will completely transform the geography of occupation. It will divide the West Bank in two. The first part, under Israeli control, comprising more than half of the area, roughly corresponding to Sharon’s 1982 plan (LINK), will include the whole of the Jordan Valley on the east along the Jordanian border and the wide meandering strip of land on the west along the Green Line, these, just like in Sharon’s original plan will connect via Jerusalem to complete the H shaped envelop. The rest, a sliced-up central area around the Palestinian cities, where most Palestinians live, will initially be under military control and thereafter gradually become the “Palestinian State”. In this geographical arrangement the Palestinians are simultaneously inside and outside: landlocked inside a complete territorial envelope, without any border save the very long one to Israel, but, recalling the Apartheid era South-African Bantustans, outside the state system.

Within each of the main areas describes above, there will be islands belonging to the other zone. The inability to draw a line that would clearly separate Palestinians from Israelis fragmented the Territories into a patchwork of pockets and islands. More than 100,000 Palestinians will be left within the Israeli side, surrounded by the barrier from east and by earth ramps, ditched and road-blocks from west, and about the same number of Israelis, in remote settlements and military installations, will remain in pockets and islands of “Special Security Zones” within the Palestinian side of the barrier.

To protect the settlements islands, and reassure their inhabitants, a sequence of fortifications identical to those that compose the primary barrier, is being laid out in smaller circuits around them. Like splintered worms, the barrier’s shreds take on renewed life, curling around the isolated settlements and along the roads connecting them. The barrier thus ceased to be the single and continuous line of a border and turned into a condition – the very state of heightened security itself.

It is a condition of double enclosure. Settlements are fenced in for self-protection while Palestinian towns are enclosed from outside to prohibit security threats from leaking out. With this arrangement, the traditional perception of political space as a continuous territorial surface, clearly delimited by borders, is no longer relevant.

If the relation between the length of a border and the surface of the territory is an indication to the amount of ‘security’ – the folds of the barrier line and its separate shreds place “security” everywhere throughout the terrain. With this principle in mind, Sharon finally merged the two extremes that define Israel’s relation to its edge, simultaneously creating the line of a “border” and the security space of the “frontier”. Similar to the way in which the fjords, islands and lakes along Scandinavian coasts create a whole zone across which water meets rock, the barrier’s folds and shreds create an ever-present high-friction zone where civilian population are jammed against into “security”.

Beyond its complexity, flexibility and length, it is the “temporal” nature of the frontier that renders it most effective in terms of the occupation. The Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir noted that the occupation perpetuates itself through ever new temporary facts, and that it is exactly the “permanent temporality” of conflict that allow the occupation to continue.

Indeed throughout the Intifadah, all the fences, dykes, ditches and check points were quickly deployable and removable, put up and dismantled – making temporary curfews and closures, surprise check-points and lightning operations, shrinking and stretching the territory in seemingly unpredictable ways.

Local security systems, instruments in the spatial organization of fear, placed around shopping malls, bus stations and inner city residential neighbourhoods allow the border to fractalize further. On both sides of the green line, walls, fences and CCTV based security systems become the rule rather than the exception . Fortifications sold to the Israeli public as security measures recall Mike Davis’s observation that in LA security turned into a lifestyle.

The government maintained that the principles that guide the path of the barrier are “temporary and urgent security considerations” and not political ones and that the barrier is not, and will never become a permanent border. The claim for the “temporality” of the barrier describes it as an instrument of contingency in a temporary state of emergency gone permanent.

Barriers are indeed different than borders in that they do not separate an “inside” and an “outside” of sovereignty based political and legal system, but merely act to prohibit movement across a territory. But security and politics were never separate in Israeli history, and temporary Israeli security arrangements, even when they didn’t cost as much, were always the way of the state to set permanent facts on the ground.
Hollow Land

When the barrier is completed and the temporary-cum-permanent security measures will outline the border of a permanent-temporary Palestinian State scattered on land locked sovereign islands, another territorial paradox will have to be resolved.

The fragmentation of jurisdiction across the surface will not be compatible with Sharon’s public declarations that with the implementation of the American sponsored Road-Map, he will carve out a “contiguous area of territory in the West Bank that would allow the Palestinians to travel from Jenin [the northern most city in the West Bank] to Hebron [the southern most city in the West Bank] without passing any Israeli roadblocks.” When the bewildered reporters objected based on the fact that the proposed path of the barrier will enclose these cities and set them apart in a complete territorial envelops, and asked how could contiguity be resolved with fragmentation, Sharon responded, probably with one of his famous winks, that this will be accomplished on ”a combination of tunnels and bridges”

This type of continuity, Sharon realised in 1996 when as Minister of National Infrastructure, he inaugurated the first apparatus of vertical separation – the Tunnel Road – can be achieved not on the surface but in volume.

The Tunnel Road connects Jerusalem with the southern settlements of Gush Etzion and further, with the Jewish neighbourhoods of Hebron. To accomplish this it performs a double contortion: spanning as a bridge over a Palestinian cultivated valley, and diving into a tunnel under a Palestinian suburb of Bethlehem. Both the valley that the road spans over, and the city it dives under, are, according to the Oslo agreement, areas under limited Palestinian sovereignty, and thus the physical separation of traffic arrangements is mirrored by a political one – the city above is under Palestinian limited sovereignty while the road below it is under full Israeli sovereignty.

By introducing the vertical dimension, in similar schemes of over and under-passes, linkage could be achieved between the different territorial islands and the last territorial paradox of the eternal frontier be resolved. Israeli/Palestinian roads and infrastructure will connect settlements/Palestinian towns while spanning over or under Palestinian/Israeli lands.

Consequently, and hand in hand with the planned completion of the barrier, plans are under way to transform road no. 60 – the main north-south traffic artery connecting all major Palestinian cities – into an elevated construction placed on stilts allowing for Israeli east-west routes (those making the H plan) to pass undisturbed underneath it. In the point when these roads cross, sovereignty will be divided along the up down axis of the vertical dimension.

In the West Bank, bridges are no longer merely devices engineered to overcome a natural boundaries or connect impossible points. Rather, they become the boundary itself. 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 “hollow” three-dimensional surface, within which the West Bank could be physically partitioned into two separate but overlapping national geographies. Within this volume, separate security corridors, infrastructure, overground bridges and underground tunnels are woven into an Escher-like space.

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 closed off walled spaces and exclusive security corridors, all overlooked through specially conceived and inhabited observation points.

Although, and perhaps because borders and the technologies necessary to maintain them have become so incredibly expensive and complex, the politics of separation will soon be completely and utterly exhausted as a viable alternative. The volumetric technologies of separation might well be geometrically creative and “interesting” planning wise but in essence they are the very familiar and traditional absolute and hermetic borders, here disguised within the Trojan horse of spatial radicalism.

The different formal variations on partition plans – the ‘design solution’ to the conflict considering current facts on the ground – have become utterly unfeasible, non-viable and incapable to answer the aspirations of two nations grounded in territorially based identities. Against the endless search for the form and mechanisms of ‘perfect’ separation, across complex lines, points surfaces or volumes, comes the realisation that a viable solution does not lay within the realm of design. If THE territorial struggle of the century is seriously proposed to be foreclosed in this bizarre manner, perhaps the only counter proposal is not for more planning “creativity” a la Sharon, but for a non-territorial, perhaps a legal approach, one based on other principles than on partition.

If we dare look at the ‘Holy Land’ as a densely inhabited environment of quite modest proportions (it barely exceeds the London 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 in complex geometry – but the formation of a single democratic, non-discriminatory and non-ethnic state based on mutuality, equality and fundamental political and human rights across the complete borders of Israel and Palestine.