THE WALL - A Line in the Sand

NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/arts/design/01ouro.html

JERUSALEM

Just north of this city, you can climb to the top of a bluff overlooking part of the dark concrete barrier that is slowly snaking its way northward along the West Bank.

For now, it stops abruptly in a cloud of construction dust at a makeshift checkpoint a few hundred yards from here. But at dusk, its future path is outlined by a necklace of lights. Following routes traveled by Israelis, the lights turn eastward, to trace the contours of barren hills before coiling tightly around the Kochav Yaakov settlement. The surrounding territory, inhabited by Palestinians, is enveloped in darkness. For those who imagined the new Israeli security barrier as a simple line on a map, the image is illuminating. In certain respects, the proposed 450-mile barrier is a model of planning reduced to its most primitive - the desire to divide black from white, us from them.

 

Conceived in 2002 to protect Israel from terrorists, it has been extolled as a necessary tool for self-preservation. It has also been assailed as a formula for ghettoization and a symbol of colonialism. But on a fundamental level, it is also a piece of architecture. And its construction has generated an architectural debate as charged as any in the political realm. That debate has pitted strategists who mine the leftist architectural theories of the 1960's for ideas on contemporary urban warfare, against architects who see the barrier as a perversion of those ideas, along with the utopian visions of Modernists who believed society's problems could be
solved with concrete, glass and steel. It is not only unfolding in the halls of academia, but in Israeli and American military circles. And it presents a vision of the wall as a system of complex, interweaving spaces - some concrete, some invisible - that is far from our normal perception of an international border.

At the center of this debate is Eyal Weizman, a 35-year-old Israeli architect and activist who has been a controversial figure in his homeland since 2002, when he published a report for a local human rights organization that essentially accused Israeli architects of being collaborators in the colonization of the West Bank . Building is never a neutral act, of course, and Mr. Weizman makes no distinctions between the realms of architecture and politics. For decades, he has often noted, Israeli architects made much of their livelihood designing settlements in the occupied territories. Many felt their job was to solve problems - to make spaces functional, more humane, more aesthetically pleasing. But in doing so, Mr. Weizman argues, they also made the unacceptable seem tolerable, lending an oppressive policy a veneer of good taste.

"We examined these architectural drawings in a clinical manner," Mr. Weizman said.
"We showed that the crime was in the making of the line - in the drawing itself - not only in the principle of building a settlement." Those views have struck a nerve among architects, but his real target is the barrier itself - especially the huge concrete slabs that snake through the area's dense urban neighborhoods. Twisting along a path that the Israeli Supreme Court has ordered redrawn many times, the wall has to take into account the constantly shifting political realities of the Middle East . And it is only one element of an elaborate system of controls that includes advanced surveillance techniques both on the ground and in the air. Mr. Weizman, who is now based in London , describes the barrier as "too insane to operate - eventually, it will collapse under its own weight."

Among the most provocative counterpoints for Mr. Weizman's analysis is Shimon Navez, a retired brigadier general in the Israeli Army. General Navez, who despite his nearly 30 years in service revels in the kind of jargon more typically heard in graduate architecture studios, directs the Israeli Defense Forces' Operational Theory Research Institute, which trains
senior military staff in innovative war tactics. "We were looking for new modes of thinking that could be suitable to military strategy," he said. "The Americans were looking for technological solutions; we wanted to understand the whole depth of the problem.

It struck us that architecture could be a very helpful metaphor." The general has little faith in the barrier, which he called "too simplistic, too vulgar" to accomplish its task. "It is a tragic regression in terms of strategy," he said. "It derives from a necessity, but in the longer range it will create a lot of damage - a lot of antagonism. It is a huge violation of space that will be hard to remove."

GENERAL NAVEZ'S main interest lies in those theorists - embraced by the generation of architects that cut its teeth during the Paris uprisings of 1968 - who sought to break down the hierarchies of postwar society. Among them were Gilles Deleuze and the Situationalists, intellectual troublemakers who theorized about how abandoned parts of the city could be imbued with new meaning, and George Bataille, who sought to break down the physical
constraints imposed by architecture as part of a broader anticapitalist agenda.
Like Deleuze, General Navez speaks of "striated" and "smooth" spaces - of a world shaped by solid walls and a more fluid one that is virtually without boundaries. In General Navez's view, the West Bank is already an example of smooth space. It is segregated into a matrix of carefully defined zones, some of which are controlled by the Israeli military and others of which are controlled jointly with the Palestinian Authority. Satellite and aerial surveillance has become ubiquitous. And an Israeli company is now developing a handheld thermal-imaging machine that will let soldiers detect human figures through concrete.

As an example of how these ideas are being applied, General Navez cites the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza , saying that as long as Israel controls the air space, what happens on the ground is essentially irrelevant from a security standpoint. "The main idea is that we can see and do what we please," he said. General Navez does not direct Israeli military policy. But his views have exerted an influence over a small group of Israeli generals who he refers to as his "disciples." He has also met with officials at the Pentagon and at American military research groups like the Rand Corporation to discuss urban warfare in the Middle East , where "swarming" - the idea that soldiers infiltrate enemy space like "clouds" operating in small, loosely coordinated groups - has become a catch phrase. In such a scenario, the traditional command structure does not apply. Urban soldiers communicate directly with each other in a fluid, amorphous world, free to react to whatever situation arises.

Compared to such a dystopian vision, a concrete barrier erected to separate Israelis from Palestinians can seem like an apparition from antiquity, a contemporary counterpart to the Roman "limes," the crude wooden barrier Trajan built to keep out warring tribes - to separate civilization from barbarity. Yet to Mr. Weizman, these are simply two forms of the same evil. General Navez, he said, "is simply trying to replace one form of control with
another that is less visible." THE so-called smooth space that is part of General Navez's military vision contrasts strikingly with the experience of the average Israeli or
Palestinian on the ground, where it is harder to escape from concrete reality.
In the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis, for example, the former road to Jericho now ends at a part of the wall spray-painted with anti-American and anti-Israeli graffiti. A freshly paved road leading to an Israeli settlement runs alongside the barrier. On the other side, garbage is strewn across what was once an olive grove. The wall's crudely exposed concrete bases serve as a makeshift staircase for Palestinian schoolchildren making their way up the hill to class. The disparity between the Palestinian and Israeli sides is reinforced by the robust investment in public services on the Israeli side, from sewage systems and garbage collection to well-lighted highways. The forced segregation of two worlds that were until recently intertwined has fostered some bizarre design solutions. Near Bethlehem , a section of the wall swerves abruptly to follow one side of a road that connects Israeli territory to Rachel's Tomb, the site where the biblical matriarch is said to be buried. Eventually, the wall will turn back to trace the other side of the road; once a bustling commercial strip catering to tourists, the area on either side of this corridor is already a ghost town. Many houses and shops are boarded up. The dusty streets evoke a Hollywood back lot waiting for actors to return.

Israelis driving from Jerusalem to Bethlehem now use two tunnels and a bridge to weave their way through the Palestinian enclave of Beit Jala. Above the tunnels, the military is constructing a concrete barrier that will divide Beit Jala in two, cutting many Palestinian farmers off from their lands. Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem 's former deputy mayor, refers to this as "six-dimensional space" - two three-dimensional worlds, one Palestinian, the other Israeli, that are geographically interwoven even though they no longer come into direct contact. "Once you accept the premise of separation," he said, shaking his head, "you come up with ideas that to ordinary people seem insane, but here begin to seem logical. It is now no longer horizontal division, but vertical as well. Part Arab and part Israeli. And eventually, it will create its own reality." Not even the Old City is exempt from such convoluted urban planning strategies.

 

For centuries, the Haram al Sharif, or Temple Mount , has been sacred to Muslims as the site of the Dome of the Rock shrine and Al Aksa Mosque and to Jews as the site where their ancient First and Second Temples once stood. In 2000, President Bill Clinton suggested to Prime Minister Ehud Barak that Israel control the area "underneath" the Haram al Sharif, so Jews could burrow to where the ruins of Solomon's temple once stood, while the Palestinians assumed sovereignty over the plateau on which the mosque complex sits. The plan was dropped, but the logic behind it - that Jerusalem can be parceled into horizontal strata - is very much alive. And it threatens to tear the city apart.

 

Among the barrier's less obvious effects has been to sow panic among Palestinians desperate to stay within Jerusalem 's boundaries. Many have retreated deep into the Old City 's Muslim quarter, worsening congestion there. Recently, Israeli planners suggested that new public spaces be created to ease overcrowding. But the suggestion aroused concern that it might be a first step toward razing some of the neighborhood's old residential buildings - an echo of the destruction of Muslim homes after the Jewish Quarter was recaptured by Israel in 1967. Some critics have argued that sprucing up the Old City is part of a strategy to drive Palestinians from Jerusalem altogether. Certainly, it will involve stripping away some of the city's architectural character, erasing layers of history.

But perhaps the barrier's most unexpected victim will be the cosmopolitanism that gives Jerusalem its profound meaning, the in-between places where everyday dialogue occurs.
Israel has, from its start, embraced the Modernist conviction in architecture's power to transform society. The entire country was essentially created from the ground up after its founding in 1948. " Israel is a completely designed society," Zvi Efrat, director of the
architecture school at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts, said. "Entire cities were designed since 1947 - maybe 30 cities in the first decades. I don't think there was such ambition anywhere. You saw this in the architecture schools, where students were typically asked to design entire cities from scratch."

"The wall is an extension of that approach," he said. "It is the idea that you can reshape a society with design. The problem is that there is little discussion about its implications."If some of the new cities of Israel reflect the successes of Modernism, the barrier represents the worst aspects of it - the rationalist tendency to reduce the world to a system of abstract relationships, a faith in tabula rasa planning, a distrust of urban chaos - without its idealism. The consequences extend beyond the ghettoization of Palestinians and Israelis. The wall destroys the space for those who once occupied the middle ground: those who refuse to divide the world into good and bad, civilization and barbarity. It threatens to sever the threads, already fragile, that might one day be woven into a more tolerant image of coexistence.