Israel's E1 Plan: Isolating East Jerusalem

Amid the chaos of the Israeli army's abduction of Palestinian member of parliament and Secretary General of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Ahmad Sa'dat (among other activists) last Tuesday, 14 March 2006, international attention has been distracted from Israel's continued policy of expanding its illegal settlement infrastructure in and around occupied Arab east Jerusalem.

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THE WALL - A Line in the Sand

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.

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The Mountain

The West Bank is distinct in its topographical extremities, ranging from between 400 meters under sea level, at the shores of the Dead Sea, to about 1,000 meters in the high summits of Samaria. The fact that the conflict is ‘played out’ in a mountainous region influenced the emergence of particular forms of engagements and relationships. Israeli state planning made strategic use of height. It adopted the mountainous landscape into an instrument of domination and power by placing settlements on the hilltops and laying them out as optical devices according to geometric systems that maximize visibility. By strategically overlooking the lower valleys where most Palestinian villages are located the settlements precipitated the creation of two parallel and self-referential ethno-national-geographies that manifest themselves along the vertical axis in the physical ‘above’ and ‘below.’

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Ariel Sharon and the Geometry of Occupation

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.

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The Plan - Zvi Efrat

As it is – crowded, heaped up and frantic at the center, diffused, dissociated and monotonous at the margins, the fabricated space of Israel is a ‘manner of land occupation and state founding without an historical precedent.’ Contrary to common belief and to visual impression, it was not born of haphazard improvisation, emergency solutions or speculative entrepreneurship and certainly not of spontaneous diachronic development – but rather of the unprecedented objective to put into practice one of the most comprehensive, controlled and efficient architectural experiments in the modern era.

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