Hollow land by Eyal Weizman - Verso Press

Behind the Wall, Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times, August 4 2007:

 
Hollow Land is more like an extraordinary new drawing than a conventional piece of architectural literature. It is a document that allows you to see a physical landscape overlaid with politics, sociology, religion and history, as if one were using architectural x-ray specs. It posits the contemporary urban war zone with its cocktail of violence, media, politics and extremism as the ultimate postmodern environment. It is also the most astonishing book on architecture that I have read in years. Eyal Weizman analyses the use of architecture in his homeland, Israel, as a hugely sophisticated political and cultural tool. Although the new security wall may seem like the primitive construction of a nation bereft of political solutions, Weizman looks deeper, above and below the wall, high into the sky and into the formerly impenetrable world of avant-garde architectural theory as adopted by the Israeli army. The book is effectively a section cut through the area, revealing a series of layers and territories, each manipulated by the Israeli authorities. He explores the one-sided porosity of those borders, passable by settlers but not by Arabs. He looks at how inland archipelagos have been created by the cordoning off of settlements within Arab territories. He examines the use of archaeology to justify Jewish settlement in some areas while fragments of ancient Islam are trodden over and left in the rubble.
 
Still underground, Weizman writes of how Israel cedes power to the Palestinian authorities on a horizontal slice of surface ­ the pastrami in an Israeli territorial sandwich. But the subterranean layers of history and aquifers remain in Israeli hands, as does the airspace above. Jewish roads slice through Palestinian properties; tunnels and flyovers intersect the landscape in a spatial apartheid so that settlers can avoid contact with Arabs. There is an essay on the loathed checkpoints, which may shut without reason. The one-way mirrors behind which Israeli guards survey their counterparts become a metaphor for the entire system.
 
This is a land where lines of occupation change overnight. In one of the most fascinating essays, the author compares this situation to the "extraordinary rendition" used by the US, the practice of seeing a nation's borders as infinitely flexible, a web which reaches around the world to inflict torture without sullying home soil, in which a Caribbean island can become an Orwellian terror camp, at once within and without US jurisdiction. But there is also analysis of the Palestinian response. Wary of evacuating the refugee camps for fear of forgoing their right of return, the Palestinians have been bombed, their houses demolished, their farms destroyed and confiscated. Yet they find ways of maintaining pressure. Chief among these is the emergence of a network of tunnels used for smuggling weapons and contraband. This huge web of deep tunnels creates a new urban layer, an infrastructure of resistance.
 
For an architect like me, the book¹s most astonishing investigation is the Israeli army's study and adoption of avant-garde architectural and spatial theory. Postmodernism exerted as powerful an effect on architectural as on literary theory. From Derrida to Deleuze, philosophy was used to deconstruct physical structure, space and hierarchies. The wall was reinterpreted as a repressive device, which could be bypassed to transgress the bourgeois order. The Israeli army, taking its cue from such subversion, developed new techniques, avoiding the narrow streets full of snipers and instead exploding its way through the walls of dwellings. Houses are seen as potential routes, homes as a legitimate theatre of war. Commanders also adopted the tropes of post-linearity and chaos theory, troops ³swarming² in multiple small units through battle-zones. A ghost Arab city christened "Chicago" was built to practice this new urban warfare. Through their adoption of avant-garde philosophy, Weizman suggests, the Israeli military sets itself up as an intellectual entity, lifting itself above a mere army. This barely scratches the surface of the hugely complex spatial and territorial web that Weizman explores. The literature of architecture is largely self serving, depoliticised and superficial. In Hollow Land Weizman has achieved a rare amalgam of politics, aesthetics, sociology, history and theory. He has produced a book which should be compulsory reading for anyone who thinks architecture has reduced its cultural role to the building of iconic galleries and silly skyscrapers. Rather, as Weizman shows, it remains the most politicised and potentially dangerous of all the arts.