WRITING HISTORY THROUGH SPACE
Territorial consequences and colonial practices in Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Being confronted with the most diverse investigative and journalistic opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - from the latest attacks on the Gaza Strip to the recognition of Palestine as a UN observer state – it’s complex to understand how Palestine exists as a territory. To do this, we must go back in history and understand the territorial reality that all palestinians are subjected to daily, segregated through a complex network of spacial devices scattered throughout the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.
Israel has established itself as the "State that not yet erased the 'founding violence' of their origins"[1], since the expulsion of Palestinians from its territory in 1948 – al-nakba - until the construction of the Separation Wall in the Occupied Territories, acts that incorporated the urbanism as physical and social weapon.
In the particular case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the technologies of control that allowed the continued colonization of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip represent the end of an evolutionary chain of techniques and processes of colonization, occupation and administration, developed throughout history. Despite the differences in the processes of colonization among modern empires and the Zionist State of Israel, the assumptions that targeted the domain of a population and its reduction to homo sacer[2], such as the attempt to "tame" by redesigning their space and their culture, are shared.
"A land without people for a people without land" was the phrase most often repeated by those responsible for this occupation and clearly marks the Zionist attitude of attachment, separation and violent expulsion. This belief was a reality created in order to void the islamic territory and culture of a meaning. The Arabs were, in this case, depicted by Israel as the real "foreign body" of a territory with Jewish roots. Since the occupation began, there has never been a willingness to live with this "other", to incorporate it into a cultural and spatial colonization, there was rather a constant attempt of non-recognition and expulsion. Israel saw Palestine as a land without people and as a tabula rasa where to implement the construction of a new modern nation from scratch, combining this creation of a new identity with the secular history of the Jewish people.
The design of the Israeli space always had a laboratory component of experimentation, combined with the reflection of the current global space thinking.
Since the foundation of Israel, in the era of David Ben-Gurion[3], the Zionist ideology made use of European modernist movement, which saw in architecture and urbanism a way to create a new kind of city and society to a new kind of man, fused with the machine and with the technology, to initiate a process of spatial creation of a modern and new State. But this benefit was reciprocal, since the big names of the modernist movement used Tel Aviv and Haifa to experiment a new kind of city, taking advantage of such a remarkable beginning to implement their ideas. The same happened in the process of critical review of modernism and its aesthetic transition to postmodernism. This period of architectural re-creation, which saw a gain in historicist reborn, took the will of the Jews in creating a new visual identity which combines its biblical past with a flourishing present downward so as to almost nullify the Palestinian culture as a culture of Jewish tradition and contradictorily, as non-genuine culture of that place. Much of the postmodern debate was made around Jerusalem, a city which concentrated the historical past of the three major monotheistic religions and which served as a laboratory for aesthetic experiences that unearthed a past blended with new methods and knowledge acquired. This experimental character always ran the risk and effectively changed the landscape irreversibly, expelling and destroying, physically and symbolically, Palestinian villages already consolidated to make them unrecognizable scenarios for those who lived there, wanting to delete them from the collective memory of a people in an attempt to shake his will to return.
The heyday of colonization, triggered in the 80s, in the West Bank. Israeli settlements born from the initiative of the government, which wanted to create a certain atmosphere for the Palestinian population. The image of these settlements and suburbs, with barbed wire fences and patrols with constantly vigilant soldiers, come in contrast with the styles of the native architecture and its life forms, a policy that remembers the sectorization and ghettoization, conveying a message about the impossibility of sharing the same space for two classes of people and two different cultures. The shared spaces became battlefields whose increasing violence follows the growth of hatred between Jews and Arabs, feelings that prompted the birth of fundamentalism ethnic and religious order.
The Israeli strategy of annexing territory without human presence was imposed on the Palestinians through a complex compartmentalized system of spatial exclusion. But if initially this political separation were masked as a formula for a "peaceful" settlement, after the agreements signed in Oslo the unilateral decision making accelerated the fragmentation of the territory, allowing the Israeli army to control an "archipelago" formed by more 200 separate areas and with limited autonomy. The military power today manages these areas through a filtering and flow control, turning frontiers into control mechanisms. The military checkpoints and the Separation Wall were introduced in a complex geography per se, as segregation weapons and sensors in a territorial scale surveillance network. If initially Israel prepared a domain basen in expulsion and territorial presence, in the form of direct rule of the occupied populations, currently control is thought behind these walled spaces, through the selective opening and closing of different urban valves.
This encouragement of fear policies, separation and visual control are the ultimate gesture in the consolidation of "enclaves" and the spread of physical and virtual borders in the recent context of the war against terrorism, driven by the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11. The architecture of occupation can be seen here as an accelerator of other global politics processes, as an extreme case of capitalist globalization and therefore its spacial policy.
Then we got to a point where violence imposed on the landscape completely changed the country that Palestinians knew before 1948. Today Palestine is no more than a set of separate spaces, or a fragmented territory, effectively administered by Israel. This spatial discontinuity, and the absence of a singe boundary (we have is a set of imposed borders that create "enclaves" and too complex division in order to be respected) precluds the construction of a sovereign state. Israel that despite the illegality of the process, is not willing to negotiate a return or a withdrawal from the Occupied Territories in the West Bank, insisting on prolong the occupation mechanisms until eradicate any physical and human trace of Palestine (the latest attitude of Benjamin Netanyahu who refused the status granted by the UN to Palestine and declared support for the construction of new settlements in the West Bank represents the one-sidedness of negotiation), an attitude that has brought us to the last stage, where the Palestinians, sealed in their pieces of territory resist and create ethnic antibodies against Jewish population.
Born in Braga (Portugal) on September 1st 1988, concludes a Masters in Architecture from FAUP (University of Porto) in 2012 and studied one year at the FADU/UBA (University of Buenos Aires) as an exchange student, guiding his path by an underlying interest in the intersection between architecture, society and politics.
THESIS LINK: http://issuu.com/060201027/docs/colonialismo_como_laborat_rio_urbano_._bruno_costa
PUNKTO MAGAZINE ARTICLE LINK: http://www.revistapunkto.com/2013/01/colonialismo-como-laboratorio-urbano_9.html
[1] Slavoj Zizek in Violence
[2] Latin word - obscure figure of Roman law: a person who is excluded from all civil rights.
[3] First head of state of Israel. Ben-Gurion was a leader of the socialist Zionism and one of the founders of the Labour Party, which was in power in Israel over the first three decades of the existence of the state.