Tag Archives: Israel

Environment & Justice, Struggle & Movement, Walking, Writing

Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks

4 Comments

Palestinian Walks - Raja ShehadehThey would take a few provisions and go to the open hills, disappear for the whole day, sometimes for weeks and months. They often didn’t have a particular destination. To go on a sarha was to roam freely, at will, without, restraint. The verb form of the word means to let the cattle out to pasture early in the morning, leaving them to wander and graze at liberty…a man [my only sadness that this was mostly men] going on a sarha wanders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place, going where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself. But not any excursion would qualify as a sarha. Going on a sarha implies letting go (2).

Palestinian Walks is wonderful. Heartbreaking. Some of the same themes, of course, as the talk Raja Shehadeh gave some months ago, but the writing voice was a little unexpected somehow.

We share desert, though not the same one, loss and struggle, though not to the same degree, a refuge and retreat from struggle in writing, though mine mostly unproved. So many thoughts in this book echoed so exactly with mine, but born of out such a different reality. I love this invitation to walk with him, wish I could have known these hills before their fencing and their destruction.

I find the Arizona desert impossibly beautiful, full of life even if harsh. You know what bites scratches stings. Always what has scared me more are people, they are never this simple in their stinging. I understand Shehadeh’s incomprehension when people from outside call his land barren and violent and ugly, and know his anger when they ascribe these perceptions of the land to the people who live in it. This is what I hate most about Westerns and this particular gaze–it is not my land that created the terrifying levels of brutality, but the conquest of it. The genocide of Native Americans that took place there. The conquest of Palestine is clothed in a different language of manifest destiny, but that is still where the violence comes from.

It is also carried out through a different form of land occupation — occupation by luxury villa, though still defended by guns. Routes through the landscape go from this:

Built many years ago by the owners of the land, the path was a few metres wide and bordered by stone walls. It sloped gently along the side of the hill then turned down and headed downhill. It had been carefully designed. Had it followed a straight line down it would be washed out in winter, unusable, more a canal for water than a footpath (44).

To mazes of concrete, straight roads blasted across hill tops, their refuse filling the wadis and causing flooding and erosion. Developments destroying the hills. I watch this in my desert and there too it breaks my heart. Why can’t people sit easily on the land? Instead they conquer it. It was the same in L.A. It is the same here in London where investors build skyscrapers of luxury apartments to sit empty as investments at immense environmental and social cost while people sleep in the streets. I was at the Bishopsgate Institute this evening listening to the inaugural C.R. Ashbee  lecture on the Seven Dark Arts of Developers (a play on Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture) given by Oliver Wainwright — it was very good so I am still quite furious.

On the hillside outside my old house, there was always time and space to think and always my capacity for thought was deeper there, the superficial more easily stilled:

The further down I went the deeper the silence became. As always the distance and quiet made me attentive to those troublesome thoughts that had been buried deep in my mind. As I walked, many of them were surfacing. I sifted through them. The mind only admits what it can handle and here on these hills the threshold was higher.

The other day I had to plead with a soldier to be allowed to return home (50).

In my desert it is immigration, it is unmanned planes flying overhead seeking families fleeing to a better life, it is checkpoints and motion detectors, prowling four by fours. They churn up the roads, destroy the fragile plants, ensure you never feel secure, never feel safe. There is no space for thinking, they close down the horizons. When I was little we did not need to own the land to feel safe there, to open yourself to the world there, but now in so many hills you do. You have to have a reason to be there. Papers. There is almost as much loss in losing this as there is in losing home and land. We would not need to own things or have borders at all if justice and this need for space and freedom could be respected.

This does not compare to an occupied Palestine, the suffering of their people being steadily forced further and further from the lands they love, their old and sustainable forms of farming made impossible, water and the peace simply to exist both stolen, treasured generosity to strangers unable to survive. The cynicism of Israeli property development is also far ahead of our borderlands, for all that we now have the same horror of a wall. This book illuminates the lived experience of the development and planning strategies so well laid out by Eyal Weizman in Hollow Land. 

I realized that the beautiful Dome of the Rock, for many centuries the symbol of ancient Jerusalem, was no longer visible. It was concealed by new construction. This was by design. Not only had Israeli city planners obstructed the view of this familiar landmark — they had also constructed a wide highway along the western periphery of Arab East Jerusalem, restricting its growth and separating it from the rest of the highway. Highways are more effective geographic barriers than walls in keeping neighbourhoods apart. Walls can always be demolished. But once built, roads become a cruel reality that it is more difficult to change. No visitor would now sigh, let alone fall to their knees as many a conqueror and pilgrim in the past had done… (105)

God I hate highways. Huge roads impassable to pedestrians. Los Angeles pioneered this and Los Angeles broke my heart too. Every American city drove highways right through African American and Latino neighbourhoods, destroying communities and cutting off those that were left from white people and the resources they kept. To add insult to injury freeways allow commuters to fly right over the inner cities as though they don’t even exist. Seems that Israelis have perfected the system, creating massive roads that Palestinians aren’t allowed to use, blocking entrances to villages, destroying more of the mountains. A symbol of power.

Roads have so much to answer for. I too like them best when they are humble, two lanes, and wind along the curve of the hills.

I don’t understand how this is the world we have inherited.

And so there must be struggle — I learned a whole lot here about the particularities of Israels expansion into the West Bank and just what the Oslo Accords meant. I didn’t learn nothing about how law facilitates the rich and powerful taking what they want, know too much this feeling that what you are up against is just too big, this questioning of why it is you fight.

For many years I managed to hold on to the hope that the settlements would not be permanent. I had meticulously documented the illegal process by which they came to be established, every step of the way. I felt that as long as I understood, as long as the process by which all this had come about was not mysterious and the legal tricks used were exposed, I could not be defeated and confused and Israel could not get away with it. Knowledge is power….I had perceived my life as an ongoing narrative organically linked to the forward march of the Palestinian people towards liberation and freedom…But now I knew this was nothing but a grand delusion. ..It was only my way of feeling I was part of the rest of struggling society, a way of enduring hardships by claiming and holding on to the belief that there was a higher meaning to the suffering–that it wasn’t in vain…

But the Oslo Agreements buried my truth… (123)

Writing saves me too.

There is so much more in Palestinian Walks, natural and archeological history, stories of family and friends, walks through country I have heard so much of. This is a deeply personal meditation of little romanticisation, aware of its flaws, with no hiding of discomfort or conflicted feelings and ideas. No hiding at all. This is absolutely the book I would give someone who wanted to understand why in the face of all news propaganda I hate the occupation, why I think it has to end, why I support the Palestinian cause. Maybe even if they didn’t want to understand.

3364128545_dce76b9f99_z

Save

Books, Environment & Justice, Violence

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation

1 Comment

Hollow Land - Eyal WeizmanThis book is an investigation of the transformation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1967. It looks at the ways in which the different forms of Israeli rule inscribed themselves in space, analysing the geographical, territorial, urban and architectural conceptions and the interrelated practices that form and sustain them. In doing so, it provides an image of the very essence of Israeli occupation, its origin, evolution and the various ways by which it functions.

Hollow Land is masterfully done as well. It is not a history or a detailed look at the current situation, but incorporates both into a study that instead does what Weizman calls ‘probing the various structures of territorial occupation’. His discussion of these structures is chronological, corresponding to different periods of occupation. It reads almost more like science fiction than Joanna Russ, who I was reading at the same time. It does not so much call upon Foucault or Deleuze and Guattari as exemplify them, and give them terrifying real world application. It is amazingly grounded and engaged, though the initial language put me off the tiniest bit. You think it will be theoretical and agonizingly abstracted from an unjust reality, but it is the opposite. There is so much here that makes you think about space and its connection to power and politics and war, but I personally am almost afraid to use it, as the situation it describes is unparalleled. The only thing I can relate it to is the murder and complete dispossession of Native Americans in the US and Canada. To relate it to less risks mocking the desperate violence and injustice of the occupation of Palestinian lands.

I am fascinated by the idea of elastic geographies, the way that borders and boundaries shift and change, the way that inside and outside are blurred. The State certainly has a level of power, but such boundaries are elastic because contested thus the actions of multiple actors comes into play:

‘Because elastic geographies respond to a multiple and diffused rather than a single source of power, their architecture cannot be understood as the material embodiment of a unified political will or as the product of a single ideology. Rather, the organization of the Occupied Territories should be seen as a kind of ‘political plastic’, or as a diagram of the relation between all the forces that shaped it.’

Spatial organization as a diagram of operating forces — a very cool way to think about space and power. He says elsewhere ‘The architecture of the frontier could not be said to be simply ‘political’ but rather ‘politics in matter’. This is a perfect connect to Lefebvre (who is never mentioned or cited — so many insights here appear to emerge organically from the subject, but in reviewing the notes and bibliography I found some absences rather curious), especially when he says things like

The various inhabitants of this frontier do not operate within the fixed envelopes of space – space is not the background for their actions, an abstract grid on which events take place – but rather the medium that each of their actions seeks to challenge, transform or appropriate.

Space is both the object of struggle and its product, it is both shaped by and shapes struggle.

I confess I did not know a great deal about the details of Israel’s occupation. While not written as a history, this gives you an incredible depth and breadth of view into the situation. It also challenges you to question liberalism itself, and joins in the growing body of literature critical of both liberal reform and foreign aid (and the ways these so often go together). He writes: ‘The history of the occupation is full of liberal ‘men of peace’ who are responsible for, or who at least sweeten, the injustice committed by the occupation. The occupation would not have been possible without them.’It also looks at the neoliberalisation of discourse: ‘Indeed, the bureaucratic infrastructure of the Oslo process sought to replace an ‘occupation’ with ‘management’. … In this way, Israeli-Palestinian interactions, which by the standards of international law were still performed within the framework of belligerent occupation, were depoliticized into a smilingly neo-liberal ‘service economy’, a mere business transaction.’ there is also the effort to make the situation seem a ‘natural’ rather than ‘political’ one, and the resulting policy effects:

‘Recasting the crisis in terms of ‘humanitarian politics’ was itself a political decision by the European and American donor countries; in doing so, they effectively released Israel from its responsibilities according to international law and undermined their own potential political influence in bringing the occupation to an end.’

The dallying of the IDF with radical and critical theory through their Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI) was mind-boggling. That it came bundled in a chapter explaining the new Israeli practice of blasting their way through the walls of civilian homes to move around the refugee camps made it more sinister. Being a refugee is terrible enough, but for armed men to come blasting through your wall without warning? Terrifying. Pitched battles took place in living rooms, and people lived with these holes after the conflict, covering them over with shelves and etc. It all came to pieces in the end but wow. Here is Weizman to Naveh, one of OTRI’s directors:

I then asked him, if so, why does he not read Derrida and deconstruction instead? He answered, ‘Derrida may be a little too opaque for our crowd. We share more with architects; we combine theory and practice. We can read, but we know as well how to build and destroy, and sometimes kill.’

They go to look at Deleuze and Guatarri, rhizomes and war machines. Weizman continues

When I asked him if moving through walls was part of it, he answered that ‘travelling through walls is a simple mechanical solution that connects theory and practice. Transgressing boundaries is the definition of the condition of “smoothness”.’

Thus critical theory was divorced of moral content and socialist ideals, stripped down to its ability to disrupt and used both against the Palestinians as well as in power struggles within the Israeli military, allowing it to reinvent itself. Terrifying.

There is the banality of architecture and building construction with brutal consequences:

According to testimony from Machsom Watch, the tight turnstiles ended up causing more harm and chaos. ‘People got stuck, parcels got crushed, dragged along and burst open on the ground. Heavier people got trapped in the narrow space, as were older women and mothers with small children.’45 It is hard to imagine the cruelty imposed by a minor transformation of a banal, and otherwise invisible architectural detail, ostensibly employed to regulate and make easier the process of passage.

So much of interest around defining public and private, making and unmaking subjects, examining defense (against outside forces) as opposed to security (guarding from the enemy within). There is just so much in Hollow Land, I may well read it again.

My only (small) critique is that while Weizman emphasizes the multiplicity of actors responsible for the creation of space in the occupied territories, the role of Palestinian struggle only really emerges in the last chapter on Evacuations. Even where he emphasizes the ways in which Jewish settlers followed their own logics (to counterproductive results at times) and stated outright that Ariel Sharon didn’t mastermind the settlement process, the rest of the chapter (and perhaps the book) seems to prove that his finger was literally in every pie. In spite of its desires to the contrary, there is still some sense of overwhelming power and force that the last chapter doesn’t quite manage to overcome. Where are the points where hope is possible? Though I admit, given Israel’s latest round of assassinations and bombing of the Gaza strip even now, hope seems very far away.

[written back on November 6, 2012]

Save