topic by
John Calvin
5/19/2002 (20:57) |
|
Le Monde diplomatique
-----------------------------------------------------
May 2002
PALESTINE FROM NEAR AND FAR
The bulldozer war
_______________________________________________________
In March, during the worst of the fighting on the West Bank,
a delegation from the International Parliament of Writers
visited Israel and Palestine. Among the party was Christian
Salmon from France.
by CHRISTIAN SALMON *
_______________________________________________________
During the wars in former Yugoslavia the architect Bogdan
Bogdanovich coined the term 'urbicide' to describe the
destruction of cities in the Balkans. In Palestine the
violence has targeted the entire landscape. A trail of
devastation stretches as far as the eye can see: a jumble
of demolished buildings, levelled hillsides and flattened
forests. This barrage of concentrated damage has been
wrought not only by the bombs and tanks of traditional
warfare, but by industrious, vigorous destruction that
has toppled properties like a violent tax assessor.
A concrete-and-asphalt ugliness now mars some of the most
beautiful views in the world. Hillsides have been carved
up for bypass roads to Israeli settlements. On either
side of the road Palestinian homes have been destroyed,
olive trees uprooted and orange orchards razed, on behalf
of enhanced visibility. All that remains is a no-man's
land topped by watchtowers. In the hostilities, the
omnipresent bulldozers have as much strategic importance
as the tanks. Never before has such an innocuous piece of
equipment augured such violence and brutality.
Unplanned development is not at issue, nor are the
concrete jungles of Israel's Mediterranean coastline nor
the forces of heartless capitalism. No, I am reminded of
the efforts of the former Soviet Union's Gosplan, as if
this destruction was being overseen by a state planning
committee and the wilful hand of Israel was striving to
erase the past. The twin mind-sets of construction and
destruction have long coexisted here. In the 1950s
thousands of pine trees, not olives, not oranges, were
planted to wipe out traces of destroyed Palestinian
villages; agricultural development was then hailed as a
hallmark of civilisation. But today, in thrall to the
forces of destruction, the gardener's hand has turned
against the land, slashing and plundering, uprooting,
displacing and depopulating. All geographical settings
contain intelligible signs and landmarks that bear
witness to the narrative of history; but the painful
realisation on entering Palestine is how profoundly the
topography has been altered: the landmarks have been
erased, producing disorientation.
No concerted effort is being made to create a Palestinian
state, a binational entity or even two separate Israeli
and Palestinian states. Instead the forces at work here
seek geographic fragmentation and dissolution, the
abolition of the land itself. It would not be the first
time that places and streets were renamed or localities
taken apart before being remade anew. In Bosnia this was
known as 'memoricide', the murder of the past. Here mere
name changes are not enough: forests, hillsides and
roadways must be completely deconstructed. The territory
has been mutilated. We know that geography's primary
purpose is to serve the needs of war. But in Palestine,
war is designed mostly to conquer geography.
Official speeches and UN resolutions often fail to
mention an important thing: this soil contains the
interwoven strands of thousands of years of human
history, the strata of numerous cultures and
civilisations. The countryside and the roads, the fields
and the olive groves are the endangered legacy of all
humankind. Unesco was rightly alarmed when statues of the
Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan's
Bamiyan Valley. Will we stand by impassively while
Palestine is reduced to fields of ruins and Jerusalem
becomes another Beirut? Who will speak out against the
obliteration of Palestine's natural and archaeological
sites?
Destruction
During the week we spent in Ramallah, Gaza and Rafah, all
we saw was destruction: villages, roads and homes, all
demolished. Crops have been burned and public services
bombarded. Missiles from helicopter gunships or F-16
fighter planes have destroyed newly completed civilian
infrastructure. The European Commission has compiled an
extraordinary list of the EU-funded projects that have
been damaged. These include Gaza international airport,
Gaza seaport, Ramallah's Voice of Palestine radio
station, Bethlehem's Intercontinental Hotel and a
forensic laboratory. Municipal infrastructure including
schools, public housing projects, roads, sewers and
recycling centres have been destroyed, together with the
administrative offices of a peace project in Jenin,
reforestation projects in Beit Lahia, the central
statistics office in Ramallah and irrigation systems in
Jericho. In total 17 projects valued at $15.58m. Does
anyone believe that all these sites were terrorist
hideouts?
We visited a razed village near Rafah on the Egyptian
border and walked among the rubble of bulldozed homes.
Exercise books, kitchen utensils and a toothbrush were
strewn about, signs of life reduced to pieces. One woman
told us that residents were given five minutes to leave
their homes in the middle of the night. The bulldozers
returned several times to 'finish the job'; these three
words may well become the Israeli army's catchphrase.
Mounted high atop the watchtowers, infrared machine guns
watch over the wasteland. There are no soldiers about. At
night the guns fire automatically as soon as any lights
are turned on. The first few rows of houses are riddled
with bullet holes and their residents face the constant
threat of automatic weapons fire. This must be how buffer
zones are created.
Like some stinging insect bent on inflicting injury, the
war machine is in perpetual motion, spreading boundaries
wherever it goes, patiently and absent-mindedly. Here the
border is an all-pervasive force, cutting through street
corners, hillsides, villages, even houses. Military
fortifications have replaced the olive groves. City walls
are all reinforced, each one a hostile presence. Any
private home might conceal a lurking sniper. Checkpoints
loom up at every bend in the road, sometimes every 100m;
there are over 700 in the West Bank alone. Because some
roads are blocked off, travelling to Bir Zeit University
means you have to take a bus and a taxi as well as
walking part of the way. The occupied territories have
become a grid of impenetrable cells, with the Israeli
army controlling all access in and out. There are some
220 of these rat traps perhaps reservations or ghettos
might be a better term with battalions of Merkava tanks
and Apache helicopters (supplied by the US military) on
constant patrol.
This is a new type of frontier: portable, porous and
hazy, a border in motion. One evening we climbed with
Mahmoud Darwish, the poet, to the top of a small hill in
Ramallah, where we looked out on the twinkling lights of
Jerusalem only a few kilometres away. In the foreground
lay areas in shadow, with only a few scattered lights
from Palestinian homes. To our right off in the distance,
there was a zone of bright light with a deserted
illuminated roadway leading to an Israeli settlement. And
amid this shimmering nightscape, I could pick out the
border.
The Israeli occupation comes down to this: the right to
determine what will be illuminated and what will be cast
into darkness, what will be rendered visible or
invisible, accessible or inaccessible. The border governs
every aspect, even the division of light and shadow, like
some supernatural apparition.
Shifting, furtive border
The Polish writer, Tadeusz Konwicki, once said of his
homeland: 'My country is on wheels: its borders shift in
keeping with the latest treaty.' The situation is even
worse here in Palestine: the border shifts like a swarm
of locusts in the wake of another suicide attack, like
the onset of a sudden storm. It might arrive at your
doorstep like a delivery in the night, as quickly as the
tanks can roll in; or it may slip in slowly, like a
shadow. The border keeps creeping along, surrounding
villages and watering places. It is a mobile phenomenon,
like the specially designed walls we saw in Rafah: the
dull partitions of an evolving habitat, easily
transportable to keep pace with the ever-expanding
settlements.
The border is furtive as well: like the rocket launchers,
it crushes and disintegrates space, transforming it into
a frontier, into bits of territory. This frontier
paralyses the ebb and flow of transit instead of
regulating it. It no longer serves to protect, instead
transforming all points into danger zones, all persons
into living targets or suicide bombers. It has ceased to
be a peaceful boundary designed to separate two
autonomous lands, to assign a rightful place to each, to
endow a given space with its distinctive shape, form and
colour. The border here is meant to repress, displace and
disorganise. In Israel and Palestine alike the very
concept of territory has become hostile, devoid of
content or contours, making insecurity the norm. In the
words of the French poet, René Char, 'To stifle distance
is to kill'.
There are windows with narrow openings to accommodate
guns, wall after wall of high façades, row upon row of
buildings: this is the city-as-barracks. The Israeli
settlements present a series of closed-off architectural
forms that embody the feeling of self-confinement. No
doubt this is due to security constraints but it also
reveals an obsession with space, a conception of space
based on fear and repression. 'The truth of an era', said
the Austrian writer, Hermann Broch, about late 19th
century Vienna, 'may generally be read in its
architectural façades'. If Broch's conclusion is correct,
the building façades in the Israeli settlements are
slogans that betray a sense of environmental panic, a
fear of the outside world, the antithesis of
hospitality-of-place.
This is exophobia, a fear of the outside world, the
converse of the process of occupation: the further you
advance into enemy territory, the more you retreat into
yourself. This holds for Israeli society in general. It
is not exo-colonialism, to borrow the term used by the
French architect and writer, Paul Virilio, as illustrated
by the outward-looking style of Spanish colonial
architecture in Latin America. This is endo-colonialism,
an inward-looking variety that seeks more than the
appropriation of enemy territory: it breeds
dispossession, a withdrawal into itself. Its sign is the
military bunker.
The political debates and media coverage have failed to
address an important issue: Israel's colonisation of the
occupied territories is not only unethical and illegal,
it is impracticable. Indeed it is founded on a sense of
unbearable living that is peculiar to the pathologies of
exile and also afflicts those living in refugee camps.
Strictly speaking, the Israeli settlements are
uninhabitable places, not just uncomfortable, dangerous
or impractical over the long term. The settlements show
the impossible side of habitation that goes hand in hand
with the question of return. They are an anti-urban
development, based on warfare, as we might speak of a
war-based economy. This is civil development founded on
incivility.
Hence the paradoxes. The settlements are extravagant, in
the etymological sense of the word (from the Latin extra
+ vagare, to wander). Ensuring security within areas
having a Palestinian majority there are 5,000 settlers
versus 1.5m Palestinians in the Gaza Strip requires
constant vigilance and complete control over traffic
entering and leaving the areas. An Israeli settler
driving by creates traffic jams on the side roads, which
are blocked off by checkpoints. This roadside version of
apartheid obliges the inventive civilian population to
come up with ever-greater feats of nerve.
In Gaza we saw roads separated by high walls forming a
bridge, a work-in-progress stretching across the occupied
territories. Somebody mentioned a scheme that involved
lining the roads with crocodile-infested canals. Although
this proposal may seem far-fetched, it shows the
prevailing mood. The Israeli transport minister even
estimated the cost of building a viaduct to link Gaza and
the West Bank, a grandiose project worthy of the
pharaohs. Whether true or not, such plans indicate the
climate of panic. The Other must be cast out or warded
off. The choice boils down to repression or
immobilisation. Never have so many people been confined
to such a small area. Traffic between Israel and the
occupied territories has been totally blocked off, with
large numbers of Palestinians complaining of house
arrest. Meeting with other people is impossible because
of the traffic restrictions, which also make travel
between Ramallah and Gaza impossible. Even a trip within
the Gaza Strip can take longer than the flight from Tel
Aviv to New York. In the occupied territories Israel is
occupying time as well as space, with people facing long
lines at checkpoints before being allowed to return home.
Over decades the Israelis have abandoned the utopia of
the kibbutzes for the atopia, the nowhere, of the
settlements. People were fond of saying in the 1960s that
they tried to make the desert bloom and the kibbutz
exerted a powerful appeal. Since then the biblical garden
has become a desert, a wasteland, a battlefield.
The bulldozers on the roadsides are the troubling
acknowledgement of this. The key question is not the one
posed by Kafka 'What must we do in order to live?' since
the goal here is not living, but dislodging and
destruction. This is the first war to be waged with
bulldozers. This is an attempt at deterritorialisation
without historical precedent. This is total warfare that
targets the civilian population and the land . This is
war in an age of agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces,
seeking not the division of territory but its abolition.
____________________________________________________
* Author of Tombeau de la fiction, Denoël, Paris, 1999
and Censure! Censure!, Stock, Paris, 2000. He is also the
founder and executive director of the International
Writers' Parliament, for which he edits the journal
Autodafé
Translated by Luke Sandford
____________________________________________________
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2002 Le Monde diplomatique
|
|