# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// Israeli Civilian Settlements

picture: Ma'ale Adummim (East Jerusalem's region)

ـJewish settlements within the West Bank are violating the article 49 of the Geneva Convention (see previous article). However, thinking that they simply occupy a land they do not own would be observing them in a very superficial way. In fact, they constitute a very important weapon in the Israeli strategy of oppression towards the Palestinian. All the scales and categories of building engineering are involved in this strategy; nothing is left to chance by Israeli planners, engineers and militaries.
The geographical dimension, to begin with, is studied to disturb as much as possible Palestinian life. In fact, several settlements by their location and their occupation are splitting villages from their fields or blocking exchange between the villages.
The topographical aspect of settlements are probably the most essential dimension: They occupy the top of the hills in order to maintain a constant supervision of their surroundings, benefit of the best view on what they consider to be their land by right and constitute a very visible provocation for whoever see them.
Each settlement owns a mirador that increases this hyper-vision or at least maintain the external appearance of it.
The master plan, then, imposes a strict density of settlers' houses thus allowing a defensible space to be constituted. For the same purpose, those houses are built in a quasi-fortified scheme including strong opaque walls and small windows.
The settlements finally own independent infrastructures from the Palestinian ones including roads, antennas, water and power supplies.
Settlements at night, illustrate perfectly the way they operate. The landscape around is all lighted up. You are on the road, you don't really see them but they definitely see you. The environment is entirely domesticated and controlled via a militarizated vocabulary of the land.

To go further, read Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal's A Civilian Occupation (see previous post)

Rimmonim (Ramallah's region)

Geva Binyamin (East Jerusalem's region)

Shilo & Eli (Nablus' region)

Ma'ale Levona (Nablus' region)

Pesagot (in Ramallah)

Har Homa (in Bethlehem)

Kochav Ya'akov (Jerusalem's region near Ramallah)

Pisgat Ze'ev (East Jerusalem's region)

Ma'ale Adummim (East Jerusalem's region)

# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// Interview of Raja Shehadeh

Thanks to Romaric, my friend who works at French publisher Galaade, I had the chance to meet Raja Shehadeh for an interview he kindly accepted.

Raja is a lawyer in Ramallah since the end of the 70's and has dedicated his carrier to cases of expropriation of Palestinian lands by the Israeli.

He wrote several books, including Occupier's Law and Palestinian walks.

Ramallah. 21st July 2010

Leopold Lambert: The particularity of your actions is that you are a lawyer. Despite the fact that law is violated every day by the State of Israel, what may be some naivety from me makes me think that it is the one domain that can save Palestinians from oppression. Would your expertise agree with that?

Raja Shehadeh: When I started as a lawyer, I had an exaggerated view of the importance of law. I took very seriously that law was a weapon. I still consider seriously that law is a way of preserving civilization. I have great respect for and belief in International Law, because it came as a result of wars, terrible devastating wars. In the beginning, the International Law for the protection of civilians came from people who did not think that they could stop wars with law but that within the reality of war and hostilities, there could be some protection for civilians and that there could be limitations on conquest the acquisition of territories. So something as basic as the Geneva Convention and the Hague regulations say very simply that no gain should be made through belligerency. So if a war takes place, regardless why and who started it, and territories are occupied, the occupier may transfer its civilian population to the occupied territories. It's very logical. It does make sense and it should be preserved, this is a very important principle.

At the same time, there are things that derived from this principles. If the situation lasts, the occupier may do certain things and may not do other things: he may not change the law, he has to care for the welfare of the occupied population and so on. When I came back from my legal studies, I saw that the basis of these principles were being violated and that no work was being on done on this in the late 70's. Very little work was being done. Verbal condemnations of Israel were being made but not real studies which were really important to do.

So, yes, I do believe in law. And I also believe in taking legal actions to test the possibility of how far you can go and what was the legality of the Israeli actions. The Israeli government and politics were telling the Israeli settlers that they were not taking anybody's land because this was state's land. Of course we must not forget that even if it were state land, the occupier may not take it to use to established settlements for its own population. The whole project is wrong. The Israeli supporters of settlements tried to show it is done through proper legal means, I and my colleagues showed there was no legal basis for taking Palestinian land. It was tantamount to stealing land.

At the same time, it was not really clear to me how the Israeli legal apologists were thinking and what was the nature of the legal arguments they were employing to justify their other policies in the Occupied Territories. So it was a process of discovery in a sense. Then, after going through quite a lot of case work, in court, by thinking, by reading and exploring the legal aspects, I began to understand that what underlies the Israeli position is religious ideology. Ultimately, what they are saying is: "This land belongs to us. God gave it to us". How do we get to appropriate it, is a mere detail." In furthering this the Israeli High Court played an important role. For example in the very first challenge to the High Court, the military had used the method of expropriating the land near Ramallah. When the Palestinian owner of the land challenged this order, the Court said: "Expropriation is not a proper way of taking the land because expropriation implies long term and the occupation can not be for a long term..." They didn’t say taking the land of the occupied population for building settlements for the occupier’s population is wrong. Just that this way of doing it is not right. What they were also saying was that if you use expropriation to take the land, the implication is that the land is not yours because you can only expropriate other people's land.

Later on, in another challenge, which was in Nablus where there is now the settlement of Elon Moreh, they said that expropriating private property was illegal but also that if the land were to be declared “State's Land,” then that it would be possible to take it for establishing a settlement. So since that case, the Israeli military government has been “expropriating” the land by declaring it State's land. To carry this out they changed the local law. One of the principles of the International Law is that you cannot change the local laws and there are local laws about what constitutes State land and who can make such a claim and who has the burden of proof and what it takes to lift it. They changed all of this and reversed it. They said: "Anybody who claims that it is not State's land (that is challenges an order the military makes that a certain land is State Land) has the burden to prove this." So instead of the takers proving that the land belonged to the State, it was to the other party who had to prove otherwise. The burden of proof was shifted. And they went further by restricting the definition of private land to land which is actually used continuously for ten years and so on. They made it more and more difficult for Palestinians to succeed in holding on to their land and protecting it from being taken by the settlers. Every time we managed to break through, they raised the bar and made it yet more difficult.

In the beginning, we thought that we could burden the system by bringing many cases and through applying moral and psychologically pressure by essentially proving that it was but a process of large scale theft of the land. But we were dealing with a government with seemingly unlimited resources and they started to make it more difficult and more expensive for us to pursue these cases. For example they made it necessary that we had to submit along with the case, survey maps of the entire area under consideration which sometimes included scores of acres, What the government making the claim should have done was shifted to the private owners.

It became clear to me that the basis for the actions of the Israeli government was not legal but ideological, namely that the whole of the land in their view was public, that the only legitimate public was the Jewish public, that the Jewish public had this land 2000 years ago then they left, and meanwhile other people, non Jewish, came and used the land, now those people are on parts of the land so the part where they actually using will for the time being be left to them, but only these areas, all the rest will be “returned” to its rightful Jewish owners.

Then, a very important process started at the beginning of the 1980's, which is the land use planning. The British had made statutory regional plans for the central and southern region of the West Bank; and the Israelis decided to revive these plans which were done in the Mandate times and were still being enforced in Jordan. Jordan had also passed a Planning Law in 1966. Through military orders this law was basically massacred. Where the law had involved the community in the course the planning, this was canceled and all the members of the Supreme Planning Committee became Israeli military personnel. Most of the lower committees were cancelled. Then they took those original plans and they simply unilaterally amended them. Of course those plans did not include any settlements because they were created before 1967. So the Israeli military planners placed settlements in the middle of these region and started making local zoning plans, town and village plans for all the Palestinian villages in the West Bank. The just drew a circle around the built up areas and declared this to be the border of the village for the next forty years. When negotiations seemed to be on the horizon this process was speeded up so that by the time that the Oslo Accords were signed statutory zoning plans for all the villages had been completed which the Palestinian Authority is not allowed to amend. The confinement of the Palestinians was achieved and the bulk of the land was left for the establishment and expansion of the Jewish settlements.
Again, I and other lawyers and planners started in the late eighties to take objections against these plans. A good number of objections were submitted. Sometimes they accepted to revise the plans but it was very difficult. This is why now, when you travel in the West Bank, you notice how the villages do not look so much like villages anymore. Traditionally the villagers built one floor with a garden and there was a sense of space because villages like cultivating the land around their house. Now, most villages have houses of several floors and they look cramped. That is because they are not allowed to go beyond the set borders. When they do the Israeli army come with their bulldozers and demolish this “illegal” homes.

Not only was Israel taking Palestinian land, they were denying the Palestinians from expanding on what was left for them. The process, interestingly enough, follows that of Israel; of Galilee mainly. In Galilee, you notice the exact same phenomenon. The Arabs' villages, towns and cities (Nazareth for example) are all very cramped. The villages would own land, outside of these, but they would not be allowed to build on it. Same process here. Not as severe as in Israel but with the same pattern.

And there was also a plan for the roads which was published in 1984. Not only did they plan for the settlements but also how the settlements would relate to Israel and how they would be connected to each other; connected in such a way as to disconnect the Palestinians from each others. It is all part of a total vision. It actually started very early on and that is why I felt it was very important to work on the legal aspect. Through the legal aspect, you can explain, reveal, describe, expose how this works.

Leopold Lambert: Even if the suspect is pretty much the same person than the Judge?

Raja Shehadeh: Yes; because as long as they say: "You have the means to appeal, to object.", then you have to use it in order to use all your options. Your case will be a very much stronger case if you have done this. I was able in 1985 to publish my book Occupier's Law in which I was saying that I, not only know that it is a case, but I have tried to go through the Israeli set channels to object and to challenge. The result was that the case became stronger by going through those processes.

Leopold Lambert: If we attempt to focus a little bit on architecture itself; as Eyal Weizman wrote about the notion of urbicide as being not included enough within the International Law which is not specific enough to architecture; maybe an extremely useful project here would be to redact a law that focus very precisely on architecture: its construction but also its destruction.

Raja Shehadeh: Actually, a good case to compare with would be South Africa. Also there they used architecture and town planning to implement their apartheid laws. It was very much part of the policy. I don't know how it all looks now but it is not easy to undo.

Leopold Lambert: But in this hypothesis of a new law, architects and lawyer should work together to make it happen. Do you believe yourself that there would exist any way to implement it on the international scene?

Raja Shehadeh: We have to distinguish between a situation where the state has sovereignty and one where there is occupation. In the case of the Occupied Territories international law says that: "Regardless of how the building takes place or how the appropriation of land takes place, it is illegal."

In the case of South Africa, it was also covered because apartheid was a crime against humanity. Perhaps in the Israel of 1948 it would be more appropriate in the sense that the Palestinians were Israeli citizens, and as such they were subjected to a process in which urban centers are done in such a way as to oppress them. It might work better in the framework of a sovereign country in which one group of the population is submitted to urbicide. In the case of Gaza and the West Bank it is already illegal.

Leopold Lambert: So does that mean that you don't believe so much in this architectural international law?

Raja Shehadeh: I would not be against it as such. I would not say it is a bad thing for example to describe the situation here as one akin to apartheid because it helps people to understand the situation. If there is an international law that looks at architecture, that's a plus! But it is just an addition to an illegality that is already implied.

Leopold Lambert: My point would be that if one observes the current situation in which Israel violates the law on a daily basis but the International Community do not take the measures against that, then one could think that fragmenting the law into series of very precisely described cases of violation through architecture that could ultimately lead to several recognition of these situations.

Raja Shehadeh: Yes, that's true. I also think that when you are developing an international law, you obviously do it for more than one case, for more than Palestine and Israel; so perhaps, by focusing on this case and showing how an aggressor implements policies, you can also prevent it from happening in less typical cases; in urban centers for example or with gated communities.
I think it is an important development, it is a departure. The International Law has not moved in this direction, it is a good direction to move to.

# The Evil Architects Do by Eyal Weizman

"When an architect’s design premeditatedly aims to cause material damage - as part of a largescale policy of organized aggression - a war crime may have been committed."

This article written by Eyal Weizman for Rem Koolhaas' Content is not so new anymore (2003) but unfortunately nothing has changed since then...
In this short essay entitled The Evil Architects Do, Weizman establishes that "architecture and planning intersects with the strategies of contemporary conflicts in ways that the semantics of international law are still ill-equiped to describe."
In fact, architecture has a fundamental role to play in the current warfare -which does not consist anymore in two symmetrical armies fighting in the middle of a field- and the international laws, that once again (see the previous articles) have been made supposedly to be respected by every nations, seem to be not precised enough to really describe the current ways it is now used -as construction or destruction- as a military weapon, especially in Gaza and the West Bank.
The law must therefore be re-written in a much more precised way and architects should face their responsibility in case of being the accomplices of what is being described as a war crime or a crime against humanity.

The following excerpts are what the International Laws stipulates about architecture:

The Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court
Articles referred to above in relation to the transformation of the built environment.
(See the complete statue on: http://www.un.org/law/icc/statute/romefra.htm)

Crimes Against Humanity

Article 7.2.d
“Deportation or forcible transfer of population” means forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present…

War Crimes

Article 8.2.a.iv
Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly;

Article 8.3.b.viii
The transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory;

Article 8.3.b.ix
Intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives;

# Israeli Piracy: What the f... is wrong with the New York Times ?

Apparently the American Press does not want you to know too much. Watching CNN speaking but not saying anything was not too surprising. However, reading the New York Times that relays pretty well the Israeli State's declarations, hides the obvious and even writes deliberate errors is just outrageous.
If we analyze today's article about the recent act of Piracy from the Israeli army, it seems impossible not to observe the incredible positioning of what is consider as a progressive American newspaper:

First: The Israeli State's declaration: Apparently the flotilla's boat could have bring “missiles, mortars and Iranians who will help them arm and train.” Pronounce the word Al Qaeda or Iran and the USA will let you do whatever you want. Seriously the thread is a bit too obvious here. Should we really recall that those boats were transporting aid to the Gaza strips that suffers from the Israeli blockade for a decade now. (the official blockade started in 2007 but it actually began in 2000, the only exchanges were only for the colonies before they had to withdraw).

Second: Omission. The NYTimes presents a geographical map showing where the boats were assaulted without precising on it or in the text the most important element here which is that all this operation happened in the International Waters which constitutes an absolute act of piracy. I don't want to be too much imprecise here so the followings paragraphs are directly excerpted from the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea:


Article101
Definition of piracy

Piracy consists of any of the following acts:

(a) any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed:

(i) on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft;

(ii) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any State;

(b) any act of voluntary participation in the operation of a ship or of an aircraft with knowledge of facts making it a pirate ship or aircraft;

(c) any act of inciting or of intentionally facilitating an act described in subparagraph (a) or (b).

Article102

Piracy by a warship, government ship or government aircraft whose crew has mutinied

The acts of piracy, as defined in article 101, committed by a warship, government ship or government aircraft whose crew has mutinied and taken control of the ship or aircraft are assimilated to acts committed by a private ship or aircraft.

Article110

Right of visit

1. Except where acts of interference derive from powers conferred by treaty, a warship which encounters on the high seas a foreign ship, other than a ship entitled to complete immunity in accordance with articles 95 and 96, is not justified in boarding it unless there is reasonable ground for suspecting that:

(a) the ship is engaged in piracy;

(b) the ship is engaged in the slave trade;

(c) the ship is engaged in unauthorized broadcasting and the flag State of the warship has jurisdiction under article 109;

(d) the ship is without nationality; or

(e) though flying a foreign flag or refusing to show its flag, the ship is, in reality, of the same nationality as the warship.

2. In the cases provided for in paragraph 1, the warship may proceed to verify the ship's right to fly its flag. To this end, it may send a boat under the command of an officer to the suspected ship. If suspicion remains after the documents have been checked, it may proceed to a further examination on board the ship, which must be carried out with all possible consideration.

3. If the suspicions prove to be unfounded, and provided that the ship boarded has not committed any act justifying them, it shall be compensated for any loss or damage that may have been sustained.

4. These provisions apply mutatis mutandis to military aircraft.

5. These provisions also apply to any other duly authorized ships or aircraft clearly marked and identifiable as being on government service.

Not mentioning this information pleads guilty for NY Times' (and obviously other American main medias) objectivity. Once again Israel despised International Laws (see my article about the article 49 of the Convention of Geneva) in a complete immunity. The question of the ALLEGED weapons on one of the boat becomes also obsolete since it enters into the denomination "self defense" against pirates.

Third: Error on purpose: The NY Times mentions on another page (that propose a debate about "rethinking the blockade" which already tells a lot about how this military blockade is interpreted in the Times' redaction) the "Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007". Let's recall that the Hamas became a majority in Gaza thanks to democratic election on the contrary of what would like to be believed in the Western World that finds more simple to mix everybody who is not an ally or a subject in order to amalgamate them as "security threats".

Today I am furious.
I am furious that the Israeli State daily opress the Palestinian people.
I am furious that the American medias actively hide information.
I am furious that we actually need a suppression towards an international group of people to hardly open our eyes.
and I am furious in advance to know that things are going to go back to normal very quickly and Netanyahu will be very likely able to come back very quickly in the United States to finish his American tour without anything practical atempted against the State of Israel's international crimes.

We have to act.

ps: I don't want to be too paranoid but the fact that there used to be a link towards a page for Rachel Corrie (this American woman who was killed in 2003 by an Israeli Bulldozer D9 while she was trying to avoid a Palestinian house in Gaza to be destroyed) on an other article of the NY Times and that the link does not work anymore, worries me about some (self)censorship...
Here is the original article

# In Israel, the army makes the law

In a country at war, the army has the ability to make the law thanks to the state of exception (read previous article) by purposing every measures for the sake of "national security". The hyper power gathered by a minority make this people interested in the continuous status of war. That is how the State of Israel, since its creation is paradoxically a state of exception that even extract itself from the International Laws (read previous post about the Geneva Convention).

In this regard, Tzahal just pass a decry that can potentially deports almost every Palestinian AND Foreigner living in the West Bank. Not only Israel still support the illegal Zionist settlements in the West Bank but they now want to potentially define almost any Palestinian as an infiltrator. This measure reinforce the control of the Israeli Army in the West Bank and the humiliation for Palestinians to be considered as illegal and evictable on their own land. The decry also concerns foreigners and states that those who will take part to Palestinian demonstration will be considered as infiltrator. This part of the decry very clearly shows that what Tzahal calls an infiltrator is simply somebody who do not support its actions...

Here is the Reuters' article:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The Israeli military is introducing orders that human rights activists said on Sunday could make almost any Palestinian liable for expulsion from the occupied West Bank.
In a statement, the army played down any notion of mass deportation, saying the orders simply amended existing Israeli regulations to assure military "judicial oversight" in the extradition of anyone "residing illegally" in the West Bank.
The orders, which go into effect on Tuesday, were posted on an army website and allow for the deportation, in some cases in less than 72 hours, of an "infiltrator" -- defined as someone who does not hold an Israeli permit to reside in the West Bank.
Existing regulations had defined "infiltrator" as someone who had stayed illegally in Israel after having passed through countries it considers its enemy.
Ten Israeli rights groups condemned the orders, saying in a statement that the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank, territory Israel occupied in a 1967 war, have never been required to hold an Israeli-issued residency permit.
"The military will be able to prosecute and deport any Palestinian defined as an infiltrator in stark contradiction to the Geneva Convention," the statement said.
Offenders could face a jail sentence of up to seven years.
The groups said they feared the broad wording of the orders could enable the military to expel tens of thousands of Palestinians, mainly people born in the Gaza Strip and their West Bank-born children.
Palestinians say some 25,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip live in the West Bank. The Gaza Strip is politically and geographically cut off from the West Bank. It is ruled by Hamas Islamists who do not recognise Israel.
Foreigners, including international activists who join Palestinians demonstrating against Israel in the West Bank, could also fall under the "infiltrator" category.
"These military orders belong in an apartheid state," Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said in a statement.
"Extensive in scope, they make it infinitely easier for Israel to imprison and expel Palestinians from the West Bank," he said.
The orders provide for an appeals process in which adults served notice of deportation can take their case within eight days to a panel of military judges. But some notices can be executed in less than 72 hours.

(Writing by Jeffrey Heller and Joseph Nasr, Additional reporting by Tom Perry in Ramallah, Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

you can also read the French article in Liberation

# Article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention

The Article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention (1949) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, describe the state of Israel's support to colonization as a violation of International War Law:

Art. 49. Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.
Nevertheless, the Occupying Power may undertake total or partial evacuation of a given area if the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand. Such evacuations may not involve the displacement of protected persons outside the bounds of the occupied territory except when for material reasons it is impossible to avoid such displacement. Persons thus evacuated shall be transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased.
The Occupying Power undertaking such transfers or evacuations shall ensure, to the greatest practicable extent, that proper accommodation is provided to receive the protected persons, that the removals are effected in satisfactory conditions of hygiene, health, safety and nutrition, and that members of the same family are not separated.
The Protecting Power shall be informed of any transfers and evacuations as soon as they have taken place.
The Occupying Power shall not detain protected persons in an area particularly exposed to the dangers of war unless the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand.
The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

To read the four Geneva Conventions and their three additional protocols (which are not all ratified by every nations of the world. see map here) you can visit The International Committee of the Red Cross' website

# Guantanamo / An Architektur about Giorgio Agamben and the Camps

picture extracted from the 2006 film The Road to Guantanamo by Mat Whitecross

It's been one year and half that Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States, and although one of his very first proposition was to close Guantanamo, it seems that nobody is too much in a hurry to find a way to deal with people whose majority has not been proven to be guilty of anything.
Anyway, Guantanamo as a materialization of what Giorgio Agamben calls the state of exception is compelling for the importance of architecture to that matter. In the excellent book Territories. Islands, camps and other states of utopia, the German group An Architektur (see previous post) writes a very interesting article about Agamben and the notion of camp:

The number of people detained at Camp Delta now runs to 650. Their status is neither that of prisoners of war nor that of civilians. The US has skirted the Geneva Convention and international law by arbitrarily designating the prisoners as "Unlawful Enemy Combatants," to whom constitutional rights do not apply. The prisoners have no right to legal representation or to due process, and they can be detained indefinitely without concrete charges being filed. Guantanamo Bay's special judicial-spatial status allows the US to redefine and reinterpret laws as it sees fit. Guantanamo is a space whose conventional military significance has declined but which still serves the strategic interests of the US. There, a parallel legal system for suspected terrorists has been created, which was originally site-specific, but which is meanwhile also being applied outside of this unique territory.

Giorgio Agamben: The State of Emergency and the Notion of the Camp

Reflection is needed about the paradoxical status of the detainment camp in its quality as an exceptional space. It is part of a territory which stands outside the normal rule of law but which is not therefore an external space. What is excluded there [...] is actually included by virtue of its own exclusion. The state of emergency is what, above all else, is captured in the order of the camp. The right to declare a state of emergency is the basis of sovereign authority, and a camp is the structure that realizes a state of emergency in its most permanent form.

Giorgio Agamben. Means without End

Guantanamo Bay's shifting significance within a changing political order becomes apparent, when one considers Giorgio Agamben's investigations into the relationship between sovereignty, states of emergency and camps. Agamben offers a precise analysis of the new political space that opens up, when the political system of a nation state is beset by crisis, exploring the evolutions of various functions of power. In times of crisis, the relationship between sovereignty and territory, as well as the connection between law and space, are redefined. The previous structure of the nation-state, which is based on the functional coalescence of three elements (the laws of state, the territory in question and the membership of citizens in a given nation) begins to dissolve. Proceeding from his investigation of this process, Agamben develops a model of poer that unites judicial-institutional (sovereignty and state) with bio-political (corporeal punishment) aspects. The crucial connection is the constitutive conjunction of the estate of emergency as a legal category and the camp as its spatial manifestation.
The basis of the power of state is the capacity to decide whether to declare a state of emergency i.e. to temporarily suspend the rule of law. The decision affects both the binding legal system and its suspension. As part of the sovereign authority's decision-making capacity, the suspension of law, the state of emergency, is an inherent part of the legal order. Not only is lawlessness inherent in the legal system; the former is a precondition of the latter. However, as an abstract legal dimension, a state of emergency also needs a space in which it becomes concrete. For Agamben, this is the function of the camp. In the camp, the state of emergency, which was originally a temporary suspension of the legal system, gets a permanent spatial location. Camps are exceptional areas within a territory which fall outside the jurisdiction of law. Moreover, the camp is the place, where the bio-political dimension of sovereign power denying the detainee -for example in refugee or detention camps- all legal and political status, the state reduces them to complete judicial arbitrariness and absolute state power. By showing how a temporary or spatially limited state of how a new law is created from the lawlessness of the camp. The camp is a kind of catalyst, which transforms the suspension of law into a new, permanent, spatial and legal order.
[...]
Guantanamo is an example of how a political system no longer orders legal norms and practices within a concrete territory, but rather applies ex-territoriality as a constitutive element in the maintenance of its own power. Ex-territoriality as a spatial category refers to places which are located outside of a state's borders and its legal system, but which are nonetheless under the control of its sovereign authority. The suspension of law is transformed there from a provisional measure into a permanent technique of rule. The increase in power of the executive, which exercises sovereign authority, not only leads to the loss of the absence of rights into the constitutive element of the new legal order. The state of emergency, which is manifested in various forms of ex-territoriality, becomes the new regulator of the system. It takes its place along side the state, territory and the nation as the fourth element of the political order.

Oliver Clemens, Jesko Fezer, Kim Forster, Sabine Horlitz (AN ARCHITEKTUR). for Territories. Islands, camps and other states of utopia. KW 2003

# ENOUGH !

map coming from bbc.co.uk

At the time I am writing this article the West Bank is still sealed by the Israeli army as a "prevention measure". Many defenders of the Israeli Government action claim it as legitimate defense which is already a farce when you observe the total asymmetry between the two opponents; however here, such an oppressive measure is being justified by the notion of prevention. This shift from suppression to prevention is a perfect example of a police/military absolute state. It is based on a fear narrative and maintains this potentiality of danger as a legitimacy of oppression.

The reason of such a fear here is based on the announcement -while Joe Biden was visiting Israel in order to support potential negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians- of 1600 new housing built in a illegal settlement in East-Jerusalem (on Palestinian land). This continuous illegal colonization (read Eyal Weizman's Civilian Occupation) which brings the most extreme Jewish communities on the Palestinian land, will provide to the Israeli state a total advantage for eventual land negotiation. Indeed for each settlement withdrawn (and there are dozen of them), Palestinian will have to concede something as well -which is completely absurd since all those settlements have been built in a complete transgression of International Laws.

It seems to me important to recall that Israel is one of the five religious republics in the world (with Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Mauritania) and that the fact of religion and politics being mixed up together cannot bring anything else than the fear and despise of the otherness.

As a conclusion I would like to address the fact that so few medias have been writing about the seal of the West Bank (very small article in NYTimes, a bit more in LeMonde). That is the way of banalizing injustice.

Read the BBC article about the new settlement in East-Jerusalem and the NYTimes' blog article.

# Take Back The Land

Max Rameau was invited to speak about his association yesterday at the Towards Post-Capitalist Spaces conference. Take Back The Land requisitions illegally some idle lands belonging to the city of Miami in order to provide accommodation for homeless people. The shanty town thus constituted elaborates its own rules of life in community and to maintain good relationships with the neighborhood. Max Rameau affirms that due to a "favorable" context (housing crisis), the ultimate priority for the fight should be the claim of a right to housing which is in contradiction with the current capitalistic laws of absolute profit.
My suggestion here would be (for once) a tactical argument. The fact that one needs an address (therefore a home) in order to vote seems to belong to a very violent segregation towards the poorest which is in total contradiction with the bases of democracy. I am claiming it is a tactical argument based on law since I guess people would prefer to have a home rather than the right to vote, but I feel it could be a way to emphasize the absurdity and the violence of the current situation...
Those lectures has been extremely interesting. One should compare Teddy Cruz approach with Max Rameau's since one is working to make things change in a legal and durable way, dialoguing with the institutions whereas the other is fighting violence with violence by "reclaiming the capitalist spaces" which should anyway be used for the community rather than waiting for a developer to build offices or residences on it.