# Profaning Colonial Architecture / Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti at Columbia November10th

Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, the two founders of Decolonizing Architecture (with Eyal Weizman) will be presenting their work at Columbia University on November 10th (at 6:30pm). Their lecture entitled Profaning Colonial Architecture will introduce their strategy of re-using abandoned Israeli settlements in the West Bank for the future new state of Palestine. Their projects are therefore based on a pretty optimistic scenario (Israel leaving the West Bank (1) without destroying their own settlements as they did in Gaza (2)) but as said in a BBC article that a reader just sent to me, the colonization's impact on land is such that it can now be considered almost as irreversible which make Decolonizing Architecture's projects even more important.

# If Antigone was a Refugee / Zizek, Badiou and Aloni's lecture yesterday for the Jenin Freedom Theater

Philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek and filmmaker Udi Aloni were invited yesterday in New York (peculiarly enough, hosted by St Paul's Church in Manhattan which seems to have an interesting priest) by the famous Jenin Freedom Theater (located in Jenin's refugee camp in the West Bank) in order to expose their thought about the current Palestinian situation.
It would be hard for me to make a coherent summary of those three talks and I am unfortunately lacking of time to do so; however I wanted to report several points which were evoked yesterday:

ALAIN BADIOU:
- The Palestinian weakness is and has to be an affirmation of existence
- Under the name of Palestinian lies something universal
- Palestinians are being presented but not represented

UDI ALONI (who wanted to talk as an "Israeli Jew"):
- It is very important to distinguish which art if the official art and which one is the resistive one. Films like Waltz with Bashir or Lebanon are the official art.
- The difference between Tel Aviv's population and Jerusalem's population is that Tel Aviv's is racist but think it is liberal whereas Jerusalem's know it is racist and acts like it.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK:
- Colonization does not really happen between "what is happening" (in reference of what interests Western medias). Colonization is a slow and invisible process enforced by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy system
- Joke: "In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: 'Let's establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it's true; if it's written in red ink, it's false.' After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: 'Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair -- the only thing you can't get is red ink."
That is our role to be the red ink.
- Israeli liberals want "decaffeinated Palestinians" (in reference of his observation on nowadays' society who wants coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, cream without fat, warfare without casualty, sex without sex etc.)
- Western Countries (especially in Europe currently) are acting for a "reasonable racism", a "barbarism with human face", a racial oppression that does not kill.
- "Antigone is a true bitch". He advices the Jenin Freedom Theater which wants to play Antigone to change the script during the fight between Antigone and Creon by an exasperation of the people of Thebes who proclaim a revolution and kills both of them (!).

I know that it is sometimes risky or irrelevant to extract those quotes from their context (each ot their talks last for thirty minutes), but I thought it was worth it to have a bit of the substance of what have been said.

# Sympathy with the obstacle / Parkour in Gaza

“Thus, hostile urbanists or militias always conduct the battle towards the inside, or the domain of obstacles, the urban canyon. When it comes to urbanized war, every combatant must think like an obstacle –‘See everything from the perspective of an obstacle’. West then uses Parkour as the exemplary discipline in which the practitioner becomes as one with the obstacle during movement. Every soldier should be a traceur, a swerving projectile which has a deep sympathy with its physical obstacle.”

Negarestani Reza. CYCLONOPEDIA. Complicity with anonymous materials. Melbourne: Re-Press 2008

We already wrote a bit about Parkour on boiteaoutils (link 1 and 2) and our fascination for this practice of architecture which attempts to consider every surfaces as a potential ground for the body.
In his great Cyclonopedia (already evoked in a previous article), the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani evokes urban combat as the new paradigm of war in the Middle East. He establishes a materialist interpretation of the city as a set of obstacles and the militarized choreography of bodies as a set of trajectories that develop a "sympathy" for these same obstacles.
I recently discovered this following video showing three young men practicing Parkour in the Gaza Strip. My romanticism did not need so much to see a poetical resistance by the bodies to the various obstacles the Israeli Army impose to the Palestinian population...

# The situation in Palestine is NOT a war

I just watched a television debate on the French television (thanks Maxime !) wondering if the current circumstances were allowing to think of a potential peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
This enunciation of the problem mimic the one which has been the topic of the very recent negotiations between Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas in Washington. Even Abbas himself posed the problem as such: "Israel has to choose between peace or the colonization".

HOWEVER, this enunciation is, in my opinion, symptomatic of the absolute refusal of the World to see what is the real situation in Palestine. Talking about peace implies that there is a war going on which is not the case by any mean. I affirm it; there is no war in Palestine.

Frederic Taddeï, the animator of this debate killed the latter "in utero", when his first question to his six guests the following question: "Who is to be blamed ?" This very question implies a symmetrical conflict characterized by a mutual violence between each camps, in other words, a war. The situation in Palestine is highly different and whoever went there without a preliminary educational brainwashed knows it.

In fact when Mahmoud Abbas proposes to the Israelis to choose between colonization and peace, he knows that he is bluffing at poker with no game whatsoever and his adversary knowing it. Only the Israeli State or the International Community can enforce the application of International Law which would stop the systematic daily oppression of the Palestinian people.
I am sorry to repeat what I already wrote in numerous previous articles but one has to know that there are at least 300 000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank that are violating the article 49 of the Geneva Convention -I am not even talking about the violent acts of some settlers on the local population- and that is one aspect of the illegal status of Israel.
One other is the various humiliations of Palestinian by Israeli soldiers revealing the extreme power established between a population and an army which is composed by a tremendous amount of people who are less than 22 years old. Tzahal is claiming that those cases of humiliation -those which are carried to the public- are marginal and not revealing the professional spirit of the army and I have to recognize that I understand some of those situations of "nervous breakdown" as symptomatic of the pressure put on those kids' shoulders associated with an educational brainwash (that is part of the Israeli military service's package). However and despite the fact that I condemn those acts, I also recognize the same "attenuating circumstances" to the very marginal terrorist acts committed by some disoriented Palestinians.

Nowadays, the only valid argument that can be carried by the Israelis for those violation of Law is religious. In fact, only the argument according to which God's words are the most important and that the antic territory of Israel belongs to the Jewish People. There is nothing I could argue against a Jewish fundamentalist who would affirm that a human life and human law is nothing compared to God. The defenders of Israel's occupation should thus decide if they agree with such a extremist and violent argument or not because once again, that is the only one which functions in a system of rationality that do not contain any contradiction. Nowadays, nobody can both include Human Rights in his system of rationality and defend Israel's colonization and occupation in the West Bank as this territory was defined in 1949 by the Green Line.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I am profoundly revolted against the eternal highjack of intelligence that is effectuated in debates which constantly refuse to look at the reality as it is, and the elaboration of semantic decoys in order to hide the undeniable violations of the International Law.

# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// Abandonned structures near Ramallah

While walking on Ramallah's hills (near Beituniya), I once catch sight of peculiar buildings on further away hills. Those buildings are actually concrete structures which have been part of an interrupted construction between the two Palestinian villages of Ein Kinya and Mazra'a al-Qibliya and close from the Israeli settlement Talmon (that you can see on my second photograph).
According to my source (thanks Dror !), it was very likely Palestinian constructions that have been stopped by the Israeli when the second Intifada (2000) started. If it is the case those abandoned structures are an architectural instant, symbol of the Israeli control over Palestinian lives.
I even found another picture of them from another point of view (see the last photograph). If anybody has some more, I would be very interested to see and publish them.

# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// The Palestinian Archipelago

What I call Palestinian Archipelago is the group of "islands" within the West Bank in which since the Oslo Accords (1993) Palestinian have security and civil control (Zone A) and security control joint with the Israelis (Zone B). The rest of the area in the West Bank (Zone C) is completely under Israeli control and composes the "Mare Magnum" all around those islands. I thus worked on a map that would expresses this maritime vision of Palestine.
Feel free to click on it, the resolution is pretty high.

PS: Thanks to a reader's comment, I now know that somebody (Julien Bousac) already got this ready and made a clearer map out of it.

# Urbicide

picture: Gaza after the 2008 Israeli Siege. Getty Images

Here is a small text I recently wrote about the notion of urbicide. It includes a digest of Eyal Weizman's lecture about Forrensic Architecture I had the chance to attend both in New York and in Bethlehem.

Despite of the fact that this strategy has been always occurring in history, the notion of urbicide has been invented by the former Mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanovic after the wars of Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1996. One could define it as the act of destroying buildings and cities that do not constitute any military targets. Urbicide is rather an act that is supposed to affect the very life of the population in such a way that war cannot be ignored by anybody.

This technique is being used in symmetrical wars like the Second World War and the Blitz in England on the one hand and the systematic bombing of German cities by the allies on the other hand. However, urbicide is also fully present in asymmetrical wars with the case of guerilla AND governmental terrorism. The most famous example in the Western World is of course the terrorist attacks against New York’s World Trade Center in 2001 for its sudden and unexpected violence that was both perceived literally and symbolically; however, governmental armies also use this strategy to actively oppress a given population. That was thus the case of the Serbian army over the Bosnian population during the same wars evoked above, and that also constitutes the daily life of the Palestinian population who has to suffer from the Israel Defense Forces’ domination.
One should not forget that buildings and cities are the most tangible element of a civilization since even the written heritage that composes a nation’s archive necessities an architectural container. It thus happened that a civilization fully disappeared from History after having suffered from a combined genocide and urbicide.

In fact, urbicide has been pretty much developed as long as war exists. However, one can probably affirm that its surgical application and its insertion within a global warfare strategy of a highly sophisticated army are merely recent. Its implementation by the Israeli Defense Forces, for example, is very illustrative. We already saw in the last chapter how the Israeli soldiers were sometimes destroying Palestinian homes in order to re-compose the battle field, but there are plenty of other applications of urbicide in this context. The way Arab’s villages in Israel have been fully destroyed after 1949 is highly symptomatic of this refusal from the Israeli authorities to deny the Palestinian existence in the past, in the present and of course in the future. Nevertheless, this last example remains absolutely legal from Israel who is free to develop its own land as it wishes. On the contrary, the systematic destruction of civilian Palestinian buildings and homes in the Gaza strip can be absolutely considered as a war crime according to the International Law of conflicts.
In that matter, Eyal Weizman observes the birth of a new legal discipline which places buildings as the main object of the judicial investigation. Weizman is then interested in the notion of “forensic architecture” that see war and building experts intervening in order to attempt to determine the technical means of destruction of architecture by external agents. In this regard, he focuses his study on the person of Marc Garlasco.
Garlasco was one of the Pentagon experts in “attacks design” and during the beginning of the second Gulf War in 2003, he was named “Chief of High Value Targeting”. His task consisted in the organization –Weizman uses the word ‘design’ in order to accentuate the architectural aspect of the job- of various attacks of buildings in order to assassinate several members of the Hussein administration or family. The fact that Garlasco was allowed to include the death of up to twenty nine civilians in each attacks is illustrative of the way Western armies are dealing with both military pragmatism and political communication. Just as much as there are processes and software of positive design of architecture, it also exists some for the accomplishment of a negative architecture; an architecture that has been transformed by the mean of destruction. The study of this transformation is far more objective than the chaotic aspect of such an architecture could let suppose. That is how, from his job in the Pentagon, Garlasco ended up working for the organization Human Rights Watch as an expert of what Weizman now calls forensic architecture. Before being fired by this same organization for the collection he owned of military Nazi objects, Garlasco studied the evidences of the 2008 Gaza siege. His conclusions proving that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed by the Israeli Army during this operation, were then confirmed by the United Nations’ representative, Richard Goldstone in his report.

Urbicide had thus become a scientific surgical military operation on architecture that allow to either simply kills a civilian population by the mean of architecture, or practically and symbolically destroys the organizational and cultural aspects of the city in a biopolitical attack on a population.

# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// Focus on one settlement: Ma'ale Adummim

Ma'ale Adummim is an illegal Israeli settlement near the Palestinian town of Abu Dis (in the East Jerusalem's region). It is one of the largest settlement of the West Bank and hosts around 34000 settlers. The settlement like a lot of others is situated on the top of a hill in order to gain geographical and topographical advantages against the Palestinians.

# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// Hebron = Hell on Earth

Hebron is a city in the Southern part of the West Bank. Its particularity is that Israeli settlers are both living around the city but also WITHIN the old city center. For example the market street (see pictures above and below) is surmounted by settlers who do not hesitate to throw rubbish or even acid and molotov cocktails on the Palestinian population underneath. Most commercial activities have been shut down by the Israeli soldiers and a whole part of the old city (including the Khalil Al-Rahman Mosque which is extremely important for the Muslims) is controlled directly by the Israeli Defense Forces.
Around the city, Israeli settlements are situated very close from the road and Palestinian villages. Even settlers' agricultural fields are fenced and surveyed by observation towers...

# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// Israeli Defense Forces' checkpoints

Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank are a mean to prevent, control and filter Palestinians’ movement on their lands. They also constitute a good reaction to the political situation: when the conflict is particularly tensed, they are used as much as a “risk control” as a way to oppress Palestinians and limit or dissuade their movements.
Several types of checkpoints exist. Those that are set on the line of the Wall imply a control of every vehicle and every pedestrian (buses’ customers are requested to go off and walk), their goods, their passports, permits etc. Some other checkpoints are spread all over the West Bank (mostly at every entrance of cities) and control a more or less important amount of vehicles depending on the soldiers’ mood and orders.

# 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 /// Duheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem

The Palestinian refugee camps which are present in most cities of the West Bank and the Gaza strip are precarious pieces of urbanism similar to slums that host the village population that was living on the territory that was given to Israel in 1948 by the United Nations. Duheisha is one of those camps in Bethlehem hosting currently around 10 000 people.
The main problem with refugee camps is that every new building, construction, renovation are ratifications of the situation and seen as a resignation to it. The architecture developed there is thus very handmade, almost accidental sometimes but creates a surprising form of beauty.

# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// The other side of the wall in Abu Dis

A wall having by definition two sides (and that is what his violence is about), here is the sequel of the last article: the exact other side of the wall (you can tell with the Mosque' minaret on the two articles' fourth picture) within the West Bank in Abu Dis.
It is important here to insist on the fact that the wall is absolutely not matching with the 1949 armistice Green Line and thus split an Arab district of East Jerusalem, sharing DE FACTO its people between Israeli sub-citizens on one side and Palestinians who are not authorized (for most of them) to go to Jerusalem on the other side.