Eyal Weizman’s “Hollow Land”– Read it!

I’ve been reading a most amazing book: Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, by the Israeli architect and social activist Eyal Weizman. (He is on the board of the excellent human rights organization B’tselem.)
This book is so much more than a work of dry architecture criticism! It is a deeply engaged, thoughtful, and far-reaching exploration of many of the ways in which physical “space” impacts and is impacted by Israel’s ongoing projects of colonial implantation in Palestine.
I started reading it for the excellent chapter it has on the Israelization/Judaization of Jerusalem, and was transfixed by this sentence about planning norms in the city under Israel’s control (p.47): “For the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem, unlike the Jewish residents, hardly anything was ever planned but their departure.”
One of the the things I really like about the book is the illustrations. There are scores of them, most of them in color; and they’re excellently integrated into the text. If you’ve never been to the OPTs and want to gain a vivid idea of the topography of the place– as well as its geography of human control, displacement, and spatiocide– then this book is a great place to start.
He has a whole chapter on checkpoints, which makes horrible, grisly reading, given how massively these locations of control deform the everyday life of all the West Bank’s Palestinians. It’s prefaced by a simple, full-page photo taken within the Allenby Bridge crossing point between the occupied West Bank and Jordan. The photo is taken from over the shoulder of a PA passport-control officer, looking out through the (presumably bullet-proof) glass at a receding tide of glum-faced Palestinian supplicants.
In the caption, photographer Miki Kratsman recalled about taking the shot that,

When I positioned myself over the shoulder of the Palestinian border policeman to take this photograph, I suddenly heard voices calling behind me: ‘Zooz! Zooz!’ (‘Move! Move!’ in Hebrew). Only then did I realize that behind the mirror [behind her] were the Israelis. When I tried to take a photograph of the mirror I was removed from the terminal by the angry Palestinian policeman.

Weizman has, of course, chapters on the Wall and on settlements. He also has two brilliant chapters on the human topography of the Israeli way of war. One of these is on “innovations” developed by the IOF in urban warfare, and the other on the IOF’s use of Palestinian airspace in war–with a long segment on the use of airborne platforms, usually drones, to undertake targeted killings.
Both these latter chapters are quite extraordinary, since Weizman seems to have gained the confidence of several high-ranking IOF generals sufficiently to get them to talk with great apparent frankness about the way they view the use of both ground-space and airspace in their operations.
In the book’s Postscript he writes:

Anyone living in, visiting Israel or living under its regime is well aware of the diffusion of the military in all spheres of life. Many officers and soldiers were willing to talk, mostly anonymously, about military operations, tactics, and procedures. Among the most fertile sources for this work were interviews with Shimon Naveh, a retired officer and former director of the military Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI). I thank him for being forthcoming…

Indeed he was. A large portion of the material in the two chapters on urban warfare and air war came from Naveh, who I think retired as a Brigadier-General and from his colleague Aviv Kochavi, who was commander of the Gaza front in 2005-06.
It seems that Weizman was interviewing Naveh and Kochavi at a time when they and much that they had created through OTRI was suddenly becoming somewhat discredited within the Israeli military. It was a tumultuous time in the IDF general staff in 2005-2006. Naveh, Kochavi, and the whole OTRI institution had apparently been operating under the patronage of former chief of staff, accused war criminal, and present vice-premier Moshe Ya’alon. Then, when Dan Halutz took over as chief of staff in 2005 he dismantled OTRI. But I guess that Naveh felt that many of the lessons he had been teaching Israeli officers at OTRI were being taken by them into the war against Lebanon in July-August 2006….
But, as Naveh acknowledged in an October 2006 interview that Weizman cites (p.214), “The war in Lebanon was a failure and I had a great part in it. What I have brought to the IDF has failed.”
Well, it failed in Lebanon where Hizbullah had built up a very smart and disciplined network of defensive formations that were relatively well-armed– at least, well-armed in comparison to the Palestinians of the refugee camps of Jenin and Balata where Naveh and his people had developed their ghastly tactics of control, even if not at all well-armed, in comparison with the IDF.
Weizman gives us numerous examples of the high-end, “structuralist” and “post-modernist” intellectualizing that Naveh brought to his planning of the assaults the IDF launched against several densely populated Palestinian areas in 2002-2006…
One of OTRI’s big innovations was to plan “swarming” raids in which the Israeli soldiers would advance from several points around the perimeter of, say, a refugee camp, towards the middle, all at once– and in many cases moving right through the homes of the camp’s terrified Palestinian residents, while those residents were still cowering wherever they could within whatever was left to them of their homes.
Read his fuller description of what happened in those raids, on p.194.
He concludes with this:

The unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home has been experienced by civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation…

Then, on p.217, he writes very perceptively about the IOF’s theories regarding where exactly it needs to be:

One of the primary aims of the new tactics developed by OTRI is to release Israel from the necessity of being phsyically present within Palestinian areas, but still able to maintain control of security. According to Naveh, the IDF’s operational paradigm should seek to replace presence in occupied areas with a capacity to move through them, and produce in them what he called ‘effects’, which are ‘military operations such as aerial attacks or commando raids … that affect the enemy psychologically and organizationally.’ The tactics developed at OTRI and other institutes with IDF command, thus have the aim of providing tools for replacing th older mode of territorial domination with a newer ‘de-territorial’ one, which OTRI called ‘occupation through disappearance.’

Of course, the prime example of this approach is Gaza.
Weizman makes clear, too, that the IOF’s concept of the Wall in the West Bank is that it should be permeable from west to east, even while it is expressly designed to block permeability from east to west. (Another “one-way mirror”, we could say.)
Anyway, I could write a lot more about this excellent book. Just the chapter on the IOF’s use of assassination as a policy of the Israeli state is worth re-reading several times…
In describing in great– and very helpfully illustrated– detail the technical nuts and bolts of how, exactly, Israel has been pursuing its policy of spatiocide, control, and exclusion against the Palestinians, this book makes a fine complement to Jonathan Cook’s Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair.