Word The Cat

I just reactivated my dormant virb account. should that mean anything to anyone, its over here. come say hello.

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I can’t drive but I like roads. The A10 is long, straight and plotted by Romans. The Anglo-Saxons called it Ermine Street after a tribe called the Earningas who lived in present-day Cambridgeshire. Londoners call it the Old North Road. In this article, the (car on a) road is the scene for a techno origin myth. In Detroit they build cars and the roads don’t lead out but run back into the city’s navel umbilically. This new Bass Clef track sounds a bit Detroit. From the excellent Zamyatin Tapes Vol. 1 EP promos of which (were?) here.

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Bass Clef - Get on the A10 and Drive and Drive 320k 14.6mb

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You can drive across Australia from Perth to Sydney, but it might take you a while. Roam the Hello Clouds have a foot in both cities. Their new release is out on ~scape (buyable here). People with a vauge interest in Australian jazz should also check this fantastic record by The Necks.

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Roam the Hello Clouds - Uniform 64 320k 7.5mb

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Back in London, Mala guts and de-bones Alicia Key’s ‘Feeling U Feeling Me‘ before building it a new skeleton. buyable here.

Mala - Alicia 320k 12.7mb

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Summer reading: Eyal Weizman’s ‘Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation’, a study of the role of architecture in creating and maintaining the social, cultural and psychological conditions of occupation, as well as discussions of the territorialisation of verticality and the influence of critical theory in military policy.

Architecture is embedded in the cultural fabric of a place. It can’t be neutral. It’s also a very broad term covering not only buildings, but also infastructure and the organisation of spaces both hidden and immediately visible.

Sewage

One of the most pressing infastructural concerns for the health of a densely populated urban space is sewage. International law requires occupying powers to provide a minimum level of sanitation which the IDF has failed to provide. Much of the sanitation infastructure funded by the international community in the wake of the Oslo process has been destroyed by military operations. The bombing of Palestinian electricity supplies in June 2006 also led to the deactivation of pumps and a resultant overspill of three sewage treatment facilites in Gaza. At present half of Gaza’s residents are connected to the sewer system - the rest of the waste gathers above ground. Above ground it becomes visible and politicised, speaking of place and permanence:

“In some places, efforts by UN departments to replace existing systems of infastructure with permanent underground plumbing have been rejected. The raw sewage affirms the refugee camp’s state of temporariness and with it the urgency of a claim for return… Sewage is also used as a tool in the hands of government agents. As part of the state effort to dislocate the Bedouin tribe of Jahalin, camped out on the lower slopes of a mountain onto which the settlement-town of Ma’ale Adumin is now expanding, the military civil administration disconnected one of the settlement’s sewage pipes, flooding large area within and around the Bedouin camp with streams and ponds of polluted matter, forcing it to relocate” (2007: 21).

sewage flowing down the Shiloh Valley in the West Bank

Elsewhere foamy, dark water appears in narrow streams on both sides of high seperation walls. Weizman quotes Jerusalem’s long-standing mayor Teddy Kollek: “For Jewish Jerusalem I did something in the past twenty-five years. For East Jerusalem? Zilch!… Yes, we installed a sewage system for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid they would catch it, so we installed sewage and a water system” (ibid: 22).

Lines of sight

Israeli settlements are often built on the highest ground. State architecure guidlines reccommend that living spaces view out and down; down onto the settlement houses and public spaces further down the slope (thus re-enforcing a sense of community) and out onto the surrounding landscape. A fine view of landscape commodified and/as ancient (and ancestral) is useful in encouraging migration to the settlements, but is also relevant for security concerns. Weizman quotes High Court Justice Vitkon in his 1978 arbitration on the legality of the requisition of land to build the Bet-El settlement near Ramallah:

“[T]errorist elements operate more easily in territory occpied exclusively by a population that is indifferent or sympathetic to the enemy than in a territory in which there are also persons liable to monitor them and inform the authorities of any suspicious movement” (ibid: 100).

In this way, Weizman argues, the civilian population is required to act as agents of state power “to help turn the occupied territory into an optical matrix radiating out from a proliferation of lookout points/settlemnts scattered across the landscape” (ibid:132).

Visibility is also important from other angles. At night settlements are intesely illuminated in white light, hilltop beacons streching from peak to peak. Weizman contrasts this with brown and blackouts in Palestinian communities either through lack of electricity supply or as a precaution against aerial attacks. However, just as the electricity that supplies the settlements runs on a different grid, there are different permissible ways of interacting visually with the settlements. IDF rules of engagement issued in 2003 allowed soldiers to shoot to kill any Palestinian caught observing settlements with binoculars or in any other ’suspicious manner’ (ibid:133).

Checkpoints provide other examples of this “one-way hierachy of vision” (ibid: 132). During the Oslo process (1993-2000) and before the current infitada, Palestinian officers appeared to be the ones in charge of border checkpoints. A person seeking passage would present his papers to a Palestinian border policeman who would wave him through. The Palestinian official would, however, be standing in front of a one-way mirror staffed by Israeli officials. The papers of the person seeking passage were also shown to the Israeli officials through a relay of mirrors (ibid: 138). Since the current infitada, the lines of sight in operation of checkpoints are less subtle. The Qalandia crossing has persons pass through a series of turnstiles to mini-chambers where commands are issued over loudspeaker from a bank of one-way mirrors. As an aside, checkpoint turnstiles were requested to be built to 55cm width as opposed to the standard of 75-90 cm used in Israeli swimmings pools and railway stations. The reason given for this is so that weapons cannot be concealed under clothing (ibid: 151).

Erez Terminal, Gaza, Nir Kafiri, 2004

In this way Palestinians are cast as either terrorists or null - a group of people whose rights and dignities rendered invisible in a spacial environment conceived and operated by state power. Weizman quotes Sa’adia Mandel, the head of the architecture department at Ariel College in the West Bank, “who claimed that his architecture students watching out of their classroom windows ’see Arab villages, but don’t notice them. They look and they don’t see. And I say this positively’” (ibid: 137).

Verticality

During the Camp David negotiations in July 2000, Clinton proposed (orally so that it could be withdrawn at any point) a vertical solution to the dispute over sovereignty of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, based on the (archaeologically unproven) assumption that the second temple was built on what is now under the present elvel of the mosques:

“[H]e proposed a stack of horizontal sovereign borders. The first would have passed under the paving stones of the compound. There the border between Arab Al-Quds and Israeli Jerusalem would, at the most contested point on earth, flip from the horizontal to the vertical. Palestinians gain sovereignty over the platfrom of the Haram al-Sharif, the mosque of Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. Under the paving of this platform would be a layer of 150 centimeter deep UN zone. This zone will be uninhabited but will function to seperate the parties. Israeli sovereignty comprise the volume below this layer to include the Wailing Wall and the sacred “depth of the mount”, where the Temple is presumed to have existed, extending further down to the centre of the earth. Furthermore, the airspace over the site, just like that over the entire heavenly city would remain in Israeli sovereignty. This startling proposal of stacking sovereign volumes in layers, earned it… its nickname - the Arkansas ‘Big Mac’”.

Ehud Barak cautiously welcomed the plan on the proviso that “a bridge or tunnel, though which whoever wants to pray in Al-Aqsa could access the compound” was built. The plan was flatly rejected by the Palestinian delegation, Arafat asking Clinton if he would have accepted ” a foreign sovereignty under the paving of Washington DC” (ibid:55).

The area above the land is important here because it the space which connects Gaza and the West Bank. At the start of the 2000 infitada Ehud Barak closed off Gaza international airport. “In December 2001 Sharon went further down this route, completely shutting off Palestinian airspace by bombing the Palestinian runways, and destroying the entire Palestinian air fleet - Arafat’s presidential aircraft and his two helicopters” (ibid: 254).

Under a two-state policy, questions of infastructure and verticality constantly raise their heads. In the new Jerusalem eastern ring road a high concrete wall divides the traffic into seperate Israeli and Palestinian lanes: “[The Road] extends across three bridges and three tunnels before ending in a complex volumetric knot that untangles in mid-air, channelling Israelis and Palestinians seperately along different spiralling flyovers that ultimately land them on the respective sides of the Wall… A new way of imagining space has emerged. After fragmenting the surface of the West Bank by walls and other barriers, Israeli planners started attempting to weave it together as two seperate but overlapping national geographies - two territorial networks overlapping in the same area in three dimensions without ever having to cross or come together” (ibid: 182).

Theory

In Israel, Weizman claims, there is a strong sense of the solider as pioneer, poet and philosopher (ibid: 210) and the frontier as trangressive space in which borders and the nation itself can be redrawn (ibid: 63). The IDF established an institution called the Operational Theory Reseach Institute (OTRI) whose remit is to teach the theory of war (ibid: 187). In 2002, against a background of officially sanctioned revenge killing (ibid: 196-197) Deleuzean theories of space and territoriality were deployed militarily in the Nablus refugee camp. Rather than moving though the streets where snipers would be waiting, the IDF successively blew their way through the walls of civilian homes. Weizman quotes Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi on the attacks:

“This space you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. Now, you can stretch the boundaries of your interpretation of it… The question is, how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret it as a place, like every architect and every town planner does, to walk through? This depends only on interpretation. We interpret the alley as a place forbidden to walk through, and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the wondow as a palce forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps… This is why we opted for the method of walking through walls… Like a worm that eats its way forward emerging at points and then disappearing. We were thus moving from the interior of [Palestinian] homes to their exterior in unexpected ways and in places we were not anticipated” (ibid: 198-199).

Weizman also quotes OTRI co-director Shiveh Naveh on Deleuze and Guttari’s A Thousand Plateaus:

“Several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaus became instrumental for us [in the IDF]… Most important was the distinction [Deleuze and Guattari] have pointed out between the concepts of ’smooth’ and ’striated’ space [which accordingly reflected] the organisational concepts of ‘the war machine’ and the ’state apparatus’. In the IDF we now use the term ‘to smooth out space’ when we want to refer to operation in a space in such a manner that borders do not affect us… Rather than contain and organise our forces according to existing borders, we want to move through them” (ibid: 200-201).

There’s more on the IDF and theory in this Weizman article.

I haven’t flagged it up too much, but its worth noting that the OTRI advises the US, British and Australian armies in Iraq. Similarities with Iraq can also be drawn with the vertical borders created by the ‘No-Fly Zone’ in the 90s under which the air became a space of spectacular control where fighter jets would break the sound barrier and always held the threat (and frequently the actuality) of bombings.

Hollow Land is published by Verso and is buyable most places you’d expect to be able to buy it.