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A new map of the West Bank reveals a troubling phenomenon: urban sprawl as human-rights abuse.
By Stephen Zacks
February 2003
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Photographs from A Civilian Occupation, the catalogue of Eyal
Weizman and Rafi Segal's Israeli exhibit--cancelled for political
reasons--for the 2002 World Congress of Architecture. The Shaked colony
in the West Bank near Jenin (above) is planned to optimize
surveillance of the surrounding region.
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A view from the interior of a settlement under constuction at Na'ale
(above), on the outskirts of Jerusalem, provides clear looks into the
valley below, as well as of another settlement on a distant hilltop.
Top, Milutin Labudovich. Bottom, Eyal Weizman.
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You would have a hard time finding an architect in East or West Jerusalem,
Ramallah, or Tel Aviv not armed with a map. Sometimes it is a private mental
image of the places he or she knew before the landscape was divided, but
more often it is a literal map indicating demographic changes or the Israeli
line of control's movement during the past half-century. Israeli architect
Eyal Weizman is no exception. Designed for the human rights group B'tselem
after a year of site visits and helicopter reconnaissance, his map documents
the material reality of the West Bank with painstaking accuracy. Rendered
in color-coded splotches are the boundaries of Palestinian and Israeli habitations
in the territory occupied by Israel since 1967--and the plans for further
colonization. It's a graphic illustration of a struggle waged as much in
bricks and mortar as with bombs and machine guns.
From the country's 1948 inception the Israeli program was a straightforward
one: to build a Jewish state in an area where the vast majority of the population
was not Jewish; and architecture and planning, in tandem with the advance
of soldiers and tanks, played a central role. Over the years the plan hasn't
changed much, but the map has--dramatically. Given the hell-or-high-water
pace of demolition and construction in the West Bank since the 1993 Oslo
Peace Accords, B'tselem urgently needed a document that presented both the
precise boundaries of existing Israeli colonies and an accurate picture
of what was in store for the near future. And it needed someone who could
explain the map not in terms of statistics or ideology but in the language
of planning and design.
"What B'tselem wanted to understand was how the way that space is organized
reflects on issues of human rights," says Weizman, sitting in
his Tel Aviv office overlooking the Mediterranean. "For that reason
they wanted to collaborate with an architect." Weizman was the natural
choice for the job: at the time he was doing research on the West Bank colonies
with his partner Rafi Segal for the Israeli exhibits at the Venice
Biennale and World Congress of Architecture--the latter censored in the
final hour for being "too political" by the Israel Association
of United Architects.
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Illegal outpost settlements in the Jordan Valley.
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B'tselem's map of the West Bank (above) shows the patterns of Israeli colonization
in blue; it's now recognized by the U.S. State Department
as the authoritative map of the region. For a full-size version of this map, log on to
www.btselem.org/English/ Publications/Summaries/ Land_Grab_Map.asp
Top & middle, Daniel Bauer; Map courtesy B'tselem
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With the help of B'tselem's researchers, Weizman collected the master plans
of more than 150 settlements in the West Bank--an unprecedented task--and
compared them with CIA satellite images and photographs shot during aerial
sorties. The resulting map starkly documents how the settlement of a mere
two percent of the West Bank has cut the territory into a meaningless patchwork
of isolated enclaves. "It was very clearly stated in the master plans
for the whole West Bank that you need to bisect the area," Weizman
explains, "to put wedges in between the Palestinian cities to shrink
their economy and create forced emigration. The other thing was not to allow
the formation of a Palestinian state, not to allow contiguity between the
enclaves." Indeed traveling anywhere in the West Bank, it's difficult
to avoid the realization that its Judaization, as colonization is often
called, is being massively accelerated, as evidenced by the construction
cranes and frames of modern apartment houses rising from nearly every hilltop.
"Human-rights organizations normally deal with fast processes--military
incursions, illegal arrests, assassinations, torture," Weizman says.
"We were looking into slow processes and saying that the concept manifests
itself most clearly in the processes of encroachment, growth, and sprawl,
both in the design and approval and in the way matter is organized--the
very orientation of the house and the windows with the landscape. There
was a careful process of strategic design that pushed the civilian population
into the occupied territories to achieve geopolitical objectives."
To a great extent colonization of the West Bank is being accomplished in
much the same way the suburbanization of America was achieved: through highway
construction, regional planning ordinances, and the provision of irresistible
economic incentives. "A new Jewish immigrant from America or Europe
can come here and basically get a no-money-down mortgage on a house at preferred
interest rates," says Fred Schlomka, an activist for the Israeli Committee
Against Home Demolition, which provides assistance to Palestinian families
whose houses have been bulldozed. "The price tag is probably about
half of what a home would cost in a similar community inside Israel."
Through his research Weizman also ducumented a type of planning he describes
as the "politics of verticality." "They managed to seize
all the hilltops," Weizman says, "leaving the valleys in between
them in Palestinian hands. It's almost like you have a model of the terrain
and you cut a section at say six hundred meters, and everything that's above
is Israeli. What was created was an incredible fragmentation of the terrain
into two systems that work across the vertical axis."
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