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May 20, 2002
Edward Said
The Crisis for American Jews
May 19, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
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The New Crusade:
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May
20, 2002
The Bulldozer
War
by Christian
Salmon
During the wars in former Yugoslavia the architect
Bogdan Bogdanovich coined the term "urbicide" to describe
the destruction of cities in the Balkans. In Palestine the violence
has targeted the entire landscape. A trail of devastation stretches
as far as the eye can see: a jumble of demolished buildings,
levelled hillsides and flattened forests. This barrage of concentrated
damage has been wrought not only by the bombs and tanks of traditional
warfare, but by industrious, vigorous destruction that has toppled
properties like a violent tax assessor.
A concrete-and-asphalt ugliness now mars
some of the most beautiful views in the world. Hillsides have
been carved up for bypass roads to Israeli settlements. On either
side of the road Palestinian homes have been destroyed, olive
trees uprooted and orange orchards razed, on behalf of enhanced
visibility. All that remains is a no-man's land topped by watchtowers.
In the hostilities, the omnipresent bulldozers have as much strategic
importance as the tanks. Never before has such an innocuous piece
of equipment augured such violence and brutality.
Unplanned development is not at issue,
nor are the concrete jungles of Israel's Mediterranean coastline
nor the forces of heartless capitalism. No, I am reminded of
the efforts of the former Soviet Union's Gosplan, as if this
destruction was being overseen by a state planning committee
and the wilful hand of Israel was striving to erase the past.
The twin mind-sets of construction and destruction have long
coexisted here. In the 1950s thousands of pine trees, not olives,
not oranges, were planted to wipe out traces of destroyed Palestinian
villages; agricultural development was then hailed as a hallmark
of civilisation. But today, in thrall to the forces of destruction,
the gardener's hand has turned against the land, slashing and
plundering, uprooting, displacing and depopulating. All geographical
settings contain intelligible signs and landmarks that bear witness
to the narrative of history; but the painful realisation on entering
Palestine is how profoundly the topography has been altered:
the landmarks have been erased, producing disorientation.
No concerted effort is being made to
create a Palestinian state, a binational entity or even two separate
Israeli and Palestinian states. Instead the forces at work here
seek geographic fragmentation and dissolution, the abolition
of the land itself. It would not be the first time that places
and streets were renamed or localities taken apart before being
remade anew. In Bosnia this was known as "memoricide",
the murder of the past. Here mere name changes are not enough:
forests, hillsides and roadways must be completely deconstructed.
The territory has been mutilated. We know that geography's primary
purpose is to serve the needs of war. But in Palestine, war is
designed mostly to conquer geography.
Official speeches and UN resolutions
often fail to mention an important thing: this soil contains
the interwoven strands of thousands of years of human history,
the strata of numerous cultures and civilisations. The countryside
and the roads, the fields and the olive groves are the endangered
legacy of all humankind. Unesco was rightly alarmed when statues
of the Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan's
Bamiyan Valley. Will we stand by impassively while Palestine
is reduced to fields of ruins and Jerusalem becomes another Beirut?
Who will speak out against the obliteration of Palestine's natural
and archaeological sites?
Destruction
During the week we spent in Ramallah,
Gaza and Rafah, all we saw was destruction: villages, roads and
homes, all demolished. Crops have been burned and public services
bombarded. Missiles from helicopter gunships or F-16 fighter
planes have destroyed newly completed civilian infrastructure.
The European Commission has compiled an extraordinary list of
the EU-funded projects that have been damaged. These include
Gaza international airport, Gaza seaport, Ramallah's Voice of
Palestine radio station, Bethlehem's Intercontinental Hotel and
a forensic laboratory. Municipal infrastructure including schools,
public housing projects, roads, sewers and recycling centres
have been destroyed, together with the administrative offices
of a peace project in Jenin, reforestation projects in Beit Lahia,
the central statistics office in Ramallah and irrigation systems
in Jericho. In total 17 projects valued at $15.58m. Does anyone
believe that all these sites were terrorist hideouts?
We visited a razed village near Rafah
on the Egyptian border and walked among the rubble of bulldozed
homes. Exercise books, kitchen utensils and a toothbrush were
strewn about, signs of life reduced to pieces. One woman told
us that residents were given five minutes to leave their homes
in the middle of the night. The bulldozers returned several times
to "finish the job"; these three words may well become
the Israeli army's catchphrase. Mounted high atop the watchtowers,
infrared machine guns watch over the wasteland. There are no
soldiers about. At night the guns fire automatically as soon
as any lights are turned on. The first few rows of houses are
riddled with bullet holes and their residents face the constant
threat of automatic weapons fire. This must be how buffer zones
are created.
Like some stinging insect bent on inflicting
injury, the war machine is in perpetual motion, spreading boundaries
wherever it goes, patiently and absent-mindedly. Here the border
is an all-pervasive force, cutting through street corners, hillsides,
villages, even houses. Military fortifications have replaced
the olive groves. City walls are all reinforced, each one a hostile
presence. Any private home might conceal a lurking sniper. Checkpoints
loom up at every bend in the road, sometimes every 100m; there
are over 700 in the West Bank alone. Because some roads are blocked
off, travelling to Bir Zeit University means you have to take
a bus and a taxi as well as walking part of the way. The occupied
territories have become a grid of impenetrable cells, with the
Israeli army controlling all access in and out. There are some
220 of these rat traps--perhaps reservations or ghettos might
be a better term--with battalions of Merkava tanks and Apache
helicopters (supplied by the US military) on constant patrol.
This is a new type of frontier: portable,
porous and hazy, a border in motion. One evening we climbed with
Mahmoud Darwish, the poet, to the top of a small hill in Ramallah,
where we looked out on the twinkling lights of Jerusalem only
a few kilometres away. In the foreground lay areas in shadow,
with only a few scattered lights from Palestinian homes. To our
right off in the distance, there was a zone of bright light with
a deserted illuminated roadway leading to an Israeli settlement.
And amid this shimmering nightscape, I could pick out the border.
The Israeli occupation comes down to
this: the right to determine what will be illuminated and what
will be cast into darkness, what will be rendered visible or
invisible, accessible or inaccessible. The border governs every
aspect, even the division of light and shadow, like some supernatural
apparition.
Shifting, furtive
border
The Polish writer, Tadeusz Konwicki,
once said of his homeland: "My country is on wheels: its
borders shift in keeping with the latest treaty." The situation
is even worse here in Palestine: the border shifts like a swarm
of locusts in the wake of another suicide attack, like the onset
of a sudden storm. It might arrive at your doorstep like a delivery
in the night, as quickly as the tanks can roll in; or it may
slip in slowly, like a shadow. The border keeps creeping along,
surrounding villages and watering places. It is a mobile phenomenon,
like the specially designed walls we saw in Rafah: the dull partitions
of an evolving habitat, easily transportable to keep pace with
the ever-expanding settlements.
The border is furtive as well: like the
rocket launchers, it crushes and disintegrates space, transforming
it into a frontier, into bits of territory. This frontier paralyses
the ebb and flow of transit instead of regulating it. It no longer
serves to protect, instead transforming all points into danger
zones, all persons into living targets or suicide bombers. It
has ceased to be a peaceful boundary designed to separate two
autonomous lands, to assign a rightful place to each, to endow
a given space with its distinctive shape, form and colour. The
border here is meant to repress, displace and disorganise. In
Israel and Palestine alike the very concept of territory has
become hostile, devoid of content or contours, making insecurity
the norm. In the words of the French poet, Rene Char, "To
stifle distance is to kill".
There are windows with narrow openings
to accommodate guns, wall after wall of high facades, row upon
row of buildings: this is the city-as-barracks. The Israeli settlements
present a series of closed-off architectural forms that embody
the feeling of self-confinement. No doubt this is due to security
constraints but it also reveals an obsession with space, a conception
of space based on fear and repression. "The truth of an
era", said the Austrian writer, Hermann Broch, about late
19th century Vienna, "may generally be read in its architectural
facades". If Broch's conclusion is correct, the building
facades in the Israeli settlements are slogans that betray a
sense of environmental panic, a fear of the outside world, the
antithesis of hospitality-of-place.
This is exophobia, a fear of the outside
world, the converse of the process of occupation: the further
you advance into enemy territory, the more you retreat into yourself.
This holds for Israeli society in general. It is not exo-colonialism,
to borrow the term used by the French architect and writer, Paul
Virilio, as illustrated by the outward-looking style of Spanish
colonial architecture in Latin America. This is endo-colonialism,
an inward-looking variety that seeks more than the appropriation
of enemy territory: it breeds dispossession, a withdrawal into
itself. Its sign is the military bunker.
The political debates and media coverage
have failed to address an important issue: Israel's colonisation
of the occupied territories is not only unethical and illegal,
it is impracticable. Indeed it is founded on a sense of unbearable
living that is peculiar to the pathologies of exile and also
afflicts those living in refugee camps. Strictly speaking, the
Israeli settlements are uninhabitable places, not just uncomfortable,
dangerous or impractical over the long term. The settlements
show the impossible side of habitation that goes hand in hand
with the question of return. They are an anti-urban development,
based on warfare, as we might speak of a war-based economy. This
is civil development founded on incivility.
Hence the paradoxes. The settlements
are extravagant, in the etymological sense of the word (from
the Latin extra + vagare, to wander). Ensuring security within
areas having a Palestinian majority--there are 5,000 settlers
versus 1.5m Palestinians in the Gaza Strip--requires constant
vigilance and complete control over traffic entering and leaving
the areas. An Israeli settler driving by creates traffic jams
on the side roads, which are blocked off by checkpoints. This
roadside version of apartheid obliges the inventive civilian
population to come up with ever-greater feats of nerve.
In Gaza we saw roads separated by high
walls forming a bridge, a work-in-progress stretching across
the occupied territories. Somebody mentioned a scheme that involved
lining the roads with crocodile-infested canals. Although this
proposal may seem far-fetched, it shows the prevailing mood.
The Israeli transport minister even estimated the cost of building
a viaduct to link Gaza and the West Bank, a grandiose project
worthy of the pharaohs. Whether true or not, such plans indicate
the climate of panic. The Other must be cast out or warded off.
The choice boils down to repression or immobilisation. Never
have so many people been confined to such a small area. Traffic
between Israel and the occupied territories has been totally
blocked off, with large numbers of Palestinians complaining of
house arrest. Meeting with other people is impossible because
of the traffic restrictions, which also make travel between Ramallah
and Gaza impossible. Even a trip within the Gaza Strip can take
longer than the flight from Tel Aviv to New York. In the occupied
territories Israel is occupying time as well as space, with people
facing long lines at checkpoints before being allowed to return
home.
Over decades the Israelis have abandoned
the utopia of the kibbutzes for the atopia, the nowhere, of the
settlements. People were fond of saying in the 1960s that they
tried to make the desert bloom and the kibbutz exerted a powerful
appeal. Since then the biblical garden has become a desert, a
wasteland, a battlefield.
The bulldozers on the roadsides are the
troubling acknowledgement of this. The key question is not the
one posed by Kafka-- "What must we do in order to live?"--since
the goal here is not living, but dislodging and destruction.
This is the first war to be waged with bulldozers. This is an
attempt at deterritorialisation without historical precedent.
This is total warfare that targets the civilian population and
the land . This is war in an age of agoraphobia, a fear of open
spaces, seeking not the division of territory but its abolition.
Christian Salmon
is the author of Tombeau de la fiction, Denoel, Paris, 1999 and
Censure! Censure!, Stock, Paris, 2000. He is also the founder
and executive director of the International Writers' Parliament,
for which he edits the journal Autodafe. This essay originally
appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique.
Translated by Luke Sandford
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