Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation [Hardcover]

Eyal Weizman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1844671259 | ISBN-13: 978-1844671250 | Publication Date: June 17, 2007

Groundbreaking exposé of Israel’s terrifying reconceptualization of geopolitics in the Occupied Territories and beyond.

Hollow Land is a groundbreaking exploration of the political space created by Israel’s colonial occupation.

In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel’s mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which all natural and built features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged. Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon’s reconceptualization of military defense during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations.

In exploring Israel’s methods to transform the landscape and the built environment themselves into tools of domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Eyal Weizman brilliantly deconstructs Israel’s yoking of traditionally humanist disciplines and discourse to the service of its campaign against the Palestinians. This book is chilling but essential reading.” (Ahdaf Soueif )

“Hollow Land is a remarkably original work that confirms Eyal Weizman’s indispensable role as a critic of the sinister and ubiquitous instrumentality of space in contemporary politics and life.” (Michael Sorkin )

“Hollow Land is a remarkable achievement. Scholarly and poetic in its epic reach, and narrated with the clarity of vision and sensibility of an artist, Hollow Land is destined to become a classic.” (Karma Nabulsi )

“A startling exercise in what it means to think through the axiomatics of occupation, capture and subjection... Weizman boldly attempts to create an entirely new method to conceptualize the relationship between surfaces, movement, and the tools of war.” (Achille Mbembe )

“A wrenching account of the multiple ways in which the land of Palestine has been hollowed out by Israeli occupation. Weizman's stunning combination of words and images is at once a brilliant critique of the politics of space and a searing indictment of colonial rule and dispossession.” (Derek Gregory )

About the Author

Eyal Weizman is an architect and Director of the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has worked with a variety of NGOs and human rights groups in Israel-Palestine. He co-edited the book A Civilian Occupation to accompany the major exhibition of the same name, has written many articles in journals, magazines, and books, and is an editor at large for Cabinet magazine. His other books include Hollow Land and Lesser Evils. He received the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-7.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 318 pages
• Publisher: Verso (June 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844671259
• ISBN-13: 978-1844671250
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #323,178 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Space, power and illusion, May 27, 2008

By 

Nate Wright (Fort Collins, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (Hardcover)

Weizman begins his introduction by telling the story of the founding of Migron, a Jewish settlement built on Palestinian land in the West Bank. Convincing the Israeli military to build a cellular antenna, settlers first hire a single 24-hour guard. The guard is followed by his family, followed by five more families, and "by mid-2006 it comprised around 60 trailers and containers housing more than 42 families: approximately 150 people perched on the hilltop around a cellular antenna" (p. 2).

But Weizman is not content to recite the facts of Israeli occupation. His analysis draws heavily on post-structuralist thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. Covering everything from Israeli architectural aesthetics, checkpoints and border terminals, to the Wall, Ariel Sharon's conception of depth security, Israeli urban warfare doctrine and targeted assassinations, he repeatedly penetrates the surface of his extensive empirical research, locating the social narratives which give birth to these phenomena.

He is primarily concerned with charting what he calls the "elastic geographies" of the occupied territories (p. 5), a continually modifying frontier in which architecture and space become both a form of power and a conceptual way of understanding the political issues at stake.

Some issues he tackles are well worn, but by combining his extensive fieldwork as a consultant for B'Tselem with a robust theoretical approach, he still brings interesting insight. In a series of chapters covering Israeli settlements, checkpoints and the construction of the wall, he exposes not just the extensive control of Palestinian society, but also the way in which Israel's sense of security has come to depend on a conception of the territories as a malleable and vulnerable space. The spread of these control mechanisms in Israeli society, he claims, constitutes a "cognitive and practical system that sees the physical separation of Jews and Arabs, and the total control of Palestinian movement, as an important component of Jewish collective security" (p. 155).

Some of the issues, however, are less well known, such as his analysis of Israeli archaeology, architecture and landscape. He shows how city planning and architectural policies have attempted to make Jerusalem "an exhibition-piece of living biblical archaeology" (p. 29), drawing on Palestinians as "fossilized forms of biblical authenticity" (p. 43) while simultaneously seeking to reduce their contemporary presence.

Weizman's strength is in the way he hits on two registers at once. His section on Jerusalem connects in a straightforward way with Israel's sustained attempts to minimize the Palestinian population in the city, and to visually and ideologically "unite" the Jewish suburbs with the historic city. But it also taps into the enduring manifestations of the contradiction between Zionism's secular modernism and its ancient biblical promise.

Above all, "Hollow Land" doesn't just explain Israel's spatial practices of occupation. It explores the way in which Israelis' and Palestinians' self-understandings are deeply embedded in these structures. This is Weizman's contribution. While some may feel his work is too abstract, this is where the "cycle" that so often takes the blame for this conflict is found. Weizman is painting a picture of how we have lost ourselves within the conflict, and what it might mean to find a way out.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly original, powerful, December 11, 2007

By 

Carl "Mr. K" (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (Hardcover)

Weizman's analysis of the articulation (division, consolidation, dimensionality, etc.) of space as a primary expression of political power is highly original in approach, full of extraordinary insights, and provides a powerful moral argument against the occupation of Palestine. While some writers theorize about this sort of thing, Weizman's application of highly refined ideas to concrete practices demonstrates a kind of eloquence and courage that is rare in discussions of Israel and Palestine.

I think Hollow Land is an intellectual masterpiece.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this Book! Down with Israel's Palestinian Policy!, April 5, 2011

By 

NoStake - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (Hardcover)

In his book, Hollow Land, Eyal Weizman provides an original and eye-opening perspective on the various ways Israel maintains control over their occupied territories. Framing his work from the end of the Six Day War in 1967 to the present, Weizman reveals a side of Israel's "architecture of occupation" that is rarely, if at all, brought to light in American mainstream media outlets. He lays bare the "facts on the ground" and how Israel created powerful and oppressive structures of territorial occupation by implementing different spatial practices and technologies of separation and control. These tools of domination are examined individually and chronologically throughout the book's nine chapters that help highlight the evolutionary character of Israel's colonization, occupation, and governance.

Wiezman opens his book by looking at the very controversial Israeli outpost settlements that have become the most contested points of the conflict and a constant focus of political and diplomatic negotiations. These outposts as well as their architecture, Weizman says, play a vital role in formulating Israeli identity. In Jerusalem, for example, the Israeli government used "optical manipulations" in order to naturalize the occupied parts of the city in the eyes of Israeli citizens. This is seen in the use of stone cladding that both authenticated construction and linked new buildings to the sacred identity of Jerusalem.

Nonetheless, the location and layout of new Jewish settlements were not only for a growing Jewish population, but were also a means to prevent Jerusalem from functioning as a Palestinian city. Fearing a growing Palestinian demographic, the Israeli government reconfigured the city to spike the value of the housing market and enacted restrictive building codes for Palestinians that forced many families to leave Jerusalem in search of cheaper housing outside Israel's fluid borders. Weizman writes, "For the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem, unlike the Jewish residents, hardly anything was ever planned but their departure" (Weizman, 47).

Furthermore, Weizman explains that in the post-1967 world, the planning and architecture of the occupied territories dominantly fell into the hands of military men, politicians, and ideological activists. The planning culture, driven by Ariel Sharon, viewed architecture as a "continuation of war by other means." Consequently, Israeli culture was increasingly militarized as battlefield terms became normalized in civilian discourse. The outposts, or nekuda, meaning points in Hebrew, were seen as strategic positions rather than places of residency. Roadways were developed into elaborate defensive systems that separated Israelis from Palestinians as well as divided the Palestinians from themselves. Even the housing that was built in settlement areas was compared by Israeli government officials as "armored divisions." In turn, civilian settlements became military buffer zones that inadvertently made them into targets of attack by radical Palestinian terrorist groups.

In one of his most interesting chapters, "Checkpoints: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror," Weizman shows how the Israeli government created "a prosthetic political system propped up by the international community." Under Article X in the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Israeli government was granted full control over checkpoint terminals regulating the flow of people in and out of the occupied territories. In effect, these checkpoints let Israel occupy Palestine without actually having to occupy Palestine. However, these were no regular checkpoints. Run by the Palestinian guards, Israeli security agents sat behind one-way mirrors and retrieved personal travel documents through a secret compartment. After processed, the passport is given back to the Palestinian Authority who either rejects or accepts admittance based on the decisions made by the Israeli security staff. For Weizman, the architecture of these terminals served to hide the Israeli mechanisms of power and control. The Palestinian authority was "mere performance" in order to render Palestinians into believing that they were subjects of their own country rather than the objects of an occupying state.

Towards the end of his book, Weizman moves from Israel's rule over the ground to the state's tyranny of the skies. With new sophisticated weaponry, Israel's domination of the air transformed the logic of occupation as targeted assassinations became a mainstay and political tool for control. Although the air assassinations using unmanned drones and state of the art targeting equipment enjoys wide public support (80% according to Weizman) and is justified as legal in response to Israel's security concerns, these killings have "fed the conflict by creating further motivation for violent retaliations, and dramatically increased Palestinian popular support for acts of terror." Moreover, these targeted assassinations have helped normalize violence into everyday life. As Israel tries to make war more "humane" by using high impact-low blast radius missiles to minimize the loss of innocent lives, violence has become more frequent and legitimate. Notably, Weizman criticizes Israel's use of assassinations as a way to avoid engaging in solutions through a political process.

Overall, Hollow Land is a great book. However, since the book's scope is so large it misses out on the finer intricacies of this regional conflict. Also, because of this Weizman is forced into using the old Israel-Palestine binary that we so often see in the media. But these minor infractions do not infringe on this book's importance. It will open your eyes to new ways of thinking about architecture and state control. For me, this book has significantly altered my own perception concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict. Although Weizman leaves the reader off with a bleak prospect of this intense and ongoing conflict, hopefully this book may in some way help bring about a change in the future trajectory of Israeli policy concerning Palestine.