Summary
Eyal Weizman’s term, in Chapter 8 of For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, for the process that split a single territory into a series of territories: the West Bank imagined not as a two-dimensional surface but as a three-dimensional volume of layered ethnic, political and strategic territories — settlements on hilltops, roads spanning over or diving under Palestinian lands, Israeli sovereignty retained over aquifers below and airspace and electromagnetic fields above (For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, PDF p.145-146).
Details
- Beginning as ideas, policies, projects and regulations proposed by Israeli state-technocrats, generals, archaeologists, planners and road engineers since the beginning of the occupation, it has become the common practise of exercising territorial control as well as the dimension within which territorial solutions are sought (PDF p.146).
- Its instruments in the chapter include biblical archaeology and the subterranean volume as a national monument (PDF p.146-148), the vertical division proposed for the Temple Mount at Camp David in 2000 (PDF p.149-151), Jerusalem stone cladding as a device extending the city’s holiness and boundaries (PDF p.151-154), the Drobles Plan’s hilltop settlement blocks, of which about thirty-eight per cent of the West Bank was left under Israeli control in discontinuous islands around summits (PDF p.155-156), and the mountain settlements as “panoptic fortresses” and urban optical devices for surveillance (PDF p.157-159).
- Rather than a conclusive division across a boundary line, the organisation of the terrain created multiple separations and provisional boundaries relating through surveillance and control (PDF p.161).
Related pages
For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, Eyal Weizman, Temple Mount, Drobles Plan, Matrix of Control