The Funambulist Pamphlets, Volume 06: Palestine

Summary

The Funambulist Pamphlets, Volume 06: Palestine (punctum books, 2013), edited by Léopold Lambert, collects 23 short chapters and two epistolary conversations, most republished from The Funambulist blog (2010–2013), arguing that the occupation must be read as a systematic colonial politics of space — not as a sequence of spectacular news events — and that architecture is inherently political, a technology of power that can be weaponized by the occupier and, by disobedience, by the occupied.

What the file is

First edition, 2013, The Funambulist + CTM Documents Initiative (punctum books, Brooklyn, NY); 110 PDF pages, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0; edited by Léopold Lambert, November 2013; ISBN-13: 978-0615920184 on the imprint page (PDF p.4), against ISBN 9780615897189 on the closing publisher’s page (PDF p.110) — held under Open questions, not reconciled. DOI: 10.21983/P3.0054.1.00 (PDF p.110). The text copy is complete and legible; photograph, map and back-cover pages are blank in the text and were confirmed image-only in the original and read there. Read in full: PDF p.1-110 (Introduction, Chapters 01–23, the About page, the back cover and the closing publisher’s page). Chapter reprint dates and cross-volume notes are recorded in the reading notes.

Section by section

• Introduction, “Cartography of a Colonial Politics of Space” (PDF p.8). Sets the recurrent argument: the emotions provoked by spectacular events are “the substance of the status quo” since they focus on effects not causes; a deep examination of the systematic aspects of Israel’s colonial strategy is a necessary production of knowledge that can inform their deactivation, and a political manifesto of resistance can be embodied by architecture.
• 01 “The Palestinian Archipelago” (PDF p.10-16). Oslo’s Areas A/B/C (A 17%, C 63%) turn the West Bank into an archipelago of Palestinian islands in an ambient Area C sea; movement between islands is filtered by four kinds of “reefs” (barrier, route blocks/checkpoints, settlements of about 500,000 “corsairs”, exclusive Israeli routes); resistance is imagined through the body’s re-engagement with the land (Raja Shehadeh’s sarha walks) and a nomadic conception of territory; reconnection “does not seem to be winnable” other than through enforcement of international law.
• 02 “For a More Embodied Vision of the Occupation” (PDF p.17-20). Own photographs (July 2010) of ten settlements (Kochav Ya’akov, Ariel, Har Homa, Ma’ale Adummim, Rimmonim, Enav, Pesagot, Pisgat Ze’ev, Geva Binyamin, Eli) argue against disembodied cartography and against a focus on news items: the durable condition is the settlements’ “ordinary violence”, which redirects movement flows, hides behind illegality, and periodically attacks Palestinians.
• 03 “Architectural Stockholm Syndrome” (PDF p.30-32). New Palestinian bourgeois housing around Ramallah, enabled by PA estate policy under Salam Fayyad, imitates Israeli settlements; refugees refuse camp improvement as acceptance of permanence, while the depoliticized bourgeoisie reproduces the colonizer’s forms; architecture is a weapon serving a minority — answered by a weaponized Palestinian architecture (Riwaq’s traditional work; Decolonizing Architecture’s strategic propositions).
• 04 “The Route 443” (PDF p.35-36). The highway as symptomatic apartheid apparatus: a high-speed Israeli axis crossing a corridor of illegal settlements, with lateral walls hiding Palestinian villages, while Palestinians get a narrow walled road underneath — a layered, closable circulation system.
• 05 “Road Link between Gaza and the West Bank” (PDF p.37-39). On the Aix Group’s 2010 road-link study: a Palestinian-sovereign line/corridor through Israeli territory — “a sovereignty applied to a line on the map” — whose exposure to Israeli blocking illustrates why the two-state solution is not the one to wish for; the book points to Decolonizing Architecture’s narrative of 500,000 settlers leaving.
• 06 “The Ordinary Violence of the Colonial Apparatuses” (PDF p.40-41). On MachsomWatch’s monitoring of checkpoints: turnstiles, the wall, and locked checkpoint mechanisms impose physical violence on bodies; the controls are “optimized for the discomfort of these bodies” — the ordinary violence of colonization.
• 07 “The Right to the Ruin” (PDF p.42-43). Zochrot’s photographs of beautiful emptied landscapes hide destroyed 1948 villages, annihilated “to the very last stone” — a denial of civilization, an absolute rewriting of history; against it, the author’s Area-C sheepfold/agricultural-platform project is designed to be indestructible-as-ruin, a political testimony of existence.
• 08 “Sympathy with the Obstacle” (PDF p.44-46). Gaza’s parkour as subversion of an architecture built by an exterior entity: intensifying the body’s movement until imposed organization becomes irrelevant; quoting Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia (2008, p.135) on thinking like the obstacle in urban warfare; with a warning not to romanticize, since the practiced-on walls are not the imprisoning ones.
• 09 “War in the Manhattan Strip” (PDF p.47-52). A Guardian report on Gaza (Operation Pillar of Defense, November 2012) “hijacked” with names/places transposed to Manhattan so readers feel the horror of the siege. Its named people, quotations and events are the chapter’s fictional transposition of that Gaza report, presented here only as that transposition, never as fact about Manhattan or the United States.
• 10 “Political Geography of the Gaza Strip” (PDF p.53-56). Gaza as a “scale-1 experiment”: a gigantic prison since 2006 whose utilities Israel meters at the minimum before a humanitarian crisis; a military-technology testing ground (white phosphorus and flechette in Cast Lead 2008-09; remote-controlled weapon stations with all-female spotters; 3.75 cm flechette darts; no-go and high-risk zones); the siege two months before Israeli elections as interest, not security argument.
• 11 “Representation of Otherness for a Gaza Kid” (PDF p.57-58). A thought experiment on a Gazan child never leaving 140 square miles: otherness is formed by terror-inducing machines (remote gun towers, F-16s, drones, D9 bulldozers, tanks, battleships); reconciliation would require South-Africa-style strong policies, the precondition for Shehadeh’s 2037 future.
• 12 “The Policies of the “Lesser Evil”” (PDF p.59-61). Excerpt from Eyal Weizman’s “Thanato-tactics” (The Power of Inclusive Exclusion, 2009): Israel uses humanitarian organizations to manage the occupation; the lesser-evil logic lets the military incorporate its critics and naturalizes crimes; Hannah Arendt’s “radical negation of the whole concept of lesser evil in politics” is invoked, with the architectural analogue of refusing compromised commissions.
• 13 “Palestine: What Does the International Legislation Say” (PDF p.62-65). Weizman’s “The Evil Architects Do” epigraph on architecture as war crime; excerpts from the Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 49) and Rome Statute (Articles 7, 8) on forcible transfer, settlement transfer, property destruction, and attacks on protected buildings, presented as usable against Israel’s actions.
• 14 “Law as a Colonial Weapon” (PDF p.66-69). On Alexandrowicz’s The Law in These Parts: military brochures pre-printed before 1967; refusal to apply Israeli law to Palestinians to avoid de-facto citizenship; settler criminality before lenient civil courts; the Elon Moreh (1975) ruling circumvented by reviving Ottoman mawat (waste) land law; and Bassem Tamimi’s 2011 military-court statement “For me, these laws do not exist; they are meaningless” as the legitimate ground of disobedience.
• 15 “The Reasons for Disobeying a Law” (PDF p.70-73). The 2013 E1 tent village vs. Ma’ale Adummim: both territorial-architectural disobediences, but the Palestinian tents refuse a colonial law while the settlements appropriate land for interest; disobedience is legitimate only when it contests the law itself (the Rosa Parks analogy); international law, “not to be unquestionned”, should prevail over unilaterally designed colonial law.
• 16 “The Palestinian Legal Right to Return” (PDF p.74-75). About five million refugees registered with UNRWA, 1.5 million in camps (250,000 in Lebanon); Dr. Karma Nabulsi on Article 13(b) UDHR; Israel’s Law of Return applied to Jews but not to Palestinians; the author endorses the “One State Solution” and the end of apartheid.
• 17 “Manual of Return” (PDF p.76-77). The 3awda collective’s imaginary of systematic return; the Ila Falstin Sabila Group’s Arabic manual for May 15 border marchers; Zochrot’s awareness work among Israelis despite three-year army indoctrination.
• 18 “2037 by Raja Shehadeh” (PDF p.79-80). On Shehadeh’s 2037 Le Grand Bouleversement (Galaade, 2011): a fictitious earthquake and nuclear accident re-establishing Arab-Palestinian-Israeli solidarity, then an EU-like Middle East with trains Istanbul–Damascus–Jerusalem–Jericho — but new religious antagonisms too, since Israel’s economic/political class depends on apartheid.
• 19 “Running as Political Resistance” (PDF p.81-83). The 2013 Right to Movement Palestine Marathon in Bethlehem (about 650 runners): a celebration of movement within Area A whose true political resistance is letting Palestinian bodies choose speed and unfold physical capacity outside violent contexts.
• 20 “Idealism & Imagination” (PDF p.84-85). Against post-UN-vote satisfaction: idealism as continuous struggle toward the horizon; imagination as captured by capitalism (Žižek’s Mars analogy); the need to invent a new democracy for a post-apartheid country.
• 21 “Are We Questioning the Essence of Problems?” (PDF p.86-88). The Gatekeepers (Moreh, 2012) critiques tactics, not the system: the essence is “the administrative and policed organization of a people’s daily life by another people”; drone-assassination debates are a US parallel; liberal media asking wrong questions bear part of the responsibility.
• 22 “Epistolary Conversation with R. Debatty” (PDF p.89-97). On neutrality as the trap maintaining the status quo since 1967; illegality (apartheid analogy or Article 49) as the basis of indignation; the author’s Area C “Qasr” project (tents over agricultural platform over underground dwelling near Salfit/Ariel), designed to persist as ruin; Shehadeh’s sarhats, Decolonizing Architecture, and Riwaq as other disobedient strategies; the book as weapon, “no more powerful than the small hand catapults” but a refusal to submit.
• 23 “Epistolary Conversation with A. Barclay and D. Qaddumi” (PDF p.98-107). Disobedient architecture defined: when ethics diverge from law’s content, disobedience becomes necessity; legality/unexpected legality/illegality precedents (Cruz, Rameau, Cirugeda); infiltrating vs. refusing the occupier’s law (Shehadeh, Zoabi, Bishara); Barclay’s challenge that the project defers too much to Oslo lines, and the present-tense conception of resistance as creating “a territory of emancipation” for a brief instant; the book’s two audiences and the call for independent alternative information channels.
• About (PDF p.108 / printed p.107). Back-matter descriptions of The Funambulist blog (written and edited by Lambert; its name taken from architecture’s representative medium, the line, whose embodiment as a wall splits a milieu in two, and the tightrope walker who subverts that power by walking on the line), the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, and punctum books (“spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion”).
• Back cover (PDF p.109). Image-only in the text copy, read in the original: the title as THE FUNAMBULIST PAMPHLETS VOLUME 6: PALESTINE, a blurb excerpted from the Introduction (PDF p.8) on a deep examination of the systematic aspects of Israel’s colonial strategy, the first-publication line and CC BY NC ND licence icons, and a blank white rectangle at lower right.
• Closing publisher’s page (PDF p.110). The punctum books colophon page: title, Lambert, Léopold, punctum books, 2013, ISBN 9780615897189, the punctumbooks.com title URL and the DOI 10.21983/P3.0054.1.00.

Key passages

• “a political manifesto of resistance can be embodied by architecture as well” (PDF p.8).
• “one might talk about biopolitics” — and architecture as “inherently a technology of power” (PDF p.10).
• “the emotions provoked by the tragic and often spectacular events that wound both Israeli and Palestinian societies are the substance of the status quo” (PDF p.8).
• “The battle to reconnect all the Palestinian islands into a unique continent does not seem to be winnable via another way than the enforcement of the international law” (PDF p.15).
• “the ordinary violence of colonization” (PDF p.41).
• “the ruin can constitute a political testimony as the expression of existence” (PDF p.43).
• “a sovereignty applied to a line on the map” (PDF p.38).
• “This illegality is the basis for the indignation that prevents and indeed should prevent a lot of people from remaining neutral” — and “this neutrality is the real trap” (PDF p.90).
• “For me, these laws do not exist; they are meaningless.” — Bassem Tamimi, in military court 2011, quoted from The Law in These Parts (PDF p.68-69). Note: this source prints the name “Bassem Tamimi”; a separate entity page exists for Bassam Tamimi — held, not reconciled.
• “When it comes to urbanized war, every combatant must think like an obstacle” — Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, p.135, quoted in Chapter 8 (PDF p.46).
• “Resistance is always conjugated in the present and so is this project” (PDF p.104); “for a brief instant, a territory of emancipation would have existed” (PDF p.105).
• “The Funambulist, also known as a tightrope walker, is the character who, somehow, subverts this power by walking on the line” (PDF p.108 / printed p.107).

Evidence the work relies on

• Its own photographic inventory (West Bank/East Jerusalem, July 2010), OCHA maps, and the Aix Group’s 60-page 2010 Gaza–West Bank link study.
• Eyal Weizman: A Civilian Occupation (with Segal, 2003), Hollow Land (2007), “The Evil Architects Do” (2004), “Thanato-tactics” in The Power of Inclusive Exclusion (2009); Stephen Graham, Cities, War, and Terrorism (2004); Ophir, Givoni & Hanafi (eds.) (2009); Hannah Arendt on the lesser evil.
• Fourth Geneva Convention Art. 49 and Rome Statute Arts. 7–8; UDHR Art. 13; the Hague Convention Art. 23.
• Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Law in These Parts (2012); The Gatekeepers (2012); Harriett Sherwood’s Guardian Gaza report (15 Nov 2012); Haaretz pieces by Anshel Pfeffer (2010) and Arieh Egozi (2007); the UN OCHA/WFP land-and-sea report (August 2010); B’Tselem on flechettes.
• Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2008) and 2037 Le Grand Bouleversement (2011); Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia (2008); Riwaq’s National Register of Historic Buildings (from 1994); Zochrot’s village inventory; the We Make Money Not Art and Arena of Speculation interviews (2011–2012).

People, organizations, places and events (links)

Léopold Lambert, Eyal Weizman, Raja Shehadeh, Zochrot, Decolonizing Architecture, Riwaq, MachsomWatch, Bassam Tamimi, Ahmad Barclay, Hannah Arendt, Salam Fayyad, Haneen Zoabi, Azmi Bishara, Elon Moreh, Qalqilya, Gaza, Operation Pillar of Defense, Operation Cast Lead, Maale Adumim, Ariel

Concepts (links)

Palestinian Archipelago, Ordinary Violence, Architectural Stockholm Syndrome, Right to the Ruin, Lesser Evil, Weaponized Architecture, Disobedient Architecture, Biopolitics, Apartheid, Right of Return, One-state solution, Two-state solution, Sumud, Sarha, Parkour

Analysis

The book is an edited pamphlet collection, not a monograph: 23 short chapters and two epistolary conversations, most first published on The Funambulist blog between 2010 and 2013, restated here in book order, with two substantial excerpts credited to other authors — Weizman’s “Thanato-tactics” in Chapter 12 and the treaty excerpts in Chapter 13 — and a fictional transposition in Chapter 09, labelled as such on this page and never used as fact. Lambert’s own method is spatial and present-tense: his own July 2010 photographs of settlements and apparatuses, OCHA maps and the Aix Group study are used to argue that the occupation’s durable form is its ordinary, administrative organisation of daily life, not its spectacular events, and that architecture, as the drawing of lines that become walls, is inherently a technology of power. Its limits follow from that form: figures are those of the chapters’ blog dates (settler, refugee, Gaza and marathon figures run to 2010-2013 as given), the legal chapters rest on the treaty texts and the film and reports Lambert cites rather than on case law of his own, and the constructive programme — disobedient architecture, the Area C Qasr project, the ruin as testimony — is presented as proposition and manifesto, not as a built or evaluated outcome. The About page and back cover are the publisher’s and editor’s framing, not chapters: the back-cover blurb is an excerpt from the Introduction, and the closing page’s bibliographic details conflict with the imprint page on the ISBN, held under Open questions.

How it relates to other sources

• Extends the architecture-of-occupation literature already in the wiki (Weizman; Decolonizing Architecture in Kelly): the first sustained pamphlet-length restatement of its theses in blog-essay form, with the author’s own 2010 photographic inventory.
• Its legality chapters sit beside Parker’s Chapters 2 (Kuper on the Fourth Geneva Convention) and 9 (Machover on apartheid as law): Lambert’s distinctive move is to make architects face responsibility under the same texts.
• Its right-of-return chapters align with Parker’s Chapter 1 (Abu Sitta) and Kelly’s Chapter 5 (Zochrot/DAAR): Lambert is notable for the 3awda manual and the Bil’in construction actions as present-tense tactics.
• The “Manhattan Strip” chapter is the wiki’s clearest example of defamiliarization journalism used as solidarity tactic; compare Llewellyn’s media chapter in Parker.

Open questions

• Spelling: “Ahmad Barcklay” (PDF p.4 imprint) vs “Ahmad Barclay” (PDF p.6, 98) — held, not reconciled.
• Name: this source prints “Bassem Tamimi” (PDF p.68-69) while the wiki’s person page is Bassam Tamimi (with double s) — held, not reconciled.
• Slips as printed in the text copy, byte-confirmed: “optiimize” (PDF p.35), “pwith” (PDF p.42), “ofr” (PDF p.52), “unquestionned” (PDF p.72), “carreer” (PDF p.79), “emcampment” (PDF p.77), “Whole Food Program’s” (PDF p.56), “Lead Cast” (PDF p.54), “Rosa Park” (PDF p.73), “sarhats” (PDF p.96) — all as printed. An earlier variant reading at PDF p.59 was a misreading of the line-break hyphen; the text copy prints the title hyphenated across the line break there, and as “Thanato-tactics” at printed p.59 (PDF p.60), and no other form is printed.
• Figures, as the work states them: Area C 63%, Area A 17%, about 500,000 settlers (also ~500,000), Qalqiliya 45,000, 25% West Bank unemployment, about 5 million refugees (1.5 million in camps; 250,000 in Lebanon), 1.7 million Gazans, 3 nautical-mile fishing limit, no-go 500 m / high-risk 500–1,500 m zones, flechette darts 3.75 cm, marathon ~650 runners, E1 3,000 housing units — each cited in notes.
• Subtitle conflict, held, not reconciled: Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (footnote 3, PDF p.15; and Chapter 18, PDF p.79) vs Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (Chapter 22, PDF p.96, the subtitle line-break hyphenated as “Land-” / “scape” in the text copy).
• Chapter 22 date conflict, held, not reconciled: its header states the conversation was originally published on We Make Money Not Art on January 4, 2012 (PDF p.89), while its footer states “Originally published on December 28, 2011” (PDF p.97).
• Chapter 09 untransposed place name, as printed: in the fictional transposition of a Gaza report onto Manhattan and the United States, one place name is left untransposed — “a rocket fired from Gaza reached Westchester” (PDF p.51).
• ISBN conflict, held, not reconciled: the imprint page gives ISBN-13: 978-0615920184 and ISBN-10: 0615920187 (PDF p.4), while the closing publisher’s page gives ISBN: 9780615897189 (PDF p.110).
• Slip as printed in the back matter, byte-confirmed: “thought.We” with no space after the full stop, in the punctum books description on the About page (PDF p.108 / printed p.107).

Coverage

Read in full, PDF p.1-110 of 110 (parts 1-2 of 2).