the politics of verticality

The Israel–Palestine war is not simply a struggle over territory between two national entities. It is driven by Israel’s systematic denial of modern urban life to the Palestinians. One of the lessons of the battle of Jenin is that the bulldozer that demolishes houses is also a weapon in the wider strategy to prevent the Palestinians from creating a modern, normal, urban society.

A major Berlin exhibition on the architectural politics of Israel’s West Bank settlements has just been abruptly cancelled by the Israeli Association of United Architects. Paul Hilder tells a story of political censorship, intellectual complicity with power – and the ethical responsibility of true professionals.

Eyal Weizman’s analysis of Israel’s three-dimensional control of the West Bank is a striking example of how all national mythologies require an intimate connection between identity and place. But what happens when, as in Israel–Palestine, different histories collide in the same territory? Does the logic of national sovereignty override the ethical imperative of a single-state solution?

Now and in the final settlement proposals, Israel holds control of the airspace over the West Bank. It uses its domination of the airspace and electromagnetic spectrum to drop a net of surveillance and pinpoint executions over the territory.

A bewildering network of bypass roads weave over and under one another, attempting to separate the Israeli and Palestinian communities. And the future could be wilder – a 48-kilometre viaduct between Gaza and the West Bank.

From the struggles over Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount) to the historic stone with which all Greater Jerusalem is now clad, Jerusalem is an intense case study of the politics of verticality.

In a quest for biblical archaeology, Israel has attempted to resurrect the subterreanean fragments of ancient civilization to testify for its present-day rights above ground.

The aquifers deep below the West Bank are a battleground, just as much as the rivers of sewage split through its valleys by both Israeli and Palestinian settlements.

optical urbanism- photoessays to come

Photoessay on settlement brochures to come

Many different types of settlements perch atop the hills of the West Bank, providing islands of biblical identity that are also strategic vantage points.

Two-dimensional maps, fundamental to the understanding of political borders, have been drawn again and again for the West Bank. Each time they have failed to capture its vertical divisions.

Mountains play a special part in Zionist holiness. The settlers’ surge into the folded terrain of the West Bank and up to its summits combines imperatives of politics and spirituality.

None of us have a coherent mental map of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Architect Eyal Weizman explains why. We’re missing verticality. In this series of articles and photo-essays, he paints the extraordinary, three-dimensional battle over the West Bank: from settlements to sewage, archaeology to Apaches.