Rene – Eyal Weizman — The Architecture of Ariel Sharon
Topic(s): Palestine / Israel | Comments Off on Rene – Eyal Weizman — The Architecture of Ariel SharonThe Architecture of Ariel Sharon
When he has left the political arena, Sharon’s legacy needs not be written into books and albums as it is already written large into the spaces of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Whether in the military or in politics, times when Sharon is in power were always characterized by the construction frenzies that decisively shaped the physical realities in which both Israelis and Palestinians struggle to live. Significantly, Sharon was rarely photographed without a map rolled under his armpit. His influence on the transformation of the environment of the occupied territories is so great that, after Ben Gurion, who masterminded the formation and planning of the young state, he would no doubt be referred to as the Israel’s second architect. For Sharon the architect/general war is politics and politics is space making. As every architect knows well, space making involves both placing and clearing; construction and destruction. And thus, what follows could be read as a review of Sharon’s spatial oeuvre, as one architect reviews the work of another.
In all the positions he held since the 1950s when he emerged into public attention as the ‘mythical’ commander of the notorious 101 cross-border commando unit – a general in the southern front during the1973 Yom Kippur War, a minister with different portfolios, the mastermind of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the settlement project in the West Bank, and finally as a Prime Minister – Ariel Sharon displayed a consistent spatial ideology. He translated the military practices of a dynamic and ever changing battlefield into civilian planning principles and the creation of massive “facts on the ground” which, paradoxically, he was quite willing to surrender when need arose. Sharon was the embodiment of the Israeli ‘myth of the frontier’. This myth which emerged in the early agrarian Zionist settlements that shaped Sharon’s youth did not only glorified the virtues of individuality, autonomy and independence, but also fostered an intolerance to state order and laws and all things perceived as “urban bureaucracy”. Nourishing this myth was the perception of the frontier as a deep and protean zone of engagement, a shifting and shifty place of conflict.
In the last half century there hadn’t been a boundary or a law that Sharon hasn’t broken or bulldozed through. His military operations spanned across each of Israel’s borders, and his public behaviour transgressed every ethical line. But then, unexpectedly, he evacuated the settlements of Gaza and built that Wall through Palestinian lands that exemplified the reassuring iconography of a stable state border. Did Sharon mature and finally decide to “close of the Israeli frontier”?
Sharon’s architecture can be traced back to the time he served as head of IDF southern command in the early 1970s. In order to subdue Palestinian guerrillas located within the refugee camps of Gaza he carved out a grid of roads wide enough for tanks to drive through their dense built fabric, destroying nearly one thousand homes. He simultaneously oversaw the construction of a matrix of land fortifications on the hilltops throughout the occupied Sinai desert. This matrix proved a flexible net that absorbed the Egyptian attack in the 1973 Yom Kippur war and provided the basis for Sharon’s counter attack over the Suez Canal. Trumpeted after this war as the “saviour of Israel” (sometimes even as its “king”) he used the political capital thus gained to help the right wing Likud gain power. In the first Begin government of 1977, Sharon was in charge of building settlements throughout the West Bank in violation of international law. Justified as “temporary security measures,” the distribution of the civilian settlements followed the example of the defensive matrix he had built in the Sinai. However, this time they did not merely provide strategic depth, but also fragmented into separate cantons the area populated by Palestinians. It seemed as if he replaced the tank with the red-roofed single family home and deployed suburban settlements as armoured divisions across a dynamic theatre of operations.
Permanent as the settlements may seem to both their occupants and to the outside observer, for Sharon they were mere pawns that could be moved forward, rearranged or pulled back as need arose in a constantly evolving battlefield. Thus recently Sharon could remove seven thousands settlers from Gaza – and simultaneously settle ten thousands others in settlements across the West Bank. Temporariness and flexibility are indeed the hallmark of his work as an architect across the Israeli frontier. Therefore, there is no reason to doubt Sharon’s statement that the Wall itself is a “temporary security measure”, and that it will not become a permanent state border. In that it deserves a place in Bush’s and Sharon’s favored solution – the Road Map – which proposes a “soft” Palestinian sovereignty within temporary, flexible bubbles of space that the Palestinians , if they so desire, would be free to call a state. Free – that is if they would be willing to accept a series of walled out territories strung together with tunnels and bridges as the only means of contiguity. Given the fact that contemporary architectural discourse fetishises the concepts of flexibility and temporariness, it is remarkable that Sharon has not yet been offered a Pritzker Prize (the equivalent of the Nobel prize for Architects).
Although in our contemporary cities architects can impose their designs with relative impunity (barricades to stop regeneration have not been erected for decades), the architect Sharon has not imposed his plan on quite such a passive ground. The unilateral nature of Sharon’s constructions would go on facing, no doubt, continuous resistance, both from Palestinians and the world at large, which guarantee that all his forced “solutions” are to be left in place only until a further round of conflict is played out.
The settlements and the wall are parts of the same security logic of unilateral solutions that perpetuate and intensify animosity and violence, the very same animosity and violence they sought to pacify in the first place. The settlements of Gaza were destroyed. The settlements of the West Bank and even the Wall will themselves be demolished in due course. Today’s constructions are tomorrow’s rubble, and thus in more ways than one Ariel Sharon will be remembered as the architect of ruins.
EYAL WEIZMAN