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The Architecture of Ariel Sharon

Eyal Weizman

Online Publication Date: 01 May 2006

To cite this Article Weizman, Eyal(2006)'The Architecture of Ariel Sharon',Third Text,20:3,337 — 353
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 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 337 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM

Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 3/4, May/July, 2006, 337–353

The Architecture of Ariel Sharon

Eyal Weizman
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This article seeks to describe the processes that have dissolved, between
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the aftermaths of the 1967 (Six Day) and the 1973 (Yom Kippur) Wars,
Israel’s cohesive territorial, social and political structures. The narrative
will follow the construction and collapse of Israeli fortification along the
Suez Canal in the early 1970s. The breaching of the Israeli line of
defence by the Egyptian military shattered geographical and military
preconceptions as well as political hegemonies in the Israeli political
system and furthermore accelerated the processes of political and territo-
rial dissolution that have lasted to the present. These pages will thus
speculate on a possible connection between the transformations of
Israel’s military doctrine and the radical change in its political power
structure.
The project of fortification implemented first along the Suez Canal
and then on the West Bank demonstrated the difference between two
fundamentally different doctrines of territorial organisation: linear
fortifications spread along the outer edge of the occupied territories and
a matrix of strongholds laid out throughout their depth. This difference
recalls Antonio Gramsci’s connections between a ‘war of position’ and
its opposite ‘war of manoeuvre’ and similar patterns that take place in
the political sphere.1 A general comparison between military tactics and
politics – something that Gramsci admitted must be taken ‘with a pinch
of salt’ – is not undertaken here except to expose a process of ‘civiliani-
sation’ whereby ideas and organisational systems are transferred from a
military to a civilian domain. The opening of Israel’s frontier, and the
fragmented but dynamic militarised geography it implied, accelerated
processes of fragmentation within a society that had previously seemed
unified around and wedded to a single cause. In the post-1973 period,
processes of fragmentation took place on social, economic, political and
geographic levels. The executive power of a previously hegemonic Israeli
1 Antonio Gramsci, politics, dominated by the Labour party, splintered across a larger
Selections from the Prison
Notebooks, Quintin Hoare
political landscape and into complex fields of non-governmental, extra-
and Geoffrey Nowell parliamentary, micro-political, non-governmental sectarian organisa-
Smith, eds and trans, tions and pressure groups acting out their own ideology or interests.
Lawrence & Wishart,
London, 1998 (1971),
The prominence of Ariel Sharon in this essay reflects his central role
pp 229–39 in these transformations and seeks to describe events from his perspective.

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2006)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820600900745
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338
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2 Although the ceasefire lines
included many of the
Jewish holy sites, they did
not coincide with any of
the several biblical
definitions of the Holy
Land. In their maximal
form often, these were
perceived as extending
from the Euphrates river in
the north to Sinai in the
south, from the Jordanian
Desert in the east to the
Mediterranean in the west.
3 The cultivated, well-
maintained landscape of the
West Bank was one of
the surprises that awaited
the Israelis when they first
visited the occupied
territories. In school they
learnt that the Arabs
neglected the country: they
did not repair the terraces
that the ancient Hebrews
had built, that their goats
ruined the ancient forests,
that they created swamps,
that the stones of the old
buildings were stolen etc.
See Tom Segev, Israel in
1967, Keter Books,
Jerusalem, 2005, p 449.
4 The first political
difference over the
occupied territories was
manifested in a linguistic
ambivalence. The terms
‘liberated territories’ and
‘administered territories’
were used by the right and
the centre respectively. The
term ‘occupied territories’
first appeared in the
lexicon of Rakah – the
Israeli Communist Party,
and the left-wing group,
Matzpen.
Sharon’s rapid, albeit not untypical, transformation from general to
minister allowed him to translate the practices of the battle-space into
civilian practices of settlement construction. The analysis of Sharon’s
fortification project and his battle manoeuvres will attempt to shed light
on the way he imagines territory and practises space.
UNSTABLE FORM
The clear territorial boundaries along which the Israeli army (IDF) was
deployed at the end of the 1967 war – the Jordan river in the east, the
Suez Canal in the south, and the line of volcanic hills on the Golan
heights in the north – not only fulfilled Israel’s perceived necessity for a
more efficient defence but were seen as the creation of a stable territorial
form, resonant with the phantasmagoria of the ‘promised land’ to which
the IDF imagined itself to have ‘returned’ and one bound by the clear
lines of mountains, rivers and sea.2 The territorial occupation was seen
not only as a military campaign but the fulfilment of an ideological
project. The dramatic open landscapes of the Sinai desert and the holy
sites unearthed in the occupied West Bank fed the nation’s mythical
imagination.3 The sense of beleaguered claustrophobia that had domi-
nated pre-1967 Israel vanished in a national euphoria. Moreover, an
unparalleled period of prosperity now started, due at least in part to
cheap labour drawn from the newly occupied Palestinian population of
more than a million people.
Yet gradually the occupied territories, twice the size of prewar Israel,
grew too large for the national imagination.4 Creeping agoraphobia
meant that the territories had to be scanned, mapped, studied, pacified
and domesticated from within and their edges fortified against the
perceived danger still lurking ‘outside’. In the project of fortification that
ensued, driven by growing hostilities along the new ceasefire lines, two
geometric doctrines of defence were explored: linear fortification and a
matrix of strongpoints spread throughout the depth of a territory. Each
of these doctrines was derived from an existing historical military vocab-
ulary and had been employed in the fortification of the Sinai where,
during the ‘war of attrition’ of 1968–71, the seam-line between the
armies was under constant friction. But, as with many things Israeli, the
principles relating to these defensive territorial models were civilianised
into the planning principles that guided the nature and distribution of
Israeli settlement expansion. In that sense the abstract desert has become
a laboratory for much of the spatial technology of the occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza.
THE LINES
Under Golda Meir’s Labour administration, the IDF Chief of General
Staff, Haim Bar Lev, and Minister of Agriculture and head of the
Ministerial Committee on Settlements, Yigal Allon, devised models for
the fortification of the edges of the 1967 occupied territories on two
different fronts. Bar-Lev conceived of a linear fortification system
stretching along the Suez Canal on the water’s edge. The Allon Plan
 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 339 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM
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5 NAHAL is the Hebrew
acronym for ‘Noar Halutzi
Lohem’ – Fighting Pioneer
Youth. It is a military corps
that combines military
service in a combat unit
with civilian service in a
new outpost. Some 108
settlements had their
beginnings as NAHAL
outposts, and most were
set on sensitive border
points.
6 Aryeh Shalev, The West
Bank: Line of Defense,
Praeger, New York, 1985,
p1
339
advocated the redrawing of state borders and their fortification along
clear natural boundaries. The Great Rift Valley, which defined the east-
ern edge of the territories occupied by Israel, according to Allon, offered
the most suitable line, its topography forming a giant natural barrier.
Allon proposed to annex a long strip of territory stretching along the
Rift, extending from the Golan Heights at the cease-fire line with Syria
through the Jordan Valley down to the southernmost tip of the Sinai
Peninsula in Sharem al Sheik. On this strip, remote from Israeli popula-
tion centres, he proposed to establish a belt of agricultural settlements of
the Kibbutz and Moshav type as well as several paramilitary settlement
outposts inhabited by the NAHAL Corps5 – the settling corps of the IDF
– whose task was to form seeds for future settlements. Between 1967
and 1977, fifteen such settlements were established along the Jordan
River, twenty in the Golan Height and five in the Sinai Desert.
The Jordan Valley was traced by four parallel roads. The first, along
the water’s edge, was a military patrol road, the second and third strung
together two lines of agricultural settlements and their interlocking
fields. In case of invasion by Jordanian or Iraqi armour from the east,
these fields were to be flooded and the outposts would harden into
fortified military positions. Behind the two lines of settlements, on the
eastern slopes of the mountains, a communication line tied together
several military outposts and bases that overlook the lower area.6
Although it included numerous military bases, the Allon plan was largely
a civilian counterpart to the Bar Lev Line, attempting to achieve with
agricultural outposts what the Bar Lev Line sought to achieve with mili-
tary fortification. This suited Labour party ideology according to which
it was the plough, not only the sword, that was to define and defend the
borders of the state. Moreover, according to the general guidelines of the
Allon plan, the inhabitation of a fortified line with a civilian population
demonstrated Israel’s political resolve to annex the new borderline. Both
the Allon and the Bar Lev fortifications were products of a similar
doctrine that sought to establish a line of defence along the outermost
perimeter of the occupied territory. The lines of water, military strong-
holds and settlement outposts, behind which the state was fortified, were
to become the last geometrical gesture in geopolitics of solid borders.
In the War of Attrition the Bar-Lev Line became an immense
infrastructural undertaking. Huge quantities of sand were shuffled
across the desert and poured along the bank of the Canal. The sand
rampart was piled up to form an artificial landscape twenty metres high
and 200 kilometres long. A system of patrol roads, supply depots and
communication trenches were positioned along its length. Thirty-five
fortified positions (Ma’ozim) were strung alongside the earth dyke at
10 kilometre intervals overlooking the Egyptian positions across the
water a mere 200 metres away. Unlike other systems of fortifications –
concrete could always be blasted with enough explosives – the sand
ramparts of the Bar Lev Line were designed to absorb and dissipate any
shock wave or blast caused by bombardment. Given the supposed supe-
riority of the IDF to the Arab armies, the enclosure seemed complete,
and the government accordingly felt that it need not negotiate with the
Arab states.
In 1971 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat appointed Lieutenant
Ariel Sharon, Haim Bar Lev and David Ben Gurion examining the fortifications on the Bar Lev Line during the War of Attrition in 1971
General Sa’ad El Shazly as Chief of the Egyptian Military Staff. Shazly’s
 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 340 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM
340
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7 The ‘unauthorised’
publication of this book
cost Shazly three years of
hard labour in an Egyptian
military prison, allegedly
for divulging military
secrets but in effect for its
implicit criticism of Sadat.
Lieutenant General Saad El
Shazly, The Crossing of the
Canal, American Mideast
Research, San Francisco,
2003, p 329.
8 The passage continues:
‘The fourth barrier was a
secret one. Deep inside the
sand rampart the enemy
had embedded reservoirs
filled with inflammable
liquid, their outlets
controlled from the nearest
forts. In minutes, the liquid
could gush into the Canal,
turning its surface into an
inferno.’ In effect that
secret weapon never
worked. It may have been
Egyptian divers that
blocked it as Shazly claims,
or a technical problem in
its mechanisms as some
Israeli generals claimed.
Ibid, pp 7–8
Ariel Sharon, Haim Bar Lev and David Ben Gurion examining the fortifications on the Bar
Lev Line during the War of Attrition in 1971
task was to design the storming of the Bar Lev Line. In his book, The
Crossing of the Canal, he later described the Bar Lev Line thus:
… the Suez canal was unique. Unique in the difficulties its construction
presented to an amphibious assault force. Unique in its scale of defences
the enemy had erected on top of those natural obstacles… To all that saw
it, the Suez Canal seemed an impassable barrier…7
The first and most difficult obstacle was the Canal itself,
… the second obstacle was a gigantic sand dune the enemy has raised
along the length of the eastern bank. For six years, Israeli bulldozers had
laboriously piled the sand ever higher – their most sustained effort
coming, naturally, at likely crossing points… Above this formidable
barrier rose the third obstacle: the 35 forts of the Bar Lev line… Two
roads ran the length of the sand barrier, one along its crest, the other just
behind it. Hidden from our view, the enemy could manoeuvre their
armour to reinforce any sudden weak point…8
The panoramic view across the horizon is not just an aesthetic but
primarily a strategic category. Indeed, Shazly contended that one of the
major aims of the giant earth rampart of the Bar Lev Line was to deny
the Egyptian armies a view of the depth of the Sinai, while simulta-
neously creating the artificial topographical conditions that would allow
Israelis to peer into the depths of Egyptian territory. The rare advantage
that Soviet technologies of anti-aircraft missiles gained over Western
fighter jets in the early 1970s had the immediate effect of flattening the
battlefield into a horizontal two-dimensional surface, infusing the eye-
level perspective with an invigorated strategic significance. The Israeli
gaze was made more penetrating by elevating its source onto the military
outposts that nested on top of the artificial hills of the earth rampart,
allowing Israeli soldiers to see deep into the western bank of the Canal.
From the point of view of the Egyptian armies, the Bar Lev Line was a
visual barrier, a scopically defensible barrier. The barrier created an
immediate limit to their observational field, creating a blind zone that
denied them the view of their occupied territories. For the Israelis this
may have undone some of the awkwardness of having those whose land
was occupied peering back into it, as if the mere penetration of the gaze
were capable of reinforcing the desire as well as the conditions for
return.
The attack on the Bar Lev Line started with an artillery barrage.
Israeli soldiers were forced to dive into bunkers beneath the surface of
the artificial landscape and lost eye contact with the enemy pouring
 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 341 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM
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9 Sagger is a vision and wire-
guided antitank missile
introduced by the Soviet
armed forces in 1961.
10 Adriana Kemp, ‘Border
Space and National
Identity in Israel,’ in
Theory and Criticism,
Space, Land, Home, On
the Normalization of a
‘New Discourse’, ed
Yehuda Shenhav, Van Leer
Institute, Jerusalem and
Hakibbutz Hameuchad
Publishing House, Tel
Aviv, no 16, Spring 2000,
p 282
11 Ibid, p 19
12 Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Continuum
Books, New York–
London, 2004, p 387
13 Kemp, op cit, p 23
14 Ibid
341
across the ramparts and surrounding them. By the time the artillery
barrage stopped and the defenders of the Line were able to resume
their battle positions, the Line had already been stormed and the
strongpoints encircled. By breaking through the barrier and clearing up
the horizon, the Egyptian armies had also opened a perceptual field.
This clearing of the view became strategically important in the first
armed war in which new, personally guided munitions, such as the
Soviet-made Sager anti-tank missile,9 required constant eye-contact
with the target all the way to impact, turning the battlefield into a deep
perceptual field.
FRONTIER IMAGINARY
From the moment that the Bar Lev Line went into construction, Ariel
Sharon, then a prominent member of the IDF General Staff, began to
challenge the strategy of defence it embodied. Throughout his military
career, Sharon was the personification of the Israeli ‘myth of the fron-
tier’,10 which celebrated the transgression of lines and borders of all
kinds. Like its American predecessor, the Israeli frontier formed a mythi-
cal space that shaped the character and institutions of the Israelis. It was
also a laboratory for the emergence of and experimentation with new
territorial forms. Although the Zionist project had its roots in the
modern political concept of the nation-state, its ideology manifested
itself in terms of a pioneering project seeking the redemption of the
frontier as an escape from metropolitan discontent.
The Israeli sociologist Adrian Kemp claimed that, between 1948 and
1967, the Israeli state created a series of ‘rhetorical and institutional
mechanisms’ that presented the frontier region as the symbolic centre of
the nation, ‘a laboratory for the creation of a “new Jew”’.11 The estab-
lishment of the special commando battalion, unit 101, under the
command of Ariel Sharon for the purpose of deep cross-border opera-
tions, became central to the blurring of state borders and for the
distinction it implied between a domesticated ‘inside’ and wild ‘outside’.
The unit transgressed, breached and blurred borders: geo-political – its
operations crossed the borders of the state; hierarchical – its members
did not fully obey orders and operational outlines; legal – the practice
of their operation and their flagrant disregard for civilian life broke
both the law of the state as well as international law; and disciplinary –
they wore no uniforms and expressed an arrogant intolerance,
promoted by Sharon himself, of all formalities perceived as urbane
‘military bureaucracy’. For Israeli youth, the unit’s appeal lay in its
identification with a growing sense of rebellion against the parental
generation. It was a ‘war machine’ that was simultaneously internal and
external to the state political system.12 According to Chief of Staff
Moshe Dayan, who nurtured it, unit 101 was ‘a workshop for the
creation of a new generation of [Hebrew] warriors’.13 Dayan also
believed that it served a national purpose beyond the narrow military
one. By turning the frontier into a mythical space and ‘border transgres-
sion… into a symbolic practice and a spatial ritual’, it signified the fact
that the borders of the state were liquid and permeable, presenting the
state’s territoriality as an incomplete project.14
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342

THE MATRIX

In the strategic debates of the early 1970s, Sharon, then head of training
at the IDF, and a handful of other officers such as Israel Tal and
Matitiyahu Peled, repeatedly clashed with the rest of the General Staff
over the Bar Lev Line. Sharon accused his superiors of ignorance and
stupidity and demanded that the Line should be abandoned and replaced
with a flexible defensive system spread out in depth. Sharon later wrote
in his autobiography:

… from the beginning I felt that such a line of fortifications would be a

disastrous error… we would be committing ourselves to static defence.
We would be making fixed targets of ourselves… our positions and
movements would be under constant surveillance. Our procedures would
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become common knowledge. Our patrols and supply convoys would be

vulnerable to ambushes, mining, and shelling.

Because, as he claimed, the IDF ‘cannot win a defensive battle on an

outer line…’ he proposed that it should ‘fight a defensive battle the way
it should be fought – not on forward line but in depth…’.15 Sharon’s
defence geography, a flexible adaptation of the military doctrine of
defence in depth, was composed of a series of strongpoints (Ta’ozim)
spread out on the mountain summits throughout the depth of the
terrain. Between these strongholds he proposed to run mobile patrols,
constantly and unpredictably on the move.
The layout of fortification was based on a mathematical arrangement
aiming to maximise visual synergy, lines of fire and rapid movement
across the surface. The isolated semi-autonomous strongholds were to be
spread apart, so that each could be clearly seen from those near it, and
located at the distance of flat trajectory tank fire from each other. ‘High
points’, Clausewitz already noted in the beginning of the nineteenth
century, ‘are important not only for their own sake, but for the effect
they have on one another’.16
Within the strongholds, command, control and long-range surveil-
lance facilities, underground bunkers, firing positions and emplacements
for artillery were to reinforce their intrinsic strengths and give them a
semi-independent battle capacity. The seeding of strongholds implied a
constantly expanding network of roads and signal stations connecting
the disparate nodes with the rear.17 The distance between the centre of
the state and the front had expanded fourfold since the 1967 War. It
15 Ariel Sharon with David
Chanoff, Warrior, The
became necessary to extend the matrix across all the occupied territories.
Autobiography of Ariel Nearer the rear, the nodes were not just strongpoints but complexes of
Sharon, Simon & Schuster, military training, camps, depots, maintenance facilities and headquarters
New York, 2001, p 219
– some of the latter were later transformed into the seeds of civilian
16 Carl von Clausewitz, On settlements.
War, eds and trans Michael
Howard and Peter Paret,
While unable to convince the General Staff of his plans for the Sinai,
Wveryman’s Library, Sharon, in his role as director of training, immediately dispersed the vari-
London, 1993, pp 417–18 ous training schools under his command – the infantry school, the engi-
17 Martin van Creveld, neering school, the military police school, part of the artillery school, the
Command in War, main basic-training school for new recruits, the paratrooper recruit
Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1985, school – as points of control throughout the depth of the West Bank.
p 204 The layout of their infrastructure represented the blueprint for the later
 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 343 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM
18 Sharon, Warrior, op cit,
p 208
19 Stephen Kern, The Culture
of Time and Space 1880–
1918, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA,
1983, pp 305–6
20 Paul Hirst, Space and
Power, Politics, War and
Architecture, Polity Press,
London, 2005, p 52
21 Manuel De Landa, War in
the Age of Intelligent
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Machines, Zone Books,
New York, 1991, p 78
22 Topology is a branch of
mathematics engaged with
time-based transformation
(ie, stretching, bending,
distorting, squeezing) of
Euclidean geometrical
objects. Deformations are
generated in response to
external influences.
Topology seeks to describe
the degrees of contiguity
and formal continuity of an
object rather than its
dimensions or location.
This branch of
mathematics found an echo
in the work of Gilles
Deleuze, where terms such
as affiliation, pliancy and
smoothness describe a
space of constant dynamic
transformation that
attempts to replace the
static world description of
Cartesian geometry. See
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold:
Leibniz and the Baroque,
University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 1992.
23 The defensive matrix is
similar to another category
invented by Deleuze and
Guattari – the rhizome – a
system that ‘connects any
point to any other’ and
operates ‘by variation,
expansion, conquest,
capture, offshoots’.
Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, op cit,
p 23
24 Uzi Benziman, Sharon, an
Israeli Caesar, Robson
Books, London, 1985,
p 110
25 Sharon, Warrior, op cit,
p 219
343
colonisation of the area with civilian settlements.18 According to the
system of the deep matrix, the Occupied Territories were fortified by
roads, electromagnetic and radio links, seeded with logistics and strong-
points with interlocking firepower. Military installations, when not
placed along the outer perimeter of the areas occupied, were seen as a
first stage for the domestication and naturalisation of the Occupied
Territories.
This geographical form of the matrix opposes the model of a line as
an instrument creating order, separating two distinct hostile realms. It
fragments military coherence and shatters any clear geometrical
structure.19 If the idea of linear fortification and linear warfare relies on
the ability of centralised command to control all areas of the battle-
field, defence in depth seeks the relative dispersal of military authority
and the increased autonomy of each independent unit. Although this
network is still nested in military hierarchy, the dispersal of the
command structure allows the military to develop what it refers to as a
‘flexible responsiveness’ able to deal with forms of uncertainty and
chance that Clausewitz called ‘friction’.20 This was designed to respond
to the fact that highly mobile battlefields are a chaotic environment in
which the chain of command and communication is often severed. By
according greater leeway to local commanders, the necessity for central
coordination is reduced. This encourages commanders to take the
initiative and act independently in response to emergent necessities and
opportunities. War across the defensive matrix becomes a ‘self-
organising’ system of related but non-contiguous battles.21 When a
defensive matrix is attacked it liquefies and becomes flexible, capable
of adapting itself to the fall of any number of single points by forming
new connections across its depth. Once severed, either at one or several
nodes, it may nevertheless start forming new connections out of those
still ‘living’.
The geography of nodes in a matrix cannot be measured convention-
ally in terms of distance according to traditional maps. It must be seen as
a ‘flexible’ topology22 defined by nodes and dynamic vectors. The
distance between nodes is not an absolute but a relative figure, defined
by the topological characteristics of the system – the speed and the
reliability of the connection – how fast and how secure travel between
given strongpoints can be made.23
The rationale of the Bar Lev Line was to prevent the Egyptians
from disturbing the geopolitical status quo marked by the Line.
Sharon’s proposal was to encourage them to attack and then counter-
attack the moment their supply lines were over-extended.24 ‘If the
Egyptians did try a crossing, we could afford to let them get a mile or
two inside the Sinai. Then we would be able to harass them and
probe for their weak points at our convenience… [after which] we
would be in a position to launch the kind of free-flowing mobile
attack we were really good at.’25 The defensive matrix exchanges
space with time and vice versa. At the beginning of an attack it trades
space for time – the attacker is allowed to gain space while the nodes
gain organisational time – later it exchanges time back for space as
the trapping of the attacker within the webs of the matrix enables the
defender to strike at the former’s unprotected rear. The matrix of
defence is a spatial trap that allows the defenders a high level of
 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 344 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM

344

mobility while attempting to paralyse any possibility of enemy

movement.
The Israeli public were not shielded from the intense debates
between Sharon, Bar Lev and the other members of the General Staff.
Sharon was leaking to the press, which in turn used his comments to
portray the military and political elite as old-fashioned and static.26 In
1969, when Bar Lev realised he could no longer impose discipline on
Sharon, he retaliated by using a technical excuse to dismiss him from
military service. Bar Lev’s views were shared by Prime Minister Golda
Meir who saw Sharon as a threat to the Israeli state and an explicit
threat to its democracy.27 In response, Sharon revoked his membership
of the Labour Party, which he held at the time as all officers over the
rank of full colonel were expected to do. He scheduled a well-publicised
meeting with Menahem Begin, the head of the right-wing opposition. It
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was the Labour Party’s fear, before a general election, of the possible
political capital Sharon could take with him to the opposition that
forced Bar Lev to accept Sharon back into the army, and landed him
paradoxically where he needed him least – on the banks of the Canal as
IDF Chief of Southern Command. There, between 1969 and July 1973,
Sharon implemented the matrix of defence behind the Bar Lev Line,
which was itself by then almost complete. Before long the entire zone
was enveloped in a frenzy of construction. Mountain outposts were
constructed and fortified and a network of high-volume military roads
was paved to connect them. Hundreds of trucks and bulldozers were
marshalled and hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of crushed stone
were hauled into the desert. The depths of the Sinai were fashioned into
a future battlefield. At the time it seemed that every available building
contractor in the country was making a good profit constructing fortifi-
cations.
During his tenure as Chief of Southern Command, Sharon was
engaged in another policy of planning that would later come to define
Israeli spatial strategies towards the Palestinians. Sharon began to view
the conflict with Palestinian guerrillas in the Gaza strip as an urban
problem that must be addressed by the transformation of Palestinian
cities and refugee camps, which he named the ‘habitat of this terror’.
From that moment, regional and urban planning became instruments of
a militarised campaign against the refugee camps. Sharon ordered the
shoot-to-kill of any suspect without trial or inquiry, and over a thousand
people were duly shot dead or executed.28 In the last and perhaps most
brutal chapter in the urban history of the grid, Sharon ordered a rectan-
gular grid road the width of an army bulldozer to be cut through the
dense fabric of the otherwise impenetrable pedestrian alleyways of some
refugee camps in Gaza, destroying more than 6000 homes. This act of
destruction was complemented by the proposal for two types of
construction, both demonstrating the connection between urban form
26 Benziman, Sharon, op cit, and national conflict: one for Jewish settlements to be built along major
p 111
routes and crossroads in a way that could carve the Gaza strip up into
27 Baruch Kimmerling, manageable sections; the other an ‘experimental’ project for the
Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s
War Against the construction of new neighbourhoods for the refugees. The latter plan
Palestinians, Verso, assumed that the rehousing of refugees within upgraded real estate
London, 2003, p 65 would assuage their desire for a ‘return’ to the areas from which they
28 Ibid, p 62 had been deported in 1947–48.
 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 345 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM
29 Galal Nassar, ‘Dam-
busters on the Bar Lev
Line’, an interview with
Maj Gen [retired] Gamal
Mohamed Ali, commander
of the military engineers
corps before and during the
October War, Al-Ahram
Weekly, 14 October, 1998,
available at: http://
weekly.ahram.org.eg/
30 Ibid
31 Ibid, pp 55–6, see as well
p 226
32 Quoted in both Martin van
Creveld, op cit, and Benny
Downloaded By: [San Francisco State University] At: 06:36 13 September 2009
Morris and in most Israeli
accounts of the 1973 Yom
Kippur War.
33 The following is a recently
released transcript of one
of the rare times Sharon
could be reached over the
radio during this war. On
17 October after 20:20,
Sharon was called to the
radio to take orders from
southern command. The
latter tried to remind
Sharon of the planning of a
raid by one of the Egyptian
forces about which he got
orders the previous day,
although Sharon rejected
these orders. Because it was
a non-encoded radio
connection Sharon was
approached with hints but
refused to take the hints.
CO: A second thing, you
were asked to perform
something in the manner of
Wingate, do you
understand what this is?
Sharon: No.
CO: Shmulik has given you
hints about it.
Sharon: Can’t remember.
CO: It is what the
‘chopped-finger’ did like
Wingate in Burma.
Sharon: …I cannot
understand what he
wants…
CO: You remember a
wooden structure, a line of
soldiers?
Sharon: Can’t remember…
look we all fought here
very hard the whole day. I
will not start taking my
soldiers out of the trenches
345
THE BREAKING OF THE LINE
In 1973 the Bar-Lev Line looked so firm that Dayan, then Minister of
Defence, claimed that it ‘would take the American and Soviet engineer
corps together to break through [it]’.29 The Egyptian daily, Al-Ahram,
recently revealed that some Soviet military experts had suggested in 1973
that nothing less than a tactical nuclear explosion would be needed.30 But
on 6 October 1973, in a surprise attack on the Jewish holiday of Yom
Kippur, it took the Egyptian armies only a few hours to break through
the Bar Lev Line using a conventional, although extraordinary, military
strategy.
The Line that had stood up to two years of Egyptian artillery fire
throughout the war of attrition finally succumbed to water. Using the
water of the Suez Canal, special units of the Egyptian engineering corps
employed British-made high-pressure water cannon to dissolve the hard-
ened sand and make seventy breaches within the artificial landscape.31
The water cannons were similar to those that throughout the late 1960s
helped clear the banks of the upper Nile in preparation for the construc-
tion of the Aswan Dam, which was inaugurated in 1970. Thanks to the
breaches in the earth dyke, two full armies could be transported in
armoured vehicles over floating bridges onto the Asian and previously
Israeli-controlled bank. They made their way through the ravaged artifi-
cial landscape a few kilometres into the Sinai, then, wary of the fortified
depth of Israeli defences and beyond the limit of their anti-aircraft
umbrella, they stopped their progress and dug themselves in with their
guns facing east.
The perception that the breaching of the Bar Lev Line was akin
to breaching the city walls and storming the homeland was more
imaginary than real, considering the hundreds of miles Egyptian
troops would have had to cross before reaching any Israeli city. But
it was summed up in Dayan’s famous statement that the ‘Third
Temple was falling’.32 This sense of catastrophe, augmented by the
return of collective traumas, resonant with a sense of divine punish-
ment and salvation, helped increase Israeli religious and messianic
sentiment after the war. The trauma of the breached line prompted a
shift in national consciousness that four years later forced Labour
out of government.
The political significance of the 1973 war in Israel was amplified
by the fact that the war had broken out only weeks before the general
elections of 31 October 1973, and a few months after both Sharon
and Bar Lev were released from the army. The war saw the two out
campaigning for opposing parties. In the war both accepted one step
down the command ladder. Sharon received the command of the 143
Armoured Division (later known as the Likud Division) and Bar-Lev
the overall command of the southern front. Old rivalries resurfaced as
the glory-hungry generals used the war as an electoral asset. Sharon
realised that whoever first crossed the canal to its African side would
be crowned as the war’s hero. In his relentless drive towards the Line,
he allowed himself a large measure of autonomy, disregarding Bar-Lev
who tried to restrain him, at times shutting off communications alto-
gether and at others pretending not to hear explicit orders screamed
over the radio.33 Sharon was undoubtedly turning the war into a
 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 346 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM
346
in the night this is a kind of
things you give instructions
to do in the morning.
Yesterday as well I was
woken up at 23:00 to be
asked if I remember
Anthony Quinn in movie. I
could not remember. What
can I tell you. If there are
ideas, let me know in the
morning, now I cannot.
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34 Benziman, Sharon, op cit, p
163
35 Basil Liddell Hart, The
Real War, 1914–1919,
Little, Brown, London,
1961; and Basil Liddell
Hart, Strategy, Plume,
London, 1991: ‘In strategy
the longest way round is
often the shortest way
there; a direct approach to
the object exhausts the
attacker and hardens the
resistance by compression,
whereas an indirect
approach loosens the
defender’s hold by
upsetting his balance.’
36 Thirty-one years later, the
story is kept alive. In the
summer of 2003, a few
months prior to the
anniversary of the Yom
Kippur war, the IDF was
pressured to release its
official historical account.
It was completed a decade
ago, but was shelved,
largely because Sharon
feared that its publication
would undermine his
popular image as the war’s
hero.
37 Benny Morris, Righteous
Victims: A History of the
Zionist–Arab Conflict,
1881–2001, Vintage, New
York, 1999, p 433–41
38 For a review of the 1976
Edition of FM (Field
Manual) 100–105, see
John L Romjue, ‘The
Evolution of the Airland
Battle Concept’, available
at: http://
www.airpower.maxwell.af.
mil/airchronicles/aureview/
1984/may-jun/romjue.html
(accessed 16 June 2004)
personal political campaign. He used open radio communications so
that many soldiers in his division could hear him, and continued to
leak military information to his large embedded entourage of report-
ers.34 ‘Operation Stoutheart’, which Sharon led during the last stages
of the war, found a gap in the Egyptian lines, reached the canal,
broke through the Bar Lev Line (this time from east to west), brought
the IDF to the rear of the Egyptian military and cut off their supply
lines. It was a demonstration of what British war theoretician Basil
Liddell Hart called the ‘Indirect Approach’.35 According to this
doctrine, to defeat a clockwork army, it is enough to direct an attack
against its weak points seeking to throw its mechanical inertia off-
balance. The Israeli counter-crossing of the canal created a bizarre
stalemate. The two armies had switched sides across the waterline and
the continents. Such was the power of linear defence that it was
crossed twice in both directions, during a war lasting less than three
weeks.
The Yom Kippur war ended with unprecedented public outrage. But
Ariel Sharon was popularly perceived as a national hero. After the
fighting, banners were hung from the division’s vehicles, carrying the
slogans that would later feature in so many political campaigns in Israel:
‘Arik King of Israel!’ Sharon’s photograph driving a military jeep with a
blood-stained bandage around his forehead, his hair blowing in the
wind, featured on the posters of his party-political campaign.36 In
contrast to the ageing Meir and Dayan, he seemed to offer a youthful,
energetic and anti-institutional alternative to Labour.
The IDF’s crossing of the canal into Africa had also triggered a series
of global reactions. On 16 October, the day Israeli forces landed on the
African bank of the Suez Canal, the Arab states announced a blanket
seventy percent increase in oil prices and a progressive monthly five
percent reduction in output until Israel withdrew completely from the
occupied territories and ‘restored the legal rights of the Palestinians’. On
23 December, OPEC members decided to further double oil prices; in
effect prices quadrupled from $2.50 a barrel to $10 a barrel. The world
was plunged into a recession and an inflationary spiral that lasted for a
decade.37 Together with the de-coupling of the US dollar and the gold
standard in 1971, this started a shift in the world economy towards
contemporary neo-liberalism; the sociopolitical unity that the Keynesian
welfare and state-centric model had sought to create and maintain was
fragmented. The economic production of industry retreated in favour of
immaterial service sectors.
For the US military, the 1973 battles provided a laboratory that had
profound effects on NATO geography in Europe. The concept of ‘active
defence’, introduced in the 1976 edition of the US military field manual,
translated the paradigm of US military operations into a territorial model,
largely inspired by the matrix of the canal fortifications. It led to the
construction of an expanded matrix of American military bases starting
with likely battlefields in West Germany. Supplementing this geography,
new generations of guided munitions were developed, later evolving into
today’s ‘smart-bombs’.38 US military planners were oblivious to the fact
that the 1973 war was the last armed conflict that positioned two fully
mobilised national armies in large-scale ‘symmetrical’ conflict played out
for territorial gain.
 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 347 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM
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39 Gramsci, Selections from
the Prison Notebooks, op
cit, p 238
40 Gush Emunim was
founded under the spiritual
leadership of Rabbi Zvi
Yehuda Kook, the son of
the Chief Rabbi of pre-
state Israel. Kook believed
that we live at the
beginning of messianic
times, in which the
redemption of the entire
Land of Israel is essential
for the redemption of the
world. Each person, friend
or foe, is divinely ordained
to help bring about the
world’s redemption. For an
analysis of the ideological
platform of Gush Emunim,
see Gideon Eran, From
Religious Zionism to
Zionist Religion – The
Roots and Culture of Gush
Emunim, unpublished PhD
thesis, Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, 1987 [in
Hebrew].
41 Morris, Righteous Victims,
op cit, pp 433–41
42 Idith Zertal and Akiva
Eldar, Lords of the Land:
The Settlers and the State
of Israel, 1967–2004,
Zmora-Bitan Dvir
Publishing House, Tel
Aviv–Kinneret, Or Yehuda,
2004, p 31
347
FRAGMENTATION
For Gramsci, the shift from a ‘war of position’ to ‘a war of manoeuvre’
causes an erosion of hegemony in political terms. He noted (allegorically
perhaps) that since linear defence ‘demands enormous sacrifices by an
infinite mass of people… an unprecedented concentration of hegemony
is necessary, and hence a more “interventionist” government… [that
will] organise permanently the “impossibility” of internal disintegration
– with control of every kind, political, administrative, etc’.39 The politi-
cal ‘war of manoeuvre’ by contrast exists as a multiplicity of indecisive,
non-centralised, haphazard and loosely coordinated actions that eat
away at the hegemony of the state.
After the war, Israel was confronted by waves of demonstrations and
other political activities, starting with the protests of returning soldiers,
against the failure of the political-security concept of the Labour govern-
ment. The Israeli state seemed paralysed by the outer ditch and dyke that
had failed it. The breach of the fortification line (and in that respect, both
Shazly and Sharon) had fragmented more than military geography. They
shattered the unity and hegemony of the state. Breaching the Cartesian
geographical space dislocated other cohesive social structures and set in
motion a general process of sociopolitical fragmentation. The state, seem-
ing to obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which sees a constant
increase in entropy along the axis of time), started to shed power to a
variety of micro-political, non-governmental and extra-parliamentary
organisations and sectarian groups that began to comprise a more
complex and multi-polar political matrix. These began to challenge the
centralised power structure associated with the Labour movement; a
power best described by the French term étatisme, which can be trans-
lated from the Hebrew Mamlahtiyut literally as Kingdomhood.
The war produced a powerful new brand of national-religious Zion-
ism, one based on a popular fusion of messianic sentiments with military
logic. The core of organisations, such as the religious-messianic right-
wing Gush Emunim40 (Block of Faithful), which aimed to promote
settlements in the 1967 occupied territories, was formed by demobilised
soldiers and officers who had served together during the 1973 war. It
was consolidated over the months during which a large part of the
reserve force of the IDF was mobilised on the Suez Canal before the IDF
completed its withdrawal from the African bank of the canal in March
1974.41 Gush Emunim attempted to liberate some of the messianic senti-
ments that had been repressed within Zionism and to invert certain
social hierarchies within Israeli society. The image of the settler-yeshiva-
student was to replace the previous ethos of Labour-era farmer-warrior.
Gush policies contrasted the secular, and thus temporary, ‘state of Israel’
with the ancient ahistorical and transcendental power of the ‘land of
Israel’. According to them the state’s ‘weak governments’ were to be
subdued by an outburst of mystical power.
Planning the settlement project in the West Bank was seen, according
to Akiva Eldar and Idit Zertal, as ‘organizing the practical details of
salvation’.42 The Gush presented a series of master plans and acted
according to opportunities and impulses in grabbing land within the
mountain area near, or in the case of Hebron, well within Palestinian
cities. The reaction from the postwar Labour governments of Golda
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348
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43 Only at the time of the
second Begin Government,
with a more solid right-
wing coalition, did the
government begin to work
together with Gush
Emunim, adopting its
ideology in its entirety and
providing extensive
financial assistance for its
activities. See Meron
Benvenisti, Lexicon of
Judea and Samaria:
Settlements Administration
and Society, Cana,
Jerusalem, 1987, p 155 [in
Hebrew].
44 Benziman, Sharon, op cit,
p 209
45 Shlomo Sand, Intellectuals,
Truth and Power From the
Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf
War, Am Oved Publishers,
Tel Aviv, 2000, pp 162–73
46 Peace-Now is an extra-
parliamentary peace
movement, founded in
1978 during the Israeli–
Egyptian peace talks, with
a letter from 348 IDF
reserve officers and
soldiers, urging the
government to make
territorial withdrawal in
exchange for peace. See:
http://
www.peacenow.org.il
Meir and later that of Yitzhak Rabin was weak. Gush members were
also supported by several ministers, chiefly Shimon Peres. It seemed as if
the government were itself involved in undoing its own power.
Later in 1977 Egyptian President Sadat visited Jerusalem and the
peace process began. Gush Emunim and Sharon, as a minister in the first
Likud Government excluded from and opposed to the process, timed the
launch of a new settlement to coincide with a diplomatic breakthrough
or to clash with any scheduled trips to Egypt of his political opponents
Foreign Minister Dayan and Minister of Defence Ezer Weizman.43
Together with Gush members, Sharon even initiated some ‘Potemkin
settlements’ – decoys that could be mistaken for settlements from the air
– in order to persuade the Americans, who monitored the ground from
the air, and the Egyptians to believe new settlements were being
constructed under their noses in areas of the Sinai that Israel had already
agreed to hand back. The Egyptians then naturally suspended negotia-
tions and the government was embarrassed; ‘no progress’ was assured
for a while.44 In that respect, settlement construction continued to be an
oppositional anti-government project conducted from within the
Government. Its planning and timing did not follow clear centralised
decisions. In fact, despite there being countless master plans for settle-
ments, the project in its early years fostered an anti-planning ethos. The
geography of the occupation did not flow from clear concepts and
explicit goals; it evolved out of confused interaction between many sepa-
rate, mostly inconsistent and often opposing developments. What guided
it in this period was an institutional jungle in which only rivalry and
conflict could be taken for granted. It could be described as a system
undergoing an intense internal and external conflict acting itself out in
space.
STRATEGIC PLANNING
The political fermentation and dissent that characterised the postwar
Israeli Government were central to the turnabout of power that brought
the right-wing Likud party under Menahem Begin to power in the
election of May 1977. If before the turnabout the state was characterised
by the cultural and social proximity between the elite groups and a
symbiosis between so-called ‘free’ intellectuals and state politicians, after
it the Likud government distanced itself from ‘high’ culture and uninten-
tionally brought about a more liberal cultural approach. The stand-off
contributed to their autonomy and gave rise to a critical culture that
accentuated differences and ethnicities, shook the foundational myths of
Zionist ‘national unity’ and formed movements that decades later were
labelled post- and anti-Zionist.45 Another important non-governmental
political group, Peace Now,46 was formed by demobilised soldiers and
centre-left-wing intellectuals four years after Gush Emunim and with the
entirely opposite aim – to act against the messianic right and to promote
peace treaties with Arab governments based on the formula of ‘land for
peace’. With a weakened state, these two NGOs shaped a political field
that became a complex matrix of micro-political powers.
In the first Likud government Ariel Sharon was appointed Minister of
Agriculture and took over the Ministerial Committee for Settlement.
 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 349 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM

349
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Sharon explains his settlements plan, 1977

This position, normally thought to be meaningless in the Israeli political

context, was made into an influential and powerful portfolio in an
administration of politicians who, except for Dayan who had crossed
political lines, were accustomed to a permanent role in the political
opposition and lacked any experience in government.
Forty days after his appointment, at the end of September 1977,
Sharon explains his settlements plan, 1977

47 In 1982, a few months Sharon announced the first in a series of plans prepared with a professor
before his invasion of of architecture at the Technion, Avraham Wachman, for the creation of
Lebanon, Sharon, then
Minister of Defence,
new Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank.47 Settlements,
published his master plan according to the Wachman–Sharon plan, were to be organised in
for Jewish Settlements in sustainable blocks. Each block was to be organised around an urban
the West Bank Through the
Year 2010 – later known settlement acting as a node to provide services to several smaller ‘semi-
as the Sharon Plan. urban settlements’, ‘rural settlements’ and ‘community settlements’.
48 Elisha Efrat, Geography of Each block of settlements was to become a semi-autonomous structure
Occupation, Judea, that was in turn networked to other such nodes and further to the main
Samaria and the Gaza metropolitan centres.48 Having successfully demonstrated the shortcom-
Strip, Carmel Press,
Jerusalem, 2002, pp 65–67 ings of the Bar-Lev Line, Sharon now turned against the second of the
[in Hebrew] Labour defensive lines, the Allon Plan. Seeking to implement the lessons
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350
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The West Bank Barrier, Tul Qarem Region. Photograph: Eyal Weizman, 2003

of the Sinai campaign of 1973, Sharon claimed that: ‘a thin line of settle-
ments along the Jordan [i.e. the linear Allon Plan] would not provide a
viable defence unless the high terrain behind it was also fortified…’. The
plan promoted a matrix of more than a hundred points to be inhabited
by suburban, urban and industrial settlements on the mountain ridges
across the full depth of the West Bank in and around Palestinian cities
and villages. These were placed on strategic summits that could overlook

Jewish settlement of Eli, Ramallah Region. Photograph: Eyal Weizman, 2001

 CTTE_A_189994.fm Page 351 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:59 AM
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49 Emmanuel Sivan, ‘The
lights of Netzarim’,
Ha’aretz, 7 November
2003
50 Sharon’s early plans for the
West Bank were adopted
by the Settlement Division
of the World Zionist
Organisation – a non-
governmental organisation
affiliated to his Ministry of
Agriculture. See Matityahu
Drobless, Masterplan for
the Development of
Settlement in Judea and
Samaria for the Years
1979–1983, Settlement
Division of the World
Zionist Organisation,
Jerusalem, 1979 [in
Hebrew].
51 Halper, ‘The Key To Peace:
Dismantling The Matrix
Of Control’, op cit;
Deleuze and Guattari,
Plateaus, op cit, pp 389–90
52 The Italian architectural
research group Multiplicity
demonstrated that it takes
an Israeli driver ninety
minutes to cross the West
Bank from north to south,
while the same journey
takes a Palestinian driver
eight hours. Stefano Boeri,
‘Border Syndrome’, in
Territories, eds Anselm
Franke, Eyal Weizman,
Stefano Boeri, Rafi Segal,
KW, Berlin and Walther
Keoing, Cologne, 2003,
pp 24–5
53 Zertal and Eldar, Land of
the Lords, op cit, p 92
351
each other and exercise control over the terrain between them. To a
great extent, settlements were laid out according to a logic of visibility –
to both see and be seen. The principle of visual domination sought to
create the condition by which the trajectories of movements within the
terrain around and beneath settlements would be overlooked. But
Sharon also wanted the ‘Arabs to see Jewish lights every night at 500
meters…’49 to make visible the dominance of the occupation.
The plan included a high-volume traffic network that wove its way
The West
Jewish settlement
Bank Barrier,
of Eli,Tul
Ramallah
QaremRegion.
Region.Photograph:
Photograph:Eyal
EyalWeizman,
Weizman,2001
2003
between the settlements, across occupied territories and into the Israeli
heartland, as well as linking with other settlements whose role was to
protect the new routes.50 The settlements, relying on their own weapons
and military contingency plans, were to form a mesh of ‘civilian fortifi-
cations’ integrated into the IDF’s overall system of defence, serving stra-
tegic imperatives by overlooking main traffic arteries, road junctions,
and Palestinian cities, towns and villages in their region. Jeff Halper later
called this interlocking series of settlements, roads, barriers and military
bases the ‘matrix of control’. Deleuze and Guattari illustrated the differ-
ence between a matrix and a line-based geography by comparing the
game of Go to that of Chess. If the aim of Go is the ‘bordering, encir-
cling, shattering’ of the opponent, it implies ‘a war without battle lines,
with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battle even: pure strat-
egy’. Jeff Halper echoed this: ‘you win by immobilising your opponent,
by gaining control of key points of a matrix so that every time s/he
moves s/he encounters an obstacle of some kind’.51 The Israeli control of
nodal points acts as on/off valves regulating movement, replacing the
necessity for the direct presence of Israeli forces within Palestinian cities.
The matrix would control the Palestinians physically, collectively and
politically without the necessity of being everywhere all the time.
This location strategy was based on another military principle: the
party who moves faster across a battlefield will win the battle. It sought
to determine different speeds at which Israelis and Palestinians could
move across the terrain. The six-lane bypass roads on which military
vehicles and civilian vans can rush between settlements contrast with the
narrow dirt-roads connecting Palestinian towns and villages. This
‘slowing down’ of the Palestinian population is what Israeli journalist
Amira Hass called ‘the theft of time’.52 The architectural research group
Multiplicity demonstrated that normally it takes an Israeli driver ninety
minutes to cross the West Bank from north to south, while the same
journey takes a Palestinian driver at least eight hours. The IDF believes
that fixing the Palestinian population in relatively stationary and
isolated islands makes them more manageable and controllable.
Neither this plan nor the ones that followed were officially adopted
by the Government – indeed they were unintelligible to most of its
members. Nonetheless they went on to provide a basis for official settle-
ment policy. The Government authorised Sharon’s request to initiate
three new settlements every month.53 Thus, in the late 1970s and early
1980s began another construction frenzy indicative of Sharon’s closeness
to executive power. Sharon and Gush Emunim were spinning a growing
spider’s web of installations. The West Bank, like the Sinai a few years
beforehand, was being inscribed by two symbiotic and synergetic instru-
ments of territorial expansion: the outpost observation point and the
serpentine road network. The latter was the prime device for serving the
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54 Ibid, p 88
55 Sharon, Warrior, op cit,
p 366
56 Nekuda (point) is also the
title of the journal of the
settlers movement.
Available at: http://
www.virtualjerusalem.com
/news/nekuda/ (accessed
22 November 2003).
57 Quoted in Paul Virilio, A
Landscape of Events, MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA–
London, 2000, p 92
58 Eran Tamir Tawil, ‘To
Start a City from Scratch,
An interview with
Architect Thomas M
Leitersdorf’, in A Civilian
Occupation, The Politics
of Israeli Architecture, Rafi
Segal and Eyal Weizman,
Verso Books–Babel
Publishers, London–Tel
Aviv, 2004, p 45
former, the former overlooking and protecting the latter. Across the
span of the territory, mobile homes were delivered, roads paved, tents
set. The infrastructure, water and electricity came from nearby military
bases:
Equipped with maps Sharon and his assistant for settlement issues – Uri
Baron – jumped from hill to hill… to locate places for settlements… The
points selected were overlooking the terrain around them and limited the
possibility of Palestinian villages to spread out…54
TEMPORARY POINTS
Fearing the reversal of his spatial project, Sharon was reluctant to imple-
ment his plans gradually. He believed it was important ‘to secure a pres-
ence first and only then build the settlements up’.55 He acted to establish
the entire skeleton of the project and to scatter the area with small
outposts, some hardly more than footholds, composed of tents or mobile
homes – and inhabited most often by Gush members – knowing that
each of these outposts, once establishing itself as a fact on the ground,
would later grow into a suburban settlement. The outposts had the
potential for immediacy, mobility and flexibility. They were the perfect
instruments of colonisation. Prefabricated homes allowed for quick,
overnight deployment on the back of trucks or, in cases where a road
was not available, by helicopter. The prefabricated rigidity of the single
element allows for an immediate urbanism based on patterns of quick
repetition and flexible distribution. The seed of mobile homes may then
be free to transform and evolve into a ‘mature’ settlement as conditions
allow. The fact that settlements were referred to in Hebrew as ‘points on
the ground’ and a single settlement sometimes simply as Nekuda56 or
‘point’ in Hebrew is indicative of a planning culture that considered
them less in terms of housing and more in terms of their strategic loca-
tion. Lenin once described strategy as ‘the choice of points where force is
to be applied’.57 Points have neither dimension nor size; they are coordi-
nates on the X/Y axis of the plane and on the Z axis of latitude. The
settlement ‘location strategy’ was based on a close reading of the terrain.
Tactical considerations dictated the places where settlement effort was to
be concentrated.
Thomas A Leitersdorf, architect and town planner of the settlement
Ma’ale Edumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank, located east of
Jerusalem, described the meetings of the ministerial committee
appointed to designate the location to the settlement in 1978: ‘When we
put the alternatives to the Ministerial Committee for Settlement, headed
at the time by Ariel Sharon, the only questions asked were:
‘Which of the alternative locations has better control over the main
routes?’ … I replied that according to these criteria the ideal location
would be location A… At that moment Sharon rose up and declared,
without consulting the Committee that ‘the State of Israel decides on
location A’.58
Israeli suburbia made perfect use of the system laid out for mobile
defence in depth, incorporating its fragmented and nodal structure. The
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59 On 12 November, the
ministerial committee for
security accepted Allon’s
proposal and decided from
then on that the Green Line
would not be marked on
official plans, but only the
purple lines of the new
ceasefire. See Segev, op cit,
p 615
60 Kemp, ‘Border’, op cit,
p 45
353
system of fifty highways together with a modern infrastructure became
an effective instrument of development. It merged the needs of a sprawl-
ing suburbia with national security and political ambitions to push ever
more Israelis into the West Bank. This ‘Biblical’ heartland of the West
Bank was seen as sacred territory and as a defensible frontier, a border
without a line. The ‘artificially created’ Green Line, Israel’s internation-
ally recognised 1949 border, was erased by state geographers from the
maps59 or stretched to incorporate every new outpost and settlement,
transforming state territory into a fragmented frontier whose boundaries
were fluid and elastic. The open frontier blurred the distinctions between
a political ‘inside’ and ‘outside’; or, as the Israeli sociologist Adriana
Kemp says, it blurred the difference between ‘the political space of the
state and the cultural space of the nation’, a difference ‘hidden by the
hyphenated concept of “nation-state”’.60 Battlefield terms such as
strongpoint, advance, penetration, encirclement, envelopment, surveil-
lance, control and supply-lines migrated from the military to a civilian
practice. The small red-roofed single family home replaced the tank as its
basic battle unit. District regional and municipal plans replaced the
strategic sand table. Homes were deployed like armoured divisions in
formation across a theatre of operations to occupy hills, to encircle an
enemy or to cut its communication lines. Architecture and planning were
used as a continuation of war by other means. Like the tank, the gun and
the bulldozer, building material and infrastructure were used to achieve
tactical and strategic aims. It was urban warfare in which urbanism
provided not only the theatre of war but its weapons. This civilianisation
of military organisation in fact became the militarisation of many
spheres of life. War was only over because now it was everywhere.
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 only recently Sharon could remove seven thou-
sand settlers from Gaza – and simultaneously settle ten thousand others
in settlements across the West Bank. Temporariness and flexibility are
indeed the hallmark of his work as an architect across the Israeli fron-
tier. (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 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.