#40: Eyal Weizman & Olga Ravn
Lordy, lordy, my substack is 40! My mom had a huge party when she turned 40 and for years we used the leftover Styrofoam cups that screamed in some weird cursive “lordy lordy Cindy’s 40!” I don’t remember the party because I was sequestered to my room, but I remember the cups.
The past few weeks I was able to finally spend some time with my precious friends Alex and Scott who have been living across the pond for some years now. It was my first time seeing Scott since I moved to Atlanta nearly 7 years ago, and my first time seeing Alex in something closer to 4 or 5 years. I love my friends.
A perusal of my camera roll since my last post reveals that I finally started running again, my appreciation for Houston legends Dress Code and their homemade Palestinian solidarity banner, my love for legendary weirdos Alternative TV (and legendary weirdo Barry simultaneously appreciating Alternative TV), another burst of a Leon Golub obsession, and some progress in a new band.
Men are not for burning. Read on.
Hollow Land by Eyal Weizman
Nearly every day since returning from Europe, I pass a series of posters pasted onto the wall of the decommissioned Holly Street Power Plant that produced chemical spills in 1974, 1991, 1992, and 1993, a proliferation of cancer cases in the residents of the time, and endless noise pollution in what used to be a very Black and Hispanic neighborhood. The posters used to say “STOP THE GENOCIDE” and “WE ARE NOT THE ENEMY” on top of and under two visibly Palestinian women, but a slow collective effort over the last month has literally defaced these women, leaving only a single final face that begs anyone who can recognize the humanity in her gaze to “STOP THE GENOCIDE.”
It’s an incredible display of gentrification, but my optimism, or perhaps my naivete, always makes me wonder how someone walking past these two repeating faces can feel the desire to peel away at them. Most obviously, they need to, at the bare minimum, not recognize the humanity of the women they are supposed to reflect. But how is that done? I ask myself, what mechanisms of the State, of the media, and of our culture can so effectively render invisible the lives of 2.3 million Gazans?
Eyal Weizman answered this question for me with incredible force through discussion of the architecture of the Israeli occupation. “The built environment — and its destruction and construction — is…more than just a backdrop of [the Palestine-Israel] conflict. Rather, it is the means by which domination takes shape,” he writes in the introduction to his masterpiece Hollow Land. Weizman offers a powerful analysis of Israel’s nearly 60 year long occupation and the various tools it has used to settle contested land, destroy Palestinian autonomy, and reduce Palestinian life to what Agamben would call bare life.
While Israel allows, to whatever extent, Palestinians to live on land, it maintains sovereignty of the ground beneath them and the sky above them in Gaza and the West Bank. About 80% of the area’s aquifer lies under the West Bank, but is completely under the control of Israel, with no regard to who lives directly above it. Israel uses 83% of the annually available water while leaving 17% to West Bank Palestinians. This issue of vertical control is further illuminated by laws that restrict Palestinian water pumps to only reach down to seasonal wells, while Israel plunges its pipes deep down into the ancient waters of the aquifers. Rest assured that they have ruined the aquifers in their environmental arrogance.
Residential architecture plays a fundamental role in nativizing Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Since the British occupation beginning in 1917, the only permitted exterior building material has been “Jerusalem Stone.” Israel’s 1968 master plan demanded this practice stay in place, so that all newly constructed Israeli buildings have walls of ancient stone and red roofs, thus visually dissolving the new settlements in with the old, creating an appearance of organic belonging quite different from the sites of refugee housing with plumbing so inadequate as to create an excess of raw sewage alongside living quarters. These same houses and the roads that connect Israelis created perimeters and lines in between existing Palestinian villages that divide and demarcate. This era of the master plan saw a more rapid investment in settlement than the more common tools of the war machine, creating a war by other means. Through its architecture, Israel created a narrative of settlers in harmony with their environment and a surplus population living in filth.
During this time Israel also began acting on old Ottoman empire laws which stated that any land not continuously cultivated in the past 10 years was not privately owned and could be acquired by the state and that any piece of privately owned land not cultivated consistently for three years could also be acquired by the State. Private lands necessitated taxes that most Palestinians could not afford. However, to deal with those who could afford the taxes, Israel began planting pine forests on the land it was able to acquire that grew quickly and deposited acidic pine needles in the earth, killing the local undergrowth and depriving shepherds of their pasture who are then forced to release it. Pine deserts, they’re called. Where the Israelis plant pines, the Palestinians used to plant olives.
But what gave the settlements such backing? What made it feasible to occupy this land, and restrict Palestinian life the way Israel did and continues to do? How can Israel demolish Palestinian houses, settle the area, and deem it well and necessary? Security. In the name of human rights, Israel settles and colonizes Palestine to ensure the security of its people. In 1978, a High Court Judge wrote that:
In terms of purely security-based considerations, there can be no doubt that the presence in the administered territory [occupied in the terminology of the time] of settlements - even ‘civilian’ ones - of the citizens of the administering power makes a significant contribution to the security situation in that territory, and facilitates the army’s performance at its tasks. One need not be an expert in military and defense matters to appreciate that terrorist elements operate more easily in a territory that is occupied exclusively by a population that is indifferent or sympathetic to the enemy that n in a territory in which there are also persons liable to monitor them and inform the authorities of any suspicious movement. With such people the terrorists will find no shelter, assistance and equipment. These are simple matters and there is no need to elaborate.
The logic of the wall, now standing more than 20 years, is the same. The wall is a “temporary” measure to ensure the security of Israeli citizens. Not only does it separate the settler and their victims like the border walls so many of us know in the U.S., but it remains elastic, able to further tighten itself around Gaza or the West Bank when new ‘security threats’ present themselves. Military rule is then able to perpetuate itself through ever-new perceived security threats.
Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” Human rights absorb everyone into a bizarre international legal system that continuously benefits the powerful, the Western, the white at the cost of countless Black and Brown lives in the Global South and East. It is astonishingly easy for Israel, and the U.S., to name any Palestinian who so much as gazes at a Israeli settlement ‘suspiciously’ a security threat and perform wildly asymmetric feats of violence. It’s even easier when the U.S. vetoes a ceasefire at the UN Security Council one day and then sells $106.5 million dollars of tank munitions to Israel the next day.
Perhaps I’ve merely parroted a few shocking examples of the brutality and obtuseness of Israeli settler-colonialism without talking about the book. The book is much more than this and Weizman’s analyses and arguments are brilliant, especially in the way he is able to string these acts of oppression together in a way that elucidates a clear logic of occupation. It’s hard to not restate some of the most brutal occupational maneuvers, but I will refrain from more. I know many of us are invested in learning more about Palestinian occupation right and I highly recommend you read this if you want something more than a history of how we got here.
A hundred meters down from the de-faced women as I approach the bench I sit on and read before the sunset somebody wrote on the same wall, in a blend of CAPS lock and lowercase letters with an odd capital R, “USE MY TAXES to Repaint // NOT BOMB KIDS!” with the bottom line in crescendo. I like it. Last night, a private individual must have taken the time to color match the wall, because today as I ran past it, it curiously read “USE MY TAXES to Repaint// S!” with the area that used to say “NOT BOMB KID” in a grey indistinguishable from the rest of the wall. I wish I could slap that jackass in the face with Weizman’s heavy book.
The Employees by Olga Ravn
The Employees is a comedic existential workplace comedy of the 22nd century. As I understood it, there are three essential moving parts to the book. The humans, the humanoids (indistinguishable from the humans when wearing clothes (they don’t have genitalia)), and the Objects. The Objects are still a mystery to me but they produce a sensation in the humanoids and maybe in the humans too. The humans can die, the humanoids can’t (they can be turned off, reset, refreshed, and whatever is backed up can get put in another humanoid body). The humans have an existential crisis because they are on a spaceship that won’t land anywhere before they die, rendering their life seemingly purposeless or at least without any individuality. The humanoids have an existential crisis because they can’t die. In Heideggerean language, if there is no possibility of being-towards-death then there is no life. Events unfold (it’s an incredibly brief book and I wouldn’t want to ruin it) and the remaining humanoids are waiting to run out of battery stranded on a strange planet with grass and sun. They’re disconnected from their ship and the events they are experiencing are unable to be backed up although eventually their consciousnesses will be implanted into new bodies. Everything after their disconnection will disappear when that happens. They lay in the grass knowing they will never remember it.
I can go out into the valley now. No one can stop me. Grass has started to grow, or at least what looks like grass from the things I’ve been told. I’ve never seen grass before. Slender, green blades peeping out of the wet earth. It rains nearly every day in the valley; a cold and persistent rain. The earth is darkened by it. The earth, I lie down on it. There’s a tuft of grass next to my hand. The earth wishes me neither good nor ill. It was a coworker who told me the recording equipment was still running and there’s a chance you’ll play this back to us when we return. I know I probably won’t be able to remember the grass. I know the chances are that I’ll never see grass again. Not even in the places where I’m soon to wake up and be reuploaded is there grass, so I’ve heard. If I pull up some grass from the earth and keep it in my hand from now on, will there be a chance then? No, we’re given new bodies. My dead body will have to lie here with the grass in its fist, while I go on in some other place.