© 2002 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA

Bulldozers and Bombs:

The Latest Palestinian–Israeli

Conflict as Asymmetric Urbicide

Stephen Graham

School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University,Newcastle, UK; s.d.n.graham@ncl.ac.uk

Introduction: “Urbicide” by Bulldozer at Jenin

The bulldozing of the centre of the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002made a mockery of Ariel Sharon’s repeated claims over the previousmonth that Israel’s invasion of the occupied territories was aimed todestroy the “terrorist infrastructure” behind recent Palestinian suicideattacks. Sharon’s real purpose was to destroy the urban, civil andinfrastructural foundations of the proto-Palestinian state. To invoke aterm used by both Marshal Berman (on the collapse of the Bronx) and the architect Bogdan Bogdanovitch (on the deliberate culturalannihilation of Sarajevo and other Balkan cities), Sharon’s war was astrategy of “urbicide”. Its main purpose was to deny the Palestinianpeople their collective, individual and cultural rights to the city-basedmodernity long enjoyed by Israelis. Sharon’s was a deliberate strategyto compel Palestinians to indefinite poverty.

The Israelis made dramatic efforts in the invasion to undermine the already slow modernisation of the cities that today house the vastmajority of the Palestinian people. Water tanks were systematicallyridden with bullets. Electronic communications were bombed andjammed. Roads were dug up and ruined. Electricity transformers weredestroyed. Computers were smashed, their hard drives stolen. Anycultural or bureaucratic symbol of the proto-Palestinian state was ran-sacked. Houses were bulldozed—some with their occupants still inside.Financial damage to infrastructure from the first major offensive alonehas been estimated by donors at US$361 million (Giacaman andHusseini 2002).

In addition, hospitals were bombed and medical equipment lootedand wrecked. During the attacks, ambulances were prevented fromentering the war zones, condemning many to a slow, avoidable death

as their blood, literally, seeped away. Those medical staff who gotthrough were, in some cases, deliberately attacked, and at least fivewere killed.

Numbers of civilian casualties, especially in Jenin, are difficult toestimate. At the time of this writing (17 June 2002), most reportsestimated that at least 52 Palestinians were directly killed in Israel’sfirst Jenin attacks. At least 22 of these were civilians, including chil-dren and disabled people (Human Rights Watch 2002:4). In the Jeninoperation, Israeli bulldozers levelled a 300-by-250-metre area, buryingsome civilians alive and leaving over 4,000 people homeless (HumanRights Watch 2002:4). The destruction is captured graphically inFigure 1. Reports tell of Israeli soldiers carefully marking houses for demolition with blue markers from detailed maps. It is clear thatthe objective was the deliberate and wholesale removal of the core ofthe Jenin refugee camp, long seen by Israeli military leaders as one of the main areas for producing and equipping suicide bombers. Sincethe demolitions, all attempts at rebuilding and removing unexplodedordinance have been blocked by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). AsJonathan Cook reported in the Guardian on 3 June 2002, “[K]eepingthe heart of the camp in ruins will make Jenin more accessible nexttime the tanks rumble in”. Even since this was written, there havebeen many instances of such reinvasion.

The Context: Broader Infrastructural Warfare

The April invasion followed earlier efforts by Israel to destroy thedeveloping infrastructure of the Palestinians—much of it financed,since the Oslo Accord, by aid from Europe and the United Nations. InJanuary 2002, Josep Pique, president of the European Union Councilof Ministers, complained that Israel had systematically bombed Gaza International Airport, Gaza Port and Palestinian TV and radiotransmitters, which together had received around $20 million in EUsupport. Under the guise of “destroying sniper hiding places” the IDFhave also destroyed many fields, olive groves, factories and green-houses, adding to the economic effects of the bombings and tighteningcheckpoints.

Such destruction has occurred against a broader context of system-atic infrastructural and planning biases, which have prevented themodernisation of Palestinian settlements in Israel and the occupiedterritories over the decades since 1967. At the same time, Israel haspoured billions of dollars into building over 400 new Jewish settle-ments in the West Bank and Gaza. These have been equipped withlavish, dedicated highways and electricity, water and telephone linksthat literally bypass the Palestinian neighbourhoods around them. Suchpolicies have been deliberately designed to fragment and underminethe contiguity and coherence of Palestinian territory.

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Only when the lack of infrastructure threatens to produce widerexternalities for Jewish populations has the Israeli state investedsystematically in modernising occupied Palestinian communities. Onretiring, Teddy Kollek, Mayor of Jerusalem between 1967 and 1993,made a startling admission. “For Jewish Jerusalem I did something inthe past 25 years”, he reflected.

For East (Palestinian) Jerusalem? Nothing! Sidewalks? Nothing!Cultural institutions? Not one! Yes, we installed a sewerage systemfor them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! Therewere some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that theywould catch it! (Israel–Palestinian Peace-Building Program 2002)

Urbicide by Bulldozer: Tracing the Origins

The deliberate destruction of settlements by Israel in 2002 is notentirely new. Sharon, who is nicknamed the “Bulldozer”, has a longassociation with its use as a weapon of war and intimidation. In 1953,forces commanded by Sharon levelled homes in the West Bank villageof Kibya, killing 69 Palestinians, in retaliation for the slaying of aJewish woman and her two children.

Sharon revealed the philosophy behind urbicide by bulldozer in aninterview in Ha’aretz on 26 January 2001. When asked what he woulddo about persistent Palestinian shooting into the new Jewish settle-ments at Gilo, south of Jerusalem, he replied: “I would eliminate thefirst row of houses in Beit Jela”. And, if the shooting persisted?

I would eliminate the second row of houses, and so on. I know the Arabs. They are not impressed by helicopters and missiles. Forthem there is nothing more important than their house. So, underme you will not see a child shot next to his father [as was the casewith Mohamed Al-Dorra]. It is better to level the entire village withbulldozers, row after row. (Jansen 2001:2)

The current war, however, marks a shift from occasional and sporadicdemolitions to the systematic and planned destruction of carefullytargeted settlements for political and military reasons. An Israeli chiefof staff recently claimed that “[T]he D-9 [armoured] bulldozer [that isinvariably used to do the destruction] is a strategic weapon here”(Harel 2000; see Stein 2002).

The shift to deliberate urbicide by bulldozer is one result of a deepen-ing antagonism amongst Israel’s right-wing military and political elitestoward the natural demographic and urban growth of the Palestinianpeople. They see rapid and spontaneous Palestinian urbanisation anddemographic growth, within both Israel and the occupied territories, asthe Palestinian’s major long-term strategic “weapon” in shifting thedemographic, geopolitical and military balance against Israel. Sharon

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and his military leaders worry that Palestinian urbanisation anddemographic growth—largely unplanned and poorly serviced by infra-structure—is now undermining the viability of the Zionist state itself.

Such growth overwhelms efforts by Israel to support the in-migrationof Jews into both Israel itself and the new settlements (a balancefurther tipped by growing out-migration of Jews from Israel becauseof the increasing incidence of suicide bombs). The fast-growing, labyrin-thine Palestinian cities of the West Bank and Gaza also challengeIsrael’s military omnipotence. Such places help Palestinian fightersavoid surveillance, detection and capture—even when Apache heli-copter gunships buzz overhead, occasionally killing alleged Palestinianfighters (with those unlucky enough to be in the vicinity succumbingas “collateral damage”). Places like the Jenin refugee camp are com-monly dehumanised as “terrorist nests” in the right-wing Israeli media.

As we saw with the death of 13 Israeli soldiers in Jenin on 9 April,as fighting terrain, such places dramatically negate the superiority of high-tech Israeli forces over low-tech Palestinian ones. They exposeIsraeli soldiers to the risks of snipers, ambushes, booby traps andhomemade bombs. They also inhibit the traditional military tactics ofinvasion and occupation, because tanks—when they can get in at all—are very vulnerable to attack.

Hence the shift to mass demolition as Israel’s preferred strategy of getting tanks into the centre of Jenin refugee camp—a place theycould not otherwise enter. The demolitions were the brutal reactionon the part of Israeli politicians and military planners to the deaths ofthe Israeli soldiers. But they were also a response to the fact that manyPalestinian fighters sought refuge within a built environment the veryexistence of which implicitly challenged Israel’s military omnipotenceover the whole geopolitical space of “Greater Israel” (ie the land tothe west of the Jordan River).

These demolitions are the most extreme element of a broaderstrategy of destroying the landscape in the creation of Israeli andJewish settlement and mobility spaces that are supposedly less vulner-able to Palestinian attack. “What is most striking in Palestine now isthe violence wrought against the land, the terrain”, writes ChristianSalmon (2002) of the Autodafe writers collective. This process is now intensifying with the construction, beginning in June 2002, of a massive 110-km fence along a large part of the 1967 “Green Line”on land forcibly taken from Palestinians. The fence will have a “bufferzone” of several kilometers on the western side to be forciblybulldozed of Palestinian settlements, structures and vegetation. AsSalmon (2002) continues, such policies mean that

houses are destroyed, olive trees uprooted, orange groves land waste… to improve … visibility … The bulldozer one runs across at every

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roadside seems as much a part of the strategy in the ongoing war asthe tank. Never has such an inoffensive machine struck me as beingmore of a harbinger of silent violence. The brutality of war. Geography,it is said, determines war. In Palestine it is war that has achieved theupper hand over geography.

From Urbicide to Genocide? Effi Eitam and

Representations of Palestinians as a “Cancer”

Within the (Greater) Israeli “Body-as-State”

A key force behind Israel’s shift to a strategy of urbicide by bulldozeris Effi Eitam. A retired IDF brigadier, General Eitam commanded anarmy brigade during the invasion of southern Lebanon in the 1980s.He is now an ultra-right-wing leader of the Jewish settlers’ NationalReligious Party and was invited to join Sharon’s new ruling coalitionon 10 April 2002 as Sharon brought in a group of hard-liners andmarginalised more conciliatory figures such as Shimon Peres. Suchhas been Eitam’s meteoric political rise that many already rate him asa serious contender for future leader of Israel.

Crucially, Eitam has also headed a group of senior Israeli generalswho, in late 2001, developed the plan for the Israeli invasion of theoccupied territories that was presented to Sharon on 31 January 2002.The plan, which Sharon seems to have loosely followed since, wasdirectly aimed at smashing the political, infrastructural and urbanfoundations of the Palestinian State, partly, at least, to “encourage”Palestinians to leave the occupied territories.

Eitam wants Arabs and Palestinians to leave Israel and the occupiedterritories, to be accommodated in a new, two-lobed “Palestinian”state in Jordan and the Sinai in Egypt. He spoke at a recent confer-ence in Israel on the links between war and cities, attended by thisauthor. Israel, he argued, faced a “Jihad of buildings”. The spontaneousconstruction of Palestinian housing and refugee camps within bothIsrael and the occupied territories was, he argued, a “cancerous tumourdestroying the ordered host” of the Israeli state. It threatened, he said,to undermine Israel militarily and demographically. “Eventually”, he believed, “this could destroy the strongest army in the world”. The necessary response, to Eitam, was urbicide—to change the IDF’stactics so that they challenge the very existence of Palestinian cities.

Viewing Palestinian cities as “cancerous tumours” within the “orderedbody” of (greater) Israel legitimises the bulldozing of avenues throughpeople’s homes so that tanks can reassert Israeli military control andsurveillance. It existentially denies Palestinians the right and space to exist—even in a miserable refugee camp with little or no infra-structure or services. Most astonishingly—and Eitam is fully aware ofthe charged irony here—the corporeal “body-as-state” metaphors of“cancers” and “ordered bodies” that Eitam regularly employs to describe

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Arab settlements are virtually search-and-replace copies of Hitler’smetaphorical depictions of Jewish ghettos in Mein Kampf. Fromcountless examples in history, it is obvious that from such metaphorsgenocides can grow. The Jewish people should be the last to needlessons on how quickly this can happen.

Worryingly, Eitam already hints at such quasigenocidal fantasies.His belief is that, in a context of war, Israeli military force andstrategies of deliberate urbicide will make life so intolerable thatPalestinians will “voluntarily” leave their homeland in Israel or theoccupied territories for Jordan and Egypt. The aim, as suggested by Israeli minister for Labor Shaloumo Bin Azri in May 2001, is to “convert the life of Palestinians into hell” through the ongoingdestruction of infrastructure, the building of fences and “buffer zones”and the strengthening of curfews and checkpoint controls (ArabicNews 2001). This policy, euphemistically labelled “transfer”, is now alegitimate political idea in Israel. “Transfer” is “ethnic cleansing” byurbicide—not (yet?) a deliberate massacre, but a systematic programmeof urban and infrastructural destruction, with heavy casualties alongthe way.

On the need to remove the “cancer” of Israeli-Arab settlementsfrom the “ordered” spaces within Israel, Eitam argued in Ha’aretz on6 April 2002 that “in war we [ie Jewish Israelis] behave as in war. I cansee that as a consequence of war few Arabs [Israeli citizens] willremain here [in Israel]. As a result of war many Palestinians may findthemselves again as refugees, on the other side, the eastern side, ofthe Jordan river.” If such visions continue to influence Sharon’sfraying coalition and his military and territorial strategies, shifts fromurbicide to genocide can genuinely not be discounted. This is somethingfor US and EU leaders, who have taken few direct actions againstIsrael’s attacks, to consider immediately.

Bombs Versus Bulldozers: Suicide Bombing

as (Asymmetric) Urbicide

What Israel’s strategy of deliberate urbicide totally fails to do—as thetragic litany of ongoing suicide bombs demonstrates—is to improvethe security of Israelis in their own cities. For, in this war of (asymmetric)urbicide, Palestinians have their own weapon against the modernurban life of the Israelis that will not be stopped by anything but a just,two-state, geopolitical settlement with substantial internationalenforcement. Untraceable and unstoppable, bypassing fences, check-points and targeted assassinations alike, and driven by despair,vengeance and religious certitude, the suicide bomb continues to denyIsraelis their modernity, their cities, their freedom. Hundreds ofIsraeli civilian have been killed by such bombs. Whole swathes of the economic hearts of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa are being

economically starved as terrified Israelis stay at home and shop on the’net. And the national economy is on a major slide.

Whilst they have no doubt killed many of the organisers of thesuicide bomb campaign in recent West Bank offensives, it is alreadyclear that Israel’s brutal current attacks will, tragically, only add to thequeues of people, from both sides of the new fence, desperate enoughto consider such extreme measures.

References Arabic News (2001) Israeli official calls for striking Palestinian infrastructure.

ArabicNews.Com 6 May. Available at http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/010605/2001060505/html (last accessed 10 April 2002)

Cook J (2002) Time to clean up the battlefield of a dirty war. The Guardian 3 June:16Giacaman R and Husseini A (2002) Life and health during the Israeli invasion of

the West Bank: The town of Jenin. Indymedia Israel. Available at http://www.indymedia.org.il (last accessed 29 May 2002)

Harel A (2000) This time, the chief of staff keeps his lips sealed. Ha’aretz 28December:3

Human Rights Watch (2002) Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and thePalestinian Authority territories. 14(3)

Israel-Palestinian Peace-Building Program (2002) Jerusalem: Planning and develop-ment. Available at http://www.atsc.org/1spal/ jerusalem/jeruplans.htm (last accessed4 March 2002)

Jansen M (2001) The bulldozer baron. Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line 8–14 February.Available at http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly (last accessed 15 May 2002)

Salmon C (2002) Sabreen, or patience. Available on the Autodafe Web site athttp://www.autodafe.org (last accessed 18 April 2002)

Stein Y (2002) Policy of Destruction: House Demolitions and Destruction of AgriculturalLand in the Gaza Strip. Report by B’Tseelem—The Israeli Information Center forHuman Rights in the Occupied Territories. February. Available at http://www.btselem.org (last accessed 5 May 2002)

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