Please note that this text was published in 2016, with a focus on the systematic use of the bulldozer by the Israeli state to destroy Palestinian homes since 1948. For this issue, the text has been slightly revised but the scale and the intensity of the genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank this past year, to which the bulldozer takes its full role (recent revelations about its most direct murderous function make this even clearer), would require an entire new chapter in the future, when the act of writing becomes possible again…
Welcome to the 56th issue of The Funambulist, the first of what I hope to be many published in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone versions. Entitled Bulldozer Politics, it is also a particular issue, due to the significant space occupied in it by this present introduction, as well as a long format by my dear colleague at the office, Shivangi Mariam Raj. The reason for attributing so much space to our own contributions is twofold: the wish to revive the argument I tried to articulate in a 2016 small francophone (untranslated) book, La Politique du Bulldozer: La Ruine palestinienne comme projet israélien (Bulldozer Politics: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Project), as well as to showcase this argument put at work by Shivangi Mariam, in the context of the ongoing mass bulldozer demolitions organized by Indian states against Indian Muslim homes.
This small book had emerged from the urge to write while witnessing from afar, the summer 2014 onslaught of the Israeli siege and invasion of Gaza. During two months, we felt that we were witnessing the very worst: endless bombings and tank/ship shelling, over 2,300 Palestinians killed, tens of thousands displaced within the Gaza Strip, entire parts of the city in ruins… Back then, writing and making maps was my own way to deal with the overwhelming emotions that each day was bringing. A decade later, after months of seeing how the most intense and murderous forms of settler colonial violence can be normalized and worsened, I have simply not managed to write anything.
Since October 2023, Israel has used bulldozers as key weapons in its ground invasion of Gaza, desecrating several cemeteries and demolishing Palestinian homes that thousands of bombs had somehow not destroyed.
As I am writing these lines in late August 2024, Israeli bulldozers are also at work in Jenin and Tulkarm, as key parts of the most destructive and murderous offensive in the West Bank since the Second Intifada (2000–05). Such a strategic use of this particular weapon does not differ from the history of bulldozer politics in Palestine since 1948, which I tried to briefly describe in this book. The idea was to show how the Israeli army produces Palestinian ruins according to a clear-cut, precise strategy, in stark contrast to the seemingly indiscriminate chaos of debris created by demolitions. The intentional refinement of the conditions for destruction is in fact so thoughtful and controlled that the process of ruination becomes similar to its opposite, i.e. the conception of an architectural project as practiced by any architect. Here, we need to shed the simplified image of chaos that destruction and ruin normally contains, and instead think of them in the context of precise, long-term military strategies aimed at controlling both the environment and the arrangement of bodies in space – in the same way as any other architectural project. We are accustomed to the destructive action of the bulldozer in the context of civil demolitions of buildings or neighborhoods in our cities, a transformation of the urban environment that is also rarely innocent from a political point of view. In Palestine, it has been a veritable weapon of war as early as 1949, when the Israeli army began demolishing the ruins of the numerous Palestinian villages emptied of their inhabitants the year before.
Founded in 1925, the US company Caterpillar launched a new model of bulldozer called the Caterpillar D9 in 1954 that, since then, has affected hundreds of thousands Palestinian lives. Soon after its marketization, the Israeli army became a zealous purchaser of this model, armored it (like the US army did), and used it in every military operation it has led, from the Sinai to Lebanon. At 8 meters long, 4 meters high and 4.60 meters wide, the 60-ton steel monster has a 1.80-meter-high front bucket, as well as a rear ripper which, like a plowshare, can dig a 1.70-meter-deep furrow. This destructive tool was especially used during the Second Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to sever Palestinian infrastructure (roads, water supply, and sewers).
The D9 is available in a number of variants, which Israeli army sales agents can boast about in “real-life” tests when trying to sell them at international military trade shows. The D9T version, for example, doesn’t even require an operator in the bulldozer’s cockpit, as it is operated by remote control. In 2008, the Israeli army also designed a “Lioness” version, whose taller-than-wide stature makes it easier to penetrate dense urban fabrics, whether Palestinian or other. Today, Caterpillar is one of the main companies implicated for “complicity or acquiescence […] in actual and potential human rights violations” by numerous non-governmental organizations, including Human Rights Watch. Calls for the US company to stop selling its products to the government arms manufacturer Israel Military Industries (through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales Program), as well as the boycott encouraged by the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign, have so far gone unheeded.
An infamous character recur throughout this book: Ariel Sharon, nicknamed “Arik the Bulldozer.” He was a key instigator of how bulldozers have been systematically employed in the urban contexts of Gaza and the West Bank, but also in Lebanon and the Egyptian Sinai. Throughout the book, he is cited in various military and political positions he held between 1948 and 2006, before a stroke that left him in a coma for eight years and his death in 2014. As a platoon leader during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 within the Haganah (the main Zionist paramilitary organization prior to the establishment of the state of Israel), he later became commander of an armored unit during the invasion of Sinai and Gaza, then general at the head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command between 1969 and 1973. He took up the position of Minister of Agriculture between 1977 and 1981 (during the first forms of civil colonization of the West Bank), just before becoming head of the Ministry of Defense, where he oversaw the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Finally, he was Prime Minister (2001-2006) during the Second Intifada and the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which turned it into an open-air prison, regularly bombarded by Israeli air and naval forces and invaded by the ground army.
Sharon’s wide-ranging military and political responsibilities (he has also served as Minister of Industry, Housing, Energy and Foreign Affairs) are no accident. The process of ruining Palestinian living conditions goes beyond the purely military sphere, as the Israeli government is implementing it in collaboration with civil society. We can see the resolutely constructivist aspect of its project, whether it materializes in the sustained, planned construction of segregating infrastructure, or in concomitant destruction.
The following parts are some of the revisited (and translated) chapters of the book. They work in a reverse chronological order, taking us from the current moment all the way to the Nakba, demonstrating how this use of bulldozers in the systematic destruction of Palestinian homes – and even of Palestinian ruins – has been at work ever since the 1948 ethnic cleansing. The title of each part contains a key date and a key place that illustrate processes of destruction that are, in turn, spread out both in space and time.
July 1, 2014, Idhna
Punitive demolitions ///
On June 23, 2014, the Israeli army decided to relaunch its strategy of punitive demolition of Palestinian homes, which it had previously deemed counterproductive and abandoned in February 2005. On July 1, Israeli soldiers dynamited the home of Ziad Awawdeh’s large family. Ziad is a Palestinian from Idhna (near Hebron), who was back then detained and awaiting trial for killing an Israeli policeman. The Israeli organization Hamoked had lodged several appeals against this punitive destruction with the Israeli Supreme Court, insisting that such an act constituted a violation of international law. But these were all rejected, with the court claiming that the deterrent effect of such a measure was legitimate. On August 11, the Israeli army destroyed two more Palestinian homes in Hebron, followed in November by five more in Jerusalem – each time for punitive reasons that targeted the families and/or entourage of Palestinians prosecuted for one-off attacks on Israelis.
This method of punitive home demolition has been used by the Israeli army since 1967, when it invaded East Jerusalem, , as well as the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai in Egypt, and the Golan Heights in Syria. Hamoked records nearly 1,800 cases of punitive demolition or sealing of Palestinian homes between 1967 and 1998. This method was suspended from 1998 until the Second Intifada, when the Israeli army again destroyed 664 homes of relatives of Palestinian fighters, leaving 4,182 people homeless.
A 2014 report by Jacob Burns for Amnesty International also illustrated another method of ruination used by the Jerusalem police. After an attack on a synagogue in November 2014 that killed six Israelis, the police demolished the home of one of its perpetrators (who was killed in the initial attack), leaving his wife and three children homeless. The other perpetrator of this attack lived with his grandfather, also in East Jerusalem.
In his case, the Israeli police used a different technique, pouring 90 tonnes of concrete into the rooms where he lived, leaving only about one meter between the concrete and the ceiling of each room.
This is a particularly vicious form of collective punishment, as the house soon collapses into the adjacent gully under the weight of the concrete poured into it. Here, the process of ruination is initially concealed, as it is contained within the dwelling (with the exception of a broken window to pour concrete into), and its spectacular collapse occurs later, after the police have withdrawn.
This case of punitive demolition of Palestinian homes, is based on a state of emergency law introduced by the British Mandate in 1945. This legislation specifies that a military command can order the destruction of a house or land from which an enemy attack is suspected to have been carried out, or if it belongs to relatives of suspected attackers. Yet this article had been annulled even before the end of the Mandate (1948) – its spirit rendered null and void by the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949).
This logic of collective punishment can be of course seen in the bombings of Gaza, but also in other operations by the Jerusalem police, who – after one or more occupied Palestinian neighborhoods in the east of the city have been the scene of protests – send their trucks to spray “skunk ” (a pestilential chemical solution) on their walls. Such degradation of Palestinian living conditions can also be understood as a process of ruination, although in this case the structure of their dwellings are not targeted.
The process of ruination also extends to the regular demolition of Palestinian homes considered to have been illegally built in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Since the Oslo Accords were secretly signed in 1993 between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the West Bank has been divided into three zones known as A, B and C. Zone A comprises all Palestinian towns and cities (Hebron being an exception), theoretically under civil and police control of the Palestinian Authority – when in fact, it could not be clearer that the Israeli army reserves the right to periodically invade Palestinian cities (in particular Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarem) and lead murderous military raids or drone strikes. Zone B, an interface area, is theoretically controlled by both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli army. Area C occupies over 63% of the West Bank and is under the absolute control of the Israeli army. No Palestinian structure may be built on 70% of Area C (i.e. 44% of the West Bank), and construction on the remaining 30% (19% of the West Bank) must be authorized by the Israeli Civil Administration according to particularly strict and restrictive requirements. Many Palestinians therefore build without such authorization, a requirement that normalizes the occupation and its military-administrative legislation. Between 2000 and 2012, the Civil Administration ordered the demolition of 9,682 Palestinian homes (at the expense of their inhabitants), and used army resources to destroy 2,829 of them.
April 10, 2002, Jenin
Counterrevolutionary destruction
during the Second Intifada ///
Although it’s difficult to pinpoint a precise date for the start of the Second Intifada, it seems reasonable to consider that September 28, 2000 – marking Likud leader Ariel Sharon’s spectacular invasion of East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque compound – was the beginning of five years of asymmetrical confrontation. In the months following this event, Sharon’s resolutely aggressive actions and speeches seemed to pay off handsomely with the Israeli electorate, as he was elected Prime Minister by direct universal suffrage – a method since abandoned – with over 62% of the vote, replacing Ehud Barak in February 2001.
The year 2002 was characterized by the Israeli army’s multiple sieges of Palestinian towns, both in the West Bank and Gaza. In Ramallah, the Mukataa (headquarters of the Palestinian Authority), where President Yasser Arafat was based, was besieged throughout April. Home to over half a million people and key sites of the Palestinian resistance, refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank were particularly targeted. In January, Israeli army D9 bulldozers destroyed over a hundred homes in the Rafah refugee camp, leaving around 1,600 people homeless. The siege of the Nablus camp three months later was made known to the architectural public by Eyal Weizman’s well-known study in Hollow Land (2007). In particular, Weizman described the way that Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi – who is now the commander in chief of the Israeli occupying forces – led his soldiers’ attack by digging the walls of Palestinian homes from the inside, allowing the invasion to proceed indoors rather than through the streets of the West Bank’s largest refugee camp. In this case, the ruination is terribly effective, leaving huge holes in the walls separating people’s homes from their neighbors’, yet it remains invisible from outside.
Between April 2 and 18, 2002, Jenin’s refugee camp’s 13,000 inhabitants were besieged by the Israeli army, which sought to annihilate the armed factions of the Palestinian resistance. The first days of the invasion were characterized mainly by Israeli troop movements supported by helicopter bombardments. However, on April 9, thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush, precipitating the destruction of the camp that had already begun on April 4.
From April 10 onwards, D9 bulldozers entered the Hawashin neighborhood where the ambush had taken place, and set about digging streets wide enough for Israeli tanks to pass through the dense urban fabric of the camp, destroying whole sections of the adjacent buildings – a strategy already used in the past.
However, the demolitions did not stop at providing logistical support for Israeli troops, but rather enabled them to use tanks in the battle. Bulldozers became the main means of destroying the Palestinian built environment, with absolute indifference to whether or not the inhabitants were present inside. D9 bulldozers worked relentlessly to destroy over 140 homes and damage over 200 others, killing many Palestinians who had not fled their homes, and leaving 4,000 others homeless.
The most precise testimony to this systematic destruction comes from Moshe Nissim, one of the D9 bulldozer operators during the destruction of the Jenin camp. Far from repentant, he describes the 75-hour shift he spent “half-naked” at the wheel of his demolition machine, with only a few snacks and bottles of whisky as sustenance. Seemingly the subject of obsessive disorders (made evident, for instance, by his fascination for Jerusalem’s Israeli football team, Beitar, notorious for the racism of its fans), his testimony records his incessant requests to be authorized to destroy more and more Palestinian buildings:
“I begged for work: ‘Let me finish another house, open another track.’ […] I wanted to destroy everything. I begged the officers, over the radio, to let me knock it all down; from top to bottom. To level everything. […] I couldn’t stop. I wanted to work and work. […] I kept begging for more and more missions.”
The testimony as a whole reveals a mental instability that pushed the Israeli organization Gush Shalom to question why such an untrained individual could find himself behind the wheel of such a destructive device. Nevertheless, even such questioning seems to testify to a certain confidence in the Israeli army’s willingness to self-regulate and judge exceptions to its self-proclaimed “humanitarian” rule. However, Nissim’s exceptional character within this army is linked only to his unbridled Stakhanovism, and not to the nature of his actions, which are fully in line with the logic examined in this book. In this respect, we can note that the unit which he belonged to subsequently received from the high command – “an official citation for services rendered to the motherland.”
Just as Nissim’s action cannot be understood as exceptional, the chaos of ruins and rubble it caused should not be seen as random or indiscriminate. The fact that homes are destroyed is of significant importance, representing a vital and personal attack. This harassment applies in particular to a population that has already been refugees for a long time, since this destruction is reminiscent of all the destruction of Palestinian villages, experienced by the elders since 1948. As Nissim himself says, “I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn’t mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down.”
Nevertheless, his observation is still a logic of “negative” destruction, but he also describes such a destruction with terms that, in contrast, suggests a “positive” construction. He claims for instance to have created a stadium in the middle of the refugee camp. The importance of this statement lies in a suggested contrast between the destruction of over a hundred Palestinian homes, and the aspiration to a creative act that results from this leveling. We can see here, an application of architectural thinking at work in the Israeli army’s use of the bulldozer, and the replacement of Palestinian livelihood by the Zionist infrastructure.
In a similar vein, the way streets in the camp have been widened to allow Israeli tanks to circulate, is reminiscent of Baron Haussmann’s massive transformation of Paris’s urban fabric between 1852 and 1870. Haussmann combined his sanitizing ambitions – a terminology often used by counterinsurgency theorists – with counterrevolutionary functions against the many proletarian revolts of the time. He built wide boulevards that enabled regular troops and their artillery to advance rapidly through the city if necessary. The reconstruction of the Jenin camp is interesting to observe in this respect. Although it was carried out under the aegis of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) and not that of the Israeli army, writer and curator Justin McGuirk, and Weizman after him, both have insisted on the debates that took place to determine whether the winding alleys preceding the siege should be rebuilt, or whether the streets of the rebuilt camp should be widened. Against the advice of the camp’s popular committee, UNRWA eventually decided in favor of the latter option, arguing that it would be easier for ambulances to enter the camp in the event of a new siege, even though they were forcefully blocked from entering the camp by the Israeli army in 2002. We can therefore affirm that the urban planning of the Jenin camp provides easy conditions for its invasion by the Israeli army. In this respect, this decision can be fully considered an architectural project of the same army, despite the fact that it was not involved in the decision.
July 1971, Rafah
The “pacification” of Gaza
according to Ariel Sharon ///
In December 1969, Ariel Sharon was appointed head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, two years after leading the Israeli Sinai invasion campaign to the Suez Canal. The military and soon to be civilian occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank that accompanied this campaign and has continued ever since, intensified Palestinian resistance especially in the Gaza Strip. In October 1970, the first post-1967 Israeli settlement was established there, followed by six others over the next eight years. Sharon succeeded in convincing the Israeli Army General Staff that he could take command of a counterrevolutionary mission in Gaza, and subsequently gave himself the means to do so.
His memoirs are useful for understanding the methods he used. He describes them in terms of their alleged surgical precision, hitting only members of the PLO without affecting the rest of the Gazan population; a lie used countless times in the successive invasions of Gaza until today. The way in which Sharon describes his reconnaissance of the Gaza Strip testifies both to his quest for absolute control, and to his self-romanticization:
“I’d get up at dawn and, equipped with a snack and a canteen of water, […] I’d set out to explore a given area. Day after day, systematically, I inspected every square meter of every refugee camp and every orangery.”
The area mentioned by Sharon in this extract corresponds to a grid of 1,500-meter wide squares. He applied this grid to 360 square kilometers of the Strip on the Israeli military maps, and then assigned control to as many squads of Israeli soldiers as there are squares.
Here we can recognize the historical need for counterrevolutionary forces to administratively compartmentalize urban environments that escape their control.
We can think of, for example, the “pacification” operations carried out in Algeria by Marshal Bugeaud and the French army in the 1840s. An urban fabric as dense and politically crucial as that of the Casbah of Algiers was destroyed, and the streets and houses were administered by naming and numbering, in order to make control more effective. While it’s not certain that Sharon had read the little manual written by Bugeaud after the Paris revolution of 1848, La Guerre des rues et des maisons (War of Streets and Houses), it’s a safe bet that he was well aware of the French marshal’s methods and deeds.
In Gaza, Sharon goes on to describe a series of methods used by his soldiers to locate and destroy PLO hideouts and bunkers, but only once does he mention the massive destruction this counter-insurgency mission had wrought:
“The camps occupied relatively small areas, but they were densely populated. […] As the years went by, families grew and added rooms and lean-tos, creating a bottleneck that left only narrow passages three or four feet wide between the hovels. This maze was ideal for terrorists [sic]. So I had the alleys widened to facilitate the work of our patrols. To do this, we had to demolish a large number of hovels and relocate their occupants.”
Sharon’s description greatly understates the scale of these demolitions, as well as the violence of their means, since they were carried out by Caterpillar D9 bulldozers, already described above. Around 2,500 homes were demolished in Rafah, particularly in its refugee camp, where narrow streets were widened to facilitate the passage of Israeli army vehicles. It’s no coincidence that the nickname “Sharon’s boulevards” given to these breakthroughs reminds us of the Haussmannian boulevards of Paris, described above. In 1971, 16,000 inhabitants of Rafah found themselves homeless, since the rehousing solutions Sharon spoke of could only be found in two new districts built (called Brazil and Canada) by the Israeli government. Rehousing was only available on condition that people renounce their refugee status and therefore their “right of return” to their land in other parts of Palestine – a condition that was simply unacceptable to most of the Palestinians concerned.
This process of mass bulldozing was generally far from the last in Gaza, and at Rafah in particular. Following the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, the Israeli army evacuated the Sinai Peninsula, which it had occupied since 1967, and dismantled the Israeli civilian settlements there – destroying the latter so that the Egyptian population could not benefit from them. This was a tactic that would be repeated in Gaza during the 2005 so-called “disengagement.” Gaza, which had never been separated from the Sinai since 1948 (under Egyptian control until 1967, when both were occupied by the Israeli army), had a militarized border with Egypt in April 1982. To this end, the Israeli army – whose Minister of Defense at the time was Ariel Sharon – destroyed more than 300 Palestinian homes in Rafah, cutting the town in two and establishing an Israeli patrol zone between the Palestinian and Egyptian sides.
When Sharon was head of the Israeli government (2001-2006), the use of bulldozers was systematized as a weapon of war. In 2002, Caterpillar D9s destroyed the tarmac of the Yasser Arafat international airport in Rafah, which had been inaugurated with great fanfare four years earlier following the 1993 Oslo Accords. Between 2001 and 2004, 2,500 Palestinian homes were demolished in Gaza, with two-thirds of them in Rafah and particularly along the border. The Israeli patrol zone that “dug” into Rafah’s urban fabric in 1982 was between 20 and 40 meters wide. In 2004, this was no longer so much a patrol zone as a veritable 300-meter-wide militarized no-man’s-land, separating the Egyptian and Palestinian parts of the city. This buffer zone enables Israeli bulldozers to dismantle some of the tunnels that provide Gaza’s population with access to numerous products banned by the Israeli blockade and the circulation of arms for the Palestinian resistance.
However, the demolitions are not exclusive to the Palestinian side of the city. Indeed, the Egyptian government of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, in power since the military coup of July 2013 and the disputed elections that followed it, has indeed undertaken to demolish the border town with a clear aim of prohibiting any links to the Gaza Strip. In March 2015, the width of the buffer zone on the Egyptian side was increased by two kilometers, and the demolition of the rest of the town occurred in 2015-16.
The demolitions initiated by Ariel Sharon in 1971 were thus only the first step in a new series of destructions of the Palestinian built environment. The border within Rafah, which for a long time had been materialized only by the presence of metal barrels, now forms an ever-widening “fault line,” destroying every dwelling in its path. Once again, the demolitions undertaken by the Israeli army over the last 76 years must be both understood for their destructive effects and for their patient formation of a terrain, conducive to achieving settler colonization of Palestine. These demolitions are part and parcel of territorial military strategies, the ruins and rubble of which should not distract us from their precision. It should also be remembered that these bulldozing policies are in addition to the Israeli army’s murderous bombardments of the Gaza Strip.
June 7, 1967, Jerusalem
Erasure in the Old City ///
After the 1956 invasion of the Sinai by the Israeli, French, and British armies, following the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the UN provided an “Emergency Force” (UNEF) to facilitate the withdrawal of foreign troops from the Egyptian peninsula. On May 15, 1967, more than ten years after the deployment of this force, Nasser successfully asked for its withdrawal from Egyptian soil, and redeployed part of the national army in the peninsula. This movement of Egyptian troops continues to feed the Israeli demagogic narrative of an imminent military aggression against Israel.
On June 5, 1967, and under pressure from the newly named Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan and several generals including Ariel Sharon, the Israeli government ordered the invasion of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. Two days later, the Israeli army invades the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Tulkarm and Qalqilya are two of the cities first invaded. Seven thousands out of the 25,000 inhabitants of Tulkarm fled and became refugees. The systematic evictions and home demolitions that had characterized the 1948 Nakba were also perpetuated during the Naksa in Qalqilya, which saw close to half of its 2,000 houses destroyed by the Israeli army, creating 12,000 additional refugees. Closer to Jerusalem, three villages – Imwas, Yalou, and Beit Nuba (8,000 inhabitants in total) – were fully evicted and subsequently destroyed by soldiers, in a repetition of a process that dozens of villages in the area (on the other side of the so-called “Green Line”) were subjected to, a bit less than two decades earlier.
That same June 7, the Israeli army invaded Jerusalem’s Old City. Israeli soldiers penetrated the holy site of the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, and proceeded to set up an Israeli flag on top of the Dome of the Rock. Two days after the invasion, while the Israeli army was also invading the Golan Heights bordering Syria with Palestine, Israeli bulldozers entered the Old City and proceeded to destroy 139 houses in the Mughrabi (Maghrebi, sometimes also called “Moroccan”) Quarter in order to clear the square that currently exists in front of the Western Wall (“Kotel” in Hebrew, “Al Buraq” in Arabic). The Palestinian inhabitants of these homes were authorized to only take a few personal items before being evicted by Israeli soldiers. Several of them were killed in their sleep by the night demolition of their homes. The bulldozers’ work was constant during two days and two nights, in a clear strategy of “fait accompli,” anticipating a possible intervention by the United Nations.
In the morning of June 12, less than a week after the invasion, the Mughrabi Quarter was fully destroyed and its inhabitants who survived the demolition were made refugees.
In 2014, Israeli authorities built a new ramp alongside the Western Wall to allow settlers and tourists to access the Al Aqsa Mosque compound without permission from the Jordanian-appointed Jerusalem Waqf, in charge of access to the holy site.
The June 1967 invasion of the Old City initiated a process that is still at work today, through the minutious yet systematic theft of building after building (sometimes, apartment after apartment). For instance, Palestinian Armenians currently struggle against the further colonization of their Quarter in the Old City. Last November in Cow’s Garden (the most southwestern part of the Old City), a bulldozer accompanied by Israeli police destroyed The June 1967 invasion of the Old City initiated a process that is still at work today, through the minutious yet systematic theft of building after building (sometimes, apartment after apartment). For instance, Palestinian Armenians currently struggle against the further colonization of their Quarter in the Old City. Last November in Cow’s Garden (the most southwestern part of the Old City), a bulldozer accompanied by Israeli police destroyed part of the existing car park in front of a barricade bearing the Armenian flag. The bulldozer-enacted colonization of the Old City reproduces at a smaller scale, the same spatial logics at work in the rest of Palestine.
July 18, 1948, Lubya
The Palestinian Ruin and its absence ///
The 1948 Nakba saw the unfolding of Plan Daleth (Plan D), the ethnic cleansing of some 800,000 Palestinians (half the population) from a territory that is assimilated as Israel today – called instead ‘48 Palestine by most Palestinians.. An important component of the Israeli state’s founding narrative is the date on which the displacement of the Palestinian population began. As such, it is often attributed to the end of the British Mandate – concomitant and consubstantial with the founding declaration of the State of Israel – as well as the entry into war of its neighboring states (Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq) on May 15, 1948. The destruction and population displacements caused could thus be attributed to the war – the latter’s asserted symmetry cannot be supported by the facts (115,000 Israeli soldiers were engaged against some 50,000 Arab combatants).
Historical map (left) showing the location of Lubya in 1948, while the aerial photo (right) shows the forest that was grown over the ruins of the Palestinian village, as well as the location of the neighboring colony of Giv’at Avni. / Palestine Open Maps (left) and Google Earth (right).
Nevertheless, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé shows, ethnic cleansing had already begun in March of the same year, so that by the end of April, 250,000 Palestinians had already been expelled and 200 Palestinian villages destroyed. The course of action for the Haganah was as follows: destroy the pockets of resistance in each Palestinian village – resistance was very weak before May 15 – expel the population; then dynamite or even mine each house one by one, to prevent their return. By the “end” of the Nakba in July 1949, 531 villages had been emptied and destroyed in this way.
In 1949, the same territory invested by the State of Israel was already dotted with the ruins of Palestinian villages, whose presence is a reminder of Palestinian people’s existence on this land.
Ruins have the power to stir the senses of those who see them. As vestiges, the traces of an original architecture attest to the life it once sheltered.
From the early 1950s onwards, the Israeli government set about concealing these ruins, either by destroying them completely, or using them as foundations for new towns – many mosques were thus given new functions for instance – also planting forests on top of them. This last aspect is particularly interesting in terms of the governance involved. Indeed, the body in charge of forest planting in Israel is the Jewish National Fund, a non-governmental organization that used to be part of the World Zionist Organization. Founded in 1901, the JNF was responsible until 1948 for raising funds from members of the Jewish diaspora to purchase land in Palestine. Such collections were made using small metal coin boxes bearing either a map of Palestine or the future Israeli flag.
These coin boxes continued to exist after the creation of the State of Israel, although the latter seemed to render them obsolete. Indeed, in 1950, the JNF’s vocation shifted from the purchase of land to the management of land from which Palestinians had been expelled, and its potential afforestation. Since then, the JNF’s little coin boxes have been encouraging individuals in favor of Israeli policies to plant trees on the land ethnically cleansed during the Nakba. Thus, the Birya forest (one of the largest planted by the JNF), which extends over 20,000 dunums (2,000 hectares) north of Lake Tiberias, conceals the ruins of no fewer than six Palestinian villages.
Some fifteen kilometers south of Birya, we find the Lavi forest – as well as the kibbutz of the same name, founded in 1949 – and the Israeli village of Giv’at Avni (whose construction dates back only to 1991 and is still progressing according to its semi-concentric master plan). Hidden beneath the forest are the ruins of the Palestinian village of Lubya, home to 2,730 inhabitants before 1948. The village was captured on July 18, 1948 by the Haganah, and immediately destroyed with dynamite. In the film The Village Under the Forest (2013) by Mark J. Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum, an Israeli Haganah veteran called Shimon Nachmani (who was part of the capture of Lubya) explains that one kilogram of dynamite placed in the center of each house was enough to demolish it.
What dynamite didn’t completely destroy, bulldozers would take over in 1949, demolishing many Palestinian village ruins in the early 1950s. The final leveling of Lubya was not completed until 1965, and when in 1991 the Israeli village of Giv’at Avni was founded not far from Kibbutz Lavi, the JNF planted a pine forest covering the last remnants of the Palestinian dwellings. Part of it was named “The Forest of South Africa,” in a claimed tribute to the South African Jewish diaspora (of which Heidi Grunebaum herself is a member) – a group which had contributed financially to the forest’s foundation through coin boxes and other donations to the JNF. However, the South African ambassador to Israel distinguished himself in 2013 by being the only one to refuse that eighteen trees to be planted in his name and that of his country within the “Ambassadors’ Forest.” The latter was planted by the JNF in the Naqab desert, which first necessitated the repeated expulsion of the Bedouin population from the village of al-Araqib, and later its demolition.
The trees in Israel thus hide the circumstances that preceded the state’s foundation in 1948, in particular in the way they erase the presence of former Palestinian villages. A ruin can tell the story of its past existence: it is an architecture whose functional state can be reconstituted by thought – we can look at it and imagine the human life that inhabited it, sometimes for centuries. The ruins of emptied Palestinian villages, whose houses were dynamited during the Nakba, are thus able to tell the story of their past existence and of the historical Palestinian presence. But ruins are also capable of telling another story: that of the entropic process that turned a building into a ruin (whether erosion, or a more sudden destructive event) and, potentially, the political circumstances that enabled such a transformation. In the case of these villages, their eradication was sudden and violent, as evidenced by the landslides that inevitably provoked “superfluous questions” among tourists in the 1950s and early 1960s – to use the official terminology of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1965.
In order to retroactively legitimize the great Israeli founding narrative, which struggled to come to terms with the original crime of ethnic cleansing, Palestinian ruins that had not been destroyed after the Nakba gradually disappeared from the landscape between 1965 and 1969. During these five years, over a hundred ruined Palestinian villages were meticulously leveled by the Israeli Land Administration and its bulldozers. JNF forests were subsequently planted on a significant number of these sites, thus completing the strategy of “disarabifying” Israel from both a historical and a landscape point of view – a colonial actualization of the biblical call to “make the desert bloom,” to which Israeli land-use policies regularly refer.
Ariel Sharon, whom I have mentioned on several occasions, has also played a role in these policies. Beginning as a platoon leader in the Haganah in 1948, he took part in several attacks on Palestinian villages, as well as in their destruction; in this sense it’s no coincidence that his first government mandate was as Minister of Agriculture between 1977 and 1981 (before becoming Minister of Defense at the helm of the Lebanon invasion in 1982). As such, he was closely involved not only with the establishment of the first colonies in the West Bank, but also with the fate of the JNF’s forests. In 1978, he created a paramilitary unit called the “Green Patrol,” responsible for ensuring that these forests flourished. Called the “Black Patrol” by Palestinian Bedouins, this patrol moved 900 Bedouin camps and their animals, with their goats being particularly targeted by an Israeli law passed in 1959 that limited their numbers, so as not to hinder the growth of young tree shoots.
Conclusion ///
On October 7, 2023, many of us were awestruck by the photo of a bulldozer smashing the heavily militarized wall surrounding the Gaza Strip. My celebration of what I described the next day as the most beautiful architectural gesture there can be, got me some defamatory attacks in the German and Swiss press, in deliberate confusion of this magnificent prison break (somewhat reminiscent of the spoon-dug escape from the Gilboa prison by six Palestinian prisoners in 2021), the anti-colonial and asymmetric armed struggle against the Israeli military, police, and militias, as well as the massacre of Israeli unarmed settlers – whose circumstances remain to be clarified given the amount of hasty and deliberate disinformation around it, but as a whole, we cannot possibly deny it happened.
One of the reasons this photo of the bulldozer hit me so much when I first encountered it, was that for once, the spectacle of destruction was not of another Palestinian home. Instead, it was the dismantlement of a key component of the settler colonial architecture in Palestine. Anti-colonial revolutions have shown us in the past that parts of settler colonial infrastructure can be reappropriated, their segregative functions deactivated, and thus serve a liberated people. It is my conviction that many other parts of this infrastructure, on the other hand, cannot be reconfigured to serve anything other than inequality, control, and oppression. What can change is the people who are targeted by these logics, but not its violent function itself. This is where the bulldozer can intervene as a liberatory weapon in dismantling these apparatuses of colonial violence. The argument I have tried to articulate here is that the seemingly chaotic nature of debris should not deceive us about the precise strategic order that is enacted in systematic destruction (be it in Palestine or in the other geographies described in this issue). Similarly, we can also see in the debris of a smashed militarized wall, the constructivist vision of a liberated future. Although this side of destruction is not so present in the pages of this issue, I invite you to keep it in mind while you are reading it. ■