Jerusalem

So I went to Jerusalem last week, and spent the afternoon wandering around the Old City. We went through a checkpoint on the way there and on the way back. The first one looked like nothing other than a toll plaza, except that we had to get out and show documentation before moving on. The other checkpoint, at a settlement called Gilo right next to Bethleham, looked essentially like a holding pen for animals. Very small turnstiles, and lots of fences and turns in the path that goes through the building and by the booth with a soldier sitting in it. It was pretty empty when we went through, but I can’t really imagine what it looks like when its really crowded, which I think is often, when people are going to and from work in Jerusalem. Imagine a fairly standard commute, only with a twice-daily (at least) spot of humiliation.

I was pretty much only in the Old City of Jerusalem; I wandered around by myself for a while and then met a British dude and wandered around with him. I guess it’s common knowledge that there are lots of holy things in the Old City – I saw the Western Wall, holy in Judaism, and the church of the Sepulchre, where Jesus was crucified. At least, I think so; I was kind of eavesdropping on some of the tours, so I didn’t get a very clear description. The Temple Mount was closed because of Ramadan, which was too bad, but I just wandered around the different quarters – Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian. There were lots of little shops, some of which were selling, I kid you not, Rajasthani fabric. Actually just Indian. Also, lots of T-Shirts with American sports team logos written in Hebrew. I’m not really sure who the market is for those. Also a lot of creepy IDF-themed shirts. One said: “America: Israel is behind you” with a picture of a fighter jet. I don’t even really know what that means.

I’ve been reading this book called “Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation” by Eyal Weizman. It’s really fascinating; he looks at the physical architecture of Israeli expansion and occupation since 1967, the planning processes that went into it, and how physical structures are very carefully planned so as to fit into a larger political agenda. For example: “Under Israel’s regime of ‘erratic occupation’, Palestinian life, property and political rights are constantly violated not only by the frequent actions of the Israeli military, but by a process in which their environment is unpredictably and continuously refashioned, tightening around them like a noose.”

I’m not very far into the book, but I did read the chapter on Jerusalem, which was totally fascinating. I didn’t realize that so much of the occupation is in fact in Jerusalem and the surrounding area. Immediately after the war in 1967, the occupation of Jerusalem was a top priority for Israel – with a number of layers of settlements around the city, which are now mostly absorbed into Jerusalem itself, and I think not considered by most Israelis as settlements at all. Weizman writes (in 2007) that there are about 200,000 settlers within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem – as many as in the entire rest of the West Bank. Now, of course, the Wall is being built to isolate those areas.

The most interesting thing in this book about Jerusalem, though, was the way that “Jerusalem stone,” the stone that everything in Jerusalem is built of, was used to assert a historical continuity that would imply Israeli rights to the city. Post-67, a number of regulations were passed that said that all buildings had to be clad in this stone – both within the Old City and within the areas annexed in the war. Weizman argues that the use of the stone in these annexed areas served both to enforce a visual assumption that Jerusalem is an undivided city, an ancient city, and a “holy city,” as opposed to being simply a city with a large number of holy sites. All of this was done with a mind to keeping Israeli control of this now visually homogenous space.

I’m looking forward to reading more of this book, because the use of space here is, next to the violence, which I have been lucky enough to have not seen, the most obvious way that the occupation works. Control of space = control of movement.