Urbicide in Palestine

Spaces of Oppression and Resilience

Nurhan Abujidi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317818830
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Exploring the way urbicide is used to un/re-make Palestine, as well as how it is employed as a tool of spatial dispossession and control, this book examines contemporary political violence and destruction in the context of colonial projects in Palestine.

The broader framework of the book is colonial and post- urban destruction urbanism; with a working hypothesis that there are links, gaps and blind spots in the understanding of urbicide discourse. Drawing on several examples from the Palestinian history of destruction and transformations, such as; Jenin Refugee Camp, Hebron Old Town, and Nablus Old Town, a methodological framework to identify urbicidal episodes is also generated.

Advancing knowledge on one historical moment of the urban condition, the moment of its destruction, and enhancing the understanding of the Palestinian Israeli conflict from urbanistic/ architectonic and Urbicide / Spacio-cide perspectives through the use of case studies, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers with an interest in Urban Geography and Middle East Politics more broadly.

Part I

City, war and urbicide

Inquiry

1

Cities and war

The destruction of man-made places has been a recurrent consequence of natural calamity and human violence. Graham (2005) argues that cities have played a strategic role in military campaigns throughout history, since the time of Trojan War. Whether because of their geo-strategic location, their concentration of wealth and power or their inherent symbolic value, be they fortified cities of ancient times or the urban metropolis of modern times, cities have always carried prominence in the strategy and execution of warfare between rival entities. Today’s unprecedented worldwide urbanization is rendering this phenomenon ever more predominant than at any other time in history. The most significant causal relationship between warfare and the development of urban settlements is the protection that cities have afforded against external enemies. Walled cities offered the dual advantages of numbers and défendable boundaries. It is generally much safer to be in a city than living alone in the hinterland. Thus, cities arguably trace their initial raison d’ítre and the subsequent growth of their significance, above all other secondary benefits of the collective living, to the physical and psychological security that the collectivity afforded against uncertainties beyond the walls. Mumford (1961: 44) writes: “The power of massed numbers in itself gave the city superiority over the thinly populated widely scattered villages, and served as an incentive to further growth.” Pirenne (1936: 21) sees the origins of European cities in “Fortified cities erected by the feudal princes to provide shelter for their men.” Bloch (1961: 20) notes that “the disorders of the early Middle Ages had in many cases induced men to draw nearer to each other.”

The advantages of a consolidated and fortified urban morphology against the external hostile forces are evident in the rise and fall of empires. Constantinople continued as a major city for centuries after the military strength of the Byzantine Empire had collapsed. The city’s legendary wall structure kept its residents safe even in the absence of the imperial military might. Likewise, ancient cities such as Babylon, Jericho, Paris, London, and Rome all began as fortified places for collective safety.

Cities were not only self-contained spheres of daily lives for their residents but, later, also integral parts of a system of power projection by the larger political entity, be it an empire or a kingdom. Modern cities trace their origin to the city-states of the Greek polis. War of the Greek civilization was a struggle between the city-states, and although warfare often took place outside the city, the urban centers were always the ultimate spoils of war. The Roman Empire, based in the greatest city-state of all, built fortified cities as centers of its gradually far-flung power. Cities were the bulwarks of the empire’s power projection, defended against the barbarian hordes. The sack of Rome itself symbolized the end of the Empire’s territorial cohesion and the descent into fractured political authority and social uncertainty.

Urban settlements have grown fatalistically indifferent toward defense by neglecting their fortifications and strategic layout. While cities have always been closely interwoven with military technologies, concerns and strategies, as Steven Graham (2003) argues, the intensification of global urbanization, growing population pressures, resource shortages and resultant inequalities in distribution are further deepening the significance of urban terrain as the strategic site of military, socio-economic and representational symbolic struggles.

City, urbanity and war: historical perspective

Warfare, like everything else is being urbanized.

(Graham, 2005: 4)

Pre-modem period: first urban settlements

Eduardo Mendieta (2004: 6) argues that cities are the jewels of empires with their own sets of logics deriving from the various dialectics of the imperial design. Cities are the maelstrom from which the storms of war surge. Cities have been the locus and the pivot of war. They are the fundamental physical, political, and economic setting in which conditions toward war develop. Lewis Mumford (1961) highlights that the institutionalization of war—and, in fact, the modernization of the means of waging war—was made possible by the emergence of cities (as early as the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egyptian dynasties, between 3,000 and 6,000 years ago). The sacrificial rituals of the ancient times to the totemic and blood-thirsty gods were transformed into rationalized and regimented projects of “mass extermination and mass destruction” through the organizing of societal institutions and the accumulation of the military power bestowed upon a king (Mumford, 1961:42). The rituals—once exercised to ensure fertility and abundant crops, an irrational act to promote rational purposes—were transformed into a rational execution of physical power by one community over another in order to eliminate uncertainties from the continuity of the power structure. Mumford demonstrated how the historic development of kingship was accompanied by a shift in the socio-religious practice from the sacrificial rites of the fertility god to the cult of sheer physical power. During the development of the early prototype urban communities of the Neolithic times, the king sought to attribute his earthly authority with the divine origin in order to legitimize his absolute rule. As urbanity took on its ever-increasing complexities, the king came to replace god as the very source of divine protection, and his words were the law. The king found it necessary to consolidate, maintain and project his ever-increasing power and to reaffirm his divinity through deliberate acts of destruction and killing:

If anything were needed to make the magical origins of war plausible, it is the fact that war, even when it is disguised by seemingly hard-headed economic demands, uniformly turns into religious performance; nothing than a whole sale ritual sacrifices.

(Mumford 1961: 42)

Royal power came to measure its strength and divine favor by its capacities not merely for creation but even more through pillage, destruction and extermination. Mumford (1961) observes that the establishment of law within the urban civilizations has been accompanied by laws regarding warfare: “Plato declared ‘in the Law’, every city is a natural state of war with every other.”

As the city transformed the waging of war into a legitimate means of acquiring power, hegemony and wealth, in turn the city itself became the target of war; its developing economy, power and resources: “As soon as war had become one of the reasons for the city’s existence, the city’s own wealth and power made it a natural target” (Mumford 1961: 46). The city with its accumulated tools and equipments, and its hoards of gold, silver and jewelry heaped in palaces and temples, became the legitimate end target of military campaigns. Historians date the rise of organized warfare to the establishment of cities; the chief enemy of the city was a rival city under another god that claimed equal power. Mumford argues that the city became the means and ends of war, thus perpetuating the institution of war. If we have superseded war, it is partly because we are urbane, grounded in the city that gave birth to war and that war parented. When war became fully established and institutionalized, it started to spread beyond its original urban centers. Violence thus became normalized and spread away from the urban centers where the collective manhunts and sacrifices were first instituted. Throughout the greater part of history, enslavement, forced labor, and destruction have accompanied and penalized the growth of urban civilization. Thus, the sacking and killing of fortified cities and their inhabitants were the central events in pre-modern war (Graham 2004a, after Weber: 58).

For more than a thousand years afterwards, state power remained fragmentary and its borders uncertain, and the city retained a special role in the state. The city in medieval Europe was a fortified space, the only relatively certain territory wherein the writ of rulers ran. Graham (2004a) explains how during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries modern nation-states emerged in Europe as “bordered power containers,” and started to seek monopoly on political violence. He further argues that these cities that lay at the core of nation-states were no longer the organizers of their own armies and defense. They maintained political and economic power; it was the elite of these cities who directed violence, control, repression, and the colonial acquisition of territory, raw materials, wealth and labor power from afar (Driver and Gilbert, 2003).

The pre-modern war is essentially social rather than technological in character; it is an expression of the existential rather than the instrumental aspect of warfare. Pre-modern conflict merges unconventional—to use the term du jour, asymmetric —warfare methods with the conventional or semi-conventional military activities of failed states. The pre-modern model of conflict also tends to exploit the rise of non-state actors, cultural identity politics, and ethno-political conflict. In many respects, pre-modern war represents what Evans (2002) describes as a cultural revolt against the philosophy of Western liberal globalism; it is a conscious rejection of the universal values based on cosmopolitan democracy that followed Western victory in the Cold War. Evans argues that pre-modern struggles embrace aspects of sub-state or intrastate civil conflict and ethnic cleansing ranging from Bosnia through Somalia to East Timor. Evans (2002) argues that those who wage such struggles may choose to sport middle-class suits and exploit the spread of advanced technology, but their mind-sets are mixtures of the anti-modern, the millenarian, and the tribal. Such radicals embody what Pierre Hassner (2000: 205) has called “the dialectic of the bourgeois and the barbarian.”

Modern war: unconventional place annihilation

Paul Virilio (2002) contends that military projects and technologies drive history and that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was driven not primarily by the politics of wealth and production techniques but by the mechanics of war. Virilio highlights how the traditional feudal fortified city disappeared because of the increasing sophistication of weapons and possibilities for warfare. For him, the concept of siege warfare became rather a war of movement. In Speed and Politics (1968), Virilio suggests “history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems.” Graham (2004a: 165) sees that the deliberate destruction and targeting of cities has been a re-occurring event throughout 8,000 years of urban history. He stresses the fact that there is a strong link between urbanization and the prosecution of political violence to modernity, as the infusion of cities and warfare is becoming a de facto. He further refers to Pieterse’s (2002: 3) account of this strong connection between city, war and modernity: “After all, modernity, through most of its career, has been modernity at war.”

Modern wars are strongly represented in First and Second World Wars. Although the two wars are not similar in terms of the type of weapons, military strategy and scale of destruction they produced, they are classified as modern in terms of the scale of international engagement in these wars.

The First World War is considered the last classical war in a period that witnessed an increase in cities’ sizes, especially Berlin. The technology for bombing civilian targets in the First World War was so weak that only Paris was really in danger. As such, the dominant effect of war on city growth was the rise of war-related industries and government in these capitals, and this tended to stimulate city growth. This war was the last classical war of a symmetrical engagement between state armies in the open field. Until this moment of history no specific term or discourse was developed to define or reflect on the urban destruction that results from war fighting.

The Second World War announced the rise of place annihilation. It was a completely different war to the First World War; it marked a shift in war techniques and approaches in the twentieth century—a shift to “total war.” Total war meant that cities and their population overwhelmingly became the actual target of war where, as Martin Shaw (2003) suggests, bombing moved from the selective destruction of key sites within cities to extensive attacks on urban areas and, finally, to instantaneous annihilation of entire urban spaces and population. Hewitt argued that the Second World War was “a warfare that strove towards, it did not always achieve, an end of the settled historic places that have been the heart of civilian life” (1987: 446). Only Paris—which saw little bombing—escaped unscathed. London, and particularly Berlin and Dresden, lost substantial numbers from then-population during the war. The destruction of housing was massive and, unsurprisingly, the population also fell. Hewitt coined “place annihilation” to describe the massive and, in many cases, total destruction that occurred in many major cities around the globe, such as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Berlin, and Dresden. The industrial city thus became “in its entirety” a space for war. But this literature is overwhelmingly concerned with the destruction wrought by aerial bombing during the Second World War.

Graham (2005) argues that in modern war there is a direct connection with and a concentration on city destruction and sometimes on the city’s total annihilation. He further suggests that historically urbanity in its deepest meaning and essence was the target of war destruction:

In an urbanizing world, cities provide much more than just the backdrop and environment for war and terror. Rather, their buildings, assets, institutions, industries and infrastructure; their cultural diversities and symbolic meanings, have long actually themselves been the explicit target for a wide range deliberate, orchestrated attacks.

(Graham 2005: 32)

Kaldor (1999) recognizes the historicity of Clausewitz’s ideas on war as the articulation of Napoleonic Wars experiences—its pre-dating of the industrialization of warfare, modem alliances and the codification of the laws of war. In particular, she recognizes that “Clausewitz could not possibly have envisaged the awesome combination of mass production, mass politics and mass communications when harnessed to mass production.” Kaldor (2001) argues that in twentieth-century wars there is a parallel with the pre-modern period, which was also characterized by a diversity of military forces—feudal levies, citizens militias, mercenaries, pirates, for example—and by a corresponding variety of types of war. While cities have always been closely interwoven with military technologies, concerns and strategies, it is now clear that the intensification of global urbanization, resource shortages, inequalities and population pressures are further deepening the role of urban terrain as the strategic site of military, social and representational struggles.

Two interlinked developments have been critical for Kaldor (2001) in bringing about these changes. One is the sheer destructiveness of modern warfare. As all types of weapons have become more lethal and/or more accurate, decisive military victory has become more and more difficult. The scale of destruction in the Second Wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: experiencing spaces of oppression and resistance
• Part I City, war and urbicide
• Part II Urbicide in Palestine
• Part III Revision
• Bibliography
• Index