Several years ago at a conference in Dublin, I listened to an Israeli architect and academic, Eyal Weizman, explain how Israel’s military was carrying out new research on how to use architecture — including the layout of Palestinian homes in the West Bank — to enhance its operations. Weizman explained how we should take a fresh look at everyday structures, such as homes, tower blocks, and roads, to consider how they are deployed for control of populations.
On Thursday, as I arrived in Poland for a conference, I discovered that Weizman has made a documentary for Al Jazeera English on Israel’s “architecture of violence”, containing the Palestinians in the West Bank and supporting Jewish settlements: “The occupation is an environment that was conceived to strangle Palestinian communities, villages and towns, to create an environment that would be unliveable for the people there.”
