Graham, Stephen. "Bulldozers and bombs: the latest Palestinian–Israeli conflict as asymmetric urbicide." Antipode 34.4 (2002): 642-649.

1. 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 2002
made a mockery of Ariel Sharon’s repeated claims over the previous
month that Israel’s invasion of the occupied territories was aimed to
destroy the “terrorist infrastructure” behind recent Palestinian suicide
attacks. Sharon’s real purpose was to destroy the urban, civil and
infrastructural foundations of the proto-Palestinian state. To invoke a
term used by both Marshal Berman (on the collapse of the Bronx)
and the architect Bogdan Bogdanovitch (on the deliberate cultural
annihilation of Sarajevo and other Balkan cities), Sharon’s war was a
strategy of “urbicide”. Its main purpose was to deny the Palestinian
people their collective, individual and cultural rights to the city-based
modernity long enjoyed by Israelis. Sharon’s was a deliberate strategy
to 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 vast
majority of the Palestinian people. Water tanks were systematically
ridden with bullets. Electronic communications were bombed and
jammed. Roads were dug up and ruined. Electricity transformers were
destroyed. Computers were smashed, their hard drives stolen. Any
cultural or bureaucratic symbol of the proto-Palestinian state was ransacked. Houses were bulldozed—some with their occupants still inside.
Financial damage to infrastructure from the first major offensive alone
has been estimated by donors at US$361 million (Giacaman and
Husseini 2002).
In addition, hospitals were bombed and medical equipment looted
and wrecked. During the attacks, ambulances were prevented from
entering the war zones, condemning many to a slow, avoidable death
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643
as their blood, literally, seeped away. Those medical staff who got
through were, in some cases, deliberately attacked, and at least five
were killed.
Numbers of civilian casualties, especially in Jenin, are difficult to
estimate. At the time of this writing (17 June 2002), most reports
estimated that at least 52 Palestinians were directly killed in Israel’s
first Jenin attacks. At least 22 of these were civilians, including children and disabled people (Human Rights Watch 2002:4). In the Jenin
operation, Israeli bulldozers levelled a 300-by-250-metre area, burying
some civilians alive and leaving over 4,000 people homeless (Human
Rights Watch 2002:4). The destruction is captured graphically in
Figure 1. Reports tell of Israeli soldiers carefully marking houses
for demolition with blue markers from detailed maps. It is clear that
the objective was the deliberate and wholesale removal of the core of
the Jenin refugee camp, long seen by Israeli military leaders as one
of the main areas for producing and equipping suicide bombers. Since
the demolitions, all attempts at rebuilding and removing unexploded
ordinance have been blocked by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). As
Jonathan Cook reported in the Guardian on 3 June 2002, “[K]eeping
the heart of the camp in ruins will make Jenin more accessible next
time the tanks rumble in”. Even since this was written, there have
been many instances of such reinvasion.
The Context: Broader Infrastructural Warfare
The April invasion followed earlier efforts by Israel to destroy the
developing infrastructure of the Palestinians—much of it financed,
since the Oslo Accord, by aid from Europe and the United Nations. In
January 2002, Josep Pique, president of the European Union Council
of Ministers, complained that Israel had systematically bombed
Gaza International Airport, Gaza Port and Palestinian TV and radio
transmitters, which together had received around $20 million in EU
support. Under the guise of “destroying sniper hiding places” the IDF
have also destroyed many fields, olive groves, factories and greenhouses, adding to the economic effects of the bombings and tightening
checkpoints.
Such destruction has occurred against a broader context of systematic infrastructural and planning biases, which have prevented the
modernisation of Palestinian settlements in Israel and the occupied
territories over the decades since 1967. At the same time, Israel has
poured billions of dollars into building over 400 new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. These have been equipped with
lavish, dedicated highways and electricity, water and telephone links
that literally bypass the Palestinian neighbourhoods around them. Such
policies have been deliberately designed to fragment and undermine
the contiguity and coherence of Palestinian territory.

3. Figure 1: Aerial photograph of the destruction of the centre of the Jenin refugee camp caused by the battle and Israeli bulldozers (used by
permission from Public Relations Branch, Israeli Defence Forces)
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Only when the lack of infrastructure threatens to produce wider
externalities for Jewish populations has the Israeli state invested
systematically in modernising occupied Palestinian communities. On
retiring, Teddy Kollek, Mayor of Jerusalem between 1967 and 1993,
made a startling admission. “For Jewish Jerusalem I did something in
the past 25 years”, he reflected.
For East (Palestinian) Jerusalem? Nothing! Sidewalks? Nothing!
Cultural institutions? Not one! Yes, we installed a sewerage system
for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do
you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There
were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that they
would catch it! (Israel–Palestinian Peace-Building Program 2002)
Urbicide by Bulldozer: Tracing the Origins
The deliberate destruction of settlements by Israel in 2002 is not
entirely new. Sharon, who is nicknamed the “Bulldozer”, has a long
association with its use as a weapon of war and intimidation. In 1953,
forces commanded by Sharon levelled homes in the West Bank village
of Kibya, killing 69 Palestinians, in retaliation for the slaying of a
Jewish woman and her two children.
Sharon revealed the philosophy behind urbicide by bulldozer in an
interview in Ha’aretz on 26 January 2001. When asked what he would
do about persistent Palestinian shooting into the new Jewish settlements at Gilo, south of Jerusalem, he replied: “I would eliminate the
first 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. For
them there is nothing more important than their house. So, under
me you will not see a child shot next to his father [as was the case
with Mohamed Al-Dorra]. It is better to level the entire village with
bulldozers, row after row. (Jansen 2001:2)
The current war, however, marks a shift from occasional and sporadic
demolitions to the systematic and planned destruction of carefully
targeted settlements for political and military reasons. An Israeli chief
of staff recently claimed that “[T]he D-9 [armoured] bulldozer [that is
invariably 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 deepening antagonism amongst Israel’s right-wing military and political elites
toward the natural demographic and urban growth of the Palestinian
people. They see rapid and spontaneous Palestinian urbanisation and
demographic growth, within both Israel and the occupied territories, as
the Palestinian’s major long-term strategic “weapon” in shifting the
demographic, geopolitical and military balance against Israel. Sharon

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and his military leaders worry that Palestinian urbanisation and
demographic growth—largely unplanned and poorly serviced by infrastructure—is now undermining the viability of the Zionist state itself.
Such growth overwhelms efforts by Israel to support the in-migration
of Jews into both Israel itself and the new settlements (a balance
further tipped by growing out-migration of Jews from Israel because
of the increasing incidence of suicide bombs). The fast-growing, labyrinthine Palestinian cities of the West Bank and Gaza also challenge
Israel’s military omnipotence. Such places help Palestinian fighters
avoid surveillance, detection and capture—even when Apache helicopter gunships buzz overhead, occasionally killing alleged Palestinian
fighters (with those unlucky enough to be in the vicinity succumbing
as “collateral damage”). Places like the Jenin refugee camp are commonly 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 expose
Israeli soldiers to the risks of snipers, ambushes, booby traps and
homemade bombs. They also inhibit the traditional military tactics of
invasion 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 they
could not otherwise enter. The demolitions were the brutal reaction
on the part of Israeli politicians and military planners to the deaths of
the Israeli soldiers. But they were also a response to the fact that many
Palestinian fighters sought refuge within a built environment the very
existence of which implicitly challenged Israel’s military omnipotence
over the whole geopolitical space of “Greater Israel” (ie the land to
the west of the Jordan River).
These demolitions are the most extreme element of a broader
strategy of destroying the landscape in the creation of Israeli and
Jewish settlement and mobility spaces that are supposedly less vulnerable to Palestinian attack. “What is most striking in Palestine now is
the violence wrought against the land, the terrain”, writes Christian
Salmon (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 “buffer
zone” of several kilometers on the western side to be forcibly
bulldozed of Palestinian settlements, structures and vegetation. As
Salmon (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 as
the tank. Never has such an inoffensive machine struck me as being
more of a harbinger of silent violence. The brutality of war. Geography,
it is said, determines war. In Palestine it is war that has achieved the
upper 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 bulldozer
is Effi Eitam. A retired IDF brigadier, General Eitam commanded an
army brigade during the invasion of southern Lebanon in the 1980s.
He is now an ultra-right-wing leader of the Jewish settlers’ National
Religious Party and was invited to join Sharon’s new ruling coalition
on 10 April 2002 as Sharon brought in a group of hard-liners and
marginalised more conciliatory figures such as Shimon Peres. Such
has been Eitam’s meteoric political rise that many already rate him as
a serious contender for future leader of Israel.
Crucially, Eitam has also headed a group of senior Israeli generals
who, in late 2001, developed the plan for the Israeli invasion of the
occupied territories that was presented to Sharon on 31 January 2002.
The plan, which Sharon seems to have loosely followed since, was
directly aimed at smashing the political, infrastructural and urban
foundations 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 occupied
territories, to be accommodated in a new, two-lobed “Palestinian”
state in Jordan and the Sinai in Egypt. He spoke at a recent conference in Israel on the links between war and cities, attended by this
author. Israel, he argued, faced a “Jihad of buildings”. The spontaneous
construction of Palestinian housing and refugee camps within both
Israel and the occupied territories was, he argued, a “cancerous tumour
destroying 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’s
tactics so that they challenge the very existence of Palestinian cities.
Viewing Palestinian cities as “cancerous tumours” within the “ordered
body” of (greater) Israel legitimises the bulldozing of avenues through
people’s homes so that tanks can reassert Israeli military control and
surveillance. It existentially denies Palestinians the right and space
to exist—even in a miserable refugee camp with little or no infrastructure or services. Most astonishingly—and Eitam is fully aware of
the 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’s
metaphorical depictions of Jewish ghettos in Mein Kampf. From
countless examples in history, it is obvious that from such metaphors
genocides can grow. The Jewish people should be the last to need
lessons 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 and
strategies of deliberate urbicide will make life so intolerable that
Palestinians will “voluntarily” leave their homeland in Israel or the
occupied 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 ongoing
destruction of infrastructure, the building of fences and “buffer zones”
and the strengthening of curfews and checkpoint controls (Arabic
News 2001). This policy, euphemistically labelled “transfer”, is now a
legitimate political idea in Israel. “Transfer” is “ethnic cleansing” by
urbicide—not (yet?) a deliberate massacre, but a systematic programme
of urban and infrastructural destruction, with heavy casualties along
the way.
On the need to remove the “cancer” of Israeli-Arab settlements
from the “ordered” spaces within Israel, Eitam argued in Ha’aretz on
6 April 2002 that “in war we [ie Jewish Israelis] behave as in war. I can
see that as a consequence of war few Arabs [Israeli citizens] will
remain here [in Israel]. As a result of war many Palestinians may find
themselves again as refugees, on the other side, the eastern side, of
the Jordan river.” If such visions continue to influence Sharon’s
fraying coalition and his military and territorial strategies, shifts from
urbicide to genocide can genuinely not be discounted. This is something
for US and EU leaders, who have taken few direct actions against
Israel’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 the
tragic litany of ongoing suicide bombs demonstrates—is to improve
the security of Israelis in their own cities. For, in this war of (asymmetric)
urbicide, Palestinians have their own weapon against the modern
urban life of the Israelis that will not be stopped by anything but a just,
two-state, geopolitical settlement with substantial international
enforcement. Untraceable and unstoppable, bypassing fences, checkpoints and targeted assassinations alike, and driven by despair,
vengeance and religious certitude, the suicide bomb continues to deny
Israelis their modernity, their cities, their freedom. Hundreds of
Israeli civilian have been killed by such bombs. Whole swathes of
the economic hearts of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa are being

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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 the
suicide bomb campaign in recent West Bank offensives, it is already
clear that Israel’s brutal current attacks will, tragically, only add to the
queues of people, from both sides of the new fence, desperate enough
to consider such extreme measures.
References
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