Walking Through Walls With the Israeli Army

On the internet you’re always just a few clicks away from learning about any subject that that interests you. But the aspect of the web that never ceases to amaze me is that you can also stumble on items that lead you to become interested in topics—or combinations of topics—you never knew existed.

A prime example is this 2006 essay (pdf) by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman. For years I’ve been fascinated by the Israeli army, military microtactics, critical theory, urban warfare, nonlinearity, spatial syntax, and architecture, but never would have imagined them fitting together. But even if this strange arrangement of subjects doesn’t sound appealing to you, I recommend reading these two paragraphs from the paper’s introduction and see if you can resist this fascinating article:

The maneuver conducted by units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier General Aviv Kokhavi, as inverse geometry , the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of microtactical actions. During the battle, soldiers moved within the city across hundred-meter-long “overground-tunnels” carved through a dense and contiguous urban fabric. Although several thousand soldiers and several hundred Palestinian guerrilla fighters were maneuvering simultaneously in the city, they were so “saturated” within its fabric that very few would have been visible from an aerial perspective at any given moment.

Furthermore, soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as “infestation,” sought to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. Rather than submit to the authority of conventional spatial boundaries and logic, movement became constitutive of space. The three-dimensional progression through walls, ceilings, and floors across the urban balk reinterpreted, short-circuited, and recomposed both architectural and urban syntax. The IDF’s strategy of “walking through walls” involved a conception of the city as not just the site, but the very medium of warfare—a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

While I admired the creativity of these tactics and the bravura of their execution, I was also horrified at their application in a city environment. The damage to both buildings and psyches must have been devastating. I’m not sure what to think about it all, though it certainly raises interesting questions about the application of jus ad bellum principles in urban conflicts.

In the age of global terrorism I think every informed citizen should have a rudimentary knowledgeable of security related topics. If you share that opinion you won’t want to miss this article, one of the most important essays on architecture, urban warfare, and military ethics written in the last decade.

(Via: Hilobrow )