Sharon leaves behind a legacy of construction and destruction that has shaped today's Israel and Palestine

Whether in military uniform or in politics, Ariel Sharon's time in power was characterised by construction and destruction frenzies that decisively shaped the physical realities in which both Israelis and Palestinians still struggle to live.

His legacy is not only that of a military man and a politician, but also that of an architect. Sharon, more than anyone else, has shaped the spatial realities of Israel's occupation of Palestine.

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Sharon's architecture involved not only destruction but also construction. The other major projects he undertook, besides the destruction of the camps, was an attempt to "pacify" the refugees by constructing and forcefully relocating a few thousand of them into Israeli-style social housing blocks next to major Palestinian cities. A few pilot projects were built north of Gaza, but these housing units themselves became centres of resistance. The project was abandoned and the housing largely since demolished in Israeli incursions. His other construction project was the building of a matrix of land fortifications on the hilltops throughout the occupied Sinai desert. This matrix proved a flexible net that absorbed the Egyptian attack in the 1973 Yom Kippur/October War and provided the basis for Sharon's counter attack over the Suez Canal.

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by Eyal Weizman1

  • 1. Eyal Weizman is an architect, professor and director of the Forensic Architecture (www.forensic-architecture.org) project at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.