Architecture as Military Strategy: A Review of Eyal Weizman’s Hollow
Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
by Ron Jacobs / July 18th, 2007
The recent assumption of control in Gaza by Hamas may be more illusory
than US media has represented it as. As Eyal Weizman makes clear in is
fascinating and detailed book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of
Occupation (Verso 2007), there are innumerable and often invisible
security apparatus set up across the region that ensure almost absolute
control of the region’s surface, airspace and subterranean acreage by
the IDF and other Israeli security forces. The book, which takes the
idea of an architecture of oppression written about by Mike Davis in his
book City of Quartz and applies it to the paranoid security regime of
Tel Aviv, is a tale of the intentional construction of a suburban
security state. It is a state that provides an illusory reality of
swimming pools and ranch housing for the occupiers and an increasingly
barren, crowded life for the occupied.