Shalom CAMERA E-Mail Team:

On Sunday, January 1st, the New York Times published a severely unbalanced article about Israel's security barrier on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section.  It was written by Nicolai Ouroussoff and entitled "A Line in the Sand," with the long subheadline "Out of the concrete and soil of Israel's barrier, complex debates arise about the nature of space and the consequences of architectural theory."   Almost the entire top half of the page is taken up by a huge photo showing a section of the barrier that is a concrete wall with a guard tower.  The caption reads "The barrier now being built as a security measure by Israel has generated an architectural debate as heated in its own way as any in the political realm."  One would expect to read about architectural theories, but instead readers are mainly supplied with architects giving their political opinions. And oddly, the reporter chose to center his article on an Israeli architect who no longer even lives in Israel, but in London. 

Throughout the article, Israel's security barrier is variously called "evil," a "symbol of colonialism," "insane," "vulgar," and "a violation of space."  The only time the reporter refers to its life-saving purpose and effect is in the photo caption and at the very beginning of the article:

"[The barrier was] Conceived in 2002 to protect Israel from terrorists, it has been extolled as a necessary tool for self-preservation." 

But then he goes on to write: 

"It has also been assailed as a formula for ghettoization and a symbol of colonialism....At the center of this debate is Eyal Weizman, a 35-year-old Israeli architect and activist who has been a controversial figure in his homeland since 2002, when he published a report for a local human rights organization that essentially accused Israeli architects of being collaborators in the colonization of the West Bank.

"Building is never a neutral act, of course, and Mr. Weizman makes no distinction between the realms of architecture and politics.  For decades, he has often noted, Israeli architects made much of their livelihood designing settlements in the occupied territories.  Many felt their job was to solve problems - to make spaces functional, more humane...But in doing so, Mr. Weizman argues, they also made the unacceptable seem tolerable, lending an oppressive policy a veneer of good taste.

" 'We examined these architectural drawings in a clinical manner,' Mr. Weizman said. 'We showed that the crime was in the making of the line - in the drawing itself - not only in the principle of building a settlement.'

"...Mr. Weizman, who is now based in London, describes the barrier as 'too insane to operate - eventually, it will collapse under its own weight.'

The reporter then goes on to provide what he calls "among the most provocative counterpoints for Mr. Weisman's analysis [by] Shimon Navez, a retired brigadier general in the Israeli Army."  However, Navez isn't providing balance at all to Weisman's anti-barrier argument, he merely enhances it.

"The general has little faith in the barrier, which he called 'too simplistic, too vulgar' to accomplish its task.  'It is a tragic regression in terms of strategy,' he said. 'It derives from a necessity, but in the longer range it will create a lot of damage - a lot of antagonism.  It is a huge violation of space that will be hard to remove."  

Then, inexplicably, the reporter talks about one of Navon's military theories, "swarming," as if it has something to do with architecture: "Urban soldiers communicate directly with each other in a fluid, amorphous world, free to react to whatever situation arises. Compared to such a dystopian vision, a concrete barrier erected to separate Israelis from Palestinians can seem like an apparition from antiquity, a contemporary counterpart to the Roman 'limes,' the crude wooden barrier Trajan built to keep out warrning tribes - to separate civilization from barbarity.  Yet to Mr. Weisman, these are simply two forms of the same evil.  General Navez, he said, 'is simply trying to replace one form of control with another that is less visible.' "  

When one turns to page 30 to continue the long article, one finds another huge photo (taking up a quarter of the page) of a section of the barrier, again a portion that is a concrete wall with a guard tower.  Nowhere is the security barrier shown as a fence, which is quite misleading, since 95% of the completed barrier will be a fence, not a concrete wall, and since the vast majority of the barrier currently completed is also fence, not wall.

The reporter then goes on to turn history on its head.  From 1948 - 67, under Jordanian occupation of eastern Jerusalem, Jordan expelled all the Jews, destroyed dozens of synagogues and Jewish institutions, and essentially did its best to erase evidence of  thousands of years of Jewish life there.  When Israel liberated eastern Jerusalem and united the city in 1967, Israel gave the Muslims autonomy over the Temple Mount (where the Al Aqsa compound sits) and Arabs were not expelled from the city.  Here's how the reporter refers obliquely to this history:

"Among the barrier's less obvious effects has been to sow panic among Palestinians desperate to stay within Jerusalem's boundaries.  Many have retreated deep into the Old City's Muslim quarter, worsening congestion there. Recently, Israeli planners suggested that new public spaces be created to ease overcrowding.  But the suggestion aroused concern that it might be a first step toward razing some of the neighborhood's old residential buildings - an echo of the destruction of Muslim homes after the Jewish Quarter was recaptured by Israel in 1967.  Some critics have argued that sprucing up the Old City is part of a strategy to drive Palestinians from Jerusalem altogether.  Certainly, it will involve stripping away some of the city's architectural character, erasing layers of history.  But perhaps the barrier's most unexpected victim will be the cosmopolitanism that gives Jerusalem its profound meaning, the in-between places where everyday dialogue occurs."  

Since the barrier is a result of Palestinian terrorism, isn't it really more accurate to say that these supposed consequences result from terrorism?  And as for a loss of "cosmopolitanism," the writer's premise is somewhat farfetched.  Israel is a very diverse society.  20% of Israel's citizens are Arabs, and even with the barrier completed, Jerusalem's streets will continue to abound with Muslim, Christian and Jewish Israelis, as well as of course, Palestinians and tourists of all ethnicities and religions.

One more architect is interviewed about the barrier.  Zvi Efrat, director of the architecture school at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts, said, "Israel is a completely designed society...The wall is an extension of that approach..It is the idea that you can reshape a society with design.  The problem is that there is little discussion about its implications."  

Reporter Nicolai Ouroussoff concludes the piece with puffery, completely divorced from the reality of the brutal terrorism that threatens Israelis daily:  "If some of the new cities of Israel reflect the successes of Modernism, the barrier represents the worst aspects of it - the rationalist tendency to reduce the world to a system of abstract relationships, a faith in tabula rasa planning, a distrust of urban chaos - without its idealism. "  

Distrust of "urban chaos"?  Does he really not understand that the security barrier stems from a distrust of terrorists who want to blow up Israelis in pizzerias, busses, malls, and at Bat Mitzvah and Passover celebrations?? 

One can almost hear John Lennon's "Imagine" playing in the background as one reads the final paragraph: "The consequences extend beyond the ghettoization of Palestinians and Israelis.  The wall destroys the space for those who once occupied the middle ground: those who refuse to divide the world into good and bad, civilization and barbarity.  It threatens to sever the threads, already fragile, that might one day be woven into a more tolerant image of coexistence."  

Unfortunately, since the Palestinian Authority has been unwilling to take significant action against the terrorists, Israel is forced to separate the "good and bad," that is, terrorists from law-abiding Palestinians who want to enter Israel.  The writer also doesn't seem to understand the concept of a two-state solution, where Israelis and Palestinians will have two separate countries with borders one day.  Most countries have some kind of border control, particularly if there are security concerns. 

If ever the Palestinians reform their society and learn to truly coexist with the Israelis without resorting to violence, then certainly the security barrier could be removed and the open border restored. But lives lost in terrorist attacks can never be restored, something Ouroussoff never dwells on.

ACTION ITEMS:

Please protest this unbalanced political rant disguised as an architecture article.

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