top: Sweeping arms of both the military and the planners left: Settlers score the desert right and below: Soldiers move as freely as sewage
There is, of course, a long tradition of reading meaning into these sands. Part of the devilry of mapping a peace here is in the layering of the two sides’ sacred sites. 7 For interloping Christians, whose combats are now mostly elsewhere, the place of Jesus’ death has been tangled in memory with the significance of their written bible. 8 Mediaeval crusaders were keen to triangulate chapter and verse. No less – well – imaginative was imperial Briton Gordon Pasha’s claim in 1884 that the architecture and topography of Jerusalem revealed a (cartoonishly) literal symbol of the body of Christ. 9 This avowal of coherence is equally a feature of the German tradition of history-writing which says that the historian’s writerly task is to tell the story of the identity of a nation by representing its ‘historical idea’ or ‘seed’ – to bring its essential aspects together under a single concept or metaphor. 10
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4 Léopold Lambert, Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence. dpr-barcelona, 2012 5 RG Collingwood, The Principles of Art. Oxford University Press, 1938: 139-144 6 The blending of bodily detail into the abstracted totality of Weizman’s Israel comes close to one ideal of literary realism. 7 See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature . Willard R Trask trans. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1953 8 See Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 . University of California Press, 2000. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory . Lewis A Coser trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 9 Daniel Bertrand Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict. Raleigh: Duke, 2002. pp.20-21 10 Historismus; see Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012. ch 1. All roads lead through Hegel here.
all images courtesy of Eyal Weizman and Verso
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