This last week, about 60,000 people had to flee from their homes in Haifa as forest fires were reaching the city outskirts. With the help of several countries’ firefighter crews (including four Palestinian ones), the Israeli firefighters now seem to have gained control of the fires. During the same week, about a dozen of smaller fires started in forests across the country, recalling to a lesser degree the situation in 2010, when a massive wildfire had burnt Mount Carmel (South of Haifa) and killed 44 people. Members of the Israeli government including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were quick on their feet to accuse Palestinian living in Israel (citizens deprived of the recognition of their Palestinian-ness) to have triggered these fires and they promised severe punishment for the accused supposed arsonists, describing “new forms of terrorism,” and suggesting stripping the accused’s citizenships and destroying their family homes (for more on the collective punishment that home demolitions constitute, see my article about it in the new issue of The Funambulist Magazine). The fact that the Israeli government intends to systematically blame Palestinians for every problems of the Israeli society, in particular when it is being accused of unpreparedness, should not surprise us. This article does not even intend to debunk these accusations and, on the contrary, even accepts them in order to fundamentally deny to the Israeli forests the status of natural innocence that the Zionist narrative pretends that they embody.

(below) Jewish National Fund money-collecting blue boxes: before 1948 to buy land in Palestine, after 1948 to grow forests in Israel.

As described in a previous article entitled “Make the Desert Bloom: Manufacturing the Israeli Territory/Narrative,” in order to understand the political role of the Israeli forests, one must study the history of the organization in charge of planting and maintaining them: the Jewish National Fund (JNF). It is a non-governmental organization controlled by the World Zionist Organization that, until the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, had been collecting money (thanks to small money boxes like the ones shown below) within the worldwide Jewish diaspora during the first half of the 20th century, in order to buy as many parcels of land as possible from the Palestinian farmers and landowners. In the three last months of the British Mandate on Palestine in May 1948, various Zionists paramilitary groups started besieging Palestinian villages, subsequently evicting and destroying them. This process of systematic and massive dispossession, displacement and destruction continued after May during the war that was claimed to legitimize the creation of the State of Israel on a large part of Palestine. 800,000 Palestinians (about half of the Palestinian population back then) thus became refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip without any possibility to return to their villages and towns. As described many times on this blog, the successive Israeli governments’ strategy in order to manufacture a national narrative that does not include the massive and systematic violence that the Nakba actually constituted, consisted in minimizing and concealing the past presence of the Palestinian people on the land claimed by the State of Israel. The ruins of the evicted and destroyed Palestinian villages were thus demolished in the 1950s and in some instances, forest planted by the JNF were grown on their past location (like in Lubya as showed in the film The Village under the Forest by Mark J Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum). The double-story that a ruin is, by definition, able to unfold (the assertion of its past existence and the marks of its slow or accelerated destruction) was thus denied to the Palestinian narrative, thus adding an additional layer of dispossessive violence to the Zionist enterprise.

(above) Ruin remains of the villages of Bayyarat Hannun (left) and Yibna (right) / Excerpts of the book Les Absents (2016) by Bruno Fert.
(below) JNF’s largest forest, Birya before (1953) and after its plantation (2008)

Concealing the last remains of Palestinian ruins and, through them, the narrative they carried, was however not the only political aim of these newly grown forests. One of the important reasons that some Israeli forests are currently burning is that these forests are made of pine trees, well-known for their high degree of inflammability, in particular in a very dry environment as the climate in Palestine provides. The reason this type of trees were planted, rather than more vernacular species insists on the Ashkenazim dominating part of the Zionist imaginary.  The implementation of pine trees in Israel contributes to provide a visual representation of the Israeli claim of “exceptionalism” in the region, and was meant to appear as an extension of Europe (the Swiss mountains are often cited as an example) in a geographical context that the 19th-century orientalists had mostly described as arid and deserted — Palestine was more often described through its southern desert than through its northern continuity of the Lebanese and Golan fertile lands. Moreover, settler colonialism has yet to find a better way to assert and implement itself than through its usual operations of geoengineering that claim land in imposing a control on it.

(above) JNF “Tree Center” website inciting the Jewish diaspora to fund the planting of a tree for various occasions.
(below) The aforestation of the Negev desert: the Zionist imaginary of “making the desert bloom” at work / Excerpt of The Erasure Trilogy (2015) by photographer Fazal Sheikh

Whether some Palestinians actually contributed to the current fires — couldn’t it be arguably seen as a form of non-violent resistance as they are hypocritically encouraged to undertake by Western nations? — or it was instead the ghosts of the Nakba, as friend Karim Kattan suggests in an forthcoming novel, the current fires of Israeli forests cannot be read in the apolitical understanding of natural disasters (the further question being, do natural disasters still exist anywhere?) but, rather through the prism of Palestine’s political history. In this regard, it is hard not to appreciate the symbol of olive trees growing in the dead trunk of pine trees unfit for the climate in which they were forced to grow, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006). Through this specific symbol and the fires, we should perhaps refrain (however tempting it might be) from the idea of a natural order that would refuse to leave unpunished operations that challenged it but, rather, think that the depoliticization of what they represent fundamentally reinforces the dominant narrative. If we are to accept the newly defined paradigm of the so-called “anthropocene” (regardless of the ironic anthropocentrism and chronocentrism it constitutes), we need to refuse to be moralist ‘tree-huggers’ that consider the conventional forms of “nature” in a complete denial of the political reasons that brought them to existence. As always when it comes to thinking of the future of Palestine, we should refrain from nostalgia and, as such, we should not make the mistake of thinking than burning all the forests planted by the JNF and thus going back to a supposedly original flora would end the apartheid implemented through the Zionist project. However, when we see a pine tree burning in Israel, we can certainly distinguish a tiny part of this project burning through it. What we construct with the ashes is up to us.

The post Israeli Forests on Fire: The Political History of Pine Trees in Palestine appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

The Funambulist presents:

A conversation centered around the issues discussed in various issues of The Funambulist which articulates a critical discourse about the politics of the designed/built environment in relation to the bodies.

Featuring Ana Naomi de Sousa, Sinthujan Varatharajah, Sarah Turnbull, Mohamed Elshahed and Léopold Lambert.

MOHAMED ELSHAHED, editor of Cairobserver, contributor to issue 1: Militarized Cities with the text “Cairo: Militarized Landscape.”
SARAH TURNBULL, criminologist, contributor to issue 4: Carceral Environments with the piece coauthored with Tings Chak “Migrant Detention: Stories from the U.K.”
SINTHUJAN VARATHARAJAH, PhD student in political geography, contributor to issue 5: Design & Racism with the text “The Keys to Return,” and issue 8: Police with the text “Racial Profiling: Between Legal Actions and State Recognition.”
ANA NAOMI DE SOUSA, documentary filmmaker and journalist, contributor to issue 10: Architecture & Colonialism with a “political walk” in London at night.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT, architect, editor-in-chief of The Funambulist.

This event is hosted by Float PR at NT’s bar (1 Westgate Street, London Fields). RSVP on Facebook if you’d like

The post The Funambulist Event With Four Contributors on Dec. 7 – 7:30PM at NT’s bar in London Fields appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

The photographic series analyzing the architecture of police stations in the Paris banlieues as representative and reinforcing force of the degree of antagonism from the police to the residents of a given municipality continues here, as well as in the current issue of The Funambulist Magazine dedicated to the police.

The photographs and map presented here attempt to show that architecture also constitutes both a symbolic and real weapon for reinforcing the sustained antagonism developed by the police against the banlieue youth. In the wealthy neighborhoods of Paris and the western, white, middle-class banlieues, the architecture of police stations is mostly divided between heritage buildings or new, relatively transparent, and welcoming buildings. Conversely, in the northeastern and southern banlieues, where working-class and racialized neighborhoods are the most common, the architecture of the police stations, and in particular those built since the 2005 revolt, attests to and enables the police’s (and by extension, the State’s) antagonism towards the neighboring residents.

The most recently built police stations attempt to present themselves as authored works, designed by architecture offices that also build libraries, schools, housing, etc. However, the cultured aspect of these stations fails to hide their capacity to respond to the potentiality of a “siege” undertaken against them, in the police’s fantasy of a conflict that would involve no restraint. These stations’ ground floors do not have any windows, or when they do, they echo medieval arrow slits; the walls sometimes present various degrees of inclination, a well-known technique by 17th-century fortress architects; the entry sequences are controlled and uninviting; and the sidewalks in front of their entrances are made inaccessible to vehicles through the presence of metallic cones and furniture. The fact that the architecture offices that designed these police stations and, as such, contributed to the police infrastructure of the city do not necessarily advertise on their website such a contribution — to the notable exception of XTU, that proudly displays its design for the Plaine Saint-Denis police station on the first page of its website — can be reasonably interpreted as a partial understanding of their responsibility.

The following photographs are accompanied by the average income in the concerned municipality and the correlation between this number and the aggressiveness of the corresponding police station’s architecture is striking. For information, the annual minimum salary for a full-time activity is 13,500 euros (also the average income in Aubervilliers, La Courneuve, Stains and Garges-les-Gonesse). This series is a work-in-progress and will soon be augmented by more photographs illustrating the varying degree of weaponization of architecture depending on the municipality, its residents, and their average income.

All map and photographs by Léopold Lambert (2015-2016) licenced under a creative commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license ///

The post The Weaponized Architecture of Police Stations in the Paris Banlieues appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

My dear liberal friends,

I know; the term “liberal” probably worries you already, as it is generally used by people who think that your political positions (or the lack thereof) are either too “politically correct” (understand, respectful of others) or not “radical” enough. This tension from two sides is probably from where you proudly think of yourselves as the “balanced ones.” Balance as the eternal middle-point, always depending on the two “extreme” tropes, regardless of what the center of this tension may stand for. But I’m not here to attack you here, I “come in peace,” a notion that is particularly dear to your heart, as we’ll talk further. I am writing to you as it is my conviction that, for better of for worse, an important part of the future of Palestine will depend on you in the next decade or two. Of course, the actual “future of Palestine” belongs to Palestinians themselves (including the Palestinian Jews we currently call “Israelis”), but the conditions in which they’d be able to seize it depend partially on the extents of what you will be able to imagine, since you are indubitably a main actor in the construction of the collective imaginary of our societies.

Your vision of the situation in Palestine (understand the historical region in its entirety) has been driven by decades of symmetrical descriptions of it, opposing two homogeneous and equal camps. You have been reading the New York Times, Le Monde, Die Welt, or Haaretz for years and these newspapers provided a narrative that fit well with your desire for balance. It acknowledged the violence of the Israeli colonization of Gaza (before 2005), the West Bank, and sometimes in Jerusalem, but also recognizes to Israel “the right to defend itself” against the very handy notion of “terrorism” that can accommodate many things. It made you dislike the word “Zionism,” but it also made you wonder whether anti-Zionism and antisemitism are indistinct ideologies. But, let’s not make a caricature of yourself my dear liberal friends; you may very well have seen by yourself the colonial apparatuses at work in Palestine, or you might even live there if you are Israeli, and you might even call yourself “pro-Palestinian” (as if what was involved was a football game) in conversations or on social media. Your favorite drawing is then the four successive maps that show the drastic reduction of Palestinian land since the 1947 designed-to-fail UN partition plan and the 1948 creation of the Israeli state, to the few ‘islands’ left to the Palestinians after the 1993 Oslo Accords. One date in particular founds your indignation: 1967, when the Israeli army invaded the West Bank, East-Jerusalem, Gaza (as well as the Egyptian Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights). This army invasion relates to many others for you and the subsequent civil colonization that followed it is also simple for you to uncompromisingly condemn. This is why, a few days ago, you were happy to hear that the United Nations Security Council had voted Resolution 2334, condemning the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East-Jerusalem despite the attempts of the US President-Elect to avoid this vote, originally proposed by Egypt. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy too; such a condemnation was the result of decades of Palestinian activism in general, and of the BDS campaign in particular these recent years. It was also a courageous act of defiance against diplomatic bullying from the governments of New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal, which sponsored the resolution after the Sisi government withdrew it.

However, it is my conviction (as well as many others’, of course) that we should also refuse one aspect of the narrative reinforced by this resolution: the crystallization of the “1967 borders” (i.e. the borders between Israel and Jordan-and-Egypt-administered Palestinian territories from 1949 until the 1967 invasion) and the subsequent so-called “two-state solution” that emerges from their fetichization. Despite their role in the establishment of Zionism and the massive land expropriation from Palestinians farmers that they constitute, the settlements paradoxically might be the most useful obstacle to the creation of a skimpy Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Their condemnation (and the potential eviction that could virtually follow) by many governments, in particular Western ones, should therefore be interpreted as one of the necessary steps towards the creation of such a state, which would constitute for them the achievement of what they call “the peace process.” This notion of “peace” pleases you, dear liberal friends and, quite frankly, there is no absolute reason to blame you for it, but its invocation may blind you from the fact that there is no war in Palestine, ‘simply’ the administrative and military establishment of a racial hierarchy that we call apartheid. This apartheid is not merely segregating two essential groups that we call “Israelis” and “Palestinians” (or sometimes, even more erroneously, Jews and Muslims), since 1.7 million (20%) of Israeli passport holders are Palestinians, that the statuses of a Palestinian Jerusalemite or a member of the Palestinian Authority in, say Ramallah, is hardly comparable to the status of a permitless resident of Hebron’s old city, and even less so with a Palestinian refugee who lived all their life in a camp in Gaza or in Lebanon, and that the Jewish part of the Israeli society itself is divided in religious factions and, at a less official level, also experiences forms of structural racism — against the 700,000 Mizrahi or the 150,000 Ethiopian Israeli citizens for instance. This complexity, proper to any form of coloniality that always categorizes and hierarchizes bodies, is one of the main reason for a Palestinian state to bring nothing but the crystallization and relative retroactive legitimization of the violence of the Nakba in 1948, in particular when it comes to the denial of return for the 5 millions of Palestinian refugees of Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Furthermore, the accession for Palestinians to any state-like institutions has never prevented the Israeli army from mobilizing its arsenal against them whether in Gaza or in the West Bank — we can recall the siege on the Mukataa in Ramallah in 2002 for instance — but, on the contrary, allowed to establish a self-centered political and economic Palestinian elite that is keen to see itself ruling this small state rather than facing its responsibilities after the end of the apartheid.

In conclusion, dear liberal friends, I am inviting you to refrain from your usual “you’re dreaming!” or “it will never happen” that usually characterize your response to this vision when we describe it to you. On the contrary, see how simple it would be for the apartheid to end from a technical standpoint since it would replace the complex colonial categorization and hierarchization of bodies by the absolute equality of their rights — including in the right to return, about which the State of Israel proves everyday its simplicity by attributing the citizenship to all Jewish person who would like to ask for it. Not to give you too much importance dear liberal friends, but it seems that the realization of this simple vision depends on whether you’ll choose to believe in it or not.

Map above: fragment of one of the “Excavated Objects from a Post-Apartheid Palestine,” Léopold Lambert (2015-2016).

The post On the Future of Palestine: Letter to My Liberal Friends appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Dear readers of The Funambulist,

I am very happy to wish you a joyful new year and to announce a double-launch today: like every two months, a new issue of the magazine is ready to be released and, exceptionally, it is accompanied by the launch of a brand new website that brings together the magazine, the blog, and the podcast, facilitate the open-access navigation and purchases, as well as allows subscribers to gain full access to the magazine’s archived articles. We hope that you will enjoy your navigation on this new platform, as well as the contents of this new issue, and I would like to thank Francis Redman and Marlow Perceval for respectively designing and coding this new platform.

NEW WEBSITE’S FEATURES:

• Easier navigation in the different issues of the magazine.
• Easier subscribing process.
• Archived magazine articles accessible for subscribers.
• The podcast is now on the same platform than the magazine and blog.
• Contributor section.
• Stockists & libraries section.

THE FUNAMBULIST 9 (JAN-FEB 2017) ISLANDS:

The ninth issue of The Funambulist engages a shift in the geographical focus of the magazine. Periodicals regularly produce issues on islands but may tend to focus on their geological formation, or the ways in which supposedly “desert islands” have been rendered “inhabitable,” thus perpetuating the colonial narrative of Robinson Cruzoe. This particular issue attempt to amplify the voices of indigenous narratives, as well as on non-colonial protocols of passage on these islands, like in the cases of displaced persons in the Mediterranean Sea or the Indian Ocean. Whether they are the settings of decolonizing and demilitarizing struggles (Mayotte, Kanaky – New Caledonia, Hawai’i, Diego Garcia, Puerto Rico, Okinawa), or of the economization and incarceration of displaced lives (Lesvos, Nauru, Christmas Island), or places that even face the threat of absolute disappearance, as a consequence of the “big countries’” mode of existence (Tuvalu, Kiribati), the narratives voiced in this issue are simultaneously asymmetric regarding the forces against which they are mobilized, and united in a continuously reaffirmed urgency that always sooner or later topples these forces.

Read more

Read the articles online (subscribers)

The post The Funambulist 9 (January-February 2017) Islands Is Now Published + New Website appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

The tenth issue of The Funambulist Magazine (Mar-Apr 2017) dedicated to “Architecture & Colonialism” will be released on March 1st, but Paris residents and visitors are invited to attend to its launch event at the great space created by artist Kader Attia, La Colonie (128 rue Lafayette, 75010 Paris) on February 20 (7:30PM) with contributors Françoise Vergès, Zahra Ali, Ann Laura Stoler, and Mawena Yehouessi.

Presentation of the event (in French) ///

À l’occasion du lancement du numéro 10 (mars-avril) « Architecture & Colonialism » de la revue anglophone The Funambulist, nous vous invitons à une présentation de ce numéro ainsi que du numéro 9 (janvier-février) « Islands » à La Colonie. Ces deux numéros ont ceci en commun que de penser l’espace du colonialisme historique et contemporain, ainsi que des mouvements de décolonisation s’y opposant. Après une présentation de la revue par son fondateur, Léopold Lambert, les quatre invitées-contributrices de la soirée, Françoise Vergès, Zahra Ali, Ann Laura Stoler et Mawena Yehouessi présenteront à leur tour leur contribution à The Funambulist avant d’ouvrir un temps de conversation avec le public présent.

Présentation des intervenant-es:
– MAWENA YEHOUESSI, co-fondatrice de Black(s) to the Future. Contribution au numéro 10: « Politiques afrofuturistes »
– ANN LAURA STOLER, professeure en anthropologie et histoire à la New School (NYC), auteure de nombreux ouvrages sur le colonialisme. Contribution au numéro 10: « Architectures légales et physiques du colonialisme »
– ZAHRA ALI, sociologue, éditrice du livre « Féminismes islamiques ». Contribution au numéro 07: « Une perspective féministe décoloniale sur l’Irak d’hier et d’aujourd’hui »
– FRANÇOISE VERGÈS, politologue, titulaire de la chaire Global South(s) au Collège d’études mondiales, auteure de nombreux ouvrages. Contribution au numéro 09: « Mayotte comme site du républicanisme postcolonial français »
– LÉOPOLD LAMBERT, fondateur/rédacteur de The Funambulist, architecte, auteur de « La politique du bulldozer : La ruine palestinienne comme projet israélien »

Le numéro 9 (Jan-Fev 2017) « Islands » tente d’amplifier les voix des récits decoloniaux indigènes ainsi qu’insister sur les protocoles de passages non-coloniaux sur ces îles des personnes déplacées en Méditerranée ou dans l’Océan Indien. Qu’ils proviennent de combats de décolonisation et/ou de démilitarisation (Mayotte, Kanaky-Nouvelle Calédonie, Hawai’i, Diego Garcia, Puerto Rico, Okinawa), de l’économisation et incarcération de vies exilées (Lesvos, Naura, Île Christmas), ou bien encore d’îles étant menacées de disparition pure et simple (Tuvalu, Kiribati), ces récits rendent compte à la fois de l’asymétrie des forces contres lesquelles ils sont mobilisés, ainsi que de leur certitude que ces forces coloniales seront tôt ou tard renversées.

Le numéro 10 (Mar-Avr 2017) « Architecture & Colonialism » tente de mystifier le colonialisme comme époque historique ayant un début et une fin. À travers des exemples historiques (camps de « regroupement » en Algérie, urbanismes coloniaux en Libye, Égypte, Jordanie, contrôle d’une domesticité genrée en Iran ou à Java, formations extralégales en Afrique de l’Est, etc.) et contemporains (colonisation en Palestine, enclaves européennes au Maroc, etc.) ce numéro pense l’architecture fondamentalement comme un dispositif d’organisation hiérarchique des corps dans l’espace.

The post Launch of The Funambulist 10 (Mar-Apr 2017) Architecture & Colonialism in Paris on Feb 20 appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

“The Architecture of the State of Emergency in France.” First published in Harvard Design Magazine, number 42 (Spring-Summer 2016) edited by Jennifer Sigler.

In January 2015, two successive attacks in Paris led to the assassination of 12 people at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and the arbitrary murders of five more at a kosher supermarket two days later. Overshadowing the mourning of the victims of these attacks, an ideological debate quickly fragmented French citizens into those who affirmed the slogan “Je suis Charlie,” and many others who, despite sharing a sense of shock over the violence, refused to associate themselves with a publication famous for insulting religion in general and Islam in particular. While millions of people rallied in France on January 11th to defend “the freedom of speech against terrorism,” others feared the political instrumentalization of an event attended by demagogic politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy, Viktor Orbán, Ahmet Davutoğlu, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Avigdor Liberman. But this gathering was not the only political gesture made in response to the attacks. On January 12th, the implementation of so-called Operation Sentinel enabled the deployment of 11,000 soldiers in major cities across France to patrol airports and train stations, as well as stand guard in front of religious buildings and offices of the press. Police officers, who days earlier carried only handguns, were armed with machine guns and rifles, contributing to an atmosphere of aggression and paranoia—not to mention the economic prosperity of arms manufacturers.

Eleven months later, on November 13th, coordinated attacks left 130 people dead and 352 injured at six sites in Paris and the northern suburb of Saint-Denis. It was then that the political instrumentalization of fear took the form of legal promulgation. A national state of emergency was declared, temporarily restricting certain rights and increasing executive and police power. Such exceptional measures have been decreed in only three other historical contexts: during the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), during revolts in the overseas territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia in 1984 and 1985, and in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities in 2005 after a series of revolts. These examples highlight the connection between the history of the state of emergency and the history of colonialism—whether historical colonial subjects (Algeria), assimilated colonial subjects (overseas departments/collectivities), or metropolitan colonial subjects (banlieues, or suburbs, inhabited largely by second- and third-generation immigrants from former French colonies). The logic behind this link is clear: France suspends the rights that it claims as indispensible principles—enshrined in slogans like “the country of human rights” and “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”—when confronted by its colonial subjects, who are understood as fundamentally outside of the notion of “national identity,” a concept so often deployed by politicians across the political spectrum.

Instead of integrating the estimated 4.7 million Muslim citizens in France into a great “us” that was de facto united around a sense of loss after the attacks, the government chose to implement an antagonistic, racist state of emergency. On February 19, 2016, a few days before the state of emergency was set to end, parliament authorized a three-month extension. During the previous three months, many city inhabitants witnessed the appearance of heavily armed soldiers and police officers patrolling and controlling access to streets via checkpoints controlling access to specific streets (a tedious process for those who happen to live on one of them).

During the bloody suppression against the 1871 Paris Commune—when the city declared its independence from the rest of France during three months—the militarized essence of Parisian Haussmanian architecture was made apparent. The 19th-century piercing of large avenues allowed cavalry and artillery to circulate fluidly in the city to suppress potential insurrections. Today, various police and military vehicles still capitalize on these channels to control the city. The high density of Paris’s urban fabric also facilitates the control of entire neighborhoods through the use of police barricades or concrete blocks, as was the case in Brussels following the March 22, 2016, bombings. Of course, architecture was not conceived in order to implement such a control; yet it has an inherent capacity to enforce certain organizational schemes for bodies in space.

These very visible features of the state of emergency hid the fundamental inequality of such exceptional measures. Police searched over 3,300 homes, offices, mosques, and restaurants in numerous cities across the metropolitan and overseas territories, overwhelmingly targeting Muslims (and to a lesser degree Roma, as well as ecologists during the United Nations Climate Change Conference). Admittedly, accounts of these searches vary drastically. Some describe police officers visibly embarrassed to search the offices of a Muslim association, while others depict a fully armed squad searching homes during the middle of the night while insulting the residents. People have reported finding their doors pulverized and their possessions spread chaotically across their apartments. Regardless of whether police officers showed professionalism or abused their power, there is an inherent violence to these perquisitions. Not only was the privacy of homes and other spaces violated, but broken doors came to act as proof of the existence of a tacit sub-citizenry, one whose rights and dignity were of little import to the state.

Broken doors show the will of the state and its police to master the spatial agency embodied by architecture. Architecture’s protective function, materialized by walls—a locked door is nothing else than a wall—is here compromised by the exceptional measures enabled by the state of emergency. Meanwhile, the same walls are alternatively orienting their imprisoning function on the 290 Muslims who were subsequently put under house arrest.

If most of the searches described above have led to no conclusive results, it is because most of these searches do not aim to find anything in particular. They are used as an intimidation technique against persons and communities thought to be practicing a radical interpretation of Islam, as well as a means for the police to construct a cartography of private spaces (an opportunity that only arises during a state of emergency). Reports written and filed by law-enforcement officials of these searches crystallize their collective observations of a normally inaccessible realm, thus constructing a unique cartography of spaces unrelated to the mandate of the search. Here, again, the notion of cartography relates to architecture’s production of knowledge that emerges from surveying and drawing, which corresponds to a higher ability to control the space considered.

In the case of France, not just any neighborhoods are searched. The overwhelming majority of searches have been conducted in the banlieues, where a large number of Muslims live under economically precarious conditions. The French police have developed an antagonist relationship with the banlieues, intervening mostly as a form of suppression rather than protection. The state of emergency allowed the police to establish precise cartographic knowledge of what they understand to be the bastions of the adversary. As a result of these legal conditions, the antagonism that the police develop toward residents—especially youth—materializes as an even more asymmetrical violence than that of “normal” times.

Five days after the November attacks, 1,500 officers from various branches of law enforcement, including the RAID—an elite tactical unit of the French National Police—raided a building in the center of Saint-Denis where two suspects and one family member were hiding. The televisual imagery linked to this event was like that of a war zone, with the setting already prepared as the face of the banlieues (despite it possessing what could be defined as a typically Parisian urbanity). The deployment of SWAT teams or soldiers in the banlieues is not uncommon in such neighborhoods, where delinquency, criminality, and threat to national security are often demagogically confused by politicians and the police. In his 2010 book, Opération Banlieues, Hacène Belmessous examined the potential scenarios that would lead the French army to intervene in the banlieues during the most intense years of the Sarkozy administration.[1] Although antagonism between the French government and the suburban youth has always been strong, the seven years of Sarkozy’s governance (four as Minister of Interior Affairs, and five as President) intensified the violence of this relationship.

Belmessous describes how in addition to urban planners, architects, local associations, and social-housing developers, the police have participated, in recent years, in decisions regarding the renovation of some suburban neighborhoods. The relationship between the former and the police seems often to reach a level of complicity in the surveillance and control of the residents. In 2010, a new law “reinforcing the fight against group violence and the protection of persons in charge of a public service mission” allows social developers to set up video surveillance cameras whose feed of common spaces of social housing buildings is sent directly to the police.[2] Such measures resonate with 1970s architectural theories of “design against crime” as defined by architects like Oscar Newman and Barry Poyner, who used architecture’s capacity to control visibility and filter bodies in order to police collective housing spaces.[3] At other times, the policing renovation comes at the expense of the architects’ original scheme: in a recent article for The Funambulist, Belmessous describes how the great pedestrian plain of La Grande Borne—a large postwar housing estate one hour south of Paris—had been transformed to accommodate vehicles crossing it.[4] Although it was claimed that the change would mostly serve the fire department in case of an emergency, Belmessous notes that the residents he interviewed were positive that the transformation was requested by the police.

Part of the latter’s influence on urban design and architecture can be also found in the relatively recent constructions of several police stations in the northern and eastern banlieues of Paris. Those communicate themselves—through their spatiality, aesthetics, and choice of material (brick, black steel, and even, in one instance, imitation marble)—as if they were designed by architecture offices also responsible for libraries, schools, or other, less inherently politically charged buildings. However, their careful design fails to disguise their fortified characteristics understood in a broader narrative of a fantasized civil war between the banlieue youth and the police. If there are any windows at all on the ground level, they often resemble medieval arrow slits. Exterior walls sometimes present various degrees of inclination—a technique used by 17th-century fortress architects. Entrances are controlled and uninviting, and adjacent sidewalks are protected from vehicles by metal bollards and furniture.

Comparing these police stations to those built in Paris’s wealthier neighborhoods or western suburbs displays the drastic difference in the relationships between the police and local populations. Police stations in wealthy neighborhoods are a far cry from the fortress-like structures of the banlieues; instead they tend to occupy valuable historical heritage buildings or, alternatively, new buildings with large welcoming glass surfaces. This contrast drives us to question the role of the police in a given environment, and how architecture materializes this role.

The police have a strong sense of space. Like the military, they deploy themselves within space, controlling and appropriating it. Their participation in the design of banlieues, as described above, has drastic consequences in terms of how these urban spaces are defined and experienced. Yet, we should refrain from seeing such involvement as a corruption of the noble discipline we presume architecture to be. While police and architecture do not necessarily share the same aim, their respective functions have in common the organization of bodies in space—the police do so through intimidation and coercion, the architect through walls. Of course, a wall that splits a given urban or national territory into two segregated parts and any “normal” house wall do not bear the same political intensity; yet, both define the social condition of their sides and enforce the position of bodies according to their trace. Architecture does not need the intention of controlling bodies in order to do so, but its deliberate instrumentalization by the police or the military can be considered as another aspect of these forces’ legal recourse to violence that define their function. Architects need therefore to understand this intrinsic correlation between architecture and policing if they intend to take responsibility for the political dimensions of their work, or resist the fears they too often crystalize and reinforce. In order to do so, they need to continuously practice the counterintuitive exercise that consists in thinking against the very essence of their discipline.

[1] Hacène Belmessous, Opération Banlieues: Comment l’état prépare la guerre urbaine dans les cités françaises (Paris: La Découverte, 2010).

[2] See Belmessous, Opération banlieues, 137–38.

[3] Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (London: Macmillan, 1973); Barry Poyner, Design against Crime: Beyond Defensible Space (Oxford: Butterowrth-Heinemann, 1983).

[4] Hacène Belmessous, “French Banlieues: Neighborhoods in a State of Exception,” trans. Liduam Pong, The Funambulist 2 (November–December 2015).

The post The Architecture of the State of Emergency in France (Harvard Design Magazine 2016) appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

On February 2, 2017, in the banlieue municipality of Aulnay-sous-Bois (North-East), 22-year-old Black man Théo L. was raped by a police officer, while three others were holding him. As of today, Théo is still at the hospital suffering of a 3.5-inch-long tear of his anus. The video showing the crime was quickly spread, provoking outrage country-wide, and making it impossible for police officers to deny the anal penetration with a telescopic baton to which Théo was subjected. However, the officers and the service within the police in charge of the investigation have since made the outrageous claim that what happened was an accident, going as far as forming the phrase “deliberate rape” to describe what the situation was not according to them, in an extremely dangerous redefinition of what a rape actually is: an unambiguous crime with no room whatsoever for interpretation regarding what could be claimed as “attenuating circumstances.” The same night, the cité des 3000 — a cité consists of high-density social housing in low density urbanism — where Théo lives was plunged into darkness while the police undertook numerous identity checks within it. Other banlieues saw young people revolting against armed police officers in full gear operating in neighborhoods that they appear to consider as enemy territory.

The rallying cry of our outrage can be found in the phrase “Théo et Adama te rappellent pourquoi Zyed et Bouna courraient” (“Théo and Adama remind you why Zyed and Bouna were running”), associating the police crime against Théo to the death of Adama Traoré immediately following his arrest in July 2016, and the death of 17-year-old Zyed Benna and 15-year-old Bouna Traoré in an electric closet in 2005 while being illegitimately chased by the police, which had been the starting point of the great banlieue revolts of that year. Although it is important to note that the stories of Théo L., Adama Traoré, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré are only the most mediatized of many more instances of police targeting of the Arab and Black youth in metropolitan France and in overseas territories (where the continuity of colonialism is the most obvious, yet remains relatively unaddressed in main media) the organizing done around them is immensely important.

This is why, last Saturday (February 11, 2017), 3,000 of us gathered in front of the High Court of Bobigny, the prefecture of Seine-Saint-Denis, which constitutes the department with the most pauperized banlieues of Paris, including Aulnay-sous-Bois, while other gatherings were organized in a few other banlieues of France. The spatial characteristics of this protest were truly remarkable, which pushes me to describe them here, in relation to the photographs that I could take while being there [***For all of the images taken that day please visit the original post on The Funambulist***]. In contrast to the journalists present who did not have the decency to recognize that covering what happened could only be done through their own subjectivity as limited-in-space bodies, I only present my own photographs here as an embracing of such subjectivity.

The gathering happened in a strip of land above an underground highway that separates South Bobigny, which includes the subway station, a shopping mall, a few institutional buildings and an important amount of social-housing towers, from the most Northern part of the municipality, where the High Court, the police station and some office buildings share their space with a more house-based (pavillionnaire) residential urbanism. This strip of land that would have trouble qualifying as park as nothing seem to be made to invite any activity in it whatsoever, is augmented by a large avenue and, further, tram rails. The strip is fenced, which allowed the police that day to block the exits fronting the High Court and keep us out of the avenue. The most striking feature of this place is the blue bridge linking the South part to the High Court. At the beginning of the protest, a squads of fully-geared and armed police officer was already in position to block the bridge using what I called a few times the “politics of narrowness” that the bridge architecturally produced as a corridor. Meanwhile, officers from the BAC — Brigade Anti-Criminalité, the easiest brigade to link directly to colonial history, and the most violent one in the banlieues — were taking advantage of the bridge’s overhang to monitor the crowd. In this regard, the symbolic of the bridge’s pyramidal structure did not go unnoticed in the divine monitoring it suggested! It ought to be observed that although I never found myself in a situation where police officers could so easily control the territory, the gaze had certainly some symmetrical characteristics and it was easy for us to monitor the various movements of the police on the bridge too.

After an hour of powerful speeches, calling for justice for Théo and other victims of police violence, as well as insisting on the systemic manifestation of this violence, the crowd, until then solidly gathered, turned to the bridge where about twenty teenagers and young men decided to charge the police. Here again, the spatial characteristics of the corridor makes it easier to defend than to attack, in particular (obviously) when the attack only has small stones to its disposal, and the defense is armed of various incapacitating grenades, flash balls and later, tear gas grenades shot by mortar at us without consideration for any crowd panic that it could create. Later on, dozens of police trucks intervened while tear gas kept on falling from the sky, regardless of who may be under — I found myself in a few situations where we had to run away with mothers and their children. The subsequent car-burning and window-breaking that happened in the neighborhood and particularly in the nearby shopping mall was, as usual, the only aspect of the event described at length by the media and politicians later that day. Various speakers at the protest and other representatives of banlieue association voiced their regret that a few kids would turn to violence to express their rage against the police, while upright alternative media such as Mediapart made a point to address the fact that the fires and stones were only the responsibility of a small minority.

However, we can see how this apologetic or minimizing reactions contributes, as always, to the narrative of the “demonstration, while legitimate, that took an ugly turn” —legitimacy being only brought up when it is placed in contrast of an apparently more important problem. Such a narrative only makes sense if there is a strict discontinuity between the event and recent as well as deep history. Recent history here is an abominable crime committed by four police officers on a young man, as well as the strong and provocative presence of police officers “ready for the battle” aiming their weapons at a demonstration mobilized against the police. My friend and I even heard one of the officers on the bridge uttering the words “un accident est si vite arrivé” (“an accident could easily happen”) referring without doubt to the police qualification of the rape against Théo as an accident to use it as an euphemistic threat. The deep history with which the current police violence is in continuity is the colonial history itself and its structural racism.The indigénat (indigenous administrative status in the colonies and in the “metropolis”) has mutated into a subcitizenry to which belong French citizens whose families were formerly colonized subjects, in particular those who are currently residents of the banlieues. The police in its various degrees of spectacular violence, from the daily controls, intimidations, insults, and humiliations, all the way to rape and murder, is only the most visible materialization of such a citizenry, but we should not be mistaken: this is an administrative and social violence too.

The post A Spatial Report of the February 11 Banlieue Protest Against Police Violence in Bobigny appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Dear readers of The Funambulist,

The high frequency of publication of the magazine continues with, today, the release of the tenth issue of The Funambulist (March-April 2017) dedicated to Architecture & Colonialism (see description below). As usual, you can purchase the issue in its digital or print+digital form, or decide to support the editorial project in a sustained manner through a monthly or annual subscription — all subscribers have access to the magazine’s full online archives. Sales and subscriptions to the magazine constitute 70% of the project’s incomes (i.e., means of existence); your support is very important!

THE FUNAMBULIST 10 (MARCH-APRIL 2017)
ARCHITECTURE & COLONIALISM:

The tenth issue of The Funambulist operates somehow in continuity with issue 9 Islands (January-February 2017), which offered the words of indigenous and anticolonial struggles from various islands of the world. Voices from Kanaky, Mayotte, Hawai’i, and Puerto Rico resonate therefore here with those from Libya, Kenya, Palestine, and Java, in the colonial situations they all describe. While the last issue was dedicated to the seminal work of Édouard Glissant, inscribed throughout the pages of this present one is the influence of another Martiniquais: Frantz Fanon.

The two editorial arguments of this issue are simple: colonialism is not an era, it is a system of military/police, legal, administrative, social, and cultural system of domination; and, architecture is not (only) an aesthetic vessel, it is an apparatus organizing and hierarchizing bodies in space.

Editor-in-Chief: Léopold Lambert
Part-time assistant: Noelle Geller

Contributors: Kelsen Caldwell, Mawena Yehouessi, Jess Myers, Fabien Sacriste, Mia Fuller, Mahy Mourad, Jawad Dukhgan, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Samaneh Moafi, Ann Laura Stoler, Sophia Azeb, Bruno Fert, Adele Jarrar, Haneen Odetalla, Méria Faïdi, Stefan van Biljon, Kelechi Anabaraonye.
Contributing copyeditor: Maxwell Donnewald

READ MORE

READ THE ARTICLES ONLINE (SUBSCRIBERS)

The post The Funambulist 10 (March-April 2017) Architecture & Colonialism Is Now Published appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Earlier today, I encountered the presentation of a new building designed by well-known French architect Rudy Ricciotti in collaboration with Passelac & Roques on the popular website, Archdaily. This building is the Memorial of the Camp of Rivesaltes (formerly known as “Camp Joffre”) in French Catalonia, and the press release that Archdaily docilely reproduced without any critique, comment, or request for additional information, only introduces the history curated by the Memorial through the following extremely vague sentence: “We cannot remain detached from the history of Camp Joffre through a discourse that is indifferent to the human drama that unfolded on this very site,” before continuing with the usual architectural considerations one may find for any other building — Ricciotti’s office’s official website does not even include a textual description of the project. This short article will therefore attempt to present the camp’s history, the selective memorialization of this history of incarceration and State violence, and the subsequent responsibility Ricciotti and Archdaily bear in silencing this fundamental dimension of this project.

Situated five kilometers away from the city of Perpignan, the Camp Joffre was created in 1939 as a military facility — Joseph Joffre was a WWI French General — that quickly became a carceral one as part of the massive arrest accomplished by the French Police in the so-called “Free Zone” during the occupation of the Northern part of the country by the German army (1940-1942). The camp, under the Vichy sovereignty, was then used to incarcerate 17,500 people: 9,275 Spanish Republicans (the Spanish border is only 25 kilometer away), 1,225 French Romanis, and 7,000 Foreign Jews arrested by the French police, 2313 of whom will later be”handed” to the Nazis to be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the Holocaust. In this regard, the Camp Joffre was sinisterly called the “Drancy of the Free Zone” in reference to the camp of Drancy in the northeastern banlieue of Paris, where 67,400 Jews were incarcerated between 1942 and 1944 before being deported to the death camps. 215 people died during their incarceration in Camp Joffre. After 1942 and the invasion of the “Free Zone,” the camp was used by the German army as a military facility. At the end of the war, more than 10,000 German, Austrian, and Italian prisoners of war, as well as some French collaborators were incarcerated in the camp until their liberation in 1948. Many will die in the two first years of captivity due to the very poor conditions of detention.

In the beginning of the 1960s and, with the novel independence of its former colonies, the French government had to provide accommodation for dozens of thousands of families of colonized subjects who were engaged with the French army in its war against the decolonial movements. It is particularly the case of the 91,000 so-called “Harkis” from Algeria who had to relocate to France after their participation in the war effort against the Algerian Revolution between 1954 and 1962. Between 1962 and 1964, 21,000 of them were housed in the Camp Joffre, which was not modified in its military and carceral original urban plan and, as such, remained a highly controllable, segregated and oppressive spatial setting. Later on, about 800 Guineans soldiers and their families moved in the camp after living in remaining military facilities in Senegal or Ivory Coast — these countries’ independence did not mean the end of colonialism, or at least a part of it — as well as some Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian soldiers who fought alongside the French army against the decolonial movements of Indochina.

This history, in particular the contribution of the camp to the Holocaust and the incarceration of Spanish Republicans, is well-acknowledged by the Memorial and the national narrative that legitimized its creation. As such, it takes part in the relatively recent acknowledgment of France’s eager collaboration with the Nazis during WWII —although the term “France” is usually substituted with “the Vichy Regime.” The history of the camp in its relation to colonialism is under emphasized, but the situation of the Harkis can be said to have been addressed by the national narrative as their abandonment by the French government after these first years of precarious accommodation was also acknowledged by President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012. Of course, such acknowledgement changed nothing to the conditions of life of their descendants and of other former colonized subjects, but this specific article solely focuses on the national memorialization of historic violence.

A last historical episode of the camp is however completely obliterated from this memorialization. The Memorial’s official website barely give us an indication: “…between 1986 and 2007, a small [sic] administrative detention center for soon-to-be-expelled foreigners was set up there. This center was eventually transferred to Perpignan as it appeared as incompatible with the creation of a place for memory and history.” Although this migrant detention center can be said to be small in relation to others in the European Union (its detention capacity is only 21 people), we can see how the term “small” is used here to minimize the continuation of violence in the Camp Joffre. Moreover, its propensity in expelling people rapidly increases significantly the amount of people who were detained in it (1,094 in 2006 for instance, see source).

This capacity was also more than doubled (48) when the transfer occurred from a site deemed to host a memorial about historical violence to the airport surroundings of Perpignan — a common location and remote urban typology for migrant detention centers. This State violence, non-recognized as such or legitimized by current ideologies and politics — as if the historical violence memorialized today had not followed the same logic of legitimization yesterday — is thus reterritorialized, perhaps waiting for its future memorialization. Architects and journalists (in this case, Archdaily editors) are accomplices to selective national(ist) narratives of memorialization when they refuse to acknowledge and engage with the continuity of the historic violence that States (in particular Western ones) memorialize, by definition, always too late since it is their very own violence that is being memorialized. Although we can celebrate the creation of such architecture of remembrance and sensitization to the national responsibility in historic violence, they are useless if they do not fundamentally engage with the continuation of the logics that allows the conditions for this violence to occur.

The post Architects Accomplices of a Selective National(ist) Narrative of Memorialization – Rivesaltes, France appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Photograph above by Christel Bonard of Gwendolyne, holding the Guianan flag (thanks Lya Selma Zébus-Loubidika)

You might or might not have heard about the general strike currently unfolding in Guiana. Guiana is a French colony in South America, home of 250,000 people, including 9,000 members of the Indigenous Nations of Kalina, Arawak, Emerillon, Galibi, Palikur, Wayampi and Wayana whose ancestors were slaughtered in trying to prevent the colonization of their land in the 18th century. Thousands of enslaved African bodies were later forcefully brought to Guiana by the French. Some became maroons and formed free communities in the rain forest. Similarly to other French slavery colonies, the 1948 abolition saw the engineered arrival of Chinese and Indian exploited manpower to the territory. It is now only known by most French “metropolitans” as the rocket-launch site of the European Space Program.

OVERSEAS “DEPARTMENTS” ///

Since 1946, Guiana is one of the five “overseas departments” of France alongside Martinique, Guadeloupe, Mayotte, and La Réunion. The departementalisation of four of these colonies was indeed voted a year after the end of WWII in a law drafted by the parliament representatives for Martinique and Guadeloupe (Léopold Bissol), Guiana (Gaston Monnerville), and La Réunion (Raymond Vergès) and eventually carried by Aimé Césaire (who was then Mayor of Fort-de-France, and also representative for Martinique) himself. This law was granting the full French citizenship to all colonized subjects in these four territories and it does not require much speculation — Césaire was, of course, very vocal about it — that these representatives were in no way aiming for the current still colonial conditions when drafting this law. In fact, the current six overseas departments (Mayotte became a “department” in 2001) are subjected to an ambiguous contradictory designation that, on the one hand, make them fully French when it is to the advantage of the French State, while, on the other hand, deeply neglecting their existence, as well as undermining the legitimate claim to the French full-citizenry for their predominantly racialized populations (cf. articles by Françoise Vergès and Hamid Mokaddem respectively about Mayotte and New Caledonia-Kanaky in the 9th issue of The Funambulist).

GENERAL STRIKE ///

Today, Guiana, just like Martinique and Guadeloupe in 2009, undertakes a general strike to protest against the extreme precariousness in which non-public workers have to live and the deep disparity between the level of life in “Metropolitan France” and in the colonies. Rallying under the Creole scream “Nou Bon Kesa” (“We Won’t Take It Anymore”), they are dozens of thousands striking and demonstrating — they even succeeded in stopping the launch of a rocket last week — creating what Western media seem unanimous to call “a paralysis” of Guiana in a biased capitalist (and implicitly ableist) reading of the situation. The understanding of society in the strict form of flows and the perception of their interruption (the “paralysis”) as a form of violence corresponds, indeed, to the capitalist vision transformed into reality.

The “500 Brothers,” a group of masked Black men mobilized against criminality and who form one of the core organization in this strike particularly catch the French press’ gaze, revealing the apparently terrifying-yet-fascinating vision that unidentifiable, resolute Black male bodies constitute for white viewers — we can see in this terrified fascination a perfect and rare correspondence of what they actually see and what they imagine seeing. As usual, this paranoid fetichization of what is perceived as a violence — made illegal by the 2010 islamophobic law forbidding anyone to “wear an outfit dissimulating the face” in public space — to which the gun and sword logo in the back of the “500 Brothers” (either clumsily or very skillfully) contributes, takes the focus away from the formidable crowds demonstrating these last few days.

“MANIFESTO FOR HIGH-NECESSITY PRODUCTS” ///

During the general strikes of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 2009, Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and seven other Caribbean (male, regrettably) authors had published with Galaade Editions a short “Manifesto for High-Necessity Products” that envisioned a post-capitalist society that the strike was alluding, where high-necessity products consisted of food of course, but also “dignity, honor, music, songs, sports, dances, readings, philosophy, spirituality, love, free-time dedicated to the accomplishment of great intimate desires (in short, the poetics).” They borrow Jean-Claude Michéa’s concept of “ethic cleansing” (“épuration éthique”) as a creation of capitalism that “directs all imaginaries” (“préside dans tous les imaginaires”). And. although I have followed some thinkers in the past in arguing that Gilles Deleuze had a rather “metropolitan” reading of islands and their colonial conditions, it is tempting to also use the quote about Third-World Cinema in The Time-Image (1985) that these Carribeans authors use to open the manifesto:

The moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims “There have never been people here,” the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty town and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute.

We can re-read the manifesto today, having in mind that, on the contrary of the imaginary created by the mainstream press and politicians of overseas territories being far behind the Metropolis’ modernity, their struggles constitute the vanguard vision of the decolonial processes that shall happen in the old Metropolis as the last lines of the manifesto suggests:

So here is our vision: Small countries, suddenly at the new core of the world, suddenly immense to be the first examples of post-capitalist societies, able to undertake a human fulfillment as a part of the living’s horizontal plenitude.

The post General Strike in Guiana: The Vanguard of France’s Decolonization Is in the Overseas Territories appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

The five following film/books dedicated to a specific aspect of the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) from a fascinating historical series in which each new volume is engaged in a productive dialogue with their predecessors. Although this dialogue is fairly common with history books that need to acknowledge the genealogy to which they belong, this specific series of works indicate this genealogy directly in their titles:

• The Battle of Algiers (film): In 1966, Gilo Pontecorvo released what certainly remains one of the best political films of cinema’s history (discussed several times on this blog). It recreates the decolonial struggle of the FLN in the Algerian capital between 1954 and 1960, and provides a verified historical reconstitution of the battle that opposed the FLN and its accomplices with the French police, then paratroopers deployed in Algiers to destroy any form of nationalist insurrection in Algiers. The film is particularly attached to show the extreme importance of the urban fabric in which this battle unfold, in particular Algiers’ Casbah. In fact, its labyrinthine, sinuous and narrow streets, as well as the vertical layers of circulations (even on the roofs) of the dense old city (half destroyed by the French colonizers in the 1830s) proved tremendously useful for the FLN, despite the success of the paratroopers in dismantling the resistant network in Algiers in 1958 (the battle was lost, but four years later, the war was won).
• The True Battle of Algiers: In 1971, General Jacques Massu published his memoirs of the same period of time with a title that certainly takes reference in Pontecorvo’s film, which was banned in France until that year. The addition of the term “true” to the title shows that Massu, who was in charge of the French colonial violent counter-insurgency, refuses Pontecorvo’s narrative. The fictitious character of Lieutenant-Colonel Mathieu in the film (a mix of Massu himself as well as General Marcel Bigeard, in charge of the counter-insurgency in the Casbah) is portrayed as a non-ideological professional military passionate by intelligence, strategy and accomplishing his mission, while Massu was more ideologically involved in Algeria remaining fully part of France. In 1958, he did not directly took part to, but supported the military semi-successful putsch against President René Coty’s administration, which eventually “brought back” Charles De Gaulle as President of the Republic without any election. De Gaulle, as a military-became-politician, was perceived as stronger to annihilate the Algerian decolonial movement, but pragmatically engaged negotiations with the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, and in 1960, Massu publicly criticized him and was subsequently fired from his position. The true battle of Algiers constitutes therefore also a narrative retroactively oriented against De Gaulle.
• The Battle of Algiers (books): In 1984, Saâdi Yacef, one of the leader of the FLN during the battle of Algiers wrote three books recounting the revolutionary struggle from his perspective. He cites Massu’s book several times to contradict it, in a dialogue that is significant in this series since Yacef had already written “Memories of the Battle of Algiers in 1962 and was a producer of Pontecorvo’s film, even playing a character strongly influenced by his own biography (called El-hadi Jafar in the film).
• The Battle of Paris: In 1991, Jean-Luc Einaudi continues the series “The Battle Of…” with a book that describes the key moment of the “metropolitan” equivalent of the battle of Algiers. On October 5, 1961, a curfew only targeting Algerians in the Paris region was declared by Maurice Papon, the infamous Prefect of police of Paris at that time (more on him in a future post). The FLN France Federation organized massive demonstrations of 20,000 Algerians living in Paris and its banlieues on October 17. The police suppression of these demonstrations ended as a massacre both in “hot blood” (demonstrators shot on site, numerous of them beaten with batons, many thrown in the Seine River) and in “cold blood” (torture, and systematic beating in detention for some of the thousands who were arrested and detained that evening). This event is at the core of a research I am currently doing and I will soon publish a long cartographic transcription of it on this blog.
• The Battle of France: In 2004 is published the most recent book of this series. Written by Linda Amiri, it is here again a direct reference to The Battle of Algiers, of course, but even more importantly to its direct “predecessor,” Einaudi’s Battle of Paris. Through this research, Amiri wanted the description of the October 17, 1961 massacre to be understood in its geographic (“Metropolitan” France) and historical (1954-1962) context. She even returned to the first significant immigration of Algerian workers in France (going from colonial subjects to immigrants in the “metropolis”) in 1912 and help us, through many quotes from the archives of both the French police and the FLN France Federation, to understand the specificity of the situation for Algerians (in general, and members of the decolonial movement in particular) working in France during the Algerian Revolution.

I have (serendipitously enough) watched/read these five film/book in their chronological order and they now constitute very important documents in a research I have undertaken to propose in the future a hopefully comprehensive spatial/architectural analysis of the five states of emergency promulgated by the French State since the legislative creation of this state of exception in 1955. As the fifth of these states of emergency is still ongoing since November 13, 2015, there is no doubt that history can teach us a lot about France’s colonial continuum today.

The post The Battle Of…: Five Film/Books About the Algerian Revolution appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

This article is published in parallel with Warscapes, thanks to Bhakti Shringarpure who asked me to write it and edited it.

We are days away from the second round of the French Presidential elections between a banker candidate, Emmanuel Macron, who wants to rule France like a start-up company and the President of the Front National (FN), Marine Le Pen. She has temporarily stepped down from this position for this second round but will, without doubt, resume her role as soon as the election is over. Le Pen wants to significantly and systematically consolidate France’s white supremacy and nationalism even though a lot of noise is produced around the question of voting for or against the latter.

Some of those who refuse to serve as the eternal bulwarks against the FN are activists who because of their race, religion, sexuality or immigration status would likely become the first targets of a Le Pen presidency. It is not possible to judge them for their position, which says a lot about the degree of their resignation. However other advocates of the non-vote on Sunday are people who do not risk much from a Le Pen administration. One could even say that they might indirectly benefit from it and it is those who seem to have forgotten what the FN stands for.

Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen (the father of Marine), this political party has been at the forefront of nationalist programs and ideology in Europe since then. I am writing this text exactly twenty-two years after the murder of Brahim Bouarram, a young Moroccan drowned by a group of FN sympathizers in the Seine river in Paris. This reminds us also of the massacre of October 17, 1961 when a few hundred Algerian men were thrown into the river by French police under the orders of the infamous Paris Prefect, Maurice Papon (more on this historical episode soon on The Funambulist blog).

In 2002, a few years later, JM. Le Pen obtained the second largest amount of votes at the Presidential election and a large part of the France population took to the streets to show their fierce opposition to the values defended by the FN.  As a result, the opposing candidate, standing-President Jacques Chirac, was reelected with 82% of the votes. Since 2011, when JM. Le Pen’s daughter Marine Le Pen was elected new President of the party, JM. Le Pen still remains President of Honor. The FN undertook a “de-evilization” process that has much more to do with the way it ‘markets’ itself than how its actual political programs significantly evolved. Such a marketing strategy seems to have paid off when one observes that she has a real shot in Sunday’s election.

Many analyses can be written about the nationalist and racist ideology developed by JM. Le Pen (in its most explicit forms) and M. Le Pen (in slightly more disguised forms) but, as we saw all too well with the election of the current President of the United States, the visceral sometimes has to take over the intellectual presentation of arguments. This is therefore the story of an object.

An object that has a lot to say about France’s last century of history as well as the current moment France is experiencing before the second round of the country’s Presidential Election. It is an object that links three eras of structural racism in France. The first one is the military occupation of the country by the German army between 1940 and 1944. The second comprises the murderous violence deployed by the French state against decolonization movements in Indochina, West Africa, the Maghreb, Algeria in particular, as well as on its own soil. And the third one can be found in the last twenty years of French politics during which the father-and-daughter’s Front National became an unavoidable actor of a representative democracy in decay.

This object is a knife. As we learn from reading a 2012-text written by journalist Florence Beaugé, it is a knife found by twelve-year-old Mohamed Cherif Moulay on March 3, 1957, in a dark corner of his house in Algiers’ Casbah. The night before, a group of French paratroopers had entered his family house and tortured his 42-year-old dad, Ahmed Moulay, in front of his wife and his six children, with water, electricity and, at least one knife, before killing him. The knife was forgotten by one of the soldiers and later found and hidden by Mohamed Moulay, 12 years old. It is only in 2003 that the knife will exit the Moulays’ house, when the Algiers correspondent to French newspaper Le Monde brings it back to France to be used as an evidence in the trial for defamation that Jean-Marie Le Pen’s attempted against Le Monde. 5 centimeters long and 2.5 centimeters wide, it is the same kind of knife that was used by the Hitler Youth. It was fabricated by German knife makers in the Ruhr according to the investigation made by journalist Sorj Chalandon. The blade bears the name of J.A. Henckels, manufacturer in Solinger.

On the sheath, one can read J.M. Le Pen, 1er REP.

The post The Testimony of an Object: Le Pen and the French History of Violence appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on May 22, 2017
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In my current research about the architecture of the five states of emergency declared by the French State since 1955, the October 17, 1961 massacre that occurred in Paris towards the end of the Algerian Revolution is a key event. One thing strikes in the (disproportionally small) memorialization that is made of this event every year: the supposed spatial and temporal punctuality of its occurrence. According to the main narrative, the scenes of extreme violence of French police officers throwing Algerians into the Seine River happened around the Place Saint-Michel at the very center of Paris and manifested itself in the “hot-blooded” moment of suppression of massive demonstrations. What further research reveal on the contrary, is that this massacre occurred in a multiplicity of spatialities and temporalities. This is what this series of maps using aerial imagery of the time (plus/minus 3 years) attempts to illustrate in its descriptions of this event in a similar fashion to the one I had drawn to address the relationship between the city’s physicality and the bloody annihilation of the Paris Commune in 1871 (see these maps here).

In order to understand this event, some historical context is necessary: in 1961, the revolution led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) that aims at decolonizing Algeria is seven years old. Initiated in Algiers’ Casbah (see previous post), the decolonial movement spread to the rest of Algeria, as well as in large French cities, where an important amount of Algerians live (350,000 in 1962). Although several administrative institutions dedicated specifically to North Africans residing and working in France have been created throughout time by the French State — see Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control Between the Wars by Clifford Rosenberg (Cornell, 2006) for an account of the 1920s and 1930s in particular — Algerians in France are not administratively considered as colonial subjects, and virtually benefit from the same rights than any other French citizen, Algeria being considered as a part of France. In reality, the job and housing segregation is manifest, and the police, in particular the Paris one, practices racial profiling on a daily basis. The Brigade des Nord-Africains (BNA) that explicitly targeted North Africans and had provided auxiliary officers to the Gestapo during the occupation (1940-1944) was dissolved in 1945 but, in 1953, a new branch of the Paris police is created to operate on the same logic: the Brigade des Agressions et Violences (BAV). Racial profiling as a colonial and counter-insurrection tactic is never made more explicit than when on October 5, 1961, a curfew solely implemented on Algerians is declared by the Seine (Paris metropolitan area) Prefecture of Police.

One character is central, not only to the October 17, 1961 massacre, but more generally of the French state’s history of violence from the 1940s to the 1980s: Maurice Papon. During the Nazi occupation of France (1940-1944), Papon occupied the position of General Secretary of the Bordeaux Prefecture and, as such, he facilitated the deportation of 1,600 Jews from the South of France to the camp of Drancy (Paris banlieue), before being eventually deported to Auschwitz. His trial for his participation to the Holocaust only happened in 1998 and, after France’s Liberation, Papon was given numerous executive responsibilities all connected to French colonialism and counter-insurgency — as such, we can think of him as a historical alter ego to Robert Bugeaud (often cited on this blog), who has been active on the counter-insurrection and colonial front both in France and Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s:
– 1945: charged of the vice-direction of Algeria at the Ministry of the Interior.
– 1946: takes part in the Interministry Commission on the French West Indies.
– 1949: is named Prefect of Constantine (Algeria) for the first time.
– 1951: occupies the position of General Secretary of the Paris Prefecture of Police
– 1954: is named General Secretary of the Morocco Protectorate
– 1956: returns to Constantine as IGAME (Prefect with extraordinary powers) to lead the counter-insurrection against decolonial movements in the Northeastern part of Algeria. In 1956 and 1957, records attests of the killing of 18,316 “rebels” [sic] by the French colonial police and army, as well as 117,000 people “regrouped” in camps — see Fabien Sacriste’s text about these camps in the Aurès in The Funambulist 10 Architecture and Colonialism.

In 1958, the FLN in Paris is particularly active in its clandestine political organizing, raising and transferring funds — with the help of French “suitcase carriers” about whom I’d like to write in the near future — also regularly carrying assassinations of its opponents, Algerians they consider as “traitors,” and French police officers. On March 13, 1958, police officers demonstrate in front of the French Parliament to demand more latitude and immunity in their job; the next day, Papon is named Prefect of the Seine and is charged of annihilating the action of the FLN in the Paris metropolitan area, strengthen by his training in counter-insurrectional tactics and practices from his experience cited above. As shown on maps 3 and 4 below, on August 28, 1958, Papon organizes massive rounds up of Algerians that result in the detention of 5,000 of them, including in the infamous indoor velodrome, the “Vel d’Hiv,” where on July 17, 1942, 12,884 Jews had been rounded up before being deported to Auschwitz. In January 1959, Papon creates the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV) where Algerians can be legally “assigned to residence” [sic] without trials (see map 18 below). In March 1961, he creates a new branch of police under his direct orders: the Force de Police Auxiliaire, composed of harkis (Algerian volunteers in the French police and army in France and Algeria). These officers are given the biggest latitude in their suppression of the FLN and many Algerians suspected to have ties with the decolonial organization — given that the FLN was intimidating recalcitrant Algerians to pay the revolutionary tax, this means almost every Algerians — are arbitrarily arrested and tortured in police stations and other buildings’ basements (see maps 5, 6, and 7 below). Some of those tortured are later thrown into the Seine River, months before the October 17, 1961 massacre, now associated with this atrocious practice.

Although the references I have been using for this article (see below) are quite precise and comprehensive in the descriptions of the October 17, 1961 massacre and its historical context, they surprisingly fail to indicate an important contextual element: on April 21, 1961, four generals of the French colonial army in Algeria, Maurice Challe, Edmond Jouhaud, Raoul Salan, and André Zeller, attempt a coup against the President, Charles De Gaulle, who is negotiating the Algerian independence with the Temporary Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA). On April 23, the state of emergency is declared in France and on April 26, the generals are arrested and the coup is effectively a failure. The state of emergency however remains operative to prevent other attempts of the kind, or terrorist actions by the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) in favor of French Algeria. Although this state of emergency that lasts until October 9, 1962 (one month after the Independence of Algeria) is not oriented against Algerians in essence, it makes only little doubt that the extra executive powers it legally allows has a lot to do with the way Papon acts in the second part of 1961.

As mentioned above, one particular measure of exception taken by Papon consists in a curfew specifically targeting Algerians on October 5, 1961. This measure motivates the FLN in France to organize massive demonstrations in Paris on October 17. All Algerian men are asked to join the demonstrations unarmed — any person found with a knife risks to be severely punished by the FLN — in the center of Paris in evening in order to form three corteges protesting the curfew in particular, and French colonialism in general. What the maps above and below attempt to demonstrate is the difficulty for Algerians living and working in Paris’ banlieues to access the center of the city in order to join these demonstrations — and here a broader point can be made about Paris’ segregating centrality still operative today as regularly discussed here. Bridges and subways stations are particular sites of violence, as their narrowness allows a tight and systematic control by the police (see maps 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 below). On many of them, Algerians are arrested, systematically beaten with batons, and even sometimes shot and thrown in the Seine River (see maps below for more details). Although, Papon is not known to have given direct orders for the massacre to occur, he was in present in the command room of the Prefecture of Police, only meters away from the bloodbath of Saint-Michel (see map 12), and the absence of any order to prevent the violence and killings, as well as the false rumors on police radio that some officers had been killed by Algerians, makes him the effective responsible commander of the massacre — something for which he will never be prosecuted.

This is even more true when one looks beyond the “hot-blooded” murderous suppression of the demonstrations. Later that night, and in the following days, systematic beating and even killings continue in the improvised detention centers of various sizes — the largest ones being the indoor State de Coubertin (1,800 detained, see map 16), the Parc des Expositions (6,600 detained, see map 17), and the CIV itself (860 detained, see map 18) — and in the police operations on bridges at the gates of Paris (see map 19), and against the demonstrations of Algerian women and children organized by the FLN on October 20 (see map 21).

The figures of Algerians killed or injured this dreadful week of October 1961 are still unclear, in particular because of the way the Police archive have been accommodated to reflect a much lower number of casualties than reality — some people who had been killed were on the list of people deported to Algeria — but it is estimated that from 200 to 300 Algerians were killed by bullets and/or in detention, and that from 70 to 84 additional ones were killed after having being thrown in the Seine River. These deaths took years to be acknowledged, on the contrary of the nine victims of the February 8, 1962 massacre, killed by Papon’s police at the Charonne subway station during large demonstrations of French people against the OAS and the suppression of Algerians. These nine French people were members of the main worker union (CGT) and of the Communist Party and they were commemorated by 500,000 people in the streets of Paris four days later, thus contrasting with the absence of massive protest following the massacre of Algerians. Finally, in 2001, a memorializing plaque is set up in Saint-Michel to commemorate the “memory of the numerous Algerians killed in the bloody suppression of the pacific demonstration of October 17, 1961.” As often when it comes to the memorialization of colonial crimes in France, those responsible are not directly cited making it a crime with no criminals and, as explained at the beginning of this article, such a narrative also significantly reduces the spatial and temporal scope of the massacre itself. For this reason, one might value more another official plaque setup in Saint-Denis (Paris banlieue) in 2007: “On October 17, 1961, during the Algerian War, thirty thousands Algerian men and women of the Paris region pacifically demonstrated against the curfew that was imposed on them. This movement was brutally suppressed on the order of the Prefect of Paris. Demonstrators were killed by bullets, hundreds of men and women were thrown into the Seine River and thousands were beaten and imprisoned. Dead bodies were found in the Canal Saint-Denis. Against racism and forgetting, for democracy and human rights, this plaque has been inaugurated by Mayor of Saint-Denis Didier Paillard on March 21, 2007.” Nevertheless, here again, the broader context of colonialism remains shut, illustrating one more time that France has never fully engaged with the structurally racist and colonial violence of its past, let alone of its present, which operates in the direct continuity of this violence.

More than 27% of France’s current population was alive in 1961, and many actors of the October 17 massacre, Algerian demonstrators and French police officers, still carry its memory, its traumatic wounds (for the former) and its immune responsibility (for the latter). History often forgets to mention the way perpetrators and victims have to live together in societies indifferent to (if not in denial of) the violence of the way their relation came to be. In this regard, the genealogy of this violence is not solely perpetuated through family generations, but also through the racialization of French society ruled and controlled by an overwhelmingly white political class and police — the Brigade Anti-Criminalité (BAC) created in 1971 from the colonial logics of the BNA and the BAV, and particularly active in the banlieues, is the most blatant example — and, at the other end of the spectrum, racialized subjects whose lives are often territorially, socially, and economically segregated from their privileged counterparts. Paris being a city that did not structurally changed since the second part of the 19th century, the weaponized spatiality showed on the maps above and below remains fully operative today.

REFERENCES USED IN THE MAKING OF THE MAPS ///
– Jean-Luc Einaudi, La bataille de Paris, Seuil, 1991. — In 1999, Einaudi was sued by Papon for defamation. After presenting his extensive research to the court, he won his trial.
– Linda Amiri, La bataille de France, Laffont, 2004.
– Mathieu Rigouste, “The Colonial Genealogy of the French Police,” in The Funambulist 8 (Nov-Dec 2016) Police.
– Laurent Maffre and Monique Hervo, Demain, Demain, Actes Sud BD, 2012
– Jacques Panijel, Octobre à Paris (film), 1962.

The post Chrono-cartography of the October 17, 1961 Massacre of Algerians in Paris appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on June 8, 2017
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As, this week, we are commemorating the fifty years of the six-day-long war engaged by Israel in 1967, a certain amount of media (Jadaliyya, The Nation, The Intercept, The Electronic Intifada, and more) have published important articles to address the state of things in Palestine and Syria, in particular regarding the ongoing occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, as well as the continuous siege on the Gaza Strip. This article and its map intend mostly to be descriptive, aiming at a doomed-to-be-incomplete reconstitution of these six days; yet, it could not be written without insisting in its conclusion that considering 1967 as the key moment to which Palestine should be somehow “rebooted” constitutes a grave mistake. The following map and text therefore introduce eleven situated episodes of Israel’s Six Day War, as well as attempt to formulate part of the framework through which a decolonial vision of a future Palestine can be thought.

01. May 15, 1967: Gamal Abdel Nasser asks the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force in the Sinai

After the 1956 invasion of the Sinai by the Israeli, French, and British armies following the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the UN provided an “Emergency Force” (UNEF) to facilitate the withdrawal of foreign troops from the Egyptian peninsula. The UNEF was composed of 6,000 soldiers coming from Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, India, Indonesia, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Yugoslavia. On May 15, 1967, more than ten years after the deployment of this force, Nasser successfully asks its withdrawal from Egyptian soil, and redeploys part of the national army in the peninsula. This movement of Egyptian troops feeds the Israeli narrative of an imminent military aggression against Israel. Reports of communications with US intelligence that was not considering such a scenario as probable allows to think of the Israeli government’s fueling of this fear as demagogic and opportunist.

02. May 22, 1967: Egypt closes the Straits of Tiran

The Straits of Tiran are 6-km wide and situated between the Sinai and the small island of Tiran (also under Egyptian sovereignty). Because of the lack of depths in Saudi Arabian waters, it is a necessary passage for ships wanting to access the Gulf of Aqaba, at the ‘end’ of which the town of Eilat provides a small port to the State of Israel. On May 22, 1967, the Egyptian government orders the closing of the Straits of Tiran, thus shutting down one of Israel’s important supply channels for oil. Although Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol had warned that such a blockade would constitute an act of war, Lindsay Johnson’s US administration warns the Israeli government that it would only get its support in case of an Egyptian military aggression. In 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (Picador 2007), Tom Segev describes conversations between Eshkol, Chief of the General Staff (i.e. commander of the Israeli army) Yitzhak Rabin, future Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan (he was officially name on the eve of the invasion), and Intelligence chief Meir Amit proposing to “send a ship to the Gulf of Aqaba, expecting — or hoping — that the Egyptians would fire on it and Israel could then act without having taken the first shot.” This scenario was finally not adopted, favoring a narrative of ‘preemptive legitimate defense’ that characterized most Israeli wars.

03. June 5, 1967: The Israeli army invades the Sinai Peninsula

On June 5, 1967, the Israeli government, under the pressure of its newly named Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan and several generals including Ariel Sharon orders the invasion of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. The Israeli aviation succeeds in destroying a couple of hundreds Egyptian military aircrafts and, in doing so, manages to significantly render the army’s job easier on the ground. The armored divisions of Generals Ariel Sharon, Israel Tal, and Avraham Yoffe quickly take over the entire peninsula. Thousands of Egyptian soldiers are made prisoners and are treated with various degrees of violence and are sometimes even summarily executed. The Israeli occupation of the Sinai will last until 1982 (at a moment when the Israeli front will focus on Lebanon), four years after the signature of the Camp David Accords. At that point, the border between the Gaza Strip and the Sinai will be fully militarized and sealed (see past article).

04. June 5, 1967: The Israeli army invades the Gaza Strip

Since 1948, the Gaza Strip and its 400,000 inhabitants — half of whom are Palestinian refugees who were forcefully evicted from their towns and villages in 1948 by the Zionist militias or, later, the Israeli army — were under Egyptian administration. The June 5, 1967 invasion of the Sinai is done in coordination with the invasion of the Gaza Strip. Facing a fierce resistance, the Israeli army requests a support from the aviation that bombs massively Gaza on June 6. According to Jean-Pierre Filiu in Gaza: A History (Oxford University Press, 2014), 90 of the 100 UNRWA schools operating in the refugee camps are either destroyed in the bombardment or looted by the Israeli soldiers. 40,000 civilians flee the Gaza Strip as a consequence, forming the first group of refugees of the Naksa. A few days after the invasion, on June 11, two Israeli terror attacks kill respectively 8 and 10 civilians in Rafah, increasing the flee of people from the city. In 1967, Tom Segev describes some post-war scenes (hard to imagine today) of Israeli civilians shopping in the streets of Gaza in a civil praxis of the newly occupied territory.

05. June 8, 1967: The Israeli aviation accidentally or deliberately attack the USS Liberty

On June 8, 1967, the Israeli aviation and navy attack a US spying boat, the USS Liberty, which was navigating offshore of Gaza. 34 members of the crew are killed and 171 injured. The Israeli government claimed that it was an accident and apologize but, up until today, the doubt remains that this attack might have been deliberate in order to hide information that the ship could have gathered. In an article published on Monday in The Intercept, Miriam Pensack addresses the silence that still surrounds this event, in particular from the side of US intelligence.

06. June 7, 1967: The Israeli army invades East Jerusalem

Since 1948, East Jerusalem, along with the rest of the West Bank was under Jordanian administration. On June 7, the Israeli army crosses the 1949 Green Line and invade the Old City. Israeli soldiers penetrate on the holy site of the Mosque Esplanade and proceed to set an Israeli flag on top of the Dome of the Rock — Moshe Dayan will order to take it out. One episode that I wish I integrated in my short book La politique du bulldozer (B2, 2016) is the violent destruction by bulldozers of 139 houses in the Moroccan Quarter undertaken the same day to create a square in front of the Western Wall. Their Palestinian inhabitants are authorized to only take a few personal items before being evicted by Israeli soldiers. The destruction continues at night and one woman is found agonizing in the debris of a building.

07. June 7, 1967: The Israeli army invades the West Bank: Qalqilya 

In parallel of the invasion of East Jerusalem, the Israeli army also invades the West Bank. Both cities of Tulkarm and Qalqilya, the most western cities of the West Bank, are privileged targets. 7,000 out of the 25,000 inhabitants of Tulkarm flee and become refugees. The systematic evictions and home demolition that had characterized the 1948 Nakba are also perpetuated in Qalqilya that sees close to half of its 2,000 houses destroyed by the Israeli army in the following days of the invasion, creating 12,000 additional refugees. The city remains today one of where the occupation remains the most intense, the city being almost completely surrounded by the apartheid Wall.

08. June 7, 1967: The Israeli army invades the West Bank: Latrun & Hebron

Latrun is also a western locality in the West Bank (North-West of Jerusalem) and, as such, it is particularly vulnerable to the actions of the Israeli army. Following the invasion, three villages, Imwas, Yalou, and Beit Nuba (8,000 inhabitants in total) are fully evicted, and subsequently destroyed by soldiers with a method that certainly recalls those accomplished 19 years earlier during the Nakba. The photographs above by Pierre Medebielle shows that, in a similar fashion than for many Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, the Jewish National Fund was also prompt to seed forest on the location of the former villages in order to hide their past existence. See my article “‘Making the Desert Bloom’: Manufacturing the Israeli Narrative/Territory” for more on this. The same tactic was applied by the Israeli soldiers in the town of Beit Awwa (2,500 inhabitants) and the village Beit Mirsim (500 inhabitants) West of Hebron.

09. June 7, 1967: The Israeli army invades the West Bank: Jericho

Everywhere in the newly occupied West Bank, reports of looting by the Israeli soldiers and civilians emerge. Meanwhile, Palestinians are provided by leaflets informing them that they now live under military occupation — although the invasion of the West Bank may have not been planned for this exact moment, the fact that these leaflets were ready to be distributed long before 1967 shows well how this scenario had been foreseen by the Israeli high-command (see past article for more). The Allenby Bridge that links Palestine to Jordan becomes the passing point of the dozen of thousands of refugees of the Naksa. 90% of Jericho’s 1948 refugees (about 70,000) flee Palestine after this second violent episode of dispossession.

10. September 2, 1953: Construction of the Israel National Water Carrier

In order to understand the four invasions described above, one must certainly need to examine the two decades that preceded it. The historical context of the fifth invasion in the Golan Heights does not escape from this rule, far from it. In the late 1930s, long before the creation of the State of Israel, the Jewish Agency for Palestine had already commissioned studies of irrigation schemes in order to provide water in arid areas of Jewish settlements in Palestine. The 1949 Green Line is well known for its separation of Palestine between Israel on the one hand, and the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip on the other. However, it is perhaps less studied for the demilitarized zones that it created at the border of Palestine between Syria and Israel, in particular a few kilometers north of Lake Tiberias, as well as on its eastern shore. On September 2, 1953, the Israeli government orders the construction of a diversion canal upstream of the Jordan River within one of the demilitarized zone in order to feed the National Water Carrier that will ultimately distribute water in Israel, all the way to the Negev-Naqab desert. The millions of cubic water that such a diversion creates have drastic consequences on Syria and Jordan that respectively have access to 10% and 56% of the Jordan River water. In 1964, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan undertake to build their own diversion canal upstream of the Israeli one, and in July 1966, the Israeli aviation bombs the canal twelve kilometers inside Syria and destroy the engineering equipment used to construct it.

11. June 9, 1967: The Israeli army invades the Golan Heights

The invasion of the Golan Heights came after the Israeli resounding success against the Egyptian and Jordanian armies. On the dawn of June 9, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan takes the unilateral decision to invade, surprising even the rest of the government and Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin. On June 10, a ceasefire is declared but this does not prevent the Israeli army to capture the highest point of Syria, Mount Hermon (2,814m) in the very North-East of the Golan Heights. Before 1967, the plateau counted 140,000 inhabitants (including 17,000 Palestinian refugees), while in 1999, it only had 16,000 Syrians left, while Israeli settlers account for 15,000 (source: Muhammad Muslih, The Golan: The Road to Occupation, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1999).

12. Conclusion: Towards a post-apartheid condition

The 1967 Naksa constitutes a second trauma in the history of Palestinian people after the 1948 Nakba. It marks the beginning of a 50 year dreadful occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the occupation that turned into a continuous siege on the Gaza Strip. As such, it is tempting to follow what could almost be called a consensus with various degrees of explicitness (by the United Nations, the Fatah, the Israeli government, and even recently the Hamas) by aiming at the end of this occupation and the subsequent formation of a Palestinian State “within the borders of 1967.” The legal, administrative, and territorial complexity that the successive Israeli administrations have deliberately undertaken in these last fifty years to neither annex Palestinian territories to its civil realm, nor fully assume the role of a military occupier per the Geneva Convention, has allowed the durability of the occupation, but also made the scenario of two distinct ethnically-differentiated states extremely difficult, but more importantly, unwishable. 1,7 millions of Palestinians are part of the Israeli citizenry, while 600,000 Israelis live in what would constitute the territory of this potential Palestinian State — of course, they live there in violation of the international legislation (cf. article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention), but it ought to be stated that many have never lived anywhere else. Meanwhile, 5 millions Palestinian refugees have spent their entire life waiting for the right to return on the land from where they, or their family, were evicted in 1948 or in 1967. Furthermore, the idea of two uniformed nations to which should be attributed two states as the promise of a better future constitutes a grave simplification of the situation in Palestine. First of all, it denies the fundamental difference of statuses, experience, and privileges among Palestinians (Israeli passport-holders, East Jerusalem inhabitants, West Bank permit holders, West Bank inhabitants, Gaza inhabitants, refugees in Palestinian territories, refugees abroad, Bedouins, members of the diaspora, etc.) one of coloniality’s principle consisting in the establishment of a hierarchy of administrative statuses among the colonized people. But, importantly, it also denies the structural racism inherent to the Israeli society itself that also creates a tacit hierarchy between white people (mostly Ashkenazim Jews), North-Africans (mostly Sephardi Jews), Middle-Easterns (mostly Mizrahi Jews), East Africans (some of them being Ethiopian Jews), but also South-Americans, Armenians, East Asians, etc. I join friend Sophia Azeb in her doubts that there can be something called “a solution” in the idea of a state formation whether we are talking about two of them, or only one (listen to our podcast conversation “The No-State Solution,” or read her interview for The Funambulist 10 Architecture and Colonialism). What is for certain is that the axiom on which any future should be built is the strict equality of rights for all in Palestine, including the right to live and practice its entire territory.

Sources for this article:

• Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, Picador 2007.
• Muhammad Muslih, The Golan: The Road to Occupation, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1999
• Zena Tahhan, “1967 War: How Israel Occupied the Whole of Palestine,” in Al Jazeera 06/07/2017.
• Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gaza: A History, Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Ariel Sharon & David Chanoff, Warrior: An Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 2001.
• Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, The Law in These Parts (film, 2011).
• Miriam Pensack, “Fifty Years Later, NSA Keeps Details of Israel’s USS Liberty Attack Secret,” in The Intercept 06/06/2017.
• Jaddaliya editors, “The 1967 Defeat and the Conditions of the Now: A Roundtable,” in Jadaliyya 06/05/2017
• Neve Gordon, “How Israel’s Occupation Shifted From a Politics of Life to a Politics of Death,” in The Nation 06/05/2017
• Mehdi Hasan, “A 50-Year Occupation: Israel’s Six-Day War Started with a Lie,” in The Intercept 06/05/2017
• Illan Pappe, “Israel’s Occupation Was a Plan Fulfilled,” in The Electronic Intifada 06/06/2017.

Read more articles about Palestine on this blog.

The post 50 Years Later: A Map and Eleven Episodes of the 1967 Six Day War and the Palestinian Naksa appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

NEW ISSUE!

The small team of The Funambulist is happy to announce that the 12th issue of the magazine (July-August 2017) is now released. Racialized Incarceration constitutes a form of sequel to issues 4 (Mar-Apr. 2016, Carceral Environments) and 5 (May-June 2016, Design & Racism). This issue builds on these two precedents in demonstrating that incarceration is one of the horizons of processes of racialization and that architecture is an unsurpassable instrument of its enforcement. Through historical examples (concentration camps of Romani people in France, prison cities of Japanese and Japanese American people in the United States, an Aborigene prison in Australia) and contemporary ones (US prison industrial complex, immigrant detention centers in Canada, Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon), The Funambulist’s 12th issue intends to illustrate how the violence of colonial and structural forms of racism endure time and materialize in space.

THE FUNAMBULIST 12 (JULY-AUGUST 2017) RACIALIZED INCARCERATION

Editor-in-Chief: Léopold Lambert
Part-time assistant: Noelle Geller
Intern: Flora Hergon

Contributors: Nicolás Vidal, Sarover Zaidi, Suzannah Victoria Beatrice Henty, Lynne Horiuchi, Desirée Valadares, Mohamad-Ali Nayel, Michelle Bui, S.K. Hussan, Orisanmi Burton, Stella Ioannidou, & Zachary White.
Contributing copyeditor: Maxwell Donnewald
Cover photo: Desirée Valadares

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• READ THE ARTICLES ONLINE (for subscribers)
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TWO YEARS!

This new release offers us the opportunity to celebrate the second anniversary of the magazine and to prepare the third year of publication with new ideas (you can answer a survey about what these new ideas could be here). We would like to thank the 466 subscribers that support it on a monthly or annual basis, the one institution that offered it a generous grant, the 31 universities that propose it to their students and faculty, the 58 bookstores that carry it on their shelves, the 145 contributors who brought you the smart and sharp contents of these 12 issues, the 14 others who already accepted to write for issues 13, 14, and 15, the 12 places that hosted a Funambulist event in New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Prague, Montreal, and Zurich, the many friends consulted on covers, student projects, events, logistics, etc., the one copy-editor who accepts drafts three days before we have to go to print, the French Post employees who do not sigh loud enough for us to hear them when we’re coming with several hundred copies to ship and who greet us instead with a “here comes the Press!,” the two accountants who do not show their frustration in asking for a missing invoice or in repeating for the third time the way a tax form should be filled, the many activists and/or scholars who inspire us by their passion and intelligence, and more generally, all of those who, through a word, a message, or occasionally a hug, show us their support and encourage us to carry on. To all of those and many others, we say “Thank you!”

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on June 8, 2017
If you enjoy articles of the blog, have a look at The Funambulist Magazine!

As, this week, we are commemorating the fifty years of the six-day-long war engaged by Israel in 1967, a certain amount of media (Jadaliyya, The Nation, The Intercept, The Electronic Intifada, and more) have published important articles to address the state of things in Palestine and Syria, in particular regarding the ongoing occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, as well as the continuous siege on the Gaza Strip. This article and its map intend mostly to be descriptive, aiming at a doomed-to-be-incomplete reconstitution of these six days; yet, it could not be written without insisting in its conclusion that considering 1967 as the key moment to which Palestine should be somehow “rebooted” constitutes a grave mistake. The following map and text therefore introduce eleven situated episodes of Israel’s Six Day War, as well as attempt to formulate part of the framework through which a decolonial vision of a future Palestine can be thought.

01. May 15, 1967: Gamal Abdel Nasser asks the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force in the Sinai

After the 1956 invasion of the Sinai by the Israeli, French, and British armies following the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the UN provided an “Emergency Force” (UNEF) to facilitate the withdrawal of foreign troops from the Egyptian peninsula. The UNEF was composed of 6,000 soldiers coming from Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, India, Indonesia, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Yugoslavia. On May 15, 1967, more than ten years after the deployment of this force, Nasser successfully asks its withdrawal from Egyptian soil, and redeploys part of the national army in the peninsula. This movement of Egyptian troops feeds the Israeli narrative of an imminent military aggression against Israel. Reports of communications with US intelligence that was not considering such a scenario as probable allows to think of the Israeli government’s fueling of this fear as demagogic and opportunist.

02. May 22, 1967: Egypt closes the Straits of Tiran

The Straits of Tiran are 6-km wide and situated between the Sinai and the small island of Tiran (also under Egyptian sovereignty). Because of the lack of depths in Saudi Arabian waters, it is a necessary passage for ships wanting to access the Gulf of Aqaba, at the ‘end’ of which the town of Eilat provides a small port to the State of Israel. On May 22, 1967, the Egyptian government orders the closing of the Straits of Tiran, thus shutting down one of Israel’s important supply channels for oil. Although Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol had warned that such a blockade would constitute an act of war, Lindsay Johnson’s US administration warns the Israeli government that it would only get its support in case of an Egyptian military aggression. In 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (Picador 2007), Tom Segev describes conversations between Eshkol, Chief of the General Staff (i.e. commander of the Israeli army) Yitzhak Rabin, future Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan (he was officially name on the eve of the invasion), and Intelligence chief Meir Amit proposing to “send a ship to the Gulf of Aqaba, expecting — or hoping — that the Egyptians would fire on it and Israel could then act without having taken the first shot.” This scenario was finally not adopted, favoring a narrative of ‘preemptive legitimate defense’ that characterized most Israeli wars.

03. June 5, 1967: The Israeli army invades the Sinai Peninsula

On June 5, 1967, the Israeli government, under the pressure of its newly named Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan and several generals including Ariel Sharon orders the invasion of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. The Israeli aviation succeeds in destroying a couple of hundreds Egyptian military aircrafts and, in doing so, manages to significantly render the army’s job easier on the ground. The armored divisions of Generals Ariel Sharon, Israel Tal, and Avraham Yoffe quickly take over the entire peninsula. Thousands of Egyptian soldiers are made prisoners and are treated with various degrees of violence and are sometimes even summarily executed. The Israeli occupation of the Sinai will last until 1982 (at a moment when the Israeli front will focus on Lebanon), four years after the signature of the Camp David Accords. At that point, the border between the Gaza Strip and the Sinai will be fully militarized and sealed (see past article).

04. June 5, 1967: The Israeli army invades the Gaza Strip

Since 1948, the Gaza Strip and its 400,000 inhabitants — half of whom are Palestinian refugees who were forcefully evicted from their towns and villages in 1948 by the Zionist militias or, later, the Israeli army — were under Egyptian administration. The June 5, 1967 invasion of the Sinai is done in coordination with the invasion of the Gaza Strip. Facing a fierce resistance, the Israeli army requests a support from the aviation that bombs massively Gaza on June 6. According to Jean-Pierre Filiu in Gaza: A History (Oxford University Press, 2014), 90 of the 100 UNRWA schools operating in the refugee camps are either destroyed in the bombardment or looted by the Israeli soldiers. 40,000 civilians flee the Gaza Strip as a consequence, forming the first group of refugees of the Naksa. A few days after the invasion, on June 11, two Israeli terror attacks kill respectively 8 and 10 civilians in Rafah, increasing the flee of people from the city. In 1967, Tom Segev describes some post-war scenes (hard to imagine today) of Israeli civilians shopping in the streets of Gaza in a civil praxis of the newly occupied territory.

05. June 8, 1967: The Israeli aviation accidentally or deliberately attack the USS Liberty

On June 8, 1967, the Israeli aviation and navy attack a US spying boat, the USS Liberty, which was navigating offshore of Gaza. 34 members of the crew are killed and 171 injured. The Israeli government claimed that it was an accident and apologize but, up until today, the doubt remains that this attack might have been deliberate in order to hide information that the ship could have gathered. In an article published on Monday in The Intercept, Miriam Pensack addresses the silence that still surrounds this event, in particular from the side of US intelligence.

06. June 7, 1967: The Israeli army invades East Jerusalem

Since 1948, East Jerusalem, along with the rest of the West Bank was under Jordanian administration. On June 7, the Israeli army crosses the 1949 Green Line and invade the Old City. Israeli soldiers penetrate on the holy site of the Mosque Esplanade and proceed to set an Israeli flag on top of the Dome of the Rock — Moshe Dayan will order to take it out. One episode that I wish I integrated in my short book La politique du bulldozer (B2, 2016) is the violent destruction by bulldozers of 139 houses in the Moroccan Quarter undertaken the same day to create a square in front of the Western Wall. Their Palestinian inhabitants are authorized to only take a few personal items before being evicted by Israeli soldiers. The destruction continues at night and one woman is found agonizing in the debris of a building.

07. June 7, 1967: The Israeli army invades the West Bank: Qalqilya 

In parallel of the invasion of East Jerusalem, the Israeli army also invades the West Bank. Both cities of Tulkarm and Qalqilya, the most western cities of the West Bank, are privileged targets. 7,000 out of the 25,000 inhabitants of Tulkarm flee and become refugees. The systematic evictions and home demolition that had characterized the 1948 Nakba are also perpetuated in Qalqilya that sees close to half of its 2,000 houses destroyed by the Israeli army in the following days of the invasion, creating 12,000 additional refugees. The city remains today one of where the occupation remains the most intense, the city being almost completely surrounded by the apartheid Wall.

08. June 7, 1967: The Israeli army invades the West Bank: Latrun & Hebron

Latrun is also a western locality in the West Bank (North-West of Jerusalem) and, as such, it is particularly vulnerable to the actions of the Israeli army. Following the invasion, three villages, Imwas, Yalou, and Beit Nuba (8,000 inhabitants in total) are fully evicted, and subsequently destroyed by soldiers with a method that certainly recalls those accomplished 19 years earlier during the Nakba. The photographs above by Pierre Medebielle shows that, in a similar fashion than for many Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, the Jewish National Fund was also prompt to seed forest on the location of the former villages in order to hide their past existence. See my article “‘Making the Desert Bloom’: Manufacturing the Israeli Narrative/Territory” for more on this. The same tactic was applied by the Israeli soldiers in the town of Beit Awwa (2,500 inhabitants) and the village Beit Mirsim (500 inhabitants) West of Hebron.

09. June 7, 1967: The Israeli army invades the West Bank: Jericho

Everywhere in the newly occupied West Bank, reports of looting by the Israeli soldiers and civilians emerge. Meanwhile, Palestinians are provided by leaflets informing them that they now live under military occupation — although the invasion of the West Bank may have not been planned for this exact moment, the fact that these leaflets were ready to be distributed long before 1967 shows well how this scenario had been foreseen by the Israeli high-command (see past article for more). The Allenby Bridge that links Palestine to Jordan becomes the passing point of the dozen of thousands of refugees of the Naksa. 90% of Jericho’s 1948 refugees (about 70,000) flee Palestine after this second violent episode of dispossession.

10. September 2, 1953: Construction of the Israel National Water Carrier

In order to understand the four invasions described above, one must certainly need to examine the two decades that preceded it. The historical context of the fifth invasion in the Golan Heights does not escape from this rule, far from it. In the late 1930s, long before the creation of the State of Israel, the Jewish Agency for Palestine had already commissioned studies of irrigation schemes in order to provide water in arid areas of Jewish settlements in Palestine. The 1949 Green Line is well known for its separation of Palestine between Israel on the one hand, and the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip on the other. However, it is perhaps less studied for the demilitarized zones that it created at the border of Palestine between Syria and Israel, in particular a few kilometers north of Lake Tiberias, as well as on its eastern shore. On September 2, 1953, the Israeli government orders the construction of a diversion canal upstream of the Jordan River within one of the demilitarized zone in order to feed the National Water Carrier that will ultimately distribute water in Israel, all the way to the Negev-Naqab desert. The millions of cubic water that such a diversion creates have drastic consequences on Syria and Jordan that respectively have access to 10% and 56% of the Jordan River water. In 1964, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan undertake to build their own diversion canal upstream of the Israeli one, and in July 1966, the Israeli aviation bombs the canal twelve kilometers inside Syria and destroy the engineering equipment used to construct it.

11. June 9, 1967: The Israeli army invades the Golan Heights

The invasion of the Golan Heights came after the Israeli resounding success against the Egyptian and Jordanian armies. On the dawn of June 9, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan takes the unilateral decision to invade, surprising even the rest of the government and Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin. On June 10, a ceasefire is declared but this does not prevent the Israeli army to capture the highest point of Syria, Mount Hermon (2,814m) in the very North-East of the Golan Heights. Before 1967, the plateau counted 140,000 inhabitants (including 17,000 Palestinian refugees), while in 1999, it only had 16,000 Syrians left, while Israeli settlers account for 15,000 (source: Muhammad Muslih, The Golan: The Road to Occupation, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1999).

12. Conclusion: Towards a post-apartheid condition

The 1967 Naksa constitutes a second trauma in the history of Palestinian people after the 1948 Nakba. It marks the beginning of a 50 year dreadful occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the occupation that turned into a continuous siege on the Gaza Strip. As such, it is tempting to follow what could almost be called a consensus with various degrees of explicitness (by the United Nations, the Fatah, the Israeli government, and even recently the Hamas) by aiming at the end of this occupation and the subsequent formation of a Palestinian State “within the borders of 1967.” The legal, administrative, and territorial complexity that the successive Israeli administrations have deliberately undertaken in these last fifty years to neither annex Palestinian territories to its civil realm, nor fully assume the role of a military occupier per the Geneva Convention, has allowed the durability of the occupation, but also made the scenario of two distinct ethnically-differentiated states extremely difficult, but more importantly, unwishable. 1,7 millions of Palestinians are part of the Israeli citizenry, while 600,000 Israelis live in what would constitute the territory of this potential Palestinian State — of course, they live there in violation of the international legislation (cf. article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention), but it ought to be stated that many have never lived anywhere else. Meanwhile, 5 millions Palestinian refugees have spent their entire life waiting for the right to return on the land from where they, or their family, were evicted in 1948 or in 1967. Furthermore, the idea of two uniformed nations to which should be attributed two states as the promise of a better future constitutes a grave simplification of the situation in Palestine. First of all, it denies the fundamental difference of statuses, experience, and privileges among Palestinians (Israeli passport-holders, East Jerusalem inhabitants, West Bank permit holders, West Bank inhabitants, Gaza inhabitants, refugees in Palestinian territories, refugees abroad, Bedouins, members of the diaspora, etc.) one of coloniality’s principle consisting in the establishment of a hierarchy of administrative statuses among the colonized people. But, importantly, it also denies the structural racism inherent to the Israeli society itself that also creates a tacit hierarchy between white people (mostly Ashkenazim Jews), North-Africans (mostly Sephardi Jews), Middle-Easterns (mostly Mizrahi Jews), East Africans (some of them being Ethiopian Jews), but also South-Americans, Armenians, East Asians, etc. I join friend Sophia Azeb in her doubts that there can be something called “a solution” in the idea of a state formation whether we are talking about two of them, or only one (listen to our podcast conversation “The No-State Solution,” or read her interview for The Funambulist 10 Architecture and Colonialism). What is for certain is that the axiom on which any future should be built is the strict equality of rights for all in Palestine, including the right to live and practice its entire territory.

Sources for this article:

• Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, Picador 2007.
• Muhammad Muslih, The Golan: The Road to Occupation, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1999
• Zena Tahhan, “1967 War: How Israel Occupied the Whole of Palestine,” in Al Jazeera 06/07/2017.
• Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gaza: A History, Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Ariel Sharon & David Chanoff, Warrior: An Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 2001.
• Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, The Law in These Parts (film, 2011).
• Miriam Pensack, “Fifty Years Later, NSA Keeps Details of Israel’s USS Liberty Attack Secret,” in The Intercept 06/06/2017.
• Jaddaliya editors, “The 1967 Defeat and the Conditions of the Now: A Roundtable,” in Jadaliyya 06/05/2017
• Neve Gordon, “How Israel’s Occupation Shifted From a Politics of Life to a Politics of Death,” in The Nation 06/05/2017
• Mehdi Hasan, “A 50-Year Occupation: Israel’s Six-Day War Started with a Lie,” in The Intercept 06/05/2017
• Illan Pappe, “Israel’s Occupation Was a Plan Fulfilled,” in The Electronic Intifada 06/06/2017.

Read more articles about Palestine on this blog.

The post 50 Years Later: A Map and Eleven Episodes of the 1967 Six Day War and the Palestinian Naksa appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on July 23, 2017
If you enjoy articles of the blog, have a look at The Funambulist Magazine!

I just came back from a week in Palestine and will attempt to make a small report about this new visit in five parts these coming days. The most urgent one is most certainly the one dedicated the current situation in Jerusalem’s Old City, where the Israeli police currently exercise an additional layer of Apartheid violence on Palestinian devotes, visitors, residents, and protesters. In the morning of July 14, three Palestinians killed two Israeli police officers controlling access to Al Haram (the Mosques Esplanade) in the Old City, in East Jerusalem before being killed themselves. In reaction, the Israeli police shut down the old city, authorizing only residents and Israeli settlers to enter the Holy city at first, then a couple days later, pilgrims and other non-Palestinian visitors — the photographs presented below were taken on July 17. Since then, the Israeli police have reopen the access to the Old City, as well as to Al Haram, but conditioned it on Friday to the sole entrance of Palestinians aged above 50 years, as well as to an obligatory passage through metal detectors, adding a layer of control to a territory already saturated by Apartheid apparatuses. Large prayers right outside the Old City were organized, as well as protests whose violent suppression lead to the death of six young Palestinian men these last two days. On Friday, a video could be seen of Palestinian protesters attempting with difficulties to evacuate the dead body of Mohammed Abu Ranam to prevent the Israeli police that had just killed him to capture it in order to significantly delay its funerals as they usually do.

Before getting to the report part of this article, it seems useful to re-introduce the territorial and legal role of Jerusalem in the Apartheid in Palestine. Cut into two during the ethnic cleansing that created the State of Israel in 1948, the eastern part of the city was under Jordanian administration before the Israeli invasion of 1967 (see recent article about the Six-Day War) and the official annexation to Israel in 1980 that was almost unanimously condemned by the United Nations Security Council Resolution 478 (only the United States abstained). Today, the presence in East Jerusalem of eleven Israeli settlements hosting over 200,000 settlers, of several police, municipal, and governmental buildings (including some ministries), of various layers of infrastructures (including the recently built tram line), as well as of the Apartheid wall that separates the city from the West Bank, render the 1949 Green Line difficult to perceive spatially. This is particular true when it comes to the Old City whose West wall is adjacent to the Green Line: many Christian pilgrims and other punctual visitors often enter it through the Jaffa Gate directly connected to the West part of the city, while Palestinian access is understood to happen solely through the Damascus, Herod’s, and Lions Gates in the North and East — as for Jewish pilgrims, they mostly enter the Old City through the Dung Gate that gives a direct access to the Western Wall since the destruction of the entire Maghrebi neighborhood the same day of the invasion of 1967. As the Israeli government and municipality understand the Palestinian part of the city, including the Old City, as being annexed, it is the heavily armed police that operates in the city, and not the occupation army as it is the case in the West Bank, thus contributing to a higher degree of normalization of the Apartheid.

Conceived as a report, the following lines are limited to my own subjective experience of the closure of the Old City. As such, they can only present a diluted version of the reality, because of the recognizable outsider nature of the body of their author, as well as of the difficulty to produce photographs of the situations witnessed, these documents being able to function as evidence (see past article). Nonetheless, when it comes to the Apartheid in Palestine, the non-spectacularness of violence that contrasts with the telegenic images of rebellions and their brutal repressions, attests of the daily, systematic, and ubiquitous characteristics of this violence.

The photographs below illustrate the additional measures of control set up by the Israeli police. They involve the transformation of Sultan Suleiman street, adjacent to the northern wall of the Old City, into a militarized zone implementing several layers of checking, searching, and filtering people wanting to access the Old City — which also have significant consequences for the commerce that rely on this street, in particular Palestinian buses serving eastern and southern towns and villages of the West Bank. Three days after the closure, foreign visitors were allowed in the Old City while Palestinians were systematically questioned and denied access if they could not prove that they reside inside. The feeling I had was later confirmed in this brilliant opinion piece by Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu: Jerusalem is becoming Hebron. As written in a past article, the southern large city of the West Bank concentrates in its urbanity all elements of the Apartheid: Israeli settlements in the Old City, military checkpoints to access the holy grave of Abraham, immune population of settlers perpetuating violence against Palestinian residents, brutal and sometimes deadly arrests and suppression of protests by the Israeli army, forceful closures of commerce in the name of “security,” segregation of the infrastructure, etc. Jerusalem’s Old City already counts many Palestinian houses that have been evicted before being occupied by Israel settlers — the most famous one being the one occupied by no other than Ariel Sharon in the Muslim Quarters — and, although the administration of Al Haram is exercised by the Islamic Waqf, its access is controlled by heavily armed Israeli police officers. The implementation of no less than three layers of checkpoints at the entrance of the Old City and metal detectors, as well as searching booths inside the city itself (see below) finalize to make the comparison with Hebron a relevant one.

Israeli commentators, including some affiliated to the “Left,” have expressed their condescending surprise at seeing the Palestinian reaction to the installation of metal detectors at the entrance of Al Haram (without mentioning the shutdown and checkpoints of this past week). What they do not seem to understand is that this measure is punitive, not preventive, and that this measure cannot be considered outside of the politics of the Apartheid since the only people these measures may protect are Israeli police officers who are enforcing such politics by their presence and the violence of their actions. Borrowing Buttu’s words to conclude: “In the name of “security,” Israel expropriates Palestinian land. In the name of “security”, Israel builds Israeli-only settlements on stolen Palestinian land. In the name of “security” Israel demolishes Palestinian homes and schools and in the name of “security” Palestinians are besieged in Gaza, forced to live without electricity, adequate medical supplies or water and even barred from accessing the sea.”

Heard and seen in and outside Jerusalem’s Old City:
– A Palestinian young man being asked where he comes from by an Israeli police officer at one of the Old City checkpoints. “Bethlehem” he answers. “Where is that?” asks the officer. Signs of disbelief on the young man’s face, split between anger and amusement.
– Indifference of the same police officers to the burgundy and blue colors of my passport and those of my colleagues, who let us access to the third layer of checkpoints.
– An American tourist wearing shorts and sneakers right outside the Mosques Esplanades, joking and laughing with an Israeli police officer holding a machine gun.
– “People are so nice. What’s not to like?!” asks another American tourist a few meters further.
– “Guarda! Questa casa e la casa di Ariel Sharon” screams an Italian guide to a group of tourists taking photos of the bridging house in the Muslim Quarter displaying a large Israeli flag on its facade.

All photographs below by Léopold Lambert. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International ///

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on July 25, 2017
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This article is the second installment of a series of five that operate as a report of my most recent (too short) stay in Palestine this month. This particular article attempts to give a spatial account of the specific case of the Shu’fat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem-Al Quds, which has been almost entirely walled off by the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality starting 2004. The documents presented here, like many in the articles of this blog, can be legitimately perceived as arid and problematically suggesting the absence of people (to the exception of a few figures here and there) in an however densely inhabited place and, as such, condemned the bodies subjected to the Apartheid apparatuses to be represented without a sense of agency. Any other approach from my end would however be marked of the symptoms of an even more problematic ethnography, capturing and loosely interpreting personal stories in a dangerous attempt to seize the essence of the residents. My hope is therefore that this account could be read alongside other documents, including the architecture project designed by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti (Decolonizing Architecture) in the Camp, as well as the article “We Are Orphans Here” written by Rachel Kushner for The New York Times Magazine in December 2016, despite the latter’s serious concessions to such an essentialist and depoliticizing ethnographic practice — see also Luca Locatelli‘s photographs in this same article for a more incarnated vision of the Shu’fat Camp.

The Shu’fat Camp counts 12,500 Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA, most of whom were or had their parents or grandparents dispossessed and displaced during the ethnic cleansing that founded the State of Israel in 1948. A few others are refugees since the 1967 Israeli invasion of East Jerusalem that was also enacted through great violence and displacement. The up-to-twelve-floor towers that populate part of the Camp territory are however the homes of a much larger number of people — around 70,000 more of them. The reason for this is that the Shu’fat Camp is part of Jerusalem’s municipal jurisdiction as it was defined by the Israeli government after the 1967 invasion and the 1980 official annexation of the eastern part of the city. As such, residents have the right to the city — Henri Lefebvre’s concept, fashionably used everywhere, could not take a stronger sense here. The State of Israel being obsessed by questions of demographics, its Ministry of the Interior never misses an occasion to revoke this Jerusalem resident status to Palestinians who cannot prove that their “center of life” is in Jerusalem. Thousands of Palestinians have therefore moved to Shu’fat to keep their Jerusalem ID, while paying significantly lower rents than the prohibitive ones that the rest of the city practices.

In 2004, when the Sharon administration decided to wall off the largest part of the West Bank from its most western part (where many Israeli settlements are situated) and Israel, the trace of the Apartheid Wall more or less followed the line of the Jerusalem municipality as forcefully established by the annexation, to the exception of two predominant Palestinian neighborhoods: Qalandiya (where is situated the well-known checkpoint violently filtering Palestinian movement between Ramallah and Jerusalem), and the Shu’fat Camp. The result of such a segregative split is that these two areas were left de facto without any jurisdiction, Jerusalem’s municipal services refusing to operate beyond the Apartheid Wall. This absence of jurisdiction however does not apply to taxes and, as the State of Israel operates under the claim that the entire city of Jerusalem is under its sovereignty, residents of the Shu’fat Camp pay taxes to the occupying state, often having to hire a bilingual accountant to process the paperwork in Hebrew as Kushner tells us in her article.

The Apartheid Wall, as well as the Israeli settlements of Pisgat Ze’ev (in the North) and the French Hill (in the South), surround almost completely the Shu’fat Camp, leaving only two points of access to mobility to its residents. The first is on the Jerusalem side, through a militarized checkpoint that can be closed at will, and where all bodies proceeding through corridors of fences, concrete blocks, and narrow turnstiles are expected to produce Jerusalem ID and are searched by Israeli soldiers. The second is on the West Bank side, through the neighboring town of Anata in Area B (under the Palestinian Authority civil jurisdiction and Israeli military control), virtually surrounded by three Israeli settlements and the Apartheid Wall, and linked to the rest of the West Bank by a sole road.

In conclusion, it is crucial to consider the Shu’fat Camp for what it is: an effectively walled off neighborhood part of a city where any form of municipal service (garbage collection, fire fighting, hospitals, public school, etc.) is denied and any connection to the rest of the city is controlled, policed, and prevented at the discretion of an army of occupation. Insisting on the Shu’fat Camp being an unalienable part of Jerusalem-Al Quds is important for at least two reasons: in the context of the Palestinian struggle, it allows us to understand at the relatively small scale of a city — and not just any city — the way the Apartheid and colonialism operate; in a more global context, it allows us to think of this urbanity as an extreme form of neighborhoods of so many cities that are discursively symptomatized to the point of defining them as so-called “No Go Zones,” effectively segregated from any form of economic, cultural, administrative and social centrality in the city, and violently and racially policed in impunity.

GENERAL MAP /// For a full map of East Jerusalem-Al Quds, see the first article of the report.

MAP KEYING PHOTOGRAPHS BELOW ///

All photographs below by Léopold Lambert. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International ///

The post Palestine Report Part 2: The Walled Refugee Camp of Shu’fat in Jerusalem appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on August 1, 2017
If you enjoy articles of the blog, have a look at The Funambulist Magazine!

This article is the third installment of a series of five that operate as a report of my most recent stay in Palestine in July. Like the two first ones respectively dedicated to the Old City and the Shu’fat Refugee Camp, this third article is set in Jerusalem-Al Quds but, this time, on the western side of the city, in the part of Palestine known as Israel since 1948. The many ruins of Lifta that remain on the slopes of the Jerusalem hills allow us to envision Palestinian life prior to this date, as well as to understand the violence that occurred on the dreadful year of the Nakba that ended the life of this 2,000-year-old village.

Situated 5 kilometer North-West of Jerusalem’s Old City, Lifta was a vibrant village prior to 1948 as the Israeli NGO Zochrot recounts in its crucial inventory of pre-Nakba Palestinian villages (see also Eitan Bronstein Aparicio and Eleonore Merza‘s De-Colonizer Map that since then deepened such an inventory):

The village houses were built mainly of stone, along the contours of the hill. The old streets of the village also ran in curvilinear fashion. […] The village had a mosque, a shrine for Shaykh Badr, and a few shops at its center. It also had an elementary school for boys and a girl’s school that was founded in 1945. There were, in addition, two coffeehouses and a social club.

The village was in effect a suburb of the city of Jerusalem, and its economic ties with the city were strong. The farmers of Lifta marketed their produce in Jerusalem markets and took advantage of the city’s services. Their drinking water was drawn from a spring in Wadi al-Shami. Their lands were planted in grain, vegetables, and fruit, including olives and grapes; olive trees covered 1,044 dunums. The rainfed agriculture of the village was concentrated in Wadi al-Shami in the depressions lying to the southwest of the village, and on the slopes in 1944/45 a total of 3,248 dunums was planted in cereals. (Zochrot)

On December 28, 1947, a bus of members of the Zionist paramilitary group, the Stern Gang (whose commander, Yitzhak Shamir, will later proceed to be Israel’s Prime Minister between 1986 and 1992), stopped in front of one Lifta’s coffeehouses and opened fire with machine guns on the patrons, killing six of them. This act of terror succeeded in its aim, as a part of the 3,000 terrorized residents fled the village in the days following the attack. In January 1948, the Stern Gang in association with another Zionist paramilitary group, the Irgun (whose commander, Menachem Begin, also later became the Israeli PM, and whose name was cynically used to name the boulevard adjacent to Lifta) continued the ethnic cleansing of the village and eventually succeeded in evicting all residents by the beginning of February. Some of them still live as refugees in East Jerusalem and Ramallah.

The importance given to temporality is crucial here as it fundamentally debunks the Israeli national narrative that only acknowledges the massive displacement of half of the Palestinian population (750,000 people) in 1948 as the result of the war against the soldiers of the Arab League that started the day the British colonial mandate ended and the State of Israel was promulgated, on May 15, 1948. Similarly to an important proportion of the 417 Palestinian villages that were evicted and destroyed in 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Lifta occurred several months before the Mandate ended and the war started — the fact that the Israeli army has consistently engaged two to three times more soldiers in this war than the Arab League that mostly concentrated its forces in bordering regions of Palestine also strongly contests the narrative of Palestinian villages being evicted, mined, and destroyed following symmetric and fierce combats. Nationalist narratives do not seem to embarrass themselves with the accuracy of history however, and accounts of Lifta’s violent eviction are often explained in a conveniently ambiguous or plainly false manner in order to forcefully comply with the Israeli national narrative as the following examples illustrate: “The population was driven out during the Arab-Jewish hostilities of 1947/48” (Wikipedia), “It is one of 400 villages abandoned by Palestinian inhabitants during the 1948 war” (Haaretz), “Lifta was one of hundreds of Arab villages that lost its residences during the 1948 war” (NPR).

Similarly to many other Palestinian villages’ ruins in what is now Israel, the territory of Lifta has been turned into a natural reserve (called Mei Naftoah as to insist on the antic Jewish name of the place in denial of the last 2,000 years of the village’s existence) that operates under the Israel Nature and Parks Authority’s rule, while its surroundings have been turned into a park and a playground by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that historically raised funds among the Jewish diaspora to buy land in Palestine and, starting in 1948, started to allocate these funds to the plantation of forests that covered the last remains of these villages, as I have described more at length in the articles “‘Make the Desert Bloom’: Manufacturing the Israeli Territory/Narrative” (April 2015), and “Israeli Forests on Fire: The Political History of Pine Trees in Palestine” (November 2016).

The cistern of the village, mentioned on the Reserve’s rule board above, is regularly used by orthodox Jewish men (including during my visit), who bath next to an Israeli David Star graffiti drawn on one of the stone remains. One finds also garbage in various places of the village, proof of the continuous desacralization (both in its deliberate and non-deliberate forms) of the Palestinian memory of the place. In 2010 however, a coalition of Israeli and Palestinian activists was formed under the name “Save Lifta” in resistance to a government-and-municipality-backed luxurious real estate project in place of the village remains. As described by Nina Valerie Kolowratnik in a 2014 conversation for The Funambulist podcast (partially about the architecture studio on Lifta that she was then leading with Nora Akawi at Columbia University), this coalition may not necessarily agree on the proper way to narrate Lifta’s history nor on the right to return for Palestinian refugees, but it was somehow successfully built on the common denominator of the resistance against the destructive plan. Although the various actions organized by the coalition have significantly slowed down the process, the closest houses from the symbolically named Ben Gurion Boulevard were destroyed at the end of 2016.

In August 2010, Palestinian architect Antoine Raffoul talked about launching “an International Architectural Competition with an open-ended brief, and to invite registered planners and architects from all over the world to contribute ideas and to produce schemes for one of the Lifta houses still standing” (The Electronic Intifada). Although one can certainly see how the proposal of constructive alternatives makes a strong case in the judicial battle to come to “save Lifta” (which may admittedly have not been Raffoul’s aim), one can also see how no stronger testimony of the Nakba violence could emerge in Lifta in the colonial structure of the Apartheid than through the resilient ruins of the village as they currently stand. As described in a few articles on this blog (including those cited above), the ruin incarnates an architectural crystallization of the past life of a building (or urbanity), as well as of the conditions that ended this life. The large majority of Palestinian villages evicted and destroyed in 1948 were deliberately deprived from their “right to the ruin” and, as such, only their known absence is able to account for the violence of the ethnic cleansing. Lifta, on the contrary, incarnates a stone evidence of the Zionist historical and sustained violence against Palestinians at the core (the central bus and future train stations are nearby, as is the iconic tram bridge designed by architect Santiago Calatrava) of a city that the Israeli government claims to be its capital. It is therefore no surprise to see this same government involved in its destruction, and it makes no doubt that any approval on its end of a “rehabilitation” process of Lifta would be tainted with (if not instrumental to) the denial violence of the Zionist narrative. Architecture competitions (or university studios) are however a good way to think architecturally, not as a means to propose alternatives in the context of an Apartheid state but, rather, as a way to produce imaginaries beyond and against this state, as Palestinian architects Elias Anastas, Yousef Anastas, Nora Akawi, Victoria Dabdoub, Dima Khoury, Inas Moussa, Ahmad Wa’ary & Mahdi Sabagh undertook through the 2012 exhibition Re:Lifta at the Yabous Cultural Center in East Jerusalem. Regardless of the specificity of each vision, the agency seized by Palestinians to design for a decolonized Lifta is what the matter the most here, since the ability to create imaginaries of a future where such an agency can be materialized (as afrofuturism teaches us) is specifically what is violently denied in the colonial territorial and narrative domination.

All photographs below and above by Léopold Lambert. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International ///

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