Deleuze e i palestinesi @ Intervista a Selma Dabbagh @ Mangialibri

Selma Dabbagh è una scrittrice britannica con un legame familiare ed affettivo molto forte con la Palestina. Nipote di un esiliato, ha difeso la causa palestinese prima nei tribunali come avvocato dei membri della Freedom Flotilla per Gaza, poi dando voce su carta a un popolo le cui istanze sono state spesso imbavagliate dal pregiudizio. La incontro al Pisa Book Festival per una chiacchierata che prendendo le mosse dal suo ultimo libro (Fuori da Gaza) spazierà verso molti dei temi che le sono cari.

READ MORE @ MANGIALIBRI

Una recente ondata di revisionismo in chiave anti-araba ha investito l’opera di grandi filosofi che come Gilles Deleuze sono stati liquidati come “antisemiti” per la loro sensibilità alla causa palestinese. Non pensi che alcuni popoli sembrano essersi arrogati l’esclusiva sul vittimismo? 
Penso che la confusione voluta tra l’antisemitismo e l’antisionismo nell’ultimo decennio è stata portata a livelli di ambiguità senza precedenti. La distinzione tra in due termini è stata resa sempre più blanda da molti sostenitori di Israele, tra cui alcuni gruppi di interesse all’estero, come negli Stati Uniti, ma per fortuna ci sono anche gruppi che combattono questa confusione. La cultura ebraica è molto più ampia e varia del sionismo. Hai assolutamente ragione, penso che alcuni sentano di avere il monopolio della sofferenza a causa dell’Olocausto, ma credo che sia una visione pericolosa.

Sempre Deleuze ha definito i Palestinesi “il popolo scomparso”, paragonandoli agli indiani d’America. Pensi che siano davvero destinati a scomparire inghiottiti dalla colonizzazione? 
Deleuze non è stato l’unico a fare questo paragone, anche Mahmud Darwish ha paragonato questi due popoli che hanno in comune il fatto di essere stati vittime di un colonialismo basato sull’idea che si possa affermare il diritto ad insediarsi in un Paese, semplicemente cacciando quelli che lo abitavano prima. L’unica differenza sta nel fatto che gli Israeliani proclamano una sorta di legame con quella terra, anche se si tratta di uno molto tenue, quasi esclusivamente sentimentale. Quello che tento di mostrare nel libro è la lunga storia di resistenza che hanno i palestinesi. Penso che mai ci siano stati dei legami forti come in questo momento tra i palestinesi che vivono a Gaza e tutti gli altri nel mondo e questo sta facendo sì che escano dall’invisibilità in molti ambiti, e anche se questo mi dà speranza rimane il fatto che abbiamo perso la leadership. Nonostante le mie molte paure io rimango però fiduciosa.

Eyal Weizman on understanding politics through architecture, settlements and refuseniks @ Middle East Monitor // The Architecture of Violence @ AlJazeera English

"We need to remember that some of the most beautiful pieces of architecture, that we all love and we all travel to see, have been military fortifications and sites of battles and execution, or beautiful castles that had a repressive social, political and military use. Architecture cannot be "tainted" by its use, because its use is part of what it is, what it does. Architecture has always been a means to create hierarchies in space to produce and represent inequality, and to exercise control."

Eyal Weizman - architect, writer, activist and professor of visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London - is explaining how architecture and power are inextricably linked, even within structures that appear largely to serve an aesthetic purpose. Buildings or cityscapes that a tourist crosses the world to see were often conceived with the intent to oversee their populations.

"Even the beautiful boulevards of Paris have been partly conceived in order to generate an environment of control over the riots and urban rebellions of the nineteenth century," he continues. "We need to understand that in architecture, beauty and horror are intrinsically linked and that accounts for the fascination we have in architecture. That its beauty is not separated from its horror but that it is part of it."

Weizman says that architecture offers a different means to understanding politics than journalism or political science does, but he is still on a "trajectory of understanding" using a series of publications and exhibitions to explore exactly how. A distinct example of the intersection of architecture and politics, and a subject the architect has dedicated much of his work to, is Israeli control of the physical space of Palestinians.

As Weizman pointed out in a recent Al-Jazeera documentary the Architecture of Violence, settlements are built on the tops of hillsides, looking down on Palestinian villages so as to dominate their surroundings and protect themselves. Their roofs are painted red, which is mandated by planning regulations of most settlements, and this helps the military navigate the landscape and identify the settlements.

It seems fitting then that inside one of these illegal housing projects, the Ariel University inside the Ariel settlement in the West Bank, is an architecture school. Yet despite the overtly political backdrop of the institute, according to Weizman, there is the willing adoption of a certain "political naivety" when it comes to studying the discipline.

"They would never discuss issues of repression or land grab directly. There is a certain pact of silence around the political dimension of architecture there. Schools of architecture depoliticise the profession, they put it very much within the domain of aesthetic experimentation," he says.

"Architects want to believe, and even the architects in the settlements, that they are serving an individual family whose home they built."

"The more they say it is not political, the more that enables the political manipulation of the use of architecture for political means," he reflects. Architects in denial become prey to those who want to manipulate their profession for political gain. "The problem really is not so much the right wing architects, because they would support this idea anyway, it's centre or centre-left, which is really most architects in Israel. They are actually those that need that process of denial."

On the one hand, says Weizman, you have military structures like watchtowers and walls that are designed within the Ministry of Defence and built according to the brute, utilitarian logic of military control. Then you have the "civilian occupation", that is civilian planners working for the government who may assign a hilltop for settlement.

Whether such designs are realised in the Ministry of Defence or in the civilian planning department within the government, it is Palestinians who are paying the physical, territorial and psychological price for having their external space controlled so aggressively. "We see the eruptive violence now in Jerusalem; it's a direct response to the next wave of the settlement project," says Weizman.

This newest wave in the settlement project has seen the illegal blocs move from being "a project of separation in space", where settlements are built on hilltops, to them entering the centres of Palestinian neighbourhoods and cities. In Silwan in East Jerusalem, for example, you see compounds made up of 45 houses built right in the heart of Palestinian homes. "There would be security on its roof, it would operate as a kind of a mini settlement within the urban fabric and that increases friction exponentially. You see the eruptive violence of protests revolting against this new phase in the settlement project," he says.

One of the strengths of the Israeli system, believes Weizman, is that you cannot draw a clear border between the Israeli economy, Israeli society and Israeli politics. All members of Israeli society, all major companies and corporations are invested in buying and selling to the occupation. "It is not as if there is a project beyond the green line and then you cross the green line into '48 Palestine and there it just simply doesn't exist. The level of connections and the network of the settlement project is not in the West Bank alone, it is in '48 Palestine, in Israel, in the Israeli government, in Israeli society, in Israeli corporations and economy."

Whether or not its intertwined nature makes the occupation irreversible or not, Weizman is unsure. But to uproot it, he says, would require a complete transformation of the state. "The state as it is would not enable a project of separation and withdrawal without a huge, internal, violent conflict in Israel, tearing Israeli society apart.

"I do not see a two-state solution as a practical or achievable way in the near future," he adds.

Resistance to Israeli hegemony, for Weizman, needs to operate on all levels. "The boycott is part of that and I think being a non-violent means of transformation, a non-armed means of transformation, a civil practice, it's part of the civil toolbox of citizens all over the world. It's a very effective way to convey to Israelis that their actions are beyond the pale; that this is not acceptable. And, of course, pushing the boycott to the field of architecture might wake architects up to understand the full political implications of the work, the implications that they still deny."

Earlier Weizman pointed out that a few cases of architectural refuseniks do exist, where architects have turned down a commission that could support their office and provide a livelihood for them and their families. "What we need is an architectural refusal to participate in that, like the soldiers who are refuseniks or like the soldiers who are committed to "breaking the silence". Architecture also needs its process of breaking the silence, of confronting the denial and understanding the political framework within which their work is located."

Whilst the mechanism of control in a capitalist society, says Weizman, can lead us to believe that we have freedom, the structures of debt and economical consideration means that to refuse we need to be strong, perhaps even stronger than a soldier who disobeys a command and refuses to carry out military service.

"An architect that is running an office, who is in debt and pays salaries, has all the economic incentives to take it [a commission], but must resist it. The punishment is obviously not in going to a military prison, as in the case of soldier refuseniks, but on the livelihood of these people. So that's a way of controlling people, of course. When the economy is organised in a particular way it's very difficult not to participate in hegemony, so hegemony works. It organises the economy, it organises the structure of debt in a way that you might conform to power."

Most of the world has been colonised, says Weizman, and therefore it is colonial architecture that has set the precedent for controlling populations across the world. "Patterns of settler colonialism have always sought to isolate and protect the coloniser," he says, "and exclude the colonised." But contemporary tools of economic and capitalist separation that can be seen, for example, in corporate high rises or gated communities also play their part.

Weizman has just returned from a trip to the US. Like Israel, highways in Los Angeles serve more affluent communities and bypass the poorer areas. In the Gulf, he says, the labour force is contained, separated and supervised. Such capitalist tools of separation, seen across the world, "are all part of the growing toolbox of architecture and planning in the West Bank – it's composed, I mean it has a sort of colonial history, but it's contemporary vocabulary exists overall, everywhere you look, everywhere you go you have the politics of surveillance, separation, supervision and sometimes even oppression. Palestine is to a certain extent, a laboratory for the application of the most extreme means."

The Architecture of Violence will be screened at SOAS Khalili Lecture Theatre at 7.15pm on 5 December as part of the London Palestine Film Festival. After the documentary Weizman will be speaking on Architecture and Violence after Gaza.

Read more @ MEM-

Visualizing Palestine: 800,000 Olive Trees Uprooted, 33 Central Parks By Polypod and Philippe Ghabayen @ The Guardian

Sources / See more @ The Guardian
800,000 olive trees uprooted. Oxfam, 2011. Olive Harvest Factsheet, p2 (PDF)
24,000 trees in Central Park. Central Park, 2013. Official Website, Frequently Asked Questions (accessed 31 May 2013)
$12.3million loss = 10% of potential peak year income from the 8 million remaining trees in West Bank and Gaza. UN OCHA, 2012. Olive Harvest Factsheet & UNDP, 2008. The Olive Harvest in the West Bank & Gaza Strip (PDFs)
80,000 families rely economically on olive harvest.UN OCHA, 2012. Olive Harvest Factsheet (PDF)

Shimon Naveh — Rhizomic Maneuver @ Laboratory of Doubt, 29Sept2013

Rhizomic Maneuver is an emergent logic and form of maneuver, that divers from the traditional paradigm. Rhizomic Maneuver is based on disorder, complex geometry, a different epistemology, a different kind of learning. Unlike the industrial manoeuver which is idealistic, rhizomic maneuver is heretical.

Yotam Feldman - Dr. Naveh, or, how I learned to stop worrying and walk through walls @ Haaretz, 25Jul2007

Dr. Naveh, or, how I learned to stop worrying and walk through walls - Yotam Feldman @ HAARETZ , 25.07.2007 (July 25, 2007)

Read more @ HAARETZ

Quite a number of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers, tough types with berets on their shoulders, consider Brigadier General (res.) Shimon Naveh a nonpareil commander and intellectual who marched them into hitherto unknown realms. But Naveh thinks that most officers are boors and illiterates, and doubts that any of them understood the full depth of his thinking. 

Naveh, 59, was at the forefront of a new conceptual approach that evolved in the IDF at the end of the Oslo period and the start of the second intifada. Together with other officer-intellectuals, he tried to explicate and develop military activity by drawing, among other sources, on terms borrowed from postmodern French philosophy, literary theory, architecture and psychology. Recently he completed a book on his experience as head of the IDF's Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI), or MALTAM in its Hebrew acronym. Naveh himself established the institute in 1995 and headed it until it was dismantled 10 years later, following a harsh report by the state comptroller. Two of his outstanding students at the institute, Brigadier General Gal Hirsh, commander of the 91st Division - who was removed from his post in the wake of his performance in the Second Lebanon War - and Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, former commander of the Paratroops and the Gaza Division, and now chief of the General Staff operations division, tried to apply what they learned at the institute in their activities in the territories. 

Can Naveh explain his conceptual doctrine in a way the public will understand? He is not optimistic. "It is not easy to understand; my writing is not intended for ordinary mortals," he says in an interview in his home in Hadera. He is not being entirely arrogant. A perusal of his dense flow charts and labyrinthine conceptual grids is liable to leave even the sharpest mind dizzy. 

Naveh may have the mind of a philosopher, but the body is pure Rambo. "Michel Foucault on steroids," as a student once described him. On the brink of his seventh decade, his tremendous mass of muscle and shiny bald head make him look like a commando still. In his study, which is crammed with volumes of philosophy, military history, psychology and literature, he articulates his ideas with extraordinary verve. Fortunately for the interviewer, he has to go the kitchen every once in a while to check on the pot of soup he is making for his wife, Prof. Hanna Naveh, dean of the Faculty of Arts and lecturer in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Tel Aviv University. The two met in first grade. 

Still, attending to his wife's meal calms him down only briefly. Questions that irk him get a furious response, and mention of the names of most of the top IDF brass generates something resembling an attack of Tourette's syndrome and a torrent of rage, verbal abuse and death sentences for some of them. "They should be executed," he asserts. The interviewer's look of astonishment does not faze him. "As you see, I shit on most of them, and I don't give a damn," he says. Earlier, when his dog greeted him as he entered the house he said exultantly, "See him? He is smarter than most of the people on the General Staff." 

The IDF's failure 

Naveh describes his last and perhaps most important military-academic project, OTRI, as a chronicle of failure. "It was a failure of the group and also my personal failure, but in a far deeper sense it was the IDF's failure. The IDF has not recovered because it doesn't have the ability, unless it undergoes a revolution." 

Naveh, who established OTRI together with Brigadier General (res.) Dov Tamari, draws on imagery from the world of construction to explain the project. "We wanted to create an intermediate level between the master craftsman, the tiling artisan or the electrician, who is the equivalent of the battalion or brigade commander, and the entrepreneur or the strategist, the counterpart of the high commander, who wants to change the world, but lacks knowledge in construction." 

Between the two levels, he continues, is the architect/commander-in-chief, whose role is "to enable the system to understand what the problem is, define it and interpret it through engineers." In the absence of this link, he maintains, armies find themselves unable to implement their strategic planning by tactical means. "Entrepreneurs and master craftsmen cannot communicate," he says. 

Already in his first book, "The Operational Art," published in 2001 and based on his doctoral dissertation, he described the level of the military architect: "The intermediate level is the great invention of the Russians. [The military architects] occupy the middle, and make it possible for the other fields, from politics to the killers, to understand, plan and learn." 

Why doesn't this work in the IDF? 

"The problem is that from the professional point of view, the heads of the army are nonentities, total ciphers. What is tragic about the army is that it has good craftsmen, but a good craftsman is always limited if his framework is not organized for him. There are no commanders-in-chief in the army, and it has been unsuccessful in creating them, with a few exceptions. Someone like [former chief of staff] Dan Halutz - it's obvious that he is a wild man politically, and maybe he was even a good pilot and squadron commander, but as an architect he is a nullity. He is even a victim of the system." 

And are the others also stupid? 

"They are on the brink of illiteracy. The army's tragedy is that it is managed by battalion commanders who were good and generals who did not receive the tools to cope with their challenges. Halutz is not stupid, even Dudu Ben Bashat [the chief of the Navy in the Second Lebanon War] is not stupid, even though he is an idiot, and his successor [Major General Uri Marom] is a total bastard. These are people without the slightest ability in abstract thought." 

And the new chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi? 

"I held him in very high regard, even though what is happening now doesn't look good. He is becoming the victim of a story that is bigger than him." 

Like a gnawing worm 

Naveh's art of operation is the military embodiment of system theory, an interdisciplinary theory that is used in thinking about computer, social and biological sciences, among others. System theory examines the operating principles of a particular unit (community, organism, computer network) through the totality of the relations between the elements that constitute it and the effect of their interactions on the overall system. 

In addition to Soviet system theory, Naveh and his colleagues tried to make use of different and newer conceptual methods. He is particularly fond of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, authors of the books "Anti-Oedipus" and "A Thousand Plateaus." He sought to enlist their theory to describe a decentralized, irregular form of military activity, an attempt by an army to emulate guerrilla methods of operation. 

Naveh and his pupils took the Deleuze-Guattari theory, which was formulated as a philosophy of resistance and liberation and was influenced by the student revolt in France in 1968 as well as by feminist and anti-nationalist thought, and made it the theoretical underpinning for assassinations, defoliation, home demolitions and wall breaking in homes. These methods reached their peak in Operation Defensive Shield, carried out by the IDF in the West Bank in the spring of 2002. According to a United Nations estimate, 497 Palestinians were killed in the operation and, according to the IDF, 800 homes were destroyed. 

Naveh urged his officers to read the writings of Deleuze and Guattari and discuss them. Noncoms who served in Naveh's institute translated several of their texts and of other philosophers into Hebrew for the officers. The officers were also treated to texts by Jean-Francois Lyotard (on the postmodern situation) and by the architect- philosopher Paul Virilio. 

Maybe you continued the French philosophers' way of blurring the distinction between theory and practice? They translated their thinking into demonstrations against the establishment, and you into actions in the West Bank. 

"I tried to extricate us from the Western separation between practice and theory. This hero, the commander, the operative person, lives in a permanently coalescing space. He needs a theory in order to think critically about the object of his observation, and the moment he acts, he changes the world, thus obliging him to recast the theory." 

How was this conceptual conversion carried out in practice? The following is excerpted from an interview Brigadier General Kochavi gave to the architect and researcher Eyal Weizman (who devotes a chapter to Naveh in his new - English-language - book, "Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation"): 

"This space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. Now, you can stretch the boundaries of your interpretation, but not in an unlimited fashion, after all, it must be bound by physics, as it contains buildings and alleys. The question is, how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret the alley as a place, like every architect and every town planner does, to walk through, or do you interpret the alley as a place forbidden to walk through? This depends only on interpretation. We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through, and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. Not only do I not want to fall into his traps, I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win. I need to emerge from an unexpected place ... This is why we opted for the methodology of moving through walls ... Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing." (From Eyal Weizman, "Lethal Theory," in English) 

An outsider won't get it, but the IDF attached considerable importance to Naveh's doctrine. "Systemic thought is an asset, and I recommend that the army continue to make use of it," says Brigadier General (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, former chief of the research division of Military Intelligence and the intelligence officer of Central Command, speaking by telephone from the United States, where he is now a strategic consultant. "To understand the new reality, you have to understand what tensions develop, what trends characterize these systems, how it all works, and then you can understand how you can operate within it." 

Who took part in the conceptual process? 

"We made an effort to instill systemic thought in the lower levels. We believed that every person needed to understand certain components of this thought process, because every corporal is a strategic corporal. If he is manning a checkpoint, he has to understand that whether he behaves or does not behave in a certain way is meaningful." 

Doesn't the Second Lebanon War reflect a failure of this approach? We heard about vague orders and misunderstanding of the system of concepts. 

"I don't think that Lebanon exemplified failure. No discussion took place there between the political echelon and the security echelon - the discussion was pretty cursory. If you read the testimonies of the prime minister and the defense minister to the Winograd Committee [which is examining the management of the Second Lebanon War], you see that they understood a few things, but did not understand them in depth. That is why they did not understand on Wednesday that a policy change was needed - the whole systemic conception was that if we are embarking on a move like this, the reserves must be called up immediately, but the reserves were not called up. I think that the orders that were issued were perfectly reasonable, and in parallel, systemic thinking was implemented. The soldiers were not addressed in incomprehensible language." 

As left as it gets 

Naveh maintains that his theory is intended to minimize damage on the Palestinian side. He describes himself as left-wing, though he adds immediately, "I did not vote in the last elections, and in the elections before that I voted for Barak because of my wife, because, really, I find the left wing in Israel absurd. In my political outlook I am a lot more left than all of them. When I went to war in 1982 I went because I enjoy killing, but already in 1980-81 I said that a Palestinian state has to be established." 

The French philosophers would probably go ape if they heard how you converted their doctrine for the army. How did you find them? 

"I understood that Deleuze and Guattari make it possible to explain problems that no one I had read earlier could explain. For example, Aviv [Kochavi] talks about executing a 'fractal maneuver' in Nablus. I didn't say that to the IDF, but Deleuze talks about fractals, about a type of operation of that kind." 

Did IDF officers actually read Deleuze? 

"There were officers who went nuts over it, in the positive sense of the term - Gal Hirsh, Nitzan Alon [head of a Military Intelligence unit], Gershon Hacohen [commander of the IDF colleges]. But the vast majority of officers, who lack an educational and learning consciousness, always see everything through cow eyes anyway. Most of the people of Israel are like that, like monkeys." 

Deleuze viewed his thought as a philosophy of liberation. Is your use of him also liberating? 

"Of course. I can explain this in two very clear dimensions. First of all, this war against the Palestinians has to lead to their liberation. Take the date of the end of Operation Defensive Shield, half a year after Defensive Shield, interpret it and go to a different place, switch the disk. It is completely clear to me that it has to lead to the liberation of the Palestinians, after the price is exacted. The second liberation is to create a prison and dismantle it, create a form of thinking and dismantle it: the idea of permanent change is liberation." 

Is it liberation to smash and blow up walls of Palestinian homes in order to move through them? 

"I am a complex creative artist. On the one hand, you have a brilliant military stroke here, and plainly it has a price, but it also involves liberation. The movement of armies involves the liberation of thought from its shackles. The whole logic of moving through the houses was to conceal your form from the adversary, and once you do that he loses his relative advantage. Aviv invented something. The wonderful thing about it is that he succeeded in closing the gap between the creeping doctrine, which rolls along slowly, and the challenges posed by the subversives. If you want to call that postmodern, you may be right. In modernity the state is the ideal concept and you win by means of presence. In our case, you operate, but not by presence. The moment you deprive the adversary of the ability to give you form, you can, you can fuck him. Aviv did marvelous things with that." 

Doesn't it upset you that the enemy here consists of civilians in refugee camps? That the walls the army is going through are in people's homes? 

"That is why I think there had to be a change of direction after Defensive Shield. Everything we go on doing will supply an illusion of security; in the long term, we are destroying everything around." 

And the price of Operation Shield was reasonable? 

"That is already a different discussion." 

Surely an opinionated person like you has an opinion. 

"The relation between the damage that was caused and the achievement was reasonable. A new situation was created, a method of operation that bore a certain degree of success. The problem is that they are not moving out of this. To this day they are delaying, doing the same thing. And by the way, almost no civilians were killed in Defensive Shield." 

Quite a lot of homes were destroyed. 

"Well, all right, homes are built and destroyed. And not that many were destroyed, anyway." 

What do you think Deleuze [1925-1995] would think about your use of his ideas? 

"He would be enthusiastic, go wild over it." 

Army-crazy 

Shimon Naveh was born in 1948 in Hadera, and at 18 was drafted into the Paratroops. He describes himself as a highly motivated soldier with intellectual inclinations, who read Tolstoy and Hemingway during basic training. He took part in all the wars from 1967 on, and rose through the ranks to brigade commander and then the commander of a reserve division. In 1991 he began his undergraduate studies in history at Tel Aviv University and by 1994 already had a Ph.D. 

"I was a general, I conquered all the peaks," he relates with typical modesty. "I was surrounded by idiots who prattled nonstop. Along came [Prof.] Itamar Rabinovich, that idiot, and people told him, 'This guy is a genius, take him.' He asked me, 'Can you complete a doctorate in three-four years?' I did it in two. I didn't have a clue about writing a doctoral dissertation, I entered a new spatial order there. As soon as I build something, I immediately destroy it and move on to a different place. The dumb ones are the buffalos, they live in their puddle - why go out, there's food, there's grass. What characterizes a general is the Odyssean urge to go to other places, where you haven't been, and there were some who did just that. For example, Aviv [Kochavi] and Gal Hirsh; for example, Itzik Eitan [former GOC Central Command], who was erased from history because he is inarticulate and an antihero." 

Could it be that you missed your calling? That if you were not a general, you would be in academe? 

"I am army-crazy, it's the good part of my life. I love the field, that sharing of the burden, that slice of the action that carries tremendous potential. When you are a brigade commander with a brigade in the south you go to sleep at night, and no sooner do you finally fall asleep in the cold sleeping bag, when you get up in the morning and say: Let's do it today. It's a fantastic feeling." 

To Naveh's relief, he was not surrounded only by dumbbells in the army. He acknowledges his debt to some of his colleagues and pupils, who shared in the development of his ideas. For example, his admiration for Gal Hirsh is unbounded: "Gal is the most poetic, creative officer I have met for many, many years. That is part of his tragedy: people don't understand him." He also emphasizes the contributions of Kochavi, Tamari, Moshe Ya'alon (a former chief of staff) and Uzi Dayan (a former deputy chief of staff) to his project. 

He is less enthusiastic about other supporters. Thus, former chief of staff Shaul Mofaz "realized that this thing, which he never bothered to learn about, provides him with an intellectual facade," Naveh relates. "So in the end he became our strongest supporter. We reached the peak of our strength thanks to him. I know him. He stinks, he is an idiot, but a terrifying bastard, a paratrooper but absolutely from the garbage of ..." 

Naveh left the army in 2005, following a harsh report by State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss on OTRI. The report was critical of the fact that all of the institute's work was carried out orally, without the ideas being put into writing. Allegations in the report about administrative irregularities were later refuted. 

"I will take apart this critique in seconds," Naveh says jocularly. "It is the critique of an idiot. He comes to examine a certain field and doesn't bother to learn about it, doesn't take the trouble to read a word about the operational art, about what it means, about our status in the world. I tell him, go to blazes, you're an idiot, you don't understand a thing. In the same breath he checks how we report on work hours and what is going on with the administrative side, allegations that were all refuted." 

Did you defend yourselves? 

"The subject under review is supposed to respond to the first draft of the comptroller's report, and then he takes it to the deputy chief of staff. In our case, even before we managed to respond to the draft, [Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe] Kaplinsky, that idiot, started to get on our case. He should have come out and said he wanted to destroy us. Kaplinsky said more than once that I had to be got rid of because I couldn't be controlled, and so did that idiot from Northern Command [the former GOC, Udi Adam], a command that is a wretched ruin." 

And then you left? 

"The examining officer was the deputy chief of the Personnel Directorate, and right away I understood that he wanted to remove us, so I said I wanted to leave. Halutz asked me why, and said 'We will talk about it on Friday.' I said, 'We are not going to meet on Friday.' I got up and left. That chapter is over for me. I won't go back there even if they offer me my weight in gold. Maybe if they offer me $40,000-50,000 a month I'll go back, but that would really be to prostitute myself." 

There was other criticism, too. Yaakov Amidror - former commander of the IDF National Defense College - said that your unit's work was tainted by "a non-distinction between truth and lie, prattle in the best postmodern tradition." 

"He is a person who has not read a word about postmodernism, a pathological liar, a pretender, a person who did nothing in his life in the army, a total idler, a showoff. He did everything by political manipulations. I do not accept acknowledgment of the worth of my theory from nonentities. That idiot was a student with me at the Command and Staff College and was always a blackboard below me." 

From whom do you accept acknowledgment? 

"From army officers in the United States, to whom I am now a consultant. In the United States I am a mentor. Do you know what a mentor is?" 

You draw on a vast array of spheres of knowledge - military thought, French philosophy, psychology, brain science. Can one person be knowledgeable about all that? 

"My main channel of activity is the military one, and in that I am the best in the world. I do not purport to be an interpreter of Deleuze; I am modest about that. I use him in a very particular way, and I am aware that there are those who will not accept my interpretation." 

Is it possible that there is a dangerous undemocratic element in the vast power officers are given here - the power to invent the language and explain the situation to the politicians as they see it? 

"There is nothing to fear here, because democracy has arranged a hierarchical structure. You are the one who recommends whether to go ahead or not." 

But don't the officers have an agenda, aren't they pushing for something specific? 

"You always promote your agenda, and of course you have an agenda - what kind of question is that for someone who studied Foucault? But people like that [officers] are from the outset not out to clobber you. The problem is not only that the generals do not know anything about commanding - they do not even know their own profession. The [former] GOC Northern Command is a piece of zilch, the [former] commander of the Navy isn't ashamed to say that he didn't think they [Hezbollah] had missiles. Beyond the fact that information existed, your role is to think. Someone like that should be executed, and I said the same about Halutz. In a well-ordered state they would be executed; the one is a criminal, the other a lout." 

How much did the change you led involve a transformation of language? Suddenly all kinds of new images and metaphors appeared in the military's conceptual world: burning [the Palestinians'] consciousness, dynamic molecule, 'snailing' [see box] and others. Some say that one effect of these unclear terms was to short-circuit communication in the Lebanon War. 

"Clearly, when your knowledge develops, one of its first manifestations is in language. Once you expand the boundaries of knowledge, the conceptual space has to evolve: new understandings emerge and have to be signified and understood. In this connection we had an accident of which we were not aware: We brought the army something new, which they were not familiar with, and it appalled people. What is all this logia? Some people were terrified, but the more courageous and the subversives ran with it. The problem was that we did not understand sufficiently the disparities between the culture of the organization, of the establishment, and what we tried to instill. So we crashed. I was critical of these developments. The fact that you discern new phenomena doesn't mean that you can say those words to plasterers and carpenters. Part of the verbiage becomes a fashion, and the worth of the expressions is lost. 

"The value of using a metaphor is not to encode something, but to help learn something, to understand something that you don't understand. Bogey [former chief of staff Ya'alon] understood that in his situation every problem was a distinct one, and he used metaphors to explain the problematic: the light at the end of the tunnel, riding a tiger. Some people didn't understand what he was saying, and twisted it. The idea is not to describe something from the military world, but to describe something external to the army, which we lack the tools to talk about. So everyone suddenly waxed poetic: the general is talking about light at the end of the tunnel. Some people hated it - Kaplinsky, because he is an idiot, a type of dolt." 

These words trickled into the general society. People outside the army also started to use them. 

"That has to do with the interface between the army and the society and the journalists, for whom I have deep contempt. You see this fashion, books like those by Amos Harel and Ofer Shelah. It's a disgrace."

The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza by Eyal Weizman - Verso Books, Uk, June 2012,

The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza

by Eyal Weizman

Groundbreaking exploration of the philosophy underpinning Western humanitarian intervention.

The principle of the “lesser evil”—the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice—has long been a cornerstone of Western ethical philosophy. From its roots in classical ethics and Christian theology, to Hannah Arendt’s exploration of the work of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi regime, Weizman explores its development in three key transformations of the problem: the defining intervention of Médecins Sans Frontières in mid-1980s Ethiopia; the separation wall in Israel-Palestine; and international and human rights law in Bosnia, Gaza and Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of new research, Weizman charts the latest manifestation of this age-old idea. In doing so he shows how military and political intervention acquired a new “humanitarian” acceptability and legality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he directs the Centre for Research Architecture and the European Research Council funded project Forensic Architecture. He is also a founder member of the collective Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) in Bethlehem, Palestine. He is the author of Hollow Land, The Least of All Possible Evils, and co-editor of A Civilian Occupation. He lives in London.

In this extract from The Least of All Possible Evils, Eyal Weizman details the dyanamic of the transport of provisions between Israel and Gaza, comparing it to a reverse Milgram experiment—a classic psychological experiment in power and authority and the capacity to inflict pain on ordinary people.

Milgram in Gaza

The legal petition against the further reduction of provisions into Gaza was rejected at the end of January 2008. ‘This is the difference between Israel, a democracy fighting for its life within the framework of the law, and the terrorist organizations fighting against it,’ the High Court stated, as if it were a state spokesperson. The court performed the task of an administrator rather than an adjudicator, a partner in the calibration of how much pain Gazans are to be made to legitimately feel. As such, acts of torture and terror aimed at forcing civilians into political compliance conferred on their makers a dignified image. Those proportionaly admin- istering the level of pain could now see themselves as being responsible for the necessary and tragic task of calculating and responsibly choosing the lesser of all possible evils.

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Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman - Verso Books (paperback), Uk, August 2012

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation

by Eyal Weizman

Acclaimed exploration of the political space created by Israel's colonial occupation

From the tunnels of Gaza to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of Palestinian towns, villages and roads into an artifice where all natural and built features serve military ends. Weizman traces the development of this strategy, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualization of military defence during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to the contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations.

Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

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A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture - Edited by Rafi Segal, David Tartakover, and Eyal Weizman - Photographs by Milutin Labudovic - Verso Books, Uk, 2003

A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture

Edited by Rafi Segal, David Tartakover, and Eyal WeizmanPhotographs by Milutin Labudovic

Israeli architects, scholars, journalists, and photographers highlight the role of architecture in the Middle East conflict.

Bringing together essays and photographs by leading Israeli practitioners, and complemented by maps, plans and statistical data, A Civilian Occupation explores the processes and repercussions of Israeli planning and its underlying ideology. It demonstrates how, over the last century, planning and architecture have been transformed from everyday professional practices into strategic weapons in the service of the state, which has sought to secure national and geopolitical objectives through the organization of space and in the redistribution of its population. In fact, as the book shows, Israeli architecture has consistently provided the concrete means for the pursuit of the Zionist project of building a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. As such, it is the first study to supplement the more familiar political, military and historical analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict with a detailed description of the physical environments in which it is played out.

The banning of the first edition of this book by its original publisher was proof, if any were needed, that architecture in Israel, indeed architecture anywhere, can no longer be considered a politically naive activity: the politics of Israeli architecture is the politics of any architecture.

With contributions by Meron Benvenisti, Zvi Efrat, Nadav Harel, Gideon Levy, Ilan Potash, Sharon Rotbard, Efrat Shvily, Eran Tamir-Tawil, Pavel Wolberg, and Oren Yiftachel

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Jerusalem, Mamila Street, November 1947 @ Verso blog

Jerusalem, Mamila Street, November 1947

The UN's newly unveiled partition plan is contrary to the wishes of most of the country's inhabitants. Palestinians took to the streets in protest. This was the last time Palestinian protest was perceived as a civil movement. Since then they have been doomed to expulsion and have been viewed as mere assailants from without. Unknown photographer, Central Zionist Archive.

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