Eternal Borders and the Territory of the Gaza Strip

22. Walls have long existed around nations as massive spectacles of engineering. Where I live temporarily, walls are primarily archeological remains of a past.  The machicolate edges of stone and towers of bastions were defensive, but the stone walls facilitated commerce and gates of entry, if they now serve as at the unavoidable infrastructure of roads and thoroughfares, as well as inherited property lines. They carve up public space, far less based on containing movement than the modern walls of globalization that have been marketed to governments and defense departments as easy tools to barricade population and prevent population flows.

But the security walls that’s been nourished in Israel, as if the nation was an incubator for the current rage of wall-building, sought to integrate video cameras for “smart fencing” that promised to be “lead[ers in] the perimeter security market by offering a one stop shop for all cutting edge perimeter intrusion detection systems (PIDS) Security Solutions.” The measures of perimeter security were focussed only on the edge of the nation, and directed funds and attention to the securitization of an edge, at detracted from the plight of those living behind the walls, or the relations of populations on either side of the wall structure. The absence of a human geography of the wall led to an urgent cry from many photographers and artists to focus on the human dimension of living with a wall that is absent from maps–and the false illusion offered by “smart thermal cameras,” embedded video analytics and military-grade security observation tools that promised surveillance on new scales. Indeed, the very scale of the new systems–up to twenty-five kilometers–seemed to far exceed the boundary perimeters and three km no-go zones that restrict access, but facilitate the allegedly “integrated surveillance towers” and detection systems in place in the largest test-case of wall-building in which the United States government was involved.

New Border Wall System and Existing Wall Structures/2023

I was very glad to leave the United States craziness to arrive in a place like Jericho. Although Palestinian Jericho is not central to the current war, the density of walls that were constructed along the West Bank terrifyingly echo the mythof the tower as a bastion of defense. Unlike the military brutality of the West Back walls, I couldn’t but return to the mythic heroic attack that marked the first battle of the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan, a heroic image of the strength go ancient towers. If in sharp contrast to the rag-tag assembly of structures of detection and defensive fencing that were trusted defensive bastions until Hamas disabled them. Yet the myth of the tower of Jericho as a central logic to the expansion of the state, and the conquest of Canaan, seemed as if it inhabited the fantasy of the “Iron Wall” as a position of empowerment. As the vaunted Gaza barrier with a concerted battery of an onslaught of missiles drones, trucks, and bulldozers, the symbolic value of a wall that provided surveillance structures seems to have crumbled, however, and raised questions of what sort of future Palestine might exist.

As the battle of Jericho narrated in the Book of Joshua was a fictive construction of nationalist propaganda, it was embellished and geographically mapped by the Kings of Judah to consolidate their claims to territory on mythic and historic grounds to an ancient Kingdom of Israel–a story, per modern archeologists, “invented out of whole cloth”—the story of the Kings of Judah of incorporating the region into Israel was symbolically powerful, and animated early excavations of the site whose walls said to have tumbled down before the powerful blowing of glass of the shofar and display of the Ark of Covenant–probably written only after the return from the Babylonian Exile in 538 BCE; the powerful story sanctioned the claims to the territory as divinely sanctified, if not the manifestation and proof of God’s law, far beyond human laws or contingency. The myth of Jericho that was so fixed in the national imaginary was one of the world’s oldest forms of monumental architecture, dating not from the biblical period, but neolithic era, was in fact discovered rather late in biblical archeology–the tower inside the walls that the archeologist John Garstang argued was evidence for the battles of the Book of Joshua had erroneously led him to date them to 1400 BC–suggested in fact astronomical purposes more than military ones, if the role of astronomy as a tool of prestige and divination is thought to be a basis for the awe that inspired migrant peoples to settle in a more communal pre-urban life. The tower that has recently provided a model for the emerging field of archeoastronomy, perhaps as the shadows of summer solstice would hit the tower first, have however undermined the quite longstanding conceit that the tower was constructed to thwart invaders or as a fortification for a settlement, or a territorial claim.

As I followed news of the recent invasion of Israel in Oxford’s Jericho, and read the unfolding story of the invasion’s planning with a vast armory of imported weapons, and a wide array of maps and terrifying instructions to stab settlers in the neck, spine, or underarms to create a greater shock value, I thought about a biblical code of the lex talionis of violent retributive justice. The military calls for the surrounding of Gaza and refuses to prepare for a ceasefire, affirming the duty to bombard the city as “our duty to protect the citizens of Israel” of course has ratcheted up the scale and dimensions of the conflict suggests a resurgent anti-ceasefire rhetoric in ways difficult to end or to overcome for any international agency or mediated power. The myth o the protection that the neolithic tower offered is in a sense hard-wired into a defensive culture, and the walls that security contractors have provided at such great cost as ostensibly impenetrable frontiers. The myth of impenetrability was of course fresh in my mind from the United States, where the fantastic image of the “impenetrable” border wall had been a perverse basis to almost overturn a democracy, and to allow a salesman to stake entry into the political sphere in ways few could ever predict. The reflexive protection offered by the walls in an age of globalization, however, was able to assuage populations who trusted the candidate to offer a panacea of protection–no drugs; lowered crime; higher wages–in a trifecta that the construction of the wall was meant to accomplish. The towers that were so prominent in the new Gaza Barrier, which had promised such an impregnable defense to allow Israel to ignore residents in the Gaza Strip so blithely, and reneg on safe passage to other Palestinian territories, or guarantee access to its own ports.

The myth of protective walls defined as towers of omnipotence, are as much to blame for the tragically escalating violence we seek to pause, based on myths of creating an evanescent sense of security. We might indeed ask, is it possible that the Gaza Barrier is only the latest attempt to promote a story about the illusion of safety for future settlements on historically contested terrain?

The completion of a network of radar, cameras, and antennae to monitor any motion on the ground–a wall system that enclosed all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from December, 2021, was an image of the primacy of engineering, before the communications infrastructure was dismantled, to stage terrible attacks on Israelis, viciously executing them and cutting up their corpses, in an untold crisis of the peacefulness in civil society.

Army Chief of General Marking Completion of Enclosure of the Palestinian enclave in Gaza Strip, 7 December, 2021/AFP

The enclosure was by no means the only option, or, indeed the option that was agreed upon, as Gaza Strip became a site of Palestinian residence in the Oslo Accords some thirty years ago. These old ruins were symbolically powerful, even if Gaza was a region in the atlases of Palestine that Warren built upon from the 1850s were far larger, and indeed extended almost to Jerusalem. The Iron Wall that now presents itself as the “only one of its kind in the world” is not only foreign to the past; it was never imagined as a plan of future settlement. Its obstruction essentially has no future.

Modern Palestine, Illustrated atlas, and Modern History of the World, 1851