When I attended Hight Holiday services this past year in Oxford’s Orthodox synagogue, it was for the first time in some years. But the spatial imaginary that unfolded in the services days before the invasion of Israel’s “border barrier” on October 7, 2024 suggested how difficult the geography of the Middle East would be. Although it was familiar, I stopped at an old prayer in the Makhzor, or holiday liturgy, praying for the safety of the Israeli Defense Forces as they guard Israel’s boundaries over the coming New Year, 5785. The prayer was familiar, but stood out for me as I returned to religious service in a foreign country: the collective imprecation to preserve the IDf defending the borders of the Holy Land suddenly seemed an aggressive act, in an era when borders are not only far more heavily fortified than in the past. For the border barriers around Israel hold mental space before the cry “from the river [Jordan] to the [Mediterranean] Sea“–a maddeningly geographically vague slogan, to be sure, but one understood to elide Israel’s presence in the Mideast, if not annihilate the state that has become trenched in as never before, as a bordered nation of fixed demarcated walls.
The militarized borders of the nation-state made the prayer disturbing days before the invasion, or the response to the shock of an armed incursion of sovereign bounds of vicious civilian and military deaths. For if the fears of any assault of Israel’s territorial claims have been met by the increasingly intense fortification of its borders, a ramping up of its claims to “security” and “securitization” that has eroded the ethical values of the state, the defenses of these boundaries were both more militarized and less sustainable in the future, and to begin the New Year by hoping for the security with which they were guarded–as if they were granted by divine right but embodied by militarized defense–was unintentionally quite off-key, and made me grind my teeth during the High Holiday I had arrived to celebrate with some trepidation in a foreign country,–not seeking friendship or continuity but orienting myself to a city I had only recently moved in mid-September. I was not concerned about Israeli borders, but fund the invocation of their guarding to carry a deep weight for the members of the congregation, reminding me that the prayer–an addition after the 1967 War– had long assumed deep significance.
If the New Year’s holiday had some spiritual resonance as a way of marking time, the sense of bonds among Jews grew with the coming invasion, making me negotiate my relation to the service I had just her. Indeed, the explosiveness of the invasion that left me and my fellow-expats reeling and hard to observe at a distance made me interrogate where that prayer had origins, and reflect how the literalization of a project of boundary-guarding had become so dangerous project of courting risks of raised the stakes, intentionally turning a blind eye. If the war was an invasion of Israel territory, the border zone between Gaza and Israel has, perhaps rightly, long been the subject of attention of Israel’s Prime Minister, who has repeatedly emphasized “stoppage points” and “closure” of the Gaza Strip and control of the border zone between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. The military securitization of these borders were hard to reconcile with the benedictions of the kindly rabbi. He led the congregation in high valedictory form at the cusp of retirement, negotiated the benediction to George V in our Mitkhor, following Anglican ritual asking for the safety of the royal family, of a piece with a sermon voicing dismay at the strain of lamentation strain of Judaism that he felt had infected or reconfigured Jewish identity at some loss.
For a strain of lamentation, derived from the poetics of the laments of the Psalmists, but expanded to the elegiac account of suffering and commemoration that expand the liturgical elegies to accounts of forced conversion, expulsions, crusades, pogroms, and even assimilation short-changed pride of a “chosen” people, the rabbi felt, undermining a sense of pride. The ancient strain of lament in Jewish poetics and poetry certainly decisively expanded in twentieth century before inexpressibility of the Holocaust, and a need to express inexpressible pain in the face of fears of annihilation. But the logic of lament of would come to the surface with quite a vengeance after the unprecedented invasion of Israeli territory on October 7, only weeks after the rabbi’s sermon, as the unspeakable trauma of the crossing of the fortified border of Israeli territory opened existential fears that set in play a logic of retribution. If lament pressed the borders of linguistic expression and actual comprehension, the escalated response metthe anguish of lamentation demands, but no response can ever fully satisfy. The call to pride, and even content with being Jews, was somewhat tempered by the calls to save the warriors defending those highly militarized geographic boundaries, as much as boundaries of expression.
The boundaries of Israel as a “state” had become not only embattled, but less defended lines than firm fences, rigid, and asserting a statehood removed from negotiation, and perhaps from Zionism, as they were understood as bulwark against Palestinian expansion that so tragically ended with the battery of hundreds of ground-to-air rockets forms the long-barricaded Gaza Strip, serving as cover for a bloody invasion of Israel planned for a decade, approved by Hamas leaders in 2021–even known by some of Israel’s intelligence forces as code-named “Jericho Wall,” an attack of unmanned drones to disable the surveillance towers along Gaza border wall, to attack military bases, but dismissed–if it was feared to constitute “the gravest threat that IDF forces are facing in defending [ Israel]”–and the intense week of bombardment accompanied the resolution with which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a press statement to be televised on a holy Sabbath, an emergency exception to the religious calendar that emphasized its urgency, in which the Prime Minister apt to view Jewish identity in an optic of perennial political persecution menacingly told the nation that “our enemies have just begun to pay the price” on national television, announcing air, drone, and artillery strikes on the Gaza Strip would be “just the beginning” of an intense national retribution for the bloody attacks on civilians and civilian abductions from Israeli territory. This was not defending borders, as the prayer suggested: but it was a reprisal against the trans-border strike that was an act of Hamas, funded by transnational groups in Iran and elsewhere, attacking the transformation of the Gaza Strip to a launching pad for strikes into Israel’s territory, as much as securing the borders of the state.
Military Incursions in Gaza by Drone, Air, and Artillery/Armed Conflict Location & Event Data/October 7-27
The horrible and terrible scale of attacks on the heavily populated region affirmed a mental imaginary we have a hard time grasping, but seemed designed to illustrate Israeli control over the region–and over a region from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea–that tried to impose itself on Palestinian cries for a vision of “from the river to the sea,” an ominously vague geography. The bombardment immediately raised questions of Gaza’s sovereignty and affirmed the territorial right of the state to defend its boundaries, even if the boundary barrier between Gaza and Israel was of Israeli military’s own creation, and lay within, technically, the territoriality of the Israeli state. The demand to reveal air dominance proceeded in unrelenting ways, as the bloody invasion of Israeli territory had pierced the ability to articulate a response, triggering traumatic memories that have produced an endless outpouring of maps in hopes to remedy how difficult it is to discuss, as if to try to ascertain some objectivity in the actual occurrences, triggering thousands of outpouring of settler violence against Palestinians easy to be predicted, but must be lamented, and an immediate escalation of retributive air strikes across Gaza Strip, as if to destroy its future, airstrikes returning to new heights but concentrated for the first time in one small region: Gaza.
Fears of a cross-border attack had circulated before the summer, and there was concern, with military drills of increasing intensity within the Gaza Strip, of crossing this border. But the barrier seemed to have fostered inexcusable ignorance that may be investigated as if blinders to national intelligence. The invasion’s shock created a vortex of mapping and remapping the Middle East to express its reality on the map, but that reality also seems inadequately expressed by any map: for it was an open denial of a political right to exist, revealing in questioning sovereign claims.
The map of the planned attack routes dismissed as impossible across a monitored border barrier reflects a locked-in mindset that saw the barrier as fixed . The IDF saw the maps of future invasion as an impossibility, unable to see the intense aspirations for the dismantling of the border as an event for which Palestinian groups as Hamas had long planned or might accomplish. Yet the fears embodied as a charge, under the cry “from the river to the sea” of such exasperating geographical vagueness, that seems an incursion of the national space of sovereignty that were hard to imagine, even if it was clearly mapped out as a multi-pronged strike invading Israeli territory, perhaps along new versions of the offensive tunnels that Israel had worked so hard in 2008, 2012, and 2014 to destroy, long realized was a threat to Israeli sovereignty, but had yet not developed tools to destroy. The maps were not by tunnels, so much as overground paths: but in the current Gaza War, the engineers of the IDF would continue to map and reveal and destroy through March, 2024, as combat engineers closed a four kilometer tunnel fifty meters below ground, destroying transnational abilities to attack Israel and prevent the possibility of incursions across its borders, in ways that tested the reconfigured borders and expanded concept of the defense of borders in a globalized world..
Plans for Proposed “Mass Invasion” of Hamas across Gaza Boundary/IDF, July 2022
Yet the nightmare of course returned. While what that consists of became unclear, as the terrible attack on Gaza unrolled in reaction to the bloody October 7 incursion of armed militants into Israel, a stunning cross-border surprise attack across twenty two points of the perimeter that killed and wounded settlers and members of the Israeli army, following a barrage of rockets fired from the barricaded Gaza Strip, entering towns to attack civilians. Can these attacks be seen as part of a movement of liberation, or self-determination, or were they an exasperated crisis of containment by a machinery of war whose gears were already ratcheted up around the dotted border walls.
The invasion of towns sent shock waves through the very notion of Zionism. The rhetoric of liberation of the motivational cry “from the river to the sea” is itself a bid to remap territoriality and territory, of course, and feared as a coded call-to-arms of the Hamas network or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, seen as a bloody cry to undermine the call for commitment of the Likud Party to defend sovereignty over all land up to the Sea, or Mediterranean. Indeed, if the rhetoric of liberation has helped to lead to an unthinkable set of military conflicts on Israeli territory of multiple points of conflict in Israel between Palestinians and IDF, redrawing the very contested barrier built around the Gaza Strip as a barricade of one of the most densely populated regions in the globe, the invasion was a planned refusal of such constraints–
Sites where Terrorist Militants Engaged Israeli Army on October 7, 2023/Visegrád
–to push the border of the Gaza Strip far beyond the massive walls Israel had constructed at significant expense. For if Israeli military had sought to cordon off what has been seen as an existential threat to Israel’s future. If the memorialization of the Holocaust has become central to the demonization of Palestinian terrorists, the border walls that seemed to staunch off a future of death found a terrifyingly brutal invasion by crossing the border barrier, triggering collective fears across the nation of an attack on Israel’s very future. Indeed, the origins of the arming of Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip have advanced, from a range of multinational sources, including Iran, to help redraw the boundaries that Israel has long defended, as a way to breach the impregnable defenses that had increasingly been built around the nation to protect it, to try to prevent against increased threats of incursion of a state that refused to negotiate for the future.
Fortified Boundary Fencing and Barriers around Israel/2020
The walling off of the Israeli border by physical barriers in recent years has speed to seek to create a bulwark against such an invasion–as if in response to the cartographic logic of the motivational cry Palestinians have popularized as a form of national liberation. The razor-tipped fencing, concrete barriers, and impassible fences have promised a sense of security in the Promised Land, which may have undermined global consensus the land is promised–and has led to much global anger at the unilateral fortification of the state as a confirmation of the most nationalist hard-line form of Zionism, refusing dialogue and directing military resources and funds to the suppression of any future for a Palestinian state, beyond parts of the West Bank, between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. Was not the invasion a bitter reminder of the site of the refugee camps established in the Gaza Strip, years ago, at the very origins of the Israeli state, as if the haunting of the region had its own memories, which refused to be silent?
I could not wish for more misfortune to a kindly Rabbi than inaugurating a New Year marked by the invasion of October 7. But the horror that unfolded in coming weeks made those days seem almost halcyon. I confess ambivalence to the faith of Judaism, but the turn of the liturgy to the safety of the soldiers guarding the Israel’s boundaries from its “enemies” made me a bit queasy, and hesitate to follow the prayer, but made me reconsider how the huge investment in those walls–and in their guarding was not also a large part of the problem, that had set in play a dynamic of contesting Israeli sovereignty–and the Zionist promise for an Israeli state–that has reconfigured the Zionist proposal in ways that have since brought unforeseen inflections to the saying Schwer tau sein a Yid, an existential statement to be sure steeped in the memories of the Holocaust, and remembrance, as if passed down through generations, poised to fall into the abyss of memory, before gaining a new spin with the assigning of redemptive strength not to “Israel” but to the barriers to contain threats.
Could it be that the cry, From the Border to the Sea, had not become a conceptual map about the way that the ruling parties had now conceived of Israel and Israeli boundaries? Indeed, Netanyahu had made clearly cartographic campaign promises, in 2019, to reduce the Palestinian Territories if re-elected, promoting 2019 as a unique “opportunity” to “kill all chances for peace” of the sort that rarely arrived, and had not existed since the Six Day War of 1967, an opportunity for redrawing the map from a position of absolute authority by whittling away at a third of Palestinian claims to the West Bank, sufficiently to stymie any hope of Palestinian statehood. The new West Bank on which Netanyahu campaigned for a second term surrounded Palestinian lands around Jericho by making it an island, extending Israel to the River Jordan “in maximum coordination with [President] Trump.” The “West Bank” would, Netanyahu argued, become an island surrounded by Israeli territoriality and control, in an attack on Palestinian statehood that sent the Arab League into full Panic Mode and seemed designed to curry and bolster the violent animosity of settlers to Palestinians in the West Bank–who now saw their rights to the areas around Jericho as sanctioned and legitimated.
Netanyahu Vows to Seize Two-Thirds of West Bank before September, 2019 Elections/Amir Cohen/Reuters
The role of the IDF in containing these boundaries–and indeed constructing them and guarding them–made it hard to participate, or to feel as if I belonged in the service, even before October 7. As the service shifted to prayers for the safety of those who “guard” the boundaries of Israel from enemies, I had a deep uneasinesss before the notion of inscribing eternal boundaries in a verbal map, as Israel’s national defense–even long before the October 7 invasion–was reliant on securitized barriers, that had long replaced fencing, that the nation had invested in as a promise to preserve national security, described as an “Iron Wall” but more accurately if less euphemistically as a “multi-layered composite obstacle” that had remapped the nation-state by “security barriers” since the Oslo Accords, with a promise to “make terrorism more difficult.” The growth of such securitized boundaries contrast to how settlement within the Green Line was celebrated by the Maariv newspaper with a special insert map in 1958 after ten years of Israel’s independence–
Maariv Newspaper insert Map, The Achievements Of Israel’s Tenth Anniversary of Independence (1958)
–by the new geopolitical boundaries the Israeli state has built around its territories. The prayer to protect the Israeli Defense Forces entrusted to protect the boundaries of Israel from its enemies sent me across a history lesson of sorts, which I ruefully noted anticipated a rash of history lessons dispensed line after the invasion of October 7, 2023. For as we tried to make sense and process the violence of the invasion and of the Gaza war–fought around the Green Line, to be sure, to prevent violation of that boundary dramatically and traumatically crossed on October 7–
the celebratory tones of the early map seem less of an achievement than an unresolved problem.
While the invasion was removed, and I was in Oxford, England, one not only felt it as an immediate violation because of the news, or the global news media, but the shock of the invasion of boundaries as a gruesome violation, indeed as a bodily violation in the manner that led accusations of rape to be assimilated to and intertwined with its acting out of an almost ritualized spectacle of violence, but the violation was cast against not only “eternal” boundaries but the fortified boundaries of Israeli territory today, boundaries that have led to the perhaps false security of borders, and the ignoring of the situation of suffering and economic inequality sharply present on their other side. What exactly were the pundits at Big Think thinking when they heralded the “Palestine Map” of the Trump administration had helped birth as of historical significance as a map “Israel can live with”?
The map seeming to offer Palestinians “open transit” by corridors designated by bidirectional arrows was indeed the first time “a U.S. administration officially proposed borders for a Palestinian state,” the quick rebuff that a map that designated Jerusalem as Israel’s national capital met–“Jerusalem is not for sale,” an aging Mahmoud Abbas fulminated as he directed utter disdain at the realtor-turned-President who sought with his real estate cronies to bring a new map to the table. The proposal of borders was, indeed, a proposal that reduced the Green Line, if it promised high tech zones in a “Vision of Peace” that offered 70% of the West Bank to Palestine, and offered–oddly, in retrospect–a “tunnel” that would link the Gaza Strip under Israeli territory tied to desert islands on the Egyptian border–a “Gaza archipelago” of “desert islands” in the Negev–
A Vision for Peace/White House Twitter, 2020/Donald J. Trump
–that seemed to be most conscious of enshrining Israeli jurisdiction over its borders,; one must feel was dreamed up by Netanyahu and Trump as they imagined a future Trump’s election might bring. For the map did little to alter the barriers, built in place of negotiable boundaries, that the prayer in the liturgy intimated were of timeless origin. Yet the prayer over which I had stumbled was not timeless at all: it had been only written in 1967, by a rather avid Zionist, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, who was the first Head Military Rabbinate of the Israeli Defense Forces, veteran of several Arab-Israeli wars, penning a prayer tat was eager to sacralize the boundaries that were in fact temporal.
The built barriers sat uneasily with the notion of sacred boundaries that Rev Goren, a founder of the state of Israel who affirmed the sacred identity of Israeli territory, sought to affirm and celebrate in 1967. If the boundaries were cast as “eternal” in the collective memory of the liturgy, praying for the safety of soldiers defending seemingly eternal boundaries “from the border with Lebanon to the Egyptian desert and from the Mediterranean Sea to the approach to the Arava, be they on land, air or sea“–raised questions even before the October 7 invasion. The return to this collective memory, invested with the status of the internal, left me uneasy on a holiday inviting one examine one’s conscience. As an American Jew and the son of a man who may have in some way aspired to be a sabra, whose contradictions may have taken their spun from that impossible hope, the boundaries of Israel long stood as traced outlines of some sacrality. They had increasingly seemed a sense of personal boundaries, or intuited as lines of personal office, as it their violation was no less than a violation of identity, as much as territorial ones.
The premium on national security that the Gaza-Israeli border barrier was built to serve disrupted the boundaries that Goren inscribed has shifted by the construction of border walls. The walls were a promise to ward off globalist dangers, tied far more to Donald Trump and the Likud Party than Zionist tradition. The budding of concrete barriers to the nation have changed “boundaries” of Israel by geodetic maps since the 1980s, increasingly promising to securitize boundaries in a unilateral fashion, making them less seen as shared by tow nations, than absolute edges to be not only defended but imposed. The defense of a border boundary made the prayer penned by Goren out of date, but the ostensible timelessness of its boundaries left a bitter taste in my mount. Yet somehow it was comforting to see the old walls of Oxford, walking around New College, and view the concept of the “wall” with less permeance as a structure, and less imposing in character–more akin, say to Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with their small electric lights.
I stumbled as I was being asked to recite a verbal map of the borders that seemed eternal, if not set by scriptural precedent. The familiar prayer gained poignancy in a foreign setting, and not only because the Oxford synagogue was monitored by a security team. The boundaries traced in the prayer stuck in my mind, as the idea of beseeching the divine to safeguard their defense, as boundaries that were long contested and seemingly contingent seemed sanctified from on high, long after the service ended. Although the administration of the Gaza Strip had long lain outside of Israel’s bounds, or even the remit of Israeli Defense Forces, when the benediction to IDF forces was composed for the liturgy in 1956, after the partition of Israeli and Palestinian lands by a Green Line, then years before the Israeli army occupied Gaza after 1967, almost ten years later.
But the fortification of these boundaries in recent years has so drastically shifted the state of play, and the sense of Israel’s place in global geopolitics, in deeply profound ways, that the prayers for those guarding these walls weren’t so easily endorsed. And it the events of October 7 left us all far more psychically dislocated in ways I hadn’t anticipated in the Yom Kippur service from the aspirational timelessness of boundaries of an idealized homeland. One longed to see the building of walls as something more of an anachronism, removed in time, as, as it happened, they were in Oxford–and in so many other English medieval towns, if they were far more part of the scene in Oxford as living anachronisms–
–gave some sort of weird historical context and deep anachronism to the building of walls with deep underground concrete barriers, in ways that seemed terribly and terrifyingly removed from the rather bucolic nature that these old stone walls in Oxford have increasingly assumed.
In recent years, the Gaza Strip boundary that had gained the misleading if rhetorically effective name of an “Iron Wall” –a misnomer for a wall not built of iron, but steel and concrete, that might promise protection of Israeli territory. Such security fences have grown part of the national infrastructure around the state, all but necessary investments and sites of protection that attempted to provide an imager of security–and securitized boundaries–for the economic development of Israel as a state, forms of permanent protection that had departed from the boundaries of belonging. These security fences had been argued to be temporary adjustments to restrain cross-border terror, that “could be moved or dismantled if a peace agreement was signed with the Palestinians.” But if the security fences have reduced cross-border attacks and Israeli mortality, the huge cost of both engineering and building a massive set of security fencing in the past two decades have come at a cost of privileging the barrier, and reorienting attention to the barrier in place of state boundaries,
and promoted a new pattern of settlement, and the prioritization of the security of settlements, that have dramatically shifted the territory, and redrawn the map of the Middle East, in ways that can hardly be called eternal–or even seen as following a vision one might claim to call Zionist.
The prayer created, of course, a sense of the eternal boundaries that was potent for many in the Israeli government–from Benjamin Netanyahu, who would have ben a child, not yet a Bar Mitzvah, when it was included in the liturgy after 1956. The repeating of this prayer gained resonance in the coming days, as it made me realize the complex overlapping sorts of spatialities or mapping regimes in the current war. It suggests the tangled nature of mapping the conflict in Gaza, where intense cruelty of a military conflict has led to the latest spate of visualization claiming to be cartographic clarifications,–running up against incomprehension of the unfolding scale of violence that is so hard to map.
Indeed, the vulnerability of Israel was long seen as a basis for the strategic right to defend Israel’s borders–a question of the essence from the foundation of the state whose strategic vulnerability of its borders has haunted the nation, as it will no doubt continue to do.
Israel’s Strategic Vulnerability from the West Bank
Yet the right to protect borders is qualitatively changed if those borders are edges of security, determined without any desire to negotiate or ability to negotiate with a presence of Palestinians who are effectively dehumanized on its other side. The vigilance of guarding borders seems a right. But I self-consciously stumbled as the congregation endorsed the future safety of the Israeli Defense Service in guarding Israel’s borders, the Gaza-Israel border barrier in my mind, before October 7. Palestinians were killed in an accidental explosion during protests along Gaza’s eastern boundary, receiving fire as they confronted Israeli forces, in a fence that was monitored, but imposed an edge of territoriality, rather than a boundary. Was this a territorial boundary, or just a physical fence? Did it define sovereignty, or was it drawn to protect a contested military line? Was this a line that the Prime Minister would have felt desperate to defend, especially a man who was born in 1948?
The promise that fencing built over three years for 3.5 billion NIS might”put a wall of iron, sensors, and concrete between [Hamas] and the residents of the south” was no boundary of the state, but it was presented as one. As a militarized barrier, it was a super-border, an isolation wall of sorts to prevent infection from the Palestinian groups who inhabited cities and refugee camps on the other side. If promoted as a defensible territorial divide that might be inserted into the Middle East as a measure of national security, the border was seen as having one side as a securitized barrier, a line that was drawn to stop thinking about those on its other side or its impact on global geopolitics. The liturgical invocation of the defense of quasi-timeless boundaries to defend cities seemed at odds with this highly militarized border, normalizing the firing of rockets form the Gaza Strip and protests at its other side as a stable boundary able to be controlled and monitored at a distance.
Palestinians Protest beside the Gaza-Isreali Border Wall on Eastern Border of Gaza Strip, 22 September 2023/ EFE/EPA/Mohammed Saber
It of course was not, and demands to be seen not as an immutable boundary line. Mapping the region with such firmness offers little plan forward, to be sure, but only a retrenchment of past borders. Two weeks before the invasion of Israel’s securitized boundary around the Gaza Strip, the role of defending bounds, and beseeching God for their defense, was pretty hard to articulate. The trust placed in a fortified boundary as part of a quite recent commitment to “surround all of Israel with fences and obstacles” mis-mapped walls as if they were defensible as timeless bounds, in ways that brought me back to the liturgy of Day of Atonement. Praying for defending built boundaries, with few prospects of future safety “over our land and the cities of our God,” made it hard to repeat the storied prayer written only in 1956. Guarding boundaries was never without its risks, to her sure, but the verbal map that mirrored military maps of the Universal Transverse Mercator, uniting land, air and sea in ways adopted after World War II, were cast as eternal, without geopolitical contingency or human intuition and origin, or diplomatic concordats with its neighbors. Was this made boundary only imagined as a line of security, rather than a mapping of friend and enemy?
The standard Mizhor prayer has since been revised among Jewish Reform congregations to include “the Innocent Among the Palestinian People,” asking that they remain “free from death and injury” as “Israeli soldiers as they defend our people against missiles and hate.” The alteration may help many examine their conscience, a deep imperative, but the power of mapping a mission of territorial redemption by timeless boundaries seems, at the same time, to be so powerfully disquieting as it transcended individual reflection, obstinately creating a “map”far more aggressive than with any negotiated historical grounds.
The verbal map I had stumbled upon resonated across a deeper history, tied mostly to scriptural markers, but nested into the military maps using a geodetic grid to unite air, land and sea forces, the Universal Transverse Mercator, that to me seems uncomfortably meshed with spatial markers of biblical tradition. Biblical tradition tugged at the military map, composed in 1956, for me, that belonged to many prayers the learned Talmudist wrote; the verbal map the congregation recited was integrated in the service seamlessly, but my voice broke at imprecating God to protect the knitting of a military and biblical map presented as transmitting sacred boundaries to the present.
As much as I tried to compartmentalize my reaction to the prayer, it seemed especially difficult to recite–and to transmit in an immutable liturgy–long before October 7, as illegal settlements in the occupied territory have so dramatically risen, from the West Bank to the southern Negev, and to the outposts of near the Gaza-Israel border barrier. When the barrier was invaded by exultant Palestinians armed to the hilt, puncturing through the menacing border boundary with vengeance and glee, the safety of its defenders imperiled by men who drove through it in bulldozers, cycles and jeeps punched holes in the notion this was an offensive edge or guarded territorial boundary.
Terrorists Crossing the Fence of Southern Gaza Border Boundary, October 7, 2023/Said Khatibn/AFP
There is a sense that this layering of cartographic spatialities can be traced to the early roots of Zionism–if not the conflation of an conceit of the harmonious living between Jews and Arabs in a Altneuland that Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionist thought, audaciously foresaw in his novel. When Rabbi Weiss, a Moravian, broached in used tones the powerful word “Palestine” as if it was a forbidden secret, or a powerful word indeed to uncork, in an early twentieth-century attempt to conjure a land free from anti-semitism in a new place rooted in old ideas in the seacoast inhabited by Philistines for Greek geographers, the fictional Rabbi paused at mentioning a land preserved in mythic terms in exile, introducing the toponym to shift conversation on the “Jewish problem” to a new level, buy broaching how “A new movement has arisen within the last few years, . . . called Zionism [whose] aim is to solve the Jewish problem through colonization on a large scale,” by allowing “all who can no longer bear their present lot will return to our old home, to Palestine.” He ws dumbfounded at provoking laugher at a dinner party in a cosmopolitan city: yet “The laughter ran every gamut. The ladies giggled, the gentlemen roared and neighed.” Yet the overlapping of old and new in a map of the region continued to provoke strong feelings of territoriality as it has been translated into firm boundaries of defense.
The notion of “Palestine” was erased from the map that Benjamin Netanyahu dsplayed to the United Nations’ 78th General Assembly, entitled “The New Middle East,” just weeks before the invasion of Israel, but its absence was a far more provocative overlapping of different and incongruous spatialities of the region than many have noted. The cartographic prop that was presented the United Nations General Assembly echoed the verbal map I stumbled upon. It was terrifying given the recent promoting of new boundaries for Israel, that terrifyingly echoed the prayers, theMiddle East that Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister promoted to the United Nations General Assembly as “new,” and as able to “bring down barriers between Israel and its neighbors” by removing boundary walls of the sort that the current Israeli government has promoted at such huge expense. Despite investing a huge amount of the military budget in barrier wall between Israel and the Gaza Strip, the barrier is hard to see as defensible–even if we only later wondered by what logic Israel imagined itself secure behind a border wall.
Benjamin Netanyahu Presenting Maps of Middle East at United Nations’ 78th Assembly/ September 22, 2023
As we looked to maps and data visualizations for compressed history lessons in future weeks, I looked to the past, from this old verbal maps that stuck stubbornly in my head–even as I was able to date its inclusion in the liturgy to the U.N. Plan of partition of February, 1956. Did Netanyahu remember this plan–or his father’s reaction to it when he was six years of age–asking the General Assembly, the international body that had partitioned the Middle East, “change the attitude of the organizations institutions toward the State of Israel,” echoing Ben-Zion’s fears that creating “an Arab state in the land of Israel” would be a conflict preparing for the destruction of Israel?
United Nations Partition Plan for Israel and Arab Lands/February, 1956
1. The Israel-Gaza Barrier was built to monitor movement between the Gaza strip and Israel a border didn’t allow. The fence and concrete constructed after a spate of Palestinian suicide bombers was not “Iron” but after Palestinians infiltrated Israeli territory, from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and by firing rockets from the Gaza enclave, it was a state of the art security barrier, perhaps even a promotion of Israeli technologies of “border building” on show for the newly elected American President, Donald Trump, and an eery imposition on Middle Eastern geopolitics. The trust in this defensive mechanism lacked any means of active protection, but as a securitized wall of tactical advantage, securing an illusion of protecting Israeli cities without any offensive action.
The new pseudo-borders of security barriers erase the partitioning of Palestinian lands by the false promise of securitized walls, as if in place of cross-border dialogue. While we map the Gaza conflict as if it were a local one, in our hyper-connected age, ostensibly without borders, the conflict on the Gaza Strip demands to be seen partly as an eternal one, but even more deeply as one of mapping sovereignty in a globalized world. The notion of “guarding boundaries” has become tantamount to the guarding of settlements in the Netanyahu regime, which had proposed a new map of Israel, not bound by a “Green Line” of past settlements drawn up in earlier treaties of the Israeli state, but advancing a new logic of accelerating settlements from the River Jordan up to the Mediterranean. Netanyahu pedantically used a red magic marker to present what he called a new prophetic vision and blessing before the United Nations General Assembly, including pained representatives from Lebanon, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia, that began from shockingly ahistorical claims Israel was founded without a Green Line dividing Israeli and Palestinian presence on the West Bank–
Benjamin Netanyahu Presenting Maps of Middle East at United Nations’ 78th Assembly/ September 22, 2023
–and continued to imagine a “New Middle East” cleansed of Palestinians.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Presenting Maps of Middle East at United Nations’ 78th Assembly/ September 22, 2023
In perhaps purposefully low-tech cartographic static maps, he heavy-lidded PM heavy handedly presented a choice between a horrific war of terrorism and “a historic peace of boundless prosperity and hope” fifteen days before the bloody territorial incursions of October 7. While the maps were not suggested to be a form of cartographic violence, they made the circuits on social media, with considerable shock at an Israeli “showing” a map entitled “New Middle East” without the presence of Palestinians as a call for “eliminating Palestine and Palestinians from the region”–and legitimizing a “Greater Israel,” commentators feared, in a weird cartographic purification.
Netanyahu assumed a vaguely professorial air, as he heralded the historical emergence of “many common interests” between Israel and Arab states after three millennia, in the emergence of a “visionary corridor” that revealed an Arab world “reconciled” to Israel. Yet weeks before the military invasion, he lifted mock-up maps of both the creation of the Israel as a state in 1948 and of “The New Middle East” in patronizing manner that persisted in incredibly eliding Palestinian Territories with Israel–and placed Israeli territory at the center of the “New” Middle East–
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Presenting Maps of Middle East at United Nations’ 78th Assembly/ September 22, 2023
–as a prophetic vision for the region that would be able to “bring down barriers between Israel and our neighbors” as we “build a new corridor of peace” omitted a Palestinian presence.
His condescendingly professorial style of addressing the UN General Assembly may have well recalled the intonations adopted by his father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, a professor of Early Modern European History who had funneled his militant revisionary Zionist vision refusing to accommodate Arabs’ pretense to sovereignty in the Middle East save from a position of absolute strength to a world picture that insisted Jews were long persecuted as racially different, as if reifying twentieth-century theories of racial purity as an optic of Jewish persecution. Netanyahu seemed to see himself as forcing the resolution of this historical dynamic, as a new historical age “will not only bring down barriers between Israel and our neighbors,” but “build a new corridor of peace and prosperity” by a “visionary corridor” negotiated at G-7 as if to win assent from General Assembly member-states to a “New Middle East” tying Israel to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan,–
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Presenting Maps of Middle East at United Nations’ 78th Assembly/ September 22, 2023
–as a chance to “tear down the walls of enmity” to proclaim peace “between Judaism and Islam” on account of a a “visionary corridor” of energy pipelines, fiber optic cables, maritime trade and transport of goods, uniting the Arabian Peninsula and Israel to the world. In place of the thick red magic marker he Sharpie illustrated epochal shift in Israel’s ties to new Arab partners of Saudi Arabia and Jordan,–imitating his use of a red magic marker to lecture the General Assembly e the Iranian nuclear threat. By heralding normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia as a “New Middle East,” he seemed to dismiss any need for future work from the United Nations, no doubt with the Gaza Strip in mind, if he had placed it off the table of the United Nations’ concerns.
That very vision of globalization was terrifying to some, promoting as consensus the recognition of Israeli independence in the Arab world. The rather foolish cartographic prop sought cartographic normalization of a myth, seeking endorsement of a “Greater Israel” that squirreled a heritage of rather radical Zionist strain into a vision of global modernization. And while in our hyper-connected age, ostensibly without borders, the conflict on the Gaza Strip can be mapped as a local one–or an eternal one. Netanyahu presented a choice that echoed the verbal map in the liturgy read in the far fuller Oxford synagogue, assuming quite professorial airs as if to channel a commanding relation before the United Nations and to the Arab world that his father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, had not only endorsed but seemed to summon an ability to conjure a means of defending Israel against its enemies by creating a new highway of information, technology, and jobs that ran from India to Israel, to guarantee the death of a two-state solution.
“Europe” and “Asia” were linked in this new globalist vision through Israel, skirting Africa and suggesting a new “First World” view that seemed to elide a Palestinian presence in the Middle East.
AP/Richard Drew
Netanyahu Demonstrates “New Middle East” and 78th General Assembly/Sept 22, 2023
Much as Netanyahu’s Middle Easter n map of Israel’s 1948 foundation included no sign of Palestinian presence, the PowerPoint manqué of revisionary Zionism beginning but ten minutes into his speech, using the crudest of cartographic props to announce a prophetic vision to the half-empty arena of the Seventy-Eighth General Assembly. The map sought to shoehorn the Gaza Strip and West Bank into a cartographic reality negating existence of the Palestinian Territories, making good on his campaign promise. This was a map of robust security rather than actual boundary lines. Was it not an endorsement of a vision of old boundaries to the Mediterranean Sea, from the River Jordan, that the ardent Zionist Goren had penned?
Prime Minister Netanyahu at his Jerusalem Office, 2016/The New York Times/Uriel Sinai
The didactic demonstration of the boundaries of Israel’s territory was more than heavy handed: few discussed it as a form of cartographic violence, save on social media, but the later attacks of October 7 perhaps demand it be seen as so. Netanyahu’s announcement to the General Assembly Israel had turned the page, and was “on the cusp of an agreement with Saudi Arabia” aimed to make global news by heralding the that the “historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia will truly create a new Middle East”–not acknowledging Saudi demands of progress toward a Palestinian State. In place of a “green line” dividing Israeli and Palestinian Territories, as if Arab states that Netanyahu seemed to have lined up as economic partners would to allow Israel to absorb the Gaza Strip, a stubborn sticking point of the settlement dividing Palestinian and Israeli sovereignty. The maps that Netanyahu showed didn’t foreground walls, or even show the extent to which Israel has been surrounded by walls, fences, and iron barriers in recent years, even if these walls na barriers defined the new status quo in Israel, both within the West Bank and its Separation Barrier, and the Gaza-Israel barrier, the so-called Iron Wall, concluded in 2021 with an underground concrete barrier, no-go zone, and a martime boundary that the Israeli navy patrolled.
Washington Post/2023
The Prime Minister, in what may be a swan-song performance of bravura with outdated visual aids, announced he was on the brink of a coming era of peace of biblical terms a peace “between Judaism and Islam, between Jerusalem and Mecca, between the descendants of Isaac and the descendants of Ishmael.” As if to anticipate the celebration of Yom Kippur, a day dedicated to righting past wrongs and vowing to not be repeated in the coming year, the evocation of peace was indeed illusory. Gaza had been under Israelite rule millennia ago–Egyptian archeologists unearthed a mosaic in Gaza that was later dated to 508-9 of the historic Israelite King David wearing a crown and playing a lyre, from the Gaza synagogue; after the Six Day war of 1967, it was transported to Jerusalem for restoration and a museum of Judea on the Jerusalem-Jericho road on the West Bank. But when the IDF forces guarding the borders of Israel was written in 1956, Gaza City lay far outside Israeli sovereignty–and the sixth century synagogue, exhumed as if a monument of biblical archeology.
King David Mosaic in Gaza Synagogue, 508 CE (Discovered by Egyptian Archeologists, 1965)
The inclusion of Gaza within biblical archeology and a cartography of redemption was tied to the greater historical evocation of the cartographic conceit of Eretz Yisrael—a “Greater” Israel, a concept Netanyahu inherited from a tradition of ultra-nationalist Zionism to which his father ascribed. The concept that arose in dreams to promote future settlement of a Zionist state was echoed in Netanyahu’s display of the “New Middle East” to the General Assembly–but that map quite quickly collapsed two weeks later, shaking this cartographic imperative with the terribly bloody invasion of Israeli territory.
International attention immediately shifted to the barrier wall between Gaza and Israel that Hamas and Islamic Jihad breached in the Al-Aqsa Flood–rather than removing walls, walls were rebuilt to , monitor the region, as IDF air planes pummeled the Gaza Strip and destroyed its infrastructure. There seemed no future for a Green Line, already conveniently absent from Netanyahu’s mock-up of a future vision of regional peace or terrain maps of the region that adorned his Jerusalem office. Netanyahu had removed any Palestinian sovereignty form the floor-to-ceiling map that hung in his Jerusalem office,–analogous to how his map of the “New Middle East” presented as if it were a point of international consensus at the United Nations removed Palestinian territoriality from the table; he seems to put sovereign boundaries in his Middle East suddenly off of the table, erasing a two-state solution, centering the map at Israel, removing any Palestinian presence in the Middle East–a cartographic imperative or romance that prevent any future or need for a “two-state” solution. Many rejected “a map that does not show territories that are occupied or annexed” as of “no help with regard to the efforts to reach a negotiated two-state.“ But Netanyahu elevated cartography a destiny, in ways the Palestinian Authority found arrogantly “hateful and provocative” use of a fake map to normalize Israel’s illegal occupation, in explicit hopes to alter the UN’s “attitude” toward Israel, by, in the words of the PA, denying “an indigenous, centuries-old presence borne out by history.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Uses a Cartographic Prop to Address General Assembly/Sept 22, 2023
The adviser to the Palestinian Authority on all manners of religious affairs and Islamic relations, Mahmoud al-Habash, found the speech not only “arrogant and racist to an astonishing degree” as a method of compulsively”lying [to people] until you belie it yourself” the was disgraceful in its distortion and disconnection from the actual Middle East, it seems to have repeated the boundaries recalled in the IDF prayer, as if he had delegated the map to be designed by a hard-right Zionist. How did other, less measured members of the Palestinian Authority, react to the map in private?
Was the arrogance of exporting a theocratic vision of radical Zionist inflection of a map that extended from “the sands of Egypt to the Avanah” to the international bod not only a declaration of the unaccountability to international law, but an image that recalled the fencing off of a border that bore the imprint, for some, of the 2009 upgrading of the border fence on the Israeli-Egyptian border fence back in 2008, completed in 2012 an upgrade of the border as a fence that became both the model for the Trump border wall with Israel and Indian nationalists’ plans for a border with he Punjab and Kashmiri regions of Pakistan with “Israel-type fencing”–an anti-indigenous tactic in itself across the border to prevent “infiltration” by “Arab militants” of Israel–
June, 2012. Idol
–to literalize a border in the “sands of Egypt” that the IDF prayer evoked the boundary of “Israel” from Lebanon to the Egyptian desert to the approach to the “Aravah” or River Jordan: this was the map that Netanyahu had so “arrogantly” bought to the General Assembly.
26 March 2008
The cartographic normalization he presented quickly collapsed. Netanyahu had rarely presented himself as a man of peace, but used the term strongly associated with his predecessor, Simon Peres, to coop the phrase–but if Peres imagined Gaza as a hub through which “merchandise and cargo will pass through its gates to points in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Iraq,” Netanyahu presented his new role in guaranteeing the “safeguarding our vital interests” by placing Israel at the center of the Middle Eastern map that ignored and erased Palestine or Palestinian interests.
The settling of the area of Southern Israel and the West Bank as areas for future settlement fit into that normalization. The illegal settler outposts first sanctioned in Netanyahu’s first term, from 1996 to 2005, accelerated in his second term, as 99.8% of land in the West Bank went to Jews, while apportioning a mere 0.2% to Palestinians–and escalated in the Trump regime to new heights–
Apportionment of Illegal Outposts in Israeli Occupied Territories
Settlers in Occupied Territories
I found the prayer for the safety of the IDF guarding Israeli frontiers demanded to be historicized as written in 1956, for Israel’s actual borders, even as they were evoked as timeless in the liturgy. Rather that desperately erase the story of contingency that led to the founding of the Israeli state, or reflect the myth-making of the unity of an Israeli region, the mandate to protect cities in Israeli territory since its 1948 founding, had accelerated rapidly by its tenth anniversary–
–but if flourishing and abundant, was circumscribed by the “Green Line” and left the Gaza Strip intact. The Green Line established on this map was the end of negotiations of sharing territorial claims, had only recently become a “secure and defensible” border in a new global context. It has been,”securitized” to respond to how Gaza and the West Bank have become remapped as Occupied Territories, to reduce threats of”insecurity and danger” that, post-1968, Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban already told the UN were equivalent to “for us something of a memory of Auschwitz.”
2. The accelerated growth of settlements far beyond the settlements of Jews promoted in Gaza Strip expanded the notion of vigilance of territorial boundaries of the past, but tragically ended with the triggering of terrible memories of brutal extermination. The very fear of vulnerability evoked in the massacres of October 7, and raised question of how borders were guarded, and what the primacy of guarding a securitized border could be. Was I asked to repeat a similar map in the Oxford synagogue, by endorsing a verbal map of Israeli boundaries? It seems the liturgy had sequestered a volatile verbal map of Israel into the Holiday service as an eternal verity the God might recognize. The blessing written by the venerated Rabbi Goren, first head of the Military Rabbinate, the foremost authority on Halakhic Law in the Independence War, tellingly blended Talmudic scholarship with military map. Goren was famously a lightning rod for Arab-Israeli relations, calling for the destruction of the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock in terms to be so extreme to serve as recruit Hamas members. Goren’s calls for the destruction of the mosques has been used by Islamists to make charges of a living Jewish extremism.
Goren’s prayer for the IDF had invited the collective endorsement of the sanctified boundaries born from a deeply conservative religious zionism seemed squirreled into the service. (I only later learned Goren’s work provided as much as anything evidence of the fears of Jewish annexation of sacred sites, that had motivated the military invasion of Israel called the Al-Aqsa Flood. As the occupation of the Gaza Strip would be presented as the most intractable point to negotiate the bloody Gaza War, I sought to discover what the “sands of Egypt” meant as a boundary in the liturgy, in 1958, when’s Isreal’s boundaries ended at the Gaza Strip. The liturgy blurred the divine authority of borders in biblical markers, in a genealogy of divine protection as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was asked to “bless fighters of the Israeli Defense Forces, who stand guard over our land and the cities of our god, from the border of Lebanon to the desert of Egypt, to the Great Sea, to the approach of the Avanah.” The vision of territorial redemption that allowed the possibility to renegotiate the boundaries of Isreal, much as the future move of the Israeli capital to Jerusalem, confiscation of Palestinian properties in 1950, or the occupation of Gaza City on the edges of Egypt’s sands ten years later.
Map of Israel and Jordan (1953-1958),/Cameron J. Nunley, Deviant Art
As the increased securitization of the Gaza Strips boundary has become an aggressive act to isolate the region, and prevent its stability, was it a boundary I could feel comfortable praying that God would protect? The war in Gaza has unfolded in ways that pit a notion of Israeli security against the territorial rights of sovereignty, it seemed that the securitization of Israel’s boundaries had created boundaries and borders on the enclave of the Gaza Strip. For the Gaza-Israel border was built not as a border, but a securitized edge had been defined, removed from dialogue with its inhabitants by a logic of securitization that, I worried, was removed from the continued safety of Israel in the Middle East. For the securitization of the boundaries of Israel created a new problem of defense, one harder to endorse, indeed, or to cast as a means to redemption. The prayer elegantly began in a scriptural register melded geo-markers of scriptural resonance with a Universal Transverse Mercator, a standard in postwar military maps, asking for safety “on the land, in the air, and on the sea” that mirrored the uniting of Israel’s navy, land based army, and airfare from 1948, and a military map that the first Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces knew well having fought in three Arab-Israeli wars to defined Israel’s borders. Goren had penned the prayer as Israel’s boundaries were poised to grow to include Jerusalem, if not the West Bank, to abut the Gaza Strip,–
Ten Year Anniversary Map of Israeli Settlements/Maariv Newspaper (Tel Aviv, 1958)
–per a map the celebrated the achievements of settling the region an its tenth anniversary the is so crowded with Hebrew toponymy to make its striking typographic density an encomiastic record
The expansion of settlements had defined a notion of “security” of protecting cities and towns–many of which seem written in pen within this newspaper map, within the curves of a green line–
–the abundance of names within the lands are less clearly protected within a green line, than are the settlements around the Gaza Strip. The notion of security was perverted, I began to think, as the boundary barrier has isolated the Gaza Strip in an attempt to contain its military threat to Israeli security by a “smart” border wall. If the border barrier was by designed to eliminate all cross-border infiltration of the sort that Israel had feared from 2014, the barrier unveiled in 2021 was designed to constrain unsupervised entry into Israeli territory. Five infiltrations had targeted IDF forces beyond “the Gaza-vicinity communities”–ifUNHCR deemed “legitimate military targets” of IDF positions in Israel near the “green line” established in the 1967 ceasefire. As a result of the fears of invasion, the IDf had constrained the movement of Palestinians: the Gaza blockade of 2007 provoked tunnels to be drilled with increased avidity, but also to constrain the enclave’s growth.
If a rich Hebrew toponomy overflows these in this newspaper insert map to celebrate settlement of cities in the region, as if celebrating the new territory that had been negotiated, the boundary of the Green Line was less a boundary, than a basis to cut Gaza off from economic development–and indeed a form of “economic war”–its securitized boundary. it has shifted from the defensive role to guard against incursions to an offensive economic closure seeking to curtail economic productivity and indeed any economic future, denying any sovereignty or security to the region.
Invoking the timeless nature of Israel’s boundaries seemed a scary erasure of all contingency, and a collapsing of all sense of a future contingency as well as the relation between human and divine law, even before the events of October 7. The defense of these boundaries was a mission that demanded divine protection and oversight, but was hardly a divine contract: the biblical genealogy the prayer invoked gained poignancy in coming weeks, as if a contract with the divine might trump international law. The verbal map of symbolic borders–not mentioning Gaza or a Gaza Strip, was echoed in prayer cards distributed to soldiers as spiritual guides, but seemed to have been rewritten by billion shekel security walls that Israel had constructed as a border with Gaza, a costly line of defense that would soon be disabled, where soldiers would die.
The familiar prayer interrupted any hopes this was an occasion to introduce myself to the congregation, as I reflected on quandaries of investing boundaries with timelessness, before the horrific invasion of Israel that triggered existential fears of survival–far from the security that the Gaza-Israel “border boundary” had officially promised. The focus of the prayer on the vigilant defense of boundaries left me inexplicably tense. The prayers that Goren wrote reminded me that the IDF, back in 5710, was born to defend borders clearly imagined as falling in Israeli sovereignty. Boundary lines was prominently in contrast to the aqua lines of lands of Palestinian autonomy in maps past the 1950 Armistice Line that defined the “Gaza Strip” as a site of Arab autonomy in the first Arab-Israeli wars. But the tenuous relation of the region to Israeli sovereignty already reminded me of how the security the state had expanded and shifted the notion of these boundaries, whose historic sites were now mapped less as a notional terrain than a security threat.
IDF Prayer Card/English
3. Even before October 7, it seemed different, as the boundaries of Israel were increasingly securitized walls. We often pray for the safety of those who secure our borders, but even before the safety of settlers beside the Gaza border barrier was put into evidence, I stumbled over the request for divine assistance in securing a border that had become a costly border of securitization, the greatest border barrier ever created in Israel and most complex project created by the IDF, its cutting edge sensors able to detect underground or offshore movements at a distance. Long before the first establishment of Islamic groups were in Gaza in the 1980s, without clear ties to Islamist politics, but the trans-national ties became the basis for building a boundary wall.
The image of the defense of the borders of “our land and the cities of our God” seemed self-righteous relic in the age of the Iron Dome and age of rocket-fire from Gaza, even before the boundary was punctured as 3,000 rockets from the Gaza Strip stunned the nation, and the barrier’s security sensors were disabled, in a strategy of offering cover for terrorists’ bloody invasions across this built boundary on October 7, shocking much of the world, as settlements around the perimeter were marked by the dark clouds of so many raging wildfires, pillaging and destroying an area of once rich agricultural production.
Map Data: OpenStreetMap/AFP/Ynet
The post-1956 prayer nested into the Makhzor invoked an eternal collective mission of defense passed in oral tradition–if that tradition surely dated from the founding of the Israel’s army as a union of its navy, army, and Air Force in the post-1949 period that “pray[ed] HaShem bless and protect the IDF and keep them always safe under the Shadow of His Wings” of a curiously timeless affect. There was a place for prayers that the Holy One, blessed be He, “preserve and and protect our fighters from every distress” and “grant them salvation until they were crowned with victory.” But they had a sense of resilience hard to process or endorse as tensions around the Gaza boundary barrier seemed invoked as a timeless mission of protecting a sanctified space “from the border of Lebanon to the desert of Egypt, to the Great Sea,” a map the divine might be expected to recognize to command precedence?
As each “crisis” in the Middle East provokes a slew of potted histories about the shifting borders of the region, collapsing time into a set of visualizations that trace individual and collective wrongs, collapsing time into a sequence of maps and infographics that dangerously risk invoking precedents that erase any sense of cartographic contingency, precisely by collapsing time and using maps as evidence of agency, if not criminality and old wrongs. They submerge or overlook the huge effect by which a cartography of security has re-written the boundaries of safety, and of boundaries as markers of safety, in a globalize world, where weapons and fortification systems are allied in new boundaries foreign to the boundaries that the IDF forces was entrusted to oversee. To be sure, the flow of arms arming men for a rampage from the coastal enclave were expanded locally, modeled after those of Russia, the former Soviet Union, Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere, for cross-border tactics, from guided missiles to Unmanned Arial Weapons (drones), that have recast border walls as a vaunted measure of security. But if the 1950 Armistice Line defined the “Gaza Strip” as an enclave of Arab autonomy in the first Arab-Israeli wars, construction of the Gaza Border Barrier, unveiled as an “Iron Wall” three years ago, in December, 2021, but begun in 2016.
If the “Iron Wall” was built and designed as former President Donald Trump unveiled proposals for a United States-Mexico Border Wall, its rhetorical origins may be more home-grown. Although the plans for an insurmountable table border wall of 140,000 tons of iron and concrete including placing “sensors and concrete between the terror organization [Hamas] and the residents of Israel’s south,” replaced the fences built in response to increased trans-national weapons by 2014, the very name of the “smart fence” has deep zionist roots, many have noted, from a time when the problem of a minority settlement of Jews had to defend its relations to Arab Palestinians residents in the Middle East, and fully realized that “Among the grave questions raised by the concept of our people’s renaissance on its own soil, . . . the question of our relations with the Arabs.”
The Russian Jew Ze’ev Jabotinsky reacted so strongly against the idea of a partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs that in the 1920s was entertained at Zionist conferences he reframed a Revisionist Zionism that preserved the idea of a “Jewish state” of territorial integrity, arguing Jews were able to by peaceful means change the attitude of the Arabs toward Zionism, and convincing them of their powerlessness to “give up hope of getting rid of settlers,” lest, as all indigenous, Palestinians, who he denied constituted a “national entity” continue to “resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement,” if a “gleam of hope that they can prevent ‘Palestine’ from becoming the Land of Israel” existed. He sought to break Arab resistance to settlers’ presence: if the “iron wall” became an end in itself in Revisionary Zionist, Jabotinisky himself clearly accorded Palestinians “national rights” and need for political autonomy in “The Morality of the Iron Wall,” but demanded both be recognized only from a position of power. The “Iron Wall” was a metaphor for the force for negotiations with Palestinians in the 1980s, that the barrier promised, and concretized a massive show of military force that was manifest in the massive investment in the Gaza-Israel border barrier constructed over three years.
The verbal map continued to remind me, after the invasion of Israel across the Gaza Strip, of how multiple spatialities existed below any map of the Gaza Strip,–an enclave with some autonomy but considered as a part of Israel, in ways that are not only rooted in its national security, but that indeed lay in the “sands of Egypt” and on the Mediterranean.
The eery timelessness of the verbal map erased contingency from the foundation of Israel as a state, against the tide of history, in ways that must have been useful and had a place, or seemed to deserve one, in religious devotion, if not in the Mizkhor given to those enlisting or conscripted in IDF forces together with a rifle. Had they been concretized into the collective memory of a generation of the nation, eager to defend the uneasy nature of these new borders of securitized fences, designed to postpone negotiation and to remap the territory?
The verbal map reconciled the ancient claims and the modern grid developed in World War II to link land, air and naval forces as Israel’s Air Force, army, and navy were united in the Israeli Defense Forces. The prayer does not mention Gaza or the Gaza Strip, although they were the gate and blurred border to the “sands of Egypt.” It made me curiously uncomfortable long before the current Gaza War, but I already paused as I tried to reconcile the eerily vague boundary of the “sands of Egypt” (which seemed a bit of a license to expand to the Sinai) against the securitized border of the Gaza Strip, patrolling entry and exit from the “Gaza Strip” by the few open gates, and monitoring the region by both air and sea, in ways that seemed to offer little place to hide but underground in the tunnels.
The boundary was not really an end of Israeli sovereignty–it claimed to occupy Palestinian enclave and had pushed the boundary barrier into the Gaza Strip The “sands of Egypt” were of course a historical battleground for proving the Israeli army back in 1967, as Arab unity was pierced by an unexpected attack of paratroopers and tank battalions on ground and air advanced into the Sinai desert. But the Gaza-Israeli border barrier seems far less of a sovereign boundary–although it touches the Egyptian a border–but a perimeter f mostly closed and open crossing points, “no-go” zones, and zones closed to most Palestinians, in an attempt to create a firm boundary of security for the Israeli settlers encouraged to live on its “other” side–where many settlers, including some who had left the Strip in 2005, had relocated, and whose security the government has sought to preserve at inordinate costs.
The Gaza Strip has long been outside the travel plans of Israelis since the nation retreated from the Mediterranean enclave in 2005, a generation ago, if the region is stubbornly seen by many in the current government as part of an eternal land. While the prayer is a version, to some extent, of the Traveler’s Prayer, or תפילת הדרך, that beseeched the Divine for security and safety on voyages by car or horse and buggy, or by sea or air, deriving from the Babylonian Talmud, scholars of the Babylonian Exile had encouraged merging individual need with that of the community, when needed, and the request “You lead us toward peace, guide our footsteps toward peace, that we are supported in peace, and make us reach our desired destination for life, gladness, and peace” and “rescue us from the hand of every foe and ambush.” The prayer was adapted by Reb Goren, following the transferral of the individual to the collective, to bind the individual to the army to a sacred notion of military struggle, asking God to “lead our Enemies under our soldiers’ sway.”
The restriction of the Gaza Strip might allow quasi-territorial autonomy without any actual ties to the greater world, save for an underground network of tunnels. We have encountered a virtual block-out of news from the Gaza Strip, and even attacks on news reporters of Palestinian quarters, the unilaterally imposed boundaries of the Gaza Strip seemed part of the redrawing of Israel’s territorial boundaries in very dangerous ways. One might sense a racial component to the resettlement of the Middle East that was, per Charles Warren of the Palestine Exploration Fund, long inhabited by “mixed race” peoples, tacitly, perhaps, granting rights of resettlement Jewish traders would reclaim. This had injected a racial component in the project of resettlement of the “clash of civilization” if not of continents and culture in the current Gaza War. To be sure, the innovation of adding a system of irrigation from Jerusalem to Hebron due to the very detail economic survey of buildings and rivers allowed the area to be reimagined as a land of settlement by farmers, rather than nomadic Bedouins who had long lived there, before it was filled by Palestinian refugee camps after 1948. But the toponymy of a biblical spatiality was symbolically important in leveraging this land as a part of a spatial imagination of statehood–even if it was not a region of Jewish resettlement–in ways that demand further research, but the maps clearly removed a Bedouin or Palestinian toponym from the enclave, not mapped in detail in early settlers’ maps.
Prayer of Tefilaht Hadarech, or Traveler’s Prayer (Hebrew: תפילת הדרך)
I processed my reaction to the blessing, as the service continued in the well-lit room. The notion of a migrant itinerancy and travel seemed a proper prayer–my grandfather would have recited it before taking a plane from Florida to my Bar Mitzvah, as he returned to orthodoxy of his youth in old age. But the sense of travel was oddly literalized in the struggles that took IDF forces into areas of Egypt and Lebanon in the three Arab-Israeli wars in which Goren had himself fought, and which he had devised a new means to understand the combat on these new edges of Israeli sovereignty.
תפילת הדרך in Eighteenth Century Siddur
The defense of the Gaza Boundary as a border didn’t include the Gaza border boundary in the collective task of protecting Israel’s borders. But, even before the terrifying invasion into the Gaza envelope October 7, standing guard over borders seemed at odds with the built border barrier that the IDF had guarded the Gaza Strip. A generation of residents has internalized the presence of a sixty kilometer security fence around its border, blocked off since 1996, for nearly a generation; Gaza’s waters and airspace have been closely monitored, mapped, and surveilled by the IDF, as if to deny the sense of its autonomous territory. The border assumed a necessity as a securitized space, preventing cross-border incursions and naturalized as a boundary to be defended, however, since the armistice of 1950, when it was cartographically naturalized as part of the Israeli state that echoed the prayer I read in the study leather Makhzor, promoting the resettlement of the region in 5710 as a project of unbounded optimism, filled, as the Ten Year Map, with a wealth of purely Hebrew toponymy–
Map of Israel and Armistice with Arab States within Palestine (1950)
–that indeed extended to the Gaza “Strip” and invested it with cultural claims.
Map of Israel and Armistice with Arab States within Palestine (1950)
Yet in the pictorial map, Gaza was clearly bound by a dark line, colored to indicate its recent inclusion in Israeli sovereignty, the Egyptian army having recently let the enclave as it was encircled by the Israeli army in 1949–and the region annexed, if its inclusion in the Israeli state in fact remained problematic, if it was mapped as part of Israeli sovereignty. The border with Gaza was surveyed as part of the terrain of the Old Testament and Apocrypha in the 1870s by the Palestine Exploration Fund–a monumental font of Middle Eastern erudition that provided a basis for early Zionism–and embodied the Holy Land in a blueprint for its resettlement. (This is the map that underlay the 1950 map issued to celebrate the armistice.)
4. The idea of vigilantly standing guard over this artificial boundary had reminded me how much the prayer had closely mirrored a military mapping tools, but how much a military map underlay the vision of boundaries of Israel that was defended by the Israeli army forces of circa 1950, glorifying the redemption of Israel that the UN partition created, which provided a way to understand the setting in which Goren had composed the prayers about defending boundaries. The pictorial map revealed that the boundaries of the Gaza Strip were indeed tacitly included in the prayer–Gaza was quite problematically if seamlessly included in Israel, an area into which Israelis and returning Jews might settle, guarded by IDF troops. The imposition of allegedly transhistorical bounds in the pictorial map were difficult to translate to the present day, but the vision of a new Israeli territory as a collective heritage in the encomiastic pictorial map from 1950 fit the tenor of those very prayers asked me to visualize. I looked back at the first maps made after Israel adopted the Right of Return–a map that was truly triumphal, and that seems to welcome Jews of the World to the new land of hope–in which Gaza was clearly mapped as a part of this new mythic imaginary state, even if it was bound by a line not explained in its legend, as a mirror of the present, a sort of media archeology of the range of satellite maps that circulated to describe the invasion of Israel beyond the barrier and the Gaza War.
Do the same ideas underly the sense of Gaza as a land of modernization, rather than a land part of an Arab state? The sense of “Gaza” as a hinge between the continents of Africa and Europe, or Israel and Egypt, places it in a borderland that has perhaps gained global attention, a seat of resistance to Alexander the Great’s siege that long stumped his military engineers, and a problematic site of modern sovereignty on the border of Egypt. Was the region remapped by the Royal Engineers provided a new gloss of problematically ambiguous sources of Torah by new archeological finds, as the Royal Engineers used tools of the British Ordnance Survey to reframe the 6,000 sq km of “Palestine” as a space for civilized habitation, reclaimed from nomadic peoples? The new place-names provided a ways to meld “rights” of Jewish resettlement with divine rights of possession the prayer invoked.
Paradoxically, indeed, the verbal map of 1956 read on Yom Kippur–echoed the map of an Armistice with Arab states of 1950, was negotiated after an armistice with Arab states, and as the Israeli Parliament had proudly proclaimed the “Law of Return” that opened citizenship to all Jews seeking to “return” to Israel–and to proclaim the security with which they might do so from the diaspora. It was a narrative promise of state citizenship from statelessness, and celebrated the achievement of Israel’s boundaries and borders in quite encomiastic terms, that demand to be reflected upon: these boundaries were revealed ion the map by the ritualized blowing of a shofar as a triumph of modern engineering, allowing Right of Return of all Jews to Holy Land in actually expanded bounds, whose power as a pictorial map attracted my late father, and many American Jews of his age as a promise of identity within a state’s new bounds.
These spatialities were being unpacked during the violence of the Gaza War, as claims for Israeli sovereignty over Palestinian autonomy seemed to be violated daily with escalating violence, a response to the invasion. The datedness of the prayer was evident before the bloody invasion. The “virtues of protecting “Israel”‘s boundaries now included a border barrier Israel constructed to meet a need to defend the safety of settler communities, many of whom had lived in “Gaza” but were encouraged to enjoy better conditions of life as they left the Gaza Strip. In recent years, a new contingent of the IDF has emerged of settlers who after a compressed military training are supplied with military arms, who have targeted Palestinians so aggressively to threaten any independence Gazans had enjoyed. I refrained form endorsing a familiar prayer for Israeli Defense Forces’ safety who “guard over our land and the cities of our God from the border of Lebanon to the desert of Egypt and from the Great Sea to the approach of the Aravah–on the land, in the air, and on the sea.” The verbal map of stubbornly sacred origins uneasily enjambed with a mission of military defense became a mediation of less than sacred qualities, more I could have imagined as I entered the synagogue.
Armed IDF Brigades Stationed Outside of Gaza Strip Boundary in 2014
The shift in recent years demands to be understood, for better or worse, as a change in “map-mindedness,” and the rise of a geolocation tools in the IDF’s Mapping Division, a shift to pinpointing threats to Israeli’s security and safety–in order to preserve a veneer of a distinctly different sort of normalcy. In an illustrated pictorial map of 1950, elevation of the flag of Israel set beside the ritual sounding of the shofar, granted every Jew a right of “return” to Israel, is mirrored in the liturgy. It secured a vision promoted a law of immigration, whose “liberation”–terms which the IDF Chief Rabbi who composed the prayer–the very man who wrote new prayers for retrieving bodily remains across battle lines–had grasped.
The Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, had promoted the army’s defense of national borders as a problem as a collective project of mapping. But the acceptance of the place of such a collective act of mapping in Jewish religious practice seemed upended by the violent destabilization of any security of the miltarized border perimeter of Gaza, a perimeter that had been devised as a fiction of preserving Israeli security at massive expense in the defense budget, as over a billion dollars–over $1.1 billion–or 3.5 billion shekels were devoted to prioritize security that led the region to be remapped for security interests in new existential ways. And even before anti-war Palestinian protestors arrived at the gates of the Bodleian Library, raising flags to demand Palestinian national rights to be free, below gates bearing the motto, Dominus Illuminatio mea–from the Psalm that Oxford took as its motto, but have new resonance of divine illumination in other contexts–
–a verbal map that seemed to arrogate divine illumination to eternal borders was hard to process.
The prayer for guaranteeing the safety of borders can’t capture the ethical conflicts of wars against non-state actors or to protect settlements. If Goren hoped “May [Hashem] cause our enemies to submit before our soldiers,/and grant them salvation and crown them with victory” in terms recalling Deuteronomy, the prayer was indeed attempted to be emended in 2012, lest soldiers justify killing innocent civilians, a change that was rejected, despite fears of invoking divine justice to kill those who were not acting against the Israeli state. The deeply problematic nature of entrusting a task of securitization, and the ethical lapses it implied, cannot seem adequate to the problems of protecting the expansive settlements that have demanded protection and defense–or the mushrooming of settlements that have consigned the “two-state” solution to a thing of the past.
The bright blue gates that formed a security boundary for the pleasant Oxford synagogue reminded me of increased danger, or a palpable fear, in the edge of Oxford in the neighborhood known as Jericho. I felt quite on edge in Oxford, not only as I was not familiar with many of the prayers, and was interrogated by volunteer guards, as a precaution, where I received a Bar Mitzvah,–a ritual event I’d rarely considered for decades and stumbled over. I remembered the same synagogue for other events–including the 1973 Yom Kippur War three years previous. But we passed the litmus test for volunteer monitors; metal gates parted as I was offered entrance to ask forgiveness before the closing of gates that figuratively mark the year’s closed.
Closed Protective Security Gates before Doors of Oxford Synagogue Complex
If the security of those sturdy steel gates for community protection were part of the reason for my own unease, even if I realized they only provided for the common good. For the need for gates placed me on edge, even if they did not seem needed at that moment.
It was hard to endorse as the virtues of protecting timeless boundaries made me uncomfortable–even before the gruesome invasion of unthinkable brutality quickly triggered brutal aerial reprisals argued would force Palestinians to “pay the price” of the incursion. For the creation of Israel’s boundaries were invested in the prayer with a neo-Old Testament aura of legitimacy, if they were of clearly military origins, using a Universal Transverse Mercator to unite air, land and sea to celebrate the boundaries of the state, as the IDF united the Air Force, army, and navy of the new nation of Israel with the modernity of the postwar period. For all the associations with a sacred geography, it repurposed a spiritual map as a collective task of the collective work and imagination of Jews–if we map the colonization and the seizure of “Palestinian” territory as the origin of the Jewish state it was a new sense of boundedness and vigilance that internalized a mission.
Looking at early maps of the Israeli nation and its bounds online in the coming weeks, trying to makes sense of the war, I was struck by the 1956 mapping of a victorious campaigns invading of the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean of 1956, that had also papered over the huge loss of life.
Josef Szapiro, Map of the Israel Campaign in the Sinai Peninsula (detail of Gaza and Rapha) (Tel Aviv,1956)
The prayer beseeched God to protect he Israeli Defense Forces in their mission to “stand guard” over Israel’s boundaries made me wonder, before the invasion of the Gaza Strip, as what that “endeavor” is and what “every success” would be has become depressingly unclear. Wondering why this was so collectively endorsed in a pro forma manner was one thing, but the question of vigilance over the boundaries’ defense would be–let alone what it would be to be “crowned with victory” as the military responded to attacks on civilians and civilian abductions from Israeli soil.
While it is hard to process the psychological impact of these incursions, a recent interactive map of the October 7th Geo-visualization Project maps to scale the incursions as bloody massacres on Israeli territory, geolocating the 1,400 Israeli citizens or residents killed in cold blood in red dots, as if flecks of blood, on a pallid toner base-map of the Israeli nation as stains on sovereign identity. To be sure, vicious polemics had been already raised since 2010 as to whether the armed settlers who were supported by IDF troops presented legitimate targets for Hamas: but the scale of the incursion of highly armed forces through the barrier and deep into Israeli territory who committed massacres of civilians was a national shock, almost impossible to map in abstract terms. Yet this tragedy, impossible to convey in a map however stark, was responded to with a violence all too terrible to map, compelled by a logic of mapping that the atrocities have accelerated.
Mapping the Massacre/Geo-Visualization Project
The map, created as military reprisals intensified to unprecedented scale, cannot be claimed to justify ramping up the scale of reprisal as “paying” a price by a daunting Deuteronimic lex talionis of equivalences impossible to map. It distills the residue on the Israeli consciousness of the attacks that began with firing 5,000 rockets “into” Israeli territory from the occupied Gaza Strip, drone strikes from UAV’s at border towers, to allow unprecedented attacks on Israeli civilian communities and military posts to challenge the notion of a secure border and of securitization. The spots of “massacres,” like blood flecks on the scene of a primal crime, left a truly indelible stain. The violent murders challenged the manufactured security of borders over which IDF watched the liturgy described,–challenging the very fixity of these built, high tech boundaries of security–a departure from the postwar vision of security the liturgy had invested with an aura of timelessness.
That verbal map may haver origins that extended back to the extensively mapping the nineteenth-century Palestine Exploration Fund. The academics and pious Anglican clergyman used new mapping tools of the Royal Army Engineers as new mapping technologies to survey the Holy Land able to map a tangled toponymy of the Bible, Old Testament, and crusaders from the 1870s as the most reliable map concretizing a historical Holy Land. The surveys created “Palestine”–and offered grist for the mills of early proto-Zionists to imagine a region placing “Gaza” or “Azah” in the Old Testament terrain in an oddly disembodied “Land of Judah” nineteenth century London academics had first defined–was perhaps the symbolic base-map for the mission of IDF fighters in the prayer written by the Talmudic wunderkind Shlomo Goren to preserve in the liturgy. It is certainly the base-map behind any claims for the legitimacy of refounding Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip.
Palestine Exploration Fund, “Holy Land Illustrating Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and Josephus” (1872-80)
–a terrain then divided largely by imagined historical boundary lines of the Empire of Philistines that was rich with biblical toponymy, but was bleached of any discussion of its residents, save for the transliteration of current toponymy in italics–Izotus, Ascalon, Azah, Bilhah, Shema.
But the verbal maps and the cartographic models of the Palestine Exploration Fund, themselves modeled after how the Ordnance Survey set a basis for territorial sovereignty, contrasted to the spatialities of Israeli borders by which Gaza was a boundary of defense. The contrast may make one joke and ask where the heirs of the Philistines are. The Gaza Boundary Barrier guarded by IDF soldiers as an “Iron Wall” is not a “boundary” but a perimeter of defense. It was hard to reconcile with the prayer to send “every blessing and success in [soldiers’] every endeavor,” asking that “He lead our enemies under our soldiers’ sway” to grant them salvation”–itself inappropriate to the attacks of the terrorist network in dense maze of underground tunnels traced under the Gaza Strip.
For even before the violence of that blood-spattered terrain, the escalation of deaths in bombing campaign will raise enduring questions of how “the Lord your God. . . . goes with you to battle your enemies for you to save you” in a campaign that lacks direction, let alone redemption in the 2,000 pound payloads of bunker-buster bombs able to liquify the ground they hit in high density areas. The numbers of reported deaths of civilians and women and children are not known, but even if they derive from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, the numbers that plateaux only in the truce suggest the scale of destruction of a once incredibly densely populated Palestinian enclave, killing an estimated 1% of residents of the region.
The numbers of fatalities released by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and Media Office, run by Hamas, may be open to question. Yet the procession of corpses buried in body-bags daily across the Gaza Strip in coming months led to the plea by a twenty-four year old girl who had tries to leave Gaza she did not “want to be a number. I just don’t want to die or get killed to be another one of those 20,000 people who got killed.” The alleged target of underground tunnels was credibly mapped as an opacity, as in this map from Al Jazeera America, that seemed to relish how much the Israeli attackers did not know about the hidden network of tunnels, showing approximate location of terrorist incursions, the tunnels to smuggle goods from Egypt, and selected interior points of entry in the Gaza Strip.
Al Jazeera America
Yet the images that the IDF released of the underground network that they claimed to target, and that maps–often wrongly described as a “satellite map”–gave an illusion of targeting to disable the terrorist network by precision raids–and the discovery of some 88 entrances to the tunnel network after the Israeli troops invaded the region claimed to have destroyed or rendered inoperable 20-40% of the network, though the actual extent of the hundreds of miles terrorist group used to conceal weapons, rockets, and grenades as well as drones beneath civilian spaces is not known, with over 800 tunnel shafts were discovered by the IDF, some 500 of which were destroyed–many located in Gaza City.
–presented an illusory promise of a “known tunnel system” as already partly compromised by the IDF where it went under the Border Boundary. The “tunnels” clarified an apparent target that might be compromised and degraded, as a realizable goal of war, even if the scale or depth of the underground network was not understood or mapped. The extent of these underground tunnels lent them an air of illegitimacy, however, lying deep underground, beyond any satellite maps of the region,, that lent the hidden network the status of a negative form of underground sovereignty. In the many maps that the IDF issued, describing the destroyed tunnels used to strike IDF bases and settler communities beyond the Gaza-Israeli barrier, the maps created an illusory target that challenged the limits of mapping Hamas’ main sites of presence in the Mediterranean enclave.
Was the cartographic logic of targeting the sites of Hamas and Islamic Jihad sustainable as a war of justice or retribution? The geolocation of the sites of massacres in the map that attacked settlers’ communities hinted at the shifted nature of mapping of Israeli territory and its defense by a practice of geolocation,–and a new paradigm of territorial mapping by geolocation–that was placed atop the timeless map concealed its own logic and modernity. Even as the tunnels in the strip reflected the sedimentary geology of the Gaza Strip, in layers of silt and calcareous sandstone and shale, under the shifting sand dunes extending to its coastal Mediterranean shore, the tunnel network was unnaturalized as if a claim for territorial sovereignty beneath its shifting sands.
The stratigraphy of Gaza is historically central to the military resistance and defense of a region existing atop ridges whose loessal soil of clay, silt, and sand are conducive to tunneling.
As if in contrast to how Israeli territory was mapped verbally by timeless bounds, Gaza Strip is a hidden network, often described as a hidden tactical infrastructure or a strategic “hive of lairs.”
Israel territoriality has been in a sense replaced, and re-engineered, by a civil defense apparatus of alarms for rocket attacks, geolocated alerts apps, and hundreds of “alert zones” that radiate from the boundary barrier, that extend the boundary barrier. There is less a boundary than a militarized zone of security. “Alert zones” create a territoriality from fear and rooted in a perpetual conflict with Palestinians–most especially from the Gaza Strip. These boundaries are not really ever geared toward greater security, but designed to hold danger at bay, so far as possible. This has been traced in many different ways, but the alarms of rocket strikes from Gaza has been a clear mode of registering the changes in the boundaries of Israel and their defense. The multiple sirens sounding across Israeli cities already conveyed a nation under attack-in 2021, when incendiary balloons crossed from the Gaza Strip “into” Israeli territory–sending the nation into a state of panic–and raising questions, if they did not already exist, of the territoriality of the Israeli state. Despite its securitized borders, and the border barrier already 81% completed, the lack of security despite the boundary barrier escalated a sense of national vulnerability–remapping the nation from Gaza, effectively, and the fear of rockets from Palestinian lands–
Rocket Sirens in Israeli Cities, before May 12, 2021
–that challenged any sense of the IDF watching over secure boundaries of territorial sovereignty.
In the conservative Oxford congregation, I looked around to see how the prayer went over the crowd, with little sense of belonging I had decided to attend the services in maybe misguided hopes find. Reading the prayer on Yom Kippur made my mind jerk back, reflexively, to the synagogue in New York City where, fifty year earlier, I recall how my nine-year-old mind tried to grasp four liberal humanist intellectuals, far more versed in Marx and Freud than scriptures panic in existential ways in the wooden pews of the Jewish Theological Seminary, shaped by Lionel Trilling far more than Shlomo Goren, grappled with the invasion of Israel’s boundaries in the Yom Kippur War. The puzzlement of those cleanly shaven elders, each now passed, is indelible as they tried to imagine the unimaginable, imagining the audacity of that attack, amazed Israel had been caught unawares, forty years ago, and the craven opportunism of a cross-border attack on a sacred holiday, only able to be understood as a result of the tensions between the United State and Soviet Union that had bitten, as it were, the Jewish people, terrifyingly poised to erupt in a potential global war. (There was a “worldwide precautionary alert” as former President Nixon seemed without power to respond, on the brink of impeachment, and the United Nations trusted to restrain global conflict.)
“Worldwide Alert” during Yom Kippur War (1977)/New York Times, October 26, 1977
The Upper West Side intellectuals disturbed from interior reflection of davenning on Yom Kippur, as if to find meaning in their yearly prayers, were suddenly quite deeply shaken than I can ever remember by what must have been the first time I experienced incredibly sudden news, crashing confirmation of human frailty as well as national vulnerability that arrived amidst the silence of a hushed congregation. This was all difficult to fit in a timeless collective ritual of belonging that extended to men reluctantly identifying themselves as Zionists or even as believers. But they had faith in that state, and its sovereign claims, even if would not admit to anything but mixed Zionist convictions. They were visibly shaken, as if the earth moved beneath their feet, and were shocked in their own sense of security. The complex maneuvers of that war, that in the end led to the expansion of occupied territories, and occupied territory that was indeed over three times Israel’s territory, created what might be a ticking time bomb for the new logic of securitizing these expanded borders in a world of far more deadly arms.They were seized with the lack of power they acutely felt in a moment of urgency.
Yet the modernity of the prayer made one contemplate the new task of the Defense Forces–before I tried to compartmentalize that thought, as the service continued. Processing what boundaries of Israel that demanded defense stuck out uncomfortably in the celebration of the High Holiday, long before the October 7 invasion. Despite its apparent timelessness, the prayer was a fabrication of the post-1956 state, when a new anxiety of the boundaries of Israel correspond to a growth of its actual boundaries, especially as they included the West Bank and East Jerusalem from 1967. The prayers found new audiences with new borders–not timeless boundaries–despite its apparent timelessness and Old Testament tenor, in tracing a generously drawn “border of Lebanon to the desert of Egypt and from the Great Sea to the approach of the Aravah–on the land, in the air, and on the sea.” Maybe it was no accident that I had some vague personal memory of when these borders changed: few did.
Post-June, 1967 Borders of the Israeli State
The duality of Israel’s mapping in terms of its defense by military forces–Army, Navy, Air Force–and the sacred precedents of mapping a region that had been literally unearthed by archeological projects of the late nineteenth century for the Palestine Exploration Fund melded and reconciled the sacred topography with one of vigilant military defense. But the increased blurring of Israeli boundaries around the securitization of settlements–and creeping claims of infringing on the idea of a two-state solution–were grimly acknowledged as a reality that voided the viability of a two-state solution by 2018 as but a “deceptive cover for a slow but ever-deepening slide into vicious occupation and legal and social apartheid,” in the words of a writer no stranger to this blog, Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, dramatically diminishing hopes for a sustainable Palestinian state. In this context, the “boundaries” over which IDF forces have stood guard have not only blurred, but been redirected from a quasi-sacred mission of securing territory to the securitization of populations in the face of the diminished hopes for Israeli support for an independent Palestinian state.
To be sure, most of the chatter overheard in Oxford in later weeks was not only from protestors insisting silence to violence was complicity–“Silence is complicity” in the words of Dr. King–after the barbaric invasion of Israel territory and killing of civilians was responded to by bombardment of Gaza, the donnish reaction seemed to be to note the liberal nature of the city as the iron wrought gates of the Radcliffe Camera, an icon of Oxford University and of the Enlightenment, to tie 10,000 ribbons of the Palestinian flag’s colors to commemorate those killed in Gaza, even as the number escalated beyond 11,000–inviting passersby to read their names and professions and lives on large paper sheets–asking their commensurability with the civilians and soldiers barbarically raped and slaughtered by the terrorists who through the barrier, whose acts swiftly triggered nightmares of the raids of pogroms over a century ago–a terrifying image indeed.
Radcliffe Camera, Oxford University, November 18, 2023
As the guarding of Israel’s borders came back in the news with the October 7 invasion, I started to think about borders, as the Israeli Defense Forces menacingly massed around Gaza’s border. In the prayer, the loosely mapped region over which the IDF stood guard in the liturgy stretched in neo-biblical “from the Great Sea [Mediterranean] to the approach of the Avanah [arid lands] on land, in the air and on the sea”–a verbal map sacred in origin, but demarcated on land, sea, and air by Israel’s army, Air Force and navy, as a land tin the manner of a Universal Transverse Mercator projection used in military maps from World War II. There was something quite devious about using such a poetic name for “the Almighty, powerful one” in a liturgy composed in 1956, as maps codified Hebrew toponymy for the Negev and much of the Israeli state.
For both fused fused a mental imaginary of the sacred with one of territorial defense. The imprecation beseeching that the “Almighty guard and protect its soldiers from trouble and anguish and crown them with the crown of salvation and victory [in] their activities now and always,” went farther–that “the King of Kings . . . pour fourth upon the dwellers of the Holy Land the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord,” fusing a sacred map in ancient boundaries by a cartographic continuity of air, land and sea of Universal Transverse Mercator projections then universally adopted only by the military maps. Gaza was not mentioned in these boundaries, but has become a site of Israel’s vulnerability as it has been walled off and remapped as if a threat of cross-border violence could be contained.
5. If there is no ending point of the Gaza War in sight, it is perhaps because it taps such ancient mental imaginaries: if the question of some Oxford undergraduates I overheard as to when Europeans last went to war because of religion misses the point, the liturgy’s prayer helpfully invited me to historicize the boundary lines of the Middle East. The cartographic scope of the IDF vigilance quite recognizably mirrored a military map circa 1948 or so, when the UN Partition that led to the creation of Israel’s boundaries, for all its liturgical associations with a sacred geography. It proposed task of mapping as a spiritual collective task of the collective work and imagination of Jews–as much as the image of colonization and the seizure of “Palestinian” territory that is often mapped as the origin of the Jewish state, but the restriction of Palestinians from Israeli sovereignty from the “river to the sea”–as the Likud Party has it–is of far more recent origin, rather than from 1956–when Shlomo Goren wrote the prayer for the liturgy–or 1967.
The historical origins of Israel as a nation are often cast as the fons et oligo of the destruction of Gaza are perhaps less at issue than the map of a surrounded Israel, in what Prime Minister Netanyahu called in 2023 “The New Middle East,” a rupture in many ways from the earlier geographic mapping of Israel, in which the boundaries were defended not from the vague border with Lebanon, deserts of Egypt, River Jordan, or Mediterranean, but in a new global map of terror. The new Middle East might be one defined less by boundaries, than by walls: for the past ten years, the nation has been enclosed in a combination of steel, concrete, and barbed wire, which the new boundary of the Gaza perimeter of buried reinforced concrete wall, a steel fence, topped with cyclone wire, towers and sensors and remotely controlled weapons is a boundary barrier of globalization as much as an “Iron Wall” able “to neutralize every attempt to harm Israeli civilians.” It was internalized as a boundary to national identity, whose crossing by Hamas became an existential shock to the nation.
Washington Post, October 10, 2024
The IDF prayer invoked a plural collective was deeply unheimlich in ways not yet fully clear to me. But it had led me to shift uneasily in the pews as I contemplated how the boundaries of settlement had expanded to protect rights of settlers that had expanded the purview of IDF officers in ways increasingly difficult to rationalize or sustain. It encapsulated, perhaps in ways more problematic than I could grasp, the sort of “short history of Israeli-Palestinian relations” in demand and widely sought. Gideon Levy described the difficulties of increased number of settlers within the IDF, according tactical authorization for the distinct sacred logic to the defense of boundaries of settlers. The premium placed on security for settlers and the conquest of lands for settlers comes from the top, and from the distorted vision of Israeli territoriality that was the product of the scion of historian Ben Zion Netanyahu, who had planted in his son a deepest commitment to decidedly maximalist territorial goals of a Jewish state.
The destruction of earlier tunnels “into” Israeli territory perpetuated the safety brought by the destruction of tunnels with entrance points outside the enclave encouraged this maximalism.
The government encouraged the claims of settlers up to the barrier to preserve a vision of Greater Israel after the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, as the removal or forced withdrawal from the Gaza Strip perpetuated a new logic of settlement outside it that has even now sustained the illusion of a resettled Gaza Strip and Palestine. The cultivation of this maximalist vision was a dire concern for the Palestinians who violently invaded Israel. Long before the staging of the bloody invasion into Israeli territory across the border barrier, and even several months previous, Hamas openly condemned the expansion of settler communities and government support as unsustainable, which it openly called “part of the all-out war waged by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people’s existence and a stark violation of international law,” fearing “imposing Israeli sovereignty over occupied Jerusalem and isolating it from other Palestinian communities and cities.” Far more recently, Hamas has cited the “Judaization” of the West Bank and an “acceleration of the settlement enterprise” in claiming responsibility for the attacks, both promoted by the current Israeli government policy of allowing “radical settlers” to expand beside and in Palestinian lands as “colonial settlements” that they were committed to push back against. The promotion of projects of settlement as an “enterprise” funded by the Israeli government, aimed at expanding Israeli sovereignty by the “fascist occupation government” in no uncertain terms–from the acceleration in 2023 of constructing 5,623 settlement units in the West Bank, a thousand south of Nablus, as over 1,300 plans for new houses exclusively for Jews raised the stakes of the belligerent nature of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank–2023 was a record year for settlement construction, and “legalization” of twenty-two towns in the West Bank once considered “illegal,” and in Palestinian hands, including these nine settlements: if 2020 brought 12,000 new housing units, the first six months of 2023 brought 5700:
The logic was central to the Prime Minister who has identified and accelerated the punitive nature of the bombing raids. Even before he imagined a political career, Netanyahu the younger accepted adherence as a goal, even in the face of inevitable international opposition and local resistance to be foundational response for the longstanding statelessness of the Jewish people,–a problem only redeemed by the sovereign affirmation of a Jewish state that would be committed to defending its territorial claims beyond even the frontiers of a historic nation. To do so would reverse a history of discriminatory deceit that might be tied to the hostility of the expulsion of Jews from Spain Benzion traced in 1,400 pages bequeathed a secular Haggadah of resilience in the face of global geography gradually internalized by his youngest son–as if trauma of expulsion, statelessness, and diaspora could be remedied by territorial consolidation.
For the ground has shifted under and at the borders of Israel alike under Netanyahu’s rule. Over two decades, as a boundary barrier around Gaza Strip was built for billions of shekels, the IDF has conscripted settlers as fighting forces, offering a reduced training program permitting them to bear Israeli arms to defend their own interests. The old verbal map we recited in the synagogue has been displaced, dangerously solidified as a line by new ideas of territoriality, around the boundary perimeter of the Gaza Strip, and deny Palestinian sovereignty. The two-decades long mutation of settlers into units of territorial defense make them targets for Hamas and Islamic jihad, provocations as militants trained and equipped by the IDF with their own notions of the protection and defense of boundaries, developed from right-wing strands of Zionism foreign to the mental map of Gorin of abstract bounds, for one of built geography and security walls.
The rise of “settler militias” has disturbingly uncanny affinity to paramilitary border patrol in the United States. They have shifted the priorities and mandate of IDF forces on the ground, to instrumentalize violence against Palestinian presence in the Gaza Strip to provoke Palestinians on the other sides of the barrier wall. The armed groups of settler militias asserted had no territorial claims or rights to territory on the borders of the Israeli state, which they sought to defend to hold the lands of new settlements that extended up to the barrier. (Update: if one wants confirmation, the late January explanation issued by Hamas cited the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and presumably the Negev, as a basis for the violent aggression described as the Al-Aqsa Wave.)
But the Gaza boundary wall is both not so easily defended as a barrier of the state–indeed, it is a false barrier of the Netanyahu regime, hardly sanctified in the mission statement of the IDF. It is hard both to process within biblical precedent, and impossible to defend as a line of national security. Yet the mission of the IDF has increasingly shifted, in little understood ways, that have made this boundary barrier gain status as a boundary of a nation. And it is distorted as a boundary by the Netanyahu government, especially as they continue to insist, as Palestinian fatalities grow, that they are entitled to expand their violence against Palestinians since October 7. The infiltration of Israeli territory across the border boundary that was presumed secure has heightened a rhetoric of securitization, exposing a sort of double-bind of committing to the securitizing of communities, in response to the breadth of the cunningly planned wave of attacks at multiple points.
As Netanyahu describes himself as the defender of a collective “safeguarding our vital interests” in openly cartographic terms which “Gaza must be demilitarized” that defends his credo that his government “will not compromise full Israeli security control from the Jordan River’s west,” or west of the Jordan, he has continued to deny any sovereignty to the Palestinians in Gaza, seeing that as a security threat to the nation that he claims to have increasingly securitized. The “buffer zones” that Jewish settlers once promoted within the Gaza Strip itself have long left, but the image of the old biblical map seems to have been revitalized in terms increasingly promising security in a global context of undue urgency.
And it seemed that the prayer-or the vision of security it offered–had been invested with new meaning, in recent years, as the rise of the Likud Party led Benjamin Netanyahu, to argue for the rights of Israel to determine its own border, and, in larger months, to refuse to accept “dictates” about Israel’s borders, or, perhaps more to the point “allow hundreds of thousands of Israelis living in the West Bank, Golan Heights, and in Jerusalem — our united capital — to be harmed.” The defense of these borders, expansive borders plotted with great care in maps, up to the edges of Palestinian sovereignty, to commit his father’s vision not of the biblical borders of Israel, but of a “Greater Israel” that encompassed the River Jordan, extending beyond the West Bank, that his son adopted as a mandate to defend, placing Israel’s defense of its boundaries at considerable risk. The slew of attacks on the West Bank that settlers attacked over two weeks after October 7, under cover of war, spread to sixty-two towns, often with IDF support.
Palestinian Communities Attacked by West Bank Settlers, October 7-22/Yesh Din
It is not a stretch to argue that the role of settlers has also shifted the sense of Israel’s boundaries. Since 2000s, Israel has begun to recruit as members of the IDF with an accelerated training, inviting them to patrol Israeli territory as regional defense militiamen, without army training, inviting men and women into the corps who are eager to exact revenge on Palestinians even if this poses risk of the Israeli state. Settler militias formed “territorial defense units” entrusted to offer security to the West Bank. Many since have been shifted to the boundary of the Gaza Strip, as border police integrated with a rotating members of the IDF with regular military training. The role of settler brigades to retake more lands in the West Bank has expanded as they were accorded greater leeway to defend territory,–although doing so raises ethical questions of increasing the autonomy and authority of such”regional defense battalions.” (Their battalions have grown by fivefold since the date of October 7, with settlers more eager than ever to exact violence on Palestinians as Israeli soldiers–even at the risk of a future peace, and even frustrating the vision and mission of the IDF.)
Could the premium placed on the expansion of these boundaries–and on the protection of the state by a system of boundary barriers and walls–be sustained? Even before October 7, this posed ethical problems. We recited the collective prayer long before the bloody October 7 invasion, before the IDF visited a destructive aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip. “Gaza” went unnamed in the verbal map evoking the nation’s bounds, if it lay on the edge of the Mediterranean (or “Great Sea”) and in the “arid lands” of the Negev desert, the ostensible mythic boundary of the Dead Sea and the River Jordan, But the ‘Gaza War’ had a momentum that has gained a fearsome apocalyptic tenor, growing in global consciousness, renamed and rebranded in a Jewish calendar by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Orchestrator of the invasion of the Gaza Strip, as not even rooted in place, but a mission, as the Simchat Torah War, or Genesis War, to tie this conflict to the birth of an Israel state. By rebuffing the brazen violation of Israel’s integrity as one of the existence of the state, the crossing of the boundary wall has started the gears of an almost unstoppable machinery of war that has led the IDF to be charged to defend the expanded bounds of Israel in existential terms–and indeed questioning, as in a mirror reflection, what the terrorist network they seek to destroy holds sacred.
The prayers penned by the Chief Rabbi of the IDF, Shlomo Goren, recalled how the IDF, back in 5710, gained the roll of defending borders, but borders that were marked in red, and did not really include the lines of Palestinian settlements, noted in green, but clearly imagined as falling within Israeli sovereignty. And in the below map, framed by elevating the flag of Israel beside the ritual sounding of the shofar, seems to announce the right of every Jew of “return”–a new law of immigration within clear boundary lines, if not of “liberation.”
This was the mindset in which IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren composed the prayer imprecating the safety of the army defending in 1967. Goren authored, as it happens, needed prayers about retrieving bodily remains behind battle lines, grasped the role of defending borders that befell to the Israeli army as a project demanding new rituals. But the prayer has been newly gained a clear political inflection, since the Right-Wing nationalist Likud Party promoted the Right of Resettlement, and affirmed that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty” and seen the resettlement of historic areas of Judea, Samaria, and, indeed, Gaza as a commitment to future settlers and a Revisionist Zionism. It invoked a postwar sense of security that indeed seemed timeless, but its timelessness was a task of remediation, that was particularly powerful as a collective task of the collective imagination.
Map of Israel and Armistice with Arab States within Palestine (1950)
Tan boundary lines was prominently in contrast to the aqua lines of lands of Palestinian autonomy but the 1950 Armistice Line that defined the “Gaza Strip” as a reminder of Arab autonomy in the first Arab-Israeli wars were long tenuously in Israeli sovereignty, long before the first establishment of Islamic groups were first found in Gaza in the 1980s, with little suspicion of Islamist politics. The map of 1950 mapped a new land of settlement, welcoming the security of settlers to imagine a new place and space they might live and economically flourish recalling a new era, combining the ritual sounding of a blast of ai shofar with waving the flag of the new state of Israel and menorah. Gaza was linked by railroad to Egypt. If the Haggadah is a story of exodus and displacement and migration, this maps a new land open for settlement. The raising of the Israeli flag and ritual sounding of the shofar in the margins of the 1950 pictorial map broadcast and celebrated the right of every Jew a right of “return” to Israel, a new law of immigration, as much as in boundary lines; it mapped the “liberation” of a territory as a nation–the terms in which the IDF Chief Rabbi who composed the prayer–in addition to prayers about the retrieval and burial of bodily remains across lines of battle–instilled the significance of defending borders of the Israeli army as a project for which religious ritual needed to be fashioned and memorialized in the liturgy.
The map of 1950 had attracted so many Americans of Jewish descent, including my late father, to visit the Holy Land to experience this collective ideal, if not loose themselves in it, and this new Eretz Ysroel, as a land of the ecstatic blowing of the shofar and raising of the candelabra. It was a utopic project of imagined resettlement; it marked the opening of a new historic era of the clearly defined boundaries of the new homeland guaranteed a Right of Return to lands that they had never inhabited. It promised a land of security, able to restore the deep dislocation writers as Stefan Zweig registered in works like The World of Yesterday, of growing up in an Era of Security, which he tied to the era of security as an ideal open to all, mirrored in the rise of the life insurance industry, where Jews like Franz Kafka worked, guaranteeing security as an asset open to all. If that was world where life was only worth living with security, security had become revealed in wartime as but an “optimistic delusion, . . . struck out of our vocabulary as if it was a phantom.”
The presence of that security was reaffirmed in the warm vibrant tones of the 1950 Armistice map of the Israeli state. To be sure, that map included Gaza– defined by its place on the Mediterranean, then securely on the edge of Israeli territory. Yet it is hard to read as part of the nation since the invasion called the “al-Aqsa Flood” was launched on October 7, suddenly upending the sense of security on which the nation had increasingly preserved and come to rely upon, despite attempts to bracket threats of the Gaza Strip. The enclave of the Gaza Strip was then part of the state that was invited to be settled by young, active Jews–set apart only by the aqua lines of lands of Palestinian autonomy in a terrain that was verdantly colored in the imaginary, if not in actuality. The map was based on the Palestine projection, and closely mirrored a military map circa 1948, when the UN Partition created Israel’s boundaries, that the prayer mirrored in the cartographic scope of the IDF’s vigilance. For all its liturgical associations with a sacred geography, the inviting green color of the topography of the young state conveyed an assurance that prayer converted to words, as if mapping was a spiritual collective task of the collective imagination of Jews–not the image of colonization and the seizure of “Palestinian” territory often mapped as the origin of a Jewish state.
The UN Partition had led to the creation of Israel’s first initial boundaries, for all its liturgical associations with a sacred geography, was of course a military map. It proposed task of mapping as a spiritual collective task of the collective work and imagination of Jews–as much as the image of colonization and the seizure of “Palestinian” territory that is often mapped as the origin of the Jewish state. The 1950 encomiastic map of Israel’s newly defined boundaries, engraved in expressionist style that recalling Chagall, Haggadah, printed the year after the post-war baby Benjamin Netanyahu was born, was a deeply optimistic map reveling in newfound security,–offering a reality far removed from the fears of vulnerability to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.
But the increased trans-national ties of the same groups by the 2014 led to building border barrier as an “Iron Wall” as a basis for security and safety, or normalcy. The first security fences around Gaza Strip followed the establishment of Islamic groups were first found in Gaza in the 1980s, with little suspicion of Islamist politics. But the current barrier was built as increased trans-national ties of the same groups by the 2014 led the wall to be seen as–even if the arms and ties to sponsors of Islamic violence were never located on one side of the wall,–but in other states, arming men for a rampage from the coastal enclave expanded by locally manufacture of arms modeled after Russian, North Korean, or Iranian missiles, including the Unmanned Arial Weapons (drones), grenades, and guided missiles, to launch the current “border war” that breached the perimeter wall–long treated as a vaunted measure of security–that was shown useless once they were disarmed.
The shift between these two maps revealed a new link between barriers and security, but should also be seen as one of “map-mindedness”–tied to new technologies, but also the new premium of geolocation within the armory of the IDF’s mapping division, a shift to pinpointing threats to Israel’s security and safety, to preserve a veneer of normalcy, and a decidedly different normalcy. The affective relation to the state in that early illustrated map of the postwar period, predating the verbal map, created a deeply affective tie to the region in its inviting green colors,–akin, not coincidentally, to images one might find in a Savoring Coffee illustrated Passover Haggadot of the postwar period with which I grew up. It secured a vision promoted a law of immigration, whose “liberation”–terms which the IDF Chief Rabbi who composed the prayer–the very man who wrote new prayers for retrieving bodily remains across battle lines–had grasped. He promoted the army’s defense of national borders as a problem of a collective project of mapping, and belonging.
The verbal map from the liturgy was an affirmation of security. It had been added to the services in 1967, by the Chief Rabbi of Israeli Defense Forces, if it evoked a rather timeless image of vigilantly securing timeless boundary lines. It was invested with a timelessness. In response to October 7, the IDF declared an obligation to “seek out and target those who wish to attack our civilians and soldiers”–a rationalization that recast enemies of the state of Israel as terrorists, and rocket fire from the Gaza Strip as being an “intolerable reality which Israelis should not have to accept.“
This is a language of securitization, more than of true security. And although the surveillance of the Gaza Strip–both from the border wall cameras and from the airspace over Gaza–gave a new logic to the maps that the IDF used to invade the Gaza Strip, and to attempt to securitize the settler communities on its periphery, the lack of true security was terribly revealed by the terrible incursion of the perimeter of the boundary wall to murder, rape, and torture of settlers. The program of “targeted killings”–the very strategy that the United States used to poor effect in Afghanistan and Iran–may have become a basis to understand the bombardment of the Gaza Strip, although it is hard to see how these raids will end or eliminate an organized and financially supported para-state organization with large backing among Palestinians. Yet the reality on the ground, unseen by Israeli commanders, was of long-growing contingents of military brigades.
It came to demand by this logic a punishment that shall rain from the skies as if it were indeed divine, a wrath at the unthinkable encroachment of the perimeter boundary that surely reflected how much trust had been placed in it by the Likud government as a measure and guarantor of Israeli security. The Likud Party had affirmed that no land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan would be under sovereignty other than that of Israel exaggerated a distorted, if long submerged, right-wing Zionist politics of the 1920s, that coined the term “Iron Wall” to argue no Jews should negotiate with Arabs save from a position of force–the position that Prime Minister Netanyahu had long identified with the “Iron Wall” constructed around the Gaza Strip.
In the immediate postwar period, Stefan Zweig had rued that “we have had to accustom ourselves slowly to living without firm ground beneath our feet, without laws, freedom, or security,” in the years shortly before he took his life in 1942, the sense of being plunged into an absence of security immediately followed October 7, 2023. The aspirational prayers that Goren had penned reminded me of the role that the IDF, back in 5710, gained the of defending borders, including Palestinian settlements, bounded in green, clearly imagined as falling within Israeli sovereignty.
The light tan boundary lines was prominently in contrast to the aqua lines of lands of Palestinian autonomy but the 1950 Armistice Line that defined the “Gaza Strip” as a reminder of Arab autonomy in the first Arab-Israeli wars were long tenuously in Israeli sovereignty. The elevation of the flag of Israel set beside the ritual sounding of the shofar, granted every Jew a right of “return” to Israel, a law of immigration that was celebrated in the map, within clear boundary lines, and indeed the “liberation”–the terms in which the IDF Chief Rabbi who composed the prayer–and many needed prayers about retrieving bodily remains across battle lines–had grasped the new role of defending borders of the Israeli army as a problem for which religious rituals needed to be improvised.)
To be sure, this sense of timelessness unlike the IDF’s fulfillment of a historical obligation in a commitment to “seek out and target those who wish to attack our civilians and soldiers”–a logic that reflected new tools of geolocation, as much as recasting Palestinians as militants, enemies of the state of Israel as terrorists. The refusal to accept vulnerability to rocket fire as other than an “intolerable reality which Israelis should not have to accept” was a logic rooted in the security of a boundary against rocket strikes. It is rooted in a language of securitization, much as of security. The surveillance of the Gaza Strip–both from the border wall cameras and from the airspace over Gaza–shaped a new logic to the maps that the IDF used to invade the Gaza Strip, in its attempt to securitize the settler communities on its periphery, and the military mission of uprooting all tunnels of Hamas. Yet this logic, which insists on the complete demilitarization of any threats from the Gaza Strip, is so unilateral that it has limited future viability. The rockets sent at the unseen and invisible targets of attack beneath the ground ignored the inhabitants that were claimed to be used by Hamas as shields without concern for life, as the campaign of intensive bombing of bombs so large to send shock-waves to the friable terrain to liquify the surface above the underground tunnels lead to a war of unprecedented scale over a small enclave.
Claims to destroy a hidden maze of underground tunnels built by the terrorist network after Israelis withdrew from 2005 are perhaps illusory–despite the maps the IDF released–but appear largely intact after four months of aerial bombardment. The network constructed with an estimated 500 tons of steel and 3,000 tons of cement transported daily across the Egyptian border to circumvent the “border barrier” provided a site of ongoing resistance aerial bombardment did not destroy; while the IDF claimed to map over sixty “entrances” to two dozen tunnels two weeks into the military campaign, even use of seismic monitors and algorithms to map the hidden reserve of Hamas’ power failed to destroy the paraterritorial reserve underneath the Gaza Strip that is an alternate form of sovereignty.
1. The role of aerial imagery in defining the sudden violation of the Gaza Border Boundary migrated to the nightly news globally as soon as they appeared on X. The shifting nature of border situation on the ground on October 7, 2023:
If a lack of true security was terribly revealed by the incursion into the perimeter beyond the boundary wall, the murdering, rape, and torture of settlers, which came to demand by this logic a punishment that shall rain from the skies as if it were indeed divine. The incursion split global media to reveal a fractured perspectives: condemnation and assertions of the rights of Israel to defend its people (USA; Germany; Ukraine); calls for mutual restraint or tepid non-involvement of measured concern (Saudi Arabia; Spain; Russia; China); commitment to “stand by the Palestinian fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem” (Iran). Global division about the attack fed fears of a conflict cascading across borders and out of control beyond borders. But to Israelis, whose response was most immediately and predictably triggered by the violent violation of the pseudo-peace that the barrier perimeter had temporarily assured, the invasion’s bloodiness reflected Israelis’ deepest fears of vulnerability.
The response of the greatest aerial bombardment than had ever occurred in revenge for the unthinkable invasion over the next five weeks seemed to not only deny any sense of territoriality to the terrorists who perpetrated the attack but sovereignty to the region, damaging buildings, shrines, monuments, and settlements as well as hospitals that would lead Israel, mutatis mutandi, to be charged with crimes agains humanity, as over 20,000 air strikes pummeled the enclave, hitting the outlying areas of Gaza City where the tunnel networks and weapons factories were suspected to be located in the first ten days of the bombardment of the Gaza Strip–
–the unrelenting aerial bombardment over the next three months included a relentless 22,000 strikes, killing and displacing the densely packed residents entirely indiscriminately per Airwars. Or so it seemed. The bombing targeted the tunnel network storing the deadly arms to stage the September 7 attack, whose destruction promised to eradicate terrorists from the city. In destroying the network used to store bombs and plan the attack that had proceeded under Israeli surveillance, the hope was not only to wreak a Deuteronomic violence of a lex talionis, but to prevent any possible future attack of Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip. But this proceeded by a relentless cartographic logic that seemed to turn a blind eye to violations of human rights.
Yet was the map of tunnels made by the Israeli Defense Foundation cartographers of a decade previous the basis for such an intensive bombing saturation? If the “newly discovered tunnels under Gaza [Strip]” came to justify expanded aerial attacks in early December, to degrade a hidden infrastructure of terror, some, as Anshell Pfefer, argued by late January 2024 “Israel will never manage to destroy” the network of tunnels under the Gaza Strip Hamas had drilled since 2007, when Hamas came to control Gaza, with Islamic Jihad–or even most of the maze of subterranean passages. But the illusion of mapping the geolocated network of tunnels made them a set of targets to be destroyed, flooded, or caved in, even if some were too deeper in the friable terrain to eliminate–and the network of tunnels were hardly the base for either network’s broad transnational backing.
The intensive bombing of the city degraded its hidden infrastructure from military intelligence, beyond the 2014 IDF mapping of tunnel network, or geolocation of sites of rockets fired into Israeli territory. The conjectural mapping of the maze of underground tunnels in which Israel feared an attack beneath the border barrier to be launched had been in part targeted and destroyed in the 2021 military exercise, Operation Guardian of the Walls, as airstrikes responded to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, responding to anticipated eviction of Palestinians by the Israeli occupied West Bank. But the barrage of over 600 bombs that destroyed parts of the tunnel network linking the Gaza Strip to Israel and military intelligence are not the sole target of the current bombardment, that has expanded unprecedentedly in hopes to kill the Hamas’ political leader, Yahya Sinwar, the orchestrator of the October 7 attacks, believed to be in the underground network of unknown size. Rather than playing a game of whack-a-mole for Sinwar, however, the surprise attack of October 7 revealed the scale of an unforeseen and unknown expansion of this network of unseen tunnels in the friable earth of the small enclave of the Gaza Strip, where the true political and military might of Hamas lay: the unprecedented scale of bombardment targeted the concealed layer of a hidden network, believed to have exits at homes, hospitals, mosques, and churches, that lay beneath a map of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, ostensibly the “true” target of the war. The underground maze were ostensibly the target of intensive bombing and destruction were a master-fiction of the Gaza War, based on IDF maps, as if the networks would be able to be destroyed by their destruction.
This was the network of munitions the IDF had failed to map, but was now mapping by an extended aerial war, whose scale was only being discovered in the course of the invasion of the Gaza Strip. If to some extent it is Netanyahu who finds himself to be troublingly “eyeless at Gaza,” lashing out at Hamas by bombing their infrastructure of tunnels in hopes to destroy it, even if this undermines the security of Gaza as a region and well-being of its Palestinian residents, as if they deserve it–the very inability to locate its extent or expanse has only led to an unethical unrelenting destruction.
IDF map of Tunnel Network in Gaza City, 2014
But the disproportionate show of force that deny any rights to self-determination and seem to seek to erase the sacred topography of the Strip. If the intelligence map of almost a decade previous was probably only a ‘rough estimation’ of the extent of the network–clearly expanded over a decade when Israeli intelligence had underestimated its threat, believing the wall and Iron Dome sufficient protection of a “forced peace”–the IDF placed blame on the existence of terrorist infrastructure as a basis for the intensive bombardment that seemed intent on uprooting–although it was never clear the eradication of the tunnel network would destroy the terrorist group.
The nearly biblical scale of violence was of an intensity challenging ability to map or understand; blocked coverage prevented journalists from tallying the effects, given limited data of numbers of Palestinians dead–estimated to be over 70% women and children. Despite attempts to locate the prime orchestrators of the invasion, saturating the region with an unseen level of devastation destroyed infrastructure and cultural sites in the region, from desrevered mosques of religious worship and pilgrimage, tombs, churches, monasteries, and libraries preserved artifacts from the Cannanite era, as well as displacing residents. The tragic erasure of its sacred topography was argued to be a cultural genocide; satellite data of destroyed structures fail to convey the level of human death or displacement as a tragic crisis in the future of Gaza as an autonomous region in central to Palestinian collective memory and global history.
Beyond vengeance strikes, the massive attempt to destroy Hamas in Gaza revealed a level of destruction that has only grown, displacing the shock at the initial invasion in global attention. The destruction of much of the habited land of the “Strip” over the next month or so, when airplanes pummeled the region with the aim to eradicate all arms in the semi-autonomous region, in a disproportionate show of force that seemed openly to deny any rights to self-determination. and, if long before the first establishment of Islamic groups were first found in Gaza in the 1980s, with little suspicion of Islamist politics, but the increased trans-national ties of the same groups by the 2014 led the wall to be seen as a barrier to safety–even if the arms and ties to sponsors of Islamic violence were never located on one side of the wall, but in Iran and other states, arming men for a rampage from the coastal enclave in ways often expanded by locally manufacturing arms modeled after those of Russia, the former Soviet Union, North Korea, and elsewhere, including for the first time Unmanned Arial Weapons (drones), grenades, and guided missiles, against which the border wall–long treated as a vaunted measure of security–were useless once they were disarmed.
6. A faulty logic of securitization has been the basis to trust the built perimeter of a boundary wall. Although “smart” in construction, the remotely-monitored barrier failed to contain an existential threat, exposed as a defensible border. Despite a focus of Israel’s current government on a new perimeter-ization of the nation seems to hope to construct walls that tact as an overlay on the negotiated national borders to secure those lines in a new logic of security and normalcy–
–that extends from the boundary of the Gaza Strip to the Golan Heights, is a concept of security tied to the engineering of boundaries of containment of threats, massive engineering feats rationalized in the era of Netanyahu as costly insurance the nation can afford.
The massive financial investment of the past twenty years, the most complex project that the Israeli Defense Forces has ever built, outsourced the intelligence of border crossing to surveillance systems in a ‘smart’ wall, a unique technological system of automated intelligence, engineered to detect any tunnel-building operations and rooted in trenches extending far below the groundwater table, a massive project costing over $1.2 billion whose diaphragm walls of eighty meters underground, making it the second most costly IDF project next to the Iron Dome defense system, partly funded by the United States, built to contain expanding threats from the Gaza Strip from 2011-21. Both lie hand-in-glove and of a piece with acceptance of a new geodetic space, mapped by radio space or aerial surveillance in relation to its perimeter, from the locations of munitions, tunnels, and weapons factories to rockets launchers.
The remapping of Palestinian presence in Gaza primarily as a terrorist threat, may be warranted by harassment of Israeli occupiers and border guards. But it is a vicious circle, that for thirty years redefined the nation’s security by investing in the guarding of its perimeter in a high tech security systems, refusing to concede national identity to Palestine, or Palestinians. It has rather defined securitized Israel against the threat of terrorism.
The border of the “Gaza Strip” has been mapped, in other words, by the Israeli Defense Forces, in exaggerated proximity to the nation, by the strike range of rockets across borders, and the hope to secure a border that was, paradoxically, not even mapped in the first settlements of Israel. And the security of the border perimeter has provided, even more dangerously, perhaps, a guarantee for the arrival of settlers in the Southern Region of Israel, in settlements that seem vulnerable to rockets fired from the Gaza Stip within fifteen seconds, demanding a new level of security to allow safety.
Reaction time of Iron Dome against Rockets Fired from within Gaza Strip/Israeli Defense Forces, 2014
But this is hardly safety, or a way to imagine security. This is the map that has been used to map the bombing of the Gaza Strip to secure Israel’s security. It is not a map with a clear boundary line, or indeed with boundaries; but is a map of existential threats and terrorism that recognizes the ongoing threats of terrorist attacks. But it was not a map that left Israel prepared for an attack that took out the monitors of the border wall. It was not a map of nations, or allowed for the national identities, and strangled any two-state solution; it was a map prioritizing the security from strikes of rockets, even if many of the actual rockets fired have continued to fail to go beyond the boundaries of the Gaza Strip, and to have landed not in populated areas in Israel, but within the Gaza Strip itself. The fear of a wave of rockets that confuse the system has never materialized, but the recent invasion on land took out the very sensors that were trusted to monitor aggressive action on along the built perimeter of the Gaza Strip.
This is a problem. If it has the logic of a more secular space, it is invested with a mission of sacred defense, although the edges of Israel are far less clear, making dangers more easy to map but more able to multiply, and indeed to crafting an illusory sense of confidence but has no longer has clear borders to defend, but is at an existential crisis every day. While the benediction praying for safety of IDF in defending Israel’s boundaries has been repeated and recited for an army that defined itself as only dedicated to defense–not aggression–the crisis of continuing to map the aggression in Gaza and the Gaza Strip as only a defensive act of taking out targets that threaten the state of Israel and Israeli citizens is a map that is dangerously removed from the ground–a map of radar, radio space and aerial surveillance–but is not necessarily aligned with the ground, or the situation of human residents, refugees, and indeed any sense of subject hood on the ground.
These are mapped only as abstractions and the hope of destroying the network of tunnels, and the war’s focus on targets of Hamas threatens as it continues to not really be about the defense of Israel’s boundaries.
Bomb Damage in Northern Gaza Strip/New York Times
The verbal map of that prayer that the first IDF Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, crafted is preserved in the prayer book given to all soldiers on their induction. It beseeches the Almighty protect abilities to strike down “the enemies” who “rise against us,” was only added in 1967, but the protection against enemies has grown beyond a simple map. As the gates of forgiveness had not yet closed this past Yom Kippur, even before the invasion of Israel’s Negev or the brutal bombing of the Gaza Strip. And if the current explosion of maps about the “Gaza” War quickly proliferated to the point of cartographic redundancy–evidenced in a UK Travel Advisory issued by the Government–an image that seemed to accept clear borders of sovereignty, but to raise the stakes of urging against any travel to an expansive area around the Gaza Strip and perimeter, West Bank, or Golan Heights–
UK.GOV, December 2023
–Gaza’s place within Israel’s boundaries is poorly mapped as a political construction that failed to provide any actual security, but is mapped as if it may soon afford a measure of security at last. The new fears of a spread of violence beyond the borders of Israel was not clearly referenced, but the territory of Israel was urged to be put off the table of all British Christmas travelers.
7. I was most concerned at how that prayer defined a map combining sacred place-names and a UTM projection of the sort that was adopted within the military as a way to unite land, air, and sea maps since 1948 as a Unitary Military Grid Referencing system (MGRS), having been proposed in the British Army before it was adopted by NATO military in 1949, rapidly refined in the postwar period. The Palestine Grid, born as a systematic referencing of archeological discoveries that led the Palestine Exploration Fund to remap the archeological discoveries. (Funds raised from pious Anglicans from 1865 used the cartographic precision had been perfected in the Ordnance Survey by the Royal Engineers to map the “Geology snd Natural History of the Holy Land.”)
If the boundaries over which the IDF used to guard Israeli sovereignty has shifted, it has done so as the state has increasingly denied the sovereignty of Palestinian residents in Israeli territory or land in ways that contrast with the mapping of Gaza as a part of the nation. The logic of bombarding the enclave of “Gaza” has shifted to a destruction of the threat of a Palestinian presence, even if the focus on the perimeter of Gaza provided less security in the end for the Jewish state than in 1950–
The protection of the very sites that the Palestine Exploration Fund identified as the sacred sites of Jewish is a history of mapping and remapping that continued through the expansion of the Palestine Grid. Although the grid continued to be used until 1994, its endurance due to its use in archeological finds offered a mastery over an ancient land into the modern world–
–mapping utility into a world imagined as of migrant settlements in tents, rather than cities, and the excavation of lost cities, as Jericho–as a collaboration of modern skills of mapping with local natives–a mapping protocol that was eagerly adopted in the reclaiming and “liberation” of holy sites of Jerusalem and what was Judea, the cataloguing of whose conquest was continued by Rav Goren as he arrived in sites that the IDF secured–from the Wailing Wall in Old Jerusalem to Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron, as well as the al-Aqsa Mosque where he sought to rebuild the First Temple.
The deep fear of whose construction has long animated Islamic relations to Israel, enduring and even fostered in the occupied areas, where it is feared as a barely hidden Zionist project. Although the Waqf that administered it from 1967, by agreement, and endures among Palestinians in the occupied territories and Gaza Strip. However improbably are plans to convert the mosque to a synagogue, it is static encouraged by hard-line members of the Israeli government who support it, with precedent in the recent conversion of a Ibrahimi mosque in the city of Hebron to a synagogue exclusively for Jews. If the translation of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) was a massive project designed to illuminate biblical truths by objective history and archeology, the very objective goals of its primary projects–the Walls of Jericho and the First Temple–were to become one basis to victoriously liberate what Goren proclaimed as the “Holiest of Holies” in Old Jerusalem, and to open the gates to the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron, where he agains sounded a shofar, fears of rewriting sacred Palestinian Territories in the Jewish nation have never been resolved.
Prayers for safety of the IDF tasked to secure Israel’s boundariess presented a cartographic précis of the defense of territory, with an uneasy echo of the hold the IDF already held on the Gaza Strip. The region blockaded by sea, walled in on land, and monitored by observation towers along a massively costly border barrier to securitize the nation against attack, returned to global news on October 7, 2023. The response to the bloody attack of an unprecedented bombing used maps IDF cartographers had long identified as the source of a feared as a center of terrorist attack. While they had mapped the site of rocket launches imagined as occurring deep into Israeli territory, in scenarios imagined so vividly in maps to haunt the very notion of Israel as a state, Israeli politicians have also used them to equate Palestinians with terrorists denying Israel’s right to exist. If the actual invasion of Israel was across the barrier into the settlements beyond the barrier, if we can hope to understand the intensity of its violence, on local and global levels, and as a potential transnational war, we must map not only as an enclave, but regional and global scale. For the very boundaries that are of Israel’s own making were insufficient to contain what it has long perceived as an existential threat.
The Gaza War is easily miscast as religious; the question is more than poorly posed. The old Palestine Grid used in the 1949 Armistice, mapping the Dome of the Rock by hexadecimal coordinates, was inherited from the Survey Department of Palestine, but left Gaza beyond the edges of the new state, if that situation changed in 1967, when Goren’s prayer was added to the liturgy. If this was a map that Goren, not only an authority on Jewish halakha, as a Yeshiva boy who had written his first works on the ritual sacrifices at the First Temple that is known now in Israel as Temple Mount, in the Old City, the very site adopted as a fighting charge for the al-Aqsa Flood or invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, was also a member of the Haganah, in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948, would be well versed with the partition that defined the Israeli state on a gridded map.
Armistice Map of 1949-50 Defining Israel’s Boundaries of Sovereignty on Palestine Grid
Goren had claimed the right of the Israeli flag that he would also planted at Hebron, site of the Cave of Patriarchs, and planned to construct a synagogue on the Temple Mount as a “liberation” of land and territory held by Arabs; as recently as 2019, relaunching a the case for “building a Synagogue on the Temple Mount where Jews might pray–currently forbidden by Israeli law–beside al-Aqsa mosque was promised as a way to “rewrite humanity’s mental map of Jerusalem, and the Jewish state behind it,” mapping the temple as a “memory site” in the collective memory of the Jewish people. Claims to restore the heritage of the temple as a restoration of collective memory, using the terms by which French secular historian Pierre Nora described places–lieux de memoire–as not mapped, but a nexus of material, symbolic and functional terms, evoke heritage in uneasy balance with claims of patrimony; broaching the place the temple holds in collective memory ignored that Jews had been forbidden from worshipping at the mosque since 1187,–crossing a line that Goren, attuned to ritual as he followed the advance of troops to sound the shofar and daven in the Cave of Patriarchs, more than offending Islamic practice, might share. The recent entry of Jews into the compound long managed by the Waqf since 1967 on the fifth day of Sukkot in early October under the protection of local Israeli police to pray was instigated by ultranationalist groups, triggering fears of its destruction and conversion to a site of Jewish worship–some 50,000 Jews have visited the site in 5783, a Temple Mount activist group reported proudly, and 51,644 the previous year.
Gaza was absent from the mission for which the liturgy prayed the IDF safely guarded. The place of Gaza in collective memory of Gaza is harder to map, but, it must be concluded, is less driven by Israel’s boundedness or boundaries than a logic of securitization that have replaced all serious discussion with Palestinians living in the enclave of the Gaza Strip. For if the current war “is a watershed moment that might reshape the Middle East’s geopolitical landscape,” it is the product and outgrowth of a map that cannot be seen in strictly tactical terms of geopolitics. The symbolic register of the region of Gaza exists as a point of origin for locations targeted by cross-border rockets and the increasing range of rocket strikes, mapping the enclave at the center of radiating rings of a topography of fear.
The new sense of the edges of the nation that the IDF patrols have changed, under the persistent threat of rockets from Gaza that have redefined the landscape of the occupation, with the growing reach of Hamas rockets’ range into Israeli territory over the past two decades, creating a problem of defining the edge of the Gaza Strip that refigured the mission of “defense” of Israeli territory.
Rocket Reach of Hamas from Gaza Strip (2014), Joe Burgess and Karen Yourish, New York Times/Jeffrey White, Palestinian Center for Human Rights; Jane’s; IDF; Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center; Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The sounding in the past ten years of Code-Red alarms alerting populations to cross-border firing of rockets targeting civilians as form of “rocket terrorism” that is “intolerable” for the state led to the attempted isolation of the threat, but has exacerbated the situation by trusting the crisis could be contained, if maps of rockets’ range–presciently cast as a matter of armaments provided Hamas–
Operating Range of Gazan Rockets (2014), IDF
–increasingly, and perhaps foolhardy, mapped the threat of rocket strikes in a space of ballistic range, left Israeli Defense Forces utterly ill-prepared for the new tools of war by which unmanned drones took out warning signs along the costly boundary barrier built around Gaza to “securitize” the nation that had come to live increasingly on tenterhooks of fears of rocket strikes.
Threats of Hamas Rocket Ranges, 2022/IDF
The relation of Israel to the occupied territories in “Gaza” was mapped in terms of vulnerability, demanding a new form of border defense, far removed from Israel’s actual borders. If the conflict of such unprecedented intensity is rooted not in a collective memory, it begins as much as with the bloody invasion of civilian space of October 7, but after nearly two decades of blockades confined Gaza by air, land and sea, cutting residents of the Gaza Strip off from a state of normality. For by remapping the Gaza Strip less as a boundary, but a narrow enclave surveilled with an unprecedented intensity by radar, aerial geolocation, and automated surveillance as if to eliminate it from the Israeli state by which it is for all practical purposes surrounded.
The barrier was attacked as if it were indeed the Israeli state, hostages were forcibly taken across it from kibbutzim into the shadowy network of tunnels Gaza Strip, the shadow territory into which Hamas retreated, silently, as if to dare Israel to invade the territory that they had long occupied. The mapping of the presence of Hamas was increasingly difficult if not impossible, save by the obliteration of its entire presence in the enclave, and the presence of Palestinian history as well.
8. The place of the prayers in the Yom Kippur and New Year’s liturgy suggest how deeply the future of Israel was felt. I smiled as the Oxford rabbi reflected on his final day after so many years of leading the congregation on his privilege of seeing the members of his congregation move through life’s stations and stages, punctuated by snapshots of annual visitations of High Holidays. But I reflected on the costs at which defending boundaries the liturgy invoked had dangerously contracted and been literalized to securitizing a territorial perimeter in a perimeterization of Israeli sovereignty–and indeed the reduction of the broad Zionist affirmation of a scriptural resonance of the mission of defense with the tactical advantages over the region’s perimeter Israel had apparently gained.
The image or false security of tactical advantage that had distorted the nature of Israel as a democratic state, and which in investing funds in the walling off of Palestinians had created a focus on demonization of all Palestinians as not Israeli, rewriting the broad history of Arab-Israeli wars for the nation’s survival as a guarding of the national status quo of a democracy that left Palestinians as threats if not second-class citizens.
This map of the nation privileges securitized boundaries. It was not only far less expansive, and grandiose, but sought to marginalize the presence of Palestinians as terrorist threats, minimizing the possibility or feasibility of Palestinian territorial claims. The marginalization of these para-territories, as areas free from any sovereignty, was a rejection of negotiation, and an insistence on the upper hand in all negotiations of the future of an Israeli state that had emphasized Jewish claims to territoriality in ways that were regressive to the polity. If I’d overheard some Oxford students eager ask one another how long it has been since Europeans had gone to war for religious reasons–an interesting academic question, perhaps–the question misunderstood the entanglement of religious believe and the sovereign claims to existence of Palestinians and Israelis.
The question is not only “Mal posé” but is a cartoonish characterization of the region, and mismaps its international scope: for it is possible “Gaza” is acquiring the summary weight as a floating place-name signifying massive needless deaths that “Sarajevo” held a century ago, as a place less known than as a tag for the unstoppable summation of military alliances and commitments, suddenly seen as a focal point of unbelievable inevitability. The attempt to provide a resolution of the presence of Palestine in Gaza focussed on containing the treat by a fixed boundary, focussing the attention of military on manning a false frontier, entrusting safety to a costly “smart” boundary wall, manned by cameras, and remote intelligence, rather than discussion, that has placed into crisis any prospect of resolving the conflict save by monitoring the region by land, air and sea.
The stakes of the conflict that shows Israel’s Defense Forces mapping the elimination of Hamas’ military offensive presence in the Gaza Strip by destroying all remnants of the tunnels they store weapons of international origin has notions to do with the timeless tropes of theatrical swordplay of a conflict played out in the Mummer’s Play pantomime between Richard III and the Turk–
For if the emblem of Hamas includes a map that is hardly located in Gaza, but in fact claimed the expansion of the boundaries of the Palestinian enclave across the Israeli Negev and to the River Jordan that would echo the former Palestinian Mandate–and cry “from the River to the Sea“–
–as its centerpiece, above the Dome of the Rock, what was first born in the presence of Islamists in Gaza Strip in the 1970s and 1980s, which emerged as a network of public assistance, it is a transnational network, if we had not forgotten, supplied with arms from North Korea, Iran, and rooted in funded from Iran, whose government has funded military networks in Israel’s enemies–
Financial Times
–that cannot be mapped by boundary lines, or only by lines of faith, but rooted in a tighter noose of existential nature drawn around Israel of Hamas offices in Lebanon, Syria, West Bank and Egypt.
How can the transnational nature of Hamas be combatted or disentangled? These are questions less rooted in religion than the pragmatics of territorial identity in a divided nation. Those relations have been distorted as they are viewed through the prism of the Cold War–a fact that the rhetoric of the Netanyahu government has nurtured and preserved to its benefit, absorbing the image of Israel as a military partner to be protected against incursion not of its neighbors, but of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
The image of existential animosity may indeed tap collective memory, and a religious geography that has deep associations in collective memory, but is redrawn as Gaza was remapped by the range of rockets fired from the Strip as a perpetual existential threat not outside Israel’s borders, but within them for over the past decade. This geography has been the logic of the military isolation of Gaza, and the isolation of Gaza Strip as an existential danger threatening not armies but civilians. And this was the fear that the al Aqsa “wave” realized, concretized in the manner that the hostages who Hamas seized seized upon as they psychologically tortured hostages they had taken by telling them the Israeli state did not exist.
Israeli Defense Forces, Gaza Rockets Endanger 3.5 Million Civilians, 2014
The current Gaza War has been one of the most intensely mapped wars, it has been haunted by a long history of territorial maps that have called into question Israel’s ability to exist beside Palestine. If the Gaza War has been informed by an intense reliance on GPS mapping–both of the cameras mounted on the border boundary to alert soldiers of an attack, border monitors disabled to allow the violent invasion of October 7 across the perimeter, to the targeting of sites of Hamas rockets and tunnels, and an intensity of offensive mapping of evacuation routes amidst systematic destruction of buildings believed to be used by Hamas at a greater scale than other recent wars.
If the war in many ways was one of the first of AI technology, from the security observation towers that lent a false sense of security to the Israeli Army before the bloody October 7 invasion, and use of unmanned drones to taking out security towers, sentinels on the perimeter topped by razor wire resembling penitentiary architecture, to the aerial bombardment of targets at unprecedented intensity, it is one that is also embedded in a long history of mapping. It is hard not to be struck by the geodetic mapping of targets in the Gaza Strip, as if to conceal the failures of military intelligence and as if to respond to the tragic bloodiness of the murders of civilians and military and the taking of Israeli hostages into the Gaza Strip, a conflation of bombing raids and a military dragnet to reclaim the hostages lost on October 7, whose fate is sadly increasingly unclear. But the failure to map any separation between civilian and military space has haunted the war more terribly than any of the Arab-Israeli wars.
The Gaza War has turned on the line Israel promised to draw between Palestine and Israeli civilians, the barrier that has symbolized the new levels of confinement of the occupied territory apart from Israeli civilians, but has horrifically led to a confounding conflation of military and civilian space. The conflation suggests the absence of a clear role of the defense of Israeli boundaries, and the failure of the fortification of a security wall, in place of all hope of negotiation. It is a boundary of wall-building, based on the suspension of any realization of a two-state solution, and premised on the invisible boundaries that can be drawn between Palestinians and Israelis monitored from the surveillance towers of gunners, sensors, and video monitors that look down on the Gaza Strip.
Tami Kalifa/AFP
The territory was long surveilled, and feared as a site of attack. If the importing of arms along transnational lines through the tunnels that Palestinian residents had engineered as an expansive “Metro” of passageways developed as an alternate modernizing of economic life as a life-line of smuggling goods, food, and energy into the enclave, that lead Egypt to build a steel boundary wall on the border with the Gaza Strip since 2009, with American assistance, after the victory of the Hamas party in local elections, to be mirrored the more massive steel walls Israel built from 2015. If these boundaries were meant to offer security to the Israeli residents after military forces had retired from the enclave in 2005, increased securitization of boundaries built around the Gaza Strip focussed increased attention on the monitoring of the Strip’s perimeter to securitize the “envelop” of the settler communities that surround the strip. These communities have been strategically placed by Israel to “envelop” Gaza, a concept that dates back to the country’s early years of statehoo in ways that led the region to be mapped extensively as a threat. The mapping of the danger of the Gaza Strip shifted the role of IDF forces from state boundaries to monitoring and blockading a strip of one of the most densely occupied areas in the world, where 15,000/sq mi rivals in population density metropolitan London, but are allowed to transit at but six patrolled crossings.
The multiple maps of the dangers of missile and rocket strikes from Gaza led the region to be long mapped as a site of vulnerability, but prepared few for the invasion of the settlements and bases around the Gaza Strip. The defense of those narrowly defined boundaries were shattered in the small enclave of the borders of the Gaza Strip, a semi-autonomous Palestinian area occupied by Israel but cordoned off behind a securitized border thad divided it from the nation, sequestered apart from the wealth, social services, and economy and access to water that the nation had enjoyed, the enclave seemed to emblematize the casting of all Palestinians as terrorists, the targeting of the Gaza Strip that would follow the bloody October 7 invasion that penetrated the defensive barrier at so many points correlated with Israel Defense Forces maps of the “terrorist” sites they had long targeted, fearing the possible rocket strikes, underground entry into settlements in southern Israeli territory, or incursions, guarding the barrier of Palestinian presence that refused to offer any concessions for Palestinian territoriality by mapping it only as a threat. The violent crossing of the boundary barrier was perhaps one of the first wars won against AI monitors, those towers of surveillance that were taken out and disabled by drone strikes allowing a land invasion, but if the initial shock of crossing the boundary wall stunned the world, and Israel, the battle was fought on very old maps indeed.
As the invasion occurred, and the retaliatory blanketing of the Gaza Strip with aerial bombardment, I kept reflecting on the profoundly victorious tone of this mental map in the liturgy, as the local invasion across the boundary barrier beyond the confines the IDF guarded around the Gaza Strip became a focus of global attention and shock, followed by military advances to the boundary wall. The advance of the territory and its invasion, shown here on Islamic World News as the entry into the Palestinian territory mapped in green, but whose sovereignty Israel denied, led to resistance to focus on the dotted white border line IDF forces defended where the boundary walls had stood.
If the Gaza Strip and its bombardment in the Gaza War were defined by threats to Israeli security and surveillance maps of the region, my mind kept turning to how the perceiving of threats to safety by the wall had focussed Israel’s attention exclusively on threats that Palestinian presence in the Gaza Strip had posed. The map was broadcast each holiday in the diaspora seemed profoundly immediate, before the bombing of Gaza, before the attack on Israel, as a mental imaginary that led me to be introspective about Israel’s constructed borders, and the new status of Israeli protection and defense of borders that would unfold in new ways in future weeks. Indeed, the question of the built boundaries of the “Gaza Strip”–a creation of post-1967 politics–as it was captured from the northern Sinai, with the annexation of East Jerusalem or its “reunification”–the most prominent act formally celebrated by the man who penned the Prayer of the IDF, Shlomo Goren, a Talmudic wunderkind from Poland who had risen to the Chief of the Military Rabbinate. But the map was newly focussed on the dangerous game of protecting the territory from threats lying across that boundary, as if the threat of any Palestinian presence must be contained. If these fears were realized in the bloody Hamas-led ground invasion, the subsequent precision bombing and declaring of Evacuation Zones and forced movement was an attack of far greater scale than any past invasion.
The area of Gaza was only notionally a boundary of Israel for Goren–it touches the Sinai, the “deserts of Egypt,” to be sure, but the densely settled sand and dune-covered region to the northeast of the Sinai lacks any logic for such dense habitation save as a site for refugees. Outside of any legally recognized bounds of nations, it has been long occupied by Israel, which has placed sanctions on it, encouraging a network of subterranean tunnels in its fissile terrain, running to Egypt, providing the main conduits of scarce commodities of food, fuel, medicine, electronics, and, increasingly, weapons, that have been used to contest the effective ‘boundary” of the security perimeter–that green dashed line–that divides the fertile fields of Israel from he sandy coastal plain that receives a foot of rainfall annually, but is now being afflict4d by extreme rains.
Despite recent hopes a two-state solution might remap the Middle East, and create an independent Palestine, on the acceleration of settlements across the West Bank and Negev–what have been remapped as the “occupied territories”–since the 1990s have blurred the boundaries over which the IDF continues to guard on land, air, and sea to give the prayer a decidedly bitter aftertaste. The failure of this mapping–or, indeed, imagining–bore terrifying fruit in the Gaza War, the result of a remapping of Israel’s security and the security of its boundaries oriented to the protection of settler communities that have so dramatically expanded along the West Bank and in the Negev region, posing a demographic and geographic challenge to any two-state solution, and pressing the boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in ways that compromise hopes for a Palestinian state.
Israeli Settler Presence in Outposts and Settlements in Palestinian West Bank, 2000-2016/VOX
What was, after all, the border between Israel and Lebanon, an area where the claims of Israel’s territoriality to occupied lands in the Golan Heights controlled by the IDF in the name of Israeli security since 2000 were contested by many international bodies–even as almost forty-five Israeli so-called “colonies” of settlers and expanded in that region–to which Syria declared its sovereign rights?
The borders of Israel are again blurred, especially by the boundary walls that the state built around the Gaza Strip, declaring a frontier thIn May, 1948, its borders under siege, uniting of the Army, Air Force and Navy as the IDF to guard reflected the military urgency of remapping Israel along a Universal Transverse Mercator, the gold standard of postwar mapping. So much was reflected in the cartographic inflection of the prayer’s definition of standing guard: the UTM remapped boundaries the liturgy echoed, even if the verbal map imply a continuity of the IDF’s mission with pointedly scriptural terms. Geodetic maps had won an instrumental role of defining territoriality in ways that coordinate air, land, and sea forces that the imprecation revealed; the imprecation’s scriptural authority o belied the modern military mapping tools adopted after World War II–accommodated to sacred functions of defending the boundaries of the new nation-state.
The map paralleled the securitization of Gaza’s boundary by IDF immediately after occupying forces left Gaza. The map acknowledged construction of as a mega-border, a bonanza for security companies of a securitized border manned by remote-control machine guns, barbed wire, backed by sensors, later built up as a technologically “smart” wall, whose “buffer” was marked by watchtowers every 2 kilometers outfitted with gunning stations and motion sensors that invading Hamas terrorists took out to enable their entry into settler lands. That was the start of a securitized border, and a discursive transformation of the role of the IDF in securing Gaza as a perimeter. But Gaza was already blockaded and highly guarded. On a holiday based on reflection of extending a covenant, the prayer recalled an antique covenant–“You have chosen us among all peoples,/ . . . you have distinguished us among all nations” —nested amidst imprecations to grant peace to Israel.
The blessing I stumbled over for the section dedicated to the Israeli Defense Forces in the liturgy that, I later found, not long after the founding of Israel beed added to the liturgy by Israel’s first Chief Military Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, a prodigious Talmudist who had fought in three Arabic-Israeli wars and as Israel’s first Chief Military Rabbi, had codified the soldiers’ prayer book and rites of war. Goren authored the prayer for the welfare of Israeli soldiers in 1956, although it read like scripture. The blessing collectively read on Yom Kippur was directed to “the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces/who stand guard over our land and the cities of our elo’ah” in 1956, that disturbing collective possessive channeling the omnipotence of “the mighty, powerful one”–the “true” God revealed in Exodus, as opposed to false gods–Goren saw no contradiction conflating a region guarded “from the border of Lebanon to the deserts of Egypt” as a map sanctified by the God of Israel and a form of redemption that was evident on the map, as well as resonating with the prophecies of Isaiah on the map, in an image truly “visible to all nations.”
In the prayer, Egypt is notably a notional border of the Jewish state, not a fixed by a geodetic line, as the actual state of Israel was. Prayers that the IDF to protect Israel “on the land, in the air, and on the sea” were difficult for me to process in light of the blockade of Gaza–they suggested a geography of redemption that didn’t correspond to the geography of an actual Middle East. And, as I realized in my consultation of books, the region of Gaza lay in the “deserts of Egypt” in 1956, not only because the sandy ground of most of Gaza Strip lay near the Sinai, then and now in Egypt’s sovereign lands, but the armistice line drawn around “Gaza” during the Nakba, the catastrophe of the violent removal of Palestinians, was in Egypt’s sands. And as the IDF massed around Gaza to “guard” its perimeter, as air strikes began over the Gaza Strip, in response to Palestinian expansion beyond the now fallen perimeter three days after the invasion, questioning whether sovereignty over these cities lay in the remit of the IDF became an even more open question, even as it was argued to be more critical than ever to Israeli security.
The transformation of many of the old Palestinian sites of actual settlement, to be sure, including hundreds of towns and villages that were destroyed as if to wipe clean traces of their Palestinian inhabitants and legacy,–as Jewish newcomers quite literally buried sites of Palestinian settlement outside the new city of Tel Aviv, transforming the village of al-Khairiyyah into the “Hariya” landfill after deporting residents of the village, to erase the memory of those expelled during the first Arab-Israeli War, akin to how the site of indigenous lands in the United States contain the most polluted lakes superfund sites, even if increasing exposure of any inhabitants to toxic chemicals tied to reduced life expectancy–placing the majority of “reservations” where indigenous Americans were granted or confined in immediate proximity to dumping sites that have become superfund sites–as attested by the terrible drinking water quality laced with legacy and emerging contaminants.
The uneven enforcement of access to clean water is a good proxy for the creation of superfund sites in close proximity to reservations, as the overdetermined nature of the pollution of areas near to or in tribal reservations, whose effective contamination and pollution seemed a symbolic expunging of them from the nation–similar to the undoing of social memory in the conversion of many older Palestinian villages to some of the largest landfillsl in the Middle East.
Is inadquate health assessments conducted on reservations a historical reason for the striking inequality of access to clean drinking water,–or were “reservations” to which indigenous were confined so effectively marginalized and expelled from the standards of national oversight of water contamination–admittedly a widespread concern in America, despite major historical advances in the provision of clean water supplies to the developing world and agreement that access to clean water is a basic human right?
The conversion of sites of Palestinian villages to eyesores of significant environmental hazards in Israel, rather than an environmentally safe solution, have erased the traces of past inhabitation, converting areas of settlement to eyesores, and effectively expunging such areas of past inhabitation from the territory from the nation, to erase the memory of previous settlements.
The blessing recited for the IDF was included in the prayer books given IDF upon enlistment, with a gun, with the prayers Israeli soldiers for use in contexts from battle injury, death, or to beseech strength from “their Defender and Assistant in their time of difficulty”. The unique contract that the army, navy and ai rforce had developed to the divine–approaching the battle ground with raised to heaven in prayer, turning their hearts to the divine for strength and to strengthen the intensity of divine attention they receive–to secure the Holy Land on air, land and sea as a military terrain. Even before the before the invasion of Israel, I pondered the blurred borders the IDF guarded by the IDF as a modern addition to the liturgy. It revealed the work of the Talmudic Wunderkind in cafating a prayer book able to be used by all Israeli Jews, of whatever origin, to affect an energetic territorial defense. The prayer of security land in part reminded me of the security monitors stationed outside the temple who questioned me before I could enter the house of prayer. I was struck that they asked about where I received a bar-mitzvah–that coming-of-age ritual deep in my personal past. They did so with an eye to their own safety, and that of the congregation, though attacks in Oxford had not occurred, in an apprehensive if festive atmosphere.
9. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War–a terrifying surprise invasion of Israel on two fronts on a sacred holiday that had called into question the fate of the state, I learned about from the astonishment of the faces and laments of my elders–assimilated Jews, who were left open-mouthed in shock in the same synagogue I would be bar mitzvahed on the floor above a few years later. The invasion on settlements mapped as targets of attack were clearly designed to trigger the most elemental if not primal fears of the Jewish people, rarely imagined to materialize outside fiction. Before the barriers of the so-called Iron Wall were breached, I was flooded with memories of the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Long before the violent killings of Israeli’s and the response of bombing the buildings and infrastructure of Palestinians living in Gaza, that invasion of Israel on two fronts fifty years ago was a moment of the intrusion of a “real world” into the silent celebration of a “sacred” holiday my nine-year-old mind could not get itself entirely around, often described as a coming of age of the Israeli state. The prayer Goren wrote after the Second Arab war of 1956 stuck in my head; after October 7 attacks on Israel’s borders, I had to return to its origins in 1956, when it was first included in the liturgy by Israel’s ambitious first Chief Military Rabbi, as if charting Israel’s future expansion to the Sinai–or even to Gaza, for that matter.
While I had not known of that Rabbi Goren, the prayer had a curious tie to that Bar Mitzvah: my late father, curiously, as a true romantic, optimistically entertained my Bar Mitzvah tutor shared a lineage of descent with Shlomo Goren, based on a family name that might be an Anglicized variant. Was our tutor–a close-bearded rabbinical student–related to the Jewish sage and Talmudic scholar linked to an expansive family tree tied to the legendary religious Zionist who, by that time, had also been elected Chief Rabbi of Israel? If Howard Gorin was by no means related to Shlomo Goren, he was a model of devout patriotism across three Arabi-Israeli wars. “You just never know . . .”
The imagined mitzvah of that strained genealogy was undoubtedly strengthened by the fact Shlomo Goren had provided a durable liturgical sanctification of bounds of symbolic potency in of sufficiently suggestive outlines: it did not include or name Gaza, but was difficult to balance with the heightened military securitization of the Gaza Strip, isolating the region’s 2.3 million inhabitants among military targets, as if the strikes are the only just or adequate means to retaliate for a devastating attack on its borders. But those security walls around Gaza, the walls that have artificially demarcated what is a transnational if not international war, are quite pernicious affordances that have allowed Israeli governments to bracket the fate of Palestinian inhabitants in Gaza, an area of Palestinian settlement even in 1956–six years after the “Gaza Strip” was first defined by an armistice line.
Josef Szapiro, Map of the Israel Campaign in the Sinai Peninsula (detail of Gaza and Rapha) (Tel Aviv,1956)
The problems of negotiating one’s own relation to such levels of trauma and violence–in an age haunted by removed violence and disasters–posed problems of psychological processing and psychic weight. The prayers recited before the violent incursion into Israel’s boundaries–before the barbaric attacks that pierced the daunting security wall–but raised problems to which I returned. For the barrier wall that was built around the Gaza Strip was never intended to be a border that was defended when it was constructed in 2005– now called the “Iron Wall”–when twenty-one Israeli civilian settlements in the Strip were dismantled–but has now become seen as if it were indeed a boundary line. For it was increasingly built as a border barrier, in the manner of the walls built as a “separation barrier” across the West Bank, from 2002, just to the west of the historic Green Line that divides Israel from Palestinian lands, on land that comprises almost a tenth of West Bank lands. The drawing of these securitized barriers have allowed as much as they have responded to the growth of Israeli settlements and outposts across the West Bank–
–were matched by a virtual explosion of settlements or towns and villages that surrounded the so-called “envelope” around the Gaza “Strip,” whose over 70,000 residents grew up to “envelop” or surround Gaza’s residents, some fifty communities of different size. In the years after Israel withdrew and Israelis left the Gaza Strip, dismantling some twenty one settlements, the evacuees were relocated to mobile homes, or “caravelles,” around the enclave, which a decade later were still occupied by over half their original residents. The border zone grew with such incentives, as a ready-made demographic barrier to contain the Palestinian state, and as an economically productive territory to defend, including paint factories, printing, flower cultivation and agriculture, a new “barrier” the IDF oversaw that was economically tied to the world in ways that the residents of the “Strip” rarely were. Indeed, the multiplication of bomb shelters across the Gaza Envelop suggests a well-protected from Ashkelon to Beerhseva–outside the Southern District–
Bomb Shelters in Gaza Envelop/International Christian Embassy, Jerusalem
–that became protected as a critical boundary of the state, focussed on the barrier wall, despite the growing threat of missiles and rockets fired from the other side of the barrier wall.
The communities developed in ways that seem strategically placed by Israel to “envelop” Gaza, a concept that dates back to the country’s early years of statehood, after the withdrawal of Israelis from Gaza, often in prefabricated houses to the north and East of the “Strip,” have tranformed the Palestinian enclave to a region shaped by defensive boundaries. The perimeter has been settled by communities funded by the state–in mobile homes assemblages called “caravillas,” before homes were built, receiving bonuses for settling in the Negev or the Galilee, provided with housing equipped with cable TV and phone lines, and abundant water sources accessible immediately beyond the boundary of the Gaza Strip.
The growth of these settlements since relocating Jewish Israelis from the Gaza Strip in 2005 created an apartheid access to water–all of the new settlements are near to water sources or with access to the conduit that carries water from the Jordan River to the Negev desert–in ways that link them to the infrastructure of water provision that the enclave of the “Strip” sorely lacks, creating a disproportionate investment in agrarian infrastructure that mirrored a two-class way of life: the National Water Carrier that distributes needed water: the engineering project allowed “settlers” to dwell in the prefabricated houses that crowd a deserted region beyond the boundary barrier, to be subsidized by the clean or recycled water that residents of the Gaza Strip were sold or denied.
The presence of residential communities that self-identify as “settlements”–an odd term for resettlement areas within the nation–were built and subsidized to accommodate Jews from Gaza’s older Jewish settlements–marked in aqua–in areas without natural access to fresh water sources–
–who had often moved to the outlying settlement areas in the north, near access to potable water, or water for crops, that were accessible in areas of Gaza that were under Israeli control before 2005. While these temporary areas of settlement were nominally temporary, their protection became a needed service of the Israeli state effectively transform the barrier to a boundary inside the state. The geopolitical dynamic of disproportionally lopsided relations that precede the Gaza War had not existed before, but reveals an apartheid that the National Water Carrier was engineered to perpetuate, differentiating access to water on each side, as freshwater wells lying just beyond the boundary, as access to water created separate realities of access to public goods within one state.
Tunnels and Pipeline Constructed in National Water Carrier/Adam Haj
–and had defined the areas of settlement where such “settlers” relocated on the desert frontier. They provided evidence of the two-tiered status of citizens in the state, as if to offer evidence of the sham of a two-state solution that the Israeli government had effectively decided to vacate or void.
Former Jewish Settlement Sites in Gaza and Gaza Envelope before Retreat of IDF/ Economist/2005
The end of the two-state solution was evident in the transformation of the border barrier around Gaza into a boundary of the Israeli state. The state shifted attention from Israel’s actual boundaries to its protection of questionable frontiers, encouraging residents to see themselves as settlers, dwelling in a border land of the so-called “Gaza Envelope” in exchange for subsidies, provided access, unlike Gaza’s residents, to the water, cable television, and telephone lines in residential “settlements” that most in the Gaza Strip painfully lacked–save via the internet.
The barrier has become a border of securitization, not of a nation, but rather of the protection to these expanded settlements. Jews from Gaza from the “occupied” territories, once seen as territories of Israeli Arabs, increasingly ringed the Gaza Strip, living in a different reality than not the other side of the wall, that recalls the different realities on each side of the US Border Wall. The barrier effected this divide. As the wall was enforced to protect Jewish “settlers” who had settled after they had left Gaza, to protect them from rocket fire, balloon-born explosives, and other arial attack, they were urged to settle in a close proximity to the barrier, in a new identity as settlers–guaranteed both subsidies as incomes, and provided access to water that Gaza, which is without an aquifer. These “occupied territories” have become seen as ringed by settlements whose protection is entrusted to the IDF, transforming what was once a security fence into a border.
For the snaking fence that was constructed around the Gaza Strip after IDF military forces withdrew in 2005 was never intended to be a boundary of the state, but was only a barrier fence in 1994, when the role of the fence was less to contain and restrict movement of Gaza’s residents, or the ten-foot high “smart” fence, equipped with surveillance sensors, that prevent the two million residents of the Gaza Strip from leaving the lands they were authorized to remain. But the transformation of this non-border into a boundary line–a demarcation line that grew and was magnified with the encouragement of Donald Trump–was an unrealistic plan of containment until it became treated as a border, even if it was never recognized as one–or indeed intended to be one. Israel has been entrusted with the protection of Gaza’s residents, but the fence has become an increasingly sharp boundary as militarization of the Gaza enclave has grown and the IDF treated the fence as a threat to Israeli security.
IDF Soldiers Guarding Fence Between Gaza and Israel, 2015/Thomas Coex
10. While the boundaries of Israel were not clearly defined before the Partition, the defense on air, and and sea were critical to the survival of the state. The expansion of Israeli territory in the next twenty years created a new state that had occupied or made incursions around much Palestinian territory, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, to the Golan Heights and to Gaza and the Sinai, with a rapidity that helped the prophetic status of the vaguely defined “desert of Egypt” or “Egyptian sands.” Gaza itself assumed a strategic role as a border and edge of the Jewish state in increasingly military, as much as scriptural, terms. Of course, the recent Gaza War–only the most recent–was a war not with a state or only along a fixed boundary, but with a non-state actor that had long opposed the very notion of the state of Israel, rather than challenge its frontiers. Operation “Protective Edge” had sought to establish an advantage over the Gaza, killing 2,000 and injuring five times that, when, about a decade ago, Gaza’s infrastructure was reduced to rubble. The coming response to their terrific invasion in which Palestinians would brutally kill Israeli soldiers and settlers near the Strip had not occurred, but anxiety about edges were part and parcel of Israel’s territorial foundation.
Scriptural precedent was accommodated to the sovereignty of the state by the vague terms of the region that the IDF was sanctioned to defend, in the prayer I was reciting with the Oxford collective, as others were reciting, contemporaneously, around much. of the world. Did these edges accommodate, as the current Prime Minister had urged, Israeli settlements within the vague edge that was guarded by the Israeli military; could they be defended as within Israeli sovereignty? The old maps seemed not to help here, but the steep charges of this verbal map had a rhetorical strength that was difficult to digest but important to situate as a contingent vision of sovereignty, far from the Partition Plan of 1947 that imagined a division of Palestinian and Israeli lands. The question of Israel’s boundaries were less at stake, of course, than its vulnerability: this is a major paradigm shift, of sorts, almost in tandem with the new tools of mapping a state not by boundary lines, or as a bounded territory, but the growth of “non-state actors” that have challenged its legitimacy in increasingly concrete ways. But we use the maps of nation states, nonetheless, as it is all we have, to map these contests on maps, although by maps that are increasingly inflected by GIS precision, and point-based mapping tools, showing the degree of desolation, destruction, and death of residents by a combination of satellite views and existing surveys, creating layers of a density that seem more real.
But they hardly capture the deep transnational ties of the groups attacking Israel’s sovereignty–or sponsoring the attacks of October 7, 2023–or the Hamas group, if they constitute what stands as our record of the Gaza War. For since 1948, or since 1967, a massive change in territoriality even as a deep persistence of historical memory persists, either of defending Israeli territoriality, or Palestinian lands–layers not often part of the maps we consult or provide to map the latest conflict. Rather than secure borders of Israel, or of the boundaries of the state, the removal of IDF forces from the Gaza Strip had shifted the IDF’s orientation from the state’s actual borders to the Gaza Strip. The range of rockets from the Gaza Strip to the rest of the state of Israel became the basis for a new mandate of security, posing the question of establishing stability and quiet for the citizens of Israel. and a reality of containing the reality of an increased threat to rocket strikes from Islamic organizations, in ways that remapped the role of the IDF and indeed the security of Israelis. Mapped by GIS, more than by the boundaries of scriptural precedent, the state was understood in terms of the safety of countering the potential armed presence of a Palestinian organization within the state, or at its edges, that posed a threat able to compromise the safety all citizens of the state.
Israeli Defense Forces GIS Team, 2014
Indeed, five years earlier, when another Israel-Gaza war began, the question of whether the fighting between Hamas rockets and the Israeli state that focussed on Gaza was a “war” or the most recent surge in a “decades-long struggle between Israel and the Palestinians,” that exploded around the Gaza Strip only as the contest has shifted to a new ground of military technology of guided missiles by which Israel’s ability to defend and control its boundaries were challenged in new ways–not on the ground, as it were, but from the air, and from the missiles or cross-border munitions stockpiled in the Gaza Strip, which had long gained unique ability for the past twenty years to fire missiles into Israeli territory, without challenging ins boundaries on the ground. The recent war has moved into a new register, not of ground warfare, but of the coordination between a grand-baseed attack and drone warfare, a new tactic of triangulation that defies the land-air-sea maps of the Israeli state that were long rooted in the past in a UTM projection of boundary defense. from 2007. As the nature of an asymmetric war between a large state and a non-state power grew in intractable ways from the Gaza Strip, the region focussed attention on containing trans-border missiles and attacks–a battery of attacks that in many ways paralleled the erasure of borders and reconfiguration of borders in a globalized world, after 9/11, but also the expansion of aerial cross-border war.
Extended Range of GRAD rockets Fired into Israel from Gaza, 2007 (2009)/Isreaeli Defense Forces
The military maps of rocket range and drone fire have not been able to keep up with the defense of boundaries. Indeed, the new maps became the grounds to affirm a new doctrine of Israel’s “right to self-defense,” not rooted in state boundaries, but in the range of Israelis who “live under rocket fire,” that paralleled the growth of the security wall that surrounded the Gaza Strip–a border that was not a border, but a protective boundary to stop cross-border war, in which the Kibbutzim of settlers in a band six miles around the Gaza Border were the most vulnerable to mortar.
IDF/2008
The modernized liturgy that Rabbi Shlomo Goren, a skilled Talmudic scholar, framed the role of the IDF in cartographically modern terms that were, disquietingly, rather seamlessly integrated with a liturgical tradition. And in the coming days, I explored the origins of this piece of liturgy, written when borders of Israel were threatened, leading to the assault on residents of towns beyond the border, and Gaza surrounded by IDF tanks, seeking to punish the region for the invasion across the reinforced security perimeter constructed for over a billion dollars, from soon after armed forces withdrew in 2005, in a boondoggle that claimed to resolve terrorism and may have set a model for the US-Mexico Border Wall. The border wall was promoted as ending terrorism in what is called “the southern region,” remapping an occupied enclave by sealing its borders, it intensified Palestinian identity–the region is mapped in bright green, with the incursion deep into Israeli settlers’ lands denoted by the dashed red line–that reflected an intentional dismantling of all alternatives to “securitizing” its boundaries by a heavily fortified perimeter that enclosed a region that was part of Israel, but whose population were compressed into an isolated enclave, made even more isolated from any contact with Israel, but in increasing contact, despite Israeli fortification of the perimeter, we would soon see, with suppliers of arms and perhaps strategic advice.
The liturgy dated, I found, from 1956–the very date Israeli settlement of Gaza became encouraged by the state as a frontier that would be able to protect its boundaries–and self-reflexively mirrored by the expansive boundaries of Israel as a state–despite its authentic Old Testament ring. And the discomfort that I felt at Goren’s formulation about the “desert of Egypt” as a frontier for the nation that would lead to stability in the Middle East was undermined by the invasion that entered Israeli territory.
Extent of Palestinian Invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023
The prayer in the liturgy assumed increasingly prominence in my mind, like the echo of an old taste, during the destruction of at least fifty holy sites in Gaza, as it replaced the sites of devotion in Jerusalem. The sacred sites in the Gaza Strip lie amidst 32,000 buildings and over 20,000 houses and counting, noted by dark green dots, and churches denoted in aqua dots, with which this densely populated strip was long prominent in a sacred–as much as geopolitical–topography. Although the long-standing tensions between the sacred and geopolitical are rarely mapped as prominently as the loss of life, the crises of health, well-being, and humanitarian disaster, but underlie the much mapped geography of the Gaza Strip. The destruction of Gaza is a humanitarian disaster, but also a loss of collective memory, and affront to the Islamic identity and Palestinian identity, whose holy sites are being systematically destroyed.
6. If we use modern mapping techniques, we risk erasing and being unmindful of the extent of aerial bombardment and destruction, and the danger of the punitive measures taken against a region–which are effectively a strike against the Islam’s presence in the Middle East. (It is not a coincidence that the invasion called the Al Aqsa Flood is named after the mosque that increasing Jewish rabbis have invited visits, encouraging access to what they call Temple Mount, site of a Second Temple, despite the longstanding policy of the Chief Rabbinate.) Amidst official maps, maps contrasting overlays of satellite photography to survey of destroyed buildings in real time, and population maps of population destiny and forced migration, we may overvalue if not fetishize the very modernity of our array of mapping tools to create stable geography, rather than the messy battery of compromises and offenses that shape the slippery history of the Gaza Strip. The more accurate map of the region may well be offered by the hyper-density of sacred sites in that region that is among the most densely populated in the world if not the Middle East–indeed, the territory rich with mosques destroyed across Israeli territory and Negev. Is it possible that the density of mosques (green dots) and Christian houses of worship (aqua), both holy sites, survives as a sort of reminder of Palestinian presence in a geographically dispersed collective memory?
Civilian Institutions and Sacred Sites across the Gaza Strip before October 7, 2023 Incursion of Israeli Territory (Hospitals, red dots; Mosques, green dots; Churches, aqua; Refugee Camps yellow dots; border crossings, black) Middle East Monitor
It cannot be mapped, and nor can the shock of the destruction of these sacred sites, some, as the ruins of Yamin Mosque, destroyed early in the October bombing campaign of reprisals that escalated with vengeance.
It is not surprising that its very topography has effectively nourished anti-Israeli propaganda, a resistance that has been fed by the myth of the capture of al Aqsa mosque to the Protocols of Zion, and the fear of a loss of sacred land as much as civil recognition in an increasingly apartheid state. Rather than a stubborn relic of the past, Gaza’s deep history–and the array of historical layers that inhabit the region–as for just reason denoted by an impregnable fortress in crusaders’ maps.
Palestine of the Crusades compiled, drawn and printed under the direction of F.J. Salmon (1950; surveyed 1937)
Although the conflicts in Gaza have been mapped repeatedly, from the incursion of Hamas terrorists into Israel across the border barrier, between the crossings into Israeli territory, denoted in black squares, modern mapping practices of mapping by satellite view, political boundaries, or OSM tools face questions of integrating the rich sacred topography of the region, or indeed the risks of obliterating the deep memories of the sacred topography of the current Gaza Strip, whose wealth might be mapped by its deep archeology–and ruins of the Byzantine, Roman, and indeed pre-Islamic Iron Age–
–as much as a region that was defined by “border breaches,” as significant as these breaches of the border were the current intensification of a long-simmering war, that was hardly ever a status quo.
The persistence of this deep sacred geography may have been buried not only in the ruins of Gaza’s destroyed buildings and flattened cities, but in maps of the enclave that Israeli Defense Forces provide of the region. If the IDF has sought to isolate the region as best possible since withdrawing militarily from the artificially demarcated region in 2015, it has been mapped as a site of danger since 1948. For even in the armistice line that was mapped by 1950 if drawn up in 1948, where Egyptian forces were encircled and a ceasefire declared, the region of Gaza was ceded to Palestinian authorities, if it is not determined by Palestinians but an early island of Palestinian governance–where Gaza provides a remnant of the expanses mapped in the Palestine Plan of Partition of 1947.
Hamas has based itself in a site not only of increased population density, but a rich topography of houses of worship–some used, as hospitals, as sites to store arms and missiles, but also the possible destruction of many sites that have cultivated a deep sense of spiritual strength and resistance, whose prominence is hard to map on a satellite map or a territorial map of the Gaza Strip, and difficult to be given proper significance only by numbers, dots, or abstract geographic markers.
The reading of the IDF prayer suggested just how deep the collective memory was of the region, from the founding of the Israeli state, and the deep awareness of destiny. The liturgy evoked territorial expanse of the Israeli state that the IDF defended in pseudo-scriptural terms that the Israeli army’s Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, wrote in 1956 used perhaps intentionally vague boundaries to define the mission of the IDF. The prayer surely reflected the dominance of a military map. Yet it masked an implicit and uneasy tension with the somewhat scriptural definition of the expanse to be guarded between the Mediterranean and Jordan, or the “arid lands,” I felt as I read it; the timelessness of the liturgy masked the question of which Israeli’s the IDF defended–or if it defended claims of a Jewish people as much as of a sovereign state’s actual boundary lines.
The liturgical additions in prayer books that all inducted soldiers gain with a gun upon entrance to the fighting forces beseeches the Almighty to strike down “the enemies” who “rise against us,” again raising questions of the plural collective that were not that clear to me, this past Yom Kippur, before the invasion of Israel’s Negev or the brutal counter-invasion of the Gaza Strip, which the Israeli army had occupied until 2005. The prayer gained new dimensions, moreover, as the military mission of destruction of Hamas was staked out in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s sabbath-eve address, breaking with religious precedent as if to underscore its importance to the nation, as a commitment to underscore the government’s commitment to defending Israeli sovereignty in the wake of the brutal violation of its bounds and the massacre of over 1,300.
If Goren was a Jew who lived under divine law, able to reconcile his vision of the state with biblical precepts and precedents, there is little divine law in the walled off region of the Gaza Strip. The region that is nominally under Israeli jurisdiction as an edge of the occupied territories however lay in a different blurred relation to the Israeli state: rather than a frontier of scriptural precedent, it was an edge of securitization of the region, and of the state. For the containment of the threat from the occupied lands controlled nominally by the state, but shut off from democracy, is a new edge-land of the Holy Land, located not on the edge of the Great Sea, or on the edge of the Lands of the Tribe of Judah–as it was, say, for the Venetian early Renaissance statesman Marino Sanudo, that advocate of Crusades to the Holy Land, who placed the city of Gaza nearby to modern Ashkelon on the coast and outer edge of the Holy Land to which Sanudo wanted to urge crusaders–on the edge of the map he plotted from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean–
Marin Sanudo, 1320, Map of the Holy Land
–and included among the Eusebian toponymy that defined the Holy Land, beside Arabia Felicis, in humanist maps of the region that introduced the Renaissance idea of firmly drawn borders around a land known as Palestine, beside Egypt, by Renaissance codics of world geography of 1475–
–that of course now borders Israeli sovereignty by a far more firmly drawn edge, more removed from azure waters, and of far smaller dimensions–and remind us of the absence of any clear border for Palestine today, as the Gaza Strip endures only as a region blockaded by land, air, and sea–the name of the “State of Palestine” claimed by the West Bank, if Palestine lacks consequential borders.
The Gaza Strip has become the most fortified and most strongly drawn edges of Israeli sovereignty. The wall was built as a challenge, or as a boast, but is less a boundary than a container of the fear of Palestinian threat. Rather than an edge of sacred or sacralized space, it lay on the edges of a modern, geodetic territoriality, behind an edge-barrier, a barrier which, as soon as its construction had been completed in 2021, above and below ground, observers wondered if it could be breeched, and the terrorist incursions on Israel’s territoriality be definitively stopped.
Residents of Gaza did not have a vote or a government, but were “contained” by a wall, and indeed their fate seems understood only by the notion of a “Gaza envelope,” the securitized area immediately outside the boundary wall in which some 70,000 Israelis live, and whose presence there seems more defended and monitored than the residents of the nominally occupied Gaza Strip from which IDF military occupiers withdrew almost a decade ago. The concentration on investment of an “iron” barrier of sixty kilometers to “contain” the increasingly existential threat that residents of Gaza posed to the Israeli state suggested that “our” referenced Jews alone, and emphasized the vigilance of monitoring resident populations in the area of the so-called “Strip”–2.2. million, over half are children, most (1.6 million) are refugees.
While the region has been mapped as an are that is monitored, blockaded to prevent entrance of weapons, its perimeter guarded on air, sea, and land in ways so tragically proven a dramatic failure, the containment of the Gaza Strip by fences and naval surveillance had created a new status quo, based on defending a boundary line behind which danger lurked, but was not negotiated with.
–even as the population of the region had been ignored as it grew, without any acknowledgment or attention from the Israeli state. For the region had been enduringly seen across the wall and not as a part of Israel, mapped as an area that existed in relation to that liminal space of a Gaza envelope, or those settlers so close to it they were potential exposed to mortar fire, rather than as a populated area; the “envelope” was mapped as a way to understand Gaza Strip for the IDF, as living targets whom Israeli’s government is committed to protect. The incursion into Israeli territory that was mapped by the icons of machine guns described the attacks on twenty individual villages of settlers’ towns and military outposts, a bravado attack of unprecedented scope that extended fifteen full miles beyond the barrier that had been breached in thirty places, to Ofakim,–but envisioned the hopes of attacking nearby cities, and indeed joining the West Bank? The scale of the plan that is suggested by the name of the al Aqsa Deluge, that sought to swamp the Israeli state. If Hamas units carried maps that plotted the extent of their planned charge into the West Bank, killing as many Israelis as possible during their advance, adopting and claiming a historical role in Palestinian history as martyrs, and provoking the invasion of the Israeli government across the border barrier.
The towns and settlements beyond increasingly securitized perimeter were imagined as targets after the monitors of the barrier were disabled, cameras and sensors destroyed early in the morning of October 7, the vulnerability of the “targets” as targets of a brutal invasion was a challenge to the IDF mandate to “defend” such settlers and defend the security of Israel, although not by its geographic boundaries, but by the promises that contractors who had specialized in the design of prisons before they branched out to building and designing securitized perimeters. The boundary barrier around the Gaza Strip lay, ostensibly, within the territory that the IDF was entrusted to defend. But the sixty kilometer fencing was built as a “border” barrier within a nation, in ways that cut off any interest in the inhabitants of the strip, whom it hermetically sealed from view lest they pollute the nation-state: I silently attempted a drash around the prayer to the IDF nested in the sacred liturgy, whose verbal map written in 1956 was from Deuteronomy and Exodus, as well as Ezekiel (47:13-20), that called the border of the land of Israel from the Jordan to the sea, in ways that was uncomfortably echoed in the Likud party platform affirmed in 1977 that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty,” as if to deny the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty that ignored the population of the region, and concretized a strikingly scriptural map as a territory on an actual map, as if there was no dissonance or negotiation between the two.
The weightiness of suppressing uprisings in Gaza echoed this topography of sovereignty that the state seemed to have internalized from Goren’s prayer, as if to extend territoriality into spiritual if not theological dimensions, and define the protection of that “envelope” of settlers as a primary duty of the IDF, and construed that protection as central to the protection of the state of Israel. Was this not a distortion of the sense of a state, or of territory, that Goren saw as a means of achieving redemption? The television audiences to which Likud leader and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played, in declaring that the aerial bombardment of Gaza was “just the beginning” a week after the invasion of armed Palestinians in a weightiness of biblical history, on the Sabbath eve, as if to signify the extreme weight of a public statement that demanded to be accorded a truly exceptional status, has been echoed in his assertions that the destruction of any threat in the Gaza Strip is a “second independence war,” critical to the state and sovereignty. The premise is perverse, but even more perverse is that it ignores the longstanding absence of any political voice or representation from the residents of Gaza, a community of refugees often displaced by a generation, whose presence had doubled since the withdrawal of IDF forces from the region, in a new topography of the Strip, as it has become an increasingly transnational region,–
–populated in 2020 by multi-national refugee camps of displaced run by the United Nations.
How can the ethical mission of the Israeli Defense Forces by reconciled with this geography, or has it been increasingly distorted by a mandate for protection that is concretized by investment in an “impervious” border wall that contractors promise can be created for the state? Or is that promise itself a mask of the need for negation and dialogue with the expanding inhabitants of the so-called Strip, that liminal territory whose territoriality Israel’s Likud party seeks only to bracket or erase?
The problematic alignment of a sacred and territorial map is “deep”–it was, to be sure, part and parcel of Israeli history. If the prayer’s verbal map was cast in biblical terms to make it enduring, rather than contingent, as if a continuation of a compact with the Almighty, the prayer recited after the Torah reading was part of the project of the Chief Rabbi of the IDF to modernize prayers for the Israeli army, that united it as a fighting force by providing modern religious practices for the new conditions of wartime. Goren had fashioned a needed rituals of state-building, as a military man who must have masked quite the dissonance form a map of geodetically determined boundaries that the state had adopted, giving them a flexibility aligned with Jewish destiny.
As Chief Rabbi, Goren is perhaps best known for having celebration, holding a Torah scroll and with shofar in hand, paratroopers reclaiming East Jerusalem in 1967, a moment he sacralized as if the Day of Redemption were at hand, lifting the shofar to mark expansion of Israeli borders to Temple Mount-d-the al-Aqsa mosque–telling television viewers that ‘this is the day we have hoped for, let us rejoice and be glad in His salvation,” as if realizing the “vision of all generations”–a staged moment if there was one–
Rabbi Goren Trying to Blow Shofar with 71st Paratropper Brigade on Reaching Western Wall in 1967
–although no sound emitted from the Shofar, as expressions of the soldiers suggest they had waited for the start of the resonant blast to begin. The announcement made to the nation by Rabbi Goren, if another man with deeper lungs had to arrive to sound the horn, that “we have not forgotten you, our holy city, our glory,” and affirming, “This year in Jerusalem–rebuilt!” Commanders were instructed to send men into the Old City “that all generations have dreamed about [entering],” under gunfire, until the announcement arrived over loudspeakers “The Temple Mount is in our hands!” Gore had, at this long-awaited moment, solemnly recited “Baruch ata Hashem, menachem tsion u-voneh Yerushalayim” [Blessed are thou, who comforts Zion and builds Jerusalem].
We may smirk a bit at the belief of many viewers of Goren’s televised announcement that redemption was indeed at hand. But the deep memory of restoring a sacred map of redemption contrasted to the different sense of Gaza’s bombardment that was ordered by Netanyahu, not a man of the cloth, and with little sense of the sacred, perhaps, but who extended the historical destruction of sacred sites of memory in much of the old city. The military advance on Temple Mount had led to an erasure of Moslem presence in the city that had been shared by three faiths, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian, allowing mosques to be destructively removed beyond Jerusalem. The Protraction of Holy Sites Act of 1967–that very year–punished desecration of Jewish holy sites and places of worship, but failed to protect any other sites of worship, like the Sheikh Eid Mosque, not included within the legal parameters of the state’s official recognition as holy or sacred sites worth protection. Jews’ recent entry to the mosque with Israeli protection was seen as an infringement of the Dome of the Rock–from which no Jews were allowed to worship since 1187.
The current plans of Orthodox Jews to build a “Third Temple” on the site of the destroyed first two as a culmination of the state of Israel, the pragmatics of compromising the mosque compound by an accommodation of Jewish worship, in defiance of the standing prohibition of non-Moslem prayer at the holy mosque since during the era of the crusaders. Indeed, the fears of the spatial division of the compound, as Israel has converted half of the Ibrahimi Mosque to a synagogue for Jewish prayer in the occupied city of Hebron in the West Bank, has increased fears of a zionist compromise of the holy sites of Jerusalem.
Detail of Hebrew Place Names on New Versions of Palestine Exploration Fund’s Archeological Map (1936; 1967)
Were such increased fears to the site designated not as al-Aqsa but rather “Temple Mount” in maps from the Six Day War that reprinted maps of the Palestine Exploration Fund, created a sacred reality to concretize conflict, superimposing a false geography of sacred worship on a contested region, borrowing from their claims of objective authority from the earlier archeological findings?
Temple Mount by Ermete Pierotti, Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), 1862/Palestine Exploration Fund
The claims are reprised, on a symbolic level, in recent fetishization of the Wailing Wall and Dome of the Rock as aspects of a holiday Menorah–to celebrate the sufficiency of oil to burn in the Temple of the Macabeen seizing of the Second Temple in Seleucid Palestine, is, for example, commemorated in the plastic resin menorahs available in the diaspora, that I found for sale in Oxford months later–the rabbinic legend of the miracle of the survival of the sold jar of uncontaminated oil found in the Temple that allowed Judas Maccabeus’ victory to be validated by a miracle, gained newfound patriotic resonance in the twentieth century, as in the diasporic imaginary the sufficiency of that jug was celebrated, as it had long been, as a sustenance of faith; the ritual celebration of the duration of one jug of oil over eight days became commemorated as a miracle of territorial defense of sorts, in the hand-painted resin copy of the Western Wall of Jerusalem, eight turreted towers bearing eight candles for each day of celebration, extended observance of “Hasmonean Independence Day” to a heroic image of a defender of Jerusalem, following the Maccabean tradition, and the nation’s integrity at the site Rabbi Goren famously claimed part of Israel in 1967.
The kitsch transformation of the “Western Wall” to a celebratory candelabra holding multicolored candles celebrated the survival of the Macabees in the Second Temple by the very form of the wall, echoing how Macabees provided a models of martial heroism that rejected stereotypes of passivity, and the model of a martial ideal of the heroic settler, incarnating military bravery and strength. SI the “Jerusalem Menorah” that is sold in the diaspora not a model of celebrating the purification of the Second Temple–the site of the current al-Aqsa mosque–and the driving of pagan idols from it. The military victories of the Maccabees that were preserved in the 2,000 year diaspora have become a romantic touchstone of military virtue and leadership made to speak to present-day Jerusalem.
The trilingual signage in the Hannukah Menorah used in the diaspora suggests that defense of these old walls of the lost “Temple Mount” was a preoccupation of all diasporic Jews, tapping the militant image of the Israeli settler–for which the Maccabees provided a new ideal type from the 1930s–as following the Macabbees in their dedication to the defense of the scriptural legitimacy of the state.
The al Aqsa Mosque is still called “Temple Mount” by Israelis who regard it as part of the state, if it is administered by the Waqf, and not Israeli authorities. The terrify8ing numbers of incursions and attacks on al Aqsa in recent years are rarely tallied, but have grown with clear geopolitical consequences, as the very name of the October 7 invasion as the Al Aqsa Flood suggests. The condemnation of entry into the mosque by the Arab League, the Waqf, UAE, Qatar, and Turkey’s Erdogan regime has lead to warnings of destabilizing regional security in April 2023. “Raging conflicts” around the access to al-Aqsa mosque were quickly tied to the Oct 7 invasion, and Mohammed Deif, chief of Hamas’ military wing, cited the blockade of Gaza, the raids on West Bank towns, and the violence at al-Aqsa as the motivations for the brutal invasion, a site that incarnates the promise of Palestinian redemption–and has increasingly has fired rockets into Israeli territory to ensure “al Aqsa’s defense,” using the mosque as a pretext for violence and a basis to mobilize Palestinian unity.
The violations of status quo agreements about the mosque, in place since 19667, led to a rise of rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, indeed, and may have provoked the stockpiling of weapons in the coastal enclave as Israel’s Air Force responded with four aerial bombardments of the city, one targeting a refugee camp deemed a “military site,” and tanks firing at Hamas positions in the southern edge of Gaza The cross-border fire echoed after fears of invading the sacred structure echoed discovery of the destruction in 1967 of venerable mosques in the city of Jerusalem, a terrifying precedent of the sovereign annexation of land for the Gaza Strip. Promotion of the false narrative of a mosque “under Israeli rule” and of “al-Aqsa that has fallen prisoner to the Jews” has rose to the status of a myth magnifying it as a goal of Islamic jihad and a site of holiness. The attacks of October 7, that led to the massacres of Israelis, followed the centrality of al Aqsa in the earlier raids into Israel two and a half years earlier, that elevated the mosque to a central call for revolt against Israeli forces across the West Bank, using the mosque as a rallying symbol of a divided nation.
Flag of Hamas Flying above al Aqsa Mosque, May 10, 2021/Ahmad Gharabli/AFP
The mosque has been more than a tension point as multiplying visits of Jews to the mosque that long banned non-Muslim prayer grew by over a third since 2014. The sense of affront played a part in the remapping of instability behind the Gaza Barrier wall, as far-right Jews have called the mosque a “temporary” presence to rebuilding a Third Temple, calling it “Temple Mount”–and remapping its sacred territory. Days before October 7, ultranationalist Jews again entered the mosque under police protection, contravening prohibitions of Jews praying in the mosque, that were broadcast widely on Al Jazeera as an invasion of the sacred space of redemption where Mohammed entered heaven. The demand to de-Judaize Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and the city of Jerusalem has emerged as a powerful negation of a Jewish Zionist narrative. If the October 7 bombardment was “a failed attempt to prevent Gaza from continuing its support [for] our people in Jerusalem and the West Bank,” it has affirmed a sacred geography of Islam against Jewish sovereign claims. The conflict may be timeless, but the erosion since the 1990s of a tenuous status quo by Israeli settlers who self-identify as “Temple Mount groups” now in Netanyahu’s government have led to the option of replacing military service as guides to lead tours of the Mosque.
The immediate protection of Jewish sacred sites alone in the city of Jerusalem contrasted with the destruction of a mosque; as military Rabbi, Goren had asked all holy places in the city to be placed under rabbinic supervision, rather than other sacred sites. “Now the Arabs are in a state of shock, and their only hope is to stay alive and not be massacred,” he crowed. He hoped Muslim control over Temple Mount would be ended at a strike of the pen, if the proposal came from the rabbinate rather than the government, issued with the aura and “idea of holiness” rather than “a political idea.” “Rabbis,” reported the Times, “buttressed calls for a synagogue to be (re)built on Temple Mount, with a 1967 Survey Map purporting to show the exact site of the First and Second temples, where, per Jewish law, it would be permissible to construct a new temple.” The aim to construct or reconstruct a Third Temple was mapped by Goren, as coinciding directly with Temple Mount, and the map he prepared on June 21, 1967 paralleled the reissuing of the map of Frederick John Salomon with Hebrew text to identify Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock and El-Marwani Mosque, identified as “Solomon’s Stables,” at the end of the 1967 Six Day War, to map the retaking and occupation of East Jerusalem.
Map of Temple Mount Made after Six Day War, from 1936 Survey of Palestine of Frederick John Salmon
Maarive Pictorial map of Jerusalem, printed just three days after the 1967 Six-Day War
But the current doctrine of Gaza’s protection was not organized or affirmed by men living under divine law. Although overlapping geographies of Temple Mount are not only competing geographies, but a chronic tension in Jerusalem, witness the riots of September, 2015, which provided in part the motivating name of the al-Aqsa Flood, or armed charge into settlements in the Negev and outside the Gaza Strip. For a geography of power has morphed to a defense of Israeli land, not by borders or frontiers, but on densely populated edges.
The conscious masquerading of the political with the theological had resonance to the liturgical addition in by prayer book. My reaction to the prayer already set me on edge at the dissonance between a sacral geography and a territory. Examining that photograph, since included in most textbooks of Israeli history, when it was accompanied by the victory cry of his division, “the Temple Mount is in our hands!” Goren again activated a sacred geography in a moment that was defining to the nation but whose listeners on television truly understood as announcing the day of redemption. The image broadcast to the nation concretized an icon of national celebration, fitting in with the expansion of the boundaries of the state in a form of scriptural destiny still alive in 1967: the arrival of shofar and scroll were not orchestrated carefully–they demanded some quick thinking and improvisation–but they followed the map already conjured in the IDF prayer, a loosely bordered geography from sea to sand, the “arid land” difficult to map; if everyone understood that it would include the West Bank, there were no clear lines drawn.
That verbal map was increasingly difficult for me to map onto the Middle East of the moment. The prayer now seems a counter-geography to the chant heard in anti-war rallies, “From the River to the Sea,” that were repeated in London and across the world. That cry, to be sure, denied the right of Israel to exist, in rather violent cartographic terms. It rejected the constraints built by Israel Defense Forces soon massed around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip, and even the defense of the so-called “envelope”–the region that the IDF has so prominently and distortingly of sovereign goals, taken it upon themselves primarily to protect. (The pro-Palestinian collective chant“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was indeed a motivating counter-narrative, rooted in promises to throw Israel “into the sea” to reclaim the “usurped” land of Palestine since the dispossession of lands in the Nakba, hanging the entire geopolitical issue on different set of historical markers). Was it a pure coincidence that the current government of Israel affirmed in its charter last December, “The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel–in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria,”–promoting the settlement of the very contested “occupied territories” including areas around the Gaza Strip?
Didn’t the warning Netanyahu issued prioritize the “securitization” of territory as a substitute for defending the nation’s sovereign bounds or the future of non-Jewish Israelis? The right-wing government had affirmed all of Israel was destined for Jewish sovereignty, and the protection of al Jewish settlers. The concentration of Israeli forces on the “occupied” areas of the Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza Strip and Negev have come to seem a devolution of the imperatives that Goren had invested in the territorial defense of a Jewish nation. But as the development of Israel as a multi-ethnic nation, and a liberal democracy, the government has, in rather devious and demonic ways, resuscitated a far-right vision of settling Palestine current among right-wing Zionists to protect the land they had settled and refuse to negotiate with Palestinians (or Arab inhabitants of the land) save from a position of power–the dogma that was linguistically identified by the logic of an “Iron Wall” even before a boundary border was built. And I worried, as the Gaza War has grown in bloody was, that the theater of the “border wall” created a sense of security but a false line of sovereignty, a piece of theater which Israel will stand to pay far more than the $1.1 billion.
The longstanding “occupied territories” that have been vowed to be settled and protected by the Israeli government, and frequently mapped, remapped, and polemically mapped again as a loss of land and act of settler-colonialism, where some 4.5 million Palestinians live, dispersed and without claims to sovereignty, are the political fault lines of the Middle East that the Gaza Strip boundary, not shown below, is interrupted, or “perforated,” in almost tactical ways by settlements, described polemically as prolonging a Palestinian diaspora, was rebuffed by armed crossing of the boundary of the reinforced “Iron Wall” of the Gaza Strip– not in reference to its materials topped by cyclone fencing and razor wire, or underground barrier, but that rehabilitated the hard far-right Zionist credo of the 1920s, newly revived, that the metaphorical “iron wall” between Palestinians and Jews was a precondition to negotiate with Palestinians only from a position of military strength, the hidden legacy that has informed twenty-foot tall border barrier finished by in 2021 over a concrete barrier extending into the earth by several meters, to prevent underground transit–its depth still secret, but that senior IDF officials felt was “deep enough” in 2018 to block any tunnels from Gaza.
Occupied Palestinian Territories, Built-Up Settlements in Dark Brown, IDF Presence in Bright Orange
The equation Netanyahu and his cabinet of ministers have drawn between the border and “Israel sovereignty” that extends over the Gaza Strip to the Mediterranean is not only the slogan of an occupying state. But the map that has become increasingly oriented toward border-defense of “edges” of land have changed in fundamental ways from the project of mapping Israeli sovereignty over Eretz Israel. In ways not effectively or sufficiently mapped, the mapping of defending the edges of the state from Lebanon to Jerusalem to Gaza, is very unlike how Goren had glossed the boundaries of the state by glossing covenants with the Israeli people in Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and Ezekiel,–even if the border tactics that are primarily understood in military maps of tactical advantage insist they are the same.
The literalization of these boundaries over the occupied territories as buffer zones cubical to the security of the states have been met by the new tools of cross-border war. But the systematic destruction of the density of so many houses of prayers, mosques, and even churches in the Gaza Strip–an area so dense that many houses are built over sacred sites, if Hamas has also used sacred sites as cover for underground tunnels and safe houses for the storing of armaments, suggests a deep danger of targeting a sacred geography that would strike deeply in collective memory, a clear retributive strike into the territory of Gaza where Hamas had based itself, and had based itself.
The blessing we recited in the liturgy troublingly blurred how boundaries and borders had changed, or were in fact negotiated with real people, rather than being issued by diktat as the “Iron Wall” demanded be done. The toughening of the borders by securitized fences was accompanied problems of remapping sovereignty, a remapping of the border as a perimeter of security, normalizing and justifying the confinement of peoples in poetically distinct ways to the expansive geography that was once tied to redemption. The increasingly tactical ways in which the border and border defense were seen, in other words, were difficult to reconcile with the timelessness that the Polish-born rabbi saw as an ecstatic sounding of calls to liberation. Israelites and indeed sojourned in “Egyptian sands” in the days of Genesis and Exodus, if for but a four hundred years; yet it is true that the Sinai was also fresh in the mind of Israelis after the second Arab-Israeli war–when the prayer was aded to the liturgy by Israel’s after the first after the foundation of Israel by a stickler for Talmudic and legal detail, who emphasized the biblical topography that lay beneath land claims.
Gaza has been occupied for a full generation or nearly sixty years, despite international demand towithdraw armed forces from the region. The occupied region has been defined act as a “buffer” to the state, treated less as part of Israel’s territory, but constructed in relation to Israel’s safety as if the “Gaza envelope” demanded preservation for security of the state. Where Palestinians aligned with Hamas had staged what seemed a suicide mission may have been a test tempting Israel’s government to invade their small enclave, but the very invocation of a border that Israeli Defense Forces were dedicated to protect–the liturgy sought collective blessing of the Israeli Defense Forces as they “guard over our land and the cities of our God from the border of Lebanon to the desert of Egypt” felt like a responsibility hard to process as we begged for atonement for sins on the day of Yom Kippur.
7. Even before we had imagined the invasion of Israel and the bombardment of the Gaza Strip, I shuddered at what I sensed was an absorptive geography, a map that was intimidating, and in the moment of Yom Kippur just too much to endorse. And so my voice trailed off in silence, rather than read the blessing to its end, as prospect of endorsing the mission unfolded before my eyes. The very goal of the Gaza War that Netanyahu announced may well be to flatten Gaza, rather than absorb it into an Israeli state. It is hard to see any infrastructure remaining in the region, or a rush of migration into the coastal strip that was once the most densely populated of areas in the world, let alone in the Middle East. But it seemed primarily intended to reestablish securitized border walls, as if the state’s covenant to protect Israelis was a rationale for defending impervious borders, irrespective of the lives or health of Gaza’s residents.
The restoration of the securitized barriers built about the Israeli state is however a view that has little futures. Of options that are on the table for reducing the size of the Gaza Strip, removing it from underground tunnel networks that have nourished militancy of Palestinians, one of Netanyahu’s ministers argued, as if Israel might benefit from forcing residents into a yet smaller space, below the northern Gaza Strip, and removing Palestinians form the historically densest and most sacred regions of settlement, imagines border drawing from a position of strength. The hubris of such remapping from a hyper identitarian narrative is extreme, but it also exemplifies the current government seems to be locked.
I kept going back to the world and words of Goren, the defense of the historical boundaries was a form of redemption. Although Rabbi Goren omitted Gaza, the Gaza Strip was in 1956 was subject to Egypt’s sovereignty, since the “Gaza Strip” was born after the 1950 Armistice, and the incursion into Gaza by Israeli Border Police to drive 3,000 Bedouin farmers was well known–the first great act of military heroism of the future IDF Southern Command, Gen. Ariel Sharon. (No Bedouin communities in the Negev were ever officially recognized by the state.) The movement was a strike of what might be called settler colonialism, to ensure the city of Raffa was a future site for Israeli settlement, and expansion. The violent clearing of the future border-town of the Gaza Strip, Raffa, clearly lay at the edges of the “Egyptian sands.” For Goren, and for Sharon, Egypt was more than a figurative border zone, but an actual national frontier; the IDF prayer that sacralized land taken by air and ground not by a geodetic line. When Israel invaded the Sinai, the expanded borders seemed heroic. Goren’s military training meant he was hardly ignorant of the status of exact frontiers, but helped him forge an expansive incorporation of the Sinai–and the Gaza Strip-into Israeli territory–that would accommodate the inclusion of the Sinai in the Israeli state. The destruction of mosques in the Holy Land seized by the Israeli state left only those in 120 Palestinian towns to survive and function after 1948–with the mosques in five hundred other villages razed–many located, to be sure, in the pre-israeli state region mapped at the time that Goren wrote the prayer for the IDF troops, if dating from the February, 1956 Partition Plan adopted by the United Nations in 1947.
United Nations’ 1956 Plan for Partition for Israel and Arab State
The 1958 map was, in many ways, a reaction to the status quo of the loose boundaries that existed in Palestine, circa 1949, through which Goren had lived and witnessed, and the pragmatic problems of defining Israel’s boundaries within a standard liturgy–quite a responsibility, to be sure, but one to which Goren had the office to be entitled, if this responsibility was indeed awesome. While he must have consulted Ezekiel and Exodus in depth, the world in which state boundaries existed was difficult given the complex geopolitical dynamic on the ground, in the first Arab-Israeli war. But it raised the problem of how a sacred space of redemption could exist within modern geopolitical terms that was revisited in the arming of Gazan terrorists to reclaim the region and indeed part of the Negev in the uprising that promised an “al Aqsa Flood” across borders, in a trans-border war at least notionally directed to the contested al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. The area was far outside of what the Israeli “Defensive” Forces held on a classified map of 1949, a full year after the Israeli Defense Forces united the ground forces, Air Force, and navy as a common mission of protecting the state on three fronts under the name “Army of the Defense for Israel.”
Palestine Military Situation, April 1949
Those clear scare quotes around the descriptor “Defensive” before “Forces” raises questions about territories then held by members of the Israeli Defense Forces and their place in the Negev and sands of Egypt. Perhaps such prominent scare quotes were a message to the American President. They echoed unease, as I wondered blockades of Gaza, or bu9ilding a security perimeter at a cost of $1.1 Bn, was a bonanza for security companies, not really about the well-being of the nation but a piece of theater in itself. The charter of the Likud clearly maps it out as a rebuff to the Palestinian slogan–: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” The shift to preserve the safety of settlements that approach the borders of comfort with Palestinian towns seem dedicated to the new tactics of aggressive settlement–if not protection of settlers’ lands–that in increasingly aggressive ways denied any possibility of future compromise of a two-state solution.
The prayer in the New Year’s liturgy disturbed me as if it became an invitation to participate in an absorptive geography that had internalized the Gaza Strip, abstracted any willingness to accord it sovereignty. For the Gaza Strip, an artifact of the dispossession of Palestinian lands, is now mapped as a crucial buffer zone, a basis for the new reality oil cross-border violence more than one of settlement. My apprehensiveness predated Israel’s invasion or retaliatory strikes on the Gaza Strip. IDF troops guarding boundary barriers around Gaza did not merit a blessing from Oxford’s synagogue, in Jericho, England; and the blockade that had cut the region off from 2005, making it a boundary line more than a frontier, defining it as a “buffer” zone by a sixty km fence since 1994, a timeline with clear parallels to the US-Mexico boundary. The extent of detailed spatial information that the Hamas group had possessed about Israel’s military bases near the border boundary and indeed the organization of kibbutzim of settlers was nothing less than a geospatial boondoggle for invaders, that provided a cache of information crucial to the invasion that left 1,400 dead, systematically killed in violent ways, leaving many more traumatized or violently violated.
The expansive Israeli retributive assault on Palestinians was hard to see as vigilance over the border Israel had created around the Gaza Strip, the failure seems to lie not with IDF forces, so much as the absence of vigilance about Israel’s security by a Primer Minister who downplayed military intelligence, and failed to imagine such a devastating attack from forces in the Gaza Strip, a lulled by a false sense of security in a region argued tone securitized by an “impregnable wall” that may, indeed, have offered a template, prototype, and proof of concept for the many border walls built on actual territorial borders of blurred sovereign divides–as between Mexico and the United States, or Hungary and its neighbors, or, indeed, on a symbolic level, England and the EU. While the IDF had warned of the danger of an analogous attack on the barrier, Israelis downplayed Hamas’ military technologies and capacities, convinced that the Iron Wall–“The Barrier”–in place was a hermetic divide, reinforced by concrete, able to seal off Israelis from any military threat.
But the reliance on geospatial surveillance was disabled by drones with surgical precision, in ways that an intelligence document eerily entitled “The Jericho Wall” predicted was in the works for some time, attempting to stage over sixty breaches of the boundary barrier by drones and rocket attacks. The military reproduction of a sort of divine judgment was perhaps coyly entitled The Jericho Wall as it echoed the providential assistance by which Joshua’s men had encircled the ancient city thirty times before its walls fell–a spatial poetics that seemed to respond to the Surah from the Koran to “true believers” and God-fearing men who were blessed by Allah–taking the Surah as a “Surprise them through the Gate!”–in Hamas chatter. Hamas purchases of GPS jammers provided means to enable the invasion, enabled by “suicide drones” and geospatial weaponry. Propaganda showing images of flying Palestinian flags from atop synagogues were dismissed as aspirational dreams–but were echoed by the triumphant vision of tanks carrying Palestine flags. The charge to surprise them through the gates belied the legend of two impregnable walls of Jericho crumbling before the power of trumpet blasts of Israelites were well-mapped in legend from Joshua 6–as if to remind Israeli forces of the legend of an impregnable wall voiding actual concerns of an attack–
–as the Israeli government dismissed out of hand reports of a planned large-scale invasion on the massive border created by the boundary barrier Israel had built at a cost of over a billion dollars, and had entrusted with an impregnable system of defense beyond Palestinians’ technological capacities to dismantle or storm. But the barrier’s vaunted security, as we have heard in past days, would contain the threat of Palestinians whose ability to gain access to armaments. As the slogan was echoed in Hamas lines and radio in the days before the attack, the likelihood of any such surprise attack was doubted, dismissed as the optimistic inventions of those technologically ill-equipped to stage a multi-pronged attack on sixty sections of the barrier wall, and a fear .
The legend of the storming of Jericho by the early state of Judea was elaborated, of course, as evidence of the divine assistance that the Isrealites to settle Canaan, in the Bible, in propaganda that embellished as the story of encircling the walls of Jericho–a city which retains powerful nationalist resonances–as evidence of spiritual will overpowering a physical wall, in which trumpet blasts mapped onto the divine assistance that brought walls closed to the Israelites to the ground–
–whose performative spectacle became an icon of national self-determination as it was elaborated, in a mythical moment foretelling the destiny of national formation, trumpet blasts proclaiming the first battle for the later expansion of the Israelites’ kingdom as a collective possession of a territory. Yet if Jericho has become a more recent site of Palestinian resistance, reclaimed as a center to protest the rejection of a 2020 proposal for “Peace” that reduced Palestinian Territories to a discontinuous set of islands, and recognized established permanent settlers communities. Jericho, in short, has symbolically stood at the center of legends of the power of walls, and of Palestine.
The area where I live for the year, a part of Oxford whose name, Jericho, grew as a site those arriving in Oxford at the edge of closed city walls stopped for the night, of course share its name with a Palestinian settlement of the West Bank. It is a settlement to which those living in Gaza were promised safe passage, since 2005, although the idea of such passage has been long deferred since a Palestinian protest movement was disabled by Israeli forces. Rather than the ecstatic events of Joshua 6:1-27, Jericho became a basis for staging strong protests to the map of the “Trump Peace Plan,” drafted without Palestinian input, that called for Palestinians to “recognize Israel’s sovereignty over areas necessary to our security and central to our heritage,” in Netanyahu’s welcoming words, expressed to then-President Trump, and full recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem–and full access to the al-Aqsa mosque. The Palestinians in Jericho protested the notion that the “Plan” was for peace with signs proclaiming “Palestine is not For Sale” and “No Palestinian State without the Jordan Valley,” suggesting the lack of any integrity it offered Palestinian claims.
It was a map designed not with any real political significance, save domestic Israeli politics, but followed a logic of security and securitization, rather than a recognition of negotiated frontiers. It suggested a high-speed links between fragmented Palestinian Territories, and even an underground tunnel linking Gaza and the West Bank, and the existence of fifteen “enclave communities” of Israelis in Palestinian lands–even if it promised a “future State of Palestine,” that futurity existed on a map of the State of Israel that assured the integrity of post-1967 borders were preserved, and mandated a demilitarized Palestine, if it billed itself “A Vision of Peace”–albeit one without any Palestinian input or acknowledgement of a Palestinian state, save within Israeli boundary lines.
Although the walls of Jericho outside Oxford are for the most part gone, although they had long existed, they are now a basis for the growth of trees and suburban foliage,–quaint evidence of aspirations to retain a Neo-medieval past, more J.R.R. Tolkien than militarized defense, ringed with moss or grass, as if a pastoral or bucolic more than an aesthetic of violent sectarian divides.
It is eery walking around Oxford: the green and pleasant lands of England were a such a contrast with the dark satanic mills of the Gaza Strip that it is bizarrely privilaged to undertake to write about those walls before the other, if not disorienting.
Stories are stied to walls, even if but archeological reminders of ties to the past, but the evocative name of Jericho, the Palestinian city, whose stone walls date from around 8000 BCE, were in fact a centerpiece of the Palestine Exploration Fund that had offered many of the new Hebrew names for cities, towns, and rivers in the Negev long predating Israel as a state.
The Palestine Exporation Fund used maps to promote its surveys of many biblical cities, however–including Jericho, whose walls were a centerpiece for archeological exploration. Charles Warren had in 1867 excavated a tower for the Palestine Exploration Fund as confirmation of the ancient biblical site, first situating “Jericho” in a new network of historical archeology. The Archbishop of York declared authoritatively that the survey revealingly mapped a “Palestine [that] belongs to you and to me”–even if it was discovered by a local remembered only as “Qasatly”–Nu’man ibn Abdu ibn Yousef Ibn Nicola Al Kibrany Al Qasatly–who collated place-names with biblical geography, has helped register names of Arabic villages that have been since destroyed. In its maps, Palestine became “ours . . . . the land to which we may look upon, with as true patriotism as we do to this dear old England, which we love so much.” But the Arabic villages registered in the survey across current Israel are a resonant landscape of dispossession–most far removed from of Gaza or the Gaza ‘Strip.’
Jericho’s ancient tower marked a new era of biblical archeology, after excavating Jerusalem and much of the Transjordan, in this map: the map helped advocate Jewish settlement of a land Warren felt could accommodate 15 million Jewish settlers in The Land of Promise (1875). within its borders. The Survey of Palestine expanded on the Ordinance Survey of Jerusalem, was an antiquarianism funded by clergymen and archeologists, but also a form of military intelligence in which the walls of Jericho were central.
If the Fund sought “bring to light the remains of so many races and generations which must lie concealed under the accumulation of rubbish and ruins on which those villages stand,” Warren and others assiduously mapped Temple Mount and the site of what was believed the biblical city of Jericho, where those historical walls came tumbling down, using edges and walls as the basis of reconstructing claims to a disappeared and seemingly nearly vanished world of ancient edges.
If Jericho was believed the tallest stone tower in antiquity, it was a site for celestial observations among early astronomers, whose astronomical observation may have confirmed the status of the early city and astrological prediction, infthe Paleolithic, per modern archeologists, who have called Warren’s identification of it as the site of biblical Jericho in the late 1860s (1865–1869, 1876) and the start of the Survey of Western Palestine. The tower of Paleolithic Jericho had little to do with Jericho the neighborhood, but the resonant name of the town to which Palestinians are denied safe transit.
The twenty steps of the cylindrical tower most likely built in the Neolithic period as a testament cutting-edge astrological skills of prognostication at the end of its stairs will probably never revealed to be a site of biblical legends of struggle and war, as Warren’s excavations of the late 1860s were promoted offering incontrovertible evidence, in an pseudo-antiquarian discovery heralded as of monumental importance of the sacred past to the clergy had promoted it, but evidence of the status of a neolithic village seeking promote the success of an early fixed settlement.If stone tower was a monument of Paleolithic ngineering, it stands, across history, in eery counterpart to the observational towers that studded the “Iron Wall” built to enclose the area by the Israeli government and IDF engineers: less a reference to the cyclone fencing and razor wire that top the fence, or the underground wall that prevent trans-border tunnels, promoted as if it followed a right-wing doctrine developed by the most hard-line Zionists of the 1920s, to appeal to Jewish settlers, by denying any form of negotiation with Palestinians save by military strength–it seems as useful as the Maginot Line on which France had so depended before World War II. Even as the terminology of modernization of a defensive Maginot Line presented itself as the embodiment and direct descendent of hard-line Zionism, the Iron Wall deviated rom any vision of democracy and liberal social justice the Russian-born teacher of the first Alyiah of Palestine, Yitzhak Epstein, in 1907 imagined, when he placed a premium on Palestinian-Jewish dialogue as a need that far outweighed all other issues for the Jewish people as they sought to imagine “our people’s renaissance” on “its own soil.”
Even as the boundary barrier of state of the art technology was presented itself as an heir and logical conclusion, as if it offered evidence of skills of engineering that was able to bring o its conclusion a yearning for a homeland born in the Babylonian Exile, the “Protective Edge” operations that had killed thousands and left thousands more injured–over 10,000–was more an open-air prison. The surveillance towers may pose as a modern version of the Babylonian towers of astronomical observation–but offers no viable future map for peaceful settlement or life. The security walls were built as a protective envelope, making the nation an incubator for the current rage of wall-building, integrateingvideo cameras for “smart fencing” as “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
To be sure, the “Trump Plan” offered what was celebrated by folks with little sense of cartographic power plays as “a Palestine ‘Israel can live with” put the former President in the position of mapping the new boundaries of a Palestinian state–with no input from Palestinians–that Prime Minister Netanyahu had already approved. It would have allowed the wall dividing Jerusalem to stand but left all Jerusalem under Israeli control–as well as the Jordan River valley–and allowed all Israeli settlements to not only remain in Palestine, but be annexed to the Israeli state, a unilateral vision of “Peace” if there eve was one that bizarrely proposed a large underground tunnel connect Gaza to the West Bank, historical Palestine for the Palestinians, where Israel lost no land. If the “map” was cited as a first by the folks at BigThink, as if it was a “significant first,” it is likely to be seen as an insult, allowing a divided Palestine to exist removed from Jordan, whose confines were approved by an Israeli state eager to impose restrictions on Palestinian movement. A Palestine which Israel could securitize, the map would allow walls to divide Jerusalem, and more security walls to be built around Gaza; even if it provided the first published bordering of Palestine, the borders of Palestine would invite more border walls and a bizarre system of bridges and tunnels that would probably be monitored by Israeli
2020 Trump “Vision for Peace Conceptual Map: A Future for Palestine”
The fruit of Jared Kushner’s intense meetings with Netanyahu’s team, the proposal entitled “A Future for Palestine” was less a future that any Palestinians would want, but a walled off existence that allowed numbers “Israeli access roads” to Israeli “enclaves” settlements in a future Palestine. And if we were invited to see its publication as a precedent, it was a sort of strong-arming to accept a fragmented continued presence that accommodated Israel’s construction of securitized walls.
While the liturgy was intentionally imprecise to accommodate the nation’s future growth, the Gaza Strip was indeed recently in what might be called the local cartographic news of the day, and would assume a prominent role in later persuasive cartographies of the state. It to be sure didn’t name the Gaza Strip–a region in Egyptian sovereignty back in 1956, subject to aggressive raids by Israel’s paratroopers led by Ariel Sharon, the war hero turned politician who later promoted the region’s settlement–it clearly lay in “Egypt’s sands.” For Gen. Ariel Sharon, then of the Southern Command in the Gaza, the region had been an valid area of valid settlement, which his division of paratroops he commanded had attacked. Sharon had led IDF forces to expel over 3,000 Bedouins tribesman from the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, where they had bene farmers, leading men eager to secure Israel’s borders and expand the notion of a “buffer zone” that protected Israel’s and Jerusalem’s sense of vulnerability. Israeli civilian settlement of Rapha, the border checkpoint to Egypt in the news today, however had sufficiently infringed Egypt’s sovereignty to provoke the Yom Kippur War–according to Anwar Sadat’s memoirs–and if the first Arab-Isreali war had finalized a power-sharing agreement in 1948, the edge of the Egyptian border had become a “buffer” and edge of Israel that, as the edges contested in future Arab-Israeli wars, are disputed boundaries that have continued to be contested between Israel and Palestinian groups tied to Hamas and Israel.
The Gaza Strip lay at the edges of Israel’s sovereignty, but the border with Gaza is of course in the news. Gaza was long a borderland, as it was increasingly seen as a frontier of Israel which might be settled. Yet the tight border controls over the Gaza Strip that developed, with increasing audacity, after withdrawing military forces from Gaza in 2005, and border guards now monitor the exit of the thousands of Palestinians who once left the enclave of the strip every day to work in Israel. Goren must have known of these raids and incursions, made during the Israeli military campaign in the Sinai, as a retributive strike at the end of the war with echoes of earlier raids on West Bank towns.
Battle Lines between Palestinian Fighters (Hamas) and Israeli Forces and Palestinian Incursion, October 10
Even the week before the October 7 invasion of Israel or subsequent bombardment of the Gaza Strip, reciting those prayers was eery on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. They reflexively invited me to recall the traumatic invasion with some fear, as I’m sure most of the congregants also felt, the fiftieth anniversary of the surprise attack agains occupiers on two fronts in the Suez and Golan Heights having been recalled rather widely as a testing of the nation. As I stumbled with some surprise more than confusion at prayers for the IDF, not only because of my limited Hebrew or zionist credentials, but not wanting my silence to be overly conspicuous, I even wondered how I could stay silent in the unfamiliar congregation, which I’d attended in what may be quixotic hopes to find contacts to orient myself to the city. If removed from Israel, in the coming weeks, no one was removed from Gaza. The area that was mapped in the detail of the war was an early redrawing of the 1948 partition of Israel and Palestine, whose colors placed Gaza almost at a midway point in the coastal territories that Palestine held below Jaffa and Tel Aviv.
Goren’s prayer was already a revisionary cartography of the partition of Palestine between Israel and Palestine, a two color map below, pushing Palestine from Beersheba, and coloring the entire Negev green. The guarding of a continuous region that extended “to the sands of Egypt” was an optimistic expansion of the territory from the actual map, and raised the questions of in what sort of sediment Gaza lay.
That was a tricky map to translate into claims for sovereign defense. The conflation of a sacred map in the prayer with a military map eliding airspace, ports, and territorial waters, as the Universal Transverse Mercator, made me uncomfortable. For if the sanctification of the map seemed a source of redemption, the control of all movement outside or within the Gaza Strip has created a lack of future that may well have helped attract some of the very missiles and anti-tank weapons and explosive drones able to mount a cross-border assault of the sort Israel has never anticipated. Israel has monitored a securitized border around Gaza that clearly violated international humanitarian law, regularly removing it from electricity, internet, medical help, food and water, in a blockade that uncomfortably echoes that charge to “defend” land, air and sea.
The shifting lines in Egypt’s sands were redrawn and re-negotiated in 1967, 1972, and 1974–years, just before my Bar-Mitzvah, not to belabor a personal narrative or confound it with a shifting map–that removed Gaza from Egyptian sovereignty, and create the problem of a two-state solution that the Israeli state was increasingly resistant or indeed unwilling to accommodate, normalizing the Gaza Strip as a border-region of Israel, without sovereignty, but viewed as an enemy within a state, or a thorn in the side of a body politic that was increasingly resistant to accommodate self-rule and increasingly open to a new model of border security and surveillance separate from governance.
But the charge to monitor the sacred bond to the scriptural land–to treat that map as the territory–has become confused with the protection of a border, and the insulation of Israel by a militarized “envelope,” managed more by the tactical tools of security technology than an ethics of defense. It is a position of a negotiation only from a position of total power, and of the ensuring of security, that is difficult to reconcile with international law, and even difficult to reconcile with a defense of state sovereignty. Since the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from Gaza Strip area, in 2005, the failure to provide security or to provide passage and crossings to Palestinian settlements has perhaps trained eyes and resentment on a fortified border, in ways that shifted the transnational position of Gaza Strip as a center of military weapons trained on its border wall and less committed to cross-border stability than a duty to retake “lost” or “stolen” lands.
Has the need for security against a group that is committed to destroying the state of Israel has created the indefensible concentration on the border of Gaza–surrounded by military bases and automated sensors, overwhelmed ideas of sovereignty, in an attempt to ensure the enclave’s lasting separation from Israel? The cordoning off of a region the military sectored off from the rest of the state, seemed, rather than defending the nation, a security perimeter of modern military form, in names of attempting to root out threats to Israel. As the Israeli troops entered the Gaza Strip, realizing their plans for attack to dismantle Hamas, in late October, determined to eradicate the underground if hidden pockets of armaments in the enclave from which the attacks in Israel’s territory were planned, and from where, Hamas official Ghazi Hamas insisted on the following day on television, attacks would occur “again and again until Israel is annihilated,” rejecting the very legality of any Israeli claims to land ownership in the region.
Military Advances of Isreali Defense Forces (Blue) into Gaza Strip on October 31, 2023
I dated the verbal map I had stumbled across was incorporated to Yom Kippur’s liturgy to 1956, to the first head of the military rabbinate. I thought to learn a bit about Goren–an orthodox Ashkenazi from Poland recognized as a Talmudic Wunderkind after he had emigrated to the British Mandate Palestine, and by 1972 was elected the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Goren crafted compromises or accommodations of scripture to modernity with considerable flair, as well as showing bravery over three wars in crossing enemy lines to retrieve remains of bodies of military dead for proper religious burial at personal risk, and celebrating the seizure of East Jerusalem as a historical moment of redemption by blowing a shofar as he held a Torah at the Wailing Wall. He saw the founding of the sovereign state as tied inextricably to Israel’s redemption; beseeching God “guard and protect its soldiers from trouble and anguish and crown them with the crown of salvation and victory” made no apology about conflating victory of expanding state sovereignty and the redemption of Eretz Israel. The prayer he included framed a vision of the Holy Land distinct from the Palestinian Land Survey of 1946–the heroic expansion of the boundary state and redemption of a people were tied, mapping Israeli sovereignty over the region of Palestine before the UN mandate. Goren must have known, when he wrote the prayer, about the brutal invasion of Gaza in 1956.
Triangulation of Palestine in October, 1948, after End of British Mandate and Failure of the U.N. Partition Plan
If that invasion was part of the 1956 wars, the relations of Israel to Gaza have been very badly served by a border that prioritized securitization, and the replacement of a military mission with border security. If the October 7 invasion revealed the vulnerability of these borders, if the attacks raised questions about how an army dedicated to defense was punishing all those in the Gaza enclave for those who had massacred 1,300 Israeli women, men, and children, soldiers and civilians alike. The discussion of the “unprecedented might” that was televised after Sabbath had begun–signaling its importance as an exceptional occasion when the watching of television would not be contrary to Shabbat laws prohibiting engaging in acts not honoring God. The retributive strike at Gaza for the destruction of that perimeter, from destroying observation towers on the border created a vulnerability Israelis had not felt by a tactical assault on the vaunted border barriers.
When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu told the nation that the surrounding of Gaza would be “just the beginning” of an augmented destructive aggression–“we are only at the beginning”–was a diktat to the citizens of the region, if a perverse echo of The Bible. “I emphasize,” he repated, “that this is only the beginning.” The solemn announcement of a war of retribution cast the carpet bombing of Gaza as a continuation of a covenant with an all-powerful God who “goes with you to battle your enemies for you,” and the raids on rocket crews underscored this was a retributive exercise. The strike against “our enemies” was waged to defend Israel, from the securitized perimeter the Israeli state had created around the Gaza Strip since 2005. Rabbi Goren paid close attention to the preservation of commandments, which he parsed with both scientific advances and Israel’s sovereign status as a nation, but the rhetorical expansion of this war to a “second Independence war”–independence from a terrorist threat, presumably–was about preservation of what Israel had long called “the Gaza envelope” that protected it from terror. Yet the existence of a retributive strike of biblical proportions is terrifying as it is a reversion to the Law of Talion, first preserved in the Code of Hammurabi, or lex talionis, and of revenge on a biblical scale, echoed in Deuteronomy, that seems to preexist the nation state and preclude any political settlements. Was the unilateral logic of the defense of these boundaries extending the logic of a deep biblical wrong?
It may even be that many believe that a severe punishment will be a lesson never forgotten. But the Code of Hammurabi is also the earliest example of presuming individual innocence–“innocent until proven guilty”–and the Burden of Proof preserved in Justinian’s Digest–an accepted international human right. But the presumption of innocence is erased by the justification of retributive strikes as a necessity to preserve Isreal’s security that have been defined by preserving securitized barriers more than boundaries. Although Israel has long insisted on the necessity of the existence of buffer zones to protect its geopolitical situation, the decision to “to enter forcefully into their territory with unprecedented force” to destroy the enemy who had murdered 1,300 Israelis must include a presumption of innocence, rather than the collective imputation of guilt. The justification of the use of a Lex Talionis seems the reflection of a state of exception–a state of exception suggested by the announcement of a war of “unprecedented might” on the Sabbath Eve–but is an argument based on an understanding of the state’s covenant to protect Israel rooted in border walls.
For the recent introduction of an architecture of securitized walls atop this archeology of a sacred past has created a difficult epistemic shift of land and defense, one that uses quite distinct notions of territory. If the Israeli state was seen to exetend the human obligation to “Fill the land and conquer it” of Genesis I:28, there is a suspicion that the IDF defines its role as to defend a land title sanctified from on high. Although Israel at present controls the Gaza Strip, the boundary barrier built between Gaza and Israel oddly severs a region from the small region that lacks territoriality, but has been granted a pseudo-territoriality. Have we come to accept the role of the Defense Forces that have taken the Deuteronomic origins of vengeance in talion-like fashion upon all residents with houses, sites of worship, or refugee camps within the old Armistice Line?
Imposing an architecture of securitized walls atop this archeology of a sacred past is an epistemic shift of territoriality,–as if the guarding of the securitized perimeter is itself a basis for humanitarian violations of a new logic of war, one that prioritizes attacks agains military targets as much as respecting territory or civilian lives, as if the the attacks against settlers who lived beside the Gaza border revenged an Abrahamic covenant that “your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies” (Genesis 22:17) For Goren, the IDF’s duty-bound commission of “standing guard over our land” seemed to impose a geodetic grid of military origin on a sacred map that was not of scriptural origin. It was as map of the securitization of Israeli citizens, to be sure, but seemed oddly at a remove from the mapping of sovereignty on Eretz Israel. The new mapping of the Gaza Strip as a threat that emerged in the decade since 2023 has only grown, as the specter of rocket strikes from within that enclave has become a perpetual preoccupation of the Israeli Defense Forces, as if the boundary of Israel were not their purview or purpose, but the securitization of the entire “homeland” of the nation, rather than the national borders of Israel.
Occupied Gaza has of course since been placed under a new obligation of a lex talionis rooted in retributive vengeance, a code that stands outside international law, whose logic is determined not by Israeli boundaries, but the defense of a security perimeter has become a surrogate for national safety and security, and a hollowing out of any independence of the occupied region whose points of crossing, rights to fishing, and area of land ownership were reduced.
The vulnerability of Israel that the October 7 invasion revealed the vulnerability of these borders, if the attacks raised questions about how an army nominally dedicated to defense was pursuing the terrorists who perpetrated it from the Gaza enclave. But the scale of destruction was hard to justify or read as based only on a map of Hamas tunnels, as many have noted. The retributive invasion have become grounds to defy international law by the military logic of the Israeli Defense Forces, however. The security emergency that the invasion of Israel provoked weeks after Yom Kippur would send me to investigate the ritual prayer newly nested in the liturgy of the Day of Atonement, in hopes to try the ties of Jews to the attacks on Palestinian presence in the Middle East from a remove. How did those ethics become so tragically distorted, to re elevated form a position of power in negotiation to a logic of securitization, rejecting any dialogue or discussion in this apparent rejection of any right to presence in the reduced area of settlement in the Gaza Strip?
8. The departure from an ethics of mapping the confines of Israel seemed as striking as the continuity between the original blessing and the prominent massing of the IDF around Gaza’s borders or their invasion of the enclave and surrounding of the remains of Gaza City. The rapid response of bombing Gaza by an unheard of onslaught from the air of which Netanyahu seemed proud offers a diktat of sorts, imposing a law of retribution, closing off any future, that combines a sense of vengeance and justice of a lex talionis of retaliation that predates the Bible in Babylonian Law, a principle of reciprocal justice traced to Mesopotamian law, which rabbinical tradition had indeed humanized by restricting and limiting reciprocal justice. For the bombing campaign is pursued by a lex talionis, focussing on the prioritized targets of a logic of military mapping, and rejecting negotiation or resolution by mapping of the Palestinian presence in the Middle East.The vulnerability of Israel that the October 7 invasion revealed the vulnerability of these borders, if the attacks raised questions about how an army nominally dedicated to defense was pursuing the terrorists who perpetrated it from the Gaza enclave, or the destruction of Palestinian sovereignty. The IDF warned in leaflets and megaphones, “Civilians of Gaza City evacuate south for your own safety and the safety of your families,” in a pretense of civility or lawfulness, urging residents “distance yourself from Hamas terrorists who are using you as human shields.” Any distinction of residents from terrorists was immediately lost.
4. The problems of walling of Palestinian populations in the Gaza Strip-a “strip” of 140 sq miles removed from the historical region of Gaza in the Negev, and removed from the areas of Palestinian land ownership that had been mapped by the Land Authority back in 1948–
Palestinian Land Ownership and Villages in Palestine in 1948 (circa 1956)
–has perhaps never been addressed, so rapidly have the securitized fences become the prime logic of understanding and mapping the State of Israel’s relation to its boundaries, and the blurring of those boundaries. In specific, the area of Gaza, whose boundedness did not exist before the state of Israel, if a historic region, lying largely inland, has become a coastal “strip,” much of its greater lands seized for settlement by kibbutzim, whose very settlement of the land was invaded October 13 with designs for bodily violence, if not mutilation. Architects had long planned on the settlement of Gaza Strip, which, after the Six-Day War, clearing Bedouin resident olive and apricot farmers, nominally under grounds for security, by troops led by Ariel Sharon, as chief of the IDF Southern Command, in border transgression to expand the territoriality of the Israeli state, creating from 1972 a sense of Gaza as a permeable border, to which incursions might be made, already since 1967 occupied by Israel, before 1993 agreements to withdraw from Gaza Strip create a framework for negotiation toward safe passages among the Palestinian Territories, from Gaza to the West Bank.
The current boundaries of the Gaza Strip in which Palestinians live in restricted boundaries are removed from the lands and villages of almost a century ago, before the postwar United Nations Partition Plan of 1948, and are also far removed from expansive state of Israel whose continued protection the IDF prayers I read in Oxford with new eyes. That prayer seemed to have inaugurate and to see as a divine mandate in Neo-Biblical rhetoric that ascribe the mapping tools to a divine authority–“elo’ah“–אֱלוֹהַּ–is not only one of the oldest name for God, but indeed also a cognate of “Allah”–اله–and indeed suggests the depths of territorial contestation dating to 1948, of bounds foreign to the new nature of the bounding of Gaza Strip to confine and limit Palestinian Authority.
Is it a coincidence that the preponderant reference to Elo-ah was in Job’s extended dialogue beseeching God for testing his faith with a succession of personal tragedy on a scale that astounds the reader’s credulity? Job, a wealthy farmer who had enjoyed good fortune, robust health, productive fields whose rich soils were well-tilled and bore grain to filled his silos, demanded he be able to address God after his cattle, his sons, daughters, and servants were killed, demanding why he was tormented by poor health, and why God allowed his adversary to test whether Job’s faith and piety depended only on his prosperity rather than possessed a deeper spiritual foundation.
Said Kharkiv/IFP
The Job-like nature of a punitive adversary who inflicts terror beyond all rational scale and dimensions seem echoed inthe Job-like scale of destruction inflicted in the Gaza Strip, as if to test its boundaries, and the resolve of its inhabitants in supporting Hamas, whose scale may be akin to what God’s allowed from his Adversary. If Israel’s government has promoted prosperity and the false security of a border wall, and is terrified by the armed invasions and their victims, and ability to cross the Gaza border barrier, the scale of reprisals it has pursued go far beyond securing boundaries, and seems to test the boundaries of the Palestinians by the Job-like scale of destruction inflicted in the Gaza Strip, imposing an unprecedented test by tools of mapping that it has used to systematically bomb cities with a new intensity–inflicting a Job-like scale of suffering before global attention, flattening civilian homes in Gaza to drive the authority of Hamas into a historic past, as if in a search for vengeance and retribution that are rooted less in the story of Job–there is no hope of dialogue as that by which Job seeks to find divine validation–but to erase its adversary.
Buildings in Jabalya (North Gaza) Destroyed by IDF Air Strikes on October 11, 2023/Yahya Hassouna / AFP
The attack on Israel threatened its borders, but the attack on Gaza goes far beyond the defense of borders, visiting upon the residents of Gaza a terrifying divine-like wrath, dangerously removed form any sense of ethics, or any hope of dialogue, but seem to demand a recognition of the integrity of boundaries of Israel that Hamas–and indeed many Palestinians–are not ready to provide. The repeated attacks on Jablya, as Israeli IDF troops entered Gaza, and tried to secure its territory, were designed to target the coordinator of the October 7 attacks on settlers’ camps in Israel.
Map of the Israel Campaign in the Sinai Peninsula (detail of Gaza and Rapha) (Tel Aviv,1956)
9. Weeks before the invaders crossed Israel’s borders, on Rosh Hashanah, my mind wandered back to the Yom Kippur War of which it was the anniversary, but the following days brought a true horror story of the provocative than the surprise attacks of Israel’s borders, a brutal invasion of Israeli settlements near the border realized a new theater of the grotesque, triggering collective memories of mass-murder on a routinized scale impossible to narrativize. The breaching of the boundary at multiple points no longer monitored by security–rather than attempt to ever advance upon Jerusalem–was a horrific invasion of territorial integrity and a nightmarish image of vulnerability. The excessive violence of invaders in Israeli settlers’ homes threatened and taunted the state and army by excessive violence Israelis to enter Gaza once again. As they abducted hundreds as hostages, and murdered, raped, and dismembered bodies, they both pressed the boundaries of memory and scars of the twentieth century and memories of vulnerability and insecurity through the visitation of violence that pressed deep fears of a total absence of safety or security on the entire Israeli state, as if taunting the IDF who had made the boundary barrier they believed secure, and disrupting the sense of the security of the nation state in ways that were perhaps not seen since the opening of surprise attacks on two fronts in the Yom Kippur War on multiple fronts on lands Israel occupied near the Suez and in the Golan Heights in which 50,000 would die.
That war was of course transnational, triggered partly by the arrival of arms form the Soviet Union and America–in ways we will only fully map, perhaps, twenty five years after the current military crisis of border crossings. But, according to Anwar Sadat, the war had been triggered not only by the deliveries of arms to Egypt, but the decisive moment of the planned settlement of Israeli civilians in Rafa, the southernmost part of Gaza, now the entry point of the Gaza Strip to Israel, which was seen by the Egyptian state as nothing less than a violation of Egyptian sovereignty. And the violation of borders that were at the heart of the existential battle that was fought on two fronts fifty years ago is more than an anniversary, at it is echoed in the intensification of destructive abilities that are now focussed on the same region, the point that was a sort of draw in the 1949 Armistice, and the region around with Israel claims to pursue a second Independence War.
Philippe Rekacewicz (1998)
The general most identified with Israel’s survival in that war–a much-analyzed and mapped war that demonstrated the fragility of Israel seemed illustrated on battlefields of two fronts–had just been remembered as risking his own life as he defended the Suez Canal, risking his own sacrifice as if his martyrdom, leaving command posts for the front lines of battle and machine gun fire. On the fifty-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the poignant perspective on the deep personal burdens Dayan carried by Dayan, overcome by massive guilt and depression as the battle on two fronts he had not foreseen, even after seeing tanks in camouflage in the Golan Heights. In the war, an image far from the smiling figure who had emerged victorious from the conflict.
According to new revelations, the deep crisis of conscience and sense of personal guilt as the conflict unfolded led Dayan to risk his life repeatedly, wracked by guilt for the nation’s future. He had not suspected attacks, and blamed himself for an attack for which the IDF was unprepared; Dayan drowned in a personal guilt that led to reckless visits to the front lines of the Sinai through armored divisions, crossing front lines at personal danger over eighteen days of combat fighting.
This surprisingly interior image of a General whose impervious exterior as a field commander in the Sinai campaign fifteen years earlier embodied a stoic resolve harbored anything other than tactical genius was a surprise. The emblem of tactical genius was panicked in the eighteen days of intense fighting that ed to the demilitarization of the Sinai Peninsula.
But it seemed right. Dayan, we know, was not alone: the IDF learned of unprecedented Egyptian military mobilization near the border, and a notable Syrian military build-up along the front line, even dismissing a warning of October 6, 1973, that intelligence of a joint attack were dismissed, and myriad intelligence failures were found after the war. The sense of the boundaries of Israel seemed unlikely to be needed to be defended before the October 7 invasion of Israel’s self-made highly garrisoned border with the Gaza Strip, even if we were all trying to make sense of what it meant to guard the boundaries of Israel.
Again, fears of invasion were soon to multiply on fronts–real fears, given the transnational ties of terrorist forces share, from Iran to South Korea to perhaps even Russia and China. Fears realized in border skirmishes between Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, and Iran’s promise that the United States would be “hit hard” if no cease-fire is implemented–a density of cross-border clashes with Hezbollah in Lebanon with Israeli Defense Forces trying to test the securitized border, in these blue pins of IDF attacks, yellow pins of Hezbollah attacks, and green pins claimed by Hamas, black pins by the Palestinian al-Quds brigade, or orange pins of al-Fajr Air Force, suggesting dangers of conflict expanding far beyond Gaza’s borders, the frontiers of the Israeli state under attack again, and even fears of strikes against the United States growing as a result of Gaza’s military invasion and the absolute violation of its boundaries and integrity in a unremitting campaigns of bombing that seemed to seek to return the violence of the attacks on settlers a hundredfold.
Borders have provided the logic of this war, and there is probably little ability to de-escalate a war that has begun by border-crossing, and indeed used border-crossing to foment fears of insecurity, and suggest the testing of a border stability as a sense of securitized borders have begun to unravel.
My apprehension at blessing the IDF had occurred weeks before. But gates and borders were perhaps on my mind, and not only because of the Gaza Barricade, which had, sad to say, almost fallen from my mind. When it came to the prayer for the IDF, I was not tense due to my own limited Zionist credentials, if that helped, or the limits of my own poor Hebrew sight-reading: the forced fit with the “service of they people Israel be ever acceptable unto thee” however made he prayer stick in my mind. And since the invasion of Gaza by IDF troops, and the surrounding of the Gaza Strip by a massing of soldiers, seeking to get in their heads, and imagine their roles in the destruction of Gaza was mapped by IDF drone, artillery, and air strikes in the immediate aftermath of the raids on Israel–indeed, by targets that must have been mapped by the IDF of the network of suspected sites Hamas held in the city that were hit by drone, artillery, and air in the coming ten days after the gruesome invasion of Israel’s borders.
The sustained striking on militarized targets across Gaza, difficult to map as discreet events, that unfolded in a barrage of strikes arriving from outside the borders, concentrated in the sectors of northern Gaza but obliterating the underground warrens of tunnels where Hamas was said to be concentrated, and had trained if not constructed weapons to arm Israel’s invaders to the teeth.
I was not surprised to learned this section of the liturgy dated from 1956, added by the first chief military rabbi, Shlomo Goren, a refugee Talmudic scholar famous for efforts to codify the prayer book for a rather polyglot army hailing form different Judaic traditions and sects to well-oiled rituals fighting machine. Goren had led troops to retake East Jerusalem, and served during the forcible expulsions and continued mass-displacement of Palestinians and Bedouins. But the violence of a security war that penned in Gaza’s Palestinian residents seemed a new standard in the absence of freedom, mobility, or political self-determination of the region’s inhabitants, a redefining of the boundary of Gaza that promised absolutely no safe-passage routes or tied to other Palestinian areas of the Middle East. This no exit situation promised no future for the region, but led the Israeli government to expand a heavy-handed focus on securitizing the region, as hopes for any Palestinian autonomous rule faded in the Trump Era, and encouraged a massive wall-building industry and the engineering of new borders that offered no possibility for consensus or dialogue.
The plans to build a “security wall” around the long blockaded Gaza Strip suggested a new demand from 2005 to build a structure able to prevent militants from “infiltrating” Jewish settlements in Israel, that has created a border barrier across which no future dialogue is destined to develop. Israel has stationed IDF in the Jordan valley permanently, and on the Lebanon border, and, for security needs, to urge Gaza residents to not tolerate Hamas, inflicted the prolonged shortages of fuel, electricity and medicines of sixteen years of tight restrictions, refusing elections there for “security” reasons, as it conflates Hamas, Salafi jihadists, and Fatah factions, as it has prioritize the security of an impervious border, and even proposing to remove 3,000 Bedouins from the Negev.
And a decade after Israeli bombs systematically killed over 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza’s borders by over 2,500 “precision strikes” per later investigations of the Gaza Platform by both Amnesty International and the University of London-based Forensic Architecture, combining photos, testimonies and video to map military strikes on Palestinian territory during that conflict, the borders vi0lated in the October 7 attack were being flattened by bombs of even greater intensity. If the 2014 air assault of fifty days was collapsed in the interactive map, the destruction of civilian houses in an area isolated by internet and communication services was only assembled by a painstaking reassembly of satellite photography, video, and preexisting open data.
Interactive Map of the over 2,500 individual attacks by Israel Defense Forces in the 2014 Assault of Gaza Strip
The massive barrier that Israel constructed around the Gaza Strip’s perimeter at huge cost–over $1.1 billion–was pierced at several points by Palestinians tied to Hamas, who took out its vaunted impenetrable security system by a barrage of missiles, crossing the Iron Wall with bulldozers, hang gliders, and jeeps, in an improvised air and land assault. The manner that the terrorists converted the Iron Wall to something that seemed a construction site–
Mohammed Faye Abu Mostafa/Reuters
–as the jubilation of the scene of the dismantling of the wall, and entrance of what seemed Palestinian tanks onto Israeli territory, seemed a cause for celebration indeed, tauntingly revealing their ability to monitor beyond the wall, across manufactured borders, and to pierce promises of securing the Israeli population living on the other side of the boundary wall. The images of Palestinian flags flying over synagogues did not occur, but they were flown on tanks in Israeli territory beyond the barrier wall.
Yousef Masoud/AP
With a far darker sense of the safeguarding of troops, removed form Talmudic principles, massive expenditures guarding Israel’s perimeter have been argued as necessary to respond to elevated threats outside Israel’s borders, more than any political vision of the state. The guarding of newly securitized borders has been accentuated in all of Israel’s frontiers–militarized border walls surround the nation state as a securitized island–
–which, beyond defending borders, border walls have cut off future plans for negotiation, which the invasion revealed them as with the efficacy of French investment in a defensive Maginot line.
Governments ave redirected funds and indeed technologies of enhanced securitization of the borders of the Gaza Strip, with underground barrier and above-ground fencing less than two years ago, leaving IDF stationed along the border barrier, hermetic sealed off from Israel, as if the entire region had no actual shared border, and was cordoned off to share no territory in common–as if the thirty-two mile wall guarding the edges of the Gaza Strip was critical to the project of a security state, and indeed so critical to the organization of the barriers of Gaza so as to make any international solution to the current war difficult to coordinate.
First Completion of Underground Wall on Gaza-Israel Border Barrier, December 21, 2021
The liturgy seems to sanctify new bounds, by intentionally vague lines, unlike most territorial maps. They should perhaps be historicized in the sense of urgency Goren’s contemporary, David Ben Gurion, felt to expel Palestinians across the Negev, and in a preface to repopulating the region–“We must give Hebrew names to these places – ancient names, if there are, and if not, new ones!”– transforming Arabic place- names of towns, rivers, roads, and mountains by Biblical analogues, in a cartographic form of disentitlement, remaking the land by renaming of towns in the Negev long inhabited by Palestinians, entrusting the toponymic changes to a committee of scholars, ostensibly objective in their remapping of lands, to conceal atrocities and massacres of Palestinian residents. The new map did not obliterate a pastoral society, but as any new map for an old land was deeply disorienting for its inhabitants, an act of cartographic violence was clearly a political dispossession.
Over-Writing of Arabic Place-Names in the 1948 index of the Survey of Palestine Maps (1:20,000)
If the work of retiring biblical or Talmudic place-names to the region was a collective refashioning the Holy Land, often based on scholarship, the Hebraicization of Arabic street names and the baed in part on the Palestinian Exploration Fund’s “scientific” collation of the Arabic place-names of the region with a biblical topography, and the exhuming of that topography on the modern map. This was heady stuff and heady verbal map, born out of years of study and of rather careful Talmudic precision, was informed by Ben Gurion’s entrusting of the objectivity of a group of nine wise men to assign new Hebrew names for mountains, valleys, springs, and roads across the Negev, in a redrawn map commensurate with the undermining of property rights. Entrusting the names to scholars to affirm the scholarly pedigree in the Negev expanded after 1951 to the entire nation, continuing an act of dismantling a political and affective relation to the land and replacing it one with a deeper integration of “Palestine” in a distributed network of knowledge, absorbed by the Israeli state.
The cartographic rewriting of an affective relation to the nation for settlers was not only about political dispossession or vacating property rights but spiritual ties to a terrain that was a text: expanding and intensifying the “Judaization of the geographical names in our country a vital issue” to the nation and led to the renaming of 5,000 places by new place-names, and a thousand new names of new settlements on what seemed a blank slate–including the historic Gaza Strip–a dry region absorbed 70,000 Palestinians displaced by compulsory transfers from Jaffa, a large Ottoman port city near Tel Aviv, in 1948, and from the larger occupied urban areas in Hebron and al-Ramla, areas Israeli authorities felt merited no status on the land, expelling all ages in forced migrations remembered as “the Great Suffering” on orders from General David Ben-Gurion himself.
The maps cleansed of Arabic place names followed this severing of ties as well as bulldozing settlement. Retested maps tried to recast the geographic displacements by a massive process of renaming–in the name of remapping the map to the territory, masking an increasingly fraught relation between territory and map. If Gaza had absorbed many from the larger Palestinian urban communities, The prayer of vintage 1956 I was hesitant to recite in the religious service was a scriptural expansion composed by a Talmudic wunderkind, it turned out, its expansive elegance of the prophetic tones of the verbal map relied upon and fused aviation maps, nautical maps, and land maps in the manner of geodetic maps the United States Army used in World War II to coordinate land, air and sea attacks in a Universal Transverse Mercator projection, even if it trigger affective ties of Zionist fervor. This was a lot to process. As an area of Palestinian settlement, indeed, “Gaza” denoted a far more expansive region in maps of the mid-twentieth century than today.
Palestinian Land Ownership and Villages in Palestine (1956), Palestine Dept. of Land Settlement
Goren’s aspirations to install a future mental map for the Israeli Army of the territory that they were volunteering to defend–as he had defended–was echoed in how the IDF encircled the inherited bounds of Gaza as they massed about them in the weeks after the October 7 attacks. And the “beginning” Benjamin Netanyahu ominously warned about in a televised speech to the nation on a recent Sabbath, rather than echo a new beginning of a stage of religious justice, suggest a Babylonian notion of a Lex Talionis of retributive violence that uses a new level of military tools and technique of precision bombing, developed in recent years to target the tunnels in Gaza City, beyond international law or indeed humanitarian precedent.
Josef Szapiro, Map of the Israel Campaign in the Sinai Peninsula (Tel Aviv,1956)
Shlomo Goren’s military experience and Zionist credo made him aim high, hoping to embody a potent symbolic sacred space in the nation’s new liturgy, successfully evoking the vigilance of the IDF united land, air and sea of distinctly military cartographic pedigree more than stake a sacred role alone–he focussed on a sacred mission of defending Israel’s expansive territorial bounds–keeping up with the new land map, as it were, by enshrining it in a standard liturgy.
The verbal map that was recited within the religious liturgy all IDF receive upon their initiation, with a gun, echoed Israeli maps of the 1957 war Goren heroically served as a General. The olive green used to map military operations that attacked Gaza by arrows, marking the state apart from Middle Eastern nations, amidst roads, oil fields, pipelines and refineries. (Gaza stayed an Egyptian military outpost, but was suspect as a seat for which Egypt fomented terrorist raids.)
In Oxford, I was far removed from Israel, of course, but felt on edge not due to unease about my own Zionist credentials. Before the chanting of anti-war pro-Palestinian groups that reminded all how “Silence was Compliance,” there was unease the IDF held authority over Gaza’s airspace, ports, and territorial waters, controlling all movement to the territory it had nominally left in 2016. Were the prayers directed to IDF to protect “on the land, in the air, and on the sea”able to be extended to the tight border controls over the Gaza Strip that developed, with increasing audacity, since withdrawing military forces from Gaza in 2005? As the blockade of Gaza’s airspace and naval access grew after 2007, the insularity of the region paradoxically increased its ties to the outside world. While these measures were ostensibly in response to a kidnapped Israeli soldier by armed groups in Gaza, belonging to Hamas, the restrictions increasingly violated international humanitarian law.
Al Jazeera/October 27, 2023
Gaza lacks any control over its own borders or political future, but its borders hold the world’s attention after the October 7 invasion. Yet Gaza’s border is quite far from the boundaries sanctified by Israel’s first Military Chief Rabbi, Goren, in ways born from military experience, boasted of uniting united land, air and sea by a military as much as sacred cartographic pedigree. For Israel’s remapping of course reduced Palestinian farming lands and land title, of which Gaza’s boundary barrier are the latest reductions, as much as the recent the Separation Barrier that has become an emblem of the occupation. Indeed, the border boundary of the Negev suggests an even more visible barrier against the invasion by terrorist subjects, if a far less openly contested one.
The map underlying Goren’s prayer of course obscures is of course one of Palestinian exile–not only against the 1948 trauma of the geographical displacement, or Nakbah–النكبة–that led David Ben-Gurion, Goren’s companion and colleague in state-formation, to affirmed “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state,” as the project of determining place-names in the Negev, or southern half of Israel, expanded to the nation. Gaza was not a site of Palestinian land ownership before 1948, according to the Palestinian Land Settlement of 1956, that sought a legal standard to map Palestinian villages and settlements after the 1948 United Nations Partition Plan, but it expulsions of Palestinians from coastal cities has transformed it to an enclave Palestinians have been forced into new borders, an Israeli-made border, effectively, whose reduced size seeks to marginalize a Palestinian presence and to contain the danger of future terrorist strikes.
Guide to Palestine and its Settlements, Sami Hadawi, Dept of Land Settlement (1956) 1:20,000. Survey of Palestine
This conceptual map may, however, abandon any clear future military outcome or exit strategy. The bombardment of Gaza’s populations to eradicate Hamas, the group identified with the horrific killing of Israeli residents from their residences, taking captives, was a dramatic reversal and denial of these boundaries of confinement. But the war is far less devoted to guarding of the boundaries of Israel, than mirror the securitization of Israel as a state. The retreat from an expansive map to a maps of securitized borders has reframed the political logic of addressing Palestinians form a position of power to a restrictive parcelization of bounding areas of Palestinian settlement, removing any future from an international form, but recasting the boundaries not in international law, a language of nations, but a lex talionis of truly biblical proportions and scope,–perhaps dating to Babylonia, but similar to the most right-wing Zionists of the 1920s who advocated the concept of an “Iron Wall” as the basic principle for Jewish settlement of Palestine and of the Middle East.
The benedictions in the liturgy in our sacred books asking for divine assistance only seemed to conceal the bitter control over Gaza’s airspace, ports, and “territorial waters” of what was hard to be called a territory. (Families of relatives who were imprisoned in Israel, largely for security crimes, were hindered or prevented from visiting relatives imprisoned in Israel, having to take a bus of their own expense and navigate security.) Gaza was mapped as a territory without territorial integrity or sovereignty, in ways that demanded global attention before it was bombed.
On Yom Kippur, a day of recalling the covenant–“You have chosen us among all peoples,/ . . . you have distinguished us among all nations” —seemed particularly troubling. Even before the invasion of Israel led war to break out that would destroy Gaza, I detected amidst imprecations to grant peace to Israel, an expansive mental map squirreled into the liturgy that made me wonder its origins.
The ominous diktat issued by Benjamin Netanyahu after the deadly incursions from several points that crossed the Gaza Border on October 7 The attacks seemed a defining moment of history in the international news: the invasive war was the equivalent of 9/11, a constitutive moment of the defense of the Israeli state. But was it not also the end-product, iv not the result, of the single-minded dedication, at great expanse, to the fortification of a segregational border wall in Gaza–less obstructive, to be sure, than the hugely monumental Separation Wall around a more urbanized East Jerusalem, but far more brutalist in its structure and psychic effects, a mental map that was rooted in sequestration, or linked triumphalism with wall-building that promised a nationalized security that reveal nothing so much as a security state that was already at a state of war and defined by a logic of imprisonment more than a logic of statehood or a recognition of sovereignty.
The self-imposed border barrier around Gaza was only a securitized fence–despite costing over $1.1B to build and still more to maintain its touted surveillance systems–based on isolating and cordoning, a militarized shadow extending over Gaza long after Israeli forces of the IDF had nominally left since 2016, but had occupied a greater part of its national consciousness–and had dedicated more funds than ever imaginable to dedicated security contractors–in hopes to ignore.
The Iron Wall that cost when completed over $1.1 billion–3.5 billion shekels–as an “Iron Wall” able to prioritize security as a state rationale that allowed the region to be remapped as if its future dangers might be contained. The map is not at all cast in the optimistically expansive terms Goren included in the liturgy over which I had stumbled, but by an “Iron Wall”–the far-right belief of early twentieth-century Zionists who refused to negotiate settling an area then known as Palestine save from the metaphorical “iron wall” that must be created between Palestinians and Jews, refused save from a position of military strength. Completed in 2021 atop an underground concrete barrier and with state-of the-art sensors, the “smart fence” was claimed impassible for all future terrorists, and seemed the end of any hope for safe passage of Palestinians or any residents of the Gaza Strip.
The border barrier is central to the mental map of a nation rooted in “stoppage” and border protection that will be an obstacle any international resolution of the current Gaza War. If the war is local, the very transnational roots of the war make any resolution improbable. The performative nature of wall-building at a massive cost–and the development of a proposal of the “Deal of the Century” he boasted to have fully financed by Arab states, in an echo of the famous promise “Mexico will pay for the Wall.” The benefits of the “smart fence” that gathered “tactical intelligence” about anyone trying to cross it, may have evidently been personified by Saar Koursh, the Israeli security expert who placed a premium on tactical intelligence from “smart” technology–“All you have to do is ask Israe!” Netanyahu vouched publicly for the advantages engineering border walls afforded. The premium on tactical intelligence led Koursh, who actively sought tout the American contract for wall building, led the “iron wall” not to be truly impenetrable or opaque–save for East Jerusalem, most of the fencing that surrounds Israel is just that–affording the ability to gather tactical intelligence so that “you can see if someone is trying to penetrate it.”
The security entrepreneur vaunts his technology as “battle proven”and provides perimeter detection systems not only to 80% of Israel’s existing borders, but to the world. Koursh had spun the company out of the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries in 1980, whose stock had peaked in the Trump years, securing securing contracts of which Gaza was the showcase–which Netanyahu securedcontracts for the chain link and barbed wire border barriers topped with observation stations along the Kenya-Somalia desert, a border Koursh promised to close to al-Shabbab terrorist, if but ten kilometers of the seven hundred km border were walled for a massive $35 million.
Kenya-Somalia Border/Al Jazeera Screenshot
Is Israel–and indeed Gaza–a showcase for the very technologies of wall-building and perimeter defense that have become a central response to globalization? The perimeter provider has been indeed a parastate provider that has re-defined the architecture of border barriers, the parastate profiteer of border architecture that is a new version of the old military industrial complex.
The proliferation of borders, border detection systems that are imported from what was developed for a prison system, has been largely absent from the newsmaps that have depicted the shock of the invasion of Israel, but have described the military incursion of a seemingly rag-tag assembly of improvised troops on motorcycles, bulldozers, hang-gliders jeeps and on foot as red arrows piercing the barrier of the borer. Nightly news mapped the October 7 invasion of Israel by arrow to assign agency to Hamas, who planned and perpetrated the deadly murders of Israelis, by mapping attacks on settlements in red that suggest danger.
Yasin DemirciI/Anadou Agency/courtesy CBS News
The news map elided this in portraying what seems a local conflict, one that flipped the no-go zone mapped around the Gaza border barriers constructed for billions of shekels, rather than aiding peace, pushing out of the confines to endanger lives in fourteen settlements beyond the “border” barrier. The danger of these violations of houses and settlements were truly barbaric and horrific in scale, and the photographic documentation of that violence suggested a desire to create an image of destruction able to be mediatized and documented to preserve an image of retribution. These were the very images that Israelis hoped to never witness in the boundaries of their own state–“You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms and how the terrorist kills them. It’s not a war, it’s not a battle.”–that make the “Iron Wall” of the border industrial complex about as invulnerable as the Maginot Line France trusted before World War II. If the border was pierced so easily, perhaps it sent shudders of fear globally that such a durable barrier might be disabled by selective strikes of unmanned drones.
The above map registered the horror felt at the entrance in men armed to the teeth in settlements long presumed to be secure on the nightly new: the multiple points of entering the Iron Wall reveals the scale of the planning of a revanchist to retake territory by bloody tactics, indeed, but erase the presence and durable psychic effects o the barrier by which the residents of Gaza were penned off. While mirroring terrifying news reports of the attacks on kibbutzim that, as an Israeli General memorably reported, seemed intentionally staged to provoke a fight or flight instinct the likes of which Israelis had never seen–a true time warp of a blood bath almost worthy of Hollywood, or “something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places.”
To be sure, the global range of weapons that were provided to Hamas militants, including many artillery launchers and rocket propelled grenades originating in North Korea, suggest less of a rag-tag improvised tools of invaders, than a systematically planned attack that extended far outside the warren of underground tunnels where the missiles had been stored. Rather than a local conflict at all, this was a global conflict, in Parvo, planned to engage not only Israel in combat, but to attack the United States by attacking Israel as its proxy–and to shame the United States, or to cast Israel as but a proxy of the global ambitions of the United States, as if to draw a parallel–as Putin had–between American support of arms sent to Ukraine and arms sales to Israel as global aggressions. But this was a local war mapped by GPS, images of the handhelds invaders used to target kibbutzim, equipped with ground plans not only of routes to settlement, revealing a planned terrorist attack–
–that was supported by mobile maps, even as rocket strikes from the Gaza Strip sought to undermine regional stability as rocket and drone fire from Gaza crossed beyond the perimeter of the Gaza Strip. The spatiality of the invasion was mirrored in the bombardment that followed October 7: whereas the IDF had targeted, a decade previous, buildings that were beside Israel’s borders in Operation Protective Edge, primarily striking he Shuja’iya district, from which many rockets into the Negev region were fired by terrorists, rather than holy places,–
IDF Pinpoint Operation in Operation Protective Edge, 2014
–the escalation of mapping tools by which Hamas groups struck into Israel, their occupying state, provoked an escalation of targets of attack by IDF GIS teams beyond the border perimeter across fifty days. The targeting of a broad tunnel networks ranged underground beneath Gaza City, the “Gaza Metro,” leading more of the city to be obliterated, They suggested a new spatiality of war, not only more linked to a complex global network of providing arms, and attempted to provoke regional instability, but it reflected a new ability for drones and Air Force weapons to pinpoint areas of the city that made the questions of boundaries, bounds, and residences less relevant. If the earlier conflict led primarily to the targeting, per GIS analyst Dan Smith, of carefully chosen targets nearer to the barrier built around Gaza, identified as sites of terrorist attacks, in a ‘pinpoint’ operation of surgical strikes against what were deemed proportionate threats, the border was less clearly relevant in recent bombing strikes.
GIS Analysis of Israeli Strikes into Gaza Strip in Operation Protective Edge/Dan Smith
If Smith insisted that ‘IDF attacks on Gaza’ is disingenuous.” The attacks, the blog concludes, “are in no way ‘random’ or ‘indiscriminate” correlated with Israel Defense Forces maps of the “terrorist” sites they targeted during the war. Yet the expansion of targets, if potentially commensurate with the deep expansion of Hamas’ military presence in the Gaza Strip over a decade, suggested the risks of an attack which has left over half of buildings in North Gaza and Gazs damaged from October 7, many far from the Israeli border barrier that isolated the Gaza Strip.
Orange Buildings in South Gaza Strip Damaged October 7-November 10; Brown after November 10/ FinancialTimes
The military tools suggest less a local conflict than a hotspot of global battlefield fought on a micro scale. Even as the war raises the stakes of mortality and brutality of death, arms furnished to Hamas to strike far into Israeli territory, crossing the boundaries to strike deep in the interior, in a battery of weaponry to disarm the vaunted Iron Wall, and puncture its alleged invulnerability, and strike fear, unleashing an exchange of violence of destructive technologies that “pinpointed” targets of bombs across the Gaza Strip over the days following the invasion, October 9-10. While these extensive strikes targeted intelligence and social infrastructure of Hamas, the infrastructure was embedded throughout and across civilian space, including several sacred mosques.
Targeted Israeli Missile Strikes into Gaza from October 8-10, 2023/Financial Times
Not only were plans for the surveillance towers studied far outside of Gaza, in the ten to fifteen years that technologies of wall-building and perimeter guarding grew, but the tactical border has been exposed to targeted drones. Indeed, the Gaza War has opened use of a range of new tactical weaponry from rocket-propelled grenades (RPG’s), guided missiles (ATGV’s), and unmanned flying vehicles whose use seems actually able to remap conflict in the Middle East in terrifying ways. These included many second- or third-generation rocket launchers molded after Soviet arms, unlike the Soviet arms that comprised the rockets which Israeli Defense Forces earlier faced.
The costly security system and electronic monitors were disabled by drone-delivered explosives, rockets and gunfire that took out a sophisticated system of sensors that seem to have been farmed from a global market of weaponry designed to enable Hamas to disable the wall’s “smart” functions. If the military patrolling the sectors of the fence of the border that were attacked were often unmanned sections, due to other reasons of an intensification of military in the West Bank, the Middle Eastern geopolitics were perhaps less crucial than the moment of mapping the best time for an attack on the border barrier that Hamas had no doubt studied from engineering plans that were either online or could be studied at a distance without much assistance, learning of the cameras on which they depended to provide the security that they promised, but whose sensors could be disabled,, and communication lines cut, to allow the fencing to be easily bulldozed or cut–overturning their logic of protection. If the border was unmanned in ways that the security contractor would never advised, after disabling the security system the walls were of little help.
11. The boundary barrier of the Iron Wall was cast as a defensive wall, protecting residents on one side. Rather than providing blurred borders that offered some room for negotiation, as the shifting borders that led to agreements to demilitarize the Sinai after the region’s occupation in 1956, when Goren wrote the prayer, after Israel withdrew from the region of the Sinai and Gaza Strip that it had invaded. If that redrawing of boundaries was one bookmark for the current Gaza War, the different geopolitical context of the border wall meant that it allowed no passage for any groups, not Palestinians least of all. The security fence was an improvised solution, designed by outside contractors who specialized in prisons, and while many promoted the Gaza Strip as a showroom of border security that was able to implemented in other countries, the borders bombed and breached by Palestinians from Gaza was never intended to be able to be functional without military presence against mass assault: the systems to “deter, delay and detect” were not only unable to withstand mass attack from the explosive bombs dropped from drones as a barrage of rockets stunned civilian areas, now cut off from a military system of response, but reliance on remote monitoring systems seems to have let the fencing, once security cameras were tagged and disabled, crossed by 2,500 on an improvised contigent of tanks, bulldozers and motorcycles, but two years after its completion.
Border Fencing Breached on October 7, 2023. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
12. The breached border barrier became the basis for a violent invasion, as invaders killed 1,400 across twenty two border communities, in a horrific invasion that triggered the deepest fears of collective memories of the Jewish people, and set a horrific set of images on hand for Hamas to register as they perpetrated what were horrific war crimes never expected to be seen on Israeli soil.
The breaching of the boundary barrier at multiple points let the border no longer monitored by security–rather than to in fact succeed, or attempt to ever advance upon Jerusalem. The men were acting as martyrs, abducting hundreds and as captives to bring them into Gaza, enacting a violence threatening and taunting by excessive violence Israelis to enter Gaza once again as a further barrage of 5,000 rockets fired at towns and village would trigger actual panic of real-time invasion.
–suggested an entry into Israeli settlements that ringed the Gaza Strip, increasingly providing a painful illustration of the drastic differences of the economic growth, productive farming, and vitality by which Gazans must have seen themselves to be effectively hemmed in, that might well echo the different economies sharpened as a starkly divide by the planned US-Mexico Border Wall.
My hesitancy to recite the prayer for the IDF preceded any expectation the IDF would be about to jump up from the page to notoriety in the global press and consciousness. But the role of the IDF in containing a threat has grown to an obsession of exacting revenge. Violence was hardly why the brazen brutality of the invasion of Israel’s borders struck a chord on a global scale, that extended far beyond the borders of Israel, in such pronouncedy visceral ways. Gaza’s border was a flashpoint of violence–if one ignored–that faded from international maps of violence, perhaps, because of the torturous logic by which PM Netanyahu argued “Anyone who seeks to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state [in the Middle East} has to support bolstering Hamas” in the Gaza Strip.
For his part, Netanyahu had taunted reporters back in February of 2016, at the very time that candidate Donald Trump was promoting a “border wall” with Mexico as the symbolic basis of his candidacy, as the showpiece of his own plans to bound Gaza: ‘Will we surround all of Israel with fences and obstacles?’ The answer is yes.” Indeed the parastate apparatus by which the contracting of security systems and walls that had origins in prison systems were relied upon for the planning, establishment and maintenance of what were argued to be “integrative communication, computing and surveillance systems” were argued to be bottleneck that protected the nation, subcontracted from the Department of Defense. The boast to surround Gaza by a wall that would protect the nation form future attacks led Netanyahu to forecast the current invasion of “unprecedented force” on television the start as a strike against “our enemies” whose destruction was “just the beginning” of aggression on unprecedented scale: as if echoing Genesis, and the affirmation of the divine Covenant read on the High Holidays by which the liturgical prayer traced an affective genealogy to an all-powerful God. Its annual recitation, congregations world-wide were reminded “Who goes with you to battle your enemies for you to save you” in Deuteronomic terms, Netanyahu argued in talion-like fashion that defied international law or international consensus–“Our enemies have just begun to pay the price“–sounding a righteous battle of a scale Hamas had never before seen. The words “unprecedented might” belonged, William Wordsworth reminded us, in in a poem he called “a dramatised ejaculation; and this, if anything can, must excuse the irregular frame of the metre,” and its phrasing affirmed that Netanyahu wanted to be seen among the “advocates of right,” and of “judgements unrevealed/ . . . and final retribution,” but the finality that he gave to the use of force was terrifying as it seemed to foreclose a vision of the future.
Discomfort at the forced enjambment of sacred and military in the liturgy’s verbal map, powerfully resonant with the in the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War in weaving nationalism and a biblical pedigree, was inflected in a new discourse of securitization. For as the Israeli state has promoted the creation of boundary walls as both perimeters of sovereignty and the best protection of its borders, the future of the region has been placed into danger, and indeed the legitimacy of Israel’s sovereignty. For it fixing attention of Israeli Defense Forces on the confines of the “edge” of the border–using cameras and radar to patrol the barriers, even if limiting opaque walls to the confines of urban areas of East Jerusalem, in order to preserve the ability to “see” the other side, the preservation of security has replaced sovereignty. If the most heavily armed and securitized borders of the state that are manned by IDF are in the West Bank and Jerusalem, the most porous were in Gaza, where the securitized boundary built by a company that specialized in prison walls was dependent on observation towers, surveillance cameras, and sensors that would register even underground tunneling, that replaced a defensive wall with securitized walls. The violence with which the walls, boundaries, checkpoints and securitized fences around Gaza are being used to cut off, isolate, and perhaps flatten the enclave in the Gaza Strip suggests a map whose ethical dimensions have been erased, perhaps sacrificed to the engineering of a border barrier that prevents cross-border dialogue.
It makes some sense to look back on the affective ties to the protection of the land that was indeed depicted by the Herut Party, the nationalist predecessor of the Likud Party, as an array of enemy forces that were shown to surround Israel from the Sinai to Lebanon on July 4, 1967 as an existential danger to the state. The map that was effectively a powerful nationalistic recruitment poster, drawn and reproduced, on the eve of the Six Day War, foregrounded the immensity of the imminent risks that wer posed by 2,300 tanks and soldiers and 1500 canon that surrounded the state–and focussed on the Gaza Strip–and which the IDF had no effective choice or response but to ensure the security of the Jewish people, as if it were indeed a “war of independence,” as is literally suggested in the date, July 4 1967. The threat of these warships would only be repelled by the army and IDF, and expanding defensive abilities that would expand Israeli territory into the Sinai, again, with the departure of a UN peace-keeping force, and secured its boundaries in ways that prepared for a demilitarized Sinai negotiated after the 1967 War. The map, a call to volunteer to arms, in ways that eerily echoed the day of America’s own Declaration of Independence, was a summons to defend a nation that was, for the first time in its history, perhaps, in a truly existential place.
“The Enemy Forces against Israel,” Herut Party Recruitment Poster Zincographic Print, 1967
Detail of Gaza Targeted by Ground, Air and Sea/Herut Party
The nationalistic call to defend Israel as a territorial unit showed the “Gaza Strip” outside of Israeli sovereignty, as it was in 1967, but as a flank that left Israel exposed, suggesting that its frontier status needed to be rethought as a bulwark for Israel’s safety. And in ways that tapped stories, and motivated populations with urgency, it parallels the verbal map of the prayer the Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Army interpolated into the liturgy in striking ways, taking the defense of Israel as a commandment. The blurring of the boundary was packed with judgement in 1956, when Israel’s military occupied the Sinai, and when in 1967 the army drove far into its sands, past Gaza, then Egypt’s one-time outpost on the Mediterranean, with surprising rapidity, the region assumed status as a default boundary of the state.
The strength of these affective ties, as queasy as they might make us, seem all but evacuated today. If the shock of the invasion of October 7 that led to the butchering of so many Israeli settlers near the fortified Gaza border being killed or massacred in cold blood was visceral and immediate for Jews in Oxford and elsewhere, the shock of such an act in the collective memory was deeper and different from the optimistic expansiveness of boundaries that Goren sketched in purely idealistic terms. The rhetoric of sanctification ignored the existence of other inhabitants, but denial of rights in the Gaza Strip is a new future of a state, of bloody wars over destroyed cities around a militarized space by which urban areas were bound.
Try as we might to remember that Goren’s ardent Zionism the writing of a displaced refugee, newly arrived in Palestine, eager to craft a unitary military liturgy about the “deserts of Egypt” dressed military conquest in a heroism of the Bible that is difficult to sustain. If the prayers are regularly recited in sabbath liturgy by orthodox, it is without nary a mention of Gaza or the Gaza Strip, but provided an imaginary that was particularly evocative in the defense of the Sinai that was seized from less vigilant Egyptian forces by a coordinated land, sea and air attack.
The Occupation of the Sinai (1956), detail/Philiippe Rekaceizc, 1998
Israeli Gains in the Six Day War in the Sinai (June 5-10, 1967)/Zvikorn, 2019
The rapid seizure of the Sinai in the Six Day War were cast as prophecies in the ritual remembrance in the Israeli-Polish talmudist’s prayer, was that may have encouraged the seizure of the Siena to be remapped as a day-by-day progression that filled the Sinai’s sands as Israel advanced by air and ground. The recited prayer is not only a militaristic credo of possessing space, but a sacralization of the and, as good a place as any to start to imagine a more ethical relation to the brutal bombing of the Gaza Strip. The dramatic expansion of control over the sinai against Egypt’s unprepared troops seemed heroic.
13. The militarization of the Gaza Strip’s border was promised to be an Iron Wall, in ways that suggest far less an act of heroism or cunning but a new technology of sealing off border crossing and stripping inhabitants of territorial–as well as human-rights. In sharp contrast to the evocation of a blurred boundary of the “deserts of Egypt,” the border confines of the Gaza Strip constrains populations. The highly militarized border wall that trained members of Hamas recently broke through to invade Israeli territory and kill Israeli settlers demands more detailed examination as a border, and an act of border-making, that was born as a new dynamics of border making and territorial dispossession in the misguided hopes to contain cross-border flows.
There-bordered Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1967 in exchange for demilitarization, Goren set sights on a broadly expanded territory after Israeli troops expelled Egyptian troops from their outposts in the Gaza Strip to the Suez Canal. The mental map that was traced in Goren’s liturgy reproduced in the Sacks-Koren machzor given to IDF with a gun from 1962, on their induction, imprecated God sanctify “Thy people Israel” with peace, while beseeching God strike down enemies of the IDF in Prayers for the State of Israel to “guard and protect its soldiers from trouble and anguish and crown them with the crown of salvation and victory” and “Guard their activities now and always.” The ethical injunction cast nation-building as a righteous and almost biblical achievement, even if of military scale, the current aggression is indeed a different dimension.
Yet a security state dedicated nominally to safety but by a logic that departs from religious fervor, if not from a Zionist vision. Goren, who worked hard to use his truly awesome Talmudic learning and rabbinic training to craft a common liturgy for Jews of many different geographic backgrounds to allow them to serve in a united military, conjured a vision rhetorically akin to a prophetic or revealed manner, far from the territorial confines of a map, but was from a world foreign to the preeminence of the definition of Israel’s safety by the fixed edge of a security wall, a boundary barrier that is far less blurred and which has come into existence as it has been engineered as a promise to protect the nation, and ensure the security of the nation. And as such, it has massively failed. The homeland Goren drew might sanctify of “recaptured” territory for soldiers by affective ties that have recede with time in ways that made them foreign to me as I silently read over them in the Oxford Orthodox congregation, and even moreso in coming days.
Was the sharp edge of the border barrier perhaps sought to conceal the military operations he knew so well, and contain the “violence” of cross-border terrorism. As a model for mapping, it is hard to see it as a basis for mapping the violent congregation of tanks and soldiers now so menacingly massed alone the edge of the Gaza Strip–even if the war expelled Egypt from Gaza.
Yet if the Zionist boundary of Egyptian sands was one thing, unprecedented killing and displacing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by unprecedented technologies cannot sustain an international support. The principle of Talion has been invoked as a way to treat prisoners of war, to be sure, but the construction of the Gaza boundary barrier–a barrier that defines less of a state or authority, intended to provide guarantees of autonomy–threatens to recast the region’s inhabitants as effective prisoners of war, to be killed as a retributive exacting of violence, may be the beginning of an erosion of international law. The imaginaries of the collective memory of violence against Jews, or of Israeli military, were indeed in stark contrast to the plans floated in the Trump administration for an “Al Aqsa Conceptual Map,” promising those in Gaza–and Hamas–the possibility for free passage via a West Bank-Gaza Strip Tunnel that had promised “a Future for Palestine”–and indeed constituted the first map ever drawn by mediators for a future Middle East to which parties had begun to agree, since Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas agreed tentatively to restore the boundaries of 1967 in 2008, critically abandoning its claims to Temple Mount–the map Abbas drew by hand from memory on a napkin that exchanged the West Bank for the Gaza Strip–
Map of Palestinian Settlements Conceded Verbally in “Napkin” Map of 2008
–the map that Trump’s team proposed had offered not only a swap of territories, but a future for Muslims to access the al-Aqsa Mosque in the future by free passage in an underground tunnel, ceding of the majority of Judea and Samaria his team touted as the “Deal of the Century.” The promise to deliver the Protocols of Safe Passage that were guaranteed in the Oslo Accords, some thirty years ago, in the “Interim Self-Government Arrangements” of 1993-95, that created a vectorization of Palestinian lands, lampooning the limited governance offered Palestinian Controld across a Palestinian Archipelago, combining Palestinian rule, joint governance with Israeli control of civilian and security matters, and Israeli governance as a series of islands whereassage was possible, where many Palestinians were prevented from gaining title to land ownership in areas of “joint” governance, and demolitions of Palestinian homes forcibly displaced many in Israeli-administered areas. Palestinian settlement has become nearly impossible in most lands, as Israel has allocated much land to Israeli settlements and access to water, as if intentionally isolating Palestinian presence in the name of demands for safety and security, that the Boussac map seeks to illustrate.
For the parcellization of space that the island maps suggest reveals not a paradise of palm trees, but an archipelago where residents are stranded–and the promise of such motion was suggested in the Trump map’s legend that “Muslims who come in peace will be welcome to visit” Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque offers a seeming resolution, by promising passage is only open to those arriving “in peace.” The very “safe passage” and processes of integration that were the hopes of Oslo Accords between Gaza and the West Bank have never arrived, interrupted, perhaps, by the Intifada Uprising of 2000, but allowing Israel So much did the “Deal of the Century” promise, although the Trumpian legacy hidden in the promised “Deal” was troublingly evanescent if not never really on the map at all.
The al Aqsa Plan offered a reconfiguration of Palestinian and Israeli territories as territories that were able to be seen on the map, a “conceptual map” that was entitled “A Vision for Peace” as it was promoted, featuring conspicuously manufacturing hubs, port access, and an effective network linking the fragmented Palestinian settlements that sought to rebut the “archipelago map” in which Julien Boussac rendered that imagined the interrupted islands of Palestinian territoriality on the West Bank as a compromised integrity. Rather than suggesting the divides among Palestinian lands, and division of authority if noting Israeli “enclaves” in ways that may boot the question of sovereignty down the road, areas partially administered by Palestinian authorities appeared resolved in ways that allowed access to sacred sites in both the “napkin” map and “Vision”–restoring the promises of Oslo, and mapping the existence of Israel beside a network of tunnels and corridors of Safe Passage that had never materialized since the Oslo Accords, and left some three quarters of Gaza’s population of 1.6 million dependent entirely on humanitarian aid and shortages of food, water, oil, fuel, and medicines ten years ago that only confirmed of their displacement from a state–and contingency of their presence on any map. The “Deal” the master of the Art of the Deal had offered a promised to change that, but made promises never to materialize.
Rather than fragment the integrity of Palestinian cities–Jericho; Ramallah; Bethlehem; Hebron–as enclaves to which zones of partial autonomy were attached, the plan proposed a nation bridged by tunnels and routes of save passage that would suggest a world not marked by “crossing points” or divided by compromised territory–or the restriction of movement imposed on Gaza’s residents. If Boussac cleverly concealed the grim reality of Palestinian populations in the commercial travel map of a maritime vacation of verdant islands with the promotional names like “Island Beneath the Wall” or “Island of Great Palestine” divided by the “Canal of Jerusalem” to convey fragmentation of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank. For his part, Boussac has energetically rebutted his map flooded Israeli populations in a biblical act of destruction, confessing the graphic was hardly so ambitious to be “a suggestion of how to resolve the conflict”–this was far above his pay grade!–but caricatured the land-locked nature of the Palestinian Territories without Safe Passage, merging the cruelty of the division of settlements with what a bucolic imaginary of tree-dotted islands.
The 2020 fake “Deal” seemed to represented a major diplomatic resolution, letting Jerusalem stand the capital of Israel, but embraing concessions of an actual Palestinian territory. Boussac deploysed the glossy syntax of commercial illustration promoting exotic vacations to expose the false promises of sectorizing Palestinian settlements by divided rule promised at Oslo, of islands of partial and completely Palestinian Jurisdiction; a decade after Oslo, whose promises of “safe ‘passage'” had never been achieved, but was a false advertisement of purely promotional literature and window dressing, concealing the isolation that stranded Palestinians felt in their jurisdictions.
Julien Boussac, L’archipel de Palestine orientale (2009)/Monde Diplomatique
The incursion of Israel’s boundary boasted its own affective ties to a geographic imaginary of course, cast as a retributive strike to retake the Al-Aqsa mosque, in seeking the invasion known as the Al-Aqsa Flood to be less of a geopolitical act of aggression or based in planned strategic design, but provoked by Israeli aggression of limiting access to the mosque, and indeed claiming it as a part of the Israeli state. Did the map embody the viability of a Palestinian claim to the mosque, and to the right to pathways among territories that were, truth be told, agreed to in the Oslo Accords?
Trump’s “Deal of the Century” used the language of salesmanship that confirmed his imagined identity as the master of the “Art of the Deal” to pretend to broker a “deal” that would guarantee shared sovereignty in a viable map. Trump’s boast was a credo–“I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. . . . Deals are my art from”–led him to boast soon after the 2016 election that a Peace Plan between Israel and the Arab world would be “the ultimate deal” as “the deal that can’t be made,” leading to the 2019 “Peace to Prosperity” realized in 2020 boasted to attract wealthy private investors and Arab states to pony up $50B that would expand border crossings and feature a travel corridor of safe passage from Gaza to the West Bank, as well as upgraded ocean terminals and energy plants to create economic security in Gaza, cut poverty, boost health care for Gaza’s residents as well as reduce infant mortality rates.
14. This quickly changed around the time of the decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by May 2018, s the Palestinian Authority boycotted the deal. The occupying power of Gaza built a 140,000 ton wall of of iron and steel to be built to police border crossings, prompting protests in the hundred meter “no-go” zone nearby to the border fence that demanded an end to displacement of Palestinians from the lands from late March 2018 through 2020–that focused attention on a wall that was being dramatically expanded form 2017 to prevent underground crossings, far unlike the fencing around the Gaza Strip border of previous years or policing of a one kilometer buffer zone.
Gaza Protests/United Nations Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs/May 2018
The parallel restriction on movement across the border barrier being built around Gaza extended far beyond international law, and indeed human rights law on occupation, claiming exceptions on the basis of security imperatives. While the escalation of border protests that demanded a Great Right of Return articulated demands for a right to settlement that were provoked both by the Israeli air, land and sea blockading of Gaza–one recalls the IDF prayer that combined military and mapping tools to protect Israel’s cities in all three forms of protection in cartographic terms–the shifting of Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital twinned the focus on the right of return to border homes that were confiscated by the creation of the boundary wall with Jerusalem, marching along the border that was increasingly heavily patrolled and surveilled and declaring “Palestine and Jerusalem belong to us” in a language of the dispossessed, contesting the cartographic boundary that the IDF had created along the Gaza border, “We will break the walls of the blockade, remove the occupation entity and return to all of Palestine.” The heightened rhetoric escalated the freedom of movement in Gaza and cross-border access by 2017 to a nation dependent on humanitarian international aid, restricting travel to a region ostensibly recognized as a territorial unit–Gaza and the West Bank. The Gaza Strip was cordoned off of a dependent occupied territory to which all entrance, even for human rights workers, NGOs, and foreign staff, as well as reporters, was restricted by IDF forces as they posed a clear and present threat to Israeli security.
Israeli Restrictions on Entering Gaza for Goods, Foreigners, and Human Rights Workers, April 2017
The very “Smart Fencing” to stop cross-border migration was the prime example of a US-Mexico border wall for Donald Trump’s “Impenetrable, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall.” The rhetoric suggested a midlife crisis as much as a national panacea, as Trump proposed the wall “was good for the heart of the nation”–truly an astounding biological metaphor of health for a man with serious heart concerns. Trump had, soon after his election, identified the state of Israel as offering America the “best option” for such needed protection on Fox News, “not just a monument with people climbing over it” but a barrier as the proven security barriers built along the West Bank or Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. They offered “999% stoppage”: “All you have to do is ask Israel!” The smart technology the Israeli defense contractor Magal had developed led its CEO, Saar Koursh, to be the early front-runner to provide “smart technology” for Trump’s wall. Trump’s election not only boosted the stock of MagalCom, a company that profited wildly from the border barrier, but the very firm that had grown by multi-million dollar government contracts to provide defense to settlements, border checkpoints and defense department by “smart”surveillance expanded a notion of border security based on the defenses of the perimeter around Gaza. Koursh’s prime showpiece of border security business was Gaza Strip, touted in 2016 as being the “showroom” for Magal Security Systems Ltd. ,–as it gained an international profile for border-wall building of an efficacy Benjamin Netanyahu boasted, as if border-building were a nation export.
The affordances of the wall around Gaza grew as American relations to Israel had undercut a future of negotiations with Palestinians that had famously introduced a future new map for peace in the Oslo accords in 1994-95. The restrictions on movement Gaza adopted from 2017 preceded American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capitol, but allowed the walling off of the Palestinian enclave to precede without debate, and without public discussion, encouraging the technology to bracket off the need for future discussion about the fate of Gaza or its relations to other Palestinian enclaves. Thee “occupied territories” were born of a sort of mythic renaming since they were captured in the defensive Six Day War territories around Jerusalem long known as Judea and Samaria in Neo-biblical fashion, noted in the Partition Plan of 1947, that assigned in vague terms “the boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River” had encouraged the reintegration of ancient kindgoms into the mapping of the nation as the hoary categories were repurposed to legitimize the territorial incorporation of the West Bank as an occupied territory, setting the precedent of defensively occupied territories. (When I first heard from an elderly neighbor who told me with satisfaction over tea that she was born in Judea in 1929 I was a bit at a loss for words, smiling to myself at how right-wing Israelis had adopted by 2000 in remapping them in the state, as if these contested sites of mental furniture had predated the creation of the Israeli state.). Was Clara rebutting the grounds for the very safe passage channels that were negotiated in Oslo? Israeli friends thought it was hysteric that a Jewish American so readily proclaimed Judea as her site of birth with an air of triumphalism, as if she was inviting me to embrace her own mental map.
They realized, no doubt, that the discussion of Judea as a place that had long preexisted Israel, a place where you might be “from,” was particularly loaded. Was not the brutal military advance that burst through Gaza’s border barrier known as the Al-Aqsa Flood itself a violent remapping of the Middle East by a human flood? The advance of men armed to the teeth that would literally flood Israeli settlements around the Gaza Strip and violently remap the region, in a righteous act of repossession. The wrath-like sense of uncontrolled anger and brutality against civilians went further than ever before, as the bombing of Gaza City would–as if planned to trigger memories and traumas of the memories of the worst Fascist brutalities of the twentieth century, suddenly realizing a traumatic memory that has been widely serialized in recent years in movies, television programs, and comic books as a deep traumatic memory, that seemed to rear its head in previously unrealizable fashion. Hitting so tender a collective nerve across the nation has prompted the retributive aerial bombardments of Gaza, in a cycle of ratcheted up violence that raises questions of international abilities to find peaceful solutions.
Expansive imaginaries underlie the violence of the war, they were condensed along the fiction of the walling off of Palestinian presence behind the border wall of Gaza. And Hamas fought it was about the boundaries of a barrier wall, boundaries distinct from the protection of the state evoked in the sabbath liturgy or indeed of a sacralized the state, so much as a state dedicated to security.
15. The sense of the state called into question in now removed from the current war, but the legitimacy of the continued legitimacy of the state seems to be at stake, the memories that haunted the invasion having provoked reprisals far out of scale to the original attacks, haunted by memories and fears of the vulnerability of the nation. But this vulnerability has been almost entirely concentrated to the Gaza boundaries, as well as the border walls with Lebanon, where IDF troops have attacked anti-tank missile in response to cross-border fire. The borders that surround Israel have been naturalized to a generation as a part of the landscape in which they live. As Gaza becoming the prime seta of investment of a securitized wall whose engineering and whose costliness suggested a form of state-building very different from the past.
I can only imagine that my father, a lapsed Zionist and lapsed Freudian, inarticulate and discombobulated by the success of the attacks, shaken by the scale of reprisals so disorienting as they shattered belief in an illusory peace of a quite tense status quo. The shock of trying to balance the false equivalences and justifications of the scale of reprisal and the deep risks of destabilization that they seemed to court was suggested in the polarization and the disorientation that the brutal bombing raids and entry into Gaza provoked, as Israel’s IDF seemed to insist that the barbarity of the terrorist group that launched the attacks demanded, by the lex talionis, to be dealt with in the only way it understood.
Children Walking to School Past a Public Mural in Gaza on the Thirtieth Anniversary of Oslo Accords/AFP
Musings on Maps 
Dan,
Trying to read your latest piece today I clicked on the link but ended up on a “not found” page on your site. If you get a chance, could you send me the link as I would like to read this one in particular, as from Berlin to Belfast (and on) I feel I have grown up in an era of walls all around us, and current circumstances make them something we deeply need to understand.
Hope all’s well, despite the challenges of the times,
Paul, thanks for your response. I have posted it, as the circumstances so rapidly changed.