Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman
had planned their own missions.
If the principle of linear defence is to prohibit (or inhibit) the enemy from gaining a foothold beyond it, when the line is breached at a single location – much like a leaking bucket of water – it is rendered useless. A network defence, on the other hand, is flexible. If one or more of its stongpoints are attacked and captured, the system can adapt itself by forming new connections across its depth. The category of ‘depth’ is thus not only spatial but conceptual, and is used to describe the level of synergy between various elements that compose a military system. The degree of a system’s depth lies in its distributed capacity to reorganize connections, and the degree to which these connections can permit, regulate and respond to information flow from strongpoints positioned in other areas in the battlefield. The relation between the system’s components is a relative figure defined by the speed and security of travel across its depth, between the different strongpoints.21
While the rationale of the Bar Lev Line was to stop the Egyptians from disturbing the geopolitical status quo that the line delineated, Sharon’s plan conversely encouraged an Egyptian attack; Israeli forces would then counterattack the moment the enemy’s supply lines became overextended:22 ‘If the Egyptians did try to cross [the canal], we could afford to let them get a mile or two inside the Sinai. Then we would be able to harass them and probe for their weak points at our convenience … [after which] we would be in a position to launch the kind of free-flowing mobile attack we were really good at.’23
Therefore, while the line is a military-geometrical instrument that seeks to separate two distinct hostile realms, the spatial–organizational model of the network creates a more diffused and dynamic geography. Following this logic, the system of defence in depth has the capacity to exchange space and time alternately. At the beginning of an attack it trades space for time – the attacker is allowed to gain space while the defender gains organizational time; later, it exchanges time for space as the trapping of the attacker within the web of the network enables the defender later to progress into and attack the latter’s unprotected rear.
The Israeli public was exposed to the classified disputes between Sharon, Bar Lev, and the other members of the General Staff that reached their peak in 1969. Sharon was leaking them to the press, which in turn used his anonymously delivered comments to portray the military and political elites as reactionary ‘slow thinkers’, a tactic that had particular impact on Bar Lev, whom the Israeli public loved to mock for his slow, ponderous manner of speaking. The disagreement was also presented as a conflict between the tank officers with their heavy-handed, technical way of thinking and the pioneering maverick frontiersman/commando-soldier embodied by Sharon.24
By the summer of 1969, when Bar Lev realized he could no longer contain Sharon’s ability to mobilize the media against the rest of the General Staff, he dismissed him from military service on a technicality: Sharon had forgotten to sign routine documents for the renewal of his military contract. Bar Lev’s action was supported by Prime Minister Golda Meir who, remembering the days of Unit 101 and Sharon’s rumoured threats to lock the entire Israeli government in a room and force it to order the start of the 1967 war, saw Sharon as a liar and a ‘threat to Israel’s democracy ’, a man ‘capable of surrounding the Knesset with tanks’.25 In response, Sharon revoked his membership of the Labor Party, which all officers over the rank of colonel were expected to hold at the time. He scheduled a meeting with Menachem Begin, then head of the right-wing opposition, at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, whose lobby was generally well frequented by journalists, ensuring that the meeting was widely noted and reported. The meeting was a political masterstroke. The Labor Party was apprehensive of the possible swing in public opinion that Sharon could provoke before a general election scheduled for October 1969. Party officials forced Bar Lev to reinstate Sharon – landing him where Bar Lev needed him least and feared him most, on the banks of the Suez Canal as Chief of Southern Command. There, between 1969 and July 1973, Sharon immediately set about implementing his defensive network behind the Bar Lev Line, which was by then almost complete. After the end of the War of Attrition in 1970, Sharon started evacuating parts of the line, cutting the number of strongholds from thirty-five to twenty-two.
The canal zone was enveloped in a frenzy of construction. Hundreds of trucks and bulldozers were assembled, and hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of crushed stone were again hauled into the desert. Mountain outposts were constructed and fortified, and a network of high-volume military roads were paved to connect them. The western Sinai Desert was fashioned by Sharon into a future battlefield, and the desert seemed to Sharon to be perfect for this; it contained only military installations, bases, roads and minefields, with no civilians to disturb the wargame. However, Sharon’s sphere of operations was soon shifted elsewhere: shortly after entering into his new post received orders from Dayan to crush Palestinian resistance entrenched within the densely populated urban areas of Gaza, where IDF units were losing control. This was the real reason Sharon was given the Southern Command: it was another of the dirty jobs no other officer wanted to – and at the time very probably could not – undertake.
The ‘Haussmanization’ of Gaza
Since his time with Unit 101, Sharon had grown to view the armed conflict with the Palestinians as an urban problem, and the rapid expansion of the refugee camps as something that Israeli occupation forces would later call the ‘Jihad of Building’. The IDF sought to address this problem by physically transforming and redesigning the very ‘habitat of terror’ whose centre was in the refugee camps.26 In the years to follow, regional and urban planning was to merge into a militarized campaign against the Gaza-based resistance.
New roads carved through the Jebalya refugee camp, Gaza Strip. Israeli Defence Force, 1972.
After the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian groups began to establish armed cells around a loose network of local command headquarters. Without the thick jungles of Vietnam, the Fatah, PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and other armed groups that belonged to or splintered from the PLO, based their command within the dense, winding fabric of the refugee camps, which they themselves developed into an extra-territorial network of armed enclaves. From there they engaged in military operations against the occupying forces, as well as in terror attacks against Israeli civilians and against Palestinians suspected of collaboration. The grid of roads along which UN agencies laid out prefabricated sheds to house the 1948 refugees grew into a chaotic agglomeration of structures and ad hoc extensions, forming a shifting maze of alleyways, no more than a metre or so wide. Although they came under Israeli control, the occupation forces could rarely enter the camps, make arrests, collect taxes or impose regulations.
The counter-insurgency campaign in Gaza started in July 1971 and lasted until resistance was suppressed in February the following year. Sharon ordered extended curfews and a shoot-to-kill policy of suspected insurgents, and established assassination squads who worked their way through lists of names. Sharon was trying to break the resistance by killing anyone involved in its organization. Over a thousand Palestinians were killed. The campaign also acquired a different dimension: that of design undertaken by destruction. Writing the latest and most brutal chapter in the urban history of the grid, Sharon ordered military bulldozers to carve wide roads through the fabric of three of Gaza’s largest refugee camps – Jabalya, Rafah and Shati. The new routes divided these camps into smaller neighbourhoods, each of which could be accessed or isolated by infantry units. Sharon also ordered the clearing of all buildings and groves in an area he defined as a ‘security perimeter’ around the camps, effectively isolating the built-up area from its surroundings and making it impossible for anyone to enter or leave the camps without being noticed. Other activities such as the paving of roads and the introduction of street lighting, were meant to enable the occupation forces to drive into the camps rapidly and without fear of land mines.27 Together, these actions caused the destruction or the damaging of about 6,000 homes in a seven-month period.28 It was not the first – nor the last – time that the single-mindedness of Sharon’s military planning was transferred to the ground without mediation, adaptation or friction, giving the execution of his plans the functional