The Politics of Verticality
Eyal Weizman

episode 6: EXCAVATING SACREDNESS

In a quest for biblical archaeology, Israel has attempted to resurrect the subterreanean fragments of ancient civilization to testify for its present-day rights above ground.

When the Zionists first arrived in Palestine late in the nineteenth century, the land they found was strangely unfamiliar, different from the one they longed for. Reaching the map co-ordinates of the site of their yearnings was not enough. The search had to continue: above, in a metaphysical sense, below the crust of earth in archaeological excavations.

That the ground was further inhabited by the Arabs and marked with the traces of their lives, complicated things even further. So the existing terrain was transformed in the Zionists’ minds into a protective wrap, under which the historical longed-for landscape was hidden.(...)

If the land to be ‘inherited’ was indeed located under the surface, then the whole subterranean volume was a national monument. From this source, the ancient civilisation could be politically resurrected to testify for the right of the present-day Israel.
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I try to avoid the parallels, but people who start invoking mystical mythological pasts to justify their current excesses scare me. Germany did the same thing in the 30s.

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Sharon is taking us back to 1948
The prospect of a two-state solution has faded - Israel and the Palestinians are now digging in for all-out existential war

Despite the havoc wrought by Palestinian suicide bombers, it is Israel that has proven to be the incontestable historical master of controlled and directed fury; from the callous, calculating terrorism of its pre-state underground to the most recent thorough and systematic lynching of the Palestinian Authority - security agencies and civilian infrastructure alike. Against this background, recent events take on a certain cyclical consistency: Israeli oppression met by Palestinian acts of resistance - sometimes bold, often bloody - met in turn by Israeli force, always excessive, invariably disproportionate and purposely designed to inflict maximum pain.

Indeed, there is even an ironic symmetry in the fact that Ariel Sharon's old "special" forces Unit 101 was as active in Jenin this month as it was half a century ago in the attack on the Palestinian village of Qibya in October 1953 when 69 civilians were killed, their houses blown up over their heads as the future Israeli prime minister oversaw the operation in person. Jenin can thus be seen as the latest episode in a long-running Israeli attempt to break the back of the Palestinian national movement by attacking its soft civilian underbelly. Sharon's ongoing assault on the authority in many ways represents a return to the raw existential confrontations of 1948 in the land of Palestine, albeit with an even greater imbalance in tools of confrontation available to each side.

Sunday's apparent resolution of the impasse over Arafat's imprisonment in Ramallah should not be misconstrued: Israeli rightwing triumphalism is in full swing and its appetite for colonial expansion and a "greater Israel" whetted again. Even before the latest violence, 34 new settlement outposts had been established by Sharon on the West Bank and plans are apace to expand into densely populated areas of Hebron and Arab Jerusalem. The apparent defeat of the authority can only serve to fire the right wing's enthusiasm for yet more radical solutions - including a return to the basics of "transfer", or ethnic cleansing, supported by about 50% of the Israeli electorate, according to opinion polls. Sharon is now likely to extend his war to Gaza and is still bent on the political, perhaps physical, elimination of Yasser Arafat. His ultimate goal is no less than the total subjugation and dissolution of the Palestinian national movement.
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