Abstract
Compared to other colonial and ethnic conflicts such as Rwanda-Burundi, Serbia-Bosnia, ect, the 1948 war did not, relatively speaking, produce many casualties. The notion of al-Nakba (the Catastrophe) is based on refugeehood and the loss of land, rather than the loss of life. Even after five years of Intifada, the number of victims is relatively low,1 certainly if compared to the six week killing rampage in Rwanda which saw some 800,000 people massacred. The Israeli colonial project is not a genocidal project but a “spacio-cidal” one. In every conflict, belligerents define their enemy and shape their mode of action accordingly. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Israeli target is the place. The Jerusalem Emergency Committee, a working group set up by Jerusalem-based NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) after the April 2002 Israeli invasion of the West Bank, reported on the systematic destruction of public places: all but two Palestinian ministries and 65 NGOs were partially or totally destroyed. What was striking about this wanton destruction was the vandalism. To seize documents and computer hard drives from the Ministry of Education can be “understood” within the framework of a military quest for information that would “prove” that the Palestinian educational system “produced incitement and engendered suicide bombers,” but why did soldiers also have to smash the computer screens and tear apart the furniture?
As of October 2005, the figures are 3,891 Palestinian dead and 29,222 Palestinian injured; 1,074 Israeli dead and 7,520 injured. For Palestinian numbers see Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in www.pcbs.org/martyrs/list.aspx; for Israeli numbers see www.idf.il/SIP_STORAGE/DOVER/files/7/21827.doc.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Selected Bibliography
Giorgio Agamben, Moyens sans fins. Notes sur la politique (Paris, Éditions Payot et Rivages, 1997).
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Standford: Standford University Press, 1998).
Meron Benvenisti, “The West Bank Data Project—A Survey of Israel’s Policies,” (Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1984)
Anthony Coon, Town Planning Under Military Occupation: An Examination of the Law and Practice of Town Planning in the Occupied West Bank, (Dartmouth Publishing Group, 1992
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
Rema Hammami, Sari Hanafi, and Elizabeth Taylor, “Destruction of Palestinian Institutions. Preliminary Report,” April 13,2002, commissioned by Jerusalem NGOs Network, Jerusalem.
Sari Hanafi, “Contribution de la diaspora palestinienne à l’économie des Territoires: investissement et philanthropie” in Maghreb-Machrek 161 (November, 1998).
Sari Hanafi, “Report on the Destruction to Palestinian Institutions in Nablus and Other Cities (Except Ramallah), Caused by IDF Forces Between March 29 and April 21,” 2002, http://www.jmcc.org/new/02/apr/destruction.htm.
Sari Hanafi, “The Impact of Social Capital on the Eventual Repatriation Process of Refugees. Study of Economic and Social Transnational Kinship Networks in Palestine/Israel,” in Exile & Return. Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews, eds. Ann Lesch and Ian Lustick (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
Sari Hanafi and Linda Taber, Donors, International organizations, local NGOs. The Emergence of the Palestinian Globalized Elite (Ramallah: Muwatin and Institute for Jerusalem Studies, 2005).
Sina Najafiand and Jeffrey Kastner, “The Wall and the Eye,” Cabinet Magazine online, (9), (Winter, 2002/03).
Mariella Pandolfi, “Moral Entrepreneur, Souveraineté mouvementé et Barbelés. Le bio-politique dans les Balkans postcommunistes,” in Anthropologie et Sociétés, numéro spécial, eds. M. Pandolfi, and M. Abélès, Politiques jeux d’espaces, 26(1), (2002).
Christian Salmon, “The Bulldozer War,” Le Monde Diplomatique (May, 2002).
Anita Vitullo, “People Tied to Place: Strengthening Cultural Identity in Hebron’s Old City,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 33(129), Fall, 2003.
Eyal Weizman, “The Politics of Verticality,” www.opendemocracy.net.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Birkhäuser — Publishers for Architecture
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hanafi, S. (2006). Spaciocide. In: Misselwitz, P., Rieniets, T., Efrat, Z., Khamaisi, R., Nasrallah, R. (eds) City of Collision. Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-7643-7868-9_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-7643-7868-9_4
Publisher Name: Birkhäuser Basel
Print ISBN: 978-3-7643-7482-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-7643-7868-4
eBook Packages: Architecture and DesignEngineering (R0)