Status Updates From أرض جوفاء: الهندسة المعماري...

"The quest to make war more 'humane' – which has been written into different conventions and laws of war since the nineteenth century – may under certain conditions result in making it more imaginable, more frequent."

"The IDF employs the sanitizing term 'focused obstruction' to describe targeted assassinations. Such rhetoric is repeated by most of the Israeli media, which conceals as far as possible the impact of the killings, mostly avoiding to mention the names of civilians killed and the display of the corpses, blood and body parts—the very images on which it lingers when covering the aftermath of a Palestinian terror attack."

in 2005, when all Israeli settlements in Gaza were evacuated, Israel bulldozed the settlement housing, but only after unsuccessfully trying to make a profit out of it by either (a) selling(!) the housing to the Gazans themselves or (b) having Emirati businessmen redevelop the area as a luxury housing project

Absolutely wild chapter about IDF theorists and officers reading Deleuze, Guattari and Debord. Former IDF general Shimon Naveh: "Some of the top brass are not embarassed to talk about Deleuze"

"In some cases, reasons for routing [of the Wall] reflected the interests of real estate companies with existing construction contracts on the land on which they had already made a large investment. The annexation of colonized lands had the potential to yield enormous profits ... Prices of properties left to the east of the Wall immediately lost 10–15 per cent of their value."

"Film-maker Avi Mugrabi recalled Ariel Sharon bragging off record while sitting down to a meal in one West Bank settlement: 'I told them: don't build fences around your settlements. If you put up a fence, you put a limit to your expansion... we should place the fences around the Palestinians and not around our places.'"

"Pine trees [near settlements] were chosen both because of their fast growth and because of the acidic deposit of pine needles they leave on the ground, which eradicates most smaller plants ... 'Pine deserts' were meant to make the land unusable for Palestinian shepherds by depriving their flocks of pasture."
I swear you can keep finding out new genres of Israeli evilness you had not even considered possible before.

For decades one of the two main legal justifications Israel has used for settlements (next to their supposedly temporary nature) is their "security" function. But that is of course a double-edged sword: "From the perspective of international law, the problem with these rulings was that the reverse must also be correct: if settlements are used for security purposes, they may also become legitimate targets for attack."

"The logic of partition of the Occupied Territories has always swung between selective presence and absence, addressing two contradictory Israeli strategies: territorial (annexing as much land as possible) and demographic (excluding the areas most heavily populated by Palestinians). ... The appearance of being out of control allowed the state to achieve its objectives without accepting responsibility for them."

Ariel Sharon was "reluctant to implement his [West Bank settlement] plans sequentially, one settlement after the other, but adopted a simultaneous approach. He believed that it was important 'to secure a presence in all points and only then build the settlements up'. He wanted to establish the skeleton for the geography of occupation, present it as an iredicable fact on the ground and later allow it to consolidate."

"While issuing an annual average of 1,500 building permits to Jewish Israelis and constructing 90,000 housing units for Jews in all parts of East Jerusalem since 1967, the municipality has issued an annual average of only 100 permits to Palestinians ... The massive overcrowding and increase in prices forced many Palestinian families to leave Jerusalem for the West Bank. This was precisely what the planners intended."

"The main surge of the colonization of the West Bank in the 1980s coincided with the Reagan-era flight of the American middle classes and their fortification behind protective walls – both formations setting themselves against the poverty and violence they have themselves produced."

"If the system [of spatial apartheid] were to be described in terms of a building, it would most closely resemble an airport with separate corridors ... and security checks that direct some passengers on hustle-free paths through luxury shops to anywhere in the world, and others towards queues, invasive security checks, and detention rooms that are sometimes separated from the shops by a single wall." (p. xxxiii)

"Israel spent decades blurring the line between the civilian and security functions of the frontier settlements, and on 7 October this blurring became a catastrophe for their inhabitants." (p. xv)

Vro this book is genius n also crazy horrifying