Concrete punishment | Archivo Orsini

ABSTRACT

Since 2015, the Israeli military has been implementing a series of new counter-insurgency tactics in Palestinian territory in which urbanism and architecture are its main weapons. Of these diverse procedures, so-called “concrete sealing” stands out as one of the most controversial punishments: it consists of pouring concrete into the house of a Palestinian attacker, rendering the domestic space useless for its inhabitants.

In the following essay, we will investigate the complexity of this new deterrence tactic that has already filled nearly 1000 square meters of Palestinian domesticity. The essay is accompanied by the first published photographs of this new practice, from the residences of Mu’taz Hijazi and Udai Abu Jamal. We will examine the historical background and precedents of this punitive action, as well as breaking down concrete punishment into its most fundamental features (communication, affect, monumentality and domesticity) in order to prove the hypothesis that the resulting architectural object represents a more refined tactic than those seen previously because it uses art and aesthetic result as tools to transform time and durability into an effective weapon and reinforces the pre-existing asymmetry of space/time relationships of Israeli and Palestinian populations.

INTRODUCTION: CONCRETE FLOODING

A passer-by would notice nothing unusual about this house in East Jerusalem. Its exterior certainly showed signs of use, but it was comparable with other buildings in the vicinity. The sitting room was cramped and gloomy for sure, with a single bare bulb to shed its weak glow against the evening dark, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Only the doorframe to the left, whose warped wood no longer stood flush with the wall around it, revealed this house’s peculiar feature: it has been filled up with cement. Israeli authorities pumped in more than 90 tonnes of concrete through the window of one of the rooms.

The room was once the bedroom of Mu’taz Ibrahim Khalil Hijazi, a Palestinian attacker who was killed after an alleged assassination attempt on a right-wing Israeli activist. See (Fig. 1).

On 29 October 2014, the rabbi Yehuda Glick led a conference entitled “Israel Returns to the Temple Mount” at Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. According to witnesses, while loading leftovers into his car after the lecture, Yehuda Glick was approached by a man and shot in the chest four times (Hasson, 2014). A few hours later, Israeli forces presumably identiﬁed Mu’taz Ibrahim Khalil Hijazi as the gunman and arrested him in the Abu Tor neighborhood in East Jerusalem. During the arrest, he was fatally shot by one of 20 bullets ﬁred at him. Seven months after his death, Israel’s High Court ruled to seal the home of Mu’taz (Ma´an News, 2015). The house was not owned by Mu’taz, but by his brother.

While the case of Mu’taz Ibrahim Khalil Hijazi is not unique, it is a key example of the new methods of collective punishment being used to support the Israel Defence Forces’ (IDF) counter-insurgency tactics. Seven cases of concrete sealing as a punishment for murder were reported and documented from January 2015 to March 2017 (B’Tselem, 2018); in all of these instances, the concrete sealing was carried out after the suspect was detained or murdered; only in one case did the suspect survive the arrest (‘Abed Mahmoud ‘Abd Rabo Dwayat). In four of these cases, the suspect was not the owner of the house; thus, the accused’s family members were the ones punished by the IDF: 46 people were left homeless (9 of them minors); 8 houses were ﬂooded, and nearly 1000 square meters were submerged in cement. Concrete sealing is a clear and atrocious violation of human rights, as well as a violation of Article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention, in which “collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited” (1949).

All of the locations where concrete sealing was applied were in East Jerusalem. When Israel took control over the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, this area was annexed to the city of Jerusalem. Israeli legislation was immediately applied, and the Palestinian population living in the 7000 ha area were granted “permanent resident” status. Since then, the Israeli government has used various tactics to reduce the Palestinian population of the zone (B’Tselem, 2017), such as restricting building permissions, declaring the surrounding areas national parks, or creating infrastructure shortages. In this sense, the process of urbanisation is used as a deterrence tactic and a population control measure (Graham, 2004) in which concrete sealing plays a key role.

Fig. 1. Mu’taz Ibrahim Khalil Hijazi’s bedroom and bathroom. Source: reproduced with permission from the photographer Jacob Burns.

Fig. 2. ‘Udai ‘Abed ‘Ali Abu Jamal’s kitchen. Source: Reproduced with permission from the photographer Jacob Burns.

The article aims to expose the mechanisms in which concrete punishment is sustained and how they work with older tactics of urban and architectonic governance in order to unpack what seems a plain and unsophisticated tactic. The focus is placed on studying the apparatus that is being activated rather than the recent and abstract experience of it because eliminating its invisibility is the ﬁrst step towards further analysis. We have chosen this approach because, when dealing with innovations on the disciplining of population, it is in the interest of the powerful to hide the conﬂict while power ﬂows in the realm of the subliminal and infraordinary (Dovey, 1999) complicating to consciously reﬂect about it. Despite the acknowledgment of the symbol’s proportionality to the vulnerability of the regime, concrete punishment is analysed from the Israeli governing practices, but throughout the article, the totalitarian role of architecture is put into question and understood as a constantly reiterated, reinforced and reinterpreted entity (Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011), despite its brutality. We investigate the eﬀects of this practice on the Palestinian population and try to give material evidence to organize the grief that it entails, as well as to facilitate a common eﬀort to overcome it (Renan, 1882)(Wick, 2011). Ultimately, this research method strives to show that “on the map of the city, we can most acutely observe that governance is not a question of imposing law on people, but of regulating things so that individual conduct situates itself within a determined frame of possible actions.” (Segal, 2012, p. 157). In our case, the urban context is highly controlled to make it activelly inﬂuence the governing structure of Israel by producing some architectonic pieces that strengthen the dominance over Palestinian daily life.

Simultaneously, concrete punishment makes this system of dominance and its outcome more undetectable by being part of quotidianity. Therefore, the goal of the article is to explore the extent of this network through its most recent example in order to give a clearer picture of how Israel is using art, architecture and time to control Palestinian population. To do so, in the ﬁrst part of the article, we study the role of architecture, urbanism and the evolution of classic counter-insurgency methods demolition and sealing until the use of concrete sealing in the conﬂict to understand how these tactics are used to produce certain environments that increase in complexity and coercive power through the manipulation of space, time and speed. In the second part, the diﬀerential features of concrete punishment are dissected in order to construct a diverse roadmap that examines several features: its communicational role as a new part of the Palestinian public landscape, its aesthetic component that makes it more eﬀective and unconscious, its aﬀective power to extend the impact to a larger population, its monumentality approach to rebuild collective memory and the intricate use of domesticity as a weapon that goes beyond perpetuation of the status quo or its destruction. See (Fig. 2).

POWER VS ARCHITECTURE: MULTIMODAL AND DIVERSE

Counter-insurgency tactics rely on a form of power that it is not completely visible but perceived, and “tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its own ability to hide its own mechanisms” (Foucault, 1980). This implies that in order to uncover its complexities, we have to focus on Israeli governing practices, despite the risk of framing the inhabitants in question with less agency than they already have (Harker, 2009)(Robinson, 2003)(Leshem, 2015).

Within this framework, the temporal vector is explored in depth throughout the whole text as the ﬁrst impulse is to understand that the IDF’s counter-insurgency “innovations” are focused on the spatial transformation of the Palestinian territory; however, we argue that they have extreme consequences over the time variable. We want to extend the spatial vision of architecture and territoriality(Malmberg, 1980) and investigate the spatiotemporal assemblages of all of these practices (Massey, 1994)(Harvey, 2000)(Brighenti & Kärrholm, 2016)(Virilio P., 2006).

The very deﬁnition of counter-insurgency is temporal and implies that the use of power is focused on controlling the future: i.e., forthcoming violent actions must be deterred. In many cases, architecture is the tool used for this control of the population because of its spatial and temporal power. In this regard, the work of Kim Dovey is particularly useful because of his focus on power as capable of manipulating time. He deﬁnes “power over” as “the power of one agent (or group) over another, the power to ensure compliance of the other with one’s will” (Dovey, 1999, p.10). He argues that this relation can take on ﬁve different categories depending on its approach and complexity: force –when the subject has no choice of noncompliance; coercion – when the subject anticipates the consequences of the force and acts to avoid them; manipulation – when the subject is tricked with what resembles free choice; seduction – when the subject is controlled through imagination and desire; and authority – when power is embedded in social structures and exercises without argument (Dovey, 1999).

The diﬀerent uses of domesticity as a weapon take on a number of these forms of power as a more advanced utilization of architecture to maintain control over a particular territory. Considered in Dovey’s system, concrete sealing works on many layers simultaneously. It is itself a material obstacle that uses force, a coercive action that creates a warning of future consequences, and a powerful image that activates the imagination by creating a seductive aesthetic objectiﬁcation. One might argue that this higher level of complexity is achieved through the incorporation of procedures of artistic work to traditional militarized architecture tactics.

ARCHITECTURE VERSUS DEMOLITION: EDIFICES AS WEAPONS

Architecture plays a key role in militarized conﬂicts and especially in the Palestinian conﬂict, as has been widely documented (Ophir, 2009)(Weizman, 2003)(Hass, 2002). As Professor Eyal Weizman puts it: “the weapons and ammunitions are very simple elements: they are trees, they are terraces, they are houses. They are barriers” (Weizman, 2005). Within this assemblage, the role of domestic architecture as a tool of the State’s violence and punishment is fundamental (Abujidi, 2014)(Falah & Flint, 2004)(Graham, 2004)(Shaﬁr, 1996)(Sheik Hassan, 2015). Speciﬁcally, the use of demolition as a weapon has a long history, and the practice was brought to Palestine during the British Mandate in 1945 as a medium to deter future attacks on its interests; it aimed to place into risk everyone’s home and “convince fathers to convince their sons that carrying out a terrorist attack, no matter how justiﬁed in the grander struggle, meant enormous hardship for the family.” (Katz, 2002, p. 160) Moreover, legislation arose out of an emergency defence regulation enacted by Israel’s High Commission that allowed local authorities to “seize and destroy houses, structures and land as punishment for illegal acts.” (Katz, 2002, p. 160). These tactics of urban destruction and infrastructure demolition were intended to undermine Palestinian resistance and its cultural foundations (Gregory, 2003)(Carey, 2001)(Kimmerling, 2003).

Deterrence methods used by the IDF range from the sudden appearance of concrete blocks and dirt mounds at the entrances to Palestinian neighbourhoods to limit the movement to and from these areas, to the demolition of houses and infrastructures in those parts of the city. The totality of the space becomes a weapon that transforms “Palestinian towns, villages and roads into an artifice where all natural and built features serve military ends” (Weizmann, 2007, p. 23). If the role of architecture is to “distribut[e] bodies, materials, movements, and techniques” (Kwinter, 2001, p. 14), then what is an architecture that is trying to impede them? See (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3. ‘Udai ‘Abed ‘Ali Abu Jamal’s house. Source: Reproduced with permission from the photographer Jacob Burns.

Since 2001, 702 punitive demolitions have left 4441 people without a home in the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem, 2017). Following a decrease in the use of demolition between 2005 and 2014, the Israeli government resumed the practice despite the fact that in February 2005 their Ministry of Defence approved the commission’s recommendations to end the demolitions of Palestinian homes. Furthermore, they have not only continued the practice, but also implemented new methods of collective punishment in order to introduce the more subliminal, quotidian and permanent way of establishing control introduced earlier in this text. Concrete punishment complements all of these procedures to create a violently toxic environment that expels all the Palestinian inhabitants of the Occupied Territories in general and East Jerusalem in particular (Graham, 2004)(Leshem, 2015)(Abujidi, 2014) because they are conceptualized by IDF brigadiers as a ‘‘human, demographic and social time bomb (Hasen, 2002, p. 6). As documented by Weizman, all of these new procedures are inspired by contemporary philosophy and have “sought to redeﬁne inside as outside, and domestic environments as thoroughfares […] involved a conception of the city as not just the site, but the very medium of warfare” (Weizman, 2006,p. 53). This strategy of conscious urban and domestic destruction is directly linked to Israel’s plans to construct a speciﬁc sense of place, space and time in the Occupied Territories (Yiftachel, 1995)(Reuveny, 2003)(Schwartz, 2014).

DEMOLITION VERSUS SEALING: TIME AS A WEAPON

Demolition as a punishment is direct and comprehensive retaliation: it obliterates what may be important to someone in response to his actions and eliminates the physical afterlife of that person’s personal possesions. While space is of great importance in the tactic, to weaponize (Lambert, 2012) housing architecture is also a temporal tactic related to a certain vision over time. In using the demolition of an attacker’s home as a weapon, the Israeli army develops a striking action in the present that is intended to fabricate the future. The Israeli bulldozers D-9 are even specially designed for the task: “retroﬁtted with steel armor plates, tiny bulletproof cabin windows, special blades and buckets optimized for concrete demolition, and a powerful asphaltripper in the rear” (Zeitoun, 2002). In this sense, demolition is a designed retaliation that tries to deter forthcoming attacks by creating an intense momentum through the process of destruction: the noise is greater, the number and size of the machines needed increases, and the violence of the process is maximal. As Goodman explains, “sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread” (Goodman, 2009, p. 5). Somehow, they try to increase the kairotic instant and leave an empty plot and a mental memory. Home demolition tries to punish a population by eﬀacing its traces, but at the same time, it always literally leaves space for renovation: it is physically viable to rebuild and recover.

Home sealing works in another temporal dimension. According to the Oxford Dictionary, to seal is to “close securely” or to “apply a nonporous coating to (a surface) to make it impervious” (Oxford Online Dictionary). Sealing thus means blocking in order to make something impenetrable; it signiﬁes inaccessibility. It does not intend to destroy the object, but instead forces it to remain frozen despite the passing of time.

The change of the counter-insurgency methods from demolition to sealing follows a logic that fully utilises the potential of ediﬁces in which “contemporary urban operations play themselves out within constructed real or imaginary architecture, and through the destruction, construction, reorganization and subversion of space” (Weizman, 2005); erasing the traces of an ediﬁce may be a powerful weapon, but manipulating, transforming or altering it may be more potent. Following this line of thinking, sealing does not represent a more “proportionate” punishment, as the Israeli government has argued. While it is less visually violent, it is also more coercive and ampliﬁes the temporal frame of collective punishment; while its duration depends on the sealing technique, it is always longer than the instant destruction of demolition.

SEALING VS CONCRETE SEALING: “ETERNALLY” PRESENT

There are many possible ways to seal a space: changing doorknobs, building walls obstructing previous doors, or melting the metal plates of entrances. The Israeli government has experimented with these in different architectural settings. All of these measures are reversible with varying degrees of eﬀort, but a domicile ﬁlled with concrete is practically irreversible. Furthermore, Israeli legislation clearly prohibits the attempt of recovering the space of punishment: “the sealing shall not be removed from a conﬁscated building of which the openings have been sealed by order of a military commander under the power vested in him in accordance with Regulation 119 of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations, 1945, except by approval of the commander of the IDF in the Area” (Security Provisions, 2009). The penalty’s irreversibility through both materiality and law ampliﬁes the degree of violence and extends the time span of the punishment. It also signiﬁes a diﬀerent conceptual approach that creates a new architectonic materiality by introducing an alien substance into the preexisting ediﬁce.

This process is related to the nationalistic discourse that Israel constructs about itself always as an “ordered body” that portrays “the Palestinian ‘‘other’’ as a cancerous, evasive, and multiplying threat” (Graham, 2004, p. 204). When looking at the images, it is impossible to escape the material, visual and conceptual relation of concrete punishment as a cancerous tactic: the spread of a fringe element that kills what was previously functioning. Is concrete punishment trying to modify the DNA of a particular architecture to create a disease?

The question of the role of materiality haunts architecture and built environments: “How do particular technologies and materials facilitate particular kinds of dwelling and inhabitation?”(Jacobs & Merriman, 2011, p. 213) Or, in the case at hand here, promote uninhabitation?Paradoxically, the success of concrete as a building material was intrinsically linked to the fact that it could be produced everywhere in large quantities and thus “made durable and stable construction possible anywhere” (Forty, 2012, p. 102). Its most prominent temporal feature is that it has a life expectancy of more than four hundred years; it could survive longer than the walls that surround it. It uses time, in its eonian sense, as a tool for disciplining the population.

The temporal dimension of concrete sealing as a counter-insurgency method is more advanced and complex than the simple deterrent of future violent actions. It also retains the kairotic moment of the punishment, but the innovation is in its temporal colonization of the neighbourhood by remaining as a constant physical object in the urban environment and part of the quotidian landscape for a very long time. It escapes the realm of remembrance of previous practices, separating itself from the pure present and becoming the always present possible future for any Palestinian family. It becomes the palpable, audible and, even, olfactory example of anyone’s future everyday. See (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Mu’taz Ibrahim Khalil Hijazi’s window before the hose was introduced to pour the cement. Source: Reproduced with permission from the photographer Jacob Burns.

SEALING VS HOUSING: NOWHERE TO HIDE

Sealing is not restricted to military situations, but also used in everyday architectonic situations. It is common practice to close oﬀ e.g. a building on the brink of collapse, a laboratory where a chemical leak has been detected, or the scene of a crime. Usually, the act of sealing implies a certain danger associated with the space in question: risk of contamination, an accident, tampering with evidence … But what risk does the former domestic space of an incarcerated or dead terrorist pose? What is the diﬀerence between targeting a house or a home, and a factory, an institution or a hospital?

Jad Isaac, director general of the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, reﬂected on the precise places where Palestinian domesticity is targeted thus: ‘‘it is important to see where the houses are located and why. It’s not arbitrary. These sites are meticulously selected. They are for the bypass roads or new zoning for the settlements, to increase Israeli control’’ (cited in Smith, 2001). The logic of these operations and methods looks to increase the separation and imbalance in the use of time and space between both territories: “it has created a reality where cohabit two types of spaces [sic]: on the one hand, a continuous, ﬂuid Israeli space, in which it is possible to travel quickly and, on the other hand, a fragmented Palestinian space, lined with obstacles, in which movement is slow” (Parizot, 2009, p. 2). It seems that there is an overall strategy to slow down the tempo of Palestinians (Weizmann, 2007)(Petti, 2008) where the battle is being fought for control over daily rhythm.

Military posts, road controls, random detentions or waiting for the Court’s sentence to seal oﬀ the house are tools to control the domestic, but also the existential rhythms of Palestinians: “waiting, that condition of being in between places, of trying to reach someone or somewhere, and just being fed up, is a condition that characterizes contemporary Palestine, chopped up by closure” (Wick, 2011, p. 25). The control of the everyday is pursued through space in order to conquer time: “Under siege, life is time/Between remembering its beginning/And forgetting its end” (Darwish, 2002). In this regard, the act of sealing appears to belong to a greater architectonic narrative in which “Israeli discourses projecting Palestinian cities as dark, impenetrable spaces full of dehumanized, terroristic subjects, go on to sustain massive Israeli violence against both the everyday urban life of Palestinians and the systems which sustain this life” (Graham, 2004, p. 210). The Israeli government looks for speciﬁc consequences by introducing risk into Palestinian domestic environment and personal spaces.

This system of control and tabulation of the everyday works together with more complex occupation mechanisms such as concrete punishment, which become machines of discipline that do not execute physical violence per se but constantly reenact it. As Sarah Ali Dwayat acknowledges, the power of the aesthetic result is not an unintended outcome of a cruel punishment, because “when they came to seal the house [last month], a soldier told me, in Arabic, that it was to send a message to others, so they wouldn’t carry out more acts of terror” (Gostoli, 2016). The goal is to transform the attacker’s former home into a communicational artefact that constantly sends out a clear message. What is, then, this missive?

HOUSING VS COMMUNICATION: THE PERMANENT MESSAGE

Targeting kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms, and moreover, family photos and personal belongings has the capacity of conquering the collective imagination of a population, making them fear for their own domestic time; it attacks the everyday by creating powerful images that serve as warning messages: the sealed house, the half submerged toy or the cement ﬂooded kitchen; the most intimate space of security morphed into a constant reminder of one’s absent son, brother or father. It appears to build an aesthetic display where its “images contaminate us like viruses” (Virilio, 1988, p. 87). In this sense, the perversion of the tactic can only be understood through the powerful lens of communication.

The role of architecture as a communicative apparatus is a contemporary preoccupation that tries to explore its importance over quotidian life (Sudjic, 2011)(Koolhaas, 2016)(Sondhi, 2015)(Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011). Roman architecture was perhaps ﬁrst to completely apprehend its own power. As Augustus Caesar declared: “I found Rome of clay; I leave it to you of marble” (Suetonius, 2007, p. 29); this exempliﬁes an understanding of ediﬁces as a strong tool for creating, evaluating and maintaining power. They represent what is right and what is not, as long as they are standing. Augustus did not build the entire Roman Empire in marble, but a group of key ediﬁces that supported its cultural campaigns, leaving no ambiguity as who held the sovereignty.

Similarly, in his book “The Ediﬁce Complex: the Architecture of Power”, theorist Dejan Sudjic reminds us of the important role of architecture as propaganda of the ruling class, both before and after a militarized conﬂict (Sudjic, 2011). The case of Saddam Hussein’s post Gulf War architecture is somehow iconic; the dictator used the communicational capacity of ediﬁces to refute the idea that he had been defeated during the conﬂict and, at the same time, to glorify himself and the regime and to intimidate his enemies. Usually, such information is transmitted through sculptures, decorations of ediﬁces, institutional buildings or whole urban renovations. Concrete punishment, however, by transforming an already existing architecture is a new exploration of its communicational role, as it is bluntly direct with the idea of who establishes and controls the power of any space.

If, as architect Bernard Tschumi noted, architecture is always “the original act of violence, this unspeakable copulating of live body and dead stone […] for you may enter the building again and again” (Tschumi, 1994, pp. 125–126), what does preventing the use of a domicile through the insertion of a new substance on its interior communicate? According to Hannah Arendt, the political system of Greek society was supported by two kinds of separations, each one with its own character and laws: the city walls and the domestic walls, where “the one harboured and enclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family” (Arendt, 1998, pp. 63–64). What does it mean to transform the home into part of the public city? In this regard, concrete punishment as a communicative device dissolves the domestic wall, blending it, both physically and conceptually, with the surrounding public space. Somehow, the home becomes part of the urban landscape, part of the neighborhood, together with the personal belongings that lied on it. It produces an immediate exhibition of the personal life to the public where the political power is at a maximum. In communicative terms, subverting the domestic walls as concrete punishment does encompasses an unprecedented show of force through rhetoric. See (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. ‘Udai ‘Abed ‘Ali Abu Jamal’s house. Source: Reproduced with permission from the photographer Jacob Burns.

COMMUNICATION VS SEDUCTION: THE AESTHETIC WEAPON

Communication, quotidian life and rhetoric are highly intertwined in the built environment, as “to engage the architectural is to engage the rhetorical” (Goodnight, 2014, p. 4). The communicative power of cemented homes conforms an object that “seems dominated by strategic pictures, verbal or nonverbal visualizations that linger in the collective memory of audiences as representative of their subjects when rhetoric has been successful” (Osborn, 1986, p. 79). The image certainly stays in the mind. In this sense, it does not only punish, but also generates an ampliﬁed object that tries to persuade and persecute the Palestinian population as “an allegory in miniature” (Campbell, 1992, p. 75). Concrete punishment is sublime in the Kantian sense of the word; ﬁlled with pure communicational potential, almost beautiful, but “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us” (Rilke, 1976). These are not just innocuous aesthetic choices in the realm of visual dominance, but conscious and studied actions to conquer collective imagining.

We have discussed the temporal conﬂict of material punishment of pouring cement into an ediﬁce; i.e., its everlastingness, but another important communicative feature is its ﬁnal patina: its unﬁnished, in the midst aesthetic quality. The volume of the home is only half ﬁlled, so the quotidian objects within it are submerged, yet totally recognisable: the wooden spoons, tea towels, the coﬀee machine, the sink or the family photos are half engulfed by the grey mass of concrete. This makes its rhetorical power so eﬃcient, calling for a kind of horriﬁc nostalgia (Massey, 2000): the tension of bisected objects is where the impact of the steady reminder is maximum, as it frees imagination and “imagination is the key to power … it determines the direction of desires” (Rorty, 1992, p. 13). In this sense, it is unsurprising that this unﬁnished, half visible, incomplete perceptive technique has been employed and mastered mainly by contemporary artists, and perhaps they are the only designed aesthetic reference. The intricacy of concrete punishment reaches new levels when these artistic procedures are employed to transform architectural wreckage into an artisticarchitectonic military operation that is closely related to Rachel Whiteread’s work “House” for the ArtAngel project.

In the project, Whitehead creates a concrete cast of the real inside of a three-story Victorian house in Mile End (London), where “what is left is a monument to past domesticity, a coarse yet intricate ediﬁce, alone in the space it once occupied with a hundred similar residences.” (Young, 1993). The work is a reﬂection of the quotidian disruptions in social space-time, as noted by geographer Doreen Massey: “It worked this disruption, ﬁrst and most obviously, in a predominantly temporal sense. It set a familiar past in the space-time of today; it made present something which was absent; it was the space of a house no longer there.” (Massey, 2000, p. 49). Time, material and domesticity are used exactly in the same way in both practices as a way to increase their aﬀective potential. Furthermore, the conceptual similarities of concrete punishment with other works such as Joseph Beauys’s terriﬁc mutations of the everyday in “Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch” or Marcel Duchamp’s interchange of functions in the “Fountain”, are so striking that we can speculate that Israeli army uses artistic methods – art – as a weapon, following the famous idea that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life” (Wilde, 1905). In this regard, we witness how art technics are being militarized to innovate Israeli’s counter-insurgency tactics.

Concrete punishment is fascinatingly complex in its imitation of landscapes of art and its simultaneous separation from the everyday in order to create an environment of ﬁction – of the sensuous – despite its dystopian and undesirable character. According to Professor John Allen, art’s capacity to mobilize aﬀects relies on “the ambient qualities of the space, where the experience of it is itself the expression of power” (Allen, 2006, p. 441). Therefore, concrete sealing’s ability to control increases proportionally with its capacity to construct a complete experience of the punishment, and it is in a sense linked to the experiential museums that recreate the contexts of its pieces in order to produce an immersive threshold of time. When entering the house of ‘Udai ‘Abed ‘Ali Abu Jamal and crawling through its frozen rooms, the “visitor” is transported to another spacetime: the one that is absent. Immersion and seduction are intimately related to rhetoric, and when working together, as in the case of concrete punishment, they are capable of becoming part of the city, community and collective memory. Concrete punishment outpaces the characteristic destruction and violence of previous practices, and it is consciously designed to belong to the group of spaces that bring out a strong aﬀective response (McCormack, 2003)(Amin & Thrift, 2002). See (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6. ‘Udai ‘Abed ‘Ali Abu Jamal’s bedroom. Source: Reproduced with permission from the photographer Jacob Burns.

SEDUCTION VS AFFECT: PERMANENT MESSAGES OF WRECKAGE AND CEMENT

Ancient Romans acknowledged the power of ediﬁces, architecture and art as representational apparatuses because of their seductive ability to channel thinking. At some point, Maecenas advised Augustus about the usefulness of constructing monuments during campaigns: “display of this kind tends to implant respect for us in our allies and to strike terror into our enemies” (Dio, 1987, p. 171). But beyond representation, architecture is capable of channelling more than symbols and signiﬁcances (Lees, 2001)(Thrift, 2007).

We are accustomed to accepting that the way we know aﬀects the way we live, but we seldom acknowledge the inverse: that the way we live aﬀects the way we know and think the world (Durán, 2008). Within this bond, architecture, as the inescapable container of our living modes, plays a decisive role in any power relation: “distraction absorbs architecture into the body, and vice versa, via tactility … and embodied, geohistorically speciﬁc, sensuous knowing (enacting) of the everyday” (Harrison, 2000, p. 226). Where, then, does this new architectonic object begin or end? What is the intended eﬀect of this ﬂooded home on the dynamic of the surrounding neighbourhoods?

According to the declarations of former IDF commander Efraim Eitam, ‘‘we are dealing with the use of urban areas as weapon, the building is a weapon” (Hasen, 2002, p. 6) and its liquidity represents an extreme case of antistasis architecture (Latour & Yaneva, 2008)(Solá-Morales, 1998) that is used to manipulate the memories of the conﬂict. It may seem contradictory that a hybrid object that is so static, heavy and ﬁxed can generate a lot of mobility and blurriness around an urban area, but it does so by mobilizing aﬀect “as a ‘sticky object of emotion’ and ‘somatic marker’ that is both emotionally charged and culturally mobilized” (Sakamoto, 2015, p. 158).

Here, time and space “are used as means of not only control but also measure and expression” (Brighenti & Kärrholm, 2016, p. 2). The IDF design of the tactic is intended to make it almost impossible to reclaim the space, or at least to give that impression not only to the former owners but to the entire population. The aﬀect concealed in the operation remains permanently frozen within an impressive complex aesthetic object of quotidian life that stresses “how aﬀect is literally design(at)ed to operate in many ways, and how architectural design operates via discourse and practice, materiality and immateriality, ephemerality, and stasis to channel preclude, and evoke particular affects” (Kraftl & Adey, 2008, p. 225). In this sense, concrete punishment has another very important feature that is not only based on restrictions of access and direct domination (McLaughlin & Muncie, 1999): it is consciously designed to aﬀect and punish large populations via collective imaginary. Concrete punishment uses temporality to extend the duration of punishment to all of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants and memories.

AFFECT VS MONUMENT: PALESTINIAN’S PUNITIVE MEMORIAL

In the case of concrete punishment, the evocation of place and its relation with the human body is more than a symbolic operation. Based on the works of geographical literature that see the spaces as ongoing material, embodied or aﬀective environments (Thrift, 2000)(Relph, 1976)(McCormack, 2003)(Ingold, 2000), we wonder: if Mutaz Hijazi’s room is no longer a bedroom or ‘Udai ‘Abed ‘Ali Abu Jamal’s kitchen is no longer a place for cooking, what are they?

The images clearly show the aﬀective potential and its power to trouble the mind, but beyond its disciplinary intent, the spaces are clearly intermingled with the sensory and the visceral in a kind of exploratory way for architecture, because “like art, urbanism can either repress modes of being or reveal new sensory possibilities that instigate novel forms of political subjectivity” (Rios, 2012, p. 201). Whether those innovations are despicable or not, the materiality embodies a potent subliminal capacity to channel aﬀects, identities, attitudes and ways of living: “architecture is an important way of anchoring identities and of constructing, in the most literal sense, a material connection between people and places, often through appeals to history” (Lees, 2001, p. 53). In this sense, there is another architectural display that is consciously designed to mobilize aﬀects, time and memories: monuments.

The link between both concrete punishment and monuments is both spatial and temporal, and it allows us to easily visualise many complexities. One could say that a main characteristic of monuments is that they are spatial materializations of power and doctrines where “what we call “ideology” only achieves consistency by intervening in social space and in its production, and thus by taking on body therein” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 44). This process of monumentality is slowacting and pertains to the temporal threshold of subliminal, relentless time.

Furthermore, the formalisation in which ideology and aﬀect become “physical” is also crucial, and even here, the material is completely related to the monumentality approach, as “nowadays any middling sized to large memorial is made of concrete” (Forty, 2012, p. 206). Statistically true or not, this substance choice is shared because of its durability: “the most beautiful monuments are imposing in their durability. A cyclopean wall achieves monumental beauty because it seems eternal, because it seems to have escaped time.” (Lefebvre, 1991,p. 221). An important diﬀerence in this approach to time is that concrete punishment does not intend to narrate a historic momentum, but to create a sense of closure: “it is not an event or rupture in time […] its everyday oppression produces uncertainty and insecurity” (Wick, 2011, p. 38, p.38).To reiterate, the atemporal quality of concrete punishment is consciously pursued to transform the dwelling into a sort of after math monument that deepens the time span of the deterrence action and becomes a longer and more profound weapon.

Another crucial tactic employed via monuments is the use of the urban space to introduce a state of exception in the quotidian: “The monument fetishizes space, it rescues it from the subversive action of everyday time […] The monument is always there, indiﬀerent to the passing of time” (Delgado, 2001, p. 63). Concrete punishment and monuments share this intention: both try to conquer and freeze time, because their narratives eventually become more feasible; they become material facts buried in collective memory. This transubstantiation is a common tactic employed through monumental spaces; it aims to transform the quotidian into materializations of the extraordinary or what have been called “mood catching environments” (Thrift, 2009). Despite the many similarities however, we are looking at something that is beyond the monumental. If, as James Young argues, monuments are “public art and political memory” (Young, 2000, p. 87), concrete punishment is both aesthetic and political, but ultimately also a weapon in its purest sense.

On 26 January 2001, Ariel Sharon gave an interview about possible solutions to the problems of shootings originating in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Beit Jala near Bethlehem, in the West Bank. He maintained that targeting homes was the only option: “I know the Arabs. They are not impressed by helicopters and missiles. For them, there is nothing more important than their house” (Jansen, 2001). In this sense, the domestic space becomes the battleground, the disputed volume, where the power of tempo is later deployed and executed. Concrete punishment tries to capture the kairotic moment of a violent episode and increase the terror intensity of the whole operation by producing a horror monument of the domestic, following the logic of “necropolitics” that “technologies of destruction have become more tactile, more anatomical and sensorial, in a context in which the choice is between life and death” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 34). See (Fig. 7).

vertical — Fig. 7. ‘Udai ‘Abed ‘Ali Abu Jamal’s kitchen. Source: Reproduced with permission from the photographer Jacob Burns.

MONUMENT VS DOMESTICITY: THE QUOTIDIAN AS COLOSSUS

Concrete punishment implies a deep and direct transformation of a material entity – the home – “to the degree that there are traces of violence and death, negativity and aggressiveness in social practice, the monumental work erases them and replaces them with a tranquil power and certitude which can encompass violence and terror.” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 222). Through this new tactic, housing architectures are not killed; they become immobile, zombies that cannot be assassinated again. Interestingly enough, concrete is often “more associated with death than life” (Forty, 2012, p. 208) and, therefore, its introduction to an already living architecture poses several necropolitical questions: “what, then, is the role of the dead body, in its corporeal form and more specifically through its spatial and material representations, in this everyday order of power?” (Leshem, 2015, p. 36) Can architecture be put to death? Could its goal be to murder not only the flooded domestic space, but Palestinian daily life as a whole? We have already talked about how the quotidian is militarized through the design of a livingdead architecture, where “invisible killing is added to outright executions” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 30), or direct murders are built upon concrete monuments.

The process of killing an architecture creates a memorial of death where the very medium is the message: “in death the future is collapsed into the present” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 37). In this regard, the domestic becomes monumental, following the logic where “public monuments often use the memory of a past use of force by the state to signify such future possibility” (Dovey, 1999). The goal of the violent action is to abduct every functionality of the home in order to transform it into a monument; to obliterate usefulness and transform architecture into a moving aesthetic “other” where its destruction is not “limited to one place or another, but a viral phenomenon to which no place in this Fig. 7. ‘Udai ‘Abed ‘Ali Abu Jamal’s kitchen. Source: Reproduced with permission from the photographer Jacob Burns. R. Delso Political Geography (2018) 57–66 63 space is immune” (Azoulay, 2011).

The role of architecture besides its capacity to make effective inhabitation of built spaces possible has been documented and investigated by many theorists and practitioners (Azoulay, 2011)(Sánchez, 2012)(Imrie, 2003)(Grosz, 1992). But, making the domestic environment uninhabitable mean? One clue could be found in Debord’s work; he writes that agents in power “first separate the subject from their own time” (Debord, 1992, p. 99). There are many explicit quotes by the Israel government that demonstrate their intention to target the everyday time of the Palestinian population. Perhaps, however, Labour Minister Ben Azri summed it all up when he called for the development of a strategy for ‘‘converting the life of Palestinians into hell (Arabic News, 2001). The Israeli government is striving to transform the personal into something subversively militarized and political because “the source of the threat to Israeli public spaces is projected as emanating from the Palestinian private spaces of family households” (Falah & Flint, 2004, p. 117). This is not only true in the case of punitive sealing and demolitions, but also for the claims of illegal construction that have forced the destruction or abandonment of 746 houses in East Jerusalem from 2004 to 2017 and left 2667 people homeless, of whom 1455 were minors (B’Tselem, 2017). Furthermore, in at least 95 cases, the demolition had to be carried out by the owner (Abuzaid, 2015).

This shocking data is manipulated through the use of language in which there are house demolitions or sealings, but never home demolitions and sealings (Harker, 2009). This “domicide” pursued by the IDF does not only concern the space of the house, but “what is lost is not the physical space, but the entire emotional essence of home – aspects of personal self identity” (Porteous & Smith, 2001, p. 63). The violent action transforms a human habitat into a human warning by substituting the lived experience for the perceived one, the everyday life for an everyday reminder of the extraordinary.

Ultimately, dominance over the domestic is the last frontier of a society in which movements, territory, daily activities, work, leisure or beliefs are controlled and channelled. Now, armament reaches the full range of human existence, from the large scale of the country to the smallest one of the bedroom, or family photos. “The unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home had been seen in Palestine, just like in Iraq, as the most profound form of humiliation and trauma” (Weizman, 2005). An ignominy that especially targets those who inhabit the domestic space as a gender weapon: mainly women and children.

It has been demonstrated that this militarization of time and domestic environments puts more pressure on women (Taraki, 2008)(Porteous & Smith, 2001)(Wick, 2011)(Harker, 2010) , and they often become the voices that explain the subversion of Israel’s tactics: “not only is he imposing a curfew on me, he is also redefining what is outside and what is inside within my own private sphere” (Segal, 2005). Private life is targeted as infrastructures and territories are targeted. The multiscalar approach of concrete punishment seems to be the spearhead of a total strategy to make Palestinian urban environments “carceral” (Bornstein, 2008), where nothing and no one is out of reach or, at least, create the appearance of it. See (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8. ‘Udai ‘Abed ‘Ali Abu Jamal’s house. Source: reproduced with permission from the photographer Jacob Burns.

CONCLUSION

The power of architecture at stake in Concrete Punishment is diverse, but when it is executed, it produces a transformation, a movement: home demolition is a transformation towards erasing where domesticity becomes just an empty plot, classical sealings mean an encapsulation where domesticity becomes inaccessible, and climactically, concrete punishment means a greater transformation into a nauseating sort of monument where the home is no longer a domestic environment but a memorial erected as a warning to the whole population: “In one min, the whole life of a house ends. The house murdered is also mass murder, even if vacant of its residents. It is a mass grave for the basic elements needed to construct a building for meaning […] And houses get murdered just as their residents get murdered. And as the memory of things get murdered—wood, stone, glass, iron, cement— they all scatter in fragments like beings” (Darwish, 2009). The article argues that the intended goal is not only to punish one household, but to colonize the urban environment with permanent nightmares of the everyday, transforming domesticity into an aesthetic artefact that uses time as its most powerful weapon to create death worlds (Mbembe, 2003)(Leshem, 2015). Because ultimately, to attack the everyday is an around the clock attack on the life of a population for whom living becomes a form of continuous struggle and anguish, with road blocks, untraversable frontiers, military posts, wreckage and, now, monuments of the living dead.

Despite the simplicity of the action itself pumping an easily transportable fluid that is able to solidify a domestic space, it allows the IDF to produce, design and sustain an occupied space while, at the same time, eliminate a Palestinian one. Furthermore, the action not only changes the dominance over a certain space to reduce Palestinian territory bit by bit but also transforms its definition by adding new layers of significance to the home: monumentality, affective, artistic or communicational. The flooded home is not just another abducted piece of land but an element that remains in the Palestinian urban fabric and serves as a permanent warning to the rest of the population that continues to inhabit the area. In that sense, the article has traced the use of time in this new tactic and tried to demonstrate that it is its main innovation because it transforms how Israel is using architectural violence from direct punishment to a more permanent, invisible and abstract way.

Throughout the text, we have explored the micropolitics of concrete punishment in order to raise awareness of the new temporal and spatial relations (Thrift, 2004) being displayed between military tactics, architecture, monuments and art in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is argued that there is an urgency to understand how the conflict of time is being played across various levels and through multiple disciplines in order to fight the asymmetric use that the powerful are applying to it. Ultimately, Palestinians are being forced to adapt to a military conflict where their day to day is always on the edge. To do that, concrete punishment steals the narrative of the past, at the same time as it freezes the present of domesticity into petrified objects of a kind of museum of horrors.

A complex military system is being deployed to assault the most precise scale of intimacy: memories, domesticity and personal time. The article examines how Israel is using the capacity of time to provoke great transformations in collective memory and erase the controversies of the present while conditioning the future. The arrow of time prompts forgetfulness but, still, “‘durability’ is unable to achieve a complete illusion (Gieryn, 2002)(Lefebvre, 1991) (Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011) . Exclusion is never absolute, even when dealing with ten thousand tonnes of concrete mass. Here, it allows us to consider that concrete punishment represents a radical shift in the use of violent materiality caused by the Israeli Occupation in which architecture is the medium and art is the technic.

This article has aimed to describe the practice of concrete punishment and analyse its impact, and understand why the Israeli government applies this tactic. It has tried to uncover the role of architecture, time and art in the production of this new tactic to render it visible despite the impossibility of condensing all the complexities. We are horrified and we condemn the tactics, stare at the images for hours in disbelief, try to unveil the sophistication of the violence applied, but ultimately, we will never fully grasp of all the unaccountable variables that make this use of architecture abhorrent: neither the smell of concrete mingling with the odours of what was once a regular household, nor the sound of the pump’s engine or the silence in its wake. “The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved, distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror” (Barghouti, 2000, p. 62). See (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9. ‘Udai ‘Abed ‘Ali Abu Jamal’s house. Source: Reproduced with permission from the photographer Jacob Burns.

FUNDING

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte del Gobierno de España) and the Polytechnic University of Madrid.