Product Description

This is a brilliantly original examination of Israel's terrifying reconceptualization of geopolitics in the Occupied Territories and beyond. "Hollow Land" is a groundbreaking exploration of the political space created by Israel's colonial occupation. In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which natural features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged. Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualization of military defense during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare. In exploring Israel's methods to transform the landscape itself into a tool of total domination and control, "Hollow Land" lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71178 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
"Eyal Weizman brilliantly deconstructs Israel's yoking of traditionally humanist disciplines and discourse to the service of its campaign against the Palestinians. This book is chilling but essential reading for everyone who cares about where our world is going today." Ahdaf Soueif, author of The Map of Love "A startling exercise in what it means to think through the axiomatics of occupation, capture and subjection. In this most Deleuzian work, Weizman boldly attempts to create an entirely new method to conceptualize the relationship between surfaces, movement, and the assets of war." Achille Mbembe, author of On the Postcolony "Hollow Land is a remarkable achievement. In its vast scope and intimate, carefully researched details, it affords us real understanding of Israel's project towards the Palestinians, and it is narrated here with the clarity of vision and sensibility of an artist. Scholarly and poetic in its epic reach, Hollow Land is destined to become a classic." Karma Nabulsi Oxford University "A wrenching account of the multiple ways in which the land of Palestine has been hollowed out by Israeli occupation. The 'facts on the ground' have never been revealed with such stark and critical clarity, and Weizman's stunning combination of words and images is at once a brilliant critique of the politics of space and a searing indictment of colonial rule and dispossession." Derek Gregory, author of The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq "At once measured and fierce, Hollow Land, is a remarkably original work that confirms Eyal Weizman's indispensable role as a critic of the sinister and ubiquitous instrumentality of space in contemporary politics and life." Michael Sorkin"

Nicolai Ouroussoff, New York Times, September 10, 2006
"...Weizman, an Israeli-born architect who is the recipient this
year of the prestigious Stirling Prize for architecture, will open a series
of lectures this fall at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal.
The talks are pegged to the release of Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture
of Occupation, a chilling book in which he explores the way the military
selects targets in bombing and fortifying cities and how those strategies
can re-emerge in civilian planning practices during peacetime. His analysis
is ideally timed..."

Jay Merrick, The Independent, June 28, 2007
"In Hollow Land, Eyal Weizman has taken [Edward] Said's thesis to
a new level, generating extraordinary, and at times surreally
uncomfortable, conclusions...Weizman's book is of salutary interest."

Customer Reviews

Architecture of oppression
This is an utterly convincing book - well-researched and documented, and unemotionally expressed. For any observer of the Palestinian scene, it rings true. As Ilan Pappe has made clear (in `The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine`), there came a point at which the Israeli state`s terrible violence against ordinary Palestinian people, feasible in the anarchic days after 1948, but increasingly criticised by international public opinion, became outmoded. Instead of wholesale massacres and expulsions, we now have land-control policies, involving the development of settlements, road classification, planning laws, building permits, the building of barriers - all of it designed to make life hopelessly difficult, if not impossible, for ordinary Palestinians. This way, the objectives of Zionism, to own and control everything from the Jordan to the sea, can be met by apparently less aggressive but more insidious means.