Third Text

9 April 2024

Designs of Occupation

Chelsea Haines

Israel’s borders – their security and insecurity – have been at the centre of global media coverage since 7 October 2023, when operatives from Hamas and Islamic Jihad breached the fence separating Gaza and Israel and killed over 1,200 soldiers and civilians of Israeli and other nationalities and kidnapped more than two hundred others. While Israel’s relentless counterattack in Gaza has killed, to date, over thirty thousand and dominated news headlines, a second front in the conflict has intensified in the occupied West Bank, resulting in the detention, forced displacement, assault and murder of hundreds of Palestinians. ^[1]

In between the devastating reports, a less troubled story circulated across US and Israeli social media in early November of four ‘cowboys’ from Montana and Arkansas who travelled to Israel to help with the harvest at farms. ^[2]  Yet a closer investigation reveals the farm they travelled to is not within the state of Israel as it is commonly defined, but Har Brakha, a religious settlement with a population of around 3,000 just south of the Palestinian city of Nablus. ^[3]  Founded in 1983 as a community settlement – an organisational structure whereby individuals purchase their own property but live according to cooperative rules – Har Brakha, like all Israeli settlements in the West Bank, is illegal under international law but claimed as part of Israel by settlers seeking to push the state – and in turn, incentivised and pushed by the state – to perpetually control, if not annex, the West Bank. In recent years, the settlement’s chief rabbi, Eliezer Melamed, has courted American evangelicals, fostering links between two otherwise disparate groups that share the belief Jews must resettle the territory known in biblical times as Judea and Samaria. The reports of the American farmhands lending help to their Israeli allies can be interpreted as part of an ongoing attempt to normalise the settlements among certain segments of the US population, especially in the face of ongoing settler violence and intensifying international scrutiny of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. ^[4]  It highlights the divergent religious and political motivations of those who move within this contested terrain. It also demonstrates how the border has been consistently redefined by settlers who have effectively transformed the West Bank into an aporia since the Six-Day War in 1967 (that Palestinians call the Naksa, or ‘setback’). In recent decades, this ‘border’ has become no border at all; it is a one-way boundary that Jewish Israelis don’t have to recognise but Palestinians do. It is continually dissolved by the actions of the state and those who act in its name.

Noam Shoked’s In the Land of the Patriarchs: Design and Contestation in West Bank Settlements delves into the complexities and contradictions of the settlements from their origins in the aftermath of 1967 until the present, revealing the history of their construction not as the outcome of a unified movement, but as a patchwork of heterogenous factions, ideologies and desires often at odds with the Israeli government and planning officials. Shoked focuses on settlement design, in so doing demonstrating how these projects came to fruition despite frequent antagonisms and mistrust between settlers and professional architects and planners. The book analyses various settlements with a level of detail that dispels easy judgments that cast the Israeli colonisation of the West Bank as a top-down process implemented at the behest of uniform militarised control. Instead, Shoked goes to great lengths to detail how the settlements arose by almost equal parts collaboration and contestation between settlers, architects and government officials, effectively writing this history quite literally from the ground up, to use the settler movement’s facts-on-the-ground rhetoric.

Map of the West Bank with Areas A and B marked in dark gray, Area C is marked in light gray (map drawn by Noam Shoked based on a map produced by Peace Now)  ^[5]

Shoked argues that the movements to occupy the West Bank that took shape after the Six-Day War, and which were bolstered by the Likud party’s rise to power in the 1970s, produced new kinds of settler ideologies that sit in uncomfortable dialogue with Israel’s originary self-image. Israel’s founding national mythology is steeped in the image of the collectively oriented kibbutzim and moshavot whose secular and socialist values formed the basis of Jewish society in Mandatory Palestine, known as the Yishuv, or literally, the settlement. Despite the strong founding national image of the Jewish pioneer, the West Bank settlements have been for decades cast aside by many Israelis who do not see an image of themselves reflected in these projects. They are even referred to by a separate word (hitnahalut) to differentiate them from the earlier settlements that became part of the state of Israel in 1948. Undoubtedly, Shoked is correct that the settlement movements produced new kinds of ideologies and imaginaries that both took inspiration from the founding myths of the state and reshaped and reinvented them to suit new needs and desires. He is also correct that many Israelis of a more liberal bent would prefer not to think of these settlements as part of the national imaginary at all; in the book, one settler joked that people from Tel Aviv believe she lives ‘beyond the dark mountains’. ^[6]  Shoked notes at length how Israeli architects and planners often don’t like to advertise their work on the settlements and those that he interviewed frequently expressed disappointment and regret both about the settlements’ detrimental effects and how they had to cede control to the settlers, resulting in compromised designs. It is fair to say that the West Bank settlements are bad architecture and worse politics, an unruly amalgam of user-led design gone amok yet legitimised by the state. Shoked aims to shed light on this hornet’s nest – so often evoked but rarely analysed – by weaving a story of design, politics and everyday life on the settlements.

In the Land of the Patriarchs seeks to work through this terrain by narrating a history of the settlements ‘from below’ – that is, from the perspective of settlers. His stated goal is not to condone their agendas or the larger occupation itself, but to understand better ‘how power works on the ground’ in an implicit critique of the top-down approaches of existing scholarship. ^[7]  Each of the five chapters takes the development of one settlement and attendant movement as its premise: Hebron, Ofra, Nofim, Betar Illit and Pnei Kedem. Each explores how settlers ultimately took matters into their own hands, both in establishing these sites and often defying commissioned architects and planning officials to produce housing and community property based on the settlement’s specific needs. At the same time, the book reveals remarkable diversity among the intentions of the settlers and the designs that resulted from these complex processes.

The first two chapters focus on settlements founded by religious Zionists who took advantage of the government’s uncertainty over how to manage its newfound conquests after the Six-Day War to settle the West Bank. In his first chapter, Shoked addresses the origins of some of the first and most notorious settlement projects in and around Hebron. A Palestinian city of great religious significance to Jews and Muslims and where a small Jewish minority had lived until their expulsion in 1936 during escalating Arab-Jewish tensions, it is not surprising that activists began to come up with plans for how to re-establish a Jewish Hebron as soon as the Six-Day War ended. After the Israeli government rejected their application to settle in the city in 1968, settlement activists rented out an entire hotel in Hebron and refused to leave. The government conceded to the squatters, first establishing Kiryat Arba, a settlement on the outskirts of the city. However, the settlers were dissatisfied with the multistory housing complex, arguing that the apartments were too small and removed from the city. They founded a second settlement project in Hebron itself, establishing a foothold through the ruins of the demolished Avraham Avinu Synagogue and later built a rekindled Jewish quarter of Hebron, which abuts the Palestinian city but remains a self-segregated enclave.

Military checkpoint near a settler compound in Hebron, 2017, photograph by Noam Shoked

Shoked aims to explore how an extraordinary (and extralegal) situation comes to be perceived as normal and how everyday life takes place within these spaces. He notes the growing extremism of the Hebron settlers and the escalating clashes and violence between settlers and Palestinian residents, yet his focus lies with the more quotidian choices made by settlers to shape their built environments. In doing so, he sets aside a deeper analysis of the extent to which a little more than 700 settlers have militarised the city of over 200,000 Palestinians, ravaged its urban fabric and made life perpetually precarious for most of its inhabitants. Despite the book’s premise, the Hebron settlement never convincingly gives rise to a sense of normality. Instead, it reveals how normalisation has failed to take root in an environment so ungovernable that subsequent settlement movements have for the most part avoided areas densely populated by Palestinians, leading Hebron to be best understood as a singular case study that highlights the most abjectly violent elements of the occupation.

Shoked’s second chapter on the right-wing religious movement Gush Emunim and their ‘moral obligation to settle the West Bank’ traces the development of Ofra and the more successfully replicated model of the community settlement. ^[8]  If the Hebron settlers wanted to build within the existing Palestinian city, the founders of Ofra took inspiration from the kibbutz in form if not in spirit. A small settlement (built on private Palestinian land), Ofra is dotted by relatively modest houses with pitched roofs and communal dining facilities. It was developed with the support of a rotating door of professional architects, who each came to various levels of impasse with settlers on demands that rubbed against the grain of established socialist planning paradigms, from the insistence on increased parking spaces to the general absence of space allocated for agriculture. In Ofra, it is not the construction of housing but the synagogue that reveals the settlement’s ideology. The original architect’s plan for a star-shaped synagogue was rejected; instead, settlers adopted a rectilinear design by Yehuda Etzion – one of Ofra’s founders – based loosely on interpretations of the ancient and since-destroyed Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and assisted by the architect Meiron Poliakin. During construction, Etzion was arrested and charged with conspiracy to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim monument located where the Temple once stood. The synagogue was completed while Etzion served his seven-year prison sentence; he later returned to Ofra, where he lives today. Poliakin refused to attend the inauguration ceremony and, according to Shoked, said his unwitting architectural collaboration with a terrorist remains too painful for him to discuss even today.

The first two chapters recount a kind of religious zeal that outsiders tend to associate with the settlements. Not all the settlements feed into such fanaticism, however, and Shoked’s overall argument is the most compelling when he analyses the less ideologically motivated settlements in his chapters on Nofim and Betar Illit. By the 1980s, new settlements like Nofim began to dot the Palestinian landscape just east of the Green Line. ^[9]  Nofim was designed for a new population known as quality-of-life settlers who moved to the West Bank primarily for economic reasons, a kind of suburban sell for working and middle-class Israelis otherwise priced out of quality home ownership. Nofim was beset first by construction delays and then by the onset of the First Intifada, which caused a significant level of buyers’ remorse from these less politically driven settlers.

In the long run, the more successful settlements have attracted not the secular middle and working classes of Israel but ultra-Orthodox communities (haredim). With a population of around 65,000, Betar Illit is the largest and most densely populated of Shoked’s case studies. Here, Shoked poses his most intriguing research question: how is it that ultra-Orthodox communities that are not traditionally political Zionists have some of the most substantial settlements in the West Bank today?

Apartment buildings with a shopping arcade on the ground floor, Betar Illit, 1996, photograph by Reuven Milon, from the Judaica Collection of the Harvard Library, Harvard University

In the Land of the Patriarchs argues that the ultra-Orthodox and their needs were historically ignored by Israeli planning authorities, a reflection of their general marginalisation in early Israeli society. From its founding in 1948 until the late 1970s, housing and urban planning in Israel were dominated by the secular elite whose left-leaning Labor values were at odds with the needs and desires of many segments of the Israeli population. The settler movement gained new life with the rise to power of Likud, which saw in them an opportunity to informally increase Israel’s foothold in the West Bank and support formerly disregarded populations. Settlements like Betar Illit spoke to the special housing and community needs of the ultra-Orthodox and the new government offered large subsidies for families to relocate to the West Bank. These new settlements were especially attractive to young families who had access to larger apartments than established, densely populated enclaves like Mea Shearim in Jerusalem or Bnei Brak outside Tel Aviv.

Shoked details how initial disappointment with secular architects’ inability to address the specific needs of different sects in Betar Illit gave way to more community oversight, which led to new designs such as the installation of ramps across the complexes to accommodate baby strollers, as well as user-based interventions, including establishing smaller stores in apartments and stairwells rather than the expensive ground-floor commercial spaces purpose-built for such activities. Community guidance in Betar Illit has come to take on more restrictive, patriarchal forms as well, such as the institution of informal police who harass women who wear jeans or who enter the front of a bus rather than their gender-prescribed entrance toward the back. As Betar Illit has grown, these new community guidelines pale in comparison to the increased restriction of movement the settlements have placed on Palestinians. Shoked notes in recent years that the position of these initially non-Zionist groups has, through the process of settlement, hardened against Palestinians, charting how a group that did not necessarily adhere to settler ideology may at first participate in the project to advance their own interests but then ultimately adopt new politics that arise out of their settlement.

Perhaps the book’s most compelling contribution is how it troubles the emancipatory connotations of design from below, or how user-generated design blurs boundaries between expert and user in ways that has democratic potential for creating more inclusive spaces. ^[10]  Shoked’s book demonstrates how similar principles have generated more exclusive spaces in the West Bank settlements, forging discrimination within the settlement and encouraging repressive structures outside it. This has significant implications for how historians of art, architecture and the built environment think about participatory structures and community input as uniformly positive. By exploring the West Bank settlements in part as design from below, the book also makes a distinctive addition to the growing body of critical literature on architecture and design of the Israeli occupation, most prominent among them being Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Weizman’s wide-ranging book primarily takes a top-down approach – analysing the settlements, checkpoints, highways, walls, large-scale mapping projects and targeted assassinations – that taken together form the infrastructure of Israel’s occupation. ^[11]  Shoked’s book charts a far messier and less controlled process, one that just as often as not operates outside the parameters of the state.

Yet the case of Betar Illit – despite its physical and social spaces shaped by settlers themselves – also appears very clearly as a state-based, top-down project to heavily subsidise the resettlement of Jewish Israelis into the West Bank to shift the territory’s demographic balance and fortify the state’s claim to the land. Hollow Land does take a more top-down approach than In the Land of the Patriarchs by focusing on the state’s infrastructures of control and regulation. It is for that very reason that Weizman’s book is ultimately more sensitive to the lived realities of those truly on the bottom of the social order. Despite their historic marginalisation by elites, the ultra-Orthodox are endowed with rights, freedoms and privileges as Israeli citizens not accorded to Palestinians. Palestinians have been detrimentally harmed by such settlements; indeed, these asymmetries of power are visible in the construction of the settlement itself. While Beitar Illit has been acclaimed by Israel’s Ministry of the Interior for responsible stewardship, the Palestinian Authority has charged that the settlement’s sewage run off has contaminated surrounding Palestinian farmland, and the nearby village of Wadi Fukin has alleged their wells have begun to run dry since Beitar Illit’s establishment. ^[12]  Shoked’s writing, so clear-eyed elsewhere, leans into generalisations when analysing the settlement’s broader geopolitical and environmental effects, and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions.

In the Land of the Patriarchs would have benefited from taking a step back at critical moments to analyse the bigger picture of how the settlements intersect with the larger project of the occupation and Israel’s intensifying right-wing politics. This is particularly evident in the concluding chapter, which focuses on Pnei Kedem, a formerly illegal outpost granted legal status by Israel as the book was going to print in February 2023. After the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the Israeli government officially adopted a policy to freeze construction of new West Bank settlements, but this has been consistently undermined by a new generation of rogue settlers and enabling government officials who have implemented new pathways that provide legal cover for outwardly illegal actions. ^[13]  Shoked lived in Pnei Kedem for ten months, living among settlers who adhere to a new and hardened settler ideology, perhaps best defined as a form of eco-radicalism – he describes a group obsessed with geodesic domes and Earthship biotecture who want to be one with nature and build settlements ‘in harmony with the world’, the disturbing irony of their claims seemingly lost on them. ^[14]  Shoked turns to the impracticalities of this so-called harmonious occupation and their structural failings, perhaps best encapsulated by the settlement’s geodesic dome, decorated with a giant Star of David, still incomplete with a leaky roof and uneven and cracked mud floor.

Builder posing by a wooden geodesic dome, then still under construction, in Pnei Kedem, 2015, photograph by Noam Shoked

The Pnei Kedem settlers would come across as pathetic if their actions were not ultimately so pernicious. In their attempts to return to nature, the settlers often eschew building codes, industrial tools and materials, and the input of planned architects, leading to inadequate design and shoddy construction unfit for habitation. Shoked describes how, as a last resort, one of the founding couples of the settlement ended up hiring Palestinian workers to complete their home in 2008, a violation of their own code to hire ‘Hebrew labour’, a concept carried over from the days of the Yishuv, part of the fantasy of a land without people for a people without land.

More generally, in recent years, worker policies have become less about relying on a Jewish Israeli workforce, but actively erasing Palestinian presence. The American cowboys at Har Brakha were not necessarily replacing Israeli farmhands but migrant workers from Southeast Asia who fled the country after the outbreak of violence on 7 October. The increased reliance on foreign workers to replace what was traditionally Palestinian labour coupled with the state’s increased desire to legalise outposts like Pnei Kedem – and even annex the West Bank altogether – highlights an accelerating process of stratification, separation and containment. Yet the hierarchy Shoked’s book complicates is that between the state and its citizens, often that of an Ashkenazi political elite (including architects and planners) and a poorer settler class, but an exclusive focus on such framing conceals an even starker hierarchy: that between settlers and the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank.

It is a tremendously delicate undertaking to write on the everyday realities of the settlements from the perspective of Israeli settlers without normalising the overall political project of the occupation, and Shoked does succeed in this endeavour. Yet those who want to understand how Palestinians have been impacted by the settlements or shaped their own built environments in the West Bank over the last fifty years will have to look elsewhere. In his opening pages, Shoked argues that writing on such topics would be a separate book and that he, as a Jewish Israeli, may not be the most effective scholar to tell it. He may very well be right; yet without such analysis the book feels incomplete, only half the story told of how power operates ‘on the ground’. Today, it is incumbent on us all to better understand the full range of actors, movements, policies and contestations that together has made the occupied West Bank perhaps the most hotly contested landscape on the planet. Those who want to start to understand how the Israeli settlements took shape can look to Shoked’s book for insight.

Noam Shoked, In the Land of the Patriarchs: Design and Contestation in West Bank Settlements is published by University of Texas Press, Austin, 2023, 400 pp, ISBN 9781477328545

^[1]    See Bethan McKernan, ‘”A new Nakba”: Settler Violence Forces Palestinians out of West Bank Villages’, The Guardian, 31 October 2023 

^[2]    See Brianna Herlihy, ‘Real-life American cowboys ride in to help Israeli farmers under siege after Hamas terror attacks’, Fox News, 13 November 2023 

^[3]    See Allison Kaplan Sommer and Judy Maltz, ‘American Evangelical Cowboys Volunteering for Israel’s War Effort Headed for West Bank Settlements’, Haaretz, 7 November 2023

^[4]    See Barak Ravid, ‘Biden warns US could sanction Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians’, Axios, 18 November 2023

^[5]    The second Oslo Accord in 1995 established what was intended to be a temporary division of the West Bank into three administrative areas, with full jurisdiction to be transferred gradually to the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA). Area A (18 per cent) was to be adminstered by the PA; Area B (22 per cent) by the PA and Israel jointly; and Area C (60 per cent) by Israel. To date, the three Areas remain as in 1995. See ‘What are Areas A, B, and C of the occupied West Bank?’, Al Jazeera, 11 September 2019.

^[6]    Noam Shoked, In the Land of the Patriarchs: Design and Contestation in West Bank Settlements, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2023, p 12

^[7]    Ibid, p viii

^[8]    Ibid, p 73

^[9]    The Green Line refers to the 1949 Armistice line between Israel and Jordan, which served as a border between these two states until 1967. While Israel claimed territory east of the Green Line after the Six-Day War in 1967, this de facto border remains the internationally recognised boundary of the state of Israel.

^[10]    Jennifer Mack, The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2017

^[11]    Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Verso, New York, 2007

^[12]  See Anita De Donato, Justices and Injustices in the Community Water Management in Wadi Fukin, Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, Paris, 2021

^[13]   See Erez Tzafadia, ‘Informal Outposts in the West Bank: Normality in Grey Space’, in Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, Marco Allegra, Ariel Handel and Erez Maggor, eds, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2017, pp 92–111

^[14]   Shoked, In the Land of the Patriarchs, op cit, p 209

Chelsea Haines is an art historian and curator who teaches at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. She writes on histories and theories of museums, exhibitions and the politics of display, with a specialisation in Israel/Palestine. She incorporates into her research and teaching critical studies of citizenship, comparative borderlands, and material and ideological imaginings of land, landscape and environment in modern and contemporary art.