JOE HALL

It’s the Israeli military! Particularly this guy:

Shimon Naveh (also known as Foucault on Steroids). In “Walking through walls: Soldiers as architects in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Eyal Weizman documents the developing tactic of employing “inverse geometry” in urban warfare. This basically means that instead of following the routes made possible by the existing infrastructure, the Israeli military has been creating their own paths through existing structures.

“Soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys and courtyards that make up the order of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows that make up the order of the building, but moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted through ceilings and floors” (2).

The destruction of civilian property this implies is immense. During operations, civilians have died after being locked in rooms of their own cut-through homes for days (3).

The Israeli military adopted this strategy after boning up on much of the theory that circulates through the blood of uber-liberal PhD programs. Here’s super-Foucault on Deleuze and Guattari: “Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space….In [the Israeli Defense Force] we now often use the term ‘to smoothen out space’ when we want to refer to an operation in a space as if it had no borders. We try to produce the operational space in such a manner that borders do not affect us” (3). Roid-Fouc ends with: “What we need is not to be there–but…to act there” (4).

Let’s circle back to ZDT. I think it brings to light the growing conviction of our own military/security apparatus in this axiom. What is important is not the occupation of a striated space so clearly represented as impossible to manage in Hurt Locker–but simply the tactical ability to locate anyone anywhere and kill them. It is critical to note that operations done via “fractal maneuvers” along routes defined by “inverse geometrical principles” are often hidden from sight. The military appropriates for itself private spaces to conduct its business. In its production of a totally smooth theater of operations, it also becomes invisible.

If ultimately the goal of the IDF in creating or creating the capacity to create smooth operational spaces is to enable the end of a physical occupation of Palestinian territory, is this really the end of “occupation”? Or is the threat of having one’s home punctured and one’s self locked in the bathroom for three days a different kind of occupation, one still in violation of basic human rights? Is it possible that in representing an “end” in the War on Terror that is concurrent with American troop withdrawals in Afghanistan, ZDT also marks the beginning of new, subtler kind of occupation of Pakistan and its border areas? And how do those huge drilling machines in the 90’s Total Recall fit into this?