A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture

Edited by Eyal Segal and Rafi Weizman. Verso/Babe, 191 pages, $20.

According to Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture contributor Zvi Efrat, Israel represents one of the most "controlled and efficient architectural experiments of the modern era," on par with Stalin's Five-Year Plan for the USSR and the infrastructural and public work projects undertaken during FDR's New Deal. Say what? As any visitor to the country will tell you, Israeli architecture is anything but striking. Nineteen-thirties Bauhaus structures sit alongside red-tiled stucco homes and apartment buildings not too dissimilar from new housing developments in Italy, France, or the Costa del Sol. If it weren't for suicide bombings and the presence of armed soldiers everywhere, visitors to the country might think they were somewhere in southern Europe, not the Middle East.

As the contributors to Eyal Segal and Rafi Weizman's collection would have you understand, it's not the Mediterranean anonymity of Israeli architecture that's important but the spacial narrative of colonization and occupation that it represents. Though pitched as a book intended to explain the political function of Israeli architecture – assembled by architects themselves – it's also an unveiling of the tradition of civil and urban planning that's always been a part of the Zionist program, equally critical of its effects on both Arabs and Israelis.

With the aid of maps, landscape and aerial photographs, documentary film stills, urban planning documents, and an interview with an architect responsible for designing the iconographic settlements of Maaleh Adumim and Emmanuel, A Civilian Occupation is comparable to a well-put-together audiovisual installation in addition to being a terrific collection of political essays. Sometimes the translation from the Hebrew is a bit wooden and the postmodernist jargon a bit obtuse. But with such a good bad trip of a book like this, easily overlooked. An essential addition to the literature of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Joel Schalit