Crimes of Space | Granta
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rana dasgupta: I’d like to begin by talking about the shape of the border, which conventionally appears as a line.
Because of its particular conception of threat – external and internal – Israel has made a disproportionate contribution to state theories of defence and segregation. In Hollow Land (2007), your account of the military, bureaucratic and architectural systems with which the Israeli state organises territories and peoples, you identify a remarkable moment in its evolving conception of ‘border’. You describe the debate surrounding the Bar Lev Line: a chain of fortifications constructed by Israel along the Suez Canal after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. The Bar Lev Line was supposed to be impregnable, but during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 it was breached in two hours by the Egyptian army.
This defensive disaster enhanced the influence of Ariel Sharon, principal critic of the Bar Lev Line, who had dismissed it as the Israeli ‘Maginot Line’ – referring to the vast defensive barrier built by France in the 1930s to protect against German invasion. Sharon argued that the border should be thought of not as a line but as a network extending deep into Israeli territory. You summarise his reasoning thus:
If the principle of linear defence is to prohibit (or inhibit) the enemy from gaining a foothold beyond it, when the line is breached at a single location – much like a leaking bucket of water – it is rendered useless. A network defence, on the other hand, is flexible. If one or more of its strongpoints is attacked and captured, the system can adapt itself by forming new connections across its depth.