THE HIDDEN INFRASTRUCTURE OF ISRAEL'S OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE, FROM THE FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

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, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel’s mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which all natural and built 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 and airborne targeted assassinations.

In exploring Israel’s methods to transform the landscape and the built environment themselves into tools of domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

"The most astonishing book on architecture that I have read in years." - Financial Times

"A masterpiece of political analysis." - The Nation

"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." - Independent

"Weizman takes his readers on a tour of the visible and invisible ways in which Israel implements its control over Palestinians ... Hollow Land is eloquent about the architectural chaos and confusion created by Israel in the Occupied Territories." - London Review of Books

"A passionate jeremiad." - Harper’s

"The author examines the construction of Israel's militarized settlement enterprise from the perspective of urban planning, positing that the displacement of Palestinians has been engineered from a spatial perspective..Weizman is well positioned to carry out such an investigation. He is an Israeli architect and professor of spatial and visual cultures, and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Weizman is also a Princeton Global Scholar. In the decade since his book came out, Weizmann established the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) in Beit Sahour, Palestine.The establishment of DAAR and its success highlight the tremendous impact Weizmann's work has had since its release. Hollow Land builds upon increasing attentiveness to urban space and architecture in the social sciences, and its release is to an extent responsible for tremendous growth in this field of study." - Journal of Palestinian Studies