Antagonistic landscapes

On verticality

A week after my stay in Efrat, a Palestinian friend drove me to Wadi an Nis to interview the villagers about their experience living adjacent to an Israeli settlement. However, as we entered the village it became quite evident that Wadi an Nis is located, not adjacent to Efrat but, quite literally, in its shadow. The Palestinian village may have been invisible in the “peaceful views” from Efrat. But the hilltop settlement towers over Wadi an Nis and is nearly inescapable in the views from the valley. We parked our car next to the Abu Bakr As Siddik mosque, the only mosque in the village, and approached two young men who were sitting on the steps outside a house. After exchanging pleasantries, my friend said, “we want to know more about your experience living next to the settlement.” They fell silent. The word “settlement” (or mustawtana in Arabic) had clearly made them nervous and one of them replied hastily, “It’s all fine. No problem.”

At that point another man had arrived on the scene. He pulled us aside and said, “We have to be careful. They can see everything that is happening here from Efrat. They will cause problems if we say too much.”² We decided to leave. But, as we made our way to the car, an elderly man sitting across the road from the house waved us over. He had overheard our conversation with the others and was willing to answer our questions. I asked him if he was concerned about being reprimanded by the Israeli authorities for talking to us. He smiled and said, “I’m too old to care.” I then asked him, “What is the relationship between the people in Wadi an Nis and the settlement.” He replied, “There is no relationship. They stand on top us. They try to control us like this. For them this is their land. We are just random people who live here temporarily.” During my stay in Efrat, my host Ilan confirmed the existence of such a perception of Palestinians among settlers when he said, “I don’t think about the Palestinians down there [in Wadi an Nis]. They want to live here, that’s okay. But they have to remember, us Jews are the owners of this land.”³ The elderly man from Wadi an Nis then continued, “They can think this is all their land. But we know that this is Palestinian land. This is mine. I was born on this land. I grew up on this land. I will die here.”⁴

In a sense, the landscape that makes up (and surrounds) Efrat personifies what some scholars would term a prototypically contested landscape. It is often argued that the identity of a landscape is constructed. That is to say, this identity is not stable, or a given. Instead, it is dynamic, “unfixed” and formed “out of the particular set of social [and political] relations which interact at a particular location” (Massey, 1994: 168). For instance, in Yeoh and Kong’s work on Singapore’s Chinatown, this identity was formed out of the “negotiation of power” between the city’s elite – namely, “planners, architects, administrators, politicians, property owners [and] developers” – and “everyday people” (Yeoh and Kong, 1994: 18). In Vietnam, Sikor writes, it was the encounter between centralized, state-mandated legal understandings of land ownership and a local community’s “lived land relations” that lent itself to the identity of the country’s rural landscape (Sikor, 2004: 75–95). And, in Fairhead and Leach’s description, the identity of the Ziama reserve in Guinea is defined by the relations between conservationists who consider the area to be essential “for the preservation of habitats and biodiversity” and the local population who value the land on the basis of vastly different socioeconomic priorities (Fairhead and Leach, 1994: 482).

As may be apparent above, such social and political relations are, however, often conflict-ridden – not least because they symbolize encounters between very different perceptions of the landscape. So, in places like Efrat and Wadi an Nis, where there are multiple, divergent narratives of to whom the land belongs (Kong and Law, 2002: 1504), the identity of the landscape is not just unfixed and dynamic; it is contested. Of course, the contested-ness of the landscape in Efrat and Wadi an Nis is an outgrowth of the spatial politics of Israel-Palestine in general where the “wider ethnonational tensions” (Yiftachel and Yacobi, 2003: 678) are often reflected in the conflict over land and territory (Gregory, 2004; Joronen, 2019; Shehadeh, 2008). But, does the term “contested” substantially represent the entirety of the spatial politics at play?

Efrat is contested in the sense that there are two distinct sets of narratives that ascribe two divergent identities to the landscape. But the term “contestation” – meaning a “process of disputing” (Stevensen, 2010: 376) – and the expression “contested landscapes” also lead us to visualize a “horizontal” struggle, involving to two (or more) parties, facing each other, combating to materialize the dreams that animate their claims to the landscape. This horizontality does not necessarily ignore the existence of a power differential. Undoubtedly, the power differential was central in the contestation between elite and everyday “ways of seeing” the landscape in Singapore’s Chinatown (Yeoh and Kong, 1994: 18). It was present in the way conservationists ignored the local population’s “social and political relationship” with the Ziama reserve (Fairhead and Leach, 1994: 482–483) as well as in the manner the new land law of 1993 in Vietnam disregarded the rural population’s “lived relations to the land” (Sikor, 2004: 76). And, it is the existent power differential in Israel-Palestine that allows the Israeli military to maintain what Jeff Halper calls a “matrix of control” that helps consolidate and facilitate the Israeli settler presence in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, at the expense of Palestinian communities (Halper, 2008: 141–174). To this end, Mitchell was right to argue that a discussion of power is inevitable in any deliberation of what a landscape is and does as it is often “an instrument of … power, perhaps even an agent of power” (Mitchell, 1994: 1). That said, irrespective of the nature of the power relations at play, the concept of “contested landscapes” serves primarily to indicate that the spatial identity of the place is a subject of a disagreement. The disagreeing parties in Singapore, Guinea, Vietnam and Israel-Palestine may have vastly unequal material resources at their disposal. However, the term “contested” only suggests the existence of overlapping (and conflicting) perceptions of the identity of a landscape.

But what Efrat is and does is about much more than just the existence of overlapping/conflicting claims to the landscape. It is about a certain verticality. And, to this effect, the concept of “antagonistic landscapes” differs from the notion of “contested landscapes”, in the sense that it highlights the existence of a power differential by politicizing the physicality of a place. The dream in Efrat is of a landscape that is devoid of Palestinian existence. With the entire settlement then built facing away from Wadi an Nis, the resultant “peaceful views” (of other nearby settlements) thus simulates a de-Palestinized landscape. This simulation would not have been possible if Wadi an Nis was in the line-of-sight of settlers in Efrat. It is only because Efrat is located on higher ground that, by virtue of its altitude, the Palestinians living in its vicinity naturally descend to the periphery of one’s view and those looking out from the settlement are able to ignore the Palestinian presence. Further, as I have demonstrated earlier, this relegation of Wadi an Nis to the periphery gained some materiality as it gave the curious settler and my host in Efrat the pretence to claim Palestinian non-existence and deny the Palestinian claim to the landscape.

That Efrat’s altitude allows its residents to feign Palestinian non-existence thus highlights the very privilege of inhabiting higher ground. This privilege is evident in Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and, as the author writes, in the “pleasure” of viewing the entirety of New York City from above. He notes that rising to the top of the World Trade Center lifts one “out of the city’s grasp.” And, being able to escape the “rumble” and “nervousness” of life in New York City in this way, made the urban landscape comprehendible. Thus, de Creteau concludes, higher ground “allows one to read it [i.e. the city], to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god” (de Certeau, 1984: 94). Similarly, Kenneth Olwig notes that higher ground lets us “overlook” the middle ground that lies below. That is to say, the “elevated position” empowers one to focus on the horizon and “the scenic space.” This in turn “provides a powerfully transcendent and sublime experience of the world” unencumbered by the complexities of the middle ground (Olwig, 2018: 9).

In this sense, Wadi an Nis is the middle ground that complicates (and challenges) the settler presence and the elevated position of Efrat helps overlook this complexity. Though, I would argue that there is a certain specificity of the antagonistic landscape, not least by way of the antagonism of its altitude. The term “antagonistic” means active opposition or hostility towards something (Stevensen, 2010: 65). And, Efrat’s active opposition and hostility towards Palestinians is visible in the way its altitude privileges a view that overlooks the undesirable presence (of Wadi an Nis) in the landscape. But this manner of overlooking the middle ground is not done simply in favour of a transcendent and sublime view of the world. Efrat purposefully overlooks Wadi an Nis in order to direct the gaze of those looking out on a much more “benign” presence – namely, the other settlements located in its vicinity. Further, the hope is that this way of overlooking Palestinians would eventually materialize in the actual de-Palestinization of the landscape. The extent to which this antagonistic landscape is able to realize the dream of Palestinian non-existence is a matter I will discuss later in this article. However, the distinguishing feature of the antagonistic landscape is that the urge to antagonize, not least by means of a privileged inhabitation of (and views from) higher ground, is its primary purpose.

The narrratives of the antagonized

To ascribe a certain antagonism to the landscape in Efrat and the HUJI campus on Mount Scopus due to their altitude, may seem like the attribution of politics into what is, in essence, a natural landscape. After all, the altitudinal dominance of Efrat and Mount Scopus over Wadi an Nis and Issawiya respectively is a consequence of their natural, and not built, characteristics. But, W.J.T. Mitchell, in his nine “theses on landscape,” reminds us that “Like money, landscape is a social hieroglyph that conceals the actual basis of its value. It does so by naturalizing its conventions and conventionalizing its nature” (Mitchell, 1994: 5). So, there is nothing natural about natural landscapes. For example, the declared goal of the Virgin Islands National Park on St. John, established “under the auspices of the United States Park Service,” was to preserve a “natural” landscape (Olwig, 1980: 22). However, there was very little that was natural about this landscape because what existed before its establishment was a cultural landscape that “did not fit the American perception of a national park.” And when this cultural landscape was erased, it was replaced by a landscape, “created” by an American governmental agency, that was far more in keeping with “foreign perceptions of what constitutes a ‘natural’ landscape” rather than local perceptions of the same (Olwig, 1980: 29). Of course, the first American national park, Yellowstone, was not natural either. It was established on “the traditional buffalo hunting grounds of various” Native American communities. Approximately “4 million buffaloes were killed” and the indigenous population was “refused permission to remain in the area” in order to make way for the Yellowstone National Park and keep up the illusion of its “natural beauty” (Olwig and Olwig, 1979: 2). For this reason, Kenneth Olwig terms the notion of a “natural landscape” a “sleight of hand” that masks the deeply “constructed” nature of the identity that the presumed natural landscape embodies and communicates (Olwig, 2008: 74). Don Mitchell similarly argues that a landscape is hardly an “unwitting biography,” as was once argued by Peirce K Lewis (1979) in his “Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene.” It is instead “produced,” “actively made,” “an act of will” and results from a “physical intervention into the world” (Mitchell, 2008: 34).

There is nothing natural about Efrat and Mount Scopus’s altitudinal dominance either. In fact, the very act of establishing the settlement and the university campus on higher ground ensured that their altitude became an act of will representing a conscious physical intervention, steeped in the broader politics of Israel-Palestine. In the “story” of antagonistic landscapes I relay in this article, I am however less focused on the extent to which such landscapes are acts of will. Instead, I am more concerned with who has the privilege or power to make a physical intervention in the world. To this end, my conception of how an antagonistic landscape functions confirms Don Mitchell’s assertion that a landscape “is an expression of power” and “determines what can and cannot be done” (Mitchell, 2008: 43). Efrat and Mount Scopus are also expressions of power, as is exemplified by their de-Palestinized views of the landscape. Moreover, in the way they materially and figuratively tower over Wadi an Nis and Issawiya, and allow those looking out from higher ground to simply overlook the Palestinian communities, such landscapes also seem to set the parameters for what Palestinians can and cannot do. Such expressions of power then expectedly antagonize Palestinians.

Except, does the feeling of antagonism constitute the entirety of their spatial experience of the antagonistic landscape? Is there no respite for the antagonized? Shelley Egoz argues that a landscape “is an existential component of humans and [therefore] is something that cannot be taken away from them” (Egoz, 2010: 26). At the outset, my Palestinian interlocuters seemed to acknowledge that the landscape they called their own had been taken away from them, at least materially. The elderly villager in Wadi an Nis claimed that the settlers in Efrat controlled the lives of Palestinians in the valley. The Palestinian students at HUJI said they felt alienated by the Israeli-ness of the university campus. Sara also revealed that she could not escape the campus’ domineering presence in the views from her home in Issawiya. Nonetheless, they also insisted that the landscape remained an existential facet of their being as Palestinians. The villager in Wadi an Nis, for instance, noted that while the settlers would claim that the landscape of (and around) Efrat is theirs, the land is in fact Palestinian. He then insisted that he would die on the land of his birth and upbringing. In the same way, Sara said,

It is of course not easy to be from Issawiya and to be a student here. They have taken our land and the university is built on stolen Palestinian land. But they can say whatever they want. I know and all Palestinians know this is Palestine. They can put up flags, have checkpoints that make our lives more difficult. But whether I am in Issawiya or up on Mount Scopus I don’t deal with the Israel symbols. I ignore them and say to myself that they have to have all these flags and nationalist symbols, make an Israeli show, because they are also aware that this is Palestinian land. They know that they have stolen this land and now have to convince everyone this is Israeli. Thinking like this makes me calm, normalizes things and I can survive this place as a Palestinian.¹⁶

It may of course be instinctive for those living in the shadow of antagonistic landscapes to try and conjure an unoccupied space of normality. But there is also a fundamental fallacy in the manner in which an antagonistic landscape communicates, and strives to materialize, a dream – a fallacy that in turn allows the antagonized to prevail. As I have mentioned earlier, landscapes in general are the product of dreams. Brasilia, for instance, was designed and built as the modern national capital of Brazil in order to fulfil the dream of civilizing the indigenous population of the Central Plateau, which would then allow the political elite to establish its sovereignty over the territorial interiors (Holston, 1989: 17). Dholera, a proposed “smart city” in the western state of Gujarat in India, was conceived out of the postcolonial dream of modernization and development. It mirrors other “master-planned” Indian cities like Chandigarh, Bhubaneshwar, Cuttack, and Gandhinagar, and shares the dream of breaking with India’s colonial legacy while embodying postcolonial India’s “attempt to fashion a new society and economy” (Datta, 2015: 7). Finally, be it the imposition of Turkish nationalist iconography into the urban landscape of Kurdish majority Turkish cities or the words of Kemal Atatürk, “Ne mutlu Türküm diyene [How happy is the one who says I am Turkish], carved onto the hills of Turkish Kurdistan by the Turkish military – they are driven by the nationalist dream of a state where (Kurdish) citizens identify themselves as Turks and not as Kurds (Houston, 2005; Ozsoy, 2013).

So, it is not unusual that the landscape in (and around) Efrat and Mount Scopus are also animated by dreams. Their antagonism, however, comes to the fore in the manner in which these dreams are premised on Palestinian absence. Further, they aim to materialize this dream (of Palestinian absence) through their verticality that eliminates Palestinians from the views of the landscape. The problem, however, is that since Efrat and HUJI on Mount Scopus are animated by utopian dreams, they are frequently unable to entirely eliminate what already exists and instead make use of what they aim to replace. This fallacy was present, for example, in the making of Brasilia. The patrons of a Brazilianized Brasilia designed the new capital city in a way that symbolized the Central Plateau’s break from Brazil’s indigenous past. However, the process of making the new Brasilia and civilizing the people of the Central Plateau faced a paradox as the “planning instruments” had to utilize what already existed. This not only reproduced the Central Plateau’s indigeneity that the new modern capital city hoped to eliminate, but also effaced the premise that necessitated the making of a new Brasilia – one that centred on differentiating between the “civilized” utopia and the “uncivilized” that it aimed to replace. It was this inherent paradox that then allowed those antagonized by the dream (and constituent landscape) of the new Brasilia to reassert the sociocultural norms and values that the patrons of the new national capital considered undesirable (Holston, 1989: 289–290).

Dholera in Gujarat also makes use of all that it aims to replace because it is a place that already exists. What exists may not abide by the vision of a new India. But an “unmodern,” “undeveloped” village with the same name exists in the vicinity of the proposed smart city. It, along with twenty-one other villages, are then meant to constitute the new Dholera (Datta, 2015: 11). This means that while the smart city premises itself as a utopian construct synonymous with the modern, developed, and postcolonial India, it is hardly “planned on terra nullius” (Jazeel, 2015: 28). It instead makes use of what exists – not least, in terms of the land that has been forcefully taken from farmers (Bennett, 2016). The new Dholera has yet to come to fruition. But it is likely that the smart city will share the destiny of other planned cities in India and only reproduce the urban maladies of the country’s past that it was meant to replace.

This problematique was also evident at the HUJI campus and in Efrat. On Mount Scopus, one could argue, the presence of Palestinian contracted workers and an ever-growing Palestinian study body are all reminders that HUJI also makes use of what it aims to replace. Yet, the insistent manner in which the campus, from higher ground, attempts to curate views of the landscape in which Palestinians are absent also reveals a certain insecurity. The Mount Scopus campus may display an Israeli-ness. But, be it the donors who insisted that one must enjoy the views of the Judean desert from the Mandel School, the floor-to-ceiling windows at the school that ensure that Issawiya is in the periphery of one’s view or the Israeli student who said that in the dark the Palestinian village disappears from the view from the Mandel School – they all exhibit an anxiety about being able to see Palestinians. As if, it is feared, being able to see Palestinians would undermine the very premise of the dream that the campus is meant to communicate and materialize. Further, this also reveals that on Mount Scopus there was a certain awareness that what was meant to be eliminated persists and, while views from higher ground allow one to feign their absence, Palestinians remained a constituent element of the new landscape. In Efrat, the settler revealed that the views from the settlement feigned peace. To this end, Efrat is designed and planned in a way that ensures that all its structures look away from the Palestinian community in its vicinity. This de-Palestinizes the view of the landscape. But, like on Mount Scopus, the insistent manner in which the settlement looks away also displays both an anxiety that being able to see Palestinians would undermine the illusion of peace as well as an awareness that while Palestinian presence was supposed to be erased, they remained an integral facet of the landscape. After all, the settler in Efrat displayed this awareness when she said, ‘This place is not peaceful. We have Arabs here. But you can’t see them from here. We like to maintain peaceful views.”

In the end, as I have argued earlier, the antagonized (and occupied) may instinctively strive to conjure an unoccupied space while living in the shadows of the antagonistic landscapes. However, such landscapes’ above-described inability to materialize utopian dreams ensures that the stories they communicate reflect not just the narratives authored by those who have the power and resources to make a physical intervention in the world. They also communicate the stories of the antagonized. This may be unintended. After all, by looking away from Wadi an Nis or by creating a view in which Issawiya to the periphery, these landscapes are in fact trying not to communicate the narratives of the antagonized. However, their inherent inability to efface the neighbouring Palestinian communities ensures that antagonistic landscapes (albeit, inadvertently) relay the narratives of both the antagonistic and the antagonized.

Conclusion

While writing about the Pueblo Indian communities, John Brinckerhoff Jackson suggests that the vernacular landscapes these communities call their own can be difficult to view, seeing as the “symbols of [European] permanent power” have consolidated their presence over them. Yet, in the shadow of these symbols of power remain “thousands of small and impoverished vernacular landscapes, organizing and using spaces in their traditional way and living in communities governed by custom, held together by personal relationships.” In this sense, Jackson concludes, a landscape tells a multi-dimensional story that includes the narratives, not just of those who own it, but also of those seemingly eclipsed by the symbols of political power that have been installed by the new owners (Jackson, 1984: 150).

Such a line of inquiry is equally pertinent to an antagonistic landscape. In this article I have characterized the landscapes of (and around) Efrat and HUJI on Mount Scopus as prototypical examples of antagonistic landscapes. For onething, being placed on higher ground, allows them to feign the absence of Palestinians in the landscape – a landscape that, for Palestinians, is integral to the aspired-for Palestinian national territorial homeland. This attempt to efface them from the land naturally antagonizes Palestinians who live in the shadows of the antagonistic landscapes. But, the absence of Palestinians is, after all, a utopian dream. And, my Palestinian interlocutors insisted that the landscape, while materially taken away, remains an integral facet of their existential being as Palestinians. As a consequence, being unable to efface the antagonized ensures that an antagonistic landscape communicates not just the narrative (and dreams) of those that antagonize. It also relays the narratives of the antagonized.

There is of course a particularity of the politics of Israel-Palestine that lead Efrat and Mount Scopus to be antagonistic in the manner that I have described in this article. Specifically, the settler colonial ideological basis for the establishment of the State of Israel, that is premised on the erasure of the indigenous, encourages a spatial politics that aims to materialize the settler’s dream of the indigene’s non-existent. So, as an outcome of this ideology, it is not surprising that the altitudinal dominance of Mount Scopus and Efrat over Palestinian communities in the vicinity is a common feature of most Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. But, by characterizing antagonistic landscapes in this article in view their physicality, rather than the underlying political ideology, also allows for the concept to be applicable across political contexts. Just as Israeli settlements antagonize Palestinian communities in their vicinity on the basis of their altitude, a similar “story” of antagonistic landscapes could be relayed through say the landscapes of Kurdish-majority Turkish cities where, as I have mentioned earlier, the Turkish state has imposed nationalist iconography that claim the non-existence of Kurdish nationhood. With the iconography often placed higher ground (high buildings and hills), the concept of “antagonistic landscapes” can then be instructive in better understanding both how such landscapes’ verticality antagonizes Turkey’s Kurdish population and the way the antagonized contend the with antagonistic message of the landscape that towers over them.

Antagonistic landscapes, as a conceptual framework, can also be applicable to urban renewal initiatives in India. The proliferation of high-rises and overpasses serve an upwardly mobile urban economic class. But what is the effect of inhabiting higher ground? What kind of view of the landscape does altitude privilege and allow one to overlook? And, how does the altitudinal dominance of this landscape effect (and antagonize) the urban poor who are often excluded from inhabiting higher ground? Of course, by arguing for the wide applicability of the concept my intention here is not to undermine the particular historical, political and socioeconomic contexts that shape such landscapes. However, its applicability across such contexts does nonetheless reveal the manner in which the physicality of landscapes can be animated and consequently politicized by dreams. The landscape may be tasked to communicate and materialize the dream of development, the dream of modernization, the dream of a homogeneous nation, or simply the dream of an unimpeded claim to a divinely ordained homeland. But, irrespective of the particular nature of a dream, the concept “antagonistic landscapes” provides a scope for exploring its violence as it acknowledges that what may be a dream for some can also antagonize others.