Between lemons and walls

There is a new aesthetics of violence being built and consolidated. 

War has abandoned the public space of the streets and has crept surreptitiously into home. The walls are not enough to guarantee the division line between what is inside and outside. That is to say, the idea of a shelter, a refuge, has become a banned word in Palestine. While ethnic bioweapons may be dangerously being considered as a valid strategy in the worldwide warfare, methods are right now employed in Palestine to implode the frontiers between household space and street. One can raid an orchard of trees. One can walk through walls.

Whole families may be identified in the privacy of their living room, silently surveilled and finally targeted by means of ultrasonic equipments. The heat, clear signal of living, is also the whistleblower. Breathing is the new sin, the path to damnation.

I cannot avoid remembering a famous statement by Edward Said when mentioning a plum loading being left to rot in Gaza: "they want to kill us as cockroaches".

Everybody should read the paper written by Eyal Weizman in which he courageously reveals the techniques (and, why not say, the philosophy) applied by Israeli Army when raiding Palestian territory. Changing the scenery of the war is the new procedure. The unbelievable war scenery is now the private space of the Palestinian houses: the roofs and the walls.

Let us pay attention to the Aviv Kochavi's words during an interview to Eyal Weizman:

 “This is why that we opted for the methodology of walking through walls. […] Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. We were thus moving from the interior of homes to their exterior in a surprising manner and in places we were not expected, arriving from behind and hitting the enemy that awaited us behind a corner. […] I said to my troops, “Friends! This is not a matter of your choice! There is no other way of moving! If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!” (go to the link)

There is something else that Weizman's papers teach us. They make us think that some  interesting readings, concepts and authors may be harmfully distorted. At this time, Deleuze was the choice.

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I heartily recommend the following readings:

Weizman, Eyal. Guerra Urbana: Passar através das paredes. 

Weizman, Eyal. Walking through Walls. Available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/weizman/en

The current project carried out by Weizman is relative to the aesthetic of Forensic Architecture. The project can be viewed at: http://www.forensic-architecture.org/project/ 

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