Postmodernism and new generation urban warfare

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, 03 February 2007 11:27.

I am indebted to Troy Southgate’s New Right Forum where a member has posted a fascinating commentary on the IDF’s new methods of urban warfare.  The Israelis have applied a postmodernist archetectural analysis to the problem of combatting an urban guerilla force.  The result, complete with all the familiar postmodern linguistics, is the (literally) devastating concept of fighting under and through a dense architectural battlefield.

It is an astounding and disturbing commentary on semitic analysis, and on the - one imagines - extraordinary Ashkenazic capacity to invent new modes of attack.

The Art of War

The Israeli Defence Forces have been heavily influenced by contemporary philosophy, highlighting the fact that there is considerable overlap among theoretical texts deemed essential by military academies and architectural schools by Eyal Weizman
The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as ‘inverse geometry’, which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’.1 During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of ‘overground tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

Contemporary military theorists are now busy re-conceptualizing the urban domain. At stake are the underlying concepts, assumptions and principles that determine military strategies and tactics. The vast intellectual field that geographer Stephen Graham has called an international ‘shadow world’ of military urban research institutes and training centres that have been established to rethink military operations in cities could be understood as somewhat similar to the international matrix of élite architectural academies. However, according to urban theorist Simon Marvin, the military-architectural ‘shadow world’ is currently generating more intense and well-funded urban research programmes than all these university programmes put together, and is certainly aware of the avant-garde urban research conducted in architectural institutions, especially as regards Third World and African cities. There is a considerable overlap among the theoretical texts considered essential by military academies and architectural schools. Indeed, the reading lists of contemporary military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord), as well as more contemporary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory. If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered away in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a place to flourish in the military.

I conducted an interview with Kokhavi, commander of the Paratrooper Brigade, who at 42 is considered one of the most promising young officers of the IDF (and was the commander of the operation for the evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip).2 Like many career officers, he had taken time out from the military to earn a university degree; although he originally intended to study architecture, he ended up with a degree in philosophy from the Hebrew University. When he explained to me the principle that guided the battle in Nablus, what was interesting for me was not so much the description of the action itself as the way he conceived its articulation. He said: ‘this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. […] The question is how do you interpret the alley? […] We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. […] I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win […] This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls. . . . Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. […] I said to my troops, “Friends! […] If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!”’2 Kokhavi’s intention in the battle was to enter the city in order to kill members of the Palestinian resistance and then get out. The horrific frankness of these objectives, as recounted to me by Shimon Naveh, Kokhavi’s instructor, is part of a general Israeli policy that seeks to disrupt Palestinian resistance on political as well as military levels through targeted assassinations from both air and ground.

If you still believe, as the IDF would like you to, that moving through walls is a relatively gentle form of warfare, the following description of the sequence of events might change your mind. To begin with, soldiers assemble behind the wall and then, using explosives, drills or hammers, they break a hole large enough to pass through. Stun grenades are then sometimes thrown, or a few random shots fired into what is usually a private living-room occupied by unsuspecting civilians. When the soldiers have passed through the wall, the occupants are locked inside one of the rooms, where they are made to remain – sometimes for several days – until the operation is concluded, often without water, toilet, food or medicine. Civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, have experienced the unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation. A Palestinian woman identified only as Aisha, interviewed by a journalist for the Palestine Monitor, described the experience: ‘Imagine it – you’re sitting in your living-room, which you know so well; this is the room where the family watches television together after the evening meal, and suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if they’re after you, if they’ve come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else. The children are screaming, panicking. Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, 12 soldiers, their faces painted black, sub-machine-guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall?’

Read the whole article here.



Comments:


1

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 03 Feb 2007 16:52 | #

I think the real barrier here isn’t intellectual but moral.  Would they be as quick to “walk through walls” if they were in West Palm Beach?  What this really does is morally unencumber those who might fight an urban war—for example someone who might want to fight a war in West Palm Beach.


2

Posted by expat on Sat, 03 Feb 2007 22:29 | #

“Moving through walls”. I recall reading an account of the Battle of Budapest in WW2; this was the way much of the battle was fought.


3

Posted by Tim on Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:07 | #

“Civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, have experienced the unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation”

They forgot to mention whites in the US.  If not in literal, then in figurative terms.  The actual combat had begun (think the LA riots and the Knoxville rape and murders), but whites, for a variety of reasons, have not struck back yet. 

In any event, this will be the way racial war is fought in the cities of the future “United States”.  The IDF is very good at this sort of thing.  Why not learn something?


4

Posted by Calvin on Tue, 06 Feb 2007 16:22 | #

I agree with Tim. Iraq proves that the West have failed to keep abreast of the shifting modalities of warfare. Terrorists are using civilian populations as a protective screen. The civilian population aid and abet national armies in the urban environment and constitute a major obstacle to an attacking force. In less squeamish days the civilian population were just incinerated with phosphorous bombs. The WarNerd is good on this sort of thing.


5

Posted by Tim on Tue, 06 Feb 2007 18:54 | #

We are not fighting an army, but peoples/cultures/religions/races.  White westerners however are not allowed to think this way.  Too bad everybody else does.  The jihadists don’t talk of defeating the US Army, but infidels.  Blacks and hispanics are not fighting the system, they are fighting Whites and in many cases the system seems to aid them. They say this all the time,  just listen to Farrakhan and La Raza.  However, for a variety of reasons, these calls for the destruction of Europeans goes unheard, except by those that are doing the actual fighting.  Walk through a muslim neighborhood in France.  I have.  I was dry sniped by everyone.  They would have cut my throat if they could.  American ghettos are a close second.  Look at the crime and violence directed at whites.  Assymetrical war has been waged on us for years.  As a last note, we could end the war in Iraq in a week if we were willing to be as ruthless as our enemy.  Just read up on the war against Japan.  Flamethrowers were the order of the day.  But we want to be nice and not get bad press, God forbid.  We have the tools and men to do it. All that is lacking is the will.  Whites had better get used to this assymetrical warfare.  It is in our future and will be on our doorsteps.


6

Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:38 | #

Noon, central time, April 15 followed by noon, central time, April 19.

No need to blockade routes of egress from the cities.  Traffic jams are what the “elites” want—- they can have them—while the “people of color” are cooking them up as long pig.



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