Well, good afternoon and welcome, everybody, to a delayed beginning of this terms.
It was study seven. A serious uh.
It's an honour and delight to present to you our speaker today, Dr. Muriel Ram,
a political and cultural geographer, currently a postdoctoral researcher at Suez.
Uh, Mariel's main research interest lies in exploring how matter matters in unstable environments, among other issues.
He has written on the militarisation of natural resources in contested territories in the Middle East,
in the Mediterranean, the infrastructure of faith and religion.
In Israel's contested urban environments.
The interaction between human lives and medical equipment in the development of clinical aid to African states and the representation
of dead matter in popular culture through the figure of the zombie and the title of his talk today is A Tale of Sand and Snow,
The Berlin, the Bar-Lev Line and the one ski site as material fantasies.
Well, we thank you for coming. Thank you. So I'm happy to talk about zombies, but it will have to wait till the end of this lecture.
Thank you so much for this opportunity. I'm really excited to be here.
I hope you can hear me. Yeah.
So I'm apologising for the I'm apologising to the microphone that I need to stand up because usually it helps me during the presentation.
And basically I will try to talk comfortable, to talk loud.
But I also want to look at this seminar as an opportunity to think outloud in a
way I do to to present to you a project I've been working on for the last year,
which is kind of like a convergence point between what I've been working on before during my Ph.D. in a sense, and what I'm trying to do now.
So my term basically looks at discusses what I call the fragile, fragile nature of geopolitical fantasies.
I want to talk about it through the relation between space thinking and placemaking
and the spaces being taken and the places being made are these two places,
which I'm sure you heard about the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.
I will just briefly refresh my memory memory about those two spaces.
Both of them were occupied by Israel in the 1967 war.
The Golan Heights is an elevated plateau located between Israel, Syria and Jordan,
approximately 1500 square kilometres of territory, 400 metres above sea level.
And the Sinai Peninsula, which is three times larger than Israel, belong to, once under Egyptian territorial sovereignty.
And Israel occupied it in 1967 and 1967 and relinquished it eventually in 1982,
I think was the last the last Israeli soldier, civilian who was there with the month of the myth.
So what's what I was interested about?
What was important to me about these two territories was, first of all,
their relation to two main bodies of knowledge relating to Israel, Israel, Palestine and the literature about the conflict.
The first body of knowledge, I like to call it occupation studies.
So I usually start when I talk about this body of knowledge,
I use this the Israeli line of the this radical and the controlling officer asked occupation, and the Israeli answer is no, just for.
And I was when I started, when we moved into London and we got start to get letters and they always started with their occupiers.
And I told my wife they may be critical, but they are polite.
How do they know that Israelis are living here? Because occupation, conceptually speaking, is a moment both of interruption,
but a moment of interpretation or different meaning of how to understand space, how to understand politics,
of controlling space in this case, not just only as a vocation in space,
but a control of space and within the bodies of knowledge dealing with occupation in the context of Israel or Israel Palestine.
It is there. It is either from the perception of the politics by a political perspective.
If you look at the work of Neve Gordon or the work of Yaron Bada or or from the perspective of geopolitical authority,
theological tendencies toward this territory,
if you look at the work of mankind figure and we get on a lot all from the or from the kind of like what I
call a West West Bank centric in the sense that it mainly deals with Israel settlements in the West Bank.
If you look kind of like the very important work being written by people,
it gets ongoing been Akiva Eldar and in the title or of the last was from from here.
So most of the work of the occupation studies dealing either with these three three
layers three branches by politics in the sense of governance governance of lives.
Most of the Palestinians in the West Bank, the theological discussion about the return, the promised land,
the biblical scripture, the tension between Israel, secular identity to its religious one and so forth.
And I'm being simplistic here, but kind of like if I tried to draw up a picture and most of them deal with the West Bank with some of the work,
kind of like looking at the Gaza Strip, but not to me.
Israel, it's been it's it is lumped together with the West Bank, the Gaza Strip.
But less work is made in regard to the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula,
not just let's leave the Sinai Peninsula for a moment on the sudden return to there.
But in relation to the Golan Heights, it's quite an interesting place.
In a sense, it has quite literally a paradoxical nature, kind of like this one of the central areas of the conflict in the Middle East,
which is constantly being imagined or offered or envisioned as kind of like a Europe.
In a sense, as you see this this invitation mostly to Israel is the context.
This this is the transition, the Goran the most Europe ever gets.
This winter you are going for a European holiday. They leave the passport at home.
The Golan is filled with wildflower and silence, Israeli silence without any disturbing disturbances.
And it is kind of like bucolic landscape in a sense,
which relates to the way in which the alternative was occupied and the danger of the landscape in which you have the common mountain,
which I'm going to talk about a bit, and the whole landscape which is crisscrossed by anti-tank trenches and bunkers.
Some of them are used as coffee places and minefields and so on and so on.
And what is interesting, this paradoxical nature, is the very materiality which enables this process or this act of imagination.
In this case, the materiality of snow, which imagines to be visionary, discussed the Golan as the most Europe as a place in Israel can get.
Moving on to the Sinai is what is interesting about the sun.
This is the silence, the literature of the sounds in the literature about the period in which Israel control the Sinai Peninsula.
Rondon was dead a short time. Nevertheless, Israel controlled the territory three times its size,
a place in which two of the most devastating conflict in Israel historically took place.
The war of attrition, which is usually not really brought up in the public discourse,
and the October war, which started in the sun and usually is discussed as a watershed moment in Israeli.
Historiography. Nevertheless, when you are talking about the literature dealing with what I call occupation studies.
There's not much about this process, this period,
even though I think we can we can think beyond the sign to see how the process of control of thinking
about the space there of of the of the of the occupation of the Sunna can tell us some things about.
So as I said, space station and placemaking in a sense,
and I just brought up this movie when movie a multiple of 1984, which was actually made inside Israel.
This is in the sense of least on film, but in a sense was one of the one of the few few movies or texts in a sense literary,
academic text that dealt with the Sinai as a space and Israel's presence there.
And this leads me, in a way, to the to the second body of knowledge of the first was occupation studies.
As I said, the second body of knowledge I'm interested in is the the material.
What I what is usually discussed in relation to what is called the social sciences, the material.
So what is the material? The academics like to talk and turn every now and then.
That's kind of like the paradigmatic shift in the when to understand and talk about social science.
So we have the discursive thought in a sense when people start to look more carefully at text and deconstruct them following the time.
And you have a special term following the federal and this subtle David Harvey,
which we start to think more seriously about how space is not a given but a construct,
something which is being constantly made through political relations, through cultural narratives.
And the material turn kind of like dovetails it in the way in which it urges us to think about the very
objects and items and the things that we use and the one which then themselves emanate all kind of powerful.
There are not only silent objects but have political agency of themselves.
So you can find a lot of so you find a lot of material dealing with things like barbed wire,
tear gas, aluminium, concrete, they're rubble, what waste and more.
All of these topics were dealt by different kind of academics trying to see, to understand how these objects has a narrative of their own,
have a presence of their own, have an agency of their own,
and not necessarily simply elements that reflect human action, but elements that shape it in a way.
So what I'm interested here is to think about how elements in this get elements of the environment also operate as agents of power, also change.
Political relations also impact the way in which we understand politics.
And I want to do is to thinking about two such elements, the snow in the case of the Golan Heights and the sand in the gas of the sun.
So if if if you want to think about something which, of course, has much more conspicuous presence in Israel, then we can look at, for example,
the unification schemes which started form the form the moment actually from when Britain started to enter
Israel Palestine a sense and the dual fixation scheme was the way not only to think about the role of,
of the environment and the politics of an environment, but also the elements of the environment which either enables or hinder the possibility of
transformation of political transformation of the territorial units known as mandatory Palestine.
So this is part of the unification scheme which was developed and and was conceived by British colonial officers.
And there's this kind of like reflection about the urgency of dealing with sand,
which might serve as a possible hindrance to the development of the country.
So this is like a reflection of one of the officers at the end of the recommendation of whether or not to develop the scheme,
basically dealing with controlling sand. That would end as I began by saying that the thing in the highest degree important
that the scheme broadly on these lines should be instituted without delay.
The appropriation of Palestine is increasing immensely fast and we are constantly urged to cram more and more Jews into the country.
So I apologise for the officer for his very crude language,
but in a sense we can understand how sand is also a factor being considered into this
calculation of the emerging conflict or the very life conflict between Jews and Arabs,
between the Zionist movement and the Palestinian localities.
And not only from. The perspective of kind of like political geography, but also cultural.
I'm trying to think about send in the way in, which is kind of like ingratiating itself into the the national narrative of the Zionist movement.
Look at these two songs, for example, Jonathan Alterman, both of them from the same year from 1934.
Wake up sound because cement is upon you.
This is a song dedicated to the construction of Tel Aviv, which is kind of like the classical Israeli narrative was built emerge out of the sand.
If you look at the work of Matthew Vine, for example, about the history of Tel Aviv and another song,
the road song, as we stretch roads of concrete in the sand.
So sun was was imagined as an adversary, as a as a project to deal with, in a sense.
And we can see here both how sand becomes a political atom.
We can see how we stretch into the the the construction of the myth of rejuvenation.
But it also has a fantastical aspect to it, in a sense.
And this brings us to the issue of how to think on the relation between material elements and fantasies,
which is kind of like the main thing I want to think about in this,
not in this conversation, in relation to the role of of materiality, such a sentence now in the context of the Golan Heights and the Sinai.
So, for example, when you were thinking about spaces of fantasy,
the fantasy is a word that's being thrown around a lot in relation to the ideological narratives of national identities.
Not only in Israel, but since we are talking about Israel, I brought this passage from Burrell's book,
The Desert in the Promised Land, in which the focus of the book itself is on the desert.
But we can see. Of course, sand plays a crucial role there.
But for for through Bovet, she speaks about how the desert itself appeared in the Zionist narratives a metaphoric bubble,
a mythical space or fantasy that conveys no goal or purpose.
Now, I think it's important to think about fantasies from kind of like a conceptual vantage point,
to think about how should we understand fantasies in a sense, not just kind of like gloss it over as another form of myth.
But fantasies have a role, some somewhat different than myths in a sense.
So there are different ways to conceptualise fantasies if we look kind of like
the Marxist tradition that looks at an ideology as a form of fantasy as a way,
and in which kind of like we mask social relations, the first conscious argument back then,
then we see the progress of this discussion in kind of like post Marxist thought,
especially with the Jewish it was supposed to continue in the communal thought,
which looks at fantasies not as a way to move away from social reality, by the way,
to construct social reality,
to construct a notion of reality that kind of like enables to move away from different things we need we want to engage with.
So in a sense, fantasies are defence mechanism.
This is kind of like the literature of psychoanalysis and lacanian literature deals a lot of fantasies as a form of individual defence mechanism.
But what kind of like perhaps differs fantasies from ideologies is the notion of acknowledgement that it is kind of like an imaginative step.
But what you articulate is are not necessarily a way to set up a plan,
which is kind of like when we relate to ideologies, the way to think about how to create the reality.
But fantasy is a way to move away from reality, to acknowledge the fact that we are setting a border between reality and fiction.
The second the second thing is that fantasies sometimes emerge when when ideologies run out of steam,
when you think about making a country great again or taking back control, when ideologies are starting to get to run things, fantasies emerge.
And the third thing is that fantasies usually look for a place to articulate themselves.
When we are thinking about fantasies, usually, and this is kind of like maybe returning to the spectre of terror.
We need to think about places from which fantasies can take shape.
So when we think about this, for example, this is from 1959, ten or more looks, 1951, 59 sorry, a snowstorm, a rare occurrence in Israel takes place.
And then beyond what's right about how the snow began on Tuesday and transformed the
Jerusalem landscape outside a window into a real winter for my childhood books,
poems and drawing. All the colours that we associate with the war at home suddenly vanished as snowflakes covered the red roofs,
blue skies, black earth and green grass with the blinding whiteness.
We gaze at images of a land abroad of which we never encountered.
Note that developments didn't bother them because it came from Eastern Europe.
The cheerful but of course, an Eastern European wasn't done to normalcy was that the West was not exactly the cheerful meaning of bells.
And this European aristocrat covered in fur, travelling in a sled,
a blizzard on the king's road to the books walls, the howling in the forest falling to white fan.
Jones's scientific expedition slowly moves forward towards the Arctic Eskimo drinking way loud inside rounded ice cabins.
Wherever you look, there's snow, snow and snow.
Now, this is doomsday, right? This is kind of like the snow, right?
You want to tell him, take it down a notch. But exactly.
See how the elements of the environment participate in this moment of fantastic imagination, which is acknowledged by the author.
It is acknowledged in this construction of time, like a place elsewhere outside, in a sense.
Literally, when we think about how Israel how Israelis speak about abroad in Hebrew,
its hoods, the islands being outside of the country through thought and food,
the materiality of snow, which have a very like sound, have a very fluid materiality,
constantly metre remap materialise and they materialise in a sense.
So moving to 1967, what happens in 1967 in relation to the production of this fantastic spaces and in this case we can think about.
Look at the Golan Heights and the Southern Peninsula, a still wonderland in a sense when we think about their relation to the West Bank,
to the discussion about the theological return in relation to the narrative of return,
the arrival into the Sinai and the Golan was always conceptualised as a secular
opportunity of expansion rather than going back to the place of our fathers,
in a sense. So we functioned like this perspective from a children's book called A-Z, which was then and turned into a very popular move in Israel.
This is from 1969. Israel was born thole islands.
The full moon is covered in snow for months, years, even.
The moon is the tallest mountain in the Golan Heights, located at the northern tip of the Golan.
For many years, Israel gazed upon the human.
Only the most daring of the youth ventured out in the dark night beyond enemy lines, then ascended it to hike its path and discovered its wonders.
Until now, an enemy stood between us and the on who not only prevented us from enjoying the mountain, but also repeatedly bombed and shelled us.
So firstly, preventing us from enjoying the mountain, how dare he preventing us from enjoying the sun?
And by the way, also bombed and shelled us. One day the son army declared war and its forces descended upon us.
Well, when you look at the historiography of the war, if you read the works of a forgotten man, the one that was the ambassador,
Michael Oren, kind of like the definitive history piece of this of the Six-Day War, the place that the role that Syria played in the war.
It was then, but it was relatively,
relatively minor to the truth until the very end of the war in relation to what happened in the Egyptian front and therefore on the Jordanian front,
one that the enemy declared war on its forces descended upon us one time,
actually in the war by territories attacking our southern lands with tanks and cannons.
This is how the war broke out. This is how we return to the human speak.
So, first of all, we see here the the the common cold, conjoining of ideology and myth.
I'm sorry, ideology and fantasy, because you have to have a narrative of return.
It's kind of like central.
Even though the Zionist movement never articulated its connection to the Golan Heights within the language of returning to some place,
it was always articulated in the sense of you need to control this,
but this area for strategic purposes and for the fact that it controls most of the water in the in the in the territory.
Well, maybe environmental reasons, but in the literature, literary sense, always in a narrative of return.
But then you see how the fantasy takes over the gaze to the mountain and not just to the mountain, but to the snow on the mountain, in a sense.
And while this book was not written by a kind of like an author, but by a general,
this is a book written by a modified rule, which later became the title of the book was published.
He was the commander of the Northern Command of Israel and later also became General Chief of Chief of Staff.
So there's the politics here. Do the construction on the fantasy and the construction of the fantasy,
which is acknowledged as a sort of imagination, as a sort of a non place, also entails degree of violence.
For example, in the case of the Sinai Peninsula, people like Alireza MOSCOSO,
which is a central figure in the planning in the spatio construction of Israel playing a figure role in the fifties and the sixties,
the way in which Israel was conceived as a space, the production of development towns and the large plans of of Israel.
If you if you know the show on plan, for example, and others any of the both both takes part in thinking about what to do with the Sinai.
And he says that the greatest adventure the advantage of the area this is from the archive for on the air is in
the qualities that from a first glance may see him as disadvantage and that is the region's wild character.
Europe has no desert and the colourful rituals of the Bay Area with its adjacent area of the Sinai
Mountains has a parrot pie only power of attraction as an exotic landscape for the European tourists.
Now he's mainly talking about the Sinai.
But when the conversation started to converge toward the area where a possible Israeli Riviera can be established in order to attract tourists,
this was the location, a place very close to what is Rafah today at the edge of the Gaza Strip.
And the plan also, by the way, included the construction of a nuclear reactor.
This is from the planning map. And the idea was to create there an Israeli Riviera.
But the same groups also said that in order to construct this fantasy that we learn from experience in Israel and abroad,
that the image is the first condition for a city success.
He's talking here in relation to the establishment of your meet in the Sinai Peninsula as a place of sand utilising sand as a source of attraction.
The image in the first is the first condition for a city success and especially for a city of this time.
Images image also determines the ability to attract outside funding.
And this image will no doubt be damaged by a direct neighbourhood linked to offer and its refugee camps,
both from the social, psychological aspects and from an environmental visual one.
So the fantasy has to be clear. There should be clear borders to the fantasy.
And we know from the work of Gorenberg and David Kretschmer that in fact,
Israel evacuated or displaced about 45000 to 20000 Bedouins living in the area of it
before it established this imagined Riviera in a place located far away from Gaza.
So there's a certain element of violence to the production of fantastic space, more so in the homeland.
So the amazement of the snow not was not only limited to the Israeli view, but also from people eager to take place to take part.
So in the reshaping of the Golan Heights, for example,
this from a potential donor for America that is talking with the Israeli authorities about the possibility
of development in the Golan Heights in relation to the snow as to why I'm so eager to assist your efforts.
This is a subject that could fill many volumes.
As recently as let's, Maya gazed upon the slopes of Mount Hermon, both on the Syrian Lebanese side of the border as well as on the Israeli side.
Then anything?
I think that Israelis would soon be skiing on the slopes, which then looked almost as distant as the moon and considerably more hostile.
Now, snow itself began within the correspondence of the Israeli authorities, the civilian and the military.
One became one of the main element that justified the development of the Golan Heights.
A whole authority called Common Authority had the authority of the mountains
was established in order to develop the northern part of the Golan Heights.
And because of the snow was deemed such an important resource, it also it also justified the destruction and erasure of the Syrian village,
which was located where later on an Israeli settlement narrative will be established.
So the Syrian village was called Jubal Dowsett.
And this is from the correspondence about your father. There's no way to clear up Juba in time.
So in a sense, this was part of a larger regional movement within the Golan Heights,
where about 270 Syrian settlements and a population of between 90000 to 100000 civilians fled and were never allowed to return,
basically were displaced. So the production of fantasy in there, in the case of the Sinai or in the case of the Hamlet,
also entails an act of violence to create this image, this pristine image of materiality.
The elemental in a sense of the snow and the importance of the snow, the importance of creating the fantasy also justified.
The use also justifies the usage of violence by the state, in a sense.
But in it also the very materiality of the snow also creates all different kind of interesting slippages in a sense,
because the snow itself never behaves like the developers wanted it to, constantly melted, basically, because it's not it's not Switzerland.
And, and the Israeli flocked to the Thurmont in order to participate in this environmental fantasy.
So we see all kinds of correspondence with ski instructors complaining about how Israelis behaved,
even though they being shown kind of like movies from European ski clubs.
What is the right way to act? They still push. They still don't know how to stand in line.
And the snow itself constantly disappears, in a sense.
And so we see how this is kind of like for one of the of the newspapers the mountain is why conform saying bodies are standing together,
creating a cast that renders the come on and resemblance of a Tel Aviv seashore.
But in a sense, in this town, like large social housing project of behaving properly in the snow,
the sand self didn't behave properly because it constantly melted in a sense.
But what is interesting, for example,
this is the passage from an author and journalist colleague Shelly left from 1973 when he talks about skiing on the come on.
So we are told this part of the acting out of our national presence in the Golan Heights,
but it is not by rejoicing in snow that the mountain is reading.
It's not with skis that sorry for the people and that ownership is purchased and not by skiing, that the land is conquered.
So this is an interesting gap like reflection in the way in which fantasies and ideologies also can move apart, move away.
And the fact is that you can either have the myth of return, of redeeming the land or the normality of skiing.
You can have both. You can articulate a desire for humanity and justification to control.
This is a moment in which fantasy is not the not only mirage outside of the ideological fervour of the art of the film,
the ideological imperative to control the territory not only emerge from it, but also clash with it.
But this was in this text is from February 73, the height of the ski season, of course, in October of 73,
after the the the October war, that the narrative about the mountain significantly changed.
And this brings us to the second construct and returns us to the Sinai to think about the ultimate, in a sense,
military fantasy constructed only on the tip of the Sinai on the Suez Canal, which is the Bar-Lev line, in a sense.
So immediately following the war, immediately following the 67 war, the fighting itself never, never, never subsided in itself subsided.
But then it continued to take place and Israel decided to control the line over the Suez Canal and start slowly.
There emerged a debate whether or not to remain over the Suez Canal itself or to to withdraw
a little bit and send mobile forces in order to patrol there or to show a presence.
And the decision was made by Bar-Lev, the general, the head chiefs of staff, and then in the end, the security minister,
that there should be a constant Israeli presence on the bank of the Suez Canal as a show of force.
Now, what is interesting, first of all, is the thing about the imperialism that relates to this decision of having a presence on the Suez Canal,
because the Suez Canal itself is is a is an imperial project, in a sense,
imperial idea that to create a human construct in order to enable movement and and fortification,
I would start with slowly started to emerge at the banks of the canal was used in actually building as an another layer on the imperial layer,
which started with the dredging of the canal itself.
Now usually in the in the, in the, in the discussion over the creation of the fortification line, which eventually became the Bar-Lev line,
it is usually discussed in relation to the, as I mentioned, the war of attrition, which started around March 1969 and October of 73.
However, what is important to understand here,
it's not that the fortification line began because the start of the fortification project began because of the arc of the war of attrition.
But the war of attrition, which was a response to the fortification itself, the response of the Egyptian forces, seeing the Israelis for the.
Find themselves on the banks of the Sun, Sinai of the Suez Canal.
What's important here is that Sam became embroiled within this fortification project.
Most of all, it is enabling in the sense that the direction of the Suez Canal created the elemental
features enabling the construction of a fortification over on the West Bank of the canal.
And then it was constructed in order to fortify it. And also private contractors were hired in order to construct it,
eventually leading to the construction of a huge and a massive project which cost the state about $200 million.
A line stretching over 160 kilometres, 30 outposts, well fortified, and layers and layers, not only of materials, but of different historical period.
So we had sand from the Dresden, a bit of the Suez.
We had the airway tracts being placed on the outpost, being taken apart from the mandatory railway tracks, from allies to contour.
We had blocks moving, moving, being moved from quarries into Sinai, but also some from the west.
Then we had private contractors being very economical, economical with the way in which they were actually hired to do the job.
They used sand basically in order to be very freeing.
That depiction of how much work they really invested, because the fact that there were there were asked to create to use this amount of stones.
So in order to to cut some cost, simply fill it up with sand.
The Gambians did this project, this big fortification, and that's that in which stones and sand was poured into it.
And we seen that in the archives. And the reports following the fortification almost frustrated the military was with the way
in which this private contractors use this national project in order to enrich themselves.
The joke, by the way, after the 1973 war, was that the only thing remaining from Bar-Lev line was the villas in Syria of the contractors.
And we will talk a little bit at the end what was really left formed from the Bar-Lev line.
But the bottom line itself, look at this depiction from a visit of a French reporter somewhere in 69.
Most often he's visiting an outpost.
He's going into an outpost most so far as the apples are centred in an Alibaba arcade.
It's on one of the dunes supported by metal beams inside this subterranean hold on a many there are many treasures the film screen protocol,
the canteen and the bottles of scotch and period that are hanging from the ceiling.
So it was indeed not just a it was more of a political project than a military one, in a sense.
What is important here is that the Israeli commanders, whether it was Bar-Lev, the general, the head chief of staff, Sharon,
which later became the commander of the Southern Front,
which was which actually hated the Bar-Lev line and tried basically to dilute and destroy it, in a sense.
And other commanders were a threat aware to the fact that the line was all basically an artefact of show and tell.
It was basically there to show presence and to tell an alert about potential encroachment of Egyptian forces.
It was never meant to stop an invasion. Even the name itself,
Bar-Lev line a reference to the Maginot Line because it worked so well for the for the French in a sense
it was a self acknowledging the generals themselves acknowledge that this is not a final line of defence,
but it also created so the self acknowledgement of an illusion in a way of this construction of a defence mechanism is what we had.
This notion of fantasy and the atmosphere itself and surreal atmosphere, especially by the soldiers in the line, was a sense of fantasy.
If you look at the the home was just somehow which is a known Israeli author visiting the line and get
like like of a few months before the war on the road north the sandstorm came on top of a surreal one.
For us. It looks like a happy dance of a million tiny demons playing on dunes sliding down on the slopes, then slowly pick up the pace.
In one thrilling moment, we were overwhelmed under the forces of nature, a giant wall, yellow, red, turning on us as the horror of Judgement Day.
We crossed this whiplash line until we punched through and beyond there a beacon of salvation,
a green sign of the IDF, Israeli Defence Forces, that had one of those weird names.
From a distant fantasy.
The very next it was a self acknowledging fantasy in a way, a creation of a political line that kind of like relates to this idea of the barrier.
Today is the famous turtle in his right hand wrote about to Europe will be a wall against Asia.
This notion of the wall of construction of the world was further to live.
Today would say we will be a wall against Asia and will make Asia pay for it.
But he was he was right in the 19th century.
And both the bottom line and the term on the art was on the human, in a sense, which was constructed on top of the ski side.
We're both artefacts in the sense of showing them of projecting and not just reporting.
They also had political and security roles, but also how the cultural and cultural all of constructing this fantasy of interesting ability in a sense.
And again, like the case of the snow, which constantly slip and create slippage,
is in the idea of of of of struck of securing the fantasy of a seaside.
Some itself also was kind of like a matter with its own political impotence.
Eventually, when the invasion started in 1973, it was the fact that the home, the whole fortification line which was built on sand,
enabled these Egyptian engineers to erode the sand by using water pumps from the canal.
In a sense that what that was what enabled the actual invasion and the breach of of the wall, in a sense,
and following the war, basically immediately after the war, Israel never returned to the Bar-Lev line.
If the Suez Canal remained in Egyptian hands, and slowly but surely Israel vacated the Sinai piece by piece until 1982.
In 1976, when when reporters reported about the outpost, one of the outpost of the of the Bar-Lev line,
actually doing the stone below all of the outpost of the line of over the line were taken by the Egyptian forces in two days,
except one the Budapest outpost, the famous outpost that was right on top at the top of the northern part point of the of the line.
So the Budapest outpost has been the span. The walk transferred on the ground, bunkers disbanded and all is left is a pile of sand.
And in a sense it is quite amazing. The story of the Bar-Lev line, not just its construction,
not just the way in which it was envisioned at the time as this impregnable line that cannot be breached,
even though the generals and their political higher echelons knowledge that the fact this could be breached, by the way, in which it vanished,
in a sense disappeared completely from the discussion, from the public conversation, in a sense, following the October war.
And actually the only museums commemorating the line are Egyptian museums over in the US in the in the Sinai Peninsula celebrating the the what.
Well Egypt or what the Israeli and Egyptian public memory is regarded as a victory, the ability to cross over.
But in the Israeli public discussion, the bottom line itself almost completely maybe not disappeared,
but kind of like diminished in its in its presence or the fantasies tend to move on.
And we see how, for example,
the same rationality leading to the construction of the Berlin Wall then moved on to the construction of the security barrier.
And in southern Lebanon, since with the same very much discourse of creating a distant line of fortifications that will serve as the ultimate defence,
when this line crumbled, in a sense, it moved on to the separation barrier in the West Bank and currently we see the same kind of
like discourse and narrative in relation to Iron Dome and the technology keeps getting better.
Actually, the war of attrition in itself, one of the of the of the truism in Israeli public discourse is that the war of attrition,
in which the Bar-Lev line was the main story in the sense that the war of attrition evaporated from the Israeli public memory.
It might be so, but in in in the from the perspective of military muscle memory, in the sense it remains very present,
because this is the war that enabled the notion of we can have a static warfare and we should create
a line of defence that constantly can be eroded and maintained in the price of like human life.
We can have a new technology of static warfare in a sense.
This is the war in the war of attrition, which we see for the first time Israel activating drones in a sense.
And this is the war in a sense that creates this notion of the fortification.
And thinking about this fortification as a form of fantasy may enable us to understand how these ideas move
around and are also structured and fractured and in a sense on the very elemental realities which sustain them.
So I will end up here. Thank you very much.