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Well, good afternoon and welcome, everybody, to a delayed beginning of this terms.

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It was study seven. A serious uh.

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It's an honour and delight to present to you our speaker today, Dr. Muriel Ram,

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a political and cultural geographer, currently a postdoctoral researcher at Suez.

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Uh, Mariel's main research interest lies in exploring how matter matters in unstable environments, among other issues.

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He has written on the militarisation of natural resources in contested territories in the Middle East,

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in the Mediterranean, the infrastructure of faith and religion.

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In Israel's contested urban environments.

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The interaction between human lives and medical equipment in the development of clinical aid to African states and the representation

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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,

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The Berlin, the Bar-Lev Line and the one ski site as material fantasies.

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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.

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Thank you so much for this opportunity. I'm really excited to be here.

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I hope you can hear me. Yeah.

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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.

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And basically I will try to talk comfortable, to talk loud.

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But I also want to look at this seminar as an opportunity to think outloud in a

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way I do to to present to you a project I've been working on for the last year,

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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.

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So my term basically looks at discusses what I call the fragile, fragile nature of geopolitical fantasies.

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I want to talk about it through the relation between space thinking and placemaking

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and the spaces being taken and the places being made are these two places,

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which I'm sure you heard about the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

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I will just briefly refresh my memory memory about those two spaces.

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Both of them were occupied by Israel in the 1967 war.

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The Golan Heights is an elevated plateau located between Israel, Syria and Jordan,

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approximately 1500 square kilometres of territory, 400 metres above sea level.

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And the Sinai Peninsula, which is three times larger than Israel, belong to, once under Egyptian territorial sovereignty.

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And Israel occupied it in 1967 and 1967 and relinquished it eventually in 1982,

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I think was the last the last Israeli soldier, civilian who was there with the month of the myth.

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So what's what I was interested about?

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What was important to me about these two territories was, first of all,

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their relation to two main bodies of knowledge relating to Israel, Israel, Palestine and the literature about the conflict.

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The first body of knowledge, I like to call it occupation studies.

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So I usually start when I talk about this body of knowledge,

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I use this the Israeli line of the this radical and the controlling officer asked occupation, and the Israeli answer is no, just for.

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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.

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And I told my wife they may be critical, but they are polite.

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How do they know that Israelis are living here? Because occupation, conceptually speaking, is a moment both of interruption,

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but a moment of interpretation or different meaning of how to understand space, how to understand politics,

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of controlling space in this case, not just only as a vocation in space,

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but a control of space and within the bodies of knowledge dealing with occupation in the context of Israel or Israel Palestine.

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It is there. It is either from the perception of the politics by a political perspective.

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If you look at the work of Neve Gordon or the work of Yaron Bada or or from the perspective of geopolitical authority,

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theological tendencies toward this territory,

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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

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call a West West Bank centric in the sense that it mainly deals with Israel settlements in the West Bank.

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If you look kind of like the very important work being written by people,

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it gets ongoing been Akiva Eldar and in the title or of the last was from from here.

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So most of the work of the occupation studies dealing either with these three three

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layers three branches by politics in the sense of governance governance of lives.

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Most of the Palestinians in the West Bank, the theological discussion about the return, the promised land,

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the biblical scripture, the tension between Israel, secular identity to its religious one and so forth.

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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,

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kind of like looking at the Gaza Strip, but not to me.

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Israel, it's been it's it is lumped together with the West Bank, the Gaza Strip.

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But less work is made in regard to the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula,

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not just let's leave the Sinai Peninsula for a moment on the sudden return to there.

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But in relation to the Golan Heights, it's quite an interesting place.

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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,

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which is constantly being imagined or offered or envisioned as kind of like a Europe.

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In a sense, as you see this this invitation mostly to Israel is the context.

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This this is the transition, the Goran the most Europe ever gets.

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This winter you are going for a European holiday. They leave the passport at home.

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The Golan is filled with wildflower and silence, Israeli silence without any disturbing disturbances.

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And it is kind of like bucolic landscape in a sense,

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which relates to the way in which the alternative was occupied and the danger of the landscape in which you have the common mountain,

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which I'm going to talk about a bit, and the whole landscape which is crisscrossed by anti-tank trenches and bunkers.

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Some of them are used as coffee places and minefields and so on and so on.

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And what is interesting, this paradoxical nature, is the very materiality which enables this process or this act of imagination.

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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.

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Moving on to the Sinai is what is interesting about the sun.

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This is the silence, the literature of the sounds in the literature about the period in which Israel control the Sinai Peninsula.

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Rondon was dead a short time. Nevertheless, Israel controlled the territory three times its size,

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a place in which two of the most devastating conflict in Israel historically took place.

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The war of attrition, which is usually not really brought up in the public discourse,

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and the October war, which started in the sun and usually is discussed as a watershed moment in Israeli.

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Historiography. Nevertheless, when you are talking about the literature dealing with what I call occupation studies.

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There's not much about this process, this period,

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even though I think we can we can think beyond the sign to see how the process of control of thinking

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about the space there of of the of the of the occupation of the Sunna can tell us some things about.

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So as I said, space station and placemaking in a sense,

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and I just brought up this movie when movie a multiple of 1984, which was actually made inside Israel.

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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,

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academic text that dealt with the Sinai as a space and Israel's presence there.

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And this leads me, in a way, to the to the second body of knowledge of the first was occupation studies.

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As I said, the second body of knowledge I'm interested in is the the material.

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What I what is usually discussed in relation to what is called the social sciences, the material.

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So what is the material? The academics like to talk and turn every now and then.

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That's kind of like the paradigmatic shift in the when to understand and talk about social science.

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So we have the discursive thought in a sense when people start to look more carefully at text and deconstruct them following the time.

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And you have a special term following the federal and this subtle David Harvey,

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which we start to think more seriously about how space is not a given but a construct,

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something which is being constantly made through political relations, through cultural narratives.

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And the material turn kind of like dovetails it in the way in which it urges us to think about the very

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objects and items and the things that we use and the one which then themselves emanate all kind of powerful.

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There are not only silent objects but have political agency of themselves.

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So you can find a lot of so you find a lot of material dealing with things like barbed wire,

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tear gas, aluminium, concrete, they're rubble, what waste and more.

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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,

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have a presence of their own, have an agency of their own,

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and not necessarily simply elements that reflect human action, but elements that shape it in a way.

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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.

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Political relations also impact the way in which we understand politics.

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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.

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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,

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the unification schemes which started form the form the moment actually from when Britain started to enter

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Israel Palestine a sense and the dual fixation scheme was the way not only to think about the role of,

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of the environment and the politics of an environment, but also the elements of the environment which either enables or hinder the possibility of

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transformation of political transformation of the territorial units known as mandatory Palestine.

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So this is part of the unification scheme which was developed and and was conceived by British colonial officers.

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And there's this kind of like reflection about the urgency of dealing with sand,

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which might serve as a possible hindrance to the development of the country.

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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,

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basically dealing with controlling sand. That would end as I began by saying that the thing in the highest degree important

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that the scheme broadly on these lines should be instituted without delay.

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The appropriation of Palestine is increasing immensely fast and we are constantly urged to cram more and more Jews into the country.

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So I apologise for the officer for his very crude language,

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but in a sense we can understand how sand is also a factor being considered into this

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calculation of the emerging conflict or the very life conflict between Jews and Arabs,

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between the Zionist movement and the Palestinian localities.

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And not only from. The perspective of kind of like political geography, but also cultural.

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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.

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Look at these two songs, for example, Jonathan Alterman, both of them from the same year from 1934.

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Wake up sound because cement is upon you.

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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.

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If you look at the work of Matthew Vine, for example, about the history of Tel Aviv and another song,

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the road song, as we stretch roads of concrete in the sand.

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So sun was was imagined as an adversary, as a as a project to deal with, in a sense.

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And we can see here both how sand becomes a political atom.

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We can see how we stretch into the the the construction of the myth of rejuvenation.

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But it also has a fantastical aspect to it, in a sense.

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And this brings us to the issue of how to think on the relation between material elements and fantasies,

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which is kind of like the main thing I want to think about in this,

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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.

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So, for example, when you were thinking about spaces of fantasy,

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the fantasy is a word that's being thrown around a lot in relation to the ideological narratives of national identities.

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Not only in Israel, but since we are talking about Israel, I brought this passage from Burrell's book,

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The Desert in the Promised Land, in which the focus of the book itself is on the desert.

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But we can see. Of course, sand plays a crucial role there.

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But for for through Bovet, she speaks about how the desert itself appeared in the Zionist narratives a metaphoric bubble,

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a mythical space or fantasy that conveys no goal or purpose.

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Now, I think it's important to think about fantasies from kind of like a conceptual vantage point,

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to think about how should we understand fantasies in a sense, not just kind of like gloss it over as another form of myth.

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But fantasies have a role, some somewhat different than myths in a sense.

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So there are different ways to conceptualise fantasies if we look kind of like

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the Marxist tradition that looks at an ideology as a form of fantasy as a way,

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and in which kind of like we mask social relations, the first conscious argument back then,

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then we see the progress of this discussion in kind of like post Marxist thought,

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especially with the Jewish it was supposed to continue in the communal thought,

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which looks at fantasies not as a way to move away from social reality, by the way,

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to construct social reality,

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to construct a notion of reality that kind of like enables to move away from different things we need we want to engage with.

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So in a sense, fantasies are defence mechanism.

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This is kind of like the literature of psychoanalysis and lacanian literature deals a lot of fantasies as a form of individual defence mechanism.

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But what kind of like perhaps differs fantasies from ideologies is the notion of acknowledgement that it is kind of like an imaginative step.

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But what you articulate is are not necessarily a way to set up a plan,

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which is kind of like when we relate to ideologies, the way to think about how to create the reality.

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But fantasy is a way to move away from reality, to acknowledge the fact that we are setting a border between reality and fiction.

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The second the second thing is that fantasies sometimes emerge when when ideologies run out of steam,

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when you think about making a country great again or taking back control, when ideologies are starting to get to run things, fantasies emerge.

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And the third thing is that fantasies usually look for a place to articulate themselves.

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When we are thinking about fantasies, usually, and this is kind of like maybe returning to the spectre of terror.

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We need to think about places from which fantasies can take shape.

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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.

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And then beyond what's right about how the snow began on Tuesday and transformed the

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Jerusalem landscape outside a window into a real winter for my childhood books,

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poems and drawing. All the colours that we associate with the war at home suddenly vanished as snowflakes covered the red roofs,

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blue skies, black earth and green grass with the blinding whiteness.

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We gaze at images of a land abroad of which we never encountered.

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Note that developments didn't bother them because it came from Eastern Europe.

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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.

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And this European aristocrat covered in fur, travelling in a sled,

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a blizzard on the king's road to the books walls, the howling in the forest falling to white fan.

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Jones's scientific expedition slowly moves forward towards the Arctic Eskimo drinking way loud inside rounded ice cabins.

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Wherever you look, there's snow, snow and snow.

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Now, this is doomsday, right? This is kind of like the snow, right?

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You want to tell him, take it down a notch. But exactly.

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See how the elements of the environment participate in this moment of fantastic imagination, which is acknowledged by the author.

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It is acknowledged in this construction of time, like a place elsewhere outside, in a sense.

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Literally, when we think about how Israel how Israelis speak about abroad in Hebrew,

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its hoods, the islands being outside of the country through thought and food,

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the materiality of snow, which have a very like sound, have a very fluid materiality,

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constantly metre remap materialise and they materialise in a sense.

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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.

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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,

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to the discussion about the theological return in relation to the narrative of return,

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the arrival into the Sinai and the Golan was always conceptualised as a secular

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opportunity of expansion rather than going back to the place of our fathers,

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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.

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This is from 1969. Israel was born thole islands.

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The full moon is covered in snow for months, years, even.

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The moon is the tallest mountain in the Golan Heights, located at the northern tip of the Golan.

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For many years, Israel gazed upon the human.

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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.

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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.

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So firstly, preventing us from enjoying the mountain, how dare he preventing us from enjoying the sun?

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And by the way, also bombed and shelled us. One day the son army declared war and its forces descended upon us.

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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,

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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.

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It was then, but it was relatively,

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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,

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one that the enemy declared war on its forces descended upon us one time,

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actually in the war by territories attacking our southern lands with tanks and cannons.

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This is how the war broke out. This is how we return to the human speak.

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So, first of all, we see here the the the common cold, conjoining of ideology and myth.

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I'm sorry, ideology and fantasy, because you have to have a narrative of return.

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It's kind of like central.

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Even though the Zionist movement never articulated its connection to the Golan Heights within the language of returning to some place,

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it was always articulated in the sense of you need to control this,

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but this area for strategic purposes and for the fact that it controls most of the water in the in the in the territory.

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Well, maybe environmental reasons, but in the literature, literary sense, always in a narrative of return.

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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.

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And while this book was not written by a kind of like an author, but by a general,

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this is a book written by a modified rule, which later became the title of the book was published.

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He was the commander of the Northern Command of Israel and later also became General Chief of Chief of Staff.

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So there's the politics here. Do the construction on the fantasy and the construction of the fantasy,

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which is acknowledged as a sort of imagination, as a sort of a non place, also entails degree of violence.

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For example, in the case of the Sinai Peninsula, people like Alireza MOSCOSO,

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which is a central figure in the planning in the spatio construction of Israel playing a figure role in the fifties and the sixties,

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the way in which Israel was conceived as a space, the production of development towns and the large plans of of Israel.

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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.

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And he says that the greatest adventure the advantage of the area this is from the archive for on the air is in

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the qualities that from a first glance may see him as disadvantage and that is the region's wild character.

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Europe has no desert and the colourful rituals of the Bay Area with its adjacent area of the Sinai

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Mountains has a parrot pie only power of attraction as an exotic landscape for the European tourists.

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Now he's mainly talking about the Sinai.

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But when the conversation started to converge toward the area where a possible Israeli Riviera can be established in order to attract tourists,

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this was the location, a place very close to what is Rafah today at the edge of the Gaza Strip.

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And the plan also, by the way, included the construction of a nuclear reactor.

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This is from the planning map. And the idea was to create there an Israeli Riviera.

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But the same groups also said that in order to construct this fantasy that we learn from experience in Israel and abroad,

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that the image is the first condition for a city success.

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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.

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The image in the first is the first condition for a city success and especially for a city of this time.

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Images image also determines the ability to attract outside funding.

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And this image will no doubt be damaged by a direct neighbourhood linked to offer and its refugee camps,

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both from the social, psychological aspects and from an environmental visual one.

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So the fantasy has to be clear. There should be clear borders to the fantasy.

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And we know from the work of Gorenberg and David Kretschmer that in fact,

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Israel evacuated or displaced about 45000 to 20000 Bedouins living in the area of it

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before it established this imagined Riviera in a place located far away from Gaza.

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So there's a certain element of violence to the production of fantastic space, more so in the homeland.

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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.

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So in the reshaping of the Golan Heights, for example,

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this from a potential donor for America that is talking with the Israeli authorities about the possibility

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of development in the Golan Heights in relation to the snow as to why I'm so eager to assist your efforts.

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This is a subject that could fill many volumes.

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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.

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Then anything?

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I think that Israelis would soon be skiing on the slopes, which then looked almost as distant as the moon and considerably more hostile.

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Now, snow itself began within the correspondence of the Israeli authorities, the civilian and the military.

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One became one of the main element that justified the development of the Golan Heights.

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A whole authority called Common Authority had the authority of the mountains

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was established in order to develop the northern part of the Golan Heights.

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And because of the snow was deemed such an important resource, it also it also justified the destruction and erasure of the Syrian village,

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which was located where later on an Israeli settlement narrative will be established.

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So the Syrian village was called Jubal Dowsett.

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And this is from the correspondence about your father. There's no way to clear up Juba in time.

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So in a sense, this was part of a larger regional movement within the Golan Heights,

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where about 270 Syrian settlements and a population of between 90000 to 100000 civilians fled and were never allowed to return,

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basically were displaced. So the production of fantasy in there, in the case of the Sinai or in the case of the Hamlet,

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also entails an act of violence to create this image, this pristine image of materiality.

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The elemental in a sense of the snow and the importance of the snow, the importance of creating the fantasy also justified.

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The use also justifies the usage of violence by the state, in a sense.

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But in it also the very materiality of the snow also creates all different kind of interesting slippages in a sense,

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because the snow itself never behaves like the developers wanted it to, constantly melted, basically, because it's not it's not Switzerland.

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And, and the Israeli flocked to the Thurmont in order to participate in this environmental fantasy.

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So we see all kinds of correspondence with ski instructors complaining about how Israelis behaved,

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even though they being shown kind of like movies from European ski clubs.

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What is the right way to act? They still push. They still don't know how to stand in line.

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And the snow itself constantly disappears, in a sense.

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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,

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creating a cast that renders the come on and resemblance of a Tel Aviv seashore.

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But in a sense, in this town, like large social housing project of behaving properly in the snow,

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the sand self didn't behave properly because it constantly melted in a sense.

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But what is interesting, for example,

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this is the passage from an author and journalist colleague Shelly left from 1973 when he talks about skiing on the come on.

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So we are told this part of the acting out of our national presence in the Golan Heights,

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but it is not by rejoicing in snow that the mountain is reading.

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It's not with skis that sorry for the people and that ownership is purchased and not by skiing, that the land is conquered.

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So this is an interesting gap like reflection in the way in which fantasies and ideologies also can move apart, move away.

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And the fact is that you can either have the myth of return, of redeeming the land or the normality of skiing.

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You can have both. You can articulate a desire for humanity and justification to control.

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This is a moment in which fantasy is not the not only mirage outside of the ideological fervour of the art of the film,

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the ideological imperative to control the territory not only emerge from it, but also clash with it.

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But this was in this text is from February 73, the height of the ski season, of course, in October of 73,

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after the the the October war, that the narrative about the mountain significantly changed.

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And this brings us to the second construct and returns us to the Sinai to think about the ultimate, in a sense,

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military fantasy constructed only on the tip of the Sinai on the Suez Canal, which is the Bar-Lev line, in a sense.

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So immediately following the war, immediately following the 67 war, the fighting itself never, never, never subsided in itself subsided.

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But then it continued to take place and Israel decided to control the line over the Suez Canal and start slowly.

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There emerged a debate whether or not to remain over the Suez Canal itself or to to withdraw

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a little bit and send mobile forces in order to patrol there or to show a presence.

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And the decision was made by Bar-Lev, the general, the head chiefs of staff, and then in the end, the security minister,

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that there should be a constant Israeli presence on the bank of the Suez Canal as a show of force.

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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,

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because the Suez Canal itself is is a is an imperial project, in a sense,

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imperial idea that to create a human construct in order to enable movement and and fortification,

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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,

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which started with the dredging of the canal itself.

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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,

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it is usually discussed in relation to the, as I mentioned, the war of attrition, which started around March 1969 and October of 73.

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However, what is important to understand here,

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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.

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But the war of attrition, which was a response to the fortification itself, the response of the Egyptian forces, seeing the Israelis for the.

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Find themselves on the banks of the Sun, Sinai of the Suez Canal.

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What's important here is that Sam became embroiled within this fortification project.

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Most of all, it is enabling in the sense that the direction of the Suez Canal created the elemental

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features enabling the construction of a fortification over on the West Bank of the canal.

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And then it was constructed in order to fortify it. And also private contractors were hired in order to construct it,

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eventually leading to the construction of a huge and a massive project which cost the state about $200 million.

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A line stretching over 160 kilometres, 30 outposts, well fortified, and layers and layers, not only of materials, but of different historical period.

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So we had sand from the Dresden, a bit of the Suez.

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We had the airway tracts being placed on the outpost, being taken apart from the mandatory railway tracks, from allies to contour.

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We had blocks moving, moving, being moved from quarries into Sinai, but also some from the west.

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Then we had private contractors being very economical, economical with the way in which they were actually hired to do the job.

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They used sand basically in order to be very freeing.

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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.

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So in order to to cut some cost, simply fill it up with sand.

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The Gambians did this project, this big fortification, and that's that in which stones and sand was poured into it.

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And we seen that in the archives. And the reports following the fortification almost frustrated the military was with the way

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in which this private contractors use this national project in order to enrich themselves.

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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.

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And we will talk a little bit at the end what was really left formed from the Bar-Lev line.

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But the bottom line itself, look at this depiction from a visit of a French reporter somewhere in 69.

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Most often he's visiting an outpost.

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He's going into an outpost most so far as the apples are centred in an Alibaba arcade.

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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,

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the canteen and the bottles of scotch and period that are hanging from the ceiling.

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So it was indeed not just a it was more of a political project than a military one, in a sense.

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What is important here is that the Israeli commanders, whether it was Bar-Lev, the general, the head chief of staff, Sharon,

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which later became the commander of the Southern Front,

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which was which actually hated the Bar-Lev line and tried basically to dilute and destroy it, in a sense.

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And other commanders were a threat aware to the fact that the line was all basically an artefact of show and tell.

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It was basically there to show presence and to tell an alert about potential encroachment of Egyptian forces.

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It was never meant to stop an invasion. Even the name itself,

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Bar-Lev line a reference to the Maginot Line because it worked so well for the for the French in a sense

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it was a self acknowledging the generals themselves acknowledge that this is not a final line of defence,

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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.

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This notion of fantasy and the atmosphere itself and surreal atmosphere, especially by the soldiers in the line, was a sense of fantasy.

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If you look at the the home was just somehow which is a known Israeli author visiting the line and get

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like like of a few months before the war on the road north the sandstorm came on top of a surreal one.

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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.

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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.

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We crossed this whiplash line until we punched through and beyond there a beacon of salvation,

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a green sign of the IDF, Israeli Defence Forces, that had one of those weird names.

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From a distant fantasy.

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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.

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Today is the famous turtle in his right hand wrote about to Europe will be a wall against Asia.

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This notion of the wall of construction of the world was further to live.

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Today would say we will be a wall against Asia and will make Asia pay for it.

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But he was he was right in the 19th century.

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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.

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We're both artefacts in the sense of showing them of projecting and not just reporting.

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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.

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And again, like the case of the snow, which constantly slip and create slippage,

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is in the idea of of of of struck of securing the fantasy of a seaside.

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Some itself also was kind of like a matter with its own political impotence.

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Eventually, when the invasion started in 1973, it was the fact that the home, the whole fortification line which was built on sand,

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enabled these Egyptian engineers to erode the sand by using water pumps from the canal.

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In a sense that what that was what enabled the actual invasion and the breach of of the wall, in a sense,

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and following the war, basically immediately after the war, Israel never returned to the Bar-Lev line.

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If the Suez Canal remained in Egyptian hands, and slowly but surely Israel vacated the Sinai piece by piece until 1982.

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In 1976, when when reporters reported about the outpost, one of the outpost of the of the Bar-Lev line,

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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,

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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.

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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.

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And in a sense it is quite amazing. The story of the Bar-Lev line, not just its construction,

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not just the way in which it was envisioned at the time as this impregnable line that cannot be breached,

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even though the generals and their political higher echelons knowledge that the fact this could be breached, by the way, in which it vanished,

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in a sense disappeared completely from the discussion, from the public conversation, in a sense, following the October war.

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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.

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Well Egypt or what the Israeli and Egyptian public memory is regarded as a victory, the ability to cross over.

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But in the Israeli public discussion, the bottom line itself almost completely maybe not disappeared,

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but kind of like diminished in its in its presence or the fantasies tend to move on.

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And we see how, for example,

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the same rationality leading to the construction of the Berlin Wall then moved on to the construction of the security barrier.

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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,

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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

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like discourse and narrative in relation to Iron Dome and the technology keeps getting better.

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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,

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in which the Bar-Lev line was the main story in the sense that the war of attrition evaporated from the Israeli public memory.

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It might be so, but in in in the from the perspective of military muscle memory, in the sense it remains very present,

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because this is the war that enabled the notion of we can have a static warfare and we should create

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a line of defence that constantly can be eroded and maintained in the price of like human life.

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We can have a new technology of static warfare in a sense.

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This is the war in the war of attrition, which we see for the first time Israel activating drones in a sense.

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And this is the war in a sense that creates this notion of the fortification.

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And thinking about this fortification as a form of fantasy may enable us to understand how these ideas move

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around and are also structured and fractured and in a sense on the very elemental realities which sustain them.

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So I will end up here. Thank you very much.