Concrete punishment: Time, architecture and art as weapons in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Abstract

Since 2015, the Israeli military has been implementing a series of new counter-insurgency tactics in Palestinian territory in which urbanism and architecture are its main weapons. Of these diverse procedures, so-called “concrete sealing” stands out as one of the most controversial punishments: it consists of pouring concrete into the house of a Palestinian attacker, rendering the domestic space useless for its inhabitants.In the following essay, we will investigate the complexity of this new deterrence tactic that has already filled nearly 1000 square meters of Palestinian domesticity. The essay is accompanied by the first published photographs of this new practice, from the residences of Mu'taz Hijazi and Udai Abu Jamal. We will examine the historical background and precedents of this punitive action, as well as breaking down concrete punishment into its most fundamental features (communication, affect, monumentality and domesticity) in order to prove the hypothesis that the resulting architectural object represents a more refined tactic than those seen previously because it uses art and aesthetic result as tools to transform time and durability into an effective weapon and reinforces the pre-existing asymmetry of space/time relationships of Israeli and Palestinian populations.