How did Palestine become Israel? Palestine has never been about ‘contested space’ in the way relatively blank territories in the Arctic region, especially ocean beds, may today be ‘contested’ by industrial nations. Those territories have never been personal or civic properties. To speak about space anywhere in Palestine or Israel, one cannot merely focus on the subject as if it were divorced from the history of colonization afflicting the country —a history entailing the deliberate and systematic expulsion and dispossession of its people from their ancestral places of birth, the destruction of their villages, the appropriation of their properties, their lands and their sources of living. Palestinian resistance to this ongoing injustice is part of a struggle that has been going on for over a century. This is not a reality that may be defined geographically or topographically, and discussed as an issue of ‘contested space’.

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Pursuant to the challenging proposal offering a ‘sculptural reading’ of film, video and photographs on the basis of what Eyal Weizman called ‘the politics of verticality’, I shall now consider a few examples of two-dimensional art to illustrate how the history of colonizing Palestine has been regulated by rules adhering to that same perspective. To do so, I shall limit the discussion to the experience of ‘place’ as it is interpreted by the colonizing settler and will conclude by contrasting the works of two artists, an Israeli and a Palestinian, who viewed ‘the place’ from different perspectives, that of the outsider whose art calls for the appropriation of ‘the place’ and that of the insider whose art is the product of a native witness of dispossession.

For lack of a better term, to describe two-dimensional works of art depicting the specifications of a place, I shall use the more common term ‘landscape’. By casting a general look at landscapes painted by members of the earliest generation of European Jewish settlers in Palestine, the viewer notes how the colonizing settler painters shared the same perspective of the architects that prefigured what Eyal Weizman coined ‘the politics of verticality’.

Israeli architect Sharon Rotbard writes that ‘the wall and the tower’ have been the two key components in building settlements throughout the history of the Jewish colonization of Palestine. Named in Hebrew, Homa Umigdal, ‘the wall and the tower’ gained a mythical national status as their structure represented, ‘the fundamental paradigm of all Jewish architecture in Israel’ an architecture that Rotbard describes as ‘an industry for the fabrication of political realities’. The Israeli architect goes on to explain that the pre-state strategy of the paramilitary wall and tower ‘served in fact to perpetuate the ghetto mentality and the impulse of enclosure’. Jewish settlers ‘made use of the double function of fortification and observation …that dominated their surroundings by the power of vision.’ As these settlements spread out, ‘every outpost had eye contact with another, enabling the towers to transmit messages by Morse code using flashlights at night and mirrors during the day.’

When the West Bank and the Gaza Strip fell under Israeli military occupation in 1967 walls and towers were built overnight to monitor movement on all major roads in the region. With God’s territories laid out before Israeli eyes, the pre-state towers were now exchanged for mountaintops; from those heights overlooking whole regions in the West Bank, fortified settlements were hastily built to establish facts on the ground.

The pre-state eye contact originally maintained between settlements across a horizontal space, now took on a three-dimensional volume wherein elevated roads connecting Israeli settlements have been raised on extended bridges that circumvent Palestinian routes and lands, or slipping into tunnels beneath them.

As for the landscapes created by Jewish settler artists during the pre-state years, which prefigured what Weizman termed the ‘politics of verticality’, they mainly depicted the place from two distinctly different points of view each of which reflects a different angle of ‘the wall and [the] tower’ sense of perspective. In other words, the illusion of space employed to exemplify Zionist ideals is seldom employed in depicting the place of the native other, namely the Palestinian Arab.
In paintings promoting the so-called ‘reclamation of the desert’, the tilling of the land and the rewards of manual labor, the spatial experience of the place is expressed either from the perspective of one close to the ground and looking up as it were to emphasize the link with heaven or from a straight forward frontal vista which usually minimized the space left for the sky.

For example, the perspective of a scene viewed from the ground up is evident in the Austrian-born Ephraim Moshe Lilien’s representing A Jewish Plowman. ( The Israel Museum, Jerusalem) . In this 1907 lithograph, we see what looks like a desert scene in which a man in biblical garb is plowing the soil with the aid of a camel, the emblematic animal associated with the desert. From the angle close to the ground, a cactus plant, which was to assume symbolic status in Israeli and Palestinian national lore, frames the corner in the foreground. The morning sky above dominates the entire place.