Hollow Land, by Eyal Weizman

Seven years ago, Edward Said explained what even many observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had not grasped: that the scores of Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza were scattered like shrapnel, and that movement from one to another was complex and controlled. Manipulations of cartography and topography had made political progress almost impossible.

In Hollow Land, Eyal Weizman has taken Said's thesis to a new level, generating extraordinary, and at times surreally uncomfortable, conclusions. If we are entitled to wonder what architecture, infrastructure and town planning have to do with warfare and human exclusion, the wonder has long gone by page 185. General Aviv Kochavi remarks that the attack on Nablus was "the reorganisation of urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions".

Shimon Naveh, ex-director of Israel's Operational Theory Research Institute, later explains that the Israeli army "started understanding fighting as a spatial problem". Weizman refers to the malignant "civilianisation" of military and philosophical terminology. But his own terms can also be heard, for example, in the corridors of London's Architectural Association: formless rival entities; fractal manoeuvre; velocity versus rhythms.

We find shadows of these phrases in the terrible beauty of Gerry Judah's artworks, derived from imagery of shattered West Bank towns. And they acknowledge the "anarchitecture" of Gordon Matta-Clark that so intrigued Israeli military thinkers in the 1960s. How extraordinary to recall that, in the 1920s, the legendary Scots town planner Patrick Geddes delivered urban schemes for Tel Aviv and Haifa based on "neotechnic order, characterised by electricity, hygiene, and art, by efficient and beautiful town planning".

In 1978, Thomas Leitersdorf created a new town east of Jerusalem, high on the Judean desert. He described this bastion as a "garden city". But Weizman's realm is riven with permanent temporariness, prosthetic sovereignty, optical urbanism, and barrier archipelagos. He quotes Ariel Sharon's chilling description of the West Bank wall as a "seam-line obstacle", as if it were the stitching on a body-bag.

The theorist Simon Marvin claims Israel's military-architectural "shadow-world" is generating more intense and better funded urban research than university programmes. If that is even broadly true, Weizman's book is of salutary interest.

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