From my blog.

What is the crossbreed of the IDF and post-structuralism? Oppression you can’t comprehend.

A chilling article by Eyal Weizman reveals an unlikely migration of ideas from the Left Bank of the Seine to the West Bank of the Jordan:

The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as `inverse geometry’, which he explained as `the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’…. This form of movement, described by the military as `infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of `walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

[Kohavi] said: `this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. […] The question is how do you interpret the alley? […] We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps.

“This is why,” explains the erudite warrior, “that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls.”

To begin with, soldiers assemble behind the wall and then, using explosives, drills or hammers, they break a hole large enough to pass through. Stun grenades are then sometimes thrown, or a few random shots fired into what is usually a private living-room occupied by unsuspecting civilians. When the soldiers have passed through the wall, the occupants are locked inside one of the rooms, where they are made to remain – sometimes for several days – until the operation is concluded, often without water, toilet, food or medicine. Civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, have experienced the unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation.

In Arab culture, the boundary between private and public — the home and the street — is generally conceived more robustly than in the West. But after all, post-structuralism is all about collapsing rigid boundaries.

What Israel did and still does to Palestinian homes, it is now doing to the entire Lebanese nation, through whose walls it crashed nearly a month ago. A million have been hoarded “inside one of the rooms” on pain of death.

Yet it isn’t cost-free to retrain a combat army for brutalizing civilians with a sugar-coating of outdated po-mo jargon. This helps account for why the IDF — which Israelis trust more than any other institution — is choking on a rag-tag militia of at most some 5,000 men.

Somehow I doubt that Deleuze and Lyotard will be of use to them there.