Soon after Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority quickly escalated. This was well reflected in a governmental decision from 2008 to provide immediate solutions against Hammas short-range missiles by bomb-proofing major educational facilities. This political decision was commissioned overnight, in order to portray a sense of security within the already-furious Israeli residents of Sderot, the largest city in the vicinity of the Gaza strip, which was forced to live with up to a hundred missiles a day.

The first stage consisted of bomb-proofing twenty four schools in and around Sderot within a time frame of three months. Special budgets were allocated for the mission, involving the ministries of education, defense and finance, while three architecture firms were hired for the job, each working with a local engineering company. All these schools received unique, custom built solutions, consisting of walls or canopies made of reinforced concrete, positioned and angled perpendicularly to the missiles’ anticipated trajectory. These solutions, positioned on top and around existing buildings, created both a new physical skin and a new type of architectural reality, in which the former playgrounds were now indoors, secluded and devoured of sunlight, while their physical effect can be seen as more offensive and fear-provoking than reality itself.

Today, these solutions are unanimously criticized and scrutinized – even by their own creators – as ‘unaesthetic’, blaming the political pressure as leading to hasty solutions. They are also criticized for being overtly expensive – costing around seventy-five million shekels – more than the cost of rebuilding some of the schools. This criticism, coupled with some doubts as of these structures’ real bomb-proofing capacities, resulted in a decision to rebuild these schools in new locations and in accordance with the latest bomb-proofing building code. These new educational facilities are proudly presented by the architects who designed them as ‘visually identical to any other school’, suggesting that the sense of fear and victimization evident in the older solutions were abolished.

A quick examination reveals a different reality; while the schools may look ‘regular’ and devoid of any external bomb-proofing elements, in closer inspection it is evident that the external windows are positioned higher than normal, at +1.40 meters from the ground, not allowing a view out while seated, while their aluminum frames are twice thicker then usual, as are the concrete walls, which, although painted in white, still transfer sound in a rather muted manner. The playground itself contains some strange looking concrete shelters sprinkled around, shaped like snails, which are meant to provide shelter for the children who play in the yard and have no time to run inside.

The harsh reality, though, is far more alarming. These concrete spaces, bomb-proofed classrooms and hallways, marketed by the government as completely safe, and evoking a sense of relief in parents who send their children there on as daily basis, are useless in case of a direct hit by a mid to high power missile. In many tests conducted by the Israeli army’s branch of Civil Defense, it is acknowledged as a solution against debris and damage caused by indirect hits only, providing safety levels of mere 5% more than a standard built space.

This kind of defensive architecture reveals itself as a program-less structural hybrid with strong architectural impacts, enforced upon an entire population in a bid to project a false sense of security. Architects take no part in the decision making processes and are given a building code manual which they have follow rigorously with zero changes allowed. In the Israeli built culture, the impacts of defensive architecture are evident everywhere, from the urban playgrounds erected over underground public shelters to the condominium towers adorning the skyline with externally mounted safety-rooms. Their evidence implies how Israel is a country in a constant state of emergency, representing a shift from the Zionist idea of a country that would be a shelter for the Jewish people to a country that is, in its entirety, in a shelter.

Nir Rothem is an architect, founder of SFARO, and co-curator of the 2010 exhibition ‘SAFE HAVEN’ (‘eretz Miklat’), presented at the Schreiber Art Gallery at the Tel Aviv University. Photographs: Roy Boshi 2010.