A Cartography of the Unknowable: Technology, Territory and Subterranean Agencies in Israel’s Management of the Gaza Tunnels

Abstract

This article evaluates the potential for agency exercised by the subterranean volume in geopolitical conflict. Joining recent geographical conceptualisations of territory as a volumetric assemblage with calls for an elemental geopolitics, it argues that the density of the underground layer creates a convoluted techno-political problem that obfuscates the state’s means of directly observing, visualising and knowing the topological space of territory. To illustrate this, a methodological approach based on the relational ontologies of actor-network-theory (ANT) and assemblage theory is applied to an empirical study of the geophysical sensing techniques used by Israeli engineers, scientists and military to manage cross-border tunnels built by the Palestinian militant group Hamas before and after the 2014 Gaza war. The soil conditions, settlement patterns and infrastructures in the Gaza-Western Negev region have necessitated experimentation with complex and multiple forms of scientific and political expertise in attempts to locate the invisible tunnels, alongside a shift towards increasingly oblique techniques of cartographic representation of the sub-surface. The contingency of these efforts has unsettled the State of Israel’s confidence in its ability to manage geopolitical risks through techniques of territorial control. This case raises poignant questions about the extent of the capacities and limitations of technological solutions and geopolitical practices to secure territory when confronted with the geophysical agency of the underground.