Behold now Behemoth: the bulldozer as tool and weapon

Behold now Behemoth:
the bulldozer as tool and weapon

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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BEHOLD NOW BEHEMOTH, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.[1]

Vast size, brute force, colossal strength: these are the qualities of Behemoth, with which God sought to awe the questioning Job. Yet, for all his divinely-wrought might, Behemoth leads a tranquil existence (quite unlike his ferocious marine counterpart Leviathan, ‘whose teeth are terrible round about’). Behemoth – the etymology of his Hebrew name suggests an origin in an Egyptian term for ‘water-ox’ or hippopotamus – is no carnivorous predator but a placid herbivore; an impressive, strong beast, but not fierce or destructive, who ‘lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens’. As Patrick Wright has noted, the term ‘behemoth’ has often been applied to that man-made monster of destruction, the tank, ‘a monstrous presence that compels by show as well as by the more conventional force hidden in its belly’.[2] The name of this mighty but docile creature should, however, perhaps more aptly be used of machines that are awesome in power but peaceful in nature, symbolizing the hope ‘that our machines can harmonize with our herbivorous behemoth animal nature rather than aid and abet our carnivorous leviathanic demonism’.[3] Rather than a tank, perhaps the mechanical Behemoth is a bulldozer.

The bulldozer is not, in either its fundamentals or its express purpose, a weapon, although as the derivation of its name suggests it has always been associated with brute force.[4] It is, in the end, a mechanized development of a simple, originally hand-held, scraping tool – and this point is reinforced by the fact that strictly speaking the term ‘bulldozer’ refers to the blade rather than the machine to which it is attached.[5] Its origins lie in agriculture, in a device invented by nineteenth-century American farmers to smooth the surface of rough land: a wooden frame, drawn by oxen, into which a vertical blade was fitted. The bulldozer blade became mechanized when it was attached to wheeled and tracked internal-combustion-engined tractors in the 1920s. The American company Caterpillar, founded in 1925, can claim to have originated the modern mechanized crawler bulldozer in the mid-1930s through their partnership with blade manufacturers LeTourneau. It was the LeTourneau company that in 1933 obtained patents for ‘bulldozer’ and ‘angledozer’ blades (the later being, as the name suggests, a bulldozer blade positioned at an angle to the axis of the vehicle, so that material is pushed aside as the blade moves forward).[6] Thus by the early 1930s the fundamental pattern of the modern bulldozer was established: a large metal blade, perpendicular or near-perpendicular to the ground surface, fitted to a tractor moving on caterpillar tracks. The blade was raised, lowered and otherwise manipulated by cable and pulley systems, and later (from the 1940s) by hydraulics. Developed in the USA, the bulldozer became a characteristically, even emblematically, American device. Such machines were produced in large numbers and proved their value in the vast construction projects of inter-war America such as highways, dams and harbour construction, as well as countless smaller schemes of building, redevelopment and improvement.[7]

The bulldozer, born as an agricultural tool, is thus a constructive rather than a destructive device, intended for the tasks of civil development and improvement. Since the 1930s the horsepower of countless bulldozers has literally prepared the ground for across the world for large-scale construction projects, whether housing estate, hospital, school, barracks, factory, road or runway. The spreading city, the rushing road, the soaring skyscraper, all rest ultimately on the labours of bulldozer blades. It is thus little wonder that bulldozers have frequently been seen as symbols of peace and progress. The populations of post-1945 Europe knew that war was truly over and reconstruction beginning when bulldozers arrived and began work on the rubble;[8] similarly, people in decolonizing, strife-torn Africa longed to see ‘some of the practical symbols of peace’ at work in their country, specifically ‘bulldozers and tractors’.[9] The bulldozer at mid-century was an icon of change for the better, of modernity itself: ‘We have had enough of pretty pictures of grinning peons in traditional Tehuana dress,’ proclaimed the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros in an attack on the ‘primitivism’ of Mexican art in 1955: ‘I say, to hell with ox-carts – let’s see more tractors and bulldozers’.[10]

Yet the inexorable power of the bulldozer, even when engaged in ostensibly innocuous activities on construction sites or clearing debris so that reconstruction can begin, always possesses a degree of danger and threat. The appeal of the spectacle of the bulldozer at work arises partly from an awareness of its colossal power and the potential for devastation and destruction that it represents. Even in the constructive activities of civil life, bulldozers can appear to be monsters, and their association with the threatening aspects of modern construction and development has become as deep-rooted as their connection with the idea of progress: ‘Perhaps the bulldozers of “progress” will plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land’.[11] The dark side of the ‘progress’ represented by new homes and highways, factories and airports, is the clearing of extant landscape, the demolition of established structures and the uprooting of existing communities. The accelerating development of the post-war years and the increasing power of earthmoving machinery made the bulldozer, to environmentalists and their supporters and many other concerned people, little more than a monstrous engine of destruction,[12] the very term bulldozer becoming ‘synonymous with the unthinking destruction of ecosystems’.[13] Not for nothing was one of the most influential critiques of 1960s urban redevelopment in the United States titled The Federal Bulldozer.[14] Opponents of new road schemes encapsulated their protests in the phrase ‘Beat the Bulldozer’ and bulldozers became prime targets for militant protestors, whether motivated by fear for their own localities or a wider environmentalism, who set them on fire, smashed their cabs and painted slogans on their blades.[15] On a global scale, the bulldozer became emblematic of the destruction of fragile ecosystems and environments from Alaska to Amazonia, suburban London to the South Pacific.[16]

The demolition of homes and the eviction of communities as a side-product of redevelopment was reason enough in itself for the bulldozer to acquire a negative image as a ‘tool of arrogance’.[17] The use of the bulldozer as a tool of social and political, as well as physical, re-engineering of the environment has, moreover, frequently gone beyond such limits to become what is effectively mechanized aggression against civilian populations. In 1966 the government of post-independence Jamaica sent bulldozers to destroy Kingston shanty-towns associated with the ‘militant poor’, Rastafarians and other perceived social threats, under the guise of a ‘modernizing’ slum-clearance operation.[18] In Moscow in 1974 the Soviet authorities used bulldozers to destroy an unofficial art exhibition – thus earning the ‘Bulldozer Exhibition’ an enduring place in history[19] – while the city of Las Vegas sought to drive away the homeless by bulldozing their shanty towns in the late 1980s.[20] The white rulers of Rhodesia used bulldozers against communities – invariably black – that they regarded as inconvenient or undesirable in the 1960s and 70s, a policy continued by the post-independence governments of Zimbabwe up to the present day.[21] In Jordan in the early 1990s the government used a bulldozer-equipped armed police unit to eliminate ‘abuse’ and ‘usurpation’ of state land by the Beni Hasan tribe; the bulldozers were used to demolish houses that the state regarded as illegal.[22] Similar acts of violent dispossession have taken place since the 1960s in, among many other places, South Africa, Honduras, Mexico, Kenya, Sudan, Iraq and Hungary.[23]

To some extent such aggressive use of bulldozers represents a logical continuation of the machines’ well-established military pedigree. It can be argued that it was the Second World War that transformed the bulldozer from an agricultural tractor with an attached blade to an integrated and dedicated earthmoving machine.[24] The fleets of modern bulldozers operated by military engineer units were vital to the construction of fortifications, highways, runways and port facilities in the European, African and, perhaps above all, the Pacific theatres of war. Modern global war depended upon modern construction expertise and mechanical power:

Before troops could be called, cantonments had to be built. Before guns or planes could be made, factories had to be erected. Before pilots could be trained, air bases had to be constructed. Before a two-ocean Navy could be created and kept in operation, shipyards and Naval bases had to be built. All these things, the American construction man was called upon to do … It was his machines that preceded the planes, the tanks, the guns, and the ships. His ‘bulldozers came first.’[25]

In the desperate beachhead and jungle fighting of the Pacific War the bulldozer was no longer merely an engineering support machine but became effectively a front-line weapon: ‘If I had to give credit to the instruments and machines that won us the war in the Pacific’, wrote Admiral William F. Halsey in 1947, ‘I would rank them in this order: submarines first, radar second, planes third, bulldozers fourth’.[26] The mechanized earthmoving power available to the Allies gave them a significant advantage over the Japanese,[27] a superiority underlined by the wartime advertisements put out by Caterpillar, the company that built thousands of bulldozers for the United States armed forces. The Caterpillar Company contrasted American technological genius and mechanical might with the ‘backward’ methods of the Japanese. The handcarts, baskets and shovels used by the Japanese are doomed to be swept aside before American bulldozer blades:

On quickly conquered islands where it became necessary to build airfields and defenses, [Japanese] tools were pitifully inadequate – picks and shovels, baskets and little ricksha carts! On the Allied side was a weapon they had overlooked – workpower – the husky American earth-moving machines that overcome the handicap of time … this heavy-duty weapon-of-all-work has given our fighting men the vital edge of victory …[28]

The bulldozer is thus a symbol of the technologically advanced Allied armies vanquishing not only their Japanese enemies but space, time, and the landscape itself. The illustration accompanying this copy shows a Caterpillar tractor fitted with a cable-operated bulldozer blade clearing land for an airstrip on a South Pacific island, driven by a heroic bare-chested operator in a steel helmet. Among the debris being swept aside and crushed by the blade are the handtools and baskets used by the Japanese – their fragility and inadequacy contrasted with the massive solidity and tireless power of the American bulldozer.

The presence of bulldozers in what was effectively the front line of combat led to the evolution of hybrid earthmovers that combined the protective (and sometimes the aggressive) characteristics of military vehicles with the conventional attributes of the civilian bulldozer. Machine-gunners rode on the vehicles alongside the operators, and it rapidly became standard practice to fit armoured cabs to bulldozers working on military installations under enemy fire to protect their operators:[29]

A disadvantage of the standard tractor-mounted machines … was vulnerability. There were many occasions, as reports from overseas showed, when operators of bulldozers and other construction machinery required protection from small arms fire … the Engineers designed armored cabs for tractors and other construction machinery at the same time they were developing the tank dozer.[30]

Pursuing the logic of armoured, and armed, earthmoving equipment, Second World War combat engineers in Britain and America produced a bulldozer that crossed the civil/military line to become an actual weapon in the form of the ‘tankdozer’, a tank fitted with a bulldozer blade. The tank and the bulldozer were already close relations mechanically and conceptually, and the combination of the two formed a cumbersome but adaptable piece of equipment that not only enabled the conventional earthmoving work of the bulldozer to be carried out in very dangerous environments but created an effective, if heavy-handed and primitive, weapon for close-in combat:

About 11:30 A.M. on October 8, A Company told the battalion commander, Col. Wheeler Merriam, that it would be delayed and requested a tankdozer to be sent to its position at the end of a tunnel. American soldiers fluent in German tried to persuade the defenders to surrender, but the enemy refused. The tankdozer was finally used to close the end of the tunnel, burying the enemy troops alive.[31]

Very similar tactics were in used by the Americans nearly fifty years later, during the 1991 Gulf War. In an incident that, in sensationalized forms, quickly became infamous, the US Army’s 1st Infantry Division used tanks fitted with bulldozer blades to force a passage through a section of the fortified ‘Saddam Line’, neutralizing extensive minefields and burying those Iraqi soldiers who had chosen not to surrender in the process.[32]

The original purpose of the tankdozer concept was mine-clearing, and such vehicles have continued to be used in that role by post-war armies, including the Israeli Defence Force in the 1973 war against Syria,[33] but the vulnerability of conventional bulldozer operators under fire gave the combination of tank and bulldozer blade an added appeal even for conventional military earthmoving operations.[34] With the division between ‘front line’ and ‘behind the lines’ often becoming purely academic in the confusion of island and jungle combat, and engineers operating in the heat of battle, what was effectively the ‘combat engineers closest approach to an assault vehicle’[35] became a valuable asset. The tankdozers and armoured bulldozers of the Second World War represented an ambiguous development in military technology, blurring the line between civil and military vehicles, between front-line weapon and behind-the-lines support equipment, between engineers and combat troops. The British Army organized dedicated assault brigades around tankdozers but in the American Army there was little enthusiasm for accommodating this device in what would effectively be front-line engineering units;[36] it was as if the tankdozer was a mongrel creature, neither truly weapon nor support vehicle, at home only in its own amorphous hinterland.

It is precisely this dual identity that makes the bulldozer useful as an instrument for imposing public order, reshaping troubled social and political landscapes in the same way as it engages in the physical re-ordering of the earth. With a physical presence as imposing as a tank but without the less desirable implications of using a vehicle purposely designed for the projection of lethal force, and possessing the vast destructive power of a weapon but lacking the legal and ethical complications that use of dedicated weaponry against civilian populations entails, the bulldozer has become a potent element in the modern civil security landscape. It has gained particular notoriety for its employment by the Israeli government in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. In the form of the colossal, inexorable bulldozers of the Israeli Defence Force, it can be said that Behemoth has returned to the Holy Land, with its destructive potential fully unleashed. The new Behemoth does not quietly crop the grass and sleep placidly in the shade. For those against whom it is used, Behemoth destroys, devours, and wreaks ruin. For the Israelis it pushes aside the obstacles to progress, striving to build their nation in security and prosperity; it protects their soldiers and civilians, their towns and settlements; it tames the wilderness and drives modernity forward; for all its destructive power, it is fundamentally a constructive tool that, even in its most militarized form, is used solely to develop and defend the land of Israel.[37]

It is typical of the automatic inclination of many commentators to interpret all Israeli actions as uniquely reprehensible that Israel has been accused of launching ‘the first war to be waged with bulldozers’[38] against Palestinians in the Territories and elsewhere. As the history outlined above makes clear, the bulldozer has a long military history and was being used to wage war before modern Israel was even established. It is true, however, that Israel’s use of militarized bulldozers, while not unique nor even unusual, does represent a particularly dramatic expression of the machine’s aggressive potential. Israel’s employment of this belligerent Behemoth sits within a historical context shaped not only by the development of the bulldozer in civil and military environments since the mid-twentieth century but also by the bulldozer’s place in Israeli culture as a machine associated with the building of a new state in the desert.

Land – contested, reshaped, devastated, developed – is a fundamental issue of the Middle East, and it is land that bulldozers manipulate and transform. The very existence of Israel itself reflects ‘the quintessential role of the settlement of land in Zionist ideology’.[39] It is little wonder that the landscape of the Holy Land is criss-crossed by bulldozer tracks: in the creation and development of Israel ‘anything that helped the organized worker conquer the land and build it up was regarded as desirable’.[40] From the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, caterpillar tracks and bulldozer blades reshaped the land around the needs of the Jewish state. Keren Kayemet LeYisrael, or the Jewish National Fund (JNF), established in 1901 to acquire land in Palestine for Jewish settlement, made extensive use of bulldozers and other modern earthmoving equipment to clear existing vegetation and plant the pine forests with which it gave every appearance of being obsessed in the 1940s and 50s:

They bring in bulldozers and, if this doesn’t work, pneumatic hammers to destroy the stone, and all to plant a few pines. Wildflowers, tulips, and anemones – don’t they have any rights? These people are my friends. They are good people. But who gave them the right to destroy?[41]

The JNF’s bulldozer-based tree plantings ‘took on the sort of environmental insensitivity usually associated with Green caricaturizations of agribusiness’;[42] from the beginning, making the ‘desert’ bloom meant placing the bulldozer firmly in the Israeli garden. As an agency committed to the ongoing transformation of the landscape in accordance with the state’s economic requirements, the JNF progressively expanded its activities – and directed its large fleet of heavy earthmoving equipment – to encompass road building.[43] This aspect of the JNF’s activities has to be seen in a context in which the construction of roads was celebrated as symbolic of the construction of Israel itself, ‘being linked to the heroic establishment of facts on the ground … Road building was accompanied by a whole culture of songs and stories about the brigades which formed the transport infrastructure that made possible the establishment of the state itself’.[44]

Israel is thus a place in which the positive associations of the bulldozer with progress, development and modernity are given further resonance by the location of these virtues within the project of constructing and developing the Jewish homeland. The reclaiming of land from the wilderness ‘features strongly in the national pantheon of symbols’[45] in Israel, and activities such as land clearance, road building, water projects and housing construction have a far more than utilitarian significance:

Visible environmental transformation … carries a powerful symbolic load for Israelis. Beyond providing housing, loci of industry, services, commerce, and recreation, new development is expected to erase old landscape chapters and their attendant cultural content. The environmental transformation associated with Zionist settlement thus marks the sanctification of land as national social space, initiating it into the realm of Israeli nation-building.[46]

The reshaping and redevelopment of land, the creation of the State of Israel from the ‘wilderness’, is fundamental to Israeli identity. It recasts the work of what elsewhere might be considered utilitarian civil engineering and construction as the vanguard of a nationalistically-oriented programme of territorial transformation. Historically, part of this programme of transformation has in some circumstances involved clearing away what constituted the pre-existing landscape: the villages, houses, orchards, fields, roads, even the very names, of an older Palestine are swept away, for ‘it is not enough to drive out the inhabitants; the very landscape must be purged of their traces, their claims, their history, their idols’.[47] From the Israeli viewpoint, however, this process can be represented, not as the replacement of existing names, but as the recovery of the original, ancient nomenclature, ‘the resurrection of ancient place names in the landscape of Zionist settlement’;[48] and as Israel’s landscape is characterized as much by the co-existence of Arab and Jewish names as it is by the alleged replacement of the former by the latter, it is hard to argue that the ‘purging’ process has been particularly thorough.

In terms of the bulldozer’s significance, however, whether such actions are represented as destruction or resurrection the bulldozer is uniquely well suited to this work of transformation, for it is essentially a matter of the re-contouring of surfaces rather than of excavation and reshaping in depth. The bulldozer blade does not dig very deep, but it does re-configure, with great power, the outward surface of the land.

[This essay forms part of an ongoing study of the cultural history of the bulldozer, and is very much a work in progress.]

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Notes

1. Job, ch. 40, vs. 15-18.

2. Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (London: Faber, 2000), p. 1; see also Wright’s discussion of the etymology of ‘behemoth’, ibid, pp. 372-3.

3. Joseph D. Andriano, Immortal Monster: The Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), p. 81.

4. ‘Bull-dose, -doze … To flog severely … To coerce by violence, intimidate’: Oxford English Dictionary. The term ‘bull-dose’ or ‘bull-doze’ appears to have originated in the context of the coercive racist violence of the nineteenth-century American South.

5. William R. Haycraft, Yellow Steel: The Story of the Earthmoving Equipment Industry (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 30; Gilbert C. Nolde, All in a Day’s Work: Seventy-Five Years of Caterpillar (Chicago, IL: Triumph Books, 2000), p. 216.

6. Eric C. Orlemann, LeTourneau Earthmovers (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks, 2001), p. 16. During the early period of bulldozer manufacture in the 1930s and 40s it was normal for tractors and blades to be made by different companies.

7. Haycraft, Yellow Steel, pp. 18, 70; Randy Leffingwell, Caterpillar: Farm Tractors and Bulldozers (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1999), pp. 117-8.

8. George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (2 vols., New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), vol. 2, pp. 34, 199, 252, 433, 440.

9. E. R. Braithwaite, A Kind of Home-Coming (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 22.

10. Quoted in Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Stein & Day, 1963), p. 431.

11. Justice William O. Douglas, dissenting judgement in United States Supreme Court, Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), p. 405: http://www.justia.us/us/405/727/case.html.

12. Adam W. Rome, ‘William Whyte, open space, and environmental activism’, Geographical Review, vol. 88, no. 2 (April 1998), pp. 271-2.

13. William R. Haycraft, Yellow Steel: The Story of the Earthmoving Equipment Industry (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 382-3.

14. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal 1949-1962 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966).

15. Derek Wall, Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement: Radical Environmentalism and Comparative Social Movements (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 3, 86, 91, 175; Marty Branagan, ‘“We shall never be moved”: Australian developments in nonviolence’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 80 (2004), pp. 202-3, 206.

16. For example, David Price, Before the Bulldozer: The Nambiquara Indians and the World Bank (Cabin John, MD: Seven Locks Press, 1989); C. E. Little & J. G. Mitchell (eds.), Space for Survival: Blocking the Bulldozer in Urban America (New York: Pocket Books, 1971).

17. Rome, ‘William Whyte’, p. 272.

18. Leonard E. Barrett, Sr., The Rastafarians (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997), pp. 10, 156ff; Barry T. Bays III, Renée Foster & Stephen A. King, Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2002), p. 29. A local opposition newspaper referred to the action as ‘Operation Bulldoze and Burn’; Barrett, p. 157.

19. Oskar Rabine, L’artiste et les Bulldozers: Être peintre en URSS (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1981), pp. 189-97; Igor Golomshtok, ‘The history and organisation of artistic life in the Soviet Union’, in Igor Golomshtok, Janet Kennedy & Marilyn Rueschemeyer, Soviet Emigré Artists: Life and Work in the USSR and the United States (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), p. 7.

20. Malcolm Garcia, ‘Down and out in Vegas’, in David Littlejohn (ed.), The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 42-3.

21. Ann Schluyter, Multi-Habitation: Urban Housing and Everyday Life in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2003), pp. 16-19, 24; Anders Corr, No Trespassing! Squatting, Rent Strikes and Land Struggles Worldwide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), pp. 97-8.

22. Omar M. Razzaz, ‘Contestation and mutual adjustment: the process of controlling land in Yajouz, Jordan’, Law and Society Review, vol. 28, no. 1 (1994), pp. 19, 31-2.

23. Corr, No Trespassing!, pp. 3, 41; Raoul J. Granqvist, The Bulldozer and the Word: Culture at Work in Postcolonial Nairobi (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 173-4; Edgar O’Ballance, Sudan, Civil War and Terrorism 1956-99 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 122ff, 169; Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 173, 198; Michael Stewart, ‘“Brothers” and “orphans”: images of equality among Hungarian Rom’, in Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis & Michael Stewart (eds.), Lilies of the Field: Marginal People Who Live for the Moment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), p. 30; Barbara Bender & Margot Winer (eds.), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 2, 78, 227; Nancy E. Churchill, ‘El Paseo del Rio San Francisco: urban development and social justice in Puebla, Mexico’, Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 3 (1999), pp. 156-73.

24. Nolde, All in a Day’s Work, p. 216.

25. Waldo G. Bowman, Harold W. Richardson, Nathan A. Bowers, Edward J. Cleary, Archie N. Carter, Bulldozers Come First: The Story of U.S. War Construction in Foreign Lands (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1944), p. v.

26. William F. Halsey & J. Bryan, Admiral Halsey’s Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), p. 69.

27. Edward J. Drea, In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), p. 39.

28. Caterpillar advertisement: ‘Workpower is on our side’ (1944); reproduced in David Fetherston, Farm Tractor Advertising in America 1900-1960 (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1996), p. 88.

29. John N. Rentz, Marines in the Central Solomons (Washington, DC: Historical Branch, US Marine Corps, 1952), p. 95.

30. Blanche D. Coll, Jean E. Heath, Herbert H. Rosenthal, The Corps of Engineers: Troops and Equipment (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1958), p. 475.

31. Donald E. Houston, Hell on Wheels: The 2d Armored Division (Novato, CA: Presidio Press), p. 295.

32. John D. Heidenrich, ‘The Gulf War: how many Iraqis died?’, Foreign Policy, no. 90 (Spring 1993), p. 121. Heidenrich establishes convincingly that reports of a huge Iraqi death toll from this operation were grossly exaggerated.

33. Donn A. Starry & Avigdor Kahalani, The Heights of Courage: A Tank Leader’s War on the Golan (New York: Praeger, 1992), pp. 129, 137-8.

34. Coll et al, Corps of Engineers, pp. 471-3.

35. Coll at al, Corps of Engineers, p. 481

36. Coll at al, Corps of Engineers, pp. 481-2.

37. There is a substantial literature, too large to summarize here, on Israel’s use of bulldozers for military and security purposes. The highly partisan nature of that literature will not surprise anyone familiar with the hostility to Israel prevalent in the European and North American journalistic and academic worlds. The Israeli Defence Force operation in the Jenin Refugee Camp in April 2002 rapidly became a particular focus of controversy, and serves as an illuminating case-study of attitudes to the ‘bulldozer war’ in Israel and the Territories. For an example of a strongly anti-Israeli viewpoint, see Stephen Graham, ‘Bulldozers and bombs: the latest Palestinian-Israeli conflict as asymmetric urbicide’, Antipode, vol. 34, no. 4 (September 2002), pp. 642-9. A more balanced analysis can be found in Stephanie Gutmann, The Other War: Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2005), ch. 5, ‘Jenin and the massacre that wasn’t’, pp. 145-78. In fairness to Graham, it must be pointed out that his article was written before the full facts about Jenin were established.

38. Christian Salmon, ‘The bulldozer war’ (French title ‘L’abolition du territoire’), Le Monde Diplomatique, no. 578 (May 2002), p. 17.

39. Colbert C. Held, Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics (3rd edn., Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), p. 311.

40. Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 163

41. Aviva Rabinovich, Israeli scientist and ecologist, quoted in Alon Tal, Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2002), p. 69.

42. Tal, Pollution in a Promised Land, p. 94.

43. Tal, Pollution in a Promised Land, pp. 103-4.

44. Tom Selwyn, ‘Landscapes of separation: reflections on the symbolism of by-pass roads in Palestine’, in Bender & Winer (eds.), Contested Landscapes, pp. 229-30.

45. Dan Rabinowitz, ‘The frontiers of urban mix: Palestinians, Israelis, and settlement space’, in Avinoam Meir & Oren Yiftachel (eds), Ethnic Frontiers and Peripheries: Landscapes of Development and Inequality in Israel (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), p. 76.

46. Rabinowitz, ‘The frontiers of urban mix’, p. 82.

47. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Holy landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American wilderness’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 2 (winter 2000), p. 218.

48. Moaz Azaryahu & Arnon Golan, ‘Zionist homelandscapes (and their constitution) in Israeli geography’, Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 5, no. 3 (September 2004), p. 499.