A croissant, in some instances, becomes a logistical issue–  even one of global import.  

Part I of III

On April 8th, less than a week after Israeli airstrikes assassinated 7 World Central Kitchen aid workers, the Israeli authority that manages the border between Egypt and Gaza inspected and released 322 trucks of aid into Gaza.  According to UNRWA, it would require 500 trucks of aid for the population of Gaza to avoid starvation.  This is part of what occupation means– managing goods across a border without answering to any civilian authority of the people encircled by such a border.  Within the framework of occupation, the distinction between bureaucratic delays and willful starvation can be opaque or negligible.  

President Biden met with Prime Minister Netanyahu on April 4th, two days after the attack on the World Central Kitchen vans.  According to the White House readout, in this meeting, “President Biden emphasized that the strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation are unacceptable.”  

Four days later the Israeli occupation allowed the 322 aid trucks into Gaza, accurately calibrating what the Biden administration and the Republican-led US Congress would consider acceptable as an ‘overall humanitarian situation.’  On April 23rd the US Senate voted to send $26bn foreign aid to Israel, of which at least $4.5bn is allocated to weapons. Biden signed that aid into law the next day, 16 days after the 322 aid trucks crossed into Gaza through the Israeli-managed ground checkpoint.

On April 8th, according to anonymous aid workers reported in Financial Times, “Aid workers were told Israeli authorities rejected the croissants because they were “non-humanitarian”.  Israel blocked filled croissants from entering the border to Gaza.   The unfolding spatial violence of the Israeli Occupation of Gaza may be read in and through these croissants.

In that same Financial Times article, Scott Anderson, deputy director of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said “Small logistical issues can cause huge delays.”  Helen Ottens-Patterson, Médecins Sans Frontières’ medical referent for Gaza, saw the logistical issues and seemingly arbitrary rules as intentional– “I think it’s a deliberate act to sabotage our activities,” the article quoted her saying. That arbitrary blockade extended to diverse medical supplies and some food stuffs, specifically croissants. 

What makes a croissant “non-humanitarian”?  One may likely associate croissants with Paris and cafes –  ie with urbanity and leisure. If humanitarian aid involves calibrating desperation and necessity,  the croissant tests that calibration. What, exactly, is necessary in a desperate situation?  In the US cities that I frequent, croissants cost $4 or $5. In Paris they are much cheaper, but still more expensive than bread.  Croissants are not for desperate people.

Who gets to say what is for desperate people? In a market economy,  the market establishes this, along with every aspect of society that keeps unhoused people unhoused, and poor people poor. In the humanitarian situation, the occupier makes a double determination–  the determination of what is not for desperate people (“non-humanitarian” as a surplus), and the determination that the people occupied will be rendered desperate, up to the most extreme state of (humanitarian) poverty, which is starving to death.  An agency proximate to such desperation and delivering any aid may then be called humanitarian, even if the same entity created the desperate circumstances. 

My reading of spatial violence through the croissant learns from Enric Miralles’ seemingly entirely formalist and playful drawing sequence titled “COMO ACOTAR UN CROISSANT / HOW TO LAY OUT A CROISSANT: El equilibrio horizontal / Horizontal equilibrium”

Miralles’ layout of the croissant did critical work on the discipline of architecture toward the end of the 20th century, work that in many ways holds prophetic relevance for the computationally-driven shifts in architectural design methods in this century.  Miralles’ layout of the croissant reveals a geometric hegemony that operates independently from function or efficiency.  Drawing the croissant as an architectural layout also draws a hegemony that can be read through its terms and priorities.  These priorities include privileging straight lines over curved ones, Euclidean geometry over topology.  This geometric hegemony constitutes buildability, feasibility, realistic practice– in short, the real.  

In other words, Miralles’ layout of a croissant demonstrates that a box is not, inherently, more rational than a blob or a cloud.  Miralles’s layout of a croissant demonstrates rationalization as a drawing procedure, one that may be invented with a referent and joyfully distributed. His annotation also declares that such rationalization obscures while it circulates.  The techniques of measurement generate legibility of the form, while also producing “lack of color, smell and taste” in the drawing.  The techniques of rationalization may be disentangled from their allegiance to the Euclidean geometries of a European and Anglo-American past. Even so they will continue to obscure certain knowledges, by design.  (Those of us who consider ourselves designers might take notice of our limitations and act accordingly.) 

What procedures can be read in the croissant embargo at the Gaza border on April 8th?  What rationalizations are demonstrated in the Israeli authorities’ rejection of croissants as “non-humanitarian”? 

The calibration of the humanitarian situation–  the attenuated violence of the occupation-as-starvation –  requires the sifting of croissants not only in accord with luxury status,  but also in relation to their efficiency. The richness of the croissant and its fluffiness are correlated, constituted as much by butter as air.  The lightness and the form enable the interior void, which might be filled with even more richness in the form of fruit or sweets. A filled croissant can deliver over 300 calories, over 10% of daily carbs and half one’s daily saturated fat.  It does so without even requiring a utensil.

A process designed to starve people–  more than 1 million people at once– would rationally exclude croissants.