A +972 dispatch
Ben Reiff
Deputy editor
Ninety-two percent of housing units. Ninety-five percent of university buildings. Ninety-four percent of hospitals. That’s how much of Gaza’s life-sustaining infrastructure Israel has destroyed since October 2023 — and the list goes on and on.
Israeli political and military officials argue that these are merely the consequences of a war targeting Hamas. But as Eyal Weizman tells The +972 Podcast, this was the same excuse used by the Guatemalan dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt before destroying hundreds of Ixil Maya villages in the 1970s and ‘80s: “If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.” A national court did not look favorably upon this defense, finding him guilty 30 years later of genocide and crimes against humanity.
In his new book “Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide,” Weizman writes that Gaza is not only a demolition zone; it is also a construction site. Almost nine months into a so-called “ceasefire,” Israeli bulldozers roam freely through two-thirds of Gaza’s pre-war territory, tearing up everything that once was and carving out an unrecognizable landscape of military roads, fortifications, and vast expanses of nothingness.
Whereas in traditional warfare, he tells The +972 Podcast, “you tend to see a kind of haphazard, almost random distribution of ruination,” Gaza has witnessed something very different. “Ungrounding is basically the erasure of all that,” he explains. “It’s much more than destruction. It’s the erasure of destruction … The rubbing out of any trace of existence.”
Weizman is well placed to analyze this process. Over the past two and a half years, Forensic Architecture — the research agency he founded and directs, based at Goldsmiths, University of London — has catalogued thousands of incidents of violence in Gaza; conducted audio-visual investigations challenging Israel’s official narrative on several high-profile incidents; and contributed a bank of evidence to the International Court of Justice to support South Africa’s application under the Genocide Convention.
The purpose of Israel’s ungrounding campaign in Gaza, as Weizman sees it, is clear: to expel the Palestinian population — which the book describes as “the strategic aim of the war” — and deny their ability to return. And this doctrine is no longer confined only to Gaza. “Ungrounding is now everywhere,” he warns, with similar processes currently taking place in West Bank refugee camps, the Syrian Golan, and southern Lebanon.
Weizman also takes us deep into Gaza’s subsoil — “the only part of Palestine still unoccupied” — where subterranean tunnels offer a lifeline for both the smuggling of goods into the besieged enclave and the organization of armed resistance. He explains why Gaza’s tunnels have been so perplexing to Israel for almost six decades, and how their role in the Israeli imagination has provided a justification for the total ungrounding of the surface.
To submit opeds, photographs, or videos for publication, write to us at oped@972mag.com |||| To pitch reported articles, write to us at editor@972mag.com.
