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Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide - Hardcover

Weizman, Eyal

 
9780593835029: Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593835026 ISBN 13: 9780593835029
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

“This impressive exposé from Weizman, founder of human rights investigative group Forensic Architecture, outlines how Israel uses environmental destruction as a tool of 'ethnic cleansing' against Palestinians.” —Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

“Ungrounding is a work of profound moral clarity and scientific precision, based on years of tireless collaboration and advocacy. Urgent and essential reading.” —David Wengrow, co-author of New York Times-bestselling The Dawn of Everything

From an acclaimed architect and investigator, a devastating, meticulous accounting of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and crimes against its people

Eyal Weizman is one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict, and the built and natural environment. As director of the organization Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers have spent decades investigating and documenting acts of war and human rights violations around the world, including extensive work in Weizman's native Israel and Palestine. Since 2023, the group’s efforts have focused on producing evidence for the International Court of Justice’s case against Israel.

In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that original and extraordinarily comprehensive research to bring us on an eye-opening journey through the “deep cartography” of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarized topography, settlements, and barriers. He catalogs, in unflinching and exacting detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unlivable for the Palestinian people. Taking us through the broader geographical and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between colonizer and colonized — and how Israel’s actions have escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide.

Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where, in 2005, he founded the Centre for Research Architecture. In 2007, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, he established the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour, Palestine. He is the author of numerous books, including Hollow Land, The Least of all Possible Evils, Investigative Aesthetics, The Conflict Shoreline and Forensic Architecture. He is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize," a Peabody Award, the European Cultural Foundation Award, and numerous other awards in human rights, investigative journalism, art, and architecture. In 2019, he was elected Life Fellow of the British Academy.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Caterpillars have been here for a long time. In August 1950 the area that came to be known as the Gaza Strip was cut off from the rest of Palestine by a ditch carved into the soil by a single-blade plough pulled by a tractor. An archival photograph depicting the scene shows the tractor to be a Second World War-era Caterpillar, model D6. It was part of a convoy of military vehicles. Behind it drove Israeli and Egyptian troops and United Nations truce observers. An Israeli soldier named Amnon Degieli described the scene. ‘A jeep with the two sector commanders, the Israeli and the Egyptian, led a convoy of vehicles. The officers held a map at a scale of 1:100,000 on which the border was sketched with a thick pencil line. On the ground the width of the pencil line was one hundred metres.’ Entire homesteads and farms fell within it. Mordechai Galili, another soldier who, like Degieli, was a settler from a nearby kibbutz named Nirim, described the process for the settlement’s bulletin. He said Israeli and Egyptian troops ‘argued over every millimetre . . . the bargaining was like in a fish market. There were arguments over every tree.’ In the scorching August heat, the ‘American major’—presumably one of the Colombian UN officers posted to the frontier—‘took off his shirt to sunbathe’. The photograph shows several of the troops lounging in what looks like an abandoned field, while the labour of partitioning Palestine was performed. The ‘American’ had the last word. ‘A signal was given, and the tractor ploughs a straight line right through orchards, vineyards and wadis. The ploughing continued segment after segment. In one location, Galili writes, ‘the tractor climbs over a cactus fence and parts it with pleasure.’ Elsewhere alarmed Palestinian farmers—witnessing the growing trench tearing them away from their lands—surround the vehicles. The Israelis taunt them: ‘Take a photograph of this place because you will not see it again.’ A Palestinian man shouts that they will soon have their land back and tells the settlers to return where they came from. A desperate farmer pleads with the Egyptian officers to move the line beyond his field. The Egyptians impatiently brush him away. Along another segment, ‘an orchard of plum and apricot trees ended up on our side. The owners are on the other side of the line. In front of their eyes we fill our stomachs and pockets, and throw the fruit stone at them, “Eat some!”’ The ploughing progressed from north to south. The landscape was rich with fields and orchards. At yet another location, Palestinian farmers realised that the plough was about to cut between two contiguous villages. ‘The people in the villages of Abasan and Khiza‘a came out in force, screaming, shouting, and yelling.’ Women and children gathered around the convoy. The demarcation process was stopped, and the Egyptian army led the convoy away. On this occasion, the Palestinian farmers succeeded in shifting the line.
This rare moment of success was recorded years later by Salman Abu Sitta, who on 14 May 1948—the day the state of Israel was declared, when he was ten years old—had been expelled with his family from their agricultural village of Ma‘in Abu Sitta (al-Ma‘in) located on a sandstone hill, some three kilometres on the Israeli-controlled side of the plough line and overlooking the towns of Khan Younis, the coastline, and beyond the horizon the Egyptian Sinai Desert. Abu Sitta has become one of the most prolific chroniclers of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba and one of the most forceful advocates for Palestinian return.
In February 2025 Salman came to the offices of Forensic Architecture, the London-based research agency I run. Together we worked on a careful digital reconstruction of al-Ma‘in—a village whose architecture, agriculture and history are central to this book.
The plough line was not an internationally recognised border but it gave rise to two new and complementary territorial units: the Gaza Strip and the Gaza Envelope. The former was a concentration area for 200,000 refugees expelled from 247 localities, villages and towns and the area's original 80,000 inhabitants; and the latter a frontier zone designed to incarcerate them. The difference between the two sides of the plough line was stark, writes Galili. ‘The Egyptian side is dark with Arabs and their herds while the Israeli side is empty.’⁶ The administrative region of the ‘Envelope’ was officially declared only in the early 2000s, as a means of providing the area with Israeli state subsidies, but the term is an apt description of this frontier zone of civilian and military installations that started to be assembled at the same time as the Gaza Strip was formed and designed to enclose it and put it under permanent siege.

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593835026
ISBN 13 
9780593835029
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
416
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Verantwortliche Person
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