Ungrounding

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 documenting acts of war and human rights violations around the world, including in Israel and Palestine. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice’s case against Israel.

In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey through the “deep cartography” of the area, from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels up 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 after October 7th 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.