Ungrounding
The Architecture of Genocide
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
A devastating, meticulous account of the history of Israel’s destruction of Gaza from an acclaimed architect and investigator
'Urgent and essential' DAVID WENGROW
'Extraordinary' ILAN PAPPÉ
Eyal Weizman is one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict and the environment, both built and natural. As director of the organisation Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers document acts of state crimes and human rights violations around the world. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel.
In Ungrounding, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the 'deep cartography' of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, its unique soil, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable.
Taking us through the broader geographic 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 coloniser and colonised – and how Israel’s actions after 7 October 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, and illustrated with dozens of original images, maps and diagrams, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This impressive exposé from Weizman (Hollow Land), founder of human rights investigative group Forensic Architecture, outlines how Israel uses environmental destruction as a tool of "ethnic cleansing" against Palestinians. The book opens in 1950 as a single plough, followed by Israeli soldiers, carves a line between Gaza city and its hinterland, dividing Palestinian farmers from their crops ("Take a photograph of this place because you will not see it again," one Israeli taunts). This separation and the later obliteration of this fertile farmland were, Weizman argues, part of the tactic of "ungrounding," which "aims to remove a society from its place and erase previous existence." Through archival research, first-person accounts, and architectural model-building, Weizman traces Israel's ongoing campaign of ungrounding, from official instructions to " ‘destroy their stone houses' " during the 1948 Nakba to the razing of Gaza after the October 7 attacks. Along the way, the author offers a myth-busting history of Gaza's tunnels that presents them as necessary civic infrastructure used to connect bifurcated refugee camps and subvert blockades. The most harrowing parts of Weizman's study emerge via Forensic Architecture's technique of "situated testimony," which uses digital models to allow "witnesses to have access to memories otherwise obscured by trauma." ("I saw the place where everything had happened... they had changed the place completely. When I saw the place it made me feel hysterical," one survivor recalls.) It's a sickening look at Israel's systemic erasure of Palestinian life.
