Ungrounding
The Architecture of Genocide
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 14 jul 2026
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- $229.00
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- Pedido anticipado
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- $229.00
Descripción editorial
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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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.
