Ben Reiff
+972 Magazine / June 25, 2026
Welcome to the +972 podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Ben Reiff, Deputy Editor at +972 Magazine, and your host for today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the River and the Sea.
TRANSCRIPT
Ben Reiff: There can be no disputing the extent of Israel’s obliteration of the Gaza Strip since October 2023. The statistics leave no room for doubt, testifying to the damage or destruction of at least 92 percent of housing units, 95 percent of university buildings, 94 percent of hospitals — and the list goes on and on.
But as Eyal Weizman writes in his new book Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, 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.
Weizman is well placed to analyse this process, which he describes as “an organized and designed campaign to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza.” Over the past two and a half years, Forensic Architecture — the research agency he 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.
I’m delighted to be joined by Eyal Weizman today to discuss all this and much more, so let’s dive right in.
The book provides a huge amount of historical context for understanding what we’ve seen over the past two and a half years, but it also introduces an analytical framework for making sense of Israel’s actions in Gaza. So tell us what you mean by ungrounding and why it’s so distinctively characteristic of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza?
Eyal Weizman: So firstly, I’d say that the book really is looking at the environmental dimension of this genocide. When it looks at the environment, it is particularly concentrated on soil and ground, which is the kind of resource that settler colonialism is so interested in.
So, ungrounding is really what connects the continuity of settler-colonial violence from the Nakba to the genocide. And that is the attempt to expel [Palestinians] and then transform the environment by all sorts of soil practices. So, you know, if in the post-1948 part of the Nakba, the way in which the soil is transformed is through the plows that actually are not only used for cultivation, but to completely erase Palestinian presence from the ground, after the genocide, these are the bulldozers that are stabbing the front loader into the ground and basically flipping everything, desertifying the alluvial part, the agricultural part of the Gaza Strip.
Ungrounding is unlike any wartime destruction, so we’re not talking here about war, we’re talking about ecocide and genocide. When Forensic Architecture, the organization that I run, when we work on war zones and aerial wars and bombardment, you tend to see a kind of a haphazard, almost kind of like random distribution of ruination. You tend to see buildings collapsing onto the ruins. You see piles of rubble. You know where the buildings stood. You can see roughly the organization of the urban surface, but ungrounding is basically the erasure of all of that. It’s much more than destruction. It’s the erasure of destruction. It’s the erasure of erasure, if you like. The rubbing out of any trace of existence.
And that comes out of the same kind of move by which both the Nakba and the genocide and periods in between to a lesser intensity sought to expel Palestinian. But expulsion, ethnic cleansing, if you like, of people from the land require both, you know, enormous amounts of violence or pogroms, massacres and bombardment or what have you, and then the denial of return. And the denial of return works through the erasure of everything that exists. So there will be nothing to return to. There will be a kind of an unrecognized area.
This is what we see very much, particularly in the 60% that Israel controls in the east of the so-called “Yellow Line,” where without now active conflict in those parts, there is a systematic demolition that could not be justified by any sort of international legal principles of distinction — proportionality, or necessity — so to speak. It’s just a simple, continuous act of erasure, almost like a national project of erasure that is happening in these parts.
You connect this practice of ungrounding very directly to one of the prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention. Can you explain how you see the relationship between ungrounding and genocide?
Forensic Architecture, we look at the built and natural environment. There is a particular environmental, or architectural clause, in the genocide convention. So under, after this, you know, special intent, the intent to destroy, and all are in part that defines a genocide, there’s various prohibitions on killing, on reproduction of a society. But one that is very environmental and architectural is what’s called Article 2C that prohibits the calculated destruction of conditions of life.
So, what are the conditions of life? They are effectively a basic kind of question for an architect or geographer to say, “What is the relation between the environment and life?” The way in which the environment is conceived as an infrastructure for life and in a traditional settler colonial context — 18th century settler colonialism, 19th century settler colonialism — the environment that buttresses life is the natural environment. It’s the soil, it’s water, it’s multiple other forms of, you know, the kind of the flora and fauna that exist within that, that provides a people’s conditions of life. In the modern era, these are cities and bits of infrastructure and homes and hospitals, and the systematic, calculated destruction of those are not a direct act of killing, but deny the possibility of society to survive through its being anchored in space.
So it is a kind of genocide by attrition, a kind of a slow motion genocide. In fact, when Lemkin writes his book in 1944 that comes up with the term genocide and later elements of that are incorporated into the 1948 Genocide Convention. But when Lemkin conceptualizes it, he thinks about the settler colonization of the Americas. And he notes that genocide can take place over decades, if not centuries. And that indigenous people displaced off their land are displaced off the means of survival, displaced onto a much less favourable natural environment with less rain, or soil or less water, and would slowly start a process of decline. Indeed, most casualties from the settler colonial projects occur not through direct kinetic violence, although this always occurred as part of displacement of people, but through that intergenerational effects of the degradation of conditions of life.
But there is obviously also a cultural life that is grounded in other types of infrastructure: universities, schools, mosques, cemeteries, archaeological sites, that actually bind people culturally to a place. And so there is cultural political life and there is biological life. And somehow those are related because when the cultural infrastructure for life is destroyed, as it has been during the Gaza genocide — we’re talking about all universities and majority of mosques and cemeteries and archaeological sites systematically destroyed — it breaks the resilience of society that can also mitigate the threat of a biological existence. So those cultural and biological life with us as a human species are kind of entangled and cannot be seen as totally separate. Although, of course, in the Genocide Convention as ratified in 1948, Lemkin’s idea of cultural life was actually ignored.
I want to dig into this a little bit more because you’re very clear that this constitutes genocide. But you also write in the book that expulsion was the strategic aim of the war. So do you see genocide and expulsion as kind of two sides of the same coin here?
Yeah, I mean, it is sometimes misunderstood to think that if the continuous aim of Israeli and Zionist settler colonization is the expulsion of Palestinians, that that is not genocide, because they could live somewhere else. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are very related concepts. I think that what was happening in Gaza since, if we just speak about that, since October 2023, is an attempt to kill enough Palestinians, destroy Palestinian life in part, so that they move away. There is no expulsion that is simply the kind of voluntary transfer that Israeli politicians are actually fantasizing about. You need to create that volition and you create that volition through enormous amounts of violence, loss, and destruction. So that is ethnic cleansing and genocide are not opposing concept. You cannot defend yourself and say, “Well, I’m not committing genocide, I’m just committing ethnic cleansing.” The way to expel a population from its place is really through an enormous amount of violence that is indistinct, that is aimed at the foundations of life that has Palestinian society as its target.
I think that the metaphor that I give in a book that is, I think, it’s most apt to understand that principle is the one that I encountered while helping litigate the genocide in Guatemala in 1982. And the Ríos Montt, the dictator of the military, dictator of Guatemala at the time, has a quote that was absolutely foregrounded in his conviction for genocide. And that is when he said, “You need to drain the river to kill the fish.” So in his conception, the fish are the guerrillas, and that he builds on Mao Zedong’s quote, the guerrilla moves amongst the people like fish in the sea or in a river. And the river is the built environment, the river is the natural environment, it’s everything that enables life in a particular location.
That is the definition of genocide and the way that it might interact with counterinsurgency. So the minute that the aim of the military is targeting the foundation of life, including society itself, and it’s built a natural environment, you’re in the genocidal territory. The bombing of the north, which is the kind of those first three, four weeks after October 7th, where you have the most intense bombing of an urban environment in a history of aerial bombardment and history of urban environments is a means for displacement, it’s a kind of a curtain of fire — it’s an enormous amount of fire, distinct or indistinct — that just washed out, or was trying to wash out Palestinians from the north towards the south.
I don’t think Israel and the Israeli military was intending for that campaign to last so long. They thought that with the shock of October 7th on Israeli society, with the enormous amount of support that Israel has achieved internationally in the immediate aftermath of that, that they could change the facts on the ground in a really fast way, like the ‘67 war, and in a few days, just like force all Palestinians out into Egypt, the border would collapse under the weight of Palestinians seeking refuge, and that the door would be locked behind them.
And then a new reality would be created and would be used strategically by Israel to effectively change forever the reality. In that respect, the genocide has failed to achieve its aim, like each and every one of Israel’s campaigns post-October 7 2023, Palestinians held on to Gaza City despite the most intense bombing they held with the fingernails to to that area. Hundreds of thousands of people remain in Gaza City. Of course, there were people that left into Egypt, but Egypt did not allow more people and used various mechanisms to stop and to hold the border. And effectively what happened is that simply the Gaza Strip has shrunk.
You also touch in the book on ungrounding that’s taken place over the last year or so in refugee camps in the West Bank. I think we’re seeing something very similar happening in southern Lebanon now as well over the last few months. So clearly, this is about more than Gaza.
Yeah. War on refugees, and the kind of developments with which Israel was kind of flattening and levelling refugee camps, particularly north of the West Bank, most famously the Jenin refugee camp with it, is more than just a way that Israel claims it seeks to contain Palestinian resistance that comes from these places. Israel, now since October 7th, seeks to undo the political category of refugee-ness. And the political category is also, like anything, grounded in environments, in the environment of the refugee camp, which testifies itself for the un-resolvability of living, the kind of the complicated part by which Palestinians negotiate the temporariness of the camp as the maintenance of the right of return by the institutions that support refugee-hood, refugee-ness, like UNRWA, for example. So all those things.
The refugee camps are being levelled and that has history in Israeli, in the history of Israeli violence towards Palestinians, say, in Sharon’s 1970 attack on Jabalia, and Al-Shati, and other refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, with a clear and testified intent to undo refugee-ness. Sharon was saying, “If we destroy the refugee camp and we build, ‘decent housing,’ resistance would disappear.” It’s only the presence of refugee-ness that puts into question the very essence and the further existence of a Zionist Israeli state. So this is why it’s a war on refugees, so this is why Jenin and Nur-Shams and other camps are being completely uprooted.
What is happening in Lebanon is also part of that because Israel has kind of used the sort of Gaza doctrine, so to speak — the ungrounding idea — also in Lebanon. The river is Shia rural life in the south of Lebanon, [it] is what put Israel under threat. And therefore, in order to kill the fish, that is, I don’t know, Hezbollah operatives in this part, they need to drain the river. And what they’re doing now is draining that river, destroying conditions of life in that part, so that Lebanese farmers could not return south into that area. Ungrounding is now everywhere and ungrounding is happening in the buffer zone and further buffer zone. I mean the entire Golan Heights is a buffer zone, and then there is a buffering of the buffer, which in 2024 is where they’re taking another piece of Syria to buffer the Golan Heights and you know again levelling of building an infrastructure within that.
Ungrounding is a process that takes place on the surface of the land, but there’s a large section of your book that deals with what’s happening below the surface. You talk about the early Zionists’ fixation with soil, including prominent figures in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, such as Yosef Weitz, who led the land department of the Jewish National Fund in the 1930s and 40s. Why did the Zionist movement view soil as being so central to their colonization efforts?
All settler colonial projects, or most of them, are agrarian in their nature, no? So obviously, Weitz was completely obsessed with soil. He was taking soil samples after, you know, there’s a diary entry I think I reproduced in the book, that after the July 1948 expulsion of Lydda and Ramle, he goes and he marvels at the treasure soil they leave behind, this hamra soil, this like red-brown soil that could be used for agrarian production. You can have oil, or diamonds as resources for other forms of colonialism, agrarian settler colonialism needs soil and water. That’s the kind of magnets for its expansion. Soil is a kind of a subterranean or terranean, if you like, kind of infrastructure along which settler colonization kind of progresses and moves.
You write in a lot of detail about the origins and development of Gaza’s subterranean tunnel network, which has become synonymous with Hamas, but which as you show actually long predates the establishment of Hamas and has been used for decades both in the smuggling of goods and in armed resistance against Israel by various Palestinian groups. I found it quite evocative the way you describe Gaza’s subsoil as the only part of Palestine still unoccupied. Can you give us a bit of history about how and why this tunnel system developed?
Firstly, as a spatial researcher also born and raised in Haifa, I had to take on several restrictions while writing about the subsurface. So the first chapter about soil and the last about the genocide are full of testimonies that I solicited, original reconstruction mappings, photographs. In that part, I consciously did not use any of those. It is more about telling the story through a conceptual framework of soil rather than mapping out anything that Palestinians are seeking to hide. Because the nature of the subsoil, that move from the surface with its overexposed photographic, top of the soil exposed to satellite images, drones, social media, everything is kind of overtly photography. You cross that threshold and you’re like, all that is shut off.
You’re in a space that is both imaginary and operates as an imaginary space because everyone can project different things onto it and use it rhetorically for different things. So saying that caveat, Palestinians retreat into the subsoil immediately with the beginning of the occupation in 1967 of the Gaza Strip. Many Palestinian dig holes, but later become more complex, into the surface. The surface is occupied, the subsoil is that part of Palestine, which is kind of beyond the omnipresent optics and policing of the colonizer, of the occupier on the surface.
So there is an indigenous knowledge — some people call it the Tarabin well, some people call it Bedouin well, for some people it’s the wells of the region — that Palestinians left landless in 1948 use that technique in order to dive into the subsoil, retreat into that part of Palestine left unoccupied, initially in order to undo those restrictions on conditions of life. If you think about the engineering and calculation of conditions of life, from the Genocide Convention, this is basically siege warfare. Siege warfare does, and this is what Gaza has been undergoing between the two catastrophes — the genocide and the Nakba — is siege, meaning, the land envelope is controlled and things are modulated coming from Israelis. It’s restricting the water coming into Gaza. It’s damming the water of Wadi Gaza before it crosses under the boundary of the Gaza Strip. And later on, after the occupation, it’s allowing more or less labour to come out always as a means of control.
And then during the blockade of the past 20 years, even calories, megawatt electricity, you know, liters of benzene and diesel are kind of being regulated in a way that calculates and creates conditions of life as a means of control, or degrade conditions of life as a means of control. In order to alleviate those conditions of life, the subsoil was the medium through which Palestinians connected to Egypt, to allow petrol, allow food around, all sorts of goods to come in and alleviate the effect of that blockade. There’s never been an unrestricted flow of goods and people.
So this is one of the origins in like finding the alleviation of conditions of life through the subsoil, just like the soil is the conditions of life during the kind of agrarian existence of people in the Wadi Gaza and the sort of northern Naqab area before the Nakba, the subsoil becomes the conditions of life after that through the smuggling tunnels of Rafah. Those farmers that are pushed into the refugee camps of this part, also have family members on the other side. And then the tunnel network becomes something like a social network, kind of like an internet of things, if you like, because the way it connects, it connects to people that you trust, people with familial or organizational affiliation, so that the network itself is a kind of a diagram of social relations on the top of the surface.
Then there is the origins of the tunnels as tactical tools for warfare. I’m particularly interested in one, as I would, Palestinian architect or architectural student His name is Mohammed Al-Aswad, but starts inventing tunnels and all sorts of contraptions, spatial contraptions to resist and escape the Israeli occupation forces in Al-Shati refugee camp, where he comes from. He builds double walls where he can walk through the house between the walls, and then from the double wall, there’s a tunnel towards the outside, and then all sort of movement along roofs and between walls, and kind of rewire the architecture of the camp as a porous medium where him and his forces could actually move across that area. Then, that kind of expands from there into a kind of a tactical defense and movement system within camps. Somewhere in between the interaction of the kind of landless farmers and the sort of the architecture of resistance, a tunnel network emerges.
But there’s no dispute that there are tunnels under Gaza, but Israel is using the imaginary of the tunnels to do several things. First, to actually create an image of Palestinian as less than humans, as a kind of infestation out of control, beast-like, demonic figures that inhabit the subsoil, as a kind of justification to unground the entire surface. The fact that there are tunnels in Israel’s conception is like what allows it to sort of total desertification of Gaza on top of the surface.
There’s a great quote in the book that you include from the recollections of an Israeli military officer in the early 1970s who described finding entry shafts in courtyards, in destroyed buildings, in orchards, in homes, under stairwells, in wells, in clay ovens, and disused toilets. He said they were hidden and camouflaged by weeds, hay, sacks, barrels, or crates. Some of the entrances led to dead-end bunkers used for hiding, while others were used by units of two to three fighters to facilitate hidden movement. Why do you think Gaza’s tunnels have been so perplexing for Israel for almost 60 years? And why, even after two and a half years of ungrounding, have many of these tunnels continued to evade Israel’s attempts to destroy them?
Israel is trying to detect tunnels through ground penetrating radar and ground penetrating radars require a certain kind of silence on the surface. But during a war when bombing is raining in, and also Israel’s own destruction — Israel’s own carpet of destruction that they’ve created — the top soil of Gaza now is full of rubble and all sorts of metal bars, etc., that the ground penetrating radars are distorted by. They’re distorted by all sorts of electrical signals.
It is also structurally extremely difficult to blow up a tunnel. A tunnel is not a thing, like in a sense of architecture, there’s an object that is self-supportive. It’s an absence of a thing. The structural forces of the earth are actually moving and protecting it in multiple other ways.
And the third thing is that tunnels are a process rather than a form. They’re an operation principle, and they could grow relatively easy in the particular soil of Gaza. You have an entire landscape under the soil — multiple layers of sand, sandstone, clay, and water. You have the shoreline, you have underground rivers, you have underground lakes, you have an entire landscape that is invisible to the eye and can only be experienced by texture and moisture and viscosity. You know, the very experienced tunnel diggers know when they cross into clay and how to follow a clay ridge that goes up and down in the subsoil. That is a kind of a very specific, very unique form of knowledge.
I want to talk a little bit about Forensic Architecture’s work over the past two and a half years, which has been incredibly vast. I mean, as well as verifying and cataloguing and archiving thousands of videos from Gaza, you’ve also carried out a number of high profile investigations into specific incidents, such as the bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in October 2023, and also the killing of 15 paramedics and NGO workers and the subsequent cover-up of those killings by the Israeli army in March 2025.
You’ve also contributed extensively to legal cases seeking to bring some kind of accountability and justice, perhaps most notably by supporting the South African application to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. There are so many crimes you could have investigated or legal cases you could have joined. I’m curious how you’ve envisioned your role as an organization during this period and how you made those decisions.
Yeah, this is a very good question, because indeed, when people think about Forensic Architecture, they think about a kind of like scene of reconstruction — we would spend a year, sometimes more than a year, on a few split seconds — and reconstruct what happened by modelling and building in the social media-circulated videos and testimonies of place and doing those really very, very careful, minute reconstructions. We’ve done several that you’ve mentioned here, and also including the killing of Hind Rajab and others.
But particularly the challenge of a genocide case is not so much the clear construction of the question of who’s done it, and there’s a question of intent, of genocidal intent, the special intent, the intent to destroy all or in part. From a legal perspective, it is actually understood by pattern of conduct, pattern of military conduct. So if you analyse an incident, a bombing of a hospital, you’re within, usually within the range of international humanitarian law, war crime. Is it proportionate? Was it a military necessity? Genocide is really about the simultaneous application of a huge multiplicity of actions.
So, we have taken in and analysed and catalogue thousands and thousands or tens of thousands of incidents. Some of them are attacks on hospitals, some of them are attacks on schools, some of them are destruction of agriculture, some of them are attacks on aid, some of them are shooting and killing of civilians, etc. Some of them are expulsion, acts of expulsion, etc. And we want to see the relation between them.
When you see that attacks on the hospital occur at the moment that Israel wants to expel a particular area, and when you see that attack on agriculture, on the food sovereignty of Palestinian in Gaza, or an attack that was simultaneously to attack to the sinking of all fishing boats, and then Israel at the same time attacks aid coming in, there is a compounded effect of different and separate action that lead to and support the declaration of genocidal intent articulated by Israeli politicians and military figures at the beginning of the of that campaign and later throughout it. So that is really where our work was mainly articulated in and that is collected in a piece of work called “A Cartography of Genocide” that includes those thousands of verified incidents and time-space relation between them showing that they add up to a particular, or fulfilling, a particular intent.
The verification part of your work, as you mentioned in the book, usually relies on kind of identifiable urban markers. But Israel’s ungrounding of Gaza has flattened much of the landscape. So what techniques has your team developed in order to overcome that challenge?
The whole art of what’s called geolocation that we started back in early 2010s, and with also partner organizations like Bellingcat and Syrian Archive and others, is really about, “Okay, you see videos from the ground, here’s an antenna, here’s a minaret of a mosque, here’s a particular roof of a building, here, this is the angle, this is when and where it happened, etc.” But Gaza is not only a demolition zone, it’s also a construction site. So the demolition of Gaza has transformed the topography of the Strip completely because the way that the Israeli army is actually kind of invading an area, it’s collecting all the rubble of neighbourhoods it has destroyed, piling them up into an artificial landscape — it loves hilltops, the Israeli army — and then from the top of those landscapes, they put snipers or tanks and then moves on.
So effectively, you have a kind of what I call the earth storm, a kind of a changing topography that is continuously like a gelatinous kind of medium. The earth is turned into this gelatin thing. In this way, memory of a place is really what you have. Sometimes a means of torture was taking Palestinians, I don’t know, from Jabalia, and putting them where their home was and allowing them to see and then telling them this is where you are. The panic that ensues by the old contours of your existence are kind of anchored in space and that ungrounding erases the memory in that way.
Re-grounding initially begins with acts of historical and memory recollections. We were using what we call situated testimony, particularly with the two survivors of the medic massacres of March 2025, where we reconstructed with them the massacre as as a transformation in the landscape and built a model with them from memory of this landscape anchoring the recollection, making them understand what has happened, because after the massacre, those survivors were interrogated and tortured, and they were blindfolded. And then when they saw the site, they couldn’t understand what happened and where they were. Slowly through the reconstruction of the soil and its transformation, we were able to reground memory in place.
I think we’ve spoken quite abstractly about the horrors of the last few years, but a lot of the story of this genocide has also been personal to you and your team at Forensic Architecture. You write about how several of your friends and colleagues at Ain Media were killed in Gaza, along with at least 14 members of your colleague Nour’s family, and the search for answers about what happened to them really fused the professional with the personal. I wondered if you’d feel comfortable telling us about some of these friends and colleagues and the work they were doing before they were killed.
Yeah, so the connection with Ain Media, like many other connections with Palestinian organizations, was formed by a former colleague of mine called Shourideh Molavi, who was actually often in Gaza and established that relation with Ain Media and conducted various collective investigations with them. She was a close personal friend of Roshdi Al-Sarraj, who’s the son of the legendary mayor of Gaza City, Yahya Al-Sarraj, and we were in touch. We were doing investigations together. I mean, I never met him in person, but he was on team calls and we were partnering on investigations. To a certain extent, they were the closest colleagues, our sort of sister organization in Gaza.
As immediately after October 7, 2023, Roshdi was asking us to help him find his colleagues or our colleagues in Gaza whose traces were lost. There’s so many Palestinians whose bodies have still not been found or buried under rubble, etc. We don’t know what happened to them. We know that there was bombing in the area where they were on October 7th itself, and the traces disappeared. So while, you know, Roshdi and his colleagues were looking for them on the ground. We were looking for them amongst the social media, the storm of videos that was coming out of Gaza. On the 22nd of October, Roshdi himself was killed in a targeted strike, covering his wife and daughter. It’s an incredibly heartbreaking set of actions and we were so involved and in there.
Then day after day, Nour and other colleagues and friends, Palestinians from Gaza and elsewhere, who had members of the family there come in and report about family members caught under…I remember in April 2025 Nour’s family was caught under a pile of rubble in Khan Younis. Her aunt and children, Nour’s cousins, were alive, under the rubble. They were knocking from under the pile.
Members of Nour’s family who knew that she was out asked for help. We were trying to call everybody that we knew and their sister, as you say. And we’re trying to alert the Red Cross, I mean, the Red Crescent said, you know, “We cannot approach. Israelis wouldn’t allow us to get near that place.” Every breath is painful in a situation like that, because you know people are still alive, crushed by buildings, and you experience it live.
So people think that, of course, we weren’t in Gaza, we didn’t experience anything directly, like what Palestinian experience there, but I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life. In that instance, the slow extinguishing of life of that family there was horrific. We were just seeing Nour at the time, dealing with that, continuing to work, doing everything that she could to try and rescue her family, who obviously perished, was enormously painful.
Wow, yeah, I can’t imagine, thank you for sharing that with us. The book closes by touching on the various reconstruction plans proposed for Gaza’s future by the American government, the Egyptian government, and also by Gazan civil society, none of which look anywhere close to becoming reality. But you also end by looking further into the future where you envision a process of what you call re-grounding through the return of Palestinian refugees, not only I think to their destroyed homes inside Gaza, but also to the communities that were destroyed during and after the Nakba 80 years ago.
I wondered if, to finish, you could tell us kind of what you see as the first step that’s necessary for that process of regrounding to take place?
I think this is the relation between the finding of evidence — photographic material — to existence, that resists the logic of grounding, resists the logic of erasure. There’s always a trace, there’s always a weak signal, there’s always something remaining, even that survives the bulldozers and survives the plows of the 1950s. These are often anchors for return. We see it, I don’t know, still in the Wadi Gaza basin with Al-Araqib, no? I mean, it was a community that returned and the buildings were demolished 200 times, more than 200 times now..
They returned to a cemetery that exists there. So those traces are really important, they are anchors. If you learn how to see, and how to amplify weak traces and really through the combined force of testimony and critical analysis of images and cartography and whatever you have in order to reconstruct those or to find and map those traces, those become the anchors for return. And the resistance to the ungrounding logic of settler colonialism is indeed insisting on those weak traces and maintaining them as acts and anchors of return.
I think that’s a great place to end. Thank you so, so much, Eyal, for joining us and for your time. I would urge all of our listeners to go and read the book. It’s really an incredible piece of work. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you, Ben.
That’s it for the +972 podcast. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time.
