How is genocide documented? How can spatial design be used as an instrument of genocide? What is the relationship between architecture and genocide? In what ways does urban planning play a role in genocide? Eyal Weizman, an architect, has pursued these questions. He was inspired to develop the concept of “forensic architecture” by what he witnessed in the land where he was born and raised. He recently gave an eye-opening talk titled “The Architecture of Genocide” in Istanbul, based on “Forensic Architecture” reports documenting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We met Weizman during the summit for a ceasefire in Gaza, where he issued important warnings regarding the reconstruction process.
You say that when Israelis hear the word “genocide”, they usually respond, “We don't line people up against a wall and shoot them.” How would you respond to the claim that 'what is happening in Gaza is not genocide'?
Especially in Israel, when you say the word genocide, people say, “But it's not like the Holocaust. There are no gas chambers, people are allowed to leave. We are not systematically killing them.” This is a misunderstanding of the legal category of genocide. The better historical framework to understand what's happening in Palestine is to think about settler colonial genocide. The genocide of the indigenous people in the Americas, in Africa… Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish Polish scholar that came up with a definition of genocide, has been very interested in the history of settler colonialism and realised that slow genocides are extremely effective. Entire indigenous population, entire linguistic groups, and entire cultural groups have been decimated. They don't exist anymore in those places that were colonised. I am interested as an architect in what is the place of space in genocidal destruction. Violence is applied on the landscape. You destroy agriculture, you contaminate aquifers, you destroy hospitals, you push people to places where there is little water. This is indirect violence that leads to the kind of colonial style, slow death. When you think in this way, you are also asking yourself, where did the genocide against the Palestinians begin? Is this something new or do we need to look at a slow genocide that goes across eight decades of settler colonial process around Gaza by which the water is taken, by which land is taken, by which people farmers were pushed away from their fields onto the sand on the dunes, by which people were pushed in from the north of Palestine. I'm interested in the spatial mechanism in the architecture of genocide. And the architecture of genocide is always two things. It's environmental. You need to understand how the environment is organised around Gaza. And you need to consider soil. Where is agricultural soil? And you need to think about the architecture that Palestinians are building in order to survive. Hospitals, schools, mosques, archaeological sites, cemeteries… My interest lies in space like a weapon: How the design of space can become a mode of killing.
All of this is designed on paper first, and then implemented on the ground. So what ideological design lies behind the architecture of genocide in Gaza?
What we call the Gaza Strip is an invention. An invention that was put in place in 1948. The Gaza region is all the way to Hebron and all the way to Beer Sheva and the whole Nakab, the whole desert part. During the war of 1948, Israel decided to expel all Palestinians. The Jordanians, the Syrians, the Lebanese allow refugees in, the Egyptian always closed. They managed to defend a small part of Palestine where all the refugees were under Egyptian control, but outside the border of Egypt. Israel wants the land without people. They built a concentration camp which is the Gaza Strip. So that is a political idea. But then came the civilian architects, because around that Gaza Strip, there was no fence, there was no wall. Civilian architects, some of them modernist architects, graduates of the school of Bauhaus, started to design kibbutzim, which was a kind of a modern form, one after the other, along the plough line, making what Ben Gurion called the organic wall. That was done on a drawing board. And they built those kibbutzim right over where the Palestinian villagers were to show them there could be no return. You cannot have this area back. They took the ploughs and the ploughs were driven on the roads and the cemeteries and the remains of the building and turned it all into fields. Like you rubber it out. Only after that came military planners and put fences and then another fence and then another fence and another, four layers of fences and the fence under the ground, a wall under the ground, against tunnels and in the air, an iron dome, to close it from above. So it became an envelope.
The concept of 'forensic architecture' also originated from the experiences of Palestinians, right?
In Palestine I grew up. I was born an Israeli Jewish person, also to a family of refugees from Europe. I could see the injustice is spatial. It's architecture. I had an architectural binocular in front of my eyes. And then I was interested in architecture and violence, architecture and power. And then slowly developed this concept of forensic architecture out of my experience of fighting colonialism in Palestine. We do analysis of smaller spaces, murders, crimes caught on camera, all using architectural techniques.
What was the most striking thing you discovered while preparing “The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation in Gaza” report?"
That starvation also has an architecture to it. The architecture of starvation included several elements. One, the destruction of fields denies people food sovereignty, and denies people the ability to feed themselves. So they depend on food Coming from the outside. But then there's the architecture of checkpoints and through the checkpoint Israel can stop the food coming in. So you need two of them together. Destruction of fear and control of checkpoints. And then they were attacking all the food warehouses in Gaza. And after that they came up with their own murderous food distribution centres where they channel Palestinian into ration giving stations and snipe at them like a death dress. So I was looking at the way famine and starvation is configured architecturally when.
You often use the example of the desert to show how a place can be used as a weapon of genocide. What you say about Gaza is reminiscent of the Armenian Genocide.
So Israel's main strategic aim of the genocide was to expel Palestinians outside of Gaza. They failed. The genocide has failed. It's produced an enormous amount of death and misery, but it is a strategic failure. Israel wanted to crash the border to Egypt. They were bombing from the north to the south and they wanted the border to crash and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would go into Egypt. Then they would close the border. That was the strategic aim. Gaza is the edge of the desert. South of Gaza there is a small river called Wadi Gaza. After Wadi Gaza, between Wadi Gaza and Rafah in the south, slowly start a desert after Rafah is full desert in Egypt and people cannot survive in a desert without artificial water desalination. The line of the desert is always the knife of the guillotine. It has been featured in the Armenian genocide when Ottoman forces took Armenian communities from water rich areas into the Syrian Desert. In the Syrian desert you're completely dependent on water that you're given. They did two things like the desert in Gaza. One, they would try to push Palestinians into the desert. And second, they created a desert out of the north part of Gaza that has some water. They uprooted everything. They created desertification. And desertification is the creation of conditions of Life calculated to bring about the destruction of the people in the genocide.
Some of your family and friends are still living in Israel. They are, of course, aware of your work. What kind of conversations do you have with them?
It has become more and more difficult. The space for conversation is closed after 7th of October. I am no Hamas supporter, but in the Israeli press I was accused of this and accused of not having any sympathy for Israeli civilians. Some of my friends stopped talking to me, I had issues inside the family, etc. I hope that this is going to ease up, but it is difficult in wartime. Everybody is hardening and the space for critical conversation is shrinking exactly at the time that you need it. Because Israeli society needs to open their eyes and not think like “What Hamas did to us on October 7th”. Of course there were atrocities there, undeniable atrocities. But why would that happen? The attack on the kibbutzim? Those kibbutzim were part of the militarization of the frontier. They're not just innocent villages there. They were built on the ruins of people to close them in. I don't think any civilian should be killed by men with guns. But one needs to understand the long history. Who are the people in Gaza? This is their land.
While we are having this conversation, the ‘Gaza Peace Summit’ is being held in Egypt.
A ceasefire is not a peace treaty. There is no peace unless there is an acknowledgement, a deep historical reckoning. There is no peace unless you are dismantling state sanctioned apartheid. There is no peace if there is no possibility for anyone to return to the land to live there. There is no peace in occupation. Occupation is violence. Resistance to occupation is legal because occupation is a violent form. I love that area. I will only return to live there with this place, I can live exactly equally to my Palestinian friends. I will not go back to live under conditions of apartheid or Jewish supremacy.
There is already talk of rebuilding Gaza following the ceasefire. What do you think will happen during this process?
I am worried that the reconstruction could become the continuation of the genocide by other means. One step of the genocide is militarily bombing and pushing people across the border. Another one is through development. Erdogan just came back from Sharm El Sheikh. He was meeting with people from the Gulf. Donald Trump is saying, “We are inspired by Gulf style development”. How do they develop? How do they build cities? They fence up huge amounts of areas, huge tens of kilometres by tens of kilometres, and put a fence around it. This area is controlled by a project manager who is like a king. Everything that comes in, that comes out is by them. And then it can be designed like a tabula rasa. And the tabula rasa of Gaza includes many many mass graves. They would say “We need to very fast develop”. They would be like in the Gulf, concentrated in specially built temporary housing, maybe close to the Egyptian border. The same way that Israel is done during the war, it can do during reconstruction. And Turkey needs to be vigilant. People here need to understand this process, that large scale development. Erdogan was saying “Bring business to our development companies”. Careful, you might be participating in war crimes.
Which activities could make actors on the ground complicit in war crimes?
This development is imposed on Palestinians. Nobody asked. They are deciding it over the Palestinian heads. They are deciding how to organise society. The neighbourhoods, the mosques, the cultural centres, the archaeology, the heritage, the schools. This is for a society to decide. If you impose something on people, you're building a prison, you're designing a concentration camp. And Turkey might be complicit in the design of the concentration camp in Gaza. And that has legal repercussions. It's not legal by international law to do that. The ICJ has ruled that there is sovereignty for Palestinians. If it's not invited by Palestinians, if it's not a Palestinian force, you cannot do that. You're continuing the genocide by other means. And everybody is running now to get business because Qatar or Saudi would pay and Turkish construction companies could bring a lot of work here. There’s lucrative business in that. But Turkey would be participating in ethnic cleansing, in occupation, potentially even in genocide. Ethically it's absolutely wrong. Look at the Gulf type architecture. Let's look at how labour is organised there. Huge fenced up country. Every truck is recorded. First they need to flatten everything under the rubble of the buildings in Gaza. There are 11,000 people missing. Until you find the last person that is missing, you cannot build on bodies. This is also illegal and wrong. If Turkey is going to push the same model like they've done after the earthquake, no consultation, evacuation of people, fenced up area, massive, fast reconstruction. We need to be very careful.
