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A literal ungrounding: Eyal Weizman, Mark LeVine, A. Dirk Moses, Melanie S. Tanielian, ‘The Earth Is Turned into a Weapon of War: Discussing Eyal Weizman’s Ungrounding’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2026

15Oct26

Excerpt from the interview: Dirk Moses: ‘The foundation for the book, Ungrounding, is the work you’ve been doing with your team at Forensic Architecture. Can you tell us about Forensic Architecture and the work that you and your team do there?’ Eyal Weizman: ‘Forensic Architecture started as a university-based research agency around 2010, but it rests upon a longer experience of documenting the spatial realities of settler colonialism in Palestine. Through publications such as, Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture and Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, a method of reading architecture (in an expanded sense: buildings, roads, bridges, the kind of physical terrain, the transformation and design of the physical terrain) started to evolve. And so did techniques of mapping its destruction: the transformation of the built environment as a means of colonization, occupation, control, etc. The work is typified by following very minute details, such as specific lines in the drawings of Israeli planners and architects as they design roads and settlements, showing how you can commit a war crime by drawing a line on a drafting table. So Forensic Architecture avant la lettre, began to document realities – both settler colonial and manifestations of state power in other places …’

Description of the book being discussed: A devastating, meticulous account of the history of Israel’s destruction of Gaza from an acclaimed architect and investigator 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 this revelatory new project, 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.


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