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All They Will Find is Sand

A very good piece by Eyal Weizman. 

I first knew Weizman when I read his 2007 book Hollow Land. Weizman is director of Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London

“The circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack and so a buffer zone is established to protect them. Afterwards, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary. In this manner vulnerability is produced and then mobilised in a feedback loop that the genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has called ‘permanent security’.

“The image of luxury towers constructed above mass graves, with tens of thousands presumably buried under the earthworks, embodies the logic of 21st-century genocide. The Israeli government now hopes, in the words of the former minister Ron Dermer, that what ‘two years of war did not accomplish will be done by market forces’. The erasure of Palestinian life in Gaza could, counterintuitively, be achieved by architectural means.

“Reconstruction plans imposed on Palestinians with the implicit aim of destroying Palestinian life in Gaza demonstrate the reason [the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael] Lemkin reserved a place for architecture in his conception of the crime of genocide. He knew that the way a people organises its space is a manifestation of its history and social structure. ‘Genocide has two phases,’ Lemkin wrote in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The first involves the ‘destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group’ – this was achieved in Gaza by Israel’s devastating bombing. The second involves the imposition of a design by the oppressor, like these reconstruction plans for Gaza. ‘This imposition, in turn,’ he wrote, ‘may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonisation of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals’.”

Related 

Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Pccupation

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