"Ungrounding": Eyal Weizman on Gaza Genocide & Israel's "Permanent Architecture of Control"

We speak with Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman about his new book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, a meticulous investigation into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the physical destruction of the territory and its impact on the Palestinian people.

Forensic Architecture was founded in 2010 as an interdisciplinary research group focused on investigating state violence and human rights violations. Since 2023, Forensic Architecture has focused on producing evidence for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Weizman says “ungrounding” is “a kind of destruction that we have not seen anywhere else,” with Israeli bulldozers “terraforming” the landscape to erase all traces of Palestinian life. With thousands of bodies still unrecovered from under destroyed buildings, Israel’s flattening, extraction and reshaping of the rubble in Gaza is a continuation of its crimes, says Weizman.

“Israel is actively and against court order, against the order of the ICJ, destroying the evidence of the genocide that it has perpetrated,” he says.