UNGROUNDING

Geology and landscape become destiny in this innovative study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Palestine’s southern Mediterranean coast, where Gaza is located, is the meeting point between different types of soil,” writes Israeli British “forensic architect” Weizman. At the coast are sand dunes. A few miles inland, the soil becomes rich and fertile, with underground aquifers flowing between layers of sand, clay, and limestone. In 1950, as Weizman chronicles, a single plow pulled by an Israeli tractor carved a trench that delineated what would become the Gaza Strip and the neighboring Gaza Envelope. Into the former were placed 200,000 Palestinian refugees from nearly 250 communities, far above the carrying capacity of the Strip—which has about the same land area as Las Vegas or Detroit—and without any of the necessary infrastructure. At the same time, Palestinian farms in the productive Gaza Envelope, a narrow belt of land about 4.3 miles wide that lies to the east of the Gaza Strip within present-day Israel itself, were destroyed by Israeli settlers: “The plough blades went over the remnants of homes, roads, fields, rubbing out Palestinian existence. They also drove their ploughs over cemeteries because these were places to which expelled Palestinians returned.” An elaborate network of tunnels underlies the Gaza Strip that, by Israeli Defense Forces estimates, extends more than 425 miles, allowing Hamas attackers on October 7, 2023, to enter Israel undetected. Weizman notes that four of the Israeli settler communities that had supplanted and bulldozed those Palestinian farms were early targets. Ironically, given an Israeli blockade on even the shipment of construction sand into the Strip, the Israeli military campaign there has provided plenty of tunnel-reinforcing rubble: “Due to ongoing Israeli bombardment, there was no shortage of this type of raw material to repurpose.” But now, of course, there are many other things to be rebuilt, among them homes, schools, and hospitals.

A bracing study of “spatial violence” and the unfortunates who suffer it.