The Brooklyn Rail

While Forensic Architecture is no stranger to methodological innovation in the face of novel human rights cases, the sheer scale and rate of atrocities being committed in Gaza—and their exceptional brutality, unimpeded by international law—has presented a unique challenge, both to our working methods and to our capacity to respond to a state of endlessly escalating urgency. What could constitute an appropriately radical response to such radical violence? The answer has been multifold, but the approach can be understood, broadly, as not only documenting the sweeping impacts of Israeli violence on Palestinian land, life, and infrastructure, but exposing the strategies underlying it—by working backwards from individual incidents to determine a series of essential typologies by which to classify them and so understand their relation to one another across space and time. Communicating this relationality is at the heart of the project, demanding the use of different forums and mediums for expanding and contracting the spatial and temporal lens through which these actions are presented, from the personal scale to the territorial, from the “ceasefire” to October 7 to 1948. This radical deconstruction of Israel’s annihilatory violence to its component parts and ultimately its historical roots may be best understood through a parallel etymological retracing of radicality from its present expression of extremity to its invocation of something fundamental to its earliest usage as a direct reference to plant roots, derived from the Latin radicalis.

Responding last year to an interview question about hope amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha said, “I see hope when people start to understand the origin of the catastrophe, not the result of the catastrophe.” The Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) generally refers to the violent expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians by Zionist forces between 1947 and 1949, which laid the groundwork for the contemporaneous founding of the state of Israel; but many Palestinians also refer to Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and Gaza as a second Nakba, or to the conditions endured in the Occupied Territories over the intervening decades as part of an ongoing Nakba. Highlighting patterns within Israeli acts of violence and dispossession going back to the (first) Nakba is one of the many ways in which we have sought to make the intentionality of Israeli actions legible—showing that the manufacturing of catastrophic conditions of life for Palestinians is now and always has been by design. This contribution seeks to open up this historical continuum by reflecting on one of Forensic Architecture’s investigations into the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages in 1948, and through it exploring the role of myth and memory in motivating the radical violence we are seeing in Gaza today.

Like the majority of Palestinian towns and villages in the first half of the twentieth century, the village of al-Dawayima—one of the largest in the Hebron area—was a farming community, sustained in large part by agricultural practices passed down and refined from one generation to the next. A combination of ancient and modern interventions allowed the villagers to navigate the semiarid climate and rocky slopes, successfully cultivate orchards, olive groves, raise livestock, and grow a variety of vegetables and grains, with yields plentiful enough to support local demand and engage in regional trade. Al-Dawayima became known for hosting one of the largest weekly agricultural markets in the region called suq al-barrayn (“the market of the two terrains”), named by the villagers to reflect the dual topographies from which their produce was sourced; the local fallahi dialect and its resulting nomenclature abounded with these types of environmental and agrarian inflections.

One of over a thousand such communities at that time, each shaped by its own regional particularities and corresponding evolution of inherited knowledge, al-Dawayima is a representative model for the entwinement of an individual, local, and national identity with the terrestrial identity of Palestine. This was reinforced by challenging, at times unstable environmental conditions and a reliance on sustainable cultivation practices, both demanding a deep attunement to the land. The natural outgrowth of Palestinian identity mirrors the linguistic evolution of the “radical” from the literal to the figurative, from its strictly botanical origins—originating in the root or earth, inherent in life’s natural processes—to signifying something fundamental to the essence of a person or thing. Such rootedness signals the profound rupture that would come with displacement, the loss of the land as a fracturing of identity itself, leaving in its wake a language of broken signifiers and a people stripped of a multigenerational vocation.

The village was one of over five hundred invaded and ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces during the Nakba of 1947–49. Over the course of a single day in late October 1948, soldiers equipped with armored vehicles and machine guns systematically hunted down and executed hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children across multiple sites in al-Dawayima. In a ministerial committee meeting just two months later, the Israeli agriculture minister reportedly condemned the “Nazi acts” that had been committed there as “something that determines the character of the nation” (even as it was agreed internally that nothing should be outwardly admitted). Some of the survivors fled to nearby villages, only to be displaced shortly thereafter when these places in turn came under siege; others sought refuge in parts of present-day Gaza and the West Bank or continued on to neighboring countries like Jordan, which became home to the largest community of al-Dawayima survivors outside of Palestine. Around one-third of Palestinians displaced during the Nakba relocated to Gaza, most of them previously self-sufficient farmers pushed into what would broadly become an Israeli-controlled wage economy. Nevertheless, the implementation of a mix of traditional farming and more experimental cultivation practices, some developed specifically to resist Israeli policies for limiting Palestinian food security, resulted in Gaza producing around 44 percent of its own food domestically before October 2023—quite uncommon for a majority-urban environment.

At first, most Palestinians who had been forced to relocate in 1948 expected that in due course they would return to their land and livelihoods. Indeed, the refugee camps set up in the years following were intended—and constructed—to be temporary; yet most of these camps persist today, their ballooning populations forced to live in temporary conditions made permanent. In parallel with this deliberate extension of precarious circumstances, Israel undertook a campaign of comprehensive erasure, which sought to destroy all evidence of Palestinian cultivation of the built and natural environment, leaving nothing behind to reclaim or return to: “a land without a people” made manifest. In the case of al-Dawayima, the village was flattened following its invasion and in 1955 the Israeli settlement of Amatzya was built directly over its ruins, a common practice in the post-Nakba period through which the newly formed state of Israel sought to eliminate any traces of the atrocities it had committed and to rewrite the land as it would rewrite its history—not least with the common refrain that the settlers, unlike the communities of Palestinian farmers before them, had been the first to “make the desert bloom.”

The incompatibility between these foundational narratives of Israeli statehood and the roots of Palestinian national identity offers some insight into the radical extremity of Israeli violence then and now: its pursuit of a constantly moving target reflects the fact that this is an ongoing war on memory itself. Where Israeli nationhood relies on the denial of Palestinian presence to continuously assert a past that never was, Palestinian nationhood relies on the continuous reconstruction of a past that, because of the singularity of Israeli presence, cannot be reclaimed. Yet the radical essentialism of Palestinian identity is such that, even uprooted, it continues to propagate in the face of genocidal erasure. A former resident of al-Dawayima known as Abu Yasser has spent decades interviewing other displaced survivors in Amman to produce an extensive community archive of “memory maps” evidencing the location of sites related to the 1948 massacre and reconstructing the physical and social structure of the village as it had been prior; “I learned that al-Dawayima doesn’t have any documents,” he told Forensic Architecture colleagues, “and wanted to be like a bridge between past and present, to convey it to our future generations.” Through their progressive, collaborative refinement over time, these intimate roadmaps to lost lifeworlds at once sharpen and secure the collective memory, their ongoing production a valuable means of community-building in itself.

A different form of memory mapping can be found at the sprawling Baqa’a camp in the outskirts of Amman, the largest Palestinian refugee camp outside of Gaza, where its different districts and neighborhoods have been named after former Palestinian towns and cities, a reflection of the natural groupings of residents that have settled there. A common practice in Palestinian localities and refugee camps, such acts of naming are both commemorative and generative in their defiant revival of place and custom through communal memory culture. Where the continuity of daily life is perpetually overshadowed by an imposed sense of impermanence, these seeds of shared origin and identity create a grounding throughline between an inherited past and a prospective future.

The Israeli denial of the Palestinian “homeland” is at risk of continuous destabilization by such forms of community transmission through which lost homelands are reconstructed, cultural continuity repaired, and Palestinian national identity endlessly reconstituted. It is an extension of this logic that underpins Israel’s progressive reframing of any and all incarnations of Palestinian community and social infrastructure—from refugee camps to schools and hospitals—as a pervasive threat to Israeli national security. This is continuous with the constant, strategic conflation of Palestinian civilians with Hamas: even children, whose disproportionate targeting is undeniably linked to their status as purveyors of a Palestinian future. While Israel has a vast playbook of longstanding mechanisms for the fragmentation of Palestinian society, from its system of tiered citizenship to its network of checkpoints, its current stress-tested position of all-but-limitless impunity, even faced with charges of genocide, means it need no longer pretend that there is any version of Palestinian society or sovereignty that it can tolerate.

Having normalized humanitarian noncompliance and either destroyed or occupied Gaza’s most fertile territory, Israel has little by little exerted totalizing control over Palestinian life and land. Under the mocking guise of an unbreachable “ceasefire,” Israel’s genocidal intent is expressed perhaps most clearly in its present determination to manufacture conditions of such extreme violence, depravation, and precisely engineered precarity in the sliver of Gaza to which its Palestinian victims have been confined, that they are reduced to a state of raw survival or “bare life,” wherein the dignity of personhood, no less nationhood, is hardly achievable. This escalating, insatiable barbarity in the name of civilization can best be understood if what is being protected is not in fact the physical security of the Israeli people, but rather the security of Israel’s fragile, fictitious narrative of origin through which it justifies its own survival at any cost.