Last week, I wrote about the patterns Forensic Architecture searches for in its interrogations of violent conflicts and environmental destruction. These patterns help to establish intent, a prerequisite for judicial determination of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
I referred to the Israeli government’s intent to commit a Genocide against the Palestinian people, how that shows up in examination of various government policies and actions since 1948. In order to have all the land, there is also a need on Israel’s part to destroy a certain sense of Palestinians as refugees, which has existed since the 1948 Nakba. With awareness and recognition of refugees, under international law comes their well-established right of return, something the Israelis have sought to deny from the very beginning. A significant thorn in Israel’s side is the existence of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief & Works Agency, specifically established after the 1948 Nakba to assist Palestinian refugees. UNRWA’s existence was intended to be only temporary, until refugees could return to their homes and lands. We have seen Israel in 2024 accuse UNWRA employees of being Hamas members, without providing any evidence, and Western nations moving in lockstep to defund UNRWA – the single organization upon which Gazans, 75% of whom are descendants of 1948 refugees, most depend for education, supplemental food, medical aid, and emergency shelter. UNRWA is the one organization fully capable of delivering such support. It has all the infrastructure in place. Many of these nations have reestablished their support of UNRWA under sustained pressure from protesting citizens. Forensic Architecture’s efforts help us to understand that the current Israeli intention to destroy UNRWA is all part of yet another pattern of erasure of Palestinians from the landscape. If there are no refugees, all those claims against the land of “Eretz Israel” evaporate.
Another example comes to mind: the pattern of destruction of health infrastructure was earlier evident in Israel’s deliberate targeting of ambulances in the West Bank and in Gaza, together with the killing of medics, during Gaza’s 18 month-long Great March of Return (2018-2019), which the world ignored. Dr. Alice Rothchild, retired physican/faculty member of Harvard Medical School, has followed the Israeli onslaught on Palestinian health care systems for decades. She has taught and worked in the West Bank and Gaza. Her latest book, Condition Critical, details her findings, and shows the long pattern of oppression and suffering of Palestinians through the health care system, at the hands of the Israeli occupation. All the work of such reputable scholars, with no agenda other than uncovering the truth in service of justice, shows that this entire catastrophe we are witnessing in Gaza did not begin on October 7th, 2023. It began when Zionism took hold as an ideology and a strategy for creating a homeland for Jewish people at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people.
What is unique about Forensic Architecture’s approach is that it involves a whole way of thinking, a kind of integrated knowledge where the model constructed is a multi-dimensional system. Using vast amounts of information – such as aerial photos, land-based photos, eyewitness testimonies, and survivor’s accounts, they superimpose multiple data points on maps and show how every bit of information relates to the whole, in time and in space. They
are at the forefront of information modelling. Once they have the digital model, they can change the parameters of that model and “see” it through time. They eliminate the possibility of ambiguity wherever possible, using methodology that is irrefutable. If you go to the link: www.gaza.forensic-architecture.org, you can discover their compelling work for yourself.
As an Israeli himself, Eyal Weizman has a very particular connection to the history and the land of Israel-Palestine. As he recounts, “Israelis are the perpetrators of Apartheid but also can’t breathe within it”. He would like to see a world where everyone can breathe.
h/t Michael McNamara for architectural context