Israeli architect Eyal Weizman is a new kind of investigator. He is founding director of Forensic Architecture, which is both a field of study, involving new ways of interrogating violent conflicts, and the name of a research agency. As he says, “We are the people’s forensic agency. We only interrogate militaries, secret services and police forces”. They also investigate the role of corporations and militaries in environmental destruction. (interview with Peter Beinart, 27 November, 24.)

Born in Haifa, Israel, now based in London, Weizman, is Professor of Spacial & Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Forensic Architecture has a dozen offices from Athens, to Rio to Bogota; their researchers use spacial architectural technologies, in service of political studies and prosecution of war crimes all over the world. They also draw from software development, interactive cartographies, remote sensing, satellite image analysis, “situated testimony”, material analysis and crowd-sourcing.

Although their primary focus continues to be Israel-Palestine, one great example of their range is their ½ hour film, Cloud Studies 2022, which shows their ground-breaking work gathering evidence of environmental destruction caused by petro-chemical industries worldwide – work that gets presented in cases brought by legal activists against corporate developers.

Forensic Architecture provides architectural and media evidence to civil society groups, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC), and the UN.

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007), updated 2017, was my first introduction to the work of Weizman and colleagues. In it, he demonstrates the spacial planning aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. He shows the long-standing intent to occupy, displace Palestinians and control the land, through detailed examination of the built environment over time. He shows the fortress-like nature of the settlements, their intentional placement on hilltops, their observation towers for the constant surveillance of Palestinians living in the valleys below, and the tragic fact of Zionist ghettoization of its own people in their segregated, walled-off enclaves.

After more than a year of research, Forensic Architecture has just released an 827 page report called: A Cartography of Genocide; A Spacial Analysis of the Israeli Military’s Conduct in Gaza since October, 2023. This report has been provided to South Africa’s legal team to support their case at the ICJ charging Israel with Genocide. Research entailed viewing 100’s of thousands of videos and testimonies coming from Gaza, “evidence flying at you” Weizman told Beinart. He says that they were looking not so much at the incident itself, “which is actually a war crime”, but at relations between statements and actions, between multiple bits of evidence, at “evidence of evidence” on a meta level. He states that you need to look at intent – cultural and political- which has been produced over a period of decades, to look at history and consider how intent was formed. You can’t understand Genocide without understanding the particular

environment, he says, and because we cannot know what is inside the archive of the Israeli military, what is behind their commands, we need to look for patterns. Actions which are systematic and widespread constitute a pattern. Patterns reflected in commands of the military were found by Forensic Architecture in Israeli destruction of:

1. agriculture
2. health infrastructure
3. public institutions &
4. displacement of Gazans.

Relations between the patterns have a compounding effect, coinciding, working together as a system, multiplying the effects on the population. According to Weizman, each one of the patterns fits a historical pattern, such as weaponizing the denial of humanitarian aid and the use of starvation. Since October, 2023, researchers found that over 70% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been destroyed, together with over 45% of its greenhouses. Those operations deny Gazans the ability to feed themselves. Together with the systematic withholding of food and water, they create conditions of famine. These same patterns were earlier evident in Israeli’s long practice of “putting Gazans on a diet” by calculating the number of calories the population needed just to survive, and restricting the amount of food allowed into Gaza on that basis. They were evident in Israel’s spraying of poisonous herbicides on Gazan farmland which started in 2014, destroying crops and livelihoods, documented by Forensic Architecture in Cloud Studies, 2022. Creating conditions where life is not possible is all part of Genocide.

Why is Forensic Architecture important?

We need the insights provided by research agencies such as Forensic Architecture because we are awash in propaganda disseminated by corporate media. We are at an historic time of recognizing the realities and inequities created and sustained by imperialism, colonialism and corporate capitalism. We need to learn the truth from reliable sources. In their own words: “We are an interdisciplinary agency operating across human rights, journalism, architecture, art and aesthetics, academia and the law. In 2022, the Peabody Awards programme wrote that we had co-created ‘an entire new academic field and emergent media practice’; in 2024, the European Research Council assessed Forensic Architecture as ‘a scientific breakthrough (defined as a revolutionary work that led to deep change in existing paradigms or new methods opening a new stream of research)’… Since 2020, FA has supported the growth of agencies worldwide that practice and apply our methods. The Investigative Commons is both a global network of practitioners, and a physical space in Berlin, within the offices of our sister agency Forensis.” Check them out for yourself at https://forensic-architecure.org .

Next week: Part 2

h/t Michael McNamara for architectural context