The Architecture of Genocide
Penguin Press, 2026
Amazon.com
Publisher’s Description:
From an acclaimed architect and investigator, a devastating, meticulous accounting of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and crimes against its people
Eyal Weizman is one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict, and the built and natural environment. As director of the organization Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers have spent decades investigating and documenting acts of war and human rights violations around the world, including extensive work in Weizman’s native Israel and Palestine. Since 2023, the group’s efforts have focused on producing evidence for the International Court of Justice’s case against Israel.
In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that original and extraordinarily comprehensive research to bring us on an eye-opening journey through the “deep cartography” of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarized topography, settlements, and barriers. He catalogs, in unflinching and exacting detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unlivable for the Palestinian people. Taking us through the broader geographical and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between colonizer and colonized – and how Israel’s actions have escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide.
Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time.
Reviews:
“This impressive exposé from Weizman, founder of human rights investigative group Forensic Architecture, outlines how Israel uses environmental destruction as a tool of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Palestinians … the author offers a myth-busting history of Gaza’s tunnels that presents them as necessary civic infrastructure used to connect bifurcated refugee camps and subvert blockades … It’s a sickening look at Israel’s systemic erasure of Palestinian life.”
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“A timely and crucial contribution tracing the trail of the Israeli architectural, ecological, and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip. The ruthlessness and inhumanity detailed in this extraordinary book, nonetheless, also hold hope for turning the future soil and grounds into spaces of liberation and reconciliation.”
Ilan Pappé, author of Israel on the Brink
“Ungrounding is a brilliant, shocking, and urgent book for our times, as well as a precious warning to future generations.”
Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and author of Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance
“In the face of overwhelming state violence, Forensic Architecture is becoming an indispensable tool of international law and human rights, as well as a new approach to history. Ungrounding is a work of profound moral clarity and scientific precision, based on years of tireless collaboration and advocacy. Urgent and essential reading.”
David Wengrow, co-author of New York Times-bestselling The Dawn of Everything
“Ungrounding powerfully reveals the architecture of the genocide in Gaza within its century-long context. But with a forensic architect’s precision, Weizman excavates, reassembles, and ultimately lays the foundations for an architecture of liberation.”
Tareq Baconi, author of Fire in Every Direction
“Ungrounding by Eyal Weizman proves that decolonization is not revenge, but a condition for justice and, in the end, for the liberation of both Palestinians and Israelis.”
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur and author of A Moon Will Rise from the Darkness: Reports on Israel’s Genocide in Palestine
“Ungrounding leads us between layers of earth and history, soil and infrastructure, elucidating both the long history of Israeli aggression against Gaza and the histories of Palestinian resistance … Weizman cuts through obfuscations and horror, and helps us to see something of the truth.”
Isabella Hammad, author of Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative
“A wake-up call to the world and the international community – a very important book.”
Shawan Jabarin, general director of Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq
About the Author:
Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where, in 2005, he founded the Centre for Research Architecture. In 2007, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, he established the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour, Palestine. He is the author of numerous books, including Hollow Land, The Least of all Possible Evils, Investigative Aesthetics, The Conflict Shoreline and Forensic Architecture. He is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” a Peabody Award, the European Cultural Foundation Award, and numerous other awards in human rights, investigative journalism, art, and architecture. In 2019, he was elected Life Fellow of the British Academy.
Jan Olof Bengtsson 