Eyal Weizman: Ungrounding

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.

Requiem pour la French Theory

På den utmärkta nätlanseringen nyligen av den engelska versionen av denna viktiga, två år gamla bok framgick att den försetts med en längre inledning av John Bellamy Foster, vilket gör att det i första hand måste vara den som bör beställas.

Att förstå den betydelsemättade ironin i användningen av den amerikanska termen “French Theory” i titeln. I första kapitlet förklarar Monville dess uppkomst och kommenterar bl.a. att “Il y a forcément une sorte de décalage, qui frise l’ironie, voire la blague, dans le fait d’utiliser le terme en anglais, et je ne suis pas sûr que les lecteurs anglo-saxons en aient toujours conscience”.

Judisk socialism och antisionism

Texten med frågan “Jews Against Zionism?” som kommer upp på bilden till detta Molly-avsnitt av Marc Lamont Hills program UpFront på Al Jazeera English är lika märklig som den nästan identiska, “Jewish Anti-Zionism?”, som kom upp för Simone Zimmermans motsvarande avsnitt av Beyond Israelism. Den judiska antisionismens förefintlighet, och dess radikalt olika versioners, är ingenting nytt och den har också alltid varit ganska välkänd, långt före Molly, ja redan från början.

Men Molly, Molly, Molly. Vilken ofantlig förstärkning hon dock har givit den judiska vänster som representerar den, främst i USA men, hoppas man, mer och mer även i Europa (hon kommer till Stockholm i höst), genom sin enastående kunskapsspridning om Bund och dess historia. Och därmed sitt bidrag till återuppväckandet och förnyelsen av dess socialistiska riktning och program som en politisk och kulturell kraft idag.

I denna intervju ligger tyngdpunkten litet mer än i tidigare på det sistnämnda. Man vill höra mer om det nu. Om en neobundistisk rörelse i hela västvärlden, utvecklad i ljuset av och som svar på och alternativ till hela den sionistiska erfarenheten.

“Founded in 1897 in the Russian Empire, the General Jewish Labour Bund was a revolutionary socialist movement that organised Jewish workers and championed Yiddish culture and democracy while standing against Zionism.

But what remains of its memory? And is its vision finding new life in the Jewish left today?

This week on UpFront, Marc Lamont Hill speaks to Emmy Award-winning artist and author Molly Crabapple.”

Revolutionärt medvetande mot teknologiskt inburande

Av Catelina Johnstone (Catelinas rubriker är ibland litet för långa för att passa här; jag byter därför denna gång ut hennes mot en kortare egen variation, dessutom på swensko.)

John F Kennedy was correct when he said “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

That’s why police robots are being aggressively normalized today. The empire managers want to make sure violent revolution is impossible, too.

The New York Times’ sports department The Athletic has a creepy new article out titled “The ‘Robodogs’ on World Cup patrol in Mexico” about how wonderful and awesome it is that the international soccer tournament is being patrolled by surveillance robots.

The article is functionally a PR piece for police robots, gushing about how “cute” and “cool” onlookers find the dystopian technology.

The piece opens with the cheery paragraph, “A group of police officers patrolling a stadium with three dogs on a World Cup matchday wouldn’t usually raise eyebrows. But when those three dogs are high-tech robots equipped with video cameras that can sustain speeds of 20kmph, you can understand the fuss.”

“The K9-Xs are made of aluminium and high-strength plastic,” The Athletic writes. “They have facial recognition and behavioural analysis systems installed, which means they detect when a group of people become agitated and send video to the police force’s centre for command, control, communication and computers.”

In a video segment accompanying the article, The Athletic’s Tomás Hill López-Menchero refers to the robots as “creatures” and says the robots “went down a treat with the public” in the World Cup audience.

It’s little things like this that help normalize police robots in public consciousness. Calling them “dogs”, giving them the name “K9”, calling them “creatures” instead of machines. It’s pretty clearly designed to evoke the image of something normal that westerners are familiar and comfortable with.

But westerners should not feel familiar and comfortable with these things, and we should not see them as normal. The fact that we’re seeing more and more use of police robots around the world should frighten us all, and the fact that popular institutions like the World Cup and the New York Times are being used to normalize them should freak us the hell out.

Our rulers are always acutely aware that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that we could turn on them at any time. This has been the case for as long as there have been rulers. History is full of examples of the masses turning against their government and establishing a new order, and the oligarchs and empire managers have long been preoccupied with the task of ensuring that this never happens to them.

Autonomous killing machines nullify many of the problems presented by human security forces. You don’t have to worry about the robot army siding with the people, or refusing to fire upon their fellow citizens. An army of militarized police robots would provide the oligarchs and empire managers of the western empire with a perpetually obedient force of bulletproof trigger-pullers who can shut down any uprising when the time comes.

The increasing ubiquitousness of police robots is not separate from the exploding prevalence of surveillance cameras and AI facial recognition, the push for digital IDs and the eradication of online anonymity, or the increasing instances of online censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. A technological cage is being constructed around the public to ensure that we can be stopped from turning against our masters.

The story of humanity in the 21st century is the story of a race between revolution and the technologies designed to prevent it. A race between the awakening of collective consciousness to the urgent need for revolutionary change on one hand, and the technological ability to quash a people’s rebellion on the other.

We’re all in this race, whether we realize it or not. We’d better pick up the pace.

Texter av Catelina Johnstone

Rupert Spira: The Nature of Consciousness

Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter

New Harbinger, 2017

Amazon.co.uk

Publisher’s Description:

Our world culture is founded on the assumption that the Big Bang gave rise to matter, which in time evolved into the world, into which the body was born, inside which a brain appeared, out of which consciousness at some late stage developed. As a result of this “matter model,” most of us believe that consciousness is a property of the body. We feel that it is “I,” this body, that knows or is aware of the world. We believe and feel that the knowing with which we are aware of our experience is located in and shares the limits and destiny of the body. This is the fundamental presumption of mind and matter that underpins almost all our thoughts and feelings and is expressed in our activities and relationships.

The Nature of Consciousness suggests that the matter model has outlived its function and is now destroying the very values it once sought to promote. For many people, the debate as to the ultimate reality of the universe is an academic one, far removed from the concerns and demands of everyday life. After all, life happens independently of our models of it. However, The Nature of Consciousness will clearly show that the materialist paradigm is a philosophy of despair and, as such, the root cause of unhappiness in individuals. It is a philosophy of conflict and, as such, the root cause of hostilities between families, communities, and nations. Far from being abstract and philosophical, its implications touch each one of us directly and intimately.

An exploration of the nature of consciousness has the power to reveal the peace and happiness that truly lie at the heart of experience. Our experience never ceases to change, but the knowing element in all experience – consciousness, or what we call “I” – itself never changes. The knowing with which all experience is known is always the same knowing. Being the common, unchanging element in all experience, consciousness does not share the qualities of any particular experience: it is not qualified, conditioned, or limited by experience. The knowing with which a feeling of loneliness or sorrow is known is the same knowing with which the thought of a friend, the sight of a sunset, or the taste of ice cream is known. Just as a screen is never disturbed by the action in a movie, so consciousness is never disturbed by experience; thus it is inherently peaceful. The peace that is inherent in us – indeed that is us – is not dependent on the situations or conditions we find ourselves in. In a series of essays that draw you, through your own direct experience, into an exploration of the nature of this knowing element that each of us calls “I,” The Nature of Consciousness posits that consciousness is the fundamental reality of the apparent duality of mind and matter. It shows that the overlooking or ignoring of this reality is the root cause of the existential unhappiness that pervades and motivates most people’s lives, as well as the wider conflicts that exist between communities and nations. Conversely, the book suggests that the recognition of the fundamental reality of consciousness is the first step in the quest for lasting happiness and the foundation for world peace.

Reviews:

“I’ve gained deeper understanding listening to Rupert Spira than I have from any other exponent of modern spirituality. Reality is sending us a message we desperately need to hear, and at this moment no messenger surpasses Spira and the transformative words in his essays.”

Deepak Chopra, author of You Are the Universe, Spiritual Solutions, and Super Brain

“Rupert Spira guides his reader on a delightful journey of discovery that uncovers and reveals what the Kashmiri Masters have called ‘the greatest secret, more hidden than the most concealed and yet more evident than the most evident of things,’ and that is consciousness itself. Rupert deserves to be congratulated for the clarity and sensitivity with which he presents the teachings of the ancient and modern Masters concerning consciousness, and his own deeply personal experience, in such a way that it can be both easily understood and applied.”

Mark Dyczkowski, author of The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism

“In these essays, Rupert Spira cracks the shell of materialism by elucidating the ‘calamitous assumption that lies at the root of our materialistic culture,’ and he artistically and persuasively leads us to the universal antidote: the realization of the primacy of consciousness. As a scientist, I very much appreciate Rupert’s pointing out that scientists will never truly succeed in their exploration of the world until they successfully investigate the nature of the subject known as ‘I.'”

Paul J. Mills, professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California, San Diego

About the Author:

From an early age Rupert Spira was deeply interested in the nature of reality, beginning to meditate at the age of seventeen and studying the teachings of the classical Advaita Vedanta tradition over the next twenty years. In 1997 he met his teacher, Francis Lucille, who introduced him to the Direct Path teachings of Atmananda Krishna Menon and to Jean Klein and the Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. More importantly, Francis directly indicated to him the true nature of experience. Rupert lives in the UK and holds regular meetings and retreats in Europe and the US.

JOB:s kommentar:

Man får väl säga samma sak här som om första upplagan av Bernardo Kastrups Why Materialism Is Baloney.

Materia eller medvetande?

Sufimarxism

Ordförande Haz fastslår:

“Any Marxist who does not undergo 5 years minimum of isolated meditation will not make it.

The revolution demands Leninist Sufi Orders dedicated to spiritual purification because most radicals are just disguising inner psychological turmoil in ideological language.”

En utmärkt början.

Men därutöver måste dessa ordnar förstås också omforma hela marxismen i enlighet med sufismens verklighetsförståelse.

De måste själva bli det mest centrala i revolutionen och dess ledarskap.

Kilboms memoarer

Skrivna på Höckertsvägen under första hälften av 50-talet:

Kilbom var liksom den yngre Henrikson en av dem som flyttade till Södra Ängby när det var nybyggt vid mitten av 30-talet och bodde där resten av sitt liv. Moster Maggan skickade för inte länge sedan ett nummer av Södra Ängby villaförenings “infoblad” med en kort artikel om ‘Karl Kilbom – Revolutionären på Höckertsvägen’.