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Lawrence Wishart Blog: Journals, Soundings

On the ruins of Gaza: Clearing the way for an urban dystopia

Posted on 19/12/2023

Mahsa Alami Fariman

Dwellings turned into rubble, ashes clouding  the air, bombardment filling the soundscape, bodies wrapped in white clothes; this is the streetscape of Gaza today, a city near ‘full-blown collapse’, as described by a senior UN official.1 This massive level of infrastructural damage is of a different order from what has gone before; it goes beyond the urban warfare that the Israeli army has for a long time been practising in Palestine, which has militarised urban space through ‘razor-wire fences, concrete walls (above and under the ground), remote-control machine guns, surveillance equipment including watchtowers, CCTV, radar sensors and spy balloons’.2 This phase of the war is not about re-defining the relationship between the physical/architectural/spatial elements and the non-physical/abstract/temporal aspects (on this, see, for instance, Eyal Weizman’s account of the ‘Defensive Shield’ operation [un-walling the wall tactic] following the 2002 Israeli incursion into Palestinian territories).3 The war in Gaza today is based on a deeply ideological conception of the relationship between existence and de-existence, appearance and dis-appearance, humanisation and de-humanisation. Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israeli National Security Council, has recently declared: The state of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in. Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal’. He continues: ‘Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist’.4 Other commentators have said Gaza should be flattened; some have said Gaza should be ‘wiped off the face of the Earth’.5 These are statements of intent that have real effects on the ground, and their shocking effects are still unfolding. The outcome is yet to become determined, despite all the determinate forces at work since 7 October – when 1300 Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed and two hundred people were taken as hostages by Hamas, after storming into the ‘Gaza Envelope’, which contains 58 settlements within 10 km of the border, and 70,000 inhabitants (ibid).

Within the 75-year-old conflict over Palestinian and Israeli nationhood, 7 October has become a turning point. To understand events of the present it is necessary to understand the history leading up to that moment. After the 1948 Nakba, the pattern, shape and scale of Israel’s hegemonic force had increasingly momentous effects on urban areas, starting with the blueprint of the Zionist settler project and the 1950s and 1960s master plan of Arieh Sharon, which led to the building of settlements, as well as the occupation of lands, including the building of new homes in what are known as the ‘frontier zones’ of the Gaza Envelope. The land here, which formerly belonged to Palestinian villagers, has been built over by the development of new towns (see Weizman [note 2] for the detail).

The events of 7 October have created another, very particular, urban moment: this time, the pattern, shape and scale of forcefully implementing Israeli hegemony has taken a fully destructive turn – the de-urbanisation, destruction and erasure of men, women and children from the surface of the city, once and for all. This conflict has transformed the terms of urban warfare – from occupation (through gradual but aggressive settlement developments) to mass destruction (through bombardment of urban infrastructures and dwellings). To put this in context, more than 40 per cent of housing in the densely inhabited strip of Gaza, where 14,893 people live per square mile, has been bombed (a 47 to 59 per cent rate of damage between 7 October and 22 November in northern Gaza; 47-58 per cent damage in Gaza City; 11-16 per cent in Deir al-Balah; 10-15 per cent in Khan Younis; and 7-11 per cent in Rafah, the area closest to the border with Egypt).6 Needless to say, the data here excludes the partial or complete mass destruction of healthcare facilities, universities, schools, mosques, refugee camps and other forms of urban infrastructure.

Reading this through Stuart Hall’s concept of contingency and conjuncture, it can be said that these events are situated at the intersection of multiple processes related to previous conflicts, and tend to fuse/condense a particular moment (7 October) into a particular configuration (the erasure of a city with all its inhabitants): this is a dangerous configuration of place, space and time that provides opportunities for the oppressor to fully re-arrange the balance of power. The new pattern of destruction is revealing something distinctively new about the urban present: it reveals an enterprise to transform a habitable city into an uninhabitable piece of land, thereby becoming ready for consolidation into a new entity.

The dystopian and futuristic AI-generated images of the NOVA Israel, for instance, which are circulating in the digital sphere amidst the current lethal bombardment and destruction of Gaza, are an indication of the ways in which different social, political, economic and ideological hegemonic forces could come together to give a specific meaning and distinctive shape to the planned future transformation of a ruined city.7 The use of artificial intelligence in these (colonial and neoliberal) attempts to reshape planning and architectural ideas and practices can take us towards thinking about the different ‘positions’ (in Hall’s formulation) that hegemonic forces adopt in order to intervene in the conjuncture, and to articulate new beliefs and possibilities for sociopolitical and material change.8 Burying a lived-in city under rubble, while giving artificial intelligence the agency to create a made-up public face or an elusive dynamic façade for a tourist city, are signs of moving from one conjuncture to another. A ready-made discourse is available for these purposes, which revolves around new forms of aestheticisation of urban forms of capitalism, new forms of economics, and new forms of the geopolitical organisation of power. Images of modern cities promoted by current Israeli architects are in the main faceless or expressionless images of a re-made ‘non-place space’, comprised of buildings not architecture, without any ‘sense of memorable adornment, decoration and style that can “catch the eye”’.9 The AI-generated image of New Israel discussed here has penetrated into the general consciousness to such an extent that it has become the symbol of city as the work of art death.10

Nevertheless, Hall also reminds us that the one thing that the hegemonic powers will not look at so carefully are the contradictions which every system always produces. Hegemony is a site of contestation: it is not a closed and totalising structure but a contingent process of struggle between dominant, residual and emergent (social) forces.11 This is to say that the people who live in a land cannot simply vanish or go away within the system of power that wants them disappeared. Every big system leaves ‘residues’, and this includes residues after the totalisation of urban spaces. The residues, those who are left out, will resist the totalitarianism of the hegemonic forces.

The Israeli state’s enforcement of modern planning through ‘development towns’ projects has created significant long-term consequences for civilians on both sides, because it has turned the city into a site of constant struggle, and created new political questions with regard to the ways in which cities should/should not operate, and who has/has not the right to home, to land, to the street and to the city. The events of 7 October and after have become a potential moment of rupture in the continuing phase of occupation and settlement development. The outcome of the struggle between these different contending relations of forces is not yet known. They have ushered in a new phase in urban warfare, against both Israeli and Palestinian civil society. However, at the moment it is only the Palestinians whose remaining vital rights to heal, to eat, to drink, to breathe, or simply to stay alive are being taken from them.  We may be witnessing the emergence of a new conjuncture, or simply a configuration within the old conjuncture, but, whatever the case, we also need to take into consideration what Hall says about the emergent residuals – those who are going to ‘disturb and unravel a[nother] particular paradigm of power which can move the conjuncture on to some other configuration’.11

 

Mahsa Alami Fariman is an urbanist, researcher and academic based at Coventry University, where she teaches on urban and human geography. Having studied architecture and urbanism in Iran and the UK, she holds a PhD in urban sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on the city, urbanism, architecture, production of space, feminism and power relations: https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/persons/mahsa-alami-fariman.

 

Notes

  1. ‘UN says Gaza near “full-blown collapse” as US vetoes ceasefire call’, Guardian, 8.12.23: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/08/gaza-israel-strikes-un-official#:~:text=Another%20said%20Gaza%20society%20was,collapse%20of%20the%20humanitarian%20system.%E2%80%9D.
  2. E. Weizman, ‘Exchange Rate’, London Review of Books, Vol 45 No 21, 2023.
  3. E. Weizman, ‘Walking through walls: Soldiers as architects in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, Radical Philosophy, No 136, 2006, pp8-22.
  4. P. Wintour, ‘Widespread destruction in Gaza puts concept of “domicide” in focus’, Guardian, 7.12.24: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/07/widespread-destruction-in-gaza-puts-concept-of-domicide-in-focus#:~:text=In%20the%20current%20Gaza%20war,UN%20shelters%20in%20the%20south.
  5. Quoted in Weizman, ‘Exchange Rate’.
  6. See Wintour, ‘Widespread destruction in Gaza’.
  7. See image cited in note 10.
  8. S. Hall, ‘The neoliberal revolution’, Cultural Studies, Vol 25 No 6, pp705-728.8.
  9. Marc Augé, cited in M. Featherstone, ‘Urban Aestheticization Processes; Cityscape, Landscape and Image’, in G. Giannakopoulou and G. Gilloch (eds), The Detective of Modernity; Essays on the Work of David Frisby, London: Routledge 2020. The second quote is from Featherstone.
  10. See https://x.com/momenelhusseiny/status/1713832081279598833?s=46&t=F4t-SrDx2IsM3Mz47AYbQQ.
  11. S. Hall, ‘Thinking About Thinking’ (lecture), 2004: https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/resource/stuart-hall-through-the-prism-of-an-intellectual-life-thinking/.