Middle East and North Africa

While many Americans believe that Israel has committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza over the past three years, attempts to understand what really happened there and hold Israel accountable have fallen short so far. The legal case at the International Court of Justice has been stalled by American and European opposition. The ferocious debate over the term itself has degenerated into partisan flamethrowing and definitional nitpicking. The campus protests that erupted in the spring of 2024 were violently repressed and have largely gone away.

A new book by the British Israeli architect and political activist Eyal Weizman tries to fill that void by telling the story of Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza street by street, farm by farm, and hospital by hospital. What sets Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide apart from this polarized discourse is its determined focus on the physical and its analytical tone. The evidence, collected by Weizman and his team from audios, videos, and interviews and subjected to rigorous analysis, is overwhelming. Their efforts produced the “Cartography of Genocide,” an interactive and constantly evolving digital map that details “an organized and designed campaign to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza.” By the end of the book, the question is less whether Israel’s actions should be regarded as genocide and more what to make of a genocidal process that seeks to not only remove a people but to fundamentally and permanently transform the land.

While many Americans believe that Israel has committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza over the past three years, attempts to understand what really happened there and hold Israel accountable have fallen short so far. The legal case at the International Court of Justice has been stalled by American and European opposition. The ferocious debate over the term itself has degenerated into partisan flamethrowing and definitional nitpicking. The campus protests that erupted in the spring of 2024 were violently repressed and have largely gone away.

Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, Eyal Weizman, Penguin Press, 416 pp., $38, July 2026

A new book by the British Israeli architect and political activist Eyal Weizman tries to fill that void by telling the story of Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza street by street, farm by farm, and hospital by hospital. What sets Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide apart from this polarized discourse is its determined focus on the physical and its analytical tone. The evidence, collected by Weizman and his team from audios, videos, and interviews and subjected to rigorous analysis, is overwhelming. Their efforts produced the “Cartography of Genocide,” an interactive and constantly evolving digital map that details “an organized and designed campaign to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza.” By the end of the book, the question is less whether Israel’s actions should be regarded as genocide and more what to make of a genocidal process that seeks to not only remove a people but to fundamentally and permanently transform the land.

Weizman is the author of the acclaimed Hollow Land, which dissected Israeli methods of settlement and physical control in the West Bank in the 2000s. He is also one of the creators and driving forces behind Forensic Architecture, a research agency whose investigations have played critical roles in documenting genocide from Guatemala to Namibia, torture prisons in Syria, and human rights abuses in Mexico. Weizman worked closely with South Africans in their petition against Israel to the International Court of Justice, providing detailed reconstructions of Israeli actions, which are scattered through the text of his new book. His outrage over state violence is not confined to Israel, but it is personal: Multiple members of his team were killed over the course of the war—victims of the very campaign that they worked to document.

Maps from the “Cartography of Genocide” interactive site........

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