As of mid-November, the death toll in Palestine has risen to more than 11,000. Over 4,500 of the dead are children. Another 3,250 people remain missing, likely buried under the rubble. Ten thousand buildings have been destroyed; 222,000 housing units have been damaged, and 41,000 have been totally destroyed. Over half of Gaza’s education facilities have been hit, leaving 100 percent of its student population with no access to education. One hundred thirty-five health facilities have been attacked, and over half of Gaza’s hospitals and two-thirds of its primary care facilities are shut down. This new wave of violence—an escalation that followed Hamas’s October 7 attack, which took an estimated 1,200 lives—has received much media attention. But the history of Israeli violence in Palestine goes back almost a century. As conditions in Palestine worsen, writer Sumaya Awad and architectural historian and urbanist Mahdi Sabbagh provide some historical context and discuss how the built environment fits into the Israeli settler colonial project.
SUMAYA AWAD: Let’s start in 1948, when Israel was established through the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians, who were forcibly expelled from their land. Over 400 Palestinian towns, cities, and villages were wiped off the map. On top of these sites of massacre, Israel began constructing its settler colonial state and its current infrastructure. There are, for example, many parks and hospitals in Israel built on burial grounds. The Absentee Property Law made that possible and was used as the foundation on which Israeli planners drafted the blueprint of Zionism as a settler project. The chief architect of that project was Arieh Sharon, who was appointed by David Ben-Gurion to be the head of the government planning department at the time. There is a physical and material planning of occupation and apartheid.
So, what does it mean, in practice, when we say “occupation architecture”?
MAHDI SABBAGH: The physical built environment often tells you everything you need to know about a place. So, even if you don’t understand the chronology or the legal framework or the difference in zoning regulations, if you look at the built environment itself, chances are you will get almost everything you need to know about a place. Then you might ask questions like, Why is it that this building is in ruins, whereas this one is in mint condition? Why is it that this town looks like it has a lot of greenery around it, whereas this one has no open space or access to open lands? When you read the landscape itself, you start to understand the structural aspects of what we call occupation.
My grandfather’s village was destroyed in 1948. Nazareth, where he and my grandmother went to live after they were expelled from various places in Galilee, is also a violent place. All of its open lands were seized, including my other grandfather’s land. Nazareth is in an artificially induced state of crowdedness because there’s nowhere to build. I grew up in East Jerusalem, in Beit Hanina, which is across the street from an Israeli settlement. We saw their parks and their streets. Their sidewalks were always well-built. Their parks were always really green. They had amenities. Even the lighting on their very clean streets was always bright, whereas in Beit Hanina there were always electricity outages. There was no open space to hang out; the only open space was the street. Our sidewalks just ended. This is what architecture tells you. It shows you the discrepancy—that inequality—and it forces you to ask certain questions like, Why is this town given all these resources and this other town not?
Each Palestinian town that’s been colonized enough usually runs the risk of getting destroyed. We saw this in ’48 and in ’67. We’re seeing this in Gaza today, where it wasn’t enough that the city was encircled and placed under a blockade and all its resources were taken away from it, but the final step was one of elimination. I think Palestinians who study the built environment have the ability to look at buildings and streets and to say, “This is a built apartheid.” The big umbrella term that I’m using right now is settler colonialism, which uses these various tools to create this environment.
SA: You used the word elimination, which seems to be the perfectly violent way of describing Israel, its project past and present. It’s very well-documented that Israel streamlines the construction of settlements on Palestinian land. In many cases, this quite literally takes place in Palestinian homes. At the same time, Israel impedes any attempt Palestinians might make at constructing their own environment. I found one statistic I think is useful: between 2016 and 2020, 99.1 percent of building permits requested by Palestinians in Area C of the occupied West Bank were rejected by Israel. Area C makes up 60 percent of the entire area of the West Bank. Are there any strategies that Palestinians employ to circumvent these types of oppressive laws and restrictions on building and urban planning?
MS: Absolutely. Silwan, in East Jerusalem, comes to mind. Silwan is a place that was designated as a green zone, meaning that Palestinians are forbidden from building anything there, even though they lived there before that designation. They lived there before Israel even took over East Jerusalem. Imagine you live in a neighborhood and, all of a sudden, occupying authorities come in and tell you, “Actually, you’re not allowed to build in your neighborhood.” You’re already living there—what are you supposed to do?
Some people try to get permits and get denied over and over again. Acquiring a permit is really expensive. Not everyone can afford to do it. People, nevertheless, build. They build their homes; they build extensions to their homes; they build partitions inside their homes. This is all illegal construction. People do it anyway. Why do they do it? I think it’s part of sumud, which can be loosely translated as “steadfastness.” It’s a form of defiance. It’s basically saying, “I’m going to tend to my family’s needs, regardless of what the law tells me. I don’t recognize this law. This law has nothing to do with me. This law is not here to protect me. This law is here to take my land.”
Silwan has a communal tent, the Wadi Hilweh tent, that was demolished five times. People keep rebuilding it. It stands on what was once someone’s private property; he gave it to the community. People gather there to protest. They gather there to pray. They hold events for kids. They do plays for children. They do after-school activities. There’s not a single amenity in Silwan, so people just do it themselves. That, to me, represents the Palestinian tradition of resistance through architecture.
SA: Something you just said really struck me, which is that Palestinians in Silwan and elsewhere are building knowing that it is very likely that in the near future it will be destroyed and that they will rebuild again after that destruction. You mentioned Jerusalem. One of the things people think about right away when they think about the violence in the architecture of Palestine is Israel’s apartheid wall. It’s the most glaring example. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that, both the very stark cases of how it confines, restricts, and redraws land and environment, so the villages that are almost entirely encircled by this wall, and then the bigger picture. By design, Israel chooses what to destroy and what to build. How does the wall fit into that?
MS: The wall is an interesting device of colonialism because its design suggests that it’s separating one side from another side. But every border creates flows of things that have to pass through it, and that shifts the way an entire area works. The Israeli apartheid wall truncates Jerusalem in four to five different locations; it zigzags in and out of the city. In the neighborhoods that the wall goes through, their economies basically collapse, and then a new economy comes in to serve the colonial power. The old economy, which is the neighborhood itself, with its own businesses, its own center of gravity, its own culture—that all disappears.
Let’s take as an example my hometown of Beit Hanina. Prior to the separation wall, the main road in Beit Hanina was an economic hub of sorts. I had friends on both sides of where the wall is now. Our grocer was on the other side. And then the wall went up, overnight. I remember the pieces of cement were laid on the sidewalk. The next day, they came and put them up, and that was it. That’s the last time I went to that grocer. That’s the last time I went to those friends’ houses. Most importantly, it’s a land grab. A lot of land was confiscated as a result of that wall. The wall is a good example of an architectural device that has multiple functions. It was a tool to ensure that East Jerusalem did not have its own center of gravity, be it economic or cultural. It made it impossible for so many Palestinians to enter Jerusalem. That’s what that wall did.
People talk about the Gaza border that was breached on October 7. People talk about the West Bank and Israel as if there is a border. But the border around Gaza should not exist. The border in the West Bank should not exist. These are not borders that the Palestinian people have agreed to. They are fundamentally illegitimate, in that they separate people from their own land, their own villages. They’re not separating a nation from another nation. They’re separating an indigenous people from their ancestral land.
Let’s consider the border in Gaza. All the lands around it are not heavily populated. The entire region, Gaza and its peripheries, is supposed to be a singular, cohesive place, but it has been cut up. In that respect, the wall meandering through the West Bank and the Gaza border are exactly the same thing. They are both separating people from their land, and they are also pushing Palestinians into areas that are getting smaller and smaller. The fear that a lot of us have is that the step after that is elimination, which is what we’re seeing in Gaza today.
SA: Right now, over a third of all structures in Gaza City have been destroyed by the bombings in the last month. The assaults on Gaza in 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2021 also systematically destroyed large segments of the area. Gaza is around the size of Philadelphia. It’s extremely small. What patterns do you see in how Israel is transforming the architecture and infrastructure of Gaza, what and how it chooses to bomb?
MS: Half of housing units in Gaza are now destroyed and/or uninhabitable. This bombing campaign seems to be eliminatory. It’s about establishing permanently that this will no longer be a city. They are destroying housing units in the tens of thousands and bombing hospitals, mosques, churches, and schools. These are areas that are supposed to be safe, where you can take shelter. In that respect, part of destroying the urban fabric, part of destroying the built environment is, in fact, genocide as well.
SA: I think the term urbicide fits here. Because, in fact, hospitals, schools, roads, houses, and infrastructure are being destroyed. The fact that that’s the target is in itself an indication of genocide.
MS: The crime of genocide doesn’t mean that it is actually executed to its completion. It can also be partial. The third act in the definition of genocide is “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in parts.” Destruction of housing units creates conditions of life that make the place uninhabitable, even unrecognizable. Israeli tactics of war destroy and flatten places to the point that a person who lives there might not even recognize their home anymore. The house and the wall, the ceiling, the floor, the door, the window, the hallway, the sidewalk, the road, the car, the tree—these are all the elements that we think about when we design places. We think about how all these things fit together. There’s something really dark about those things suddenly looking like pulverized dust. It has been haunting me, because it’s a deliberate attack on the very reality of what a city is. It’s an act of severing people from their own place in the world, of making their own city uninhabitable and unrecognizable to the point where you wouldn’t even know where to go if you had to go back.
SA: One of the big demands we have as Palestinians is the right of return. That part of Israel’s project, including what it did in 1948, is to make Palestine unrecognizable. It is so violent that calling it violent feels like an understatement.
MS: I think this is where context really helps make it clear. This is a settler colonial war, and that’s why Israel needs genocide. For the settler colony to survive, it can’t have this many indigenous people who refuse to be assimilated. Sometimes I wonder if this is why Israel targets buildings and neighborhoods and landmarks. They fear that if they leave one thing standing, that someone three or four generations later will come and be like, “I recognize this stone. I know what this is.” My grandfather, from the village of Sajra, went back and visited after it was destroyed. He saw it, and he recognized the well. He recognized the trees. He could more or less remember where his house stood. Then he took his daughters and showed them where it was. Our attachment to our places, to our cities, to our land—it’s not something you can eliminate so easily.
SA: I read a story about environmental practices of Palestinians and the ways that Israel destroyed the environment and the land. There was this story of Palestinian farmers in the ’80s who saw some olive trees that had been planted in Jerusalem, and they knew that the trees were not native to that place. They were like, “Those are not olive trees from here. This olive tree is from X olive growth in X part of the occupied West Bank. This does not belong here.” They could tell you where exactly each olive tree came from. Israel was trying to move those trees into Jerusalem to create a very particular picture that they had in mind. But the original stewards of the land knew it better than anyone else and, for that reason, could also care for it better than anyone else.
I wanted to backtrack for a second and talk about the architecture of surveillance. Like you mentioned, almost every single Palestinian city or town has a settlement, usually next to it, that is usually elevated and looking down on it. In Gaza, there is a siege on all sides, including an aerial siege from above. There’s constant surveillance. It reminds me of the panopticon. You are always seen. You are always part of the Israel project.
MS: The basic model of there always being an Israeli settlement hovering overhead is 100 percent true in every Palestinian city I’ve been in. I think of my grandmother’s house in Nazareth: you look out the window and see what used to be called Upper Nazareth—Natseret Illit in Hebrew—which now they renamed Nof HaGalil. It’s an Israeli settlement that’s built on Nazareth’s land, including my own grandfather’s land, which was confiscated in the ’50s. Every morning, she wakes up, looks out the window, and sees the settlement towering over Nazareth, saying to her: “Yes, you’re living here, but you have overlords. Your overlords are the Israeli people and the Israeli state.” In Beit Hanina, in my own bedroom growing up, I would open the window and see a settlement. I would see the tops of the buildings from the window.
This is the experience of a lot of Palestinians in a lot of villages and towns. It’s not really possible to be in a place that feels like it is just yours. There’s always this reminder that there’s something temporary about you or that you have to struggle, that you have to be careful, that you can’t get too comfortable. This is where architecture is really helpful. If Palestine is its own place, if it’s a war between two sides, then why is every Palestinian city under this condition? Why is it that there’s always a settlement encroaching on Palestinian land? Israel and Palestine—these are not two places. Israel is literally built on top of Palestine.
SA: What does Palestine teach us about how architecture is not a neutral, apolitical practice?
MS: I think Palestine renders visible certain political, social, economic dynamics that exist in all architecture. The way a city works heavily depends on who’s in control of capital and who invests and how and who makes those decisions. In a place like Palestine, it’s so crystal clear who that is because it can be drawn along racial, ethnic, religious lines. It shows you what happens when it’s built, what apartheid is. There are a lot of places in the world that have an apartheid or quasi-apartheid system in them. We just don’t call them that because often it’s a little more blurred. But in Palestine, it’s just so clear. The ways that inequality is built are undeniable.
In a way, Palestine is the teacher. I think people have been saying this a lot in activist circles lately, that Palestine teaches us about ourselves. As we see inequality and its outcome there, as we see ways in which land was just taken there, people start to reflect on their own conditions. They start to see that the same thing happens in American cities when land is taken from Black people or when indigenous people are pushed out again and again until they’re in the smallest of reservations with no resources. People start to reflect on their own conditions.
I think you don’t really need to convince people of what’s happening in Palestine, because it’s so visible. The images tell you everything you need to know.