Slow Domicide

“Slow and acute” would perhaps seem an odd way to describe the violence of Israel’s war in Gaza; through our phones, we have easy access to visual and audio evidence of the wreckage, the impact of which is dulled by the very immediacy of those images and sounds. But the description, alluded to by Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) cocurator Mahdi Sabbagh during a recent conversation staged at e-flux, accords with the particular violence carried out by and through architecture. His interlocutor, the historian Mabel Wilson, spoke about the military checkpoints she encountered firsthand on a visit to the West Bank with PalFest a few years ago. Reading from her essay in the new anthology Their Borders, Our World, edited by Sabbagh and published by Haymarket Books, Wilson drew a parallel between the checkpoints—designed for the purpose of hindering the movement of specific groups of people and goods—and the indignities she experienced in the Jim Crow South as a very young child. Grinding everything to a halt daily is the point.

The theme of manufactured scarcity was also taken up at a contemporaneous panel hosted by the Architectural League on Zoom. Natasha Aruri, an urbanist and researcher based in Berlin and Ramallah, argued that Israel’s punitive water rationing policy, under which the average Palestinian in the West Bank is forced to make do with 25 percent less water than the average Israeli, was “a quiet kind of violence” akin to “slow domicide.” Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, parsed the legal ramifications of domicide, or “the systematic and indiscriminate leveling of entire neighborhoods through explosive weapons.” He also gave shape to the insight that architecture is a tool of the oppressor by making the distinction between a building—“a fungible asset that can be replaced by something equal in size and value”—and a home—a place instilled with memories, trauma, dreams, and dignity. The laws that govern the latter concern the recognition of one’s humanity.