Do Your Own Research: Israel Is Literally Burying Evidence of Its Genocide w/ Eyal Weizman

**Richard Hames** (0:08)
Do Your Own Research is a show about the systems that make modern life possible. But that means it's also a show about the systems of modern killing and modern dying.
And what do we call a system of organized mass killing? We call it a genocide. The people of Gaza may be in what is technically called a ceasefire, but that doesn't mean that the genocide has stopped. The guns and the planes may be killing fewer people for the time being, but the bulldozers are still roaring, tearing up the houses, fields, roads, schools, mosques, hospitals that make life in the Gaza Strip possible at all.
They're trying to destroy the conditions of life and destroy the memory that there even was a Palestinian society there at all. This is exactly what is described in the Genocide Convention, imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of a group.
This is exactly what is described in the Genocide Convention, conditions of life imposed to bring about the physical destruction of a group. To understand the system of death that continues even into the ceasefire, I'm talking to Eyal Weizman, author of Ungrounding, The Architecture of Genocide, which goes back 100 years into the history of Palestine, to understand the systems of life and the systems of colonial domination that have attempted to snuff it out. Eyal is also the founder and director of Forensic Architecture, a research agency at Goldsmiths University of London. What that agency does is assemble 3D models, meticulously, of war crimes, of atrocities. They build them out of all the traces of an event, from the shaky phone camera footage to the situated testimony of a survivor to every documented piece of shrapnel, and use that to build a single coherent model. These reconstructions of events are so meticulously done that they have been used in evidence in court, and Forensic Architecture is a part of South Africa's submission against Israel at the International Court of Justice. I'll be showing some of that research on the screen as we get to it. But how do they continue this work of documenting an atrocity, a war crime, even a genocide, when the system of killing has not just been directed towards individual people, but towards the whole environment in a way that erases the traces of the life that was there before. Bury a people, and then bury the evidence that you have buried them. This show connects to a few previous ones. Luke Kemp, in particular, and my discussion with him of the notion of applied collapse, how societies are deliberately destroyed, and my discussion with Alfred McCoy of the Vietnam War, where tunnels were such a major part of the resistance. And if you want to explore those connections in depth, I know you do, you can find the full map on the Navarra Media website, link is in the show notes below and probably in a pinned comment. Eyal Weizman, welcome to URI Receptor.

**Eyal Weizman** (3:26)
Oh, happy to be here.

**Richard Hames** (3:28)
I want to start with where we are right now. We are eight months into a supposed ceasefire in the Gaza genocide. What is happening right now on the ground? What are conditions of life? What are conditions of survival?
And what is Israel doing in that rearticulated change zone of the Gaza Strip to erase conditions of life?

**Eyal Weizman** (3:52)
Right now, the survivors of the genocide, the Palestinians in Gaza, just under two million people are living on the sand dunes in the west part of Gaza, in about 40% of the area of the Strip. That area is continuously being shrunk, and the Israeli military and the prime minister want to shrink it even further to increase the pressure on it. All conditions of life, and we'll speak about conditions of life, have been dismantled. That is to say, there is no agriculture in Gaza. There is no wild stock in Gaza. There is, in and amongst the ruins of the coastal cities, from Gaza to Deir el-Balach to the western part of Hanyounes, you have people living in and amongst the ruins, inhabiting in an incredibly dystopian way, the ruins that used to be their homes, the multi-storied homes.
In between and around them, there are tens and tens of thousands of tents in which people are crowded.
Israelis denying the entry of chemicals necessary to control the pest, different pest infestation. When we speak to people inside, to friends still inside, we hear about an incredible rat epidemic. Rats are everywhere in the tents.
We have just moved from a very difficult winter with actually quite a lot of rain for that area that has flooded the areas of the tent. Also, when rain is coming, the remaining sewage facilities are overflowing and you have this kind of murky, sewage, watery kind of, you know, sort of muck that is flowing into and out of those tents, flooding everything. People are dying out of hypothermia and infection and out of things that, in any other normal circumstances, contemporary cities with older infrastructure are able to contain. But people are also just, you know, maintaining being alive, learning, studying. Schools, primary schools, universities exist more as notions than as institutions. They exist in the relation between people. People are the infrastructure of resistance, the relation, family relations, social relations, political relations in Gaza are actually maintaining a kind of a life, despite everything. Everything that is posed on Gaza, these conditions are not a kind of status quo. They're not like, you know, a ceasefire that has frozen some kind of situation. Israel still bombs into it. It has assassinated the two last leaders of the Asad al-Qassam, the Palestinian, the Hamas military wing and resistance leadership there. It is an attempt to slowly and in a controlled way, like in some kind of Milgram experiment, increase turned up hardship. So it's not a static situation. It's a situation in which time, denial, amplify each other, and in which the space itself becomes a mechanism that is designed to eject the population out of Gaza. Now, there is nowhere to go. The border is closed. But with first opportunity, Israel would again attempt to push Palestinians out. So, yeah, it isn't a siege that is so much more horrific than the siege that have been put on Gaza in the past 20 years that led to the October 7th attack, in which Israel counts every calorie and every watt of electricity, megawatt of electricity and liter of petrol, to calibrate life and to calibrate the...