Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the landscape of Israel-Palestine was radically transformed. Breaking from conventional focus on explicit sites of violence and devastation, Noam Leshem turns critical attention to 'ordinary' spaces and places where the intricate and often intimate engagements between Jews and myriad Arab spaces takes place to this day. Leshem builds on interdisciplinary studies of space, memory, architecture and history, and exposes a rich archive of ideology, culture, political projects of state-building and identity formation. The result is a fresh look at the conflicted history of Israel-Palestine: a spatial history in which the Arab past isn't in fact separate, but inextricably linked to the Israeli present.

'Life after Ruin provides a critical reading against any dichotomous view of spatial transformation in Palestine/Israel since 1948. It shows lucidly and in great detail the complexity and heterogeneity of spatial transformation in Palestine/Israel, revealing the power relations that shape this evolution on various levels. This narrative would be of interest to any student of Palestine/Israel.'

Manar Makhoul Source: Die Welt des Islams