In May 2021, after the umpteenth Israeli attempt to ethnically cleanse several families in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and the repeated attacks against thousands of Muslim worshippers who were praying at the Al Aqsa Mosque during the last week of the holy month of Ramadan, Palestinians across historic Palestine revolted and engaged in different forms of resistance. From Yafa and Lod, through Jerusalem and the West Bank, to Gaza, together they defied the regime of spatial and political fragmentation imposed by the colonial authorities. Israel violently suppressed the new uprising and subjected the already devastated Gaza Strip to heavy bombardments which resulted in another round of systematic destruction and heavy civilian casualties. 242 Palestinians were killed during the 11 days of Israeli attack on Gaza, among them 66 children. According to the United Nations, 52,000 Palestinians were displaced, while nearly 450 buildings have been destroyed or badly damaged.Footnote 1 Amnesty International denounced Israel's targeting of residential buildings in Gaza, “in some cases killing entire families—including children” that “may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity.”Footnote 2
These disturbing actions are regrettably familiar, as during the last decade and a half Gaza has experienced an unimaginable amount of ferocious wreckage. Since the beginning of the Israeli siege in 2007, after Hamas took control of the Strip, this tormented swathe of overpopulated land inhabited by mainly Palestinian refugees has been subjected to endless cycles of macro and micro colonial violence: large scale military operations, the killing and maiming of thousands of demonstrators for months during the Gaza Great March of Return, and the “slow” violence imposed on the Strip by Israel's daily mechanisms of control of the skies, waters, and flows of people and basic goods that are arbitrarily allowed and prevented from entering and exiting Gaza. The 14-year siege is only the latest chapter in a long history of oppression and unsuccessful Israeli attempts—since the beginning of the Palestinian Nakba—to “triumph over Gaza” and “break its bones,” to say it with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. By bringing together multiple contributors from different disciplines and specialists engaged in different spatial and environmental practices, Open Gaza counters this increasingly sophisticated architecture of brutality with an architecture of hope inspired by the Gaza population's will to live and remain connected to the world.
The volume's contributors take the meaning of the word “open” in different directions. Some of them are interested in opening Gaza in the sense of exposing, making evident, and theorizing Gaza's vulnerability. Gaza is open, unprotected, like an open injury. Thus, in the chapter “Gaza's Skin,” Tareq Baconi navigates Gaza's “membrane” in order to find ways to escape the settler colonial claustrophobia that has transformed Gaza into a “quarantined space” (p. 18). Baconi dissects the arsenal of physical measures and dehumanizing conceptual frames which have defigurated Gaza. In his “philosophy of the membrane,” he argues that the physical, conceptual, and emotional layers of the membrane have developed together, but that a sort of metaphysical level of political consciousness—an air of “emotions, thoughts, and solidarity” (p. 22)—provides the ultimate resource for resisting Gaza's disconnection from other fragments of Palestine and the rest of the world. Similarly, Bint-al Shirid takes the reader on a trip underground, under the skin of Gaza, in the “tunnel world” built by an enriched local elite as a mechanism of survival from the suffocation imposed by the Israeli regime of siege (p. 73). This regime's key features are reconstructed by Visualizing Palestine and Fadi Shayya in the chapter “Re-Ecologizing Gaza,” in which through the combination of powerful infographics and text they show the multiple components of Gaza's life that Israel's “de-ecologizing project” tries to disconnect (p. 142).
Reflecting another layer of Gaza's membrane, Francesco Segrebondi and Pietro Stefanini open Gaza by exposing how the recent plans for the “humanitarian reconstruction” of the Strip put in place by Israel in coordination with Egypt and the Palestinian Authority after the multiple rounds of destruction have ultimately translated into a refinement of the siege regime. Segrebondi analyzes the reconstruction of Gaza as a “frontier of urbanization processes” that reproduces political fragmentation by design de facto preventing “the essential question of reconstruction from being addressed at any collective level” (p. 202). Stefanini warns against the perils of adopting an acritical humanitarian gaze and shows how the reconstruction mechanisms constitute a “settler-humanitarian” weapon unable to achieve the ultimate Israeli goal of colonial pacification of Gaza.
In another essay, Christian Boyer historicizes the current reconstruction mechanisms within a series of imperial and colonial measures which since the Ottoman period have enclosed and precarized Gaza. He argues that only a dismantlement of these layers on which the reconstruction mechanism is architected could open to a new era of planning. Also adopting a historical perspective, in “Zoo” Malkit Shoshan shows how the brutalization of Gaza has emerged from the Age of Enlightenment and the obsessive classification of nations inspired by the classification of nature, transforming the Strip into an “urban zoo” (p. 258).
Other contributors to the volume interpret Gaza's openness in a different way. They use multiple media and planning techniques in order to articulate a meaning of “open Gaza” in which opening translates more explicitly into an act of disclosure, evasion, and imagination of an unconfined and unincarcerated Gaza. Chris Mackey and Rafi Segal transform Gaza into a “solar dome”—a photovoltaic Gaza which can be energy independent. While Denise Hoffman Brandt challenges the regime of “water injustice” (p. 280) to which Gaza is subjected by designing a resistant “micro-desalinated” Gaza. In “Collective Equipment,” a team of architects of the Royal College of Art criticizes the Gaza reconstruction mechanisms while proposing to optimize the use of the materials which are allowed into Gaza in spite of the blockade regime. The architects suggest that these materials can be used more efficiently in order to allow the population in Gaza to reacquire its agency and reaffirm its existence. Through his visual analysis of Gaza's “architecture of the everyday” (p. 27), Salem Al Qudwa invites the readers to make sense of the “un-monumental” and “anti-heroic” buildings and objects which in their permanent unfinishedness register the multiple layers of destruction of Gaza but also reveal the human dignity of those whose dignity is vilified. In the chapter “Ring City,” Michael Sorkin, Damiano Cerrone, Andrea Johnson, and Ying Liu problematize the meaning of the word planning and ask themselves how to turn planning and mapping into an antiauthoritarian concept that can transform Gaza into an improved space of urban life. In their architecture of hope, the military areas surrounding the Gaza Strip will be converted into civilian infrastructure serving Gaza and reconnecting it to the rest of Palestine and the Middle East. Similarly, Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzari (Palestine Regeneration Team, PART) use drawings, maps, and design in order to try to disclose possibilities of desegregation in the context of Gaza's enclavization. Opening Gaza here means an act of liberation in which new spaces for learning, inhabiting, and using the sea are generated, building with existing materials and escaping the framework of humanitarian reconstruction imposed by Israel. Mahdi Sabbagh and Meghan Mcallister also use maps, mainly historical maps of Gaza, in order to unearth “an open, connected, and expanded past” (p. 85). They invite the reader to explore cartographic illustrations—including pre-Nakba imperial maps—representing a networked Gaza and imagining “a city whose historic networks were never severed” (p. 94), a timeless Gaza. Similarly, Omar Yousef tells us the story of an educational center he planned in Gaza and in which he tried to connect Palestinian present and past by adopting architectural choices able to create a “dialogue between heritage and modernity” (p. 78). Yousef was never able to visit the building he planned due to Israel's violation of his freedom of movement, highlighting the tension between his cultural and political attempt to reconnect to Gaza and the “cruel absurdity” of not being able to visit part of his homeland (p.77). In “The Internet Pigeon,” Helga Tawil-Souri also draws from the Palestinian past in order to develop a visionary proposal for an open Gaza inspired by 19th-century pigeon communication, building on the tradition of Palestinian pigeon trainers. For Tawil-Souri opening Gaza means to embrace “low technologicization” (p. 159), to create techniques of communication able to escape Israeli high-tech control.
Unfortunately, some of the most imaginative chapters of the book are also the most problematic in terms of framing of the political context in Gaza. These contributions reproduce some of the key tropes which obscure the Palestinian experience of dispossession. For instance, in “City of Crystal,” Craig Konyk imagines a reconstruction of Gaza through the use of sand-cast glass made of materials that can be found in the Strip's beaches. Mosques and other buildings made of glass are meant to “bear witness to the horrors of war” (p. 259). However, Koynk's intervention seems to completely lack a clear understanding of the “causes of war.” Obliterating the history of oppression and brutalization to which Gaza has been subjected since the creation of the State of Israel, he reduces the destruction of Gaza—the very ruins on which he situates his architecture of hope—to the result of a “recurring pattern of Gazan provocation” against Israel (p. 229). In his quasi-Orientalist speculation about a Southern-Levantine Gaza, Romi Khosla represents Gaza as a “much-contested area” and a “conflict area” (p. 246). Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman plan a future of crossborder citizenship between Palestinians in Gaza and Israelis, a project of coexistence in a site of “seemingly intractable conflict” (p. 304), and collaboration between Palestinian and Israeli universities. The adoption of such frames to understand Gaza denotes a complete disregard for the systematic work of problematization and debunking of the discourse of “contested area,” “conflict” and, even worse, “the provocative Palestinians” carried out by many scholars of Israel/Palestine who have showed how this discourse erases the key settler colonial nature of the question of Palestine and tries to pacify Palestinian anticolonial resistance. Indeed, this discourse reproduces what in the conclusive chapter of the book, Hadeel Assali calls the “hyper absence” of Gaza, the systematic dehistoricization of the Strip and its erasure from scholarly intelligibility. Her final invitation to scholars to open Gaza by opening their epistemic and political heart to the perspectives and aspirations of the colonized population of Gaza, constitutes the perfect counterpoint to the problematic framing adopted in some of the final chapters of this important book.
