Behind the destruction of the cities of Gaza lies another form of violence, ever so intimate and ominous: the destruction of home.
Thread by PeterHarling
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Behind the destruction of the cities of Gaza lies another form of violence, ever so intimate and ominous: the destruction of home.
This is important to unpack, as a key to understanding the emotional shockwaves this war is causing across the region. 🧵
Gaza’s fabric, even more so than other cities in the region, was largely built by its inhabitants, in ad hoc fashion. That makes for a punishing urban space: cramped, chaotic, weak on public infrastructure.
Thus the crucial importance of private fallbacks. Especially, the home.
The home itself may be small and have little daylight, electricity, or air. But it is home: It is filled with all the things of greatest importance: the people we love, the memories we treasure, the hopes we hold, the objects that anchor us.
That is also what is being destroyed.
And it is being destroyed purposefully.
Israeli soldiers routinely stage and film themselves invading people’s most intimate space: They eat food from their fridge, smoke their narguile, fondle their lingerie, loot the family jewels, mockingly play with the toys of their kids.
These numerous videos form a pattern. Likewise with arson: Soldiers document themselves setting neighborhoods ablaze once they have been secured. Fire doesn’t do much militarily. It doesn’t tear down concrete walls.
What it does is thoroughly destroy the home within them.
Concrete poses a problem in itself. As a commonplace material, it owes much to war: first to build bunkers, then as a cheap way to rebuild Europe post 1945.
But cities of concrete also do very poorly in war: Concrete buildings are hard to repair, their rubble difficult to reuse.
The irony is that older buildings are often far more resilient. An ancient stone mosque can fall and be erected anew, virtually unchanged. The home is likely either to remain unsafe or to be torn down and erased.
That risk increases the poorer and less empowered people are.
And where are people more dispossessed than in Gaza? Their prospect, ominously, evokes a phenomenon seen elsewhere in the region: temporary camps that slowly sink in, sediment, solidify, become the city.
These permanent camps are the physical manifestation of suspended time.
Concrete camps are places where inhabitants don’t really own, inherit, and transmit. They are just as difficult to leave as they are difficult to live in. They harden, almost literally, a vulnerable group’s sense of impermanence.
The region has many layers of such neighborhoods.
What is new here is three things. The unprecedented scale: how this prospect seems to encompass all of Gaza society. The thoroughness of it all: how the smallest, most personal things one clings to can also be snatched.
And the promise of more to come: Can this be the future?
#Gaza