Why ‘ungrounding’ is the defining feature of Israel’s genocide

JVL Introduction

We repost here a transcription of a fascinating discussion organised by +972 Podcasts, featuring Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman and Ben Reiff in discussion about Eyal’s new book Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide.

“So,ungrounding is really what connects the continuity of settler-colonial violence from the Nakba to the genocide.

“Ungrounding is unlike any wartime destruction, so we’re not talking here about war, we’re talking about ecocide and genocide.

“[In normal wars] You can see roughly the organization of the urban surface, but ungrounding is basically the erasure of all of that. It’s much more than destruction. It’s the erasure of destruction. It’s the erasure of erasure, if you like. The rubbing out of any trace of existence.”

Eyal builds on the concept of “draining the river” used in the Guatemala genocide: “You need to drain the river to kill the fish.”

The fish are the fighters moving amongst the people like fish in the sea or in a river. And the river is the built and natural environment – everything that sustains life.

So “draining the river” has become, literally, the erasure of everything…

This article was originally published by +9723 Podcasts on Fri 26 Jun 2026. Read the original here.