The Architecture of Erasure

“Over our dead bodies”: Placing necropolitical activism

“…By the second question, Mbembe prompts a closer reconsider the notion of inscription-the physical and symbolic acts through which matter and meaning are demarcated both by powerful actors and by 8 those seeking to challenge their authority. The argument here pushes against a critical vocabulary of war in late modernity that is dominated by notions of erasure and place annihilation (S. Graham 2004;Makdisi 2010;Weizman 2009), by re-illuminating political contingencies and nuanced dynamics of contestation. Necropolitical activism documented here defies both the highly technological remote violence or the crude operation or the diametrically opposite pole that typifies conflict zones in late modernism -warlords, suicide bombers, mutilated bodies and entire blocks turned to rubble (Gregory 2010).…”

“…In August 2010, municipal and ILA crews accompanied by police began arriving at night to demolish over 200 tombstones they deemed "fictitious", while graves that the city saw as "genuine" were left untouched. Though several scholars have analyzed different dimensions of the Mamilla conflict (Makdisi, 2010;Reiter, 2011;Larkin and Dumper, 2012), the clash over the authenticity of the rehabilitated gravestones remains largely overlooked and under-theorized. This focus on the gravestone as a critical geopolitical signifier, almost detached from the body of the dead it marks, sets this discussion apart from other debates that place their analytical focus on the dead body as the pivotal object of geopolitical mobilization (Young and Light 2012;Verdery 1999).…”

“…In a critique of the Museum of Tolerance project, Makdisi (2010) argues that Mamilla features an extreme case of "double erasure" where the initial act of displacement is followed by a secondary erasure of the memory of the primary violence perpetrated. Images of the reconstructed gravestones being bulldozed also bring to mind…”

Negotiating Colonial Violence: Spaces of Precarisation in Palestine

“…The Al‐Haniye spring, which used to be a popular picnic site for the Al‐Walajees, has thus become almost unrecognisable for villagers during the last year, particularly due to the archaeological reconstructions around the spring. Archaeology, as acknowledged by a number of scholars, has been one of the ways through which Israel appropriates and builds ethnic belongingness to the occupied lands, sometimes with dubious interpretations, or by simply excluding non‐Jewish archaeological layers (Gori ; Makdisi ). Despite the fact that the park area was re‐zoned as a “public space” within the West Bank territory, Palestinian access to Al‐Haniye is restricted by a fence and a checkpoint that was recently moved between the village and the spring (Hasson ).…”

Impossible Witness: Israeli Visuality, Palestinian Testimony and the Gaza War

“…16. Scholarship on the politics of visuality and visibility in the context of the Israeli occupation, particularly the built environment thereof, has grown tremendously in recent years (see Makdisi 2010;Weizman 2002Weizman , 2007 142 STEIN triumph rather than atrocity. Within the terms of dominant Israeli ways of seeing, it fails to signify as evidence of Israeli violence, buried, as it is, beneath the semiotic weight of the state's classification.…”