The legendary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once tried to capture the significance of the home to Palestinians, as the fundamental source of safety and security: “A dead house is also a mass murder, even if it is empty of its residents.”
The peculiarity of the Palestinian house stems from its history of being a battlefield and a measure of the “memory of things”: its walls, what is hung on them are evidence of the identity of its inhabitants.
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In testimony documented by the Yesh Din (There is a Law) organization, one Palestinian in the West Bank said of the Israeli occupation: “They have completely destroyed the feeling that everyone has: the house is the quietest and safest place.”
Here we recall the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard who said in his book, The Poetics of Space, that the home has three functions: protection, familiarity and memory.
According to the Yesh Din report, Israel exercises ultimate control over the daily routine of Palestinians, in both the West Bank and Gaza.
It legally frames its raids on Palestinian homes under the umbrella of the “laws of conflict and war.” In other words, security pretexts drive of all the Israeli system’s interactions with Palestinians, on security, military, and legal levels.
Visible Colonialism
Since 1967, Israel has regularly stormed, smashed and demolished homes, and in doing so, executed its men, harassed its women, the utter occupation of what was not yet occupied in 1948.
The shock caused by the October 7 attacks generated brutality of revenge and the desire to “exterminate” the Palestinians and dehumanize them as “human animals.” It also led to demands that everyone blindly condemn Hamas.
The aim is to mobilize more support and advocacy for waging a “genocidal war” which is mirrored in months of relentless bombardment.
In the novel “Returning to Haifa” by Ghassan Kanafani, Saeed, the novel’s Palestinian protagonist returned with his wife Safia to the house that they no longer owned: “This is our house!” Can you imagine that? It denies us.”
“Domicide” is not considered a crime against humanity in international law, but increasingly so in academia.
This indicates the absence of the Arab and Palestinian character of their home, after it was given European features that did not resemble their identity. They denied it, and it denied them. The Israeli settler project aims to kill this protective, familiar, and memory-preserving space called “home” in the Occupied Territories of Palestine.
In order to do so, it practices violence with an intention to exterminate, or what was coined under the term domicide, which was used by the British journalist Patrick Wintour to describe the massive amount of destruction inflicted on Gaza as a result of the Israeli war. It is defined as “the deliberate widespread destruction of houses to make an area unfit for life.”
Wintour points out that “domicide” is not considered a crime against humanity in international law, but it is increasingly seen that way in academia. It is a method that was used by the Assad regime in Syria, and Russia in its war on Ukraine. International law must be reviewed to bridge this legal gap, Wintour argues.
Colonizing master and slave
Israeli colonial policies turn the house into a space to demonstrate the power of the “colonizing master” over the “colonized slave,” where that power is exercised at night which had been reserved as the quietest and safest time for the slave.
When Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza, soldiers raided homes, executing and detaining its residents after stripping them of their clothes, and publishing their photos. This war has revealed that the Israeli army has no regard for civility or international law.
What is striking about the current war is how open and blatant the war crimes are. The occupation soldiers document and publish pictures of themselves from inside the bedrooms of Palestinians in Gaza, wearing women’s nightclothes after they forced them out of their homes. They continue to violate the intimacy of the home and its personal components that are closest to its residents.
Resistance of colonialism: documenting and sharing
“All of these things are the memory of people that has been emptied of things, and the memory of things that has been emptied of people,” Darwish, the poet, wrote. “Houses are killed as are their residents. It kills the memory of things.”
The Palestinians in Gaza took advantage of social media and the growing power of its influence. Through their phones, they’ve documented and chronicled deadly actions of the Israeli military, which continued to turn their homes into piles of rubble.
The Israeli army is still searching for an image to represent its would-be “victory.”
The military violated the sanctity of residents’ homes and invaded the bedrooms, which were turned into a space for a “victory parade,” that Israel claims to have achieved.
The Israeli army is still searching for an image to represent its would-be “victory,” but all we see are violations of life and property that amount to war crimes.
Bitter tears
For years, Gazans have systematically documented the destruction of their homes. They recount their memories inside their homes before they were demolished. They publish visual testimony reviewing the life of their homes and the state of their death. They share the heartbreak of being denied the right to remove and hold on to the memories from the collective imagination.
Gazans cry bitter tears for their homes. They do not cry for stones, but for memories, familiarity, the warmth of an embrace, a long journey, and a construction journey full of hardship and scarcity of resources.
The clips that showcase the life journey of Palestinian homes in Gaza before their death reflect a love of life and a passion for beauty and art. As you flip through the video clips of homes, you find them competing in beauty and aesthetics. As such, the narrative of “dehumanization” of Palestinians is dismantled, and replaced by “dehumanization of the colonizer” — a killer of beauty, art and architecture built with the simplest resources available.
