“Truth requires a lot of attention.” Glued in Matthew Fuller’s latest book and Eyal Weizman, this sentence, throwing a raw light on our relationship with words and news, sounds both as a reminder and a hope.
While the Israeli forces massacre people in search of food, that journalists are regularly murdered, that the Gazan population lives daily in the fear of deadly strikes and new forced trips, while the weapon of hunger unloads the bodies of children, but especially at the time when, like Switzerland, most states maintain ” [en] Continuing to euphemize the situation on the spot “and to undertake any sanction against the State of Israel, the truth must be defended and recognized for what it is: an extremely precious thing, without which any ideal of justice is chimerical.
For Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect and activist, also a teacher of space and visual cultures at Goldsmiths (University of London), paying attention to the truth is an absolute requirement, even more at a time when “the art of lies is experiencing a renewed interest in the institutions of power”. He developed, with architects, videographers, computer scientists, lawyers and journalists members of the Forensic Architecture collective, founded in 2010, a method of counter-investigation based on an idea inspired by legal medicine: each action leaving traces, in bodies as in the environment, the careful study of it can, trace after trace, allow the proof of recurrent reasons (patterns) Capable of questioning the official stories, whether they are agreed or fallacious, even completely forged. Important precision, this “type of story […] Only applies to the measure of the political process in which it registers ”: in other words, we must want to know what really happened so that the truth broke out in broad daylight. The base of this investigation work is none other than the defense of human rights.
To date, the most eloquent production of Forensic Architecture is undoubtedly the report published on October 25, 2024: “A Cartography of A Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza since Octuber 2023”. With 827 pages, this identifies and then maps the operations carried out by TSAhal between October 7, 2023 and September 16, 2024. It is increased by an interactive platform which facilitates reading. The six fields of study discussed speak for themselves: space control, displacement of population, destruction of agricultural land and water resources, destruction of medical infrastructure, destruction of civil infrastructure, targeting humanitarian aid … While one could have believed in a pure outburst of hatred and violence, a warlike madness responding to another warrior madness, is a logic that is identified. of Gaza “on conditions of existence having to lead to its total or partial physical destruction”; The terms are those of the Convention for the prevention and repression of the crime of genocide, in its article 2, paragraph C.
So much for the recall. As for hope, the mere fact of reading Eyal Weizman represents one. Try the experience or, better still, listen to it. As on the occasion of this brood interview granted to the diagrams site last January. In the way he has to approach the most serious subjects, to explain the essential springs and to expose the conclusions to draw from them, we understand that he is among these people whose honesty and probity strike at first glance. One of those whose “heart is not a hardened rubber muscle”, to take up this time the expression of Elie Reclus.
Almost two centuries ago, this anarchist keen on justice was very much to recognize at first glance such a way of never dealing with his convictions, not to bend his back before iniquity, nor louvoy or maneuver between the just and the unjust. Do the same and do not leave the truth without attention.
Antoine Chollet is a geographer, writer and teacher. Recent publication: November November. On the way to the moon, the earth in mindEd. La Baconnière, 2025.
