Love what we do?
Become a member for unlimited access to EIP digital and print issues, attend Slow Factory’s Open Edu, and support us in continuing to create and publish.
Join us today.
You’re logged in, but don’t have an active membership.
Join Us
All memberships give full digital access, online and in-person events, and support climate justice, human rights, and freedom of expression.
Annual memberships available too!
$20
Member —
All digital access (suggested amount)
$40
Benefactor —
Receive a monthly(ish) printed journal
$100
Movement Builder —
Become an ambassador
Question? Ask us anything!
Urbicide as a Weapon
How Israel Destroys Land, Memory, & Heritage
“I would eliminate the first row of houses in Beit Jala. And if the shooting continued? I would eliminate the second row of houses; and so on. I know the Arabs … For them, there is nothing more important than their house. So, under me, you will not see a child shot next to his father. It is better to level an entire village with bulldozers—row after row.”
— Ariel Sharon, nicknamed ‘the Butcher of Beirut’ and later ‘the Bulldozer,’ when asked what should be done with the Palestinians in the West Bank.
The Israeli war crimes against Palestine and Lebanon since October 2023 have not been limited to the genocide of hundreds of thousands of people; they have also extended to the destruction of the built environment, including homes, streets, neighborhoods, infrastructure, and buildings of cultural and historical significance, among others. The assault against all essential components that form cities and towns is not mere collateral damage but a deliberate and systematic effort by the Zionist entity to target the physical structures that make life on this land possible and through which we assert our existence as a society.
Understanding why such force is deployed against the structures we have built goes beyond the Israeli pretense of creating ‘buffer zones’ to ensure ‘Israeli security.’ It first requires recognizing the central role of land in settler-colonial projects.
The Centrality of Land
Land is the defining feature of settler-colonial structures – the foundation upon which a settler-colonial project is built. This territoriality operates through a “logic of elimination,” where erasure is a precondition for settler-colonialism to exist.
Over the past five hundred years, as European settlers built their empires, they insisted that the lands they conquered were empty – a concept that continues to shape green colonialism and so-called conservation practices today. Promoting the narrative that the lands they colonized were uninhabited was a deliberate strategy used to justify their dominance and claims of ownership while simultaneously concealing the extermination of Indigenous peoples.
The ‘Discovery’ doctrine, first used by Portuguese and Spanish settlers in Africa and the Americas (and later adopted by other European colonizers), and the Terra Nullius paradigm – most prominently used by British settlers in Australia and New Zealand, the French in North America, and the Dutch in South Africa – provided a legal framework through which they justified claiming lands as vacant, neglected, or unproductive upon their arrival, while dismissing and dehumanizing the millions of Indigenous peoples who were already residing there.
Following this same pattern, the Israelis deceptively propagated the notion that Palestine was a “land without people for a people without a land” as a tool to legitimize and justify their occupation. The idea that Palestinian land was a ‘desert’ is both satirical and absurd, considering it is located in one of the most strategically significant areas in the world – an ancient region that has been continuously inhabited by numerous civilizations throughout history. Zionists, however, were largely successful in spreading this falsehood.
This refusal to acknowledge Indigenous peoples’ presence created the conditions for ethnic cleansing, genocide, and various forms of violence, including the destruction of the conditions that make life possible on a territory, all in order to achieve the ultimate settlers’ objective: clearing the land of any obstacles to annexation and replacement.
Clearing the Land Through Urbicide
Urbicide literally means “killing the urban,” with “urban” referring to the features that define towns and cities. More specifically, urbicide is described as “both the destruction of the built environment that comprises the fabric of the urban as well as the destruction of the way of life specific to such material conditions.”
It is also worth adding that urbicide can encompass domicide, defined as “the killing of homes,” culturcide, referring to “the killing of culture,” and even ecocide, which is “killing the natural environment.”
Urbicide has been a consistent Israeli policy since the establishment of the entity. During the 1948 Nakba, the ethnic cleansing ‘catastrophe,’ 530 Palestinian urban areas, towns, and villages were entirely erased, with over 180 of them being transformed into recreational sites or national parks. Since 1967, approximately 60,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished.
In fact, this has been far from an occasional occurrence; it is an enduring process that does not always take the form of a sudden, large-scale event. Slow urbicide is a routine practice in Palestine. The demolition of homes, streets, neighborhoods (which are often renamed), infrastructure, and sources of livelihood is an everyday phenomenon at the heart of Israel’s mechanism to uproot Palestinians. This process is also accompanied by the construction of walls, checkpoints, the imposition of sieges, control of movement, and the fragmentation of Palestinian land, which continues to shrink as Jewish settlements expand. This falls within Israel’s demographic engineering strategy, aimed at minimizing Palestinian presence and ensuring the expansion of Jewish dominance. As Ehud Barak noted, demography is an “existential” matter for Israel.
Since October 2023, 90% of Gaza’s population, equivalent to almost a million people, has been displaced. Now, they have no functioning city or homes to return to. Israel has razed 70% of Gaza’s total infrastructure to the ground, equivalent to the destruction of 160,000 housing units, with a further 276,000 units severely or partially damaged. Without basic infrastructure to sustain life, a new reality is established in which Palestinians are left with no option but to either leave this now apocalyptic city or remain and die.
This was confirmed by Trump’s most recent comment to “clean out” Gaza, describing it as “a demolition site” and stating that Arab nations should “build housing at a different location,” insisting that Palestinians have “no alternative” but to leave Gaza. Israel’s plan from the beginning has been to enforce perpetual displacement, prohibit any possibility of return, and ultimately, seek total eradication.
In South Lebanon, Israel wiped out 37 border towns throughout the war and has continued to demolish houses and shoot at anyone trying to return home, despite the ceasefire agreement. It also recently declared its plan to continue occupying five Lebanese hills.
History, Identity, and Memory
Massacring the city and transforming it into an uninhabitable wasteland is designed to not only erase its people from geography but also to remove them from history. Centuries of history have been wiped away through the Israeli execution of urbicide in both Gaza and Lebanon, with over 200 heritage sites now lying in ruins. These legacies, passed down from our ancestors, serve as a bridge between our past, present, and future continuity on this land.
In November, a so-called 71-year-old “historian” named Zeev Erlich was killed after infiltrating Lebanese territory with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to examine archaeological sites and search for alleged biblical evidence to support the Israeli narrative. He had previously published a book on Jewish history in Gaza that “strengthened the connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.” In fact, Israel has long used archaeology as a tool to colonize more land. By erasing all material traces and archaeological evidence of Palestinian or Lebanese historical presence, the settlers can then “validate” their own ‘historical land claims,’ asserting that no symbol, monument, record, or proof exists that does not align with or challenge the Israeli narrative of history.
Some of the targeted sites in Gaza include one of the world’s oldest Christian monasteries, museums with Canaanite artifacts, and libraries containing rare Quran manuscripts as well as ancient books on philosophy and medicine. In Lebanon, we are talking about the 5,000-year-old ancient city of Tyre, the historic town of Mhaibib with 2,000 years old structures, the ancient Tibnin fortress that can be traced back to the Bronze Age, the Shamaa citadel originating from the 12th century, and many others.
Wiping out heritage sites, along with places of worship, libraries, archives, museums, and cultural centers, amounts to a campaign of cultural cleansing aimed at striking at the very foundation of our society. Stripping us of these physical representations of our roots—those that tell our story and reflect our values and traditions—is an attack on our identity. Even the houses reduced to rubble, the markets, shops, schools, and parks are not merely structures devoid of meaning; they are repositories of memories and shared experiences. These are places where people express themselves, share social ties, celebrate together, and go about their daily lives.
Israel’s urbicide has been an attempt to redefine the significance of a place we have constructed over the course of thousands of years, and how we relate to it, by drastically transforming it beyond the point of recognition—severing that sense of familiarity and enforcing a sense of alienation aimed at breaking our will to remain.
Environmental Cost of Urbicide
Urbicide also comes with an astronomical environmental cost. While it will take some time before comprehensive assessments reveal the full extent of the environmental catastrophe inflicted on Lebanon and Gaza, a UN Habitat assessment focused on South Lebanon only (excluding the Beqaa) found almost 14,000,000 tonnes of debris generated from the destruction of buildings. The United Nations Environment Programme’s latest debris quantification in Gaza, revealed that the Israeli urbicide has left over 50,000,000 tonnes of debris in Gaza’s streets. This is ‘unprecedented’ devastation that could take more than 21 years to be fully cleared.
Experts have warned that the debris resulting from the extensive bombings contains threatening substances that contaminate the air, soil, and water resources—ranging from dust and toxic gases to asbestos, heavy metals, and a variety of other hazardous chemicals. Not to mention, there are still 12,000 decomposing martyrs’ bodies buried among the wreckage, along with thousands of unexploded ordnance.
Additionally, this environmental catastrophe will have far-reaching impacts that transcend Palestinian and Lebanese territories. The emissions from Israel’s war against Gaza and Lebanon jeopardize global climate mitigation efforts. A widely shared study published in January 2024 revealed that within the first 120 days alone, emissions from Israel’s war against Gaza ranged between 420,000 and 650,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, equivalent to the total annual emissions of 26 countries. The total amount of emissions released over the course of 15 months has yet to be determined, but the figures are expected to be alarmingly massive.
Conclusion
Today, reclaiming the places we have lost and rebuilding is an existential fight upon which our collective survival hinges. The transformation of the toxic wasteland created by Israel into vibrant places thriving with life once again is an indispensable act of resistance against erasure. Reinforcing our sense of belonging to the land, which Israel has systematically sought to eradicate, begins with restoring the critical infrastructures that would allow devastated cities, towns and villages to function once more, enabling displaced people to return home. This must be done carefully, retaining the place’s sense of identity, holding on to its historical memory, preserving its cultural significance, and repairing damaged heritage sites, all while simultaneously healing and regenerating the land from contamination.
Mending our bleeding wounds, however, also requires coming to terms with the fact that the struggle for liberating our lands is still in its early stages.
Keep reading:
Global Echoes of Resistance:
Artists Harnessing Art, Culture, and Ancestry
Charlie Engman
Global Echoes of Resistance:
Artists Harnessing Art, Culture, and Ancestry
Danny Aros
{
"article":
{
"title" : "Urbicide as a Weapon: How Israel Destroys Land, Memory, & Heritage",
"author" : "Sarah Sinno",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/urbicide-as-a-weapon-how-israel-destroys-land-memory-and-heritage",
"date" : "2025-03-21 16:29:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2024_10_28_ErasingLebanon_1.jpg",
"excerpt" : " “I would eliminate the first row of houses in Beit Jala. And if the shooting continued? I would eliminate the second row of houses; and so on. I know the Arabs … For them, there is nothing more important than their house. So, under me, you will not see a child shot next to his father. It is better to level an entire village with bulldozers—row after row.”",
"content" : " “I would eliminate the first row of houses in Beit Jala. And if the shooting continued? I would eliminate the second row of houses; and so on. I know the Arabs … For them, there is nothing more important than their house. So, under me, you will not see a child shot next to his father. It is better to level an entire village with bulldozers—row after row.” — Ariel Sharon, nicknamed ‘the Butcher of Beirut’ and later ‘the Bulldozer,’ when asked what should be done with the Palestinians in the West Bank.The Israeli war crimes against Palestine and Lebanon since October 2023 have not been limited to the genocide of hundreds of thousands of people; they have also extended to the destruction of the built environment, including homes, streets, neighborhoods, infrastructure, and buildings of cultural and historical significance, among others. The assault against all essential components that form cities and towns is not mere collateral damage but a deliberate and systematic effort by the Zionist entity to target the physical structures that make life on this land possible and through which we assert our existence as a society.Understanding why such force is deployed against the structures we have built goes beyond the Israeli pretense of creating ‘buffer zones’ to ensure ‘Israeli security.’ It first requires recognizing the central role of land in settler-colonial projects.The Centrality of LandLand is the defining feature of settler-colonial structures – the foundation upon which a settler-colonial project is built. This territoriality operates through a “logic of elimination,”1 where erasure is a precondition for settler-colonialism to exist.Over the past five hundred years, as European settlers built their empires, they insisted that the lands they conquered were empty – a concept that continues to shape green colonialism and so-called conservation practices today.2 Promoting the narrative that the lands they colonized were uninhabited was a deliberate strategy used to justify their dominance and claims of ownership while simultaneously concealing the extermination of Indigenous peoples.The ‘Discovery’ doctrine, first used by Portuguese and Spanish settlers in Africa and the Americas (and later adopted by other European colonizers), and the Terra Nullius paradigm – most prominently used by British settlers in Australia and New Zealand, the French in North America, and the Dutch in South Africa – provided a legal framework through which they justified claiming lands as vacant, neglected, or unproductive upon their arrival, while dismissing and dehumanizing the millions of Indigenous peoples who were already residing there.Following this same pattern, the Israelis deceptively propagated the notion that Palestine was a “land without people for a people without a land” as a tool to legitimize and justify their occupation. The idea that Palestinian land was a ‘desert’ is both satirical and absurd, considering it is located in one of the most strategically significant areas in the world – an ancient region that has been continuously inhabited by numerous civilizations throughout history.3 Zionists, however, were largely successful in spreading this falsehood.This refusal to acknowledge Indigenous peoples’ presence created the conditions for ethnic cleansing, genocide, and various forms of violence, including the destruction of the conditions that make life possible on a territory, all in order to achieve the ultimate settlers’ objective: clearing the land of any obstacles to annexation and replacement.Clearing the Land Through UrbicideUrbicide literally means “killing the urban,” with “urban” referring to the features that define towns and cities. More specifically, urbicide is described as “both the destruction of the built environment that comprises the fabric of the urban as well as the destruction of the way of life specific to such material conditions.”4It is also worth adding that urbicide can encompass domicide, defined as “the killing of homes,” culturcide, referring to “the killing of culture,” and even ecocide, which is “killing the natural environment.”5Urbicide has been a consistent Israeli policy since the establishment of the entity. During the 1948 Nakba, the ethnic cleansing ‘catastrophe,’ 530 Palestinian urban areas, towns, and villages were entirely erased, with over 180 of them being transformed into recreational sites or national parks.6 Since 1967, approximately 60,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished.In fact, this has been far from an occasional occurrence; it is an enduring process that does not always take the form of a sudden, large-scale event. Slow urbicide is a routine practice in Palestine. The demolition of homes, streets, neighborhoods (which are often renamed), infrastructure, and sources of livelihood is an everyday phenomenon at the heart of Israel’s mechanism to uproot Palestinians. This process is also accompanied by the construction of walls, checkpoints, the imposition of sieges, control of movement, and the fragmentation of Palestinian land, which continues to shrink as Jewish settlements expand. This falls within Israel’s demographic engineering strategy, aimed at minimizing Palestinian presence and ensuring the expansion of Jewish dominance. As Ehud Barak noted, demography is an “existential” matter for Israel.7Since October 2023, 90% of Gaza’s population, equivalent to almost a million people, has been displaced.8 Now, they have no functioning city or homes to return to. Israel has razed 70% of Gaza’s total infrastructure to the ground, equivalent to the destruction of 160,000 housing units, with a further 276,000 units severely or partially damaged.9 Without basic infrastructure to sustain life, a new reality is established in which Palestinians are left with no option but to either leave this now apocalyptic city or remain and die.This was confirmed by Trump’s most recent comment to “clean out” Gaza, describing it as “a demolition site” and stating that Arab nations should “build housing at a different location,” insisting that Palestinians have “no alternative” but to leave Gaza.10 Israel’s plan from the beginning has been to enforce perpetual displacement, prohibit any possibility of return, and ultimately, seek total eradication.In South Lebanon, Israel wiped out 37 border towns11 throughout the war and has continued to demolish houses and shoot at anyone trying to return home, despite the ceasefire agreement. It also recently declared its plan to continue occupying five Lebanese hills.History, Identity, and MemoryMassacring the city and transforming it into an uninhabitable wasteland is designed to not only erase its people from geography but also to remove them from history. Centuries of history have been wiped away through the Israeli execution of urbicide in both Gaza and Lebanon, with over 200 heritage sites now lying in ruins. These legacies, passed down from our ancestors, serve as a bridge between our past, present, and future continuity on this land.In November, a so-called 71-year-old “historian” named Zeev Erlich was killed after infiltrating Lebanese territory with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to examine archaeological sites and search for alleged biblical evidence to support the Israeli narrative. He had previously published a book on Jewish history in Gaza that “strengthened the connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.”12 In fact, Israel has long used archaeology as a tool to colonize more land. By erasing all material traces and archaeological evidence of Palestinian or Lebanese historical presence, the settlers can then “validate” their own ‘historical land claims,’ asserting that no symbol, monument, record, or proof exists that does not align with or challenge the Israeli narrative of history.13Some of the targeted sites in Gaza include one of the world’s oldest Christian monasteries, museums with Canaanite artifacts, and libraries containing rare Quran manuscripts as well as ancient books on philosophy and medicine.14 In Lebanon, we are talking about the 5,000-year-old ancient city of Tyre, the historic town of Mhaibib with 2,000 years old structures, the ancient Tibnin fortress that can be traced back to the Bronze Age, the Shamaa citadel originating from the 12th century, and many others.Wiping out heritage sites, along with places of worship, libraries, archives, museums, and cultural centers, amounts to a campaign of cultural cleansing aimed at striking at the very foundation of our society. Stripping us of these physical representations of our roots—those that tell our story and reflect our values and traditions—is an attack on our identity. Even the houses reduced to rubble, the markets, shops, schools, and parks are not merely structures devoid of meaning; they are repositories of memories and shared experiences. These are places where people express themselves, share social ties, celebrate together, and go about their daily lives.Israel’s urbicide has been an attempt to redefine the significance of a place we have constructed over the course of thousands of years, and how we relate to it, by drastically transforming it beyond the point of recognition—severing that sense of familiarity and enforcing a sense of alienation aimed at breaking our will to remain.Environmental Cost of UrbicideUrbicide also comes with an astronomical environmental cost. While it will take some time before comprehensive assessments reveal the full extent of the environmental catastrophe inflicted on Lebanon and Gaza, a UN Habitat assessment focused on South Lebanon only (excluding the Beqaa) found almost 14,000,000 tonnes of debris15 generated from the destruction of buildings. The United Nations Environment Programme’s latest debris quantification in Gaza, revealed that the Israeli urbicide has left over 50,000,000 tonnes of debris16 in Gaza’s streets. This is ‘unprecedented’ devastation that could take more than 21 years to be fully cleared.Experts have warned that the debris resulting from the extensive bombings contains threatening substances that contaminate the air, soil, and water resources—ranging from dust and toxic gases to asbestos, heavy metals, and a variety of other hazardous chemicals. Not to mention, there are still 12,00017 decomposing martyrs’ bodies buried among the wreckage, along with thousands of unexploded ordnance.18Additionally, this environmental catastrophe will have far-reaching impacts that transcend Palestinian and Lebanese territories. The emissions from Israel’s war against Gaza and Lebanon jeopardize global climate mitigation efforts. A widely shared study published in January 2024 revealed that within the first 120 days alone, emissions from Israel’s war against Gaza ranged between 420,000 and 650,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, equivalent to the total annual emissions of 26 countries.19 The total amount of emissions released over the course of 15 months has yet to be determined, but the figures are expected to be alarmingly massive.ConclusionToday, reclaiming the places we have lost and rebuilding is an existential fight upon which our collective survival hinges. The transformation of the toxic wasteland created by Israel into vibrant places thriving with life once again is an indispensable act of resistance against erasure. Reinforcing our sense of belonging to the land, which Israel has systematically sought to eradicate, begins with restoring the critical infrastructures that would allow devastated cities, towns and villages to function once more, enabling displaced people to return home. This must be done carefully, retaining the place’s sense of identity, holding on to its historical memory, preserving its cultural significance, and repairing damaged heritage sites, all while simultaneously healing and regenerating the land from contamination.Mending our bleeding wounds, however, also requires coming to terms with the fact that the struggle for liberating our lands is still in its early stages. Wolfe, P. (2006) “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of genocide research 8.4, 2006: 387-409 ↩ Gershon, L. (2020). How Conservation Is Shaped by Settler Colonialism. Jstor Daily. Retrieved from: https://daily.jstor.org/how-conservation-is-shaped-by-settler-colonialism/ ↩ Vilar, P. (2024) Destruction of Gaza heritage sites aims to erase – and replace – Palestine’s history. The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/destruction-of-gaza-heritage-sites-aims-to-erase-and-replace-palestines-history-240722 ↩ Coward, M. (2008). Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction. Taylor & Francis. ↩ Salhani, J. (2024). Genocide, urbicide, domicide – how to talk about Israel’s war on Gaza. Al Jazeera. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/3/genocide-urbicide-domicide-how-to-talk-about-israels-war-on-gaza ↩ Buxbaum, J. (2024). How Israel is Erasing the Nakba Through Nature. The New Arab. Retrieved from: https://www.newarab.com/analysis/how-israel-erasing-nakba-through-nature ↩ Morris, B. (2002). Camp David and After: An Exchange. The New York Review. Retrieved from: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2002/06/13/camp-david-and-after-an-exchange-1-an-interview-wi/ ↩ Tondo, L. & Tantech, M. (2025). Fifteen months of Israeli bombardment leave conditions in Gaza ‘unimaginable’ The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/13/israel-gaza-war-15-months-unimaginable ↩ Visual Journalism Team. (2025). Gaza Strip in maps: How 15 months of war have drastically changed life in the territory. BBC. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-20415675 ↩ France 24. (2025). Trump floats plan to ‘just clean out’ Gaza and resettle Palestinians in Jordan and Egypt. France 24. Retrieved from: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250126-trump-floats-plan-to-just-clean-out-gaza ↩ National News Agency Lebanon. (2024). Israeli Enemy’s Military Operations Wreak Havoc on Souther Lebanon, Destroying Over 37 Towns and 40,000 Housing Units. National News Agency Lebanon. Retrieved from: https://www.nna-leb.gov.lb/en/justice-law/736177/israeli-enemy-s-military-operations-wreak-havoc-on ↩ Uddin, R. (2024). Israeli archaeologist ‘examining ancient site’ in Lebanon killed by Hezbollah. Middle East Eye. Retrieved from: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-archaeologist-ancient-site-lebanon-killed-hezbollah ↩ Leathem, M. H. (2024). Why archaeologists must speak up for Gaza. Al Jazeera. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/25/why-archaeologists-must-speak-up-for-gaza ↩ Saber, I. (2024). A ‘cultural genocide’: Which of Gaza’s heritage sites have been destroyed? Al Jazeera. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/14/a-cultural-genocide-which-of-gazas-heritage-sites-have-been-destroyed ↩ UN-Habitat. (2025). Building destruction and debris quantities assessment, Nabatieh South (revised). United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Retrieved from: https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/2025/01/unh-uob-usj_building_destruction_and_debris_quantities_assessment_nab-south_revised_22-01-2025.pdf ↩ United Nations Environment Programme (2024). Gaza Strip - Preliminary Debris Quantification: Damage Assessment Analysis: 1 December 2024. https://wedocs.unep.org/20.500.11822/46832 ↩ Gunter, J. (2025). ‘In every street there are dead’: Gaza rescuers reckon with scale of destruction. BBC. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8x00mgjxmo ↩ Tantech, M. & Burke, J. (2025). Bombs buried in Gaza rubble put at risk thousands returning to homes, say experts. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/25/bombs-buried-in-gaza-rubble-put-at-risk-thousands-returning-to-homes-say-experts ↩ Neimark, B., Bigger, P., Otu-Larbi, F., Larbi, R. (2024). A Multitemporal Snapshot of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the Israel-Gaza Conflict. Retrieved from: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4684768 ↩ "
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "Ziad Rahbani and the Art of Creative Rebellion",
"author" : "Céline Semaan",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/ziad-rahbani-creative-rebellion",
"date" : "2025-07-28 07:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_for-EIP-ziad-rahbani.jpg",
"excerpt" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.",
"content" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.Ziad Rahbani’s passing marks more than the end of a brilliant life—it marks the closing of a chapter in the cultural history of our region. His funeral wasn’t just a ceremony, it was a collective reckoning; crowds following his exit from the hospital to the cemetery. The streets knew what many governments tried to forget: that he gave voice to the people’s truths, to our frustrations, our absurdities, our grief, and our undying hope for justice. Yet he died as an unsung hero.Born into a family that shaped the musical soul of Lebanon, Ziad could have taken the easy path of replication. Instead, he shattered the mold. From his early plays like Sahriyye and Nazl el-Surour, he upended the elitism of classical Arabic theatre by placing the working class, the absurdity of war, and the contradictions of society at the center of his work. He spoke like the people spoke. He made art in the language of the taxi driver, the student, the mother waiting for news of her son.In his film work Film Ameriki Tawil, Ziad used satire not only as critique, but as rebellion. He exposed the rot of sectarian politics in Lebanon with surgical precision, never sparing anyone, including the leftist circles he moved in. He saw clearly: that political purity was a myth, and liberation required uncomfortable truths. His work, deeply rooted in class consciousness, refused to glorify any side of a war that tore his country apart.And yet, Ziad Rahbani never lost his clarity on Palestine. While others wavered, diluted their positions, or folded into diplomacy, Ziad remained steadfast. His support for the Palestinian struggle was not an aesthetic position—it was a political and ethical commitment. And he did so not as an outsider or savior, but as someone who understood that our futures are intertwined. That the liberation of Palestine is integral to the liberation of Lebanon. That anti-sectarianism and anti-Zionism are not contradictions, but extensions of each other.He brought jazz into Arabic music not as a novelty, but as a defiant act of cultural fusion—proof that our identities are not fixed, but fluid, diasporic, ever-evolving. He blurred the lines between Western musical forms and Arabic lyricism with intention, not mimicry. His collaborations with his mother, the legendary Fairuz, carried the weight of generational dialogue, but his own voice always broke through—wry, melancholic, grounded in the everyday.Ziad taught us that being a revolutionary doesn’t require a uniform or a slogan. It requires listening. It requires holding complexity, laughing in the face of despair, and making room for joy even when the world is on fire. He reminded us that culture is the deepest infrastructure of any resistance movement. He refused to be sanitized, censored, or simplified.As we mourn him, we also inherit his clarity. For artists, for organizers, for thinkers: Ziad Rahbani gave us a blueprint. Create without permission. Tell the truth. Fight for Palestine without compromising your own roots. And never forget that the people will always hear what is real.He was, and will always be, a compass for creative rebellion."
}
,
{
"title" : "Saul Williams: Nothing is Just a Song",
"author" : "Saul Williams, Collis Browne",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/saul-williams-interview",
"date" : "2025-07-21 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_SaulWilliams_Shot_7_0218.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.",
"content" : "Collis Browne: Is all music and art really political?Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.Even now, we are reading the writings of Palestinian poets in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention those who are part of the diaspora, who are charting their feelings and intimate experiences while living through a genocide. These works of art are all politically charged because they are charged with a reality that is fully suppressed by oppressive networks and powers that control them.Shakespeare’s work was always political. He found a way to speak about power to the face of power, knowing they would be in the audience. But also found a way to play with and talk to the “groundlings,” the common people who were in the audience as well.Collis Browne: Was there a moment when you realized that your music could be used as a tool of resistance?Saul Williams: Yeah, I was in third grade, about eight or nine years old. I had been cast in a play in my elementary school. I loved the process of not only performing, but of sitting around the table and breaking down what the language meant and what the objective and the psychology of the character was, and what that meant during the time it was written. I came home and told my parents that I wanted to be an actor when I grew up. My father had the typical response: “I’ll support you as an actor if you get a law degree.” My mother responded by saying, “You should do your next school report on Paul Robeson, he was an actor and a lawyer.”So I did my next school report on Paul Robeson. And what I discovered was that here was an African American man, born in 1898, who had come to an early realization as an actor that the messages of the films he was being cast in—and he was a huge star—went against his own beliefs, his own anti-colonial and anti-imperial beliefs. In the 1930s, he started talking about why we needed to invest in independent cinema. In 1949, during the McCarthy era, he had his passport taken from him so he could no longer travel outside of the US, because he refused to acknowledge that the enemies of the US were his enemies as well. He felt there was no reason Black people should be signing up to fight for the US Empire when they were going home and getting lynched.In 1951, he presented a mandate to the UN called “We Charge Genocide.” In it he charged the US Government with the genocide of African Americans because of the white mobs who were lynching Black Americans on a regular basis. [Editor’s note: the petition charges the US Government with genocide through the endorsement of both racism and “monopoly capitalism,” without which “the persistent, constant, widespread, institutionalized commission of the crime of genocide would be impossible.”] When Robeson met with President Truman, Truman said, “I’d like to respond, but there’s an election coming up, so I have to be careful.”Paul Robeson sang songs of working-class people, songs that trade unionists sang, songs that miners sang, songs that all types of workers sang across the world. He identified with the workers and with the working class, regardless of his fame. He was ridiculed by the American Government and even had his passport revoked for his activism. At that early age, I learned that you could sing songs that could get you labeled as an enemy of the state.I grew up in Newburgh, New York, which is about an hour upstate from New York City. One of my neighbors would often come sing at my father’s church. At the time, I did not understand why my dad would allow this white guy with his guitar or banjo to come sing at our church when we had an amazing gospel choir. I couldn’t understand why we were singing these school songs with this dude. When I finally asked my parents, they said, “You have to understand that Pete—they were talking about Pete Seeger—is responsible for popularizing some of the songs you sing in school.” He wrote songs like “If I Had a Hammer,” and he too was blacklisted by the US government because of the songs he chose to sing and the people he chose to sing them for, and the people he chose to sing them with. I learned at a very early age that music and art were full of politics. Enough politics to get you labeled as the enemy of the state. Enough politics to get your passport taken, or to be imprisoned.I was also learning about my parents’ peers, artists whom they loved and adored. Artists like Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni, all from the Black Arts Movement. Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka made a statement when they started the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem that said essentially that all art should serve a function, and that function should be to liberate Black minds.It is from that movement that hip-hop was born. I was lucky enough to witness the birth of hip-hop. At first, it was playful, it was fun, but by the mid to late 1980s, it began finding its voice with groups like Public Enemy, KRS-One, Queen Latifa, Rakim, and the Jungle Brothers. These are groups that started using and expressing Black Liberation politics in the music, which uplifted it, made it sound better, and made it hit harder. The first gangster rap was that… when it was gangster, when it was directly challenging the country it was being born in.As a teenager, I identified as a rapper and an actor. I would argue with school kids who insisted, “It’s not even music. They’re just talking.” I would have to defend hip-hop as music, sometimes even to my parents, who found the language crass. But when I played artists like KRS-One and Public Enemy for my parents, they said, “Oh, I see what they’re doing here.”When Public Enemy rapped, “Elvis was a hero to most, But he never meant shit to me you see, Straight up racist that sucker was, Simple and plain, Motherfuck him and John Wayne, ‘Cause I’m Black and I’m proud, I’m ready and hyped plus I’m amped, Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps,” my parents were like Amen. They understood. They understood why I needed to blast that music in my room 24/7. They understood.When the music spoke to me in that way, suddenly I could pull off moves on the dance floor like doing a flip that I couldn’t do before. That’s the power of music. That’s power embedded in music. That’s why Fela Kuti said that music is the weapon of the future. And, of course, there’s Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. What’s Billie Holiday’s most memorable song? “Strange Fruit.” That voice connected, was speaking directly to the times she was living in. It transcended the times, where to this day, when you hear this song and you understand that the “strange fruit” hanging from Southern trees are Black people who have been lynched, you understand how the power of the voice, when you connect it to something that is charged with the reality of the times, takes on a greater shape.Collis Browne: Public Enemy broke open so much. I grew up in Toronto, in a mostly white community, but I was into some of the bigger American hip-hop acts who were coming out. Public Enemy rose to a new level. Before them, we were only connecting with punk and hardcore music as the music of rebellion.Saul Williams: Public Enemy laid down the groundwork for what hip-hop is: “the voice of the voiceless.” It was only after Public Enemy that you saw the emergence of huge groups in France, Germany, Bulgaria, Egypt, and across the world. There were big acts before them. Run DMC, for instance, but when Public Enemy came out, marginalized groups heard their music and said, “That’s for us. Yes, that’s for us.” It was immediately understood as music of resistance.Collis Browne: What have you seen or listened to out in the world that has a clear political goal, but has been appropriated and watered down?Saul Williams: We can stay on Public Enemy for that. Under Secretary Blinken, Chuck D became a US Global Music Ambassador during the genocide in Gaza. There are photos of him standing beside Secretary Blinken, accepting that role, while understanding that the US has always used music as a cultural propaganda tool to express soft power. I remember learning about how the US uses this “soft power” when I was working in the mid-2000s with a Swiss composer, who has now passed, named Thomas Kessler. He wrote a symphony based on one of my books, Said the Shotgun to the Head, and we were performing it with the Cologne, Germany symphony orchestra, when I heard from the head of the orchestra that, in fact, their main financier was the US Government through the CIA.During the Cold War, it was crucial for the American Government to put money into the arts throughout Western Europe to try to express this idea of “freedom,” as opposed to what was happening in the Eastern (Communist) Bloc. So it was a long time between when the US Government started enlisting musicians and other artists in their propaganda campaigns and when I encountered this information.There’s a documentary called Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, which talks about how the US Government used (uses) music and musicians to co-opt movements and propagate the idea of American freedom and democracy outside the US in the hope of winning over the citizens of other countries without them even realizing that so much of that art is there to question the system itself, not to celebrate it. Unfortunately, there are situations in which an artist’s work is co-opted to be used as propaganda, and the artist buys into it. They become indoctrinated, and you realize that we’re all susceptible to the possibility of taking that bait."
}
,
{
"title" : "The Culture of Artificial Intelligence",
"author" : "Sinead Bovell, Céline Semaan",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/sinead-bovell-on-ai-artifial-intelligence",
"date" : "2025-07-20 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/sinead-bovell-headshot.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Céline Semaan: It is being reported that AI will make humans dumber than ever, that it is here to rule the world, and to subjugate us all by bringing on a climate apocalypse. Being an AI and tech expert, how can you help people better understand AI as a phenomenon that will impact us but that we shouldn’t necessarily fear?",
"content" : "Céline Semaan: It is being reported that AI will make humans dumber than ever, that it is here to rule the world, and to subjugate us all by bringing on a climate apocalypse. Being an AI and tech expert, how can you help people better understand AI as a phenomenon that will impact us but that we shouldn’t necessarily fear?Sinead Bovell: It depends on where you are… in the Global North, and particularly in the US, perspectives on artificial intelligence and advanced technologies are more broadly negative. When you look at regions in the Global South, when you look at regions in Asia, AI is seen in a much more positive light. Their societies tend to focus on the benefits new technology can bring and what it can do for their quality of life. The social media ecosystem thrives on negative content, but it really does depend on where you are in the world as to how negatively you’re going to view AI. When it comes to the actual fears and the threats themselves, most of them have some validity. Humans could become less intelligent over time if they’re overly reliant on artificial intelligence systems, and the data does show that AI can erode core cognitive capacities.For example, most of us can’t read maps anymore. If you are in the military and your satellite gets knocked down and you need to understand your coordinates, that might be a problem. But for the average person, not reading a map has allowed us to optimize our time; we can get from A to B much more quickly. What do we fill the time with that AI gives us back with? That’s a really important question.Another important question is: How do we purposely engineer cognitive friction into the learning and thinking environment so we don’t erode that core capability? That’s not something that is just going to happen. We are humans, we take the path of least resistance, like all evolutionary species do. If you look at the printing press, the chaotic abundance of information eventually led to the scientific method and the peer review. Educators, academics, scientists, and creators needed to figure out a way to sort through the valuable information and the nonsense, and that led to more cognitive friction. Those pathways haven’t been developed yet for AI. How we use and assimilate AI depends on the actions we take when it comes to the climate apocalypse, for instance. As of now, how AI uses water and energy is nothing short of a nightmare. However, it’s not really AI in isolation. It’s our social media habits in general. When you look at them in aggregate and globally, our digital habits and patterns aren’t good for the climate in general. And then AI just exacerbates all of that.AI is not a technology that you are going to tap into and tap out of. It’s not like Uber where maybe you don’t use the app because you would prefer to bike, and that’s the choice that you make. AI is a general-purpose technology, and it’s important that we get that distinction, because general-purpose technologies, over time, become infrastructure, like the steam engine, electricity, and the internet. We rebuild our societies on top of them, and it’s important that we see it that way, so people don’t just unsubscribe out of protest. That only impedes their ability to make sure they keep up with the technology, and give adequate feedback and critiques of the technology.Céline Semaan: I recently saw you on stage and heard your response to a question about whether AI and its ramifications could be written into an episode of the TV show Black Mirror. Would you be able to repeat the answer you gave?Sinead Bovell: The stories we see and read about AI are usually dystopian. Arguably, there are choices we continue to make over and over again that we know will lead to negative outcomes, yet we don’t make different choices. To me, that’s the real Black Mirror episode… can we rely on ourselves? In some circumstances, we continually pick the more harmful thing. Most of the big challenges we face are complicated but not unsolvable. Even with climate, a lot of the solutions exist, and actually most of them are grounded in technology. What isn’t happening is the choice to leverage them, or the choice to subsidize them so they become more accessible, or the choice to even believe in them. That scares me a lot more than a particular use case of technology. Most of the biggest challenges we face are down to human choices, and we’re not making the right choices.Céline Semaan: Are you afraid of AI taking over the world and rendering all of our jobs useless? How do you see that?Sinead Bovell: There’s AI taking over the world, and that’s AI having its own desire and randomly rising up out of the laptop or out of some robot. I’m not necessarily concerned about that. You can’t say anything is a 0% chance, right? We don’t know. There are so many things you can’t say with 100% certainty. I mean, are we alone the universe? It’s really hard to prove or disprove those types of things. Where I stand on that is… sure allocate research dollars to a select group of scientists who can work on that problem. However, I am quite concerned about the impact AI is going to have on the workforce. We can see the destruction of certain jobs coming. It’s going to happen quickly, and we’re not preparing for it properly. Every general-purpose technology has led to automation and reconfiguration of the shape of the workforce. Let’s look at the first industrial revolution which lasted from approximately 1760-1840. If we were to zoom in on people working in agriculture, by the end of the 19th Century, around 70-80% of those people were doing something different. That is an astounding change. People had jobs, they just looked very different from working on the farm. But what if that happens in seven years rather than 80 years? That’s what scares me. I think the transition will be quite chaotic because it’s going to be quite quick, but it doesn’t have to be. History isn’t a great predictor of the future, but it does give you a lot of examples of what you don’t need to do again.The reason the industrial revolution turned out to be a good thing in the end, in terms of the life we all live, is that, for instance, we have MRIs and don’t have to have our blood drained to see if we’re sick. But people were just left to fend for themselves. It was chaos, and it turned into this kind of every person for themselves. Kind of figure it out. Get to the city. Bring your family. Don’t bring your family. It was really chaotic. How are we going to not repeat that? I don’t know if we are putting the security measures in place to make sure people are protecting that transition.The most obvious one to me is health care in the United States. I don’t know the exact number, maybe it’s around 60% of people, but don’t quote me on that, are reliant on their job for health care. That’s where their insurance comes from. What is going to happen to their insurance if their job goes away or if they transition to being self-employed? How do we help people transition? People don’t even dare go down that road, but those are the types of conversations that need to happen.Céline Semaan: In 10 years from now, will we look at AI as just another super calculator. And we will be asking the same questions that we are asking today, meaning that the change we’re seeking is not necessarily technological, but philosophical and cultural. How do you see that?Sinead Bovell: AI will look like much more of a philosophical, cultural, and social transition than solely a technological one. This is true of a lot of general-purpose technologies.The inventions in technology lead to how we organize our societies and how we govern them. If you look at the printing press, it led to a secular movement and gave power to that engine. You get big social, philosophical, cultural changes, and revolutions in society when you experience this scale of technical disruption. I think we will look back on the AI inflection point as one of the most pivotal transitions in human history in the past couple 100 years. I would say it’s going to be as disruptive as the printing press and maybe steam engine combined. And we made it through both of those. There was a lot of turmoil and chaos, but we did make it through both of those.We are a much more vibrant, healthy society now. We live longer and, relatively speaking, we have much more equality. There is a path where it works out, but we have to be making the decisions to make that happen. However, it’s not practical that a subset of the population makes the decisions on behalf of everyone. And that’s why I think it’s so important for people to get in the game and not see AI as this really technical device or technology, but instead, as a big social, cultural and philosophical transition. Your lived experience qualifies you to participate in these conversations; there’s nobody who can carry the weight of this on their own."
}
]
}
