Gaza: Before, During, and After Urbicide

Keywords: Gaza, urbicide, racial banishment, genocide
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Gaza city as an urban center is not a product of the Nakba, but it has been forever transformed
by the Israeli settler colonial displacement that forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to
it. The Gaza Strip today – made up of a vibrant indigenous city, towns, and refugee camps
whose residents once filled villages scattered across Palestine's largest district – is itself a
periphery filled with a people refusing the margins, and defying the colonial delusion that they
can be rendered peripheral, disposable collateral. Palestinians in Gaza are not surviving a
genocide, they are living through it. They are living through it together as they take in their
neighbors, as they clean half destroyed buildings to reinhabit and remake homes between the
rubble, as women gather by the dozens to create community kitchens that turn bags of aid into
meals that nourish hundreds. They can live through this genocide together and in these ways
because of the ways they have been surviving together for decades, bound in common purpose
and a belief that their collective will outlives every catastrophe.