If Gaza Were Here
with Benjamin Kaplan Weinger and Yonatan Eshban-Laderman
What would it mean to confront the destruction of our own worlds? And through what political, moral, and institutional processes has the destruction of Gaza been made possible? Prompted by these questions, this book produces a speculative archive, an experimental attempt at counter-forensics that draws on satellite imagery and the affordances of artificial intelligence to confront the witness with a new mode of apprehending anthropogenic catastrophe. The book extends co-editor Yonatan Eshban-Laderman’s “If Gaza Were Here,” a digital archive that draws on before-and-after aerial images of Gaza and then transposes the learned signature of ruination onto iconic Western landmarks (e.g., the Colosseum, Louvre, Sydney Opera House, Harvard University). The original stable diffusion artificial intelligence model mimics the aggregated scale of Israel’s wholesale destruction—and visual rendering—of Gaza during its years-long assault, widely deemed to befit the international legal threshold of genocide. This archive surfaces key themes: substitution and simulation as affective tools for the act of witnessing, tension between distance and proximity, and the ethics of dis/implication. If Gaza Were Here forces a confrontation with the politics of recognition and grievability by relocating the scene of ruination onto the viewer’s own symbolic terrain, asking why Gaza must be displaced “here” to become thinkable. At the center of this book is the aerial, the satellite, and the bird’s-eye view: a visual aesthetics born from militarized technologies of targeting, reconnaissance, and martial vision, now widely accessible through commercial mapping platforms and open-source investigation. The book poses speculation as a form of counter-forensics that turns the optics and technological infrastructures of war back on themselves. Satellite imagery and AI simulations function as epistemic repertoires that shape what counts as truth and distance. The book tracks how the contemporary aesthetics of genocide intensify abstraction and disimplication, and critically attempts to undo that abstraction through visual seriality, juxtaposition, and typological cataloguing. The heavily visual chapters situate this reversal within theories of the image, grievability, affect, and critical GIS, arguing that contemporary witnessing is increasingly organized through competing assemblages of legitimation, simulation, and circulation rather than stable documentary authority. The volume intertwines textual and visual analysis. It both adheres to the rigours of contemporary social scientific methods and represents an experimental attempt at producing a speculative archive. The book begins with a concise, evidence-forward historical account of modern Gaza, Israel’s tactics of colonial control, and the recent annihilatory operation, paired with a visual anatomy of destruction through curated before-and-after images that stage a critique through geospatial aesthetics. Then, the book proceeds with an analytical reading of “If Gaza Were Here” that exposes the selective architectures of empathy organized around perception, legibility, and proximity, paired with a visual section that reproduces “If Gaza Were Here,” typogolized by category (civilian infrastructure, hospitals, schools, residences, cultural and religious sites). A rich afterward offers a reflexive Jewish political essay on the ethics of witnessing and de-reifying Zionist frames of vision and division, broaching the situatedness of the editors and the political stakes of this work. The result is a theoretically driven, visually confronting contribution to archives of anthropogenic catastrophe.