"A beachfront property in Gaza is not a dream" : Utopia, the digital, and the image of the ruin in Palestine

Abstract

This essay takes as its starting point an image shared in December 2023 by the Israeli real estate firm Harey Zahav, depicting the plans for a row of luxury beach villas digitally superimposed onto a photograph of ruins in Gaza. Taken in the context of other images of ruination which have been shared and remediated during the assault on Gaza following October 7, 2023, this essay argues that the image is emblematic of a radical shift away from the long-standing Israeli practice of clearing or otherwise obscuring Palestinian ruins within the territory of Israel, as a means of concealing both the pre-1948 Palestinian presence in the land and the violence and ethnic cleansing through which the state was founded. Drawing on discussions of utopia by Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, China Miéville and others, the significance of the representation of images of Palestinian ruins shall be read in the context of the idea of utopia, and the ‘forced forgetting’ of the foundational violence upon which the concept of the utopian ‘blank slate’ is founded. The essay shall then build on the work of Saree Makdisi, Ilan Pappe, Walid Khalidi and others to survey the history of the Israeli treatment of Palestinian ruins, and the way in which their active destruction has been a key mechanism in a process of memoricide at work both in the Israeli relation to the landscape and discursive practices. Finally, the essay shall consider how recent images like the one produced and shared by Harey Zahav represent a shift towards a foregrounding – rather than a concealment – of state violence in the Israeli-Palestinian context, and read the significance of this shift in relation to what Taner Akçam, following Hannah Arendt, has referred to as the “end of tradition” (2025) of the post-war Western liberal world order.