The premise of this piece is both a tragedy and sad trope.

When the people of a place become dehumanized by institutional politics and mainstream media to such an extreme extent as Palestinians have, a popular tactic emerges: to argue their case on other terms. Public expenditure on foreign war crimes, for instance, or the environmental degradation that they cause somehow feel more acceptable to denounce than the war crimes themselves.

These “diplomatic maneuvers” embody what award-winning poet and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd dubs “the politics of appeal” in his recent book “Perfect Victims,” which confronts the West’s aversion to condemning Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza or acknowledging Palestinian grief without qualification.

Despite the moral shortcomings of talking points, “appeal” is admittedly the tactic I have as a writer to the global built environment community I am part of: urbanists and architects, planners and policymakers, activists, developers, everyone in-between.

I am here, too late, to do something equally necessary and ridiculous, which is to remind us all that Gaza is a city.

It’s an offensively basic claim, particularly for an ancient trade hub, a place once characterized by rich cultural heritage, extensive biodiversity and range of climate zones. It was all of these things before the 1948 Nakba, when Egypt’s refusal to accept refugees turned Gaza into a liminal city-state — one of the few still remaining, offering distinct lessons for global urban governance. This is not the first time that Gaza has been destroyed completely, but it is the first time that it’s been destroyed with 100,000 tons of bombs: the most advanced, tech-firm-backed weaponry in history.

Still, our profession’s profound culture of silence around the Israeli military’s ongoing, Western-backed, wholesale ravage of life there — a decades-long project that has only accelerated since October 2023 — suggests that we have either conveniently forgotten ourselves or purposely obscured Gaza from our urban vocabulary, reinforcing a deadly taboo with institutional quiet.

An excruciatingly urban issue

Our silence is both historically and contemporarily counterintuitive. To begin with, infrastructure and land-use planning have long been primary vehicles of Israeli occupation. Alongside physical violence and brutality, spatial violence has been engineered into daily life in the Occupied Territories through everything from food and water systems to housing and transportation.

British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman and his team at Forensic Architecture have painstakingly documented how Israel has systematically choked Palestinian development for over half a century. One tactic among many is the dubious declaration of nature reserves, curbing Palestinian land access and movement under the guise of environmentalism. Decades before the shocking indignity of today’s unchecked mass starvation was the construction of a two-tiered road system suffocated by military checkpoints.

The occupation and its incalculable human costs have always been a matter of design, enabled by the joint silence and complicity of built environment work. Our sector’s direct involvement continues today. In the wake of Israel’s latest offensive, a range of Western consultancy firms and think tanks have already supported controversial planning efforts to relocate Palestinians from Gaza. Spatial visions for a “sustainable future” are beginning to roll out as the death toll rises hourly.

It is urgent that urban planning institutions take a coherent stand in condemning Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza — not only as an intellectual exercise but as a concrete pledge to end our support now and clarify the visions we are willing to promote in the future.

A distinct hypocrisy

Our failure to articulate an industry consensus is not for lack of ability. When Russian attacks were at their height in Kyiv a few years ago, my LinkedIn feed was flooded with Ukrainian flags, my inbox filled with statements of unequivocal condemnation.

During the pandemic, as it became clear that vulnerability to Covid-19 was exacerbated by underlying factors like housing quality, air pollution exposure and local food access, the roll-out of think pieces, digital teach-ins, and new research initiatives about “urban wellness” was staggering.

The Black Lives Matter movement prompted increasing discussion of diversity’s importance in project teams — sometimes veering toward tokenism, but hopefully also sparking some honest engagement with representation. Even the most lucrative of developers I’ve worked with have a language for discussing climate change, race and class.

Urbanism sits at the heart of politics and has always been wrapped up in utopian questions of world-building, which makes it rife for critical debates, even if the nature of client- and profit-driven work can risk sanitizing them.

But while journalism, higher education, the film, music and food industries, and countless other professional institutions have been at the heart of both activism and free-speech crackdowns around Palestine, the corporate urbanism space has failed to speak up against, let alone coherently address, the urbicide and historicide in Gaza.

The stakes of silence

Israel’s onslaught has firstly been waged on the ground and secondly in a contest of rhetoric. While El-Kurd acknowledges “the written word as shamefully insufficient in the face of 2,000 pound bombs,” he also painstakingly details how words have long been weaponized by global leaders, media outlets and everyday people to maintain power and deflect blame, not only from Israel but from the American and British administrations backing its actions.

Words might not be bombs, but their absence is another kind of arsenal — silence at best normalizes and at worst fuels business-as-usual.

By now it is an undeniable fact that Israel has systematically and publicly demolished all civic infrastructure in Gaza: homes, hospitals, mosques, churches, schools and universities, public squares and playgrounds, libraries, critical habitats, archaeological and heritage assets, power and communications networks, and systems for food, water and sanitation. It has wiped out generations of people — their family bloodlines, oral histories, ecological knowledge, hopes and dreams.

By all accounts – 80,000 and rising now estimated martyred, over 100 of whom have starved to death in the past few weeks alone – this is the greatest urban humanitarian crisis of our lifetimes. The horrors compound: escalated reports of famine, targeted attacks on thousands of civilians waiting for food at distribution sites, and increasing amounts of doctors, journalists and aid workers fainting on the job from hunger and exhaustion. As professionals bound by a range of ethical codes around the world, we are contractually obliged to use our voices to disrupt the senseless razing of a landmark, ancient city and its people.

An opportunity for consensus

Our silence is not only a moral failing but also a missed opportunity. Fear of losing clients by being “too political” – or making Jewish colleagues like myself uncomfortable – has shamefully stifled our ability to demonstrate meaningful leadership and produce organized demands for our national governments.

Despite the fact that we’re all experiencing this annihilation second-hand in a constant, traumatizing livestream, we’ve made no attempt to leverage our expertise — in navigating polarization, environmental stewardship, material reuse, global supply chains and urban policy — for any useful aid or intervention.

All the while, our work in the Middle East, through projects like NEOM’s Octagon and The Line, has taken off at record pace.

This brings us to a second, and perhaps more dire, reason for dialogue. We must all be wary of attempts by Israeli and American governments to frame Gaza as a real estate development opportunity. Still, it is true that the city will, one day, be rebuilt. It is imperative that this effort is led by local people, for local people: not a population replacement project. Frankly, the International Court of Justice’s precedent suggests that the reconstruction of Gaza as a riviera should be criminal.

While what happens remains to be seen, the global built environment industry — its multinational infrastructure and engineering firms, land remediation specialists, architects and planners — will inevitably be part of rebuilding efforts. They should be driven foremost by Gazans, but the nature of power and politics makes it very likely that designers from Western and Gulf countries will have seats at the table.

Our inability to have any mature conversation about Gaza now leaves us entirely unprepared to establish consensus then: about what visions we are willing to support, how far is too far, and whose voices we will center or censor.

The controversy engulfing Boston Consulting Group after establishing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and modelling the financial costs of relocating Palestinians from Gaza – in line with Israeli war aims and Trump’s AI-powered vision for a resort-opia – should serve as a warning that complicity in genocide eventually comes with consequences.

History will already judge us, but with so many lives still at stake, it is time for the industry to finally come together and do what cities do best: step up where national leadership fails.

Calls for bold leadership

Here in the U.K., a few independent networks have emerged, such as Architects for Gaza and Architects Climate Action Network, with a list of salient demands for industry bodies. These include calling on the Royal Institute of British Architects to:

• Publicly condemn Israel’s destruction of Palestinian towns and cities,

• Expel Israel from the International Union of Architects (UIA),

• Boycott U.K. firms supporting the design or construction of projects in illegally occupied territories,

• Amplify Palestinian-led reconstruction efforts, and

• Divest from Israeli funders.

There are open letters to sign and aid resources to donate or redirect project fees to — the full $200 commission received for this article, for instance, will be split between Medical Aid for Palestinians and Islamic Relief.

Most immediately, what all of us can do is break the silence and normalize Palestinian solidarity in professional forums. Zohran Mamdani’s historic win in New York City’s mayoral primary — while openly supporting Palestine throughout his campaign — made clear that the tides of public opinion are turning. People crave city leaders who demonstrate clarity and sincerity on the matter, rather than ambivalence or floundering.

“We are told by well-meaning individuals that the more you want to accomplish, the less you should speak about Palestine,” Mamdani told Salem Barameh in an Uncivilized Media interview. “It is a glaring contradiction. We say that we care about freedom and justice and self-determination … we need to have a sense of consistency here.”

This post was originally published on Next City.