Editorial

Palestinian Repairs is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Emilio Distretti supported by RIWAQ – Centre for Architectural Conservation, Birzeit University Museum, and the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London. It draws and expands upon Architecture of Repair in Palestine, a nomadic forum that has gathered since January 2023 to think, imagine, and articulate visions of repair as acts of resistance and liberation. It features contributions by Husam Abusalem; Areej Ashhab and Raghad Saqfalhait; Rana Barakat; Khaldun Bshara; Muneer Elbaz; Samir Harb and Emilio Distretti; Shatha Safi and Hiba Omari; Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari, Cezary Bednarski, Lailac Al-Taie, and Marion Roberts; and Dima Srouji.

In many languages and traditions, “repair” means to find a remedy for what is torn or broken. Yet to speak of repair in the context of Palestine today—after more than two years of genocidal devastation unleashed by Israel in Gaza, and in the shadow of a neocolonial scramble for reconstruction—is to stand before its threshold: to confront its limits, its (im)possibility, suspended between grief and endurance, between what can be restored and what must remain a scar. To ask what is reparable, and what is not, is to ask how to mend destruction and pursue justice; how to reckon with incommensurable loss. It is to ask how life itself might begin again amid the ruins.

Following Edward Said, to call something a question is to refuse ultimate resolution or closure.1 It is to recognize an open wound—a site of tension, of inquiry, of meaning that resists being sealed. The “question of Palestine” has always borne this enduring weight: it speaks not only of dispossession and exile, but of the very conditions under which histories are narrated, memories preserved, rights recognized, justice pursued, and liberation imagined and lived. From this perspective, the question of repair becomes inseparable from the political condition of Palestine itself. It is not an abstract inquiry, but an urgent and embodied one—caught between annihilation and cynical “reconstruction plans.”

Architectural knowledge and planning are complicit in the very structures of power that have historically enforced Palestinian dispossession and the systematic destruction of Palestine’s heritage. Today, under US patronage, the specter of capital asserts itself in dual form: first, through the tons of bombs that devastate the Gazan coastline; and then, through dystopian AI-generated visions of real estate “reconstruction” that promise a new economic “peace” grounded in total erasure.

Against this erasure, repair must arise from a different ethos: one in which Palestinian acts of mending confront the layered wounds of settler-colonial violence—bodily, material, environmental, and spiritual. Such an ethos demands that architecture and heritage no longer remain instruments of containment or technocratic force, but instead become practices of liberation and return. To repair, in this sense, is not to rebuild what was, but to reimagine the grounds of life itself—to craft, from ruin, the possibility of belonging.

As Palestinians dig through mountains of rubble to recover the thousands disappeared, as families walk miles in search for fragments of home, as the living continue to struggle for food, water, and shelter, speaking about repair feels fraught with uncertainty. And yet, amidst devastation, these acts endure as a radical assertion of presence. They imply the possibility that new forms of life will still take shape. Repair, then, is not a plan but praxis; a slow, patient disentangling and reassembling of shattered life-worlds, where grief saturates the everyday.

As genocide dismantles a people—their homes, universities, hospitals, and heritage—the notion of repair becomes both impossible and indispensable. It is an expression of sumud, of steadfast perseverance, of the will to persist against erasure. In this sense, repair becomes not the end of mourning but its continuation—a labor through which the broken is given another kind of life, one that carries the trace of its fracture yet gestures toward the possibility of justice.2 It is an architecture of survival and defiance, a quiet yet unyielding movement toward liberation—an act of faith in the persistence of life amidst the ruins.

The (im)possibility of repair can be understood through the enduring history and struggle for Palestinian return—a space where the search for justice becomes a praxis, suspended between loss and hope, resisting closure. Here, acts of reconstruction are practiced daily, and liberation continues to be imagined even in the wake of catastrophe. These many forms of dignity—ones that affirm the right to exist, to inhabit, to remember, and, indeed, to return to the land—testify to the ongoing process of reconstruction in Gaza and liberation of Palestine, by Palestinians and for Palestinians.