Abstract
In his seminal novel Men in the Sun (1970), Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani poses a haunting question: “Why didn’t they knock on the walls of the water tank?”. This paper reflects on that question and how it became the compass guiding my writing and teaching about Architecture and Palestine amidst the ongoing genocide. Knocking here is more than an act of refusal; it is a demand to rupture domination, insisting on justice and on noise against the enclosures that prefer quiet compliance. Kanafani’s question echoes beyond fiction, exposing the asymmetry between oppressor and oppressed, and the violence embedded not only in silencing but in the calculated choice to remain silent.
These reflections emerge from months of research and work at the Faculty of Architecture (BK) at TU Delft in the Netherlands, where I, alongside my fellow scholars and educators at BK Scholars for Palestine, sought to reclaim institutional space for Palestine. We refused to treat the faculty’s walls as neutral architecture, because we recognized neutrality as a façade designed to conceal complicity and protect those in power. Instead, we read them as sites of struggle, surfaces capable of transmitting protest through sound, image, and presence. We knocked, loudly and insistently, to make visible the genocide in Gaza, to pierce the institution’s silence, and to challenge its complicity. In one visceral moment, protest carried us quite literally into a water tank in Delft, expelled from our own faculty, forcibly silenced, yet echoing Kanafani’s call with embodied urgency.
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Recommended Citation
Qudah, Nama'a
(2026)
"Knock to Disrupt, Knock to Make Visible: Writing and Teaching about Architecture and Palestine Amidst the Ongoing Genocide,"
Gatherings: Vol. 3:
Iss.
1, Article 6.
Available at:
https://fisherpub.sjf.edu/gatherings/vol3/iss1/6