This talk looks into the concept of “home” in spaces of colonization and violence. From Israelis who settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa, Yaffa, or Lydd, to white missionaries who build their lives in Africa, or the descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia, people dwell and thrive on expropriated lands. In her talk Kotef traces the cultural, political, and spatial apparatuses that enable people and nations to settle on the ruins of other people's homes. It curates a palimpsest of thefts and ruins, nested histories of exile and exploitation alongside the intimate, ordinary, cruelties of settler colonialism. Kotef powerfully shows how the possibility to live amid the destruction one generates is not merely the possibility to turn one's gaze away from violence but also the possibility to develop an attachment to violence itself. This is then a map of desires, losses, placements and displacements, that are meshed together to create contemporary political spaces -- a map which binds the everyday, national, and global.