Cultural genocide: Israel's war on Palestinian memory

History is replete with such examples, where the traces of earlier peoples and the material signs of their culture were removed so that those peoples themselves might be erased. The removal of any people begins with erasing their memory from the land. Once that memory has been stripped away, the falsehood can be uttered without shame: 'A land without a people for a people without a land', or the claim that the land was virgin soil awaiting those who would till it and breathe life into it.

What was evident, and here I write from direct personal experience as a citizen who lived through the first three months of the war, moving from Jabalia camp and Gaza City to Khan Younis and then to a tent in the Mawasi of Rafah, was that the cultural sector, archaeological sites, and historic buildings were targeted from the war's earliest days. This was neither incidental nor merely the by-product of a ferocious war and prolonged fighting, nor could it be dismissed as 'collateral damage'. It unfolded through systematic, deliberate, and carefully directed operations whose unmistakable purpose was the destruction of cultural infrastructure and archaeological sites. 

It is telling, for example, that Al Qarara Museum was targeted in the very first week of the war, when Israeli aircraft and tanks almost completely destroyed it during the initial waves of concentrated bombardment, before the ground invasion had even begun. The museum stood in a rural area, almost entirely removed from other institutions, surrounded only by fields and scattered homes. More broadly, any review of the systematic destruction of heritage sites, archaeological landmarks, and museums shows that much of it occurred within the first two months of the war. Before 2023 had even drawn to a close, Israel had already wiped out most of the institutions and landmarks of Gaza's cultural sector, carrying out an almost total erasure of the facilities, buildings, and material traces that told the story of Gaza Through History, the title of the celebrated 17-volume work by the Gazan historian Ibrahim Skik.

Libraries burned, archives erased

The destruction encompassed museums, libraries, printing presses, bookshops, galleries, cinemas, theatres, cultural institutions, archaeological sites, historic buildings, mosques, churches, ancient cemeteries, castles, archival centres, memorials, murals, studios, and art exhibitions. According to early reports from the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, the attacks targeted 32 cultural institutions, nine municipal public libraries, 12 museums, nine printing presses, 28 artistic monuments, and three artistic production companies.

The total number of destroyed libraries approached 80, including both public libraries and bookshops. Among the most prominent was the Gaza Municipality Library, regarded as one of the largest public libraries in Palestine. Beneath its rubble vanished hundreds of books printed before the Nakba, along with documents, newspapers, and magazines published in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Gaza before 1948. 

Another of the most significant losses was the five-storey Samir Mansour Library, the largest bookshop in both the West Bank and Gaza. That library had already been destroyed during the 2021 assault on Gaza, then rebuilt in February 2022, only to be destroyed once again a year-and-a-half later, at the outset of the present war. More recently, the son of its owner, Samir Mansour, published a book about his father's life and his years of labour in building the library, titled A Bookseller in Gaza.

The list of libraries completely destroyed also included the well-known Al Shorouq Library in Gaza, near Al Azhar University. In this context, one must also recall the Central Archives of Gaza Municipality, whose headquarters were bombed and burned, as though to ensure that not a single document would survive. Housed in a historic building, the archives contained the municipality's records over the past 150 years.

With their destruction, the memory of the modern city was obliterated: its economic, social, cultural, and political memory alike, including, of course, the minutes of municipal council meetings. To this must be added private libraries and personal collections of paintings and works of art. Beneath the rubble of homes and ruined buildings across Gaza lie Palestinian cultural treasures lost forever. A report by the Ministry of Culture estimated the destruction and damage of 2,100 historical dresses and embroidered pieces among the public holdings kept in museums and institutions that were destroyed.

Theft as a founding strategy

From the outset, the Zionist project was founded on an effort to dispossess Palestinians of their memory through the theft of heritage and antiquities and through the seizure of a vast range of their material remains. This unfolded in the service of claims for which researchers could find no material proof, whether beneath the earth or upon its surface. As a result, artefacts, remains, and historical sites of every kind were enlisted to validate the narrative the colonial project sought to entrench, as when the walls of Jerusalem, built in the 16th century, are made to stand for the Wailing Wall.

During the Nakba of 1948, Israel deliberately removed every cultural and historical site that could not be absorbed into its preferred narrative. Its aim was the erasure of Palestinian memory and the imposition of another in its place. Whatever could not be stolen from the realm of antiquities and heritage was razed. The cultural extermination, theft, erasure, and substitution that marked the Nakba make plain that what is taking place today forms part of an unbroken crime, one that demands the forcing open of the sealed locks behind which the truth has long been concealed.

One of the most vivid scenes still recalled by the people of Gaza is that of the former Israeli defence minister Moshe Dayan excavating antiquities in the cemetery of the Philistine kings in Al Darum, in Deir al Balah, where he stole sarcophagi and grave goods belonging to those ancient rulers. At the very moment when Zionist militias were ripping open the bellies of pregnant women and killing women outright, their leaders were stealing embroidered dresses from Palestinian wardrobes and stripping them from the bodies of women their soldiers had just killed. That may help explain why some among them later emerged as prominent dealers in Palestinian dresses at international auction houses.

During the current war, official reports recounted that, as civilians fled under bombardment, they saw Israeli soldiers looting antiquities and historical artefacts, loading them into military vehicles. Some members of the Israeli Knesset have even displayed a number of these items openly in the halls of parliament, without the slightest embarrassment. 

As has happened so often before, these objects will likely find their way into Israeli museums, where a fresh narrative will be woven around them and folded into the larger story of occupation. A review of exhibition practices in Israeli museums, as the writer Nasab Hussein shows in her book Museums and the Palestinian-Israeli Struggle over the Cultural Identity of Contemporary Jerusalem, reveals the systematic effacement of the original narrative attached to a given artefact and its relocation within a new narrative centred on the coloniser.

There can be little doubt that the deliberate targeting of Gaza's cultural heritage rises to the level of a war crime under the provisions of international law, and constitutes a violation of the conventions and norms established to protect heritage, including the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Cultural Genocide of 1948, the 1949 Geneva Convention and its additional protocols, and the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Beyond this, UNESCO has affirmed that cultural heritage is a foundational component of cultural identity, and has warned that its deliberate destruction may carry grave consequences for human identity and human rights. Article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights likewise affirms that every person possesses cultural and social rights.

Most grievous of all is that such provisions of international law remain largely absent from public debate, allowing cultural crimes to be pushed to the margins and sparing Israel the charge of committing them. Such accusations, after all, might draw into view the full chain of earlier cultural crimes stretching back to the Nakba, and would reopen the forbidden question of history and narrative, a question that Europe and the West have long refused to confront, lest the debate return, at its deepest foundations, to the history of antisemitism and the Jewish place in Europe.

A deafening legal silence 

In other parts of the world, acts of cultural annihilation have been included among the charges brought against wartime commanders, and some have indeed been prosecuted on that basis. In the Palestinian case, by contrast, the matter is scarcely raised even as a possible line of suspicion. Elsewhere, international courts have condemned the destruction of cultural heritage in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Myanmar, and Syria. 

In 2004, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sentenced the Yugoslav naval commander, Miodrag Jokić, to seven years in prison for ordering the shelling of the historic quarter of Dubrovnik. Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, for his part, was tried in 2016 and sentenced to nine years' imprisonment for demolishing 10 religious sites in Timbuktu. In the Palestinian case, however, the issue is met with studied disregard, as though it were an accidental by-product rather than a deliberate and systematic policy. Even the international organisations charged with such concerns scarcely give it more than passing notice.

It is true that Israel pays little heed to international law unless its provisions serve its interests, or can be made to do so. Yet even at the level of accusation, not a finger is pointed at any of its leaders on the charge of cultural extermination. Since the beginning of the war, many international organisations, despite their evident impotence, have at least busied themselves with trying to provide assistance within their respective fields, such as the World Health Organisation and the World Food Programme. 

The international body entrusted with culture, however, namely UNESCO, has scarcely stirred in defence of heritage and archaeological sites, including those already inscribed on its own lists of tangible cultural heritage, such as the Monastery of Saint Hilarion in Deir al-Balah, associated with the founder of monasticism in Christian tradition and recognised as the site of the first monastery in history.

The colonisation of terminology

Even UNESCO's own reports have been partial, marked by an excess of neutrality, avoiding fieldwork and contenting themselves with approximate figures framed according to the organisation's own criteria. These reports acknowledge only that Israel targeted a single museum, the Pasha's Palace Museum, whereas every local and Arab report speaks of between nine and 12 museums in Gaza having been targeted, some of them completely destroyed.

For UNESCO, a museum must be registered with ICOM, the International Council of Museums, and conform to exacting international standards, as though it were situated in New York or Geneva. 

Thus, the country's most important museum of Palestinian dress, located in Rafah and housing more than 400 dresses and embroidered pieces, the newest of which is more than a century old, does not qualify in its view as a museum, simply because its founder, Leila Shahin, who established it from her own funds and personal collection, did not register it with ICOM. The irony is difficult to overlook: Palestinian embroidery, of which this museum was Gaza's foremost national custodian, is itself inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The existence of such a museum, therefore, forms part of the State of Palestine's obligation to safeguard that recognised element.

Another case in point is Al Mat'haf, the museum established by the businessman Jawdat al-Khoudary, whose pieces are regularly borrowed by museums in Paris and Geneva, and whose holdings include Canaanite, Phoenician, and Roman artefacts, as well as rare statues. Yet it, too, is denied classification as a museum under the same criteria, as is the Bedouin Museum in Nuseirat. This, precisely, is what may be called the colonisation of terminology: the application of a colonial model of classification that helps diminish the gravity of the crime.

A UNESCO report issued on 29 November 2024, more than a year and a month into the war, referred to the targeting of 75 buildings, including 10 religious sites, 48 historic buildings and a museum, and seven archaeological sites. By contrast, Palestinian reports issued by governmental and non-governmental bodies point to the destruction of nine museums and nearly 200 historic buildings, to say nothing of other losses. The exclusion of Palestinian reports as a valid point of reference in identifying losses and crimes forms part of that same colonisation of terminology, operating within the wider horizon of Western epistemic dominance.

In this way, UNESCO's reports have softened the force of cultural extermination and, in so doing, relieved the organisation of the burden of demanding accountability from Israeli military commanders in relation to such crimes. Nor has meaningful pressure been exerted to secure the entry of experts to inspect devastated archaeological sites such as the port of Anthedon, Al-Balakhiyya, Tell Umm Amer, the Roman cemetery, and others.

Greater attention to these crimes would sharpen their visibility and increase pressure to have them included among the charges brought against the leaders of the Israeli government and its military commanders. That requires a more serious engagement from UNESCO, and equally from the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, ICESCO, and the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation, ALECSO.