Cassandra Voices

Tag: Gaza

  • Archiving Gaza in the Present

    Review: Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture and Erasure. Edited by Dina Matar and Venetia Porter (Saqi Books, London, November, 2025). 

    While Israel has made Gaza synonymous with its genocide, a rich cultural heritage, now largely destroyed, paints a completely different picture. The introduction to Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory Culture and Erasure states that the book serves as “a reminder that Gaza as we see it today in the media’s live-streaming coverage of the war, miserable, shattered and deformed is not the Gaza that saw the unfolding of many civilisations.”

    The book is a compilation of papers and visual material presented at a two-day conference in November 2024 in London, a little over a year since Israel unleashed its genocide in Gaza. The level of annihilation and erasure – not only of Gaza’s infrastructure but also of its historical sites – made archiving and preservation more urgent. Palestine’s historical and cultural heritage is presented in the book through the contributions of various artists, historians, lawyers, curators, archaeologists, poets and journalists. Described as an ‘archive of Gaza in the present’, the book illustrates the process of archiving even as Israel continued to wage its destructive campaign.

    There is also an urgency to archive. In 2024, halfway through the genocide before the ceasefire announcement, which Israel has now violated hundreds of times, the world was witnessing a replica of the 1948 Nakba. This time they were using sophisticated military technology resulting in unprecedented destruction of Palestinian lives, culture and heritage in Gaza. For example, camps established in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba, during which thousands of Palestinians fled to Gaza, were bombed in Israel’s genocide: “The names of camps are becoming those of mass graves.”

    With each massacre, Israel erases a part of Gaza. The compilation of essays and visual material in the book show not only the magnitude of destruction, but how much of that destruction is unknown to the West.

    Salman Abu Sitta, for example, notes that Gaza is the only place in Palestine which never took down the Palestinian flag since before the Nakba. Gaza was also the first to play a central role in the anti-colonial struggle and refugee political organisation. Gaza’s traits are largely overlooked due to the colonial impositions inflicted on it. Indeed, as Abu Sitta notes, the term ‘Gaza Strip’ is a product of this recent colonisation.

    An aerial photo of displaced Palestinians waiting in northern Nuseirat to return to their homes in Gaza. © 2025 UNRWA Photo by Ashraf Amra

    A Decolonial Act

    Archiving Gaza is a decolonial act, happening at a time of political and demographic erasure. Many artists in Gaza have had their studios destroyed in Israel’s bombing, their work decimated, yet continue to express themselves and their wider communities in Gaza.

    Thus, art became a way to document the genocide, using whatever materials were available. Some artists directed their efforts towards art therapy. One particular collection of images that stands out in the book is Ahmed Muhanna’s art work, drawn on the packaging of humanitarian aid boxes: “He began drawing on them, incorporating the stamped warning ‘Not for Sale or Exchange’ into his compositions – reframing it as an artistic and philosophical element.”

    Several artworks now deal with memories of genocide, memories of Palestinians killed by Israel, memories of being still alive amid the erasure. Maisara Baroud states: “In my work, I express the story beyond the official narrative. It is the story of war that produces a tremendous capacity for harm, conquering distance, geography, and even the speed of sound to bring death to more people in less time.”

    Prior to the genocide, Gaza was a thriving art hub, with residencies, art programmes, exhibitions and grants for artists. The art department at the Al-Aqsa University in Gaza was established in 1995, the same year the university was recognised, and it played a major role in promoting art through academic programmes. In 2021, recognising the restrictions as well as earlier destruction, the concept of the Sahab Museum (The Museum of the Clouds) was implemented, preserving material and digital works in a curated virtual space that is also an act of resistance. It decolonises Gaza through Palestinian memory, “providing an attempt to respond to the destruction of cultural archives, which lies at the heart of colonial policy.”

    The book also documents Gaza’s deceased artists. One example is Fathi Ghaben, who died after inhaling white phosphorus. His paintings are synonymous with Palestinian resistance,  depicting the Palestinian flag as well as other cultural symbols in his art, leading to his arrest and detention by Israel in the 1980s. Another Palestinian artist from Gaza, Mahasen al-Khatib was killed in October 2024, just hours after publishing her last artwork depicting Sha’ban al-Dalou, who was burnt alive following a strike on the tents outside al-Aqsa Hospital.

    The striking discrepancy between Ghaben’s paintings and the art produced during the genocide illustrate both devastation and displacement. Apart from the bombed buildings, burnt vehicles, what stands out is Gaza and its population as a multitude of barely discernible figures. Masses of people awaiting food, landscapes of tents. Upon viewing the images, one pauses to think of the population’s individual identities in the midst of these scenes, and that is where the horror surges through.

    Fathi Ghaben 1947-2024.

    Rich Cultural Heritage

    Shifting from past to present and back to the past again, the essays in the book attest to both Gaza’s rich cultural heritage, ancient civilisations and Israel’s erasure. Six thousand years of history have been battered into oblivion by Israel to sustain the myth of a barren land ripe for colonisation. Hosting two hundred archaeological sites, Israel targeted Gaza prior to the genocide in a bid to assert its fabricated narrative of ownership over the land through archaeology and excavations. The first archaeological discovery was made before the British Mandate in 1879 in Nuseirat – a statue of Zeus which now forms part of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. From 1967 onwards, excavations were carried out by the Israeli military.

    Jawdat Khoudary, a Palestinian from Gaza, started his own private collection of antiquities after finding an Islamic glass coin. With over 3,000 artefacts dating back from 2000 BC to the Ottoman Empire, Khoudary eventually decided to establish the region’s first archaeological museum in 2008. In February 2024, the museum was completely obliterated by Israel.

    The book refers to Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who coined the word genocide and who identified eight dimensions: political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral. Israel’s eradication of Gaza illustrates how each of these components is intertwined in the systematic erasure of land and generations of people.

    The erasure also limits the Palestinians people’s struggle for self-determination. Israel destroyed numerous libraries in Gaza during the genocide, but before that, it had already looted most of Palestine’s archives during the 1948 Nakba, which are now held in Israel’s State Archive and the National Library. Quoting Palestinian scholar Mezna Qato, the book notes that Palestine’s history is under Israeli state surveillance: “To tell a history of Palestine now often requires seeking access through Israeli state keepers.”

    The Islamic University of Gaza in 2021.

    As a result of Israel’s colonial violence, Gaza’s exclusion from the rest of the world is amplified in several ways. Education is one example – Western universities do not engage with Gaza’s universities, as Israel’s colonial narrative is increasingly upheld in academic institutions. The exclusion of Gaza can also be traced back to the British Mandate and the 1948 Nakba, during which the entirety of Palestine faced restrictions on curriculum expansion and resources. Since October 2023, however, Israel moved from destruction to annihilation of Gaza’s education system. Other parts of Gaza’s history are also overlooked and largely unknown to the world, such as the history of aviation in Gaza and how this was also linked to Zionist colonial violence.

    Archiving Gaza in the present, as the book title states, represents quite a contradiction. Archiving in the face of erasure primarily presents one dilemma, as the book states in the case of archaeology, “Given the ongoing humanitarian, economic and environmental crises in Gaza, identifying new archaeological sites is not currently a priority.” However, the altered landscape requires an urgency to channel efforts towards preservation.

    But altered land presents a major problem. As the book shows, so much of Gaza has been lost that its very survival as a distinct entity has been placed in peril. Amid striving to safeguard their own survival in a land reduced to rubble, Palestinians are also aware of the necessity of preserving what can be salvaged, at a time when they are also preserving their own history of the genocide. International humanitarian law has failed Palestinians, as the book asserts. A Palestinian oral history thus becomes not only central but imperative. As the international community rallies behind the U.S. 20-point plan for Gaza, which upholds the Zionist narrative of a barren land in the current genocidal erasure, reclaiming Gaza in recollections, and wider Palestinian narratives, is an important part of decolonisation.

    In complete defiance to the Zionist narrative, this collection of essays and photos stand as testimony to Gaza as Palestinians know and remember it.

    Feature Image: Forced Displacement of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip devastated by Israeli bombing, January 29, 2025.

  • Review: Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide

    Gaza’s history since the Nakba of 1948 is punctuated by waves of forced displacement. The enclave has been the epicentre of Palestinian refugees since 1948, having welcomed Palestinians from all over the colonised territories. Since Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza began in October 2023 its entire population of over two million, in a territory of just 151 km2, has been rendered internally displaced persons.

    Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide, Edited by Yousef M Aljamal, Norma Hashim, Noor Nabulsi, and Zoe Jannuzi (Haymarket Books, 2025) is a collection of twenty-seven testimonies of Palestinians living in Gaza enduring the genocide. An immediate response upon reading through the chapter titles is: to what extent have we become desensitised as spectators or activists? And, moreover, what is the link, or disconnect, between this wider perception of a genocide occurring and a person living through it?

    It begs the question, when reading through the testimonies, after more than two years how much can our mind take before the experiences themselves, narrated by survivors, merely become background noise? With the daily recounting of Israel’s kill toll being reduced to statistical data – a roll call similar to the reporting of Covid cases that gradually desensitised the listener – can our minds link back to the human tragedy?

    Of course we should. For the chapter titles speak of a shattered, mundane reality. Birthdays morph into atrocities. Education is ruptured by bombs. A woman is widowed by targeted assassination. A husband is killed while searching for food. Entire families are wiped out. The details are so mundane, so quotidian, yet genocide is an immense, unforgivable laceration in both its experience and the memory if it. That memory should, and must, extend to the rest of us. Narratives can combat desensitisation, as long as we know what to prioritise.

    In the foreword to the book, Ahmad Alnaouq writes:

    Everyone on Gaza is now a citizen journalist, determined more than ever to confront and challenge the Western media narrative – the demonising and dehumanising of the Palestinians, the lack of agency recognised, and the distortion of truth.

    This collection of testimonies directly challenges the Western hegemonic narrative which, even while reporting the official genocide kill toll, still finds ways of sanitising bloodshed and diminishing the humanity of Palestinian survivors. The kill toll is represented in two ways – as a statistic that either supports sporadic calls for accountability or offered in support of Israel “finishing the job.”

    Yousef Al-Jamal references the Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer, who was killed by Israel in 2023, and for whom storytelling was an integral component of Palestinian history.

    A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    ‘For centuries,’ AL-Jamal writes, ‘Palestinians have tended the rich oral history of Palestine, preserving cultural heritage, including folktales and stories about the land.’ This collection of narratives from the Gaza genocide is a contribution to Palestine’s oral history, and one that, due to its international dissemination, cannot be destroyed by Israel.

    The personal narratives in this book speak of a disrupted simplicity, but not a disrupted normality. This includes death or killing, displacement, hunger, the tribulations of living and enduring life under a highly militarised genocide. We find the disruption of education and attempts to teach, as well as the full spectrum of forced displacement including of a Nakba survivor, along with attempts to rebuild a semblance of normality even as Israel destroys Gaza’s infrastructure. Even before the genocide, Palestinians in Gaza faced immense hardships and restrictions which were normalised into manageable deprivation, even by international institutions.

    For many Palestinians, as evidenced by several contributors to this anthology, the large scale killing meant that families were welcoming other relatives into their midst. At times it was orphaned children, as was the case with Aisha Osama Abu Ajwa, a mother of four children who began taking care of two children whose parents were killed when Israel bombed an entire residential block. In her description of forced displacement, Abu Ajwa writes, ‘The children witnessed dozens of martyrs’ bodies strewn on the ground. They cried intensely, while blood covered the streets.’

    ‘I hope war ends soon. Eight months of continuous killing exhausts us,’ writes Fidaa Fathi Abu Yousef, whose son was killed while riding a bike just 800m away from the family home.

    Another recurring horror is Palestinians fleeing to supposedly safe zones, while Israel bombs move in the direction the displaced are heading, leaving not only a trail of displacement but bloodshed. The killing of Palestinian children, as described by the narrators of this genocide, encompass all ages. The visibility of Israel killing children is magnified when the writers note the dead children’s ages. Thus removed from the general term, the children take on meaningful identities; allowing the reader to recognise how Israel has attempted to obliterate Palestinians through its killing of the younger generations. Children killed on their birthday, children killed while sleeping, the tragedy is portrayed through the eyes of the living, bereaved and those unable to process their loss due to a perpetual quest for survival.

    Their attempt to persist in living instead of perishing at times makes the writing of these recollections and experiences become slightly devoid of emotion. Emotion almost becomes a luxury when surviving a genocide, but the almost matter-of-fact narratives in this collection make grief all the more important, not only to grasp but experience. Israel has not only wiped entire families out and lacerated others beyond repair, it has also obliterated entire psychological processes that are necessary when experiencing traumatic events. In the midst of a genocide, Palestinians are unable to experience the grieving process.

    Incessant worry about family members displaced in different locations around Gaza is another hardship Palestinians must endure. Without means of communication for the most part, relatives receive no news of each other. ‘Gaza is small, yet we have not seen each other since the war began. We have not reunited. I know nothing of my sons. My life’s dream is to reunite with them in one home before my death,’ Yusra Salem Abu Awad states in her narrative.

    The script flips to a twelve-year-old boy, Youssef Qawash, writing about how he has lost his father and uncle in a bombing and not knowing whether his father’s remains will ever be discovered. ‘My uncles have searched in Deir al-Balah and Maghazi, but no one knows where my father is buried,’ Qawash ponders, noting that his father might still be buried under the rubble of destroyed houses.

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    The ramifications of starvation are reflected in Najlaa Al-Kafarna’s story. Her husband was killed while searching for food for the family on the third day of the genocide, which was their second day of forced displacement. Six other relatives were also massacred in their search for food. Her special needs son, Muhammad, is malnourished and lacks medication and physical therapy sessions.

    Throughout most of the narratives in the book, the cry for food recurs. So does the lack of basic necessities, and the wearing of the same clothes through different seasons. We find the rationing of flour, and the shelling of a school while forcibly displaced Palestinians are baking bread. The deprivation is exacerbated by employment being almost non-existent during the genocide. Profound mental health issues as a result of ongoing trauma (Palestinians cannot speak of post-traumatic stress disorder) are also a common experience.

    ‘This war is larger than the 1948 Nakba. I am 91 years old,’ Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif says. Aged fifteen, he experienced the first Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and he notes the differences between the specific targeting of Zionist paramilitaries in 1948, and the widespread destruction of the current genocide in Gaza. One of the few remaining survivors of the Nakba, he narrates his experience of displacement in 1948 and how his family settled in Gaza in the Nuseirat camp. ‘My testament to my children and grandchildren is to never leave Gaza. We cannot leave Gaza, and we cannot migrate again,’ Abu Seif asserts, noting the miscalculation in 1948 of an eventual return and of leaving to save their lives.

    Narrating the Israeli colonial aggressions he has experienced throughout his life, he describes the genocide as ‘a war of extermination and destruction of humans and nature.’ The description is far more tangible than the word genocide will ever be, particularly now that the international community has diluted its meaning to preserve Israel’s impunity. A destruction of humans and nature is something that anyone anywhere in the world can easily envisage. This narrative brings the consequences of destruction, as well as fear, to the reader’s mind.

    The entirety of this anthology also serves to highlight what a vibrant society Palestinians in Gaza had created before the genocide. Education stands out in particular as one of their achievements. Indeed the tenacity to attempt to study and teach throughout the genocide is remarkable. Ambitions are currently stilted, but dreams are still cherished, An awareness of the many hurdles to overcome in order to create a healthy society post-genocide is also to the fore in many narratives in this collection. As the UNSC hands over the rebuilding of Gaza to the U.S. administration, thus prolonging the genocide, these testimonies will stand in opposition to the U.S.-Israeli narrative. More importantly, they are a sliver of testimony from Palestinians that neither the U.S. nor Israel, have the power to annihilate.

    Feature Image: Ahsanul Haque Z

  • Al-Quds: the Red Line

    Al-Quds (‘the holy sanctuary’), Jerusalem is the red line for the Palestinian people, the wider diaspora and the Arab collective. It is the capital of Palestine and home to the third holiest shrine in Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Muslims believe Muhammad was transported from the Great Mosque in Mecca to Al-Aqsa during the Night Journey. Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad led prayers towards this site for sixteen to seventeen months after his migration to Mecca. So how did we get to this current impasse?

    Jerusalem is in flames. Gaza is being bombed back to the Stone Age. Israeli Zionists and illegal settlers are attacking Palestinian business, homes, and people in the streets, at their residences and places of worship. Palestinians are defending themselves by any means necessary.

    Palestine: To Exist is to Resist

    I won’t give a historical lecture, just some pertinent facts. The First Zionist Congress was held in 1897 in Basel Switzerland. It was decided then that European antisemitism needed to be challenged and that a new state for the Jewish people, free from European antisemitism was to be created. Several places were considered including Madagascar, Uganda and some Latin American countries.

    Finally, it was decided Palestine would become the new Israel. From 1901 onwards the Jewish National Fund began buying land in Palestine. Palestine at that time was part of the Ottoman empire. The land was bought from absentee Turkish landowners, the Palestinians put off the land and Jewish only migrants employed.

    This continued up until World War I. The British formed regiments of Palestinian and Arab troops promising them freedom from Ottoman occupation if they fought for Britain. When the war ended the troops dispersed and Britain and France carved up the Middle East as a prize for both their colonial empires.

    All manifestations of violence today in the Middle East stem from the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and subsequent redrawing of the old Ottoman Empire into a new white European colonial construct. All those who fought for Britain and for the freedom of small nations were abandoned. They were simply cannon fodder to save British lives by using expendable Arab lives.


    History’s Dead Hand on the Middle East
    (Image: Kevin Fox, all rights reserved)

    The Jewish National Fund continued to buy up land and displace the indigenous population. As the 1920s progressed we witnessed clashes between the European colonists and the indigenous population with riots in Jerusalem during this decade.

    With the outbreak of World War II Zionist designs on fully colonising Palestine were set in motion. After 1945 further ethnic clashes occurred. The Zionists were fully armed and trained and the Palestinians had no army, just bands of neighbours and villagers trying to defend their homes and families.

    The Stern Gangs, the Hagana and the Irgun began a campaign to terrorise, murder and displace the indigenous population. They succeeded with the help of Britain and America at the UN and the state of Palestine under the British Mandate was partitioned and the new state of Israel born at the point of terrorist guns. 750,000 Palestinians were forced into exile into the surrounding Arab countries and the systematic erasure of the Palestine footprint in the new state began. Villages were destroyed so their inhabitants could not return. Businesses taken over by Jewish Zionist families, homes sequestered and the land stolen.

    This happened again in 1967 during the Six-Day War with the occupation of the West Bank. This continued Occupation and the siege on Gaza from 2007 are a continuation of the policy of the theft of homes, theft of land, theft of resources and the displacement of the indigenous population.

    From the Wild West to the Middle East, the European white colonial settlement of North America and Canada became the blueprint for the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. We can see the house evictions in Sheikh Jarrah East Jerusalem for what they really are: a continuation of the Zionist-Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It is a microcosm of everyday reality and life under Occupation.

    These house possessions by Zionists are just the latest step in the long path to the total Judification of Palestine. West Jerusalem is already nearly 100% Zionist.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing criminal corruption charges and is hanging on to power as leader of an extremist Zionist political party Likud by the skin of his teeth. During the Holy Muslim Festival of Ramadan up to 100,000 Palestinians gather for prayer and worship daily at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem known in Arabic as Al Quds

    Now if you remember, the Israeli military Occupation is illegal under international law. The Zionist settlements are illegal under international law.

    Every day Palestinians watch their homes land and businesses confiscated by the Israeli occupation. These daily injustices lead to a growing sense of frustration, anger and discontent.

    The Israeli illegal occupation forces then attacked the peaceful worshippers in the compound adjacent to the Al-Aqsa mosque. They attacked people through dispersal squads who use sound bombs, chemical canisters, arrests and assaults to clear any groups who might congregate.

    This means family, friends, neighbours and communities cannot gather in conversation in the community and in peace at the end of the day attending or leaving prayer.

    The scenes witnessed all over the Arab, Persian and Muslim world of peaceful worshippers, many of them women, being attacked inside the mosque at prayer, has led to the resistance groups in Gaza launching primitive rockets at Israel in retaliation.

    Israel’s disproportionate response by launching military sorties from land, sea and air has destroyed buildings and killed scores of men, women and children.

    While Israelis cower in their bomb shelters from the falling debris of Palestinian rockets with a payload similar to an enormous firework, the Gazan’s have no bomb shelters, no air force, no navy and no land army. They have a few rockets, machine guns, mortars and rifles to defend themselves against one the best-equipped armies in the world today.

    While yet another pro-Zionist American President Biden phones Netanyahu to give his support to the ‘Israel must have the right to defend itself ‘mantra, all we will see and hear from Western media propagandists are further Zionist cries of victimhood.

    I visited Gaza on a medical aid convoy in 2010. I walked the streets the Zionists are turning to rubble. They intend to bomb Gaza back to the Stone Age.

    Electricity only runs for a few hours a day. Fresh drinking water is nearly unheard of and bottled water and fuel for generators is sold to Gaza by Israel

    With a total land, sea and air blockade, the Gazan population has an unemployment rate of nearly 70%. They watch on each day as a bombing campaign destroys one building, one house, one business, one apartment block, and one family at a time. The fear the people, and especially the children, must be living under is unimaginable..

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    What can we do?

    Support the right of Palestinians as enshrined in International Law to free themselves from Occupation by any means necessary.

    Go on a protest.

    Support BDS and boycott Israel goods and companies.

    Demand your government divests from the political and financial support of Israel.

    Once the killings and bombings stop all the people you see protesting will go home and the Palestinians and the Yemenis and the Syrians will be forgotten. Please remember it’s not just Palestine the Zionists want to destroy. They want total hegemonic control over the entire region. That means destroying any country and its peoples that it cannot control. Look at Iraq and Libya, see Syria and Yemen watch them threaten Lebanon and Iran.

    Netanyahu’s Likud government has made Israel a cancer on the body politic of the region. Like cancer, it must respond to treatment or the host and the body die.

    There will soon be one million Zionist Jewish settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They are all illegally there. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying force suhc as Israel from settling its civilian population in occupied territory.

    UN Resolution 194 states that Palestinians exiled from their homes, land and property have the Right of Return.

    Israel has never let the Palestinians return. It continues to usurp their rights and ethnically cleanse the West Bank of its indigenous population through dispersal and dispossession.

    In 1901 European Jews had a dream of a land free from hatred, from discrimination, from racial and religious prejudice. Far from creating this land, they created a state based on hatred, discrimination, and racial and religious prejudice. To many onlookers, Israel and its settlers have recreated that which they set out to escape.

    Featured Image of Al-Aqsa Mosque by Frank Armstrong (2003).