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.

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.

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.”

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.