Speak up for Gaza

Since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, more than 200 cultural heritage sites have been destroyed alongside numerous archives, universities, and museums. There have been reports of the Israeli army looting historical artefacts and even displaying some of them at the Knesset.

Destroying Gaza’s heritage has far-reaching social, political, and emotional ramifications. It is a concerted attack on the existence of Palestine and its people.Beyond producing cultural amnesia around what it means to be Palestinian, heritage destruction symbolises the negation of Palestinian history and right to land. The Israeli obliteration of Palestinian memory is intentional. It is a genocidal strategy, according to the definition laid out by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in 1944. This effort to destroy physical links between Palestinians and their heritage is aimed at erasing Palestinian presence and legitimising Israeli settler colonialism.

The Israeli destruction of archaeological sites and looting of artefacts in Gaza also raises questions about archaeology’s purported neutrality in our world. The reality is that archaeology can be deeply political. The ability to make claims in the present based on material records of the past endows archaeology with great power. Quite literally, archaeologists provide the physical evidence required for the making of historical narratives. Archaeologists thus carry a moral obligation to inform the public of its deeply political nature.

In this context, the silence of archaeological associations across the world on what is happening in Gaza has been deafening. In Europe, Irish and Ireland-based heritage scholars mounted pressure on the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) to speak up. In early March, the EAA finally issued a statement.

But the text was disappointingly noncommittal and milquetoast in the face of atrocity. It referred to the genocides in Gaza as the “Israel/Gaza crisis” and used language ripped from UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention of 1972. In other words, it spoke of heritage in terms of its socioeconomic value – its integrity or authenticity – rather than recognising the political ramifications of heritage destruction in a settler-colonial setting. The EAA’s failure to reflect on how archaeology, and subsequently, the construction of heritage, is intertwined with power and history is dangerous, as it misrepresents the discipline as purely objective.

Some people may be aware of archaeology’s role in colonialism. Ever fewer, however, know how it informed 20th-century politics, crafting identities that rely on discovered, shared pasts and invented traditions, as historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger argued.

Archaeology forges links between the land and its people through possessing the past. Used correctly, it has the power to illuminate how people once lived in and related to our world. Used incorrectly, it becomes a technology of oppression, co-opted by power regimes who wish to harness one version or “vision” of the past to dispossess and displace others.It is no coincidence that, as the Palestinian-American anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj has written, Israel is known for using archaeology strategically to legitimise its status as a historical nation in the Abrahamic Holy Lands rather than a modern nation-state founded in 1948.

Excerpted: ‘Why archaeologists must speak up for Gaza’. Courtesy: Aljazeera.com