Since Operation Swords of Iron was launched in October 2023, nearly every library, archive, and cultural centre or institution in Gaza has been destroyed or severely damaged by Israeli bombardment, firebombing and looting. A thick residue of concrete dust now covers books lining the shelves of the Gaza Municipal Library after the roof was pulverised by a missile in November. The Great Omari Mosque, which housed the Islamic Manuscript Library – one of the most important archives in Palestine, with artefacts from the 14th century – was destroyed in December. The Israeli military detonated the last remaining university building in Gaza in January.
Every ministerial archive has been destroyed. Abdul-Latif Zaki Abu Hashem is one of the last surviving historians in Gaza. In a report for the Institute of Palestine Studies, he detailed some of the enormous losses: the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs lost its registrations of centuries-old charitable endowments; the Ministry of Education lost its archival school collections and student data; the Ministry of Interior lost its archival collections of family registration documents. According to the Librarians and Archivists with Palestine’s preliminary report, public and private collections and libraries fared no better. Municipal libraries in Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, Rafah and Khan Younis are all gone. So too are the Samir Mansour Bookshop and Library, the Diana Tamari Sabbagh Library in the Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center, and the Photo Kegham collection. The list goes on and on. Palestinian historians and writers – Abdul Karim Al-Hashash, Mosab Abu Toha, Samir Al-Sharif and Nahed Zaqout – have all mourned the destruction of their private libraries and collections. One of the largest publishing houses in Gaza, Al-Yazji, was ransacked and looted before it was burned.
We’ve been here before. The Nakba in 1948 was a loss of life and land, and the materials of social worlds crafted by communities over generations. Then, as now, the losses remain difficult to quantify and a challenge to trace. Much of these looted collections are in the Israeli state holdings, such as the Israeli State Archive and the National Library, as well as in the collections of Israeli universities, and in the hands of private collectors and former soldiers. The catalogues are kept under tight control. To tell a history of Palestine now often requires seeking access through Israeli state gatekeepers.
So how will be tell the stories and histories of Gaza? New archives – digital and diffuse – are already being formed by the Palestinians of Gaza themselves. They are the first archivists of both the atrocities of the last ten months but of Gaza’s histories and worlds too. Poets, scholars, archivists and librarians, teenagers and journalists – in the span of the last nine months, have been our exhausted lodestars, offering correctives to a media engine that no longer bothers accounting for them, let alone tell their stories. Perhaps that is why many have been killed.
Historians of Palestine often note how much harder it is to write a history of Palestine after the Nakba than a history of Palestine before it. A people scattered, isolated, under siege, bombarded, repeatedly massacred and dispossessed, has meant that generations of Palestinians must rely on shards and scraps, a thousand archival retrieval projects everywhere.
When the bombings stop, Gaza falls off the front pages, rapacious reconstruction industry gathers apace, and the young people at universities win their demands, there will be pressure to forget. We don’t have to, though. We can be curious about a people under siege, who we were deprived of meeting for so long. We can greet them, mourn with them, help carry some of their burdens, demand accountability for every loss, pick up the shards of memory and history that remain, and regather an archive of the disappeared. The only way to lose Gaza is to stop listening to the Palestinians of Gaza.
Dr Mezna Qato is a Margaret Anstee Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She is currently completing a book on the history of education for Palestinians
This article is part of the series Losing Gaza
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