Hilary Morgan Leathem

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.

Archaeology can be a mechanism for maintaining power and this is the case not just in Israel-Palestine.

In Mexico, where I have conducted research for the last 15 years, archaeology and anthropology were explicitly charged with forjando patria, or forging the nation. During the reign of Porfirio Diaz, Mexico’s second president, the government struggled to bring together its settler population with its Indigenous citizens, who had suffered from linguistic and cultural erasure during Spanish colonisation.

The proposed solution was to construct a nationalist ideology of mestizaje or “mixture”, which celebrated and claimed the monumental ruins and artistic traditions of Indigenous Mexicans as the patrimony of the Mexican state and thus all Mexicans. While this preserved the legacies of Mexico’s Indigenous communities, it also led to dispossession and displacement. As the Mexican state claimed Indigenous heritage for all, questioning the legitimacy of the Spanish-descended ruling class became impossible.

Archaeologists are scholars and experts of the past who are cognizant of the ways archaeological evidence is used to not just fashion history, but control and weaponise it. That is why archaeologists must speak up about Gaza.

Once Gaza’s heritage, libraries, and universities are gone, it can be said they were never there. With the “matter of facts” wiped from both human memory and the archaeological record, it will be impossible to scientifically “prove” Palestinian presence.

We must remember that archaeology is inseparable from politics, playing a major role in the making of history, nations, and national identity. We must also remember how the total erasure of heritage often prefigures the destruction of people, which is why cultural genocide is also classified as a war crime under international law.

The resistance of EAA and other professional archaeological organisations to issuing even a limited statement that recognises the genocides in Gaza – the ethnic cleansing coupled with the destruction of Gaza’s heritage – is tantamount to complicity and is a refusal to acknowledge archaeology’s responsibility. I hope that the continued pressure of archaeologists in Europe and across the world will change their minds.

As an anthropologist of heritage, I am haunted by the question of whether archaeology can ever do right. Here is a moment in which it might, if only it is willing to reckon with its own past.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

UN human rights expert Francesca Albanese submitted a report to the UN Security Council on Monday, stating that Israel has committed several acts of genocide in its war on Gaza and that it should be placed under an arms embargo.

In her report, Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, found “reasonable grounds” to determine that Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention.

These include killing Palestinians, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the population in whole or in part,” with these acts approved by statements of genocidal intent from senior military and government officials.

“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” the report said.

The report also accused Israel of attempting to legitimise its genocidal actions by branding Palestinians as “terrorists,” thus “transforming everything and everyone into either a target or collateral damage, hence killable or destroyable.”

“In this way, no Palestinian in Gaza is safe by definition,” it said.

The report added that the current war on Gaza did not begin on 7 October, and that it is the latest stage “of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure,” constituting an “ongoing Nakba,” or catastrophe, which refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Failure to comply

Albanese urged member states to impose an arms embargo on Israel “as it appears to have failed to comply with the binding measures ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ),” referring to the provisional measures issued by the court in January, after South Africa had taken Israel to the Hague-based court over accusation of genocide against Palestinians.

The court ordered Israel to take measures to prevent acts that fall under Article II of the Genocide Convention, while it considered its judgement.

The report also called for “a thorough independent and transparent investigation” into all international law violations and a plan to end “the unlawful and unsustainable status quo constituting the root cause of the latest escalation.”

Albanese added that Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, should be properly funded to address the spiralling humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The agency has said that that it is at “breaking point” following funding suspensions after Israel alleged that 12 of its employees were involved in the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October.

Israel imposed a visa ban on Albanese after she said on X that the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel were a “response to Israel’s aggression.”

Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva has rejected the report, condemning Albanese’s “outrageous accusations” as “simply an extension of a campaign seeking to undermine the very establishment of the Jewish State”.

“Israel’s war is against Hamas, not against Palestinian civilians,” the mission said in a statement.

(Source: Middle East Eye)

Palestinian resistance group Hamas has demanded a halt to aid airdrops after 18 people drowned while attempting to reach the dropped supplies, saying Israel must lift its brutal siege and allow aid into Gaza via land crossings.

Six people were killed in stampedes and 12 others drowned off the territory’s Mediterranean coast trying to salvage aid packages, the Hamas government and the Swiss-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said on Tuesday.

Hamas in a statement called for “an immediate end to airdrop operations” and “the immediate and rapid opening of land crossings”.

The UN children’s fund, UNICEF, said vastly more aid must be rushed into Gaza by road rather than air or sea to avert an “imminent famine”.

UNICEF spokesman James Elder pointed out that the necessary help was “a matter of kilometres away” in aid-filled trucks waiting across Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.

Video of the airdrop obtained by Reuters showed crowds of people running towards the beach, in Beit Lahia in north Gaza, as crates with parachutes floated down, then people standing deep in water and bodies being pulled onto the sand.

In Washington, the Pentagon said three of the 18 bundles of airdropped aid into Gaza on Monday had parachute malfunctions and fell into the water, but could not confirm if anyone was killed trying to reach the aid.

The US said it would continue airdrops of aid to besieged Gaza, despite pleas from Hamas to stop the practice.

It was the latest in a string of incidents involving deaths during aid deliveries in Gaza where some people are foraging for weeds to eat and baking barely edible bread from animal feed.

A piece of paper retrieved from Monday’s airdrop said in Arabic written over an American flag that the aid was from the United States.

The video showed the apparently lifeless body of a bearded young man being hauled onto the beach, the eyes open but unmoving, and another man trying to revive him with chest compressions as somebody said, “It’s over.”

“He swam to get food for his children and he was martyred,” said a man standing on the beach who did not give his name.

“They should deliver aid through the (overland) crossings. Why are they doing this to us?”

“People are dying just to get a can of tuna,” Gaza resident Mohamad al Sabaawi told the AFP news agency, holding a can in his hand after a scramble over an aid package.

Aid agencies say only about a fifth of required supplies are entering Gaza as Israel persists with an air and ground assault that has shattered the enclave, pushing parts of it into starvation already.

They say deliveries by air or sea directly onto Gaza’s beaches are no substitute for increased supplies coming in by land via Israel or Egypt.

Aid delivery crisis

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has urged Israel to give an “ironclad commitment” for unfettered aid access into Gaza and described the number of trucks blocked at the border as “a moral outrage”.

Distribution of aid inside Gaza has been complicated, particularly in the north, and last month Israeli troops killed more than 100 people trying to take aid from a convoy.

UNRWA communications director Juliette Touma said the reported drownings showed the best way to deliver aid was by trucks run by aid agencies.

“These tragic reports coming from Gaza are yet another indication that the most efficient, fastest, safest way to reach people with much-needed humanitarian assistance is via road and via the humanitarian organisations including UNRWA who are working on the ground,” Touma said.

SOURCE: TRTWORLD AND AGENCIES

The UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) has sufficient funds to run its operations until the end of May after many donors paused their funding over Israeli accusations that some staff took part in Hamas’s 7 October attack, UNRWA’s head said on Tuesday, Reuters reports.

“What I can say today is that we can run our operation until the end of May, whereas a month ago I had just the visibility for the next week or two weeks,” UNRWA Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, told Reuters in Geneva.

“But that shows also how bad the financial situation of the organisation is.”

UNRWA, which provides aid and essential services to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and across the region, has been in crisis since Israel accused 12 of its 13,000 staff in Gaza of involvement in the 7 October attack on Israel that triggered the war in the Palestinian enclave.

The accusations prompted several countries, including the United States, to pause funding. Many countries, including Canada, Australia, Finland and Sweden, have since resumed their contributions.

“I’m hopeful that more of them will come back,” Lazzarini said of donors.

Israel has informed the UN that it will no longer approve UNRWA food convoys to the north of Gaza, where famine is likely to occur by May, according to a UN-backed report published last week. An Israeli government spokesman said on Monday Israel would stop working with UNRWA altogether in Gaza.

Lazzarini described Israel’s decision not to allow UNRWA food convoys to northern Gaza as designed to “prevent people in danger of death” from surviving.

“The plan B is to go back to plan A. It is of utmost importance that convoys have access to the north,” Lazzarini said. “We will definitely be looking at partnerships, who else can do it on our behalf. Our focus is the people in danger of death right now in the north of Gaza.”

(Source: MEMO)