Gaza Lives: Resisting Cultural Genocide

Chapter 1:Cutural Genocide in Gaza

by Visualizing Palestine / October 17th, 2024

By destroying universities, museums, libraries, and archives, Israel seeks to make our memory, whether it’s collective or institutional, inaccessible. It’s an assault on continuity. They want to force people out of Gaza but they also want to make sure if people return to Gaza they find nothing and dwell for eternity in this limbo of nothingness, in this void. Israel is trying to impose a rupture between the present and the past and the future.

— Jehad Abusalim, executive director of the Institute for Palestine Studies

For the past few months, we had the opportunity to collaborate with the talented data storytellers at Kontinentalist to create Gaza Lives: Resisting Cultural Genocide. In three chapters, this story presents the devastating impact of the ongoing Israeli genocide on Palestinian cultural life and heritage; features interviews with five Palestinian cultural practitioners; and introduces Israel’s decades-long, colonial campaign to erase Palestinian culture since 1948.

This chapter details how Israeli forces have deliberately targeted and obliterated key elements of Gaza’s cultural life, bombing ancient sites, religious monuments, personal archives, and community spaces.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Visualizing Palestine is the intersection of communication, social sciences, technology, design and urban studies for social justice. Visualizing Palestine uses creative visuals to describe a factual rights-based narrative of Palestine/Israel. Read other articles by Visualizing Palestine, or visit Visualizing Palestine's website.