Dina Matar and Venetia Porter, eds., Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture and Erasure (Saqi Books, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Venetia Porter (VP): The book is the result of a conference we jointly organized at SOAS, with the Centre for Palestine Studies and the Arab-British Centre in November 2024. The contributions were extraordinary and across such a broad range of topics that we felt the need to set this down and record these in the form of an illustrated book. Saqi Books responded to this immediately and we then determined that we would get it out within the year.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
Dina Matar (DM): The book is a collection of essays, reflections, and academic articles on the diverse cultural and political practices emerging within and despite the genocide on Gaza. The book addresses these practices as both existential and productive and as together producing what we call a living archive of Gaza and its people. We use “archiving Gaza in the present” to provoke critical thinking about perceived knowledges and understanding of archives and archival practices, often discussed as of the past. In using the concept of archiving in the present, we address archives as continuous practices of reaffirmation, presence, memory-making, living, and, of course, resilience that link the past to the present and the present to the past. Together, the diverse contributions are interdisciplinary and varied in style and approach, but specifically speak to the fields of Palestine studies, visual cultures, art, literature, media, history, memory studies, politics, and war studies. These fields are often discussed separately, but this book shows their interconnectedness particularly in moments of incredible violence and destruction as we have seen in Gaza during the genocide. Importantly, I see this book as opening questions about legitimacy and truth, and raising questions about authenticity and power and specifically inviting questions about who is doing the archiving, who is claiming truth, how we theorize archiving in contexts of deliberate erasure of lives and histories, and who has the right to archive. These are questions that lie at the heart of Palestinians’ subjection to the willfulness of the settler-colonial regime. Importantly for people committed to de-colonization, these questions show that archiving remains controlled by colonial epistemologies and methodologies that determine the process through legitimation criteria and methods that ignore the voices and practices of subjugated cultural creators and other knowledge producers. The essays in this book also invite scholars, students, and others to think of archiving as a continuous process that moves between time registers and responds to seismic temporalities, a process that reveals and shows in simple language and imagery.
VP: One of the most surprising aspects that I discovered through the preparatory work on the conference, and then working on the book, was the realization of how extraordinarily rich the cultural life of Gaza was—the organizations supporting artists, the exhibitions that had taken place in the face of immense difficulty, the numbers of talented artists, the wealth of the archaeological heritage, the significance of the museums and cultural centers. The shocking realization that the cultural heritage alongside the people of Gaza was being directly targeted in order to eradicate it. That notion of “archiving” therefore became an attempt to record the before and after and, in terms of the artists, specifically, to be able to document what was happening to them during the war, the change in the art they were making, and their generosity of spirit—for example in helping children by making art with them in the most impossible of circumstances.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
DM: This book connects to my recent works on Palestine, most importantly the co-edited collection Producing Palestine with my colleague Helga Tawil-Souri and also my first monograph, What it Means to be Palestinian, where memory and remembering are also practices of archiving. It does, however, depart from my scholarship in media and communication studies where I focus on communication, power relations, and possibilities of regeneration and creativity.
VP: This work connected to my previous work at the British Museum, in particular my focus in recent years on the contemporary art of the Middle East. But in scope it departed from it quite dramatically.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
DM: We hope the book will be read by scholars and students in an intersection of fields, namely visual cultures, arts, museum studies, archeology, memory studies, literature, politics, genocide and war studies, media studies, and oral history. We hope it will be read by people interested in Palestine, journalists and cultural producers or those seeking knowledge outside of dominant knowledge production structures in the West, which remain dominated by the Israeli narrative. In terms of impact, we hope the book changes perspective about Gaza and its incredible people, their creativity and resistance as well as their love of life. Gazans, as we hope to have shown, are like everyone else but are different because of the conditions they find themselves in. In terms of scholarly impact, we hope the book begins a much-needed rethinking of knowledge production and who controls it.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
DM: I am currently working on a co-edited handbook on media and war, to be published by Routledge. I am also preparing another co-edited handbook on political communication in the Middle East and North Africa. Further on, I hope to return to researching What it Means to be Palestinian, a sequel to my first monograph.
J: Can you tell us about the process of producing the book?
VP: Our experience of working with the contributors was fantastic. Most of those who had presented papers at the conferences responded to the call and sent in their essays in accordance with our very strict deadline so we could get the book out within the year. The most complex part was obtaining images and people like Shareef Sarhan could not have been more generous in opening up their archives to us. Our excellent designer, Christopher Wilson, somehow managed to pull it all together to make it look beautiful despite the tragedy of the subject.
DM: The process of working with the contributors was smooth and organic. We were conscious of the difficult, impossibly cruel conditions some of them, particularly those still in Gaza, had to contend with on a daily basis, and we were surprised by their generosity, warmth, and engagement. Their commitment to the project actually kept us going and gave us hope. In terms of the process, it was fine—with few glitches.
Excerpts from the book
My name is Malak Mattar (pp. 60-65)
I left Gaza a day before 7 October 2023 to embark on my master’s course at Central Saint Martins in London. However, my big plans were crushed, as my family immediately began trying to survive the intense Israeli bombardments that followed and having to move multiple times. My mum was a few metres away from her school when it was flattened, killing her students and colleagues, and my father lost his cousins while they were serving aid to displaced Palestinians. As I was attempting to make new work in my studio in Archway, London, I successfully managed to call my father in Gaza after weeks of telecommunications blackout. I could hear the sound of bombardments falling at a close distance to my parents. He asked me what new works I was producing. I wondered what the point was of art in times of so much uncertainty, but he stressed how I should make the voices and stories of the people in Gaza heard through my art……… This call brought to an end my feelings of paralysis. I felt compelled to make a large painting that documented the harrowing events of the genocide in the Gaza Strip that had unfolded up to that point in time. Calling it No Words, I worked on it intensely over two months and completed it in February 2024). It portrays the devastation inflicted upon human lives, animals, archaeological sites and cherished historical buildings, alongside the profound impact of forced displacement, which has now eviscerated Palestinian society for generations.
Culturicide, Omar Al-Qattan (pp. 132-137)
The bombardment of Gaza’s cultural infrastructure, especially its historical patrimony, was cynical, wanton and comprehensive, otherwise how are we to explain the targeting of mosques and churches, museums and cultural centres, Ottoman mansions and souqs, archives and libraries? They cannot all have been military targets……… Although the Centre [Qattan Centre] has suffered only relatively minor physical damage, much of it was looted during the war, though fortunately many of its books remain in place. Thankfully it was also used as a shelter for tens of families at different periods of the war. However, most of its staff became homeless and moved to Gaza’s centre or south early in the war; of those who remained, one, Hamed al-Khalidi, was killed. According to his nephew, who survived, Hamed was shot and killed in cold blood along with other members of his family by Israeli soldiers inside the family home. At one point also, Israeli soldiers (was it one soldier or a group of them?) took the trouble to climb on top of a tank or crane to write the word ‘rage’ in Hebrew high up on one of the Centre’s external walls. Why? Had they been ordered not to bomb the centre by their commanders and, frustrated, decided to mark their fury on our walls? Did they know that the Centre is a library for children? And did they even care? What is the meaning of this ‘rage’? The terrible fury of revenge, blinded and murderous? Perhaps, but the effort to climb high enough to be able to paint the large Hebrew letters on our walls must surely show a more calculated, less spontaneous and thus much more terrifying and insidious intent.
Missing Pieces, Joanna Oyediran (pp. 232-235)
In this essay, I discuss an under-explored issue – the unlawful seizure, removal and presence of cultural property from the Gaza Strip in Israel since 1967. This Gazan material has now assumed much greater significance, given the extensive destruction of cultural property during Israel’s recent aggression against Gaza. This conduct is in violation of Article 1 of the First Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (the First Hague Protocol), to which Israel is a party. It prohibits Israel from seizing or removing cultural property from occupied territory. Unsurprisingly, there is no comprehensive inventory publicly available which sets out which Gazan artefacts have been unlawfully transferred from occupied territory into Israel, whether those excavated after the 1967 occupation or those excavated earlier and held by institutions in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. The Oslo II Agreement required Israel to provide the Palestinian Authority with all archaeological records for sites under its territorial jurisdiction. The Head of the Palestinian Authority’s Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage confirmed to the author in December 2024 that Israel had failed to transfer any of this information before the implementation of the Oslo. Agreements broke down in 2000. Despite the lack of a full inventory, we can obtain some information by looking at what is on display in Israeli museums and universities. The Code of Ethics for museums of the global organisation the International Council of Museums (ICOM) urges museums to respect fully all laws and conventions that regulate the import, export and transfer of all materials from occupied territory. The code specifies that museums should abstain from acquiring such objects. However, major Israeli cultural and educational institutions have brazenly displayed Gazan artefacts removed from occupied territory. In 1997, a report by the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq documented the presence of Gazan artefacts on display in the Hecht Museum in Haifa, in the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. On a visit by the author to the Israel Museum in December 2023, there appeared to be more Gazan artefacts on display than in 1997, notably material from Tell el-Ajjul.