In June 2016, the Palestinian artist Shareef Sarhan unveiled “Minarat Gaza” in Gaza’s port. The 15-meter-high, lighthouse-shaped sculpture was built from stone, concrete, and fragments of homes destroyed in successive Israeli assaults on the besieged enclave. The work was an attempt, Sarhan told +972 Magazine, “to transform the debris of war into a symbol of life, memory, resilience, and light.”
Seven years later, shortly after the genocide began, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the sculpture. Following months of displacement, isolation, and grief, Sarhan moved with his family to Marseille, in southern France. There, he began rebuilding not only his life, but the lighthouse itself.
Smaller than the original, the meticulously reconstructed sculpture embodied Sarhan’s refusal to let Gaza disappear. It also affirmed, he said, his determination to return one day and rebuild it once more on the shore of Gaza City.
Sarhan’s story and photographs of the sculpture appear alongside dozens of accounts by Gazan artists, curators, and archaeologists in “Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture, and Erasure.” Published late last year by Saqi Books, the volume presents archiving as an act of resistance to the destruction of Palestinian culture and memory — a response to what its editors, Dina Matar and Venetia Porter, describe as an ongoing “memoricide.”
Matar, a professor of media and communication at SOAS University of London, told +972 that the destruction of culture is part of a broader process of Palestinian dehumanization: A people stripped of their culture can be portrayed as having no history — and a people denied their history can be deprived of a moral claim to their land and reduced to a “security problem.”
Minarat Gaza by Shareef Sarhan, seen in Gaza City’s port, 2016. (Courtesy)
“We chose to publish the book in English to speak to the Western public, and to confront it with the erasure of a people’s culture, heritage, and art — in which the West is complicit,” she explained.
The book brings into view a dimension of Gaza often obscured by the flood of reporting on death, injury, hunger, and displacement: the music played at Gaza’s final concerts before the genocide, or children’s books read there at bedtime. In doing so, it seeks to restore what the genocide has tried to erase: four millennia of history that challenge the image imposed on Gaza since the Nakba as a place defined solely by deprivation, overcrowding, and perpetual conflict.
“When a university is bombed, it is not just a building that is destroyed but a place where thought is created,” Matar said. “When a library is burned, the possibility for a young generation to engage with its past is burned [with it]. When an ancient mosque, a church, or an art gallery is erased, it is an attack on an entire continuum of knowledge and community life.” She described this destruction as a form of “epistemic violence.”
Porter, a curator and now a research fellow at the British Museum, emphasized that, unlike most archives, the one in this book does not belong to the past; it is being assembled in real time, amid ongoing Israeli bombardment and siege.
“Wounded, exhausted, and hungry archaeologists in Gaza are searching through the rubble for fragments of information from their city’s history,” Porter explained. She showed me a photograph of workers carefully lifting an ancient urn from the rubble of Al-Qarara Cultural Museum in Khan Younis, which Israel destroyed early in the war, cradling the object like an injured child.
Despite the danger and lack of resources, the museum’s team has been participating in a national emergency project launched by the Palestinian Museum in the West Bank. Through this work, they have rescued 2,433 objects from the Al-Qarara collection — one of several preservation efforts documented in the book.
Having collected Palestinian embroidery for 30 years, I was drawn to a photograph of a torn embroidered dress from a collection representing different parts of the Strip. Porter explained that it had once been displayed at the Rafah Museum; founded in 2022, the museum had only been open for a few months when it was destroyed by Israeli bombs in October 2023.
A thobe from the Rafah Museum collection, courtesy of Suhaila Shaheen. (Grant Anderson for V&A Dundee)
The force of the blast carried the dress onto the roof of a building that had also been destroyed, where it remained exposed to sun and rain for nine months before museum staff recovered it. It now travels the world as part of Thread Memory, an exhibition on Palestinian embroidery co-organized by the Palestinian Museum, Saudi Arabia’s Art Jameel, and London’s V&A South Kensington.
‘Who would destroy a modern art gallery?’
In 2003, Sarhan co-founded Shababek (“Windows”), a collective that operated a studio and gallery for contemporary art in Gaza. He recalls an art scene that developed despite the near-total absence of infrastructure, funding, and institutional support. Artists were forced to become creators, curators, producers, photographers, graphic designers, and gallery managers all at once. Yet out of that scarcity emerged a vibrant cultural community determined not to be silenced.
Shababek was housed in a building near Al-Shifa Hospital and a UN compound, a location its founders believed would offer some protection during future Israeli attacks. “We thought, who would want to destroy a modern art gallery?” Sarhan said. The answer came in March 2024, when two Israeli bombs struck the building and reduced it to rubble during Israel’s two-week assault on Al-Shifa.
But Shababek was more than a studio or exhibition space: It supported emerging artists and became a second home for many of them. Against the backdrop of Gaza’s political and geographic fragmentation, Sarhan and his partners sought to build a broader artistic community, forge connections with the Arab world and the West, and establish relationships with art schools abroad.
“It’s hard to break through as a budding artist almost anywhere,” Sarhan explained. “Imagine what lies ahead for a painter — no matter how talented she may be — who was born into a siege and grew up from one war to the next.”
With conventional art supplies scarce or entirely unavailable, Shababek’s artists learned to work under nearly impossible conditions. Some transformed the remnants of war — including fragments of a destroyed kitchen — into material for their art. Veteran painter Fatima Abu Owda fashioned brushes from her granddaughters’ hair so she could continue painting, while others produced pigments from household ingredients including bay leaves, cumin, cinnamon, coffee, and pomegranate peel.
The creation of Shareef Sarhan’s Minarat Gaza, seen in Gaza City’s port, 2016. (Courtesy)
Now operating in exile, the collective has recreated the Shababek Gallery online. Drawing on photographs of the original space and its exhibitions, the group built a virtual gallery where many of the artists’ works remain accessible. Shababek also provides living stipends to more than 120 young artists who remain in Gaza.
The book presents another effort to preserve Gaza’s endangered art through digital technology: Sahab–The Cloud Museum, a project of the Hawaf Collective. Established in 2021 by Mohamed Abusal, Salman Nawati, Sondos Al-Nakhala, and Mohamed Bourouissa, Hawaf (“Edges”) brings together artists, architects, and researchers based in Gaza, Sweden, and France who are working to resist the destruction of Gaza’s cultural heritage.
The collective uses technologies such as 3D scanning to preserve the memory of places that may no longer survive in physical form. Through immersive augmented- and virtual-reality tools, Sahab enables Palestinians in the diaspora and audiences around the world to encounter Gaza’s history despite Israel’s two-decade siege of the territory.
Without a physical building in which to display its collection, the virtual museum derives its architecture from the principle of “sedimentation”: layers of digital memory, including virtual “inner courtyards,” that evoke different periods in Gaza’s millennia-long history.
Sahab thus functions as a kind of imaginary institution, placing greater value on the memories attached to an object than on its continued physical existence. Here, imagination becomes a means of preservation — and an instrument of resistance.
When exile becomes salvation
One story of rescue in the book long predates Israel’s latest aggression on Gaza, and the chain of events behind it is so improbable that it is almost hard to believe.
In 2005, a collection of 530 archaeological artifacts was taken out of Gaza for a project involving the City of Geneva, the Swiss Confederation, and the Palestinian Authority (PA), under UNESCO’s auspices. Some belonged to the Gazan collector Jawdat Al-Khudari; others came from excavations conducted jointly by the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage and Jerusalem’s École Biblique.
Venetia Porter with “Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture, and Erasure.” (Samah Salaime)
Two years later, the exhibition “Gaza at the Crossroads of Civilizations” opened at Geneva’s Museum of Art and History, attended by then-Swiss President Micheline Calmy-Rey, and PA President Mahmoud Abbas. The artifacts, however, never returned to Gaza.
After Hamas took control of the enclave in 2007, Israel tightened its blockade. The wars that followed made the collection’s return impossible. The artifacts were moved to storage at the Geneva Freeport. No one could have predicted that their exile would become their salvation.
After the start of the genocide in October 2023, Al-Khudari’s private museum housed in his hotel, Al-Mathaf, in northern Gaza, was destroyed, along with its gardens and thousands of additional archaeological objects. Israeli bulldozers later leveled the site, erasing another layer of Gaza’s material history.
The 530 artifacts, which survived only because they were no longer in Gaza, were later presented in the exhibition “Heritage in Danger” in Geneva; they then traveled to Paris for an exhibition titled “Treasures Saved from Gaza,” and afterward to Turin in Italy. With each stop, the artifacts effectively became the city’s ambassadors in exile — a physical testament to a history and culture that Israel has sought to erase.
In September 2024, the PA and the City of Geneva signed a memorandum of understanding in which they agreed that the collection would remain in Switzerland “for as long as necessary.” The hope is that it will eventually return to Gaza and form the foundation of a national museum.
One of the book’s most jarring passages appears in an essay by Omar Al-Qattan, chair of the Palestinian Museum’s board. Al-Qattan presents the destruction of Gaza’s museums, libraries, mosques, churches, cultural centers, and archives not as collateral damage but as an integral part of the assault itself: an attack on a society’s ability to preserve and tell its own story.
His essay is accompanied by a photograph that may appear almost understated amid the torrent of horrific images emerging from Gaza over the past three years, yet it captures the logic of this destruction with startling clarity. The image shows graffiti left by Israeli soldiers on a wall of the Al-Qattan Cultural Center in Gaza City’s Tel Al-Hawa neighborhood. A single Hebrew word has been scrawled across the wall: “rage.” It was written on the wall of the center’s children’s library — a place built for reading, imagination, and curiosity.
In this detail, the book’s significance comes into focus. Israel’s war on Gaza is being waged not only against the 2 million Palestinians living in the Strip, but against Gaza’s history, memory, and future. The archival efforts documented here are therefore more than repositories of the past; they are foundations from which a future can be claimed, rejecting the idea that destruction must be the final chapter.
“Archiving Gaza in the Present” is not a book of naïve hope. Some artworks have been lost forever. Some artists have been killed. Some libraries, museums, and cultural institutions will never be rebuilt as they were.
What the book offers instead is a refusal to disappear — an insistence on being, living, remembering, and rebuilding — and a refusal to let the Israeli military be the sole editor of Gaza’s history.
Samah Salaime is a feminist Palestinian activist and writer.
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