From Urbicide to Genocide

Gaza – an apology

There is only this much one can do in this world. For a reason I still cannot truly explain, I chose heritage as my professional quest.

Heritage is political. It intersects with all aspects of human existence. I tell my students and fellow-workers.

Heritage is political, but it is also slow. A long and meandering taqsim of an unfolding culture, drowned at times like these by the apocalyptic beat of the drums of war.

Over the years, as Gaza was repetitively bombed. The term urbicide was floated.

Urbicide: “a scientific, surgical, military operation in architecture that …………………………………………….. ……………………………………….. practically and symbolically destroys the organisational and cultural aspects of the city in a biopolitical attack on a population.”[1]

Architecture can be rebuilt. Heritage that is lost cannot be replaced but a people is always in the process of creating new legacies.

A dead child cannot be brought back to life.

Urbicide: “a scientific, surgical, military operation in architecture that either simply murders a civilian population by the means of architecture, or practically and symbolically destroys the organisational and cultural aspects of the city in a biopolitical attack on a population.”[2]

Today, it is genocide. The pictures of bodies under rubble say it all.

Buildings as weapons.

First to dehumanise, then to kill.

Heritage is also memory. The world must not be allowed to turn its face away. And in the future, it should not forget. The work Palestinians have done and continue to do against systemised amnesia is truly herculean. If so much of a people’s time and energy is subsumed under fighting their way into world memory, how much is left for anything else? The true Palestinian legacy is not just a legacy of resistance, it is a legacy of the art of the everyday under resistance. It is this legacy that has built and rebuilt Gaza over the years.

Buildings as resistance.

In the context of exile, Mahmoud Darwish speaks of memory as a sunset of ‘beauty rebuking a stranger’.

‘In this sunset, words alone are qualified to restore what was broken in time and place and to name gods that paid no attention to you and waged their wars with primitive weapons. Words are the raw materials for building a house. Words are a homeland.” [3]

Words are a homeland.

Gaza will prevail and it will be rebuilt, always in the hope that the homeland is not reduced to words, that the next round of buildings are never weapons, and not just buildings of resistance. That what is built is the pure beauty of everyday life, a celebration not a rebuke. A life where over 2 million people are not crammed in 365 square kilometres.

I read what I have written and it sounds foreign – meaning is subverted through a repetition born of a history of injustice that plants in me a sense of personal inadequacy. At times like these, within a regional politics of dispossession and an ethos of helplessness, the only words I claim as mine are an apology for knowing too little and not doing enough.

But I also offer my voice as an amplifier for other words – the words of resistance, sumūd, and remembrance – as spoken by the Palestinians.

Words as heritage?

Written by: May al-Ibrashy