The Assault on Collective Memory

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.This week’s post is difficult to write. So too have been last twelve weeks chronicling Israel’s War on Gaza and its long, undignified procession of crimes against Palestinian humanity, including genocide, arboricide, infanticide, ecocide, and the war against childbirth.

I feel my fingers curling inward, as if to stop the flow of words pouring onto the page. A tightness in my abdomen, as though to keep the information from seeping into my body. I feel shadows gathering, the pressing close of my ancestors and tens of thousands of newly-dead Gazans asking me to commemorate their embodiment. press closer.

Despite the fact that I’ve written about epigenetic trauma, war, exile, and the making of refugees, I learn as though from scratch that bearing witness each day to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians calls forth my ancestral memories of World War II, the Holocaust, the Gulag.  

I think, I can’t possibly consume more death. I think, Let me write about cold immersion, neuroplasticity, or the immune system instead. And then I keep reading. Researching. Distracting myself. Returning. This moving toward and moving away, a tango of embodiment.

I share this with you because it’s important to reckon the cost of bearing witness to atrocities, and to balance it against the cost of turning away.

In an attempt to ground this weeks’ topic in scholarship, I look up the etymology of the term witness.

It comes from the Old English witt, to know, and also evokes conscience, or consciousness.

Its Christian use means literally “witness.”

Digging deeper, it startles me to discover that the term witness is intimately linked to the Latin word martyr, meaning “one who bears testimony to faith” or “one who is willing to die for his or her faith.”

In the end, every road leads back to Gaza.

And as it happens, the term “witness” also relates to the Sanskrit smarati, which means “remember.”

And it is the assault on memory known as memoricide that we explore together today.

The Assault on Historical Memory

Each of us has at least one story from the life of a parent, grandparent, or relative further back in our ancestral trail. This story (or stories) acts as an emblem of the the family’s spirit. It gets passed like an Olympic torch from one generation to the next, keeping the flame of our lineage burning.   

Before we begin, let’s invite our bodies and the bodily archive of our own family history into this work.

Take a deep breath with me; in through your nose and out through your nose.

If you’re up for it, please let your eyes relax and your gaze turn inward. Call to mind a signature story like that from your family’s past. It can be joyful or sad, triumphant or heartbreaking. While you’re drawing that up from the depths of your memory, I’ll share the one that’s top of mind right now for me.

In 1939, when my mother was only 7 years old, Hitler began World War II by invading Poland from the East. At the same time, the Soviets invaded from the West. The Soviet authorities declared Poland “nonexistent,” and all Polish citizens to be Soviets.

On a cold February night in 1940, Soviet troops came to our family’s farm in the middle of the night, gave them 30 minutes to gather their children, and ordered them at gunpoint on a train to Siberia. They placed hundreds of thousands of Poles on cattle cars, as many as 90 to a car, with slatted openings at the top for ventilation. The cars were unheated; during the 6-week journey, many children and elders died of cold or illness. The trains stopped once each day to empty the bodies of the dead into the snowy tundra below.

My mother and her sisters, aged 5 and 10 years old, were Polish prisoners of war in the Gulag for two years. The Russian soldiers treated them brutally; of those who survived the exodus from Poland, countless perished in the camps. Escape was pointless; those who tried either died of cold in the surrounding forests, or were killed by wild animals.

My grandmother, barely five feet tall, was given hard labor cutting down trees in the surrounding forest. Each person was allotted one piece of bread per day; my mother and her sisters frequently cried from the stomach pains caused by hunger.

One morning, my grandmother snuck into a field to take small pieces of carrots and potatoes for her starving children. A Russian soldier and his guard dog discovered her; he let her go, warning her never to return. But just before dawn the next morning, she did return; it was a matter of survival. The soldier spotted her and gave chase. As dawn began to break, a miracle occurred: A mist descended, so thick that it obscured her as she ran into the forest. She became so lost that it took a full day to find her way back to camp.

This memory lives on in my siblings and me; in particular, in the way that I’m always afraid to run out of food, and will restock supplies long before that happens. (This is why I have a full five jugs of organic coffee placed in a neat row on the upper lefthand side of the refrigerator.)

As Israel starves 2.2 million Gazan men, women, and children, this memory has come rising up from the stone of my body like a sharp-edged sword, waiting for me to grasp it by the hilt and pull it out.  

Have you summoned your remnant of family history? Take a few deep breaths with your hands on your body, feeling what parts of your physicality, your bodily archive, play host to it. Let’s keep it close as we proceed.

What Memoricide Is + Why It Matters

Memoricide refers to the erasure of cultural memory.

My reading of it indicates that it occurs in three parts:

1. A group that has colonized another, or has aims to do so, often undertakes to deny the acts of oppression that they have committed on the less powerful group. (In this case, for example, white supremacists worldwide often deny the Holocaust. Israelis and Zionists deny the Nakba or catastrophe of 1948.)

2. The oppressors undertake the deliberate elimination of the other group’s historical past—its bodily and collective archive. Especially in war, this often involves the destruction of institutions—buildings, schools, universities, places of worship, libraries, cultural centers, meeting places, municipal sites—that hold a culture’s memory and are imbued with the loving presence of its people. You can think of these institutions are key cellular nodes in the web of connective tissue that bind a culture together.

3. Third, oppressors know that they can’t simply deny an event. To do so would leave a vacuum where the event previously lived.—and any vacuum begs to be filled. The oppressor must create and deploy a fine-tuned disinformation system to create new information, identities, and events with which to “flesh out” the culture they wish to conquer.

Russia and Israel know this well. This is why each has invested billions of dollars in creating systems of propaganda and disinformation to indoctrinate both colonialists and the ones they oppress. (Israel’s system of propaganda is known as Hasbara.)

It is much easier to indoctrinate the oppressors than it is the oppressed—that is to say, the culture in danger of being extinguished. This is because the endangered culture knows well the tools of the oppressor and will go to great lengths to keep its flame burning.

As we proceed, think of memoricide as the extensive and deliberate destruction of the history of a people with the goal of replacing it with that of another group.

Israel’s Memoricide of Palestinian Culture

Gaza has a rich and ancient cultural heritage, one vitally important to world history. For millennia, the region was a hub for culture and commerce for under Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine rule. In modern times, of course, Gaza has retained its global significance.

The 1954 Hague Convention, to which both Palestine and Israel agreed, aims to safeguard landmarks from the assaults of war. But Israel’s airstrikes have systematically targeted Gaza’s cultural landmarks in persistent and deliberate acts of memoricide, even prior to its present war on Gaza.  

In 2014, Israel tageted and  damaged dozens of cultural heritage sites.

I’d like to zoom in on one: the Great Omari Mosque.

The Mosque dates back to the pre-Islamic period, and stands on the site of an ancient Philistine temple from the 5^th century. It covers an area of 4,100 square meters and a building area of 1,190 square meters. It has 38 columns of gorgeous solid marble, reflecting the splendor of the ancient architecture in Gaza City. Like Gaza, the Mosque has an embattled history.

The Mosque was one of the most prominent historical and religious landmarks in Gaza. It housed traditional manuscripts and ancient parchments. It contained a large library that held countless priceless texts, as well as a Quran recitation yard.

It became known in the seventh century as the first mosque established in Gaza during the period of Islamization.

Like Gaza itself, the Mosque has weathered considerable conflict. In the 11^th century, Crusaders converted the mosque back to a church. In 1260, it was destroyed by the Mongols and then rebuilt. A century later, it was converted back to a mosque again. At the close of the 13^th century, the Ottomans restored it. (You can explore a beautiful pictorial rendition of the Mosque’s history.)

In an article in The Nation, Kate Wagner writes,

“In times of war, we cling to art, architecture, and other forms of culture for many reasons: to show that things and people mattered, that culture was meant to endure, that the evisceration of something priceless is a shameful crime. We are shocked by losses such as the Great Omari Mosque not only because they are terrible and sad, but also because we believed that those in power might have more respect for art and for history deemed legitimate by their own institutions than they do for human life. But, of course, this is not true: If human life is worth nothing, then neither is architecture, itself the cumulative achievement of and testimony to countless human lives… The end goal is a blank slate.”

In 2021 UNESCO, the United Nations body that designates and protects World Heritage sites, filed a report that documented Israel’s continued destruction of cultural and historic sites by in Gaza.

And in December of 2023, the group Heritage for Peace conducted a survey that outlined the damage done in the first two months of the conflict to more than 100 culturally significant landmarks in Gaza.

These include the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, the third oldest church in the world. Built in about 1150, the the church offered sanctuary to people of various faiths over generations.

And an article, ironically published in the Times of Israel in September of 2023, celebrated the discovery of a 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery in northern Gaza. The site contained over 100 graves, as well as sarcophagi decorated with grape leaves and dolphins. Its fate is yet unknown: Israel targeted it with white phosphorus.

The Rafah Museum in southern Gaza was dedicated to teaching about the territory's long and multi-layered heritage until it, too, was destroyed by airstrikes. In an interview with NPR, Museum Director Suhaila Shaheen mourned the loss of priceless coins, precious stones, copper plates, clothes, and artifacts dating back to times when the region was a hub for commerce and culture under Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine rule.

The Al-Assaina Mosque in Gaza, before its destruction. Photo: Motasem Mortaja

The Al-Hassaina Mosque after Israel’s airstrikes. Photo: Unknown.

The Assault on Higher Education

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in 2018, Palestine has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Palestinian graduates excel in fields like mathematics, engineering and business.

Israel has attempted to subvert Gaza’s intellectual as well as cultural knowledge.

The Geneva-based independent Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said a statement that Israel has systematically destroyed every university in Gaza in stages, beginning with the bombing of the Islamic and Al-Azhar universities.

During the week of January 20, 2024, Israel detonated 315 mines to demolish Al-Israa University, which lies south of Gaza City. According to a post on the school’s Facebook page, the Israeli Defense Forces seized the campus and occupied it for many months, turning it into a military base from which they interrogated detained Palestinians.

In the United States, Associated Press reporter Matt Lee questioned State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller about the justification of what looked like Israel’s controlled demolition of Al-Israa University in Gaza City.

“It’s not troubling to you?” Matt asked. “If there was a threat from this particular facility, they wouldn’t have been able to do it,” he added. “And you have nothing to say? You have nothing to say about this?”

In a statement to NPR, a UNESCO spokesperson said,

"UNESCO is deeply concerned about the adverse impact of the ongoing fighting on cultural heritage in Palestine and Israel. Our organization calls on all parties involved to strictly adhere to international law. Cultural property should not be targeted or used for military purposes, as it is considered to be civilian infrastructure."

UNESCO called Israel’s destruction of schools an “intentional destruction of Palestinian cultural and historical properties.”

Furthermore, according to the Human Rights Monitor, the IDF has killed an astounding 94 university professors. UNESCO said, “The targeted academics studied and taught across a variety of academic disciplines, and many of their ideas served as cornerstones of academic research in the Gaza Strip’s universities.”

In 2008, as part of Al Jazeera’s coverage of the 60^th anniversary of the creation of Israel and the Palestinian ‘Nakba’, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe reflected upon the events of 1948 and how they led to 60 years of division between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Here’s what Pappe had to say about memoricide:

“Part of any ethnic cleansing operation is not just wiping out the population and expelling it from the earth. A very typical part of ethnic cleansing is wiping people out of history.

For ethnic cleansing to be an effective and successful operation you also have to wipe people out of memory and the Israelis are very good at it. They did it in two ways.

They built Jewish settlements over the Palestinian villages they expelled and quite often gave them names that reflected the Palestinian name as a kind of testimony to the Palestinians that this is totally now in the hands of Israel and there is no chance in the world of bringing the clock backwards.

The other way they did it is planting trees – usually European pine trees – over the ruins of the village and turning the village into recreational spaces where you do exactly the opposite of commemoration – you live the day, you enjoy life, it is all about leisure and pleasure.

That is a very powerful tool for ‘memorycide’. In fact, much of the Palestinian effort should have been but was never unfortunately—or only recently began—was to fight against that ‘memorycide’ by at least bringing back the memory of what happened.

(Note: I talked about arboricide here.)

TW: The next section rdiscusses sexual assault and abuse in relation to memoricide.

Memoricide as a Weapon of Sexual Predators

As a survivor of sexual assault at age 15, I can’t help but think about the role of the perpetrator’s commission of memoricide in trauma.

Sexual assault is a destruction of the body archive as a sacred site, both cultural (in the ancestral memories we hold in our tissue) and personal (the way we carry the injustices that have occurred to us in this life and that left untended, can carry over into our descendants’ lives).

Perpetrators’ denial of the assault is a form of memoricide that attempts to erase key bodily and emotional memories.

Assaulters don’t stop at denial. They often supplant the memories with a form of propaganda—usually, that they are pillars of their communities. “Salt of the earth” people. They’ve worked with the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts.

Collectively, this implies that sexual assault doesn’t happen as often as we know it does—and that patriarchy is not as toxic as we make it out to be.

And yet, naming injustice is critical to reclaiming it.

Where does this leave us with Israel’s memoricide against Palestine?

As Ilan Pappe says, “Memory seems to be the only tool left for the colonized not so much to oppose the colonization, let alone dismantle it, but to survive in it.”

The link between memory and survival is key.

According to Pappe, stories accentuate the hardship in an individual’s (or a culture’s) attempt to recover memory as both an act of survival and a protest against the brutal power of erasure."

“The struggle to commemorate,” Pappe also says, “is not entirely separate from the struggle to liberate; the two are intertwined.”

And this is why we bear witness together to the atrocities occurring in Gaza no matter the denial or rationalizations that surround us.

In bearing witness, we take on some of the weight of memory’s burden. We stitch together a larger collective memory that extends beyond the bodily archives of the oppressed to include the infinite collective that supports them.

Fom Black Liturgies, the account of Cole Arthur Riley on Instagram

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If you’ve missed my other pieces on the conflict, check out the following:

My stance on the Isael-Palestine Conflict

A “Talking Points” guide to the Israel-Palestine Conflict

An article about the children of Gaza

A stunning interview on the Israel-Palestine conflict with Gabor Mate and his daughter

A piece on Israel’s indiscriminate destruction of Palestine’s olive trees

A column on the making of refugees

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Sources:

It comes from the Old English witt, to know, and also: Witness | Etymology of witness by etymonline. (n.d.). Retrieved February 5, 2024, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/witness

But landmarks in Gaza have been destroyed by Israeli strikes in previous: Veltman, C. (2023, December 3). More than 100 Gaza heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/12/03/1216200754/gaza-heritage-sites-destroyed-israel

Dozens of sites, including the now-obliterated Great Omari Mosque: Fordham, A. (2014, August 12). Gaza’s Casualties Of War Include Its Historic Mosques. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/08/12/339828441/gazas-casualties-of-war-include-its-historic-mosques

A report by UNESCO, the United Nations body that designates:  https://plus.google.com/+UNESCO. (2021, July 25). 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. UNESCO. https://en.unesco.org/protecting-heritage/convention-and-protocols/1954-convention

outlined the damage done in the first two months of the conflict to more than 100 culturally: Veltman, C. (2023, December 3). More than 100 Gaza heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/12/03/1216200754/gaza-heritage-sites-destroyed-israelIt covers an area of 4,100 square meters and a building area: Omari Grand Mosque, Gaza | IRCICA. (2020, September 8). https://www.islamicarchitecturalheritage.com/listings/omari-grand-mosque-gaza

The Great Omari Mosque was one of the most prominent: Al Jazeera English (Director). (2023, December 11). The Great Omari Mosque in Gaza’s old city centre has been hit in an Israel air strike.

The structure became known in the seventh century: Wagner, K. (2024, January 24). What Israel’s Destruction of the Great Omari Mosque Means. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/great-omari-mosque-urbicide-gaza/

These include the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius: ‘War crime’: Israel bombs Gaza church sheltering displaced people. (n.d.). Al Jazeera. Retrieved February 6, 2024, from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/20/war-crime-israel-bombs-gaza-church-sheltering-displaced-people

In an article in The Nation, Kate Wagner writes: Wagner, K. (2024, January 24). What Israel’s Destruction of the Great Omari Mosque Means. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/great-omari-mosque-urbicide-gaza/

An article in, ironically, the Times of Israel: Adwan, I. (n.d.). Archaeologists unearth largest cemetery ever found in Gaza, with rare lead sarcophogi. Retrieved February 7, 2024, from https://www.timesofisrael.com/archaeologists-unearth-largest-cemetery-ever-found-in-gaza-with-rare-lead-sarcophogi/

Its fate is unknown: Saber, I. F. (n.d.). A ‘cultural genocide’: Which of Gaza’s heritage sites have been destroyed? Al Jazeera. Retrieved February 7, 2024, from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/14/a-cultural-genocide-which-of-gazas-heritage-sites-have-been-destroyed

The Rafah Museum in southern Gaza was dedicated to teaching about the territory’s: Veltman, C. (2023, December 3). More than 100 Gaza heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/12/03/1216200754/gaza-heritage-sites-destroyed-israel

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in 2018, Palestine has one of the highest: How Israel has destroyed Gaza’s schools and universities. (n.d.). Al Jazeera. Retrieved February 6, 2024, from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/24/how-israel-has-destroyed-gazas-schools-and-universities

In a statement to NPR, a UNESCO spokesperson said: Veltman, C. (2023, December 3). More than 100 Gaza heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/12/03/1216200754/gaza-heritage-sites-destroyed-israel

The IDF has killed an astounding 94 university professors: How Israel has destroyed Gaza’s schools and universities. (n.d.). Al Jazeera. Retrieved February 6, 2024, from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/24/how-israel-has-destroyed-gazas-schools-and-universities

In the U.S., Associated Press reporter Matt Lee questioned State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller: Journalist questions bombing of Gaza university. (n.d.). Al Jazeera. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/1/19/journalist-questions-bombing-of-gaza-university

Here’s what Pappe had to say about memoricide: Israel ‘committing memorycide.’ (n.d.). Al Jazeera. Retrieved February 5, 2024, from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2008/7/6/israel-committing-memorycide

“The struggle to commemorate,” Pappe also says, “is not entirely separate: Pappe, I. (2017). The Uses and Abuses of Collective Memory. Anthropological Quarterly, 90(1), 255–266.