Countercurrents
Selma Dabbagh
The exhibition Trésors sauvés de Gaza: 5000 ans d’histoire,even with its 130 objects, felt sparse. The rescued treasures include a Hellenistic or Roman marble statuette of a Greek goddess, several large wine amphoras from the third century BCE, funerary steles engraved with Kufic calligraphy and photographs of ancient ports. But the point is there is little left. The Israeli government, its military and its archaeologists have destroyed or stolen almost everything.
The show at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, reviewed in the LRB last October by Josephine Quinn, closed last December, having had its run extended, but very few other international museums have shown any interest in hosting it. If it were for me to curate it, with an unlimited budget, I’d leave an expanse the length of an airport runway between each object to show how much has been destroyed.
When the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, the destruction was writ large in newspaper headlines and widely condemned. A year later, the Israeli army bombed the old town of Nablus. The Palestinian architect and writer Suad Amiry wrote about it in her memoir Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. Her first thought was ‘Oh, God, not the soap factory!’ She then remembered the thirteen people who’d been killed and felt ‘rather ashamed’. And yet since October 2023 five thousand years of cultural buildings and ancient libraries have been bombed into dust in Gaza with hardly a whisper from the international media or cultural institutions.
The Tresors sauvés exhibition, among other things, was a personal showcase of the skill and tenacity of Gazan archaeologists, above all Jawdat Khoudary, an engineer by training, who had salvaged and preserved most of the objects on display. He used to keep them in his garden in the Sheikh Radwan area of Gaza City, where he had hundreds of objects dating from the second millennium BCE to the Ottoman era. In 2008 he opened his museum to the public.
The previous year he had loaned 260 objects to a museum in Geneva. The extraordinary story of how they were shipped out of Gaza through the Rafah crossing reads like a spy thriller and is told by three of the actors in the drama, Béatrice Blandin, Marc-André Haldimann and Khoudary himself, in the recently published Archiving Gaza in the Present, edited by Dina Matar and Venetia Porter. But it was never safe to return them and for years they remained locked up in a crate in Geneva.
As Joanna Oyediran documents in her contribution to Archiving Gaza, the Israeli defence minister during the Six-Day War, Moshe Dayan, removed 23 sarcophagi from a cemetery in Deir al-Balah in violation of the Hague Regulations, which forbid the seizure or destruction of property in occupied territory. The ‘Dayan collection’ was acquired by the Israel Museum in 1982. It is far from the only example of Israeli looting from Palestinian land.
The British Museum will not be showing the Trésors sauvés exhibition. Last May, though, a private event to celebrate the anniversary of Israel’s founding was held at the museum, which professes ‘a deep belief in objects as reliable witnesses and documents of human history’. Unesco’s preliminary damage assessment for cultural properties in Gaza has so far verified damage to 157 sites since October 2023: fourteen religious sites, 122 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, three depositories of movable cultural property (including Khoudary’s collection), nine monuments, one museum and eight archaeological sites.
The British Museum has also removed the word ‘Palestine’ from some of its display cases, apparently because ‘audience testing has shown that the historic use of the term Palestine … is in some circumstances no longer meaningful’. The group known as UK Lawyers for Israel has said that ‘concerns were raised’ in a letter it sent to the museum. A petition criticising the museum for contributing to a ‘wider pattern of erasing Palestinian presence from public memory’ and calling on it to ‘restore the term “Palestine” to all relevant displays’ has received more than 23,000 signatures.
Venetia Porter, a former senior curator for Islamic and contemporary Middle East art at the British Museum, told me that ‘the museum needs to answer the question as to when and why did the museum decide to change any of these labels. What processes did it go through? Did these involve scholarly peer review, and what specific conversations have they had with UKLFI?’
In 2021, UKLFI demanded that the statement ‘Forensic Architecture stands with Palestine’ be removed from an exhibition at the Whitworth in Manchester. Following its removal, Forensic Architecture insisted the exhibition be shut until the statement was reinstated, as it eventually was.
UKLFI also pressed for the removal of Palestinian children’s drawings from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in February 2023 and have conducted a campaign against the rector of Glasgow University and war surgeon Ghassan Abu Sittah, accusing him of misconduct. Abu Sittah was cleared at a fitness-to-practise hearing last month, but the case cost him and his supporters nearly £100,000. UKLFI have informed his lawyers of their intention to appeal to the High Court against the decision.
David Velasco, the former editor of Artforum, fired for speaking out against the onslaught in Gaza in October 2023, wrote a piece for Equator in December on ‘How Gaza broke the art world’. He describes going to Berlin in November 2024 for a Nan Goldin retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie. ‘The museum has kept its promise to allow me to talk, and I thank them,’ Goldin said. ‘But they claim that my activism and my art are separate, even though that has never been the case.’
At the Berlin Film Festival earlier this month, the chair of the jury, the director Wim Wenders, said that filmmakers ‘have to stay out of politics’. Another juror, one of the producers of The Zone of Interest, wondered why she hadn’t been asked about ‘Senegal and all the other wars’ (there is no conflict in Senegal). Arundhati Roy withdrew from the festival. ‘To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping,’ she said. ‘It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.’
Also in Berlin, the director of The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania, rejected the Cinema for Peace Most Valuable Film Award. Hind Rajab was killed by the Israeli army on 29 January 2024, a few months before her sixth birthday. The soldiers also killed her family and two paramedics who tried to save her. ‘I refuse to let their deaths become a backdrop for a polite speech about peace,’ Ben Hania said. ‘Not while the structures that enabled them remain untouched.’ A screening of Annemarie Jacir’s film Palestine 36 in Jerusalem last month was shut down by the Israeli police. They detained the projectionist and announced that future screenings were prohibited.
Meanwhile in Australia, Adelaide Writers’ Week withdrew its invitation to the Palestinian Australian writer Randa Abdel Fattah. She called the decision a ‘blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship’. About 180 writers said they would boycott the festival. The director and all but one of the board resigned and the event was cancelled.
What is interesting and inspiring to me here is the energy of the countercurrents. I’m on the board of the Mosaic Rooms, an arts institution in London established and supported by the Palestinian A.M. Qattan Foundation. On 17 February, it reopened its doors after a yearlong renovation, with exhibitions by Bouchra Khalili and Dima Srouji. All four floors were packed and people were queuing around the corner to be let in. ‘It feels like what the Tate used to feel like,’ one of the visitors said to me.