In what is known today as the Israeli National Library, there are nearly 30,000 rare books and documents stamped with the phrase “Abandoned Property”. These are the books and manuscripts stolen by the terrorist Zionist militias — Stern, Irgun, and Haganah — from Palestinian homes, particularly in Jerusalem and Jaffa.
The occupation does not confine itself to seizing land or destroying stone; its aggression extends to the very roots of time itself, plundering ancient glory and burning the present in an attempt to erase the truth that this land possesses an identity, and that it once stood as a beacon of civilisation and a capital of culture.
Since the Nakba of 1948, military force hasn’t been the only weapon deployed. Alongside it unfolded a systematic campaign to steal intellectual heritage, as tens of thousands of books and manuscripts were looted from homes and libraries, treated as spoils of war intended to obliterate the collective memory of the people of the land.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the occupation army looted archaeological sites in the Gaza Strip, including Deir Al-Balah, stealing treasures thousands of years old, which later appeared in Israeli museums as exhibits bearing witness not to history, but to its theft.
In the latest war on Gaza, museums that once narrated the story of the enclave were reduced to ashes, including the historic Port of Anthedon. Neither the ancient Pasha’s Palace — a masterpiece of Mamluk architecture dating back to the era of Sultan Baybars — nor the Church of Saint Porphyrius, the world’s second-oldest church, was spared destruction.
Libraries, the city’s living minds, were bombed and demolished. Flames engulfed the Shabaka Centre for Contemporary Art, which housed more than 20 thousand works of art. The Rashad Al-Shawa Cultural Centre was levelled to the ground, while the pages of Gaza’s Central Archives, which carried the memory of 150 years, were scattered into the air.
It was an act reminiscent of what the Tatars and Mongols once wrought, though carried out with more sophisticated weapons and far greater savagery. This is cultural genocide: an attempt to create a rupture between the Palestinian people and their past, so that they may forget that Palestine was once a flourishing centre of trade, knowledge, and art. For historical heritage constitutes the roots that prevent human beings from becoming refugees without an identity.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 May, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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