The destruction of cultural heritage in Gaza and Ukraine
In November 2025, the Independent School for the City, together with Spatial Justice for Palestine (SJ4PN-NL) and the Ukraine-Netherlands Network (UNUN), organised a conference about the destruction of cultural heritage in Gaza and Ukraine, and about ways to protect and restore the targeted artefacts and places. This essay by Wouter Vanstiphout is a reflection on its findings.
The Monuments Men
It seems like a relatively straightforward part of post war reconstruction: the restitution of stolen artworks and the reconstruction of destroyed architectural heritage. The symbolism is heavy and easily narrated, for example, in Hollywood films like ‘The Monuments Men’ (2014)by George Clooney. The film recounts how in 1943, President Roosevelt drafted a team of art historians, museum directors, and an architect, into the army to send them into Europe and to save artworks in the wake of the Allied campaign against the Nazi’s. (Is it a coincidence that in the same year Clooney married Amal Alamuddin, a French-British-Lebanese Human Rights lawyer who had prosecuted Serbian and Lebanese leaders for war crimes committed in the war, and who went on to represent victims of genocide in Sudan, Turkey and Syria.)
Monuments ‘Men’ still exist, such as Major Ankie Petersen, an architectural historian with the Netherlands Army. At the conference, she talked about the methods that the army has to prevent plunder and demolition and how it works to restitute stolen artefacts to their owners. Much of her work consists of setting up complex drills in which situations are enacted, for example, in which artefacts are sold on black markets or architectural heritage needs to be protected. But maybe the most crucial aspect of modern Monuments Women like Petersen is to collaborate with international courts and prosecutors, in proving that the plunder and demolition occurred at all, investigate who is responsible, and eventually bring them to justice.
It is easily assumed that ‘monuments’ are just the material aspect of wartime violence, comparable to, for example, the stealing of gold from the vaults, and incomparable to the violence inflicted on the bodies of civilians by war, repression, famine, and disease brought by the war machine. But according to the 1998 Rome Statute, the destruction of cultural heritage is a war crime, and it is seen to violate International Humanitarian Law just like genocide, ethnic cleansing, wartime sexual violence, or conscripting children into the army. In fact, destroying cultural heritage inflicts trauma that can be deeper, more insidious, and long-lasting than physical and material damage.
This is demonstrated clearly and movingly by the memory work of architect Arna Mačkić on the famous destroyed bridge in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The medieval bridge symbolized the multicultural and multireligious Bosnian society, and it was precisely for this reason that the bridge was destroyed by the same nationalists who committed other war crimes like genocidal killing sprees and ethnic cleansing. Also, Arna Mačkić showed that the mere rebuilding of the bridge, no matter how precise its reconstruction of centuries-old details, does not restore the cultural richness and inclusivity it once stood for. Destroying a bridge might be a crucial part of destroying a society, but rebuilding the bridge does not, in itself, rebuild the society. What it does do is create an Instagrammable destination that risks masking the trauma’s neglect in the present day.
The destruction of cultural heritage can exist independent of war. It finds its context not in the ‘official’ violence of military campaigns, but in a campaign of cultural erasure that precedes and follows the actual war(s). A clear example is the gradual, subtle, and not-so subtle wiping of the Palestinian culture and history from memory, alongside the physical removal from their territory to make way for Israel. Denying the Palestinian people, despite thousands of years of continual habitation, their right to live in their homeland required an ideological cover story: that they had never existed in the first place, that ‘Palestine’ was in fact an empty barren land, to be colonised and brought to fruition by the return of the Jewish diaspora from North Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
Nama’a Qudah, the Palestinian and Jordanian scholar and activist who also chaired the conference, connected the denial of Palestinian nationhood with the planting of the Palestinian landscape with foreign species like the Pine tree to change the identity and face of the land, to the catastrophic Nakba - when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were violently dispossessed from their homes and their villages and towns were destroyed or occupied by the Zionist armed militias - to the genocide in Gaza where some of the oldest and most revered architectural heritage was being specifically targeted and destroyed. The most tragic example is the bombing of the Great Omari Mosque by the Israeli Defence Forces in 2023. It was the central and oldest Mosque in the Gaza Strip, going back to the 7th century when the Rashidun conquerors Islamicized a 5th-century Byzantine church. The church itself had been built on the foundations of a temple erected by the Philistines, the ancient people who founded a federation of city-states in the current Gaza in the 12th century BC. If there is one architectural witness whose very existence disproves Israel’s alibi of an empty and primitive Palestine, it is the Omari Mosque, or rather its ruins.
Archaeology with an agenda
Cultural erasure as a tool of dominance has a long history, extending beyond warfare or even physical violence. It exists on a spectrum that ranges from the seemingly peaceful to the extremely violent. At one end of this spectrum is the erasure that comes with antiquarianism: Western aristocrats or scholars who went on their ‘grand tour’ of the ‘Levant’ and the ’Orient’, taking home artefacts that go from vases to entire city gates, because they represent one of the early phases in the rise of civilisation, of which Europe was supposedly the absolute pinnacle. The artefacts were extracted from Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, or Greece and brought to Paris, London or Berlin. The local context was irrelevant as in their eyes the natives had no understanding or respect for these treasures. Bringing them ‘home’ was therefore an act of establishing the dominance of the West over the East and the South, in a passive-aggressive way.
Archaeology, however, can also be deployed in a much more actively aggressive way when it is used to create narratives that drive expansionist or exterminatory campaigns. Especially in what people in the West call the Middle East, the past has often been excavated not to complete our knowledge of how things were, but to radically edit and even falsify history. From the nineteenth century onward, destructive archaeological campaigns have been run to ‘prove’ the historicity of Biblical stories: Mount Ararat, the walls of Jericho, the Ark of Noah. Thereby not just neglecting but also destroying anything that contradicts the narrative or has nothing to say about it.
The utter neglect and destruction of the remains of ancient Sumerian and Akkadian cities by the American forces in Iraq by bulldozing them or allowing the Iraq Museum of Antiquities to be looted, was caused by a combination of cynicism and christian evangelical inspired disdain for the 'pagan’ civilisations of Mesopotamia. Since the war, it has become more clear how the invasion of Iraq was seen as a Biblically ordained apocalyptic struggle between good and evil by President George W. Bush and his advisers. When criticised, the destruction of significant parts of Mesopotamian culture, was dismissed of ‘collateral damage’ or as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (who habitually attached Bible verses to his Iraq war memos) explained it: "Stuff happens and it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”
In Israel, the destruction of any layer of history that does not fall in line with the literalist interpretation of the Bible by Christian Zionism, that originated in Imperial Britain and the United States, or the ethnonationalist historiography of Jewish Zionism, that was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is less interested in understanding the past, as it is in accelerating the future.
The competing archaeological campaigns in and around the Temple Mount by Evangelical organisations from the United States and by Israeli State Institutions are not just aimed at denying the history and the rights of the Muslim worshippers. They also give cover to the ethnonationalist project of the Israeli state and its Western support in entire Palestine. To illustrate the intermingling of strategic aims with archaeology: Yigael Yadin, who made important discoveries of early Jewish literary sources, was the second chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces before he became Professor of archaeology at Hebrew University. The biblical archaeology by Evangelical Christians from the West and Zionist archaeology by Israeli institutions, fit in two overlapping but distinct apocalyptic visions that both entail rebuilding Solomon's Temple on the Temple Mount. According to both the evangelicals and the Jewish Religious Zionists this will bring all Jews of the world together in Israel. For the Evangelicals, this would cause the second coming of Jesus Christ and the conversion of all Jews to Christianity just in time for the end of all things.1 For the Religious Zionists, it would coincide with the coming of the Messiah, thereby ending all suffering and bringing the world together in the resurrection of the dead, an end to disease and death, eternal peace and harmony and so on. The joining hands over Eretz Israel is a feat of strategic theological pragmatism by two millennialist belief systems that differ in their visions of apocalypse but wholly agree on that there is no place for Palestine in this world.
The apocalyptic fantasies have provided moral license to commit horrifying crimes of aggression, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. Connected to the rebuilding of the temple are plans to create a ‘Greater Israel’, from the Nile to the Euphrates, or alternatively, as the English Christian Zionist William Hechler would have it, from the Suez Canal to the mountains of Cappadocia. Archaeology in this part of the world has an agenda, to say the least.2
Rare earth minerals, shipping lanes and the Antichrist
A similar co-dependency of geopolitical and apocalyptic motivations can be found in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The fight is as much about rare earth minerals, as it is about shipping lanes. And as much about tactical buffer zones as it is about the right to exist of the Ukrainian people, in the future and in the past. Russian missiles and bombs are aimed at Ukrainian churches and historic cities, such as burial mounds and archaeological remains that document a specific history of Ukrainian civilisation, connected to a historic region stretching between the Baltic and the Black Sea.[1] In the eyes of the Russian invader, Ukraine has to be reduced to its only legitimate role, that of an early predecessor of the Eurasian Empire that Putin wants to (re)create. To Russia, there is no such thing as a Ukrainian nation and never has been. Just as the Israeli government and its many supporters in the West say of the Palestinians.
The erasure of Ukraine is partially informed by a pre-apocalyptic idea of Russia as the last defender of Christianity against the Barbaric hordes from the west, whose decadence has led them to both fascism and homosexuality. The Russian Orthodox Church endorses this role for Russia as the defender of the faith and, therefore, Moscow as the third Rome, after Rome and Constantinople. The vision of Putin and Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ (that includes Ukraine), is different from the Judeo-Christian one. It does not set up the end time, but it sees itself as the ‘Katechon’, whose role it is to put off the Apocalypse, by stopping the Antichrist (that would be us) from expanding eastward. And it is the fate of the Ukrainian nation that it takes up space on the battlefield where the forces of darkness and light meet for the ultimate battle. And then there are rare earth minerals, domestic power struggles, and shipping lanes, of course.
The destruction of cultural artefacts is not always aimed at removing entire nations or people from history. Often, it is surgical and aimed at a single episode. Ukrainian survivors of the Russian onslaught found out that Russian occupiers systemically destroyed dozens of monuments that had been erected in the past decades to commemorate the Holodomor. This massive man-made famine killed 3,5 to 5 million people between 1932 and 1933 and is internationally recognised as a genocide committed by the Stalin-led Soviet Union. Denying its very reality is a crucial aspect of the erasure of the Ukrainian people and of the narrative of Russia’s destiny as the saviour of civilisation.
Erasure of the erasure
This brings us to the ultimate form of cultural erasure: the erasure of the erasure itself from history. A genocide is only complete when its completion has been forgotten and covered by the dust of time. The erasure of erasure happens in many ways, by destroying or building over the ruins of villages or towns emptied of Palestinians. But it also happens by forbidding reporters to enter the battlefields or by outlawing discussion of the Nakba, as some city councils in Germany have done.3 Of course, it happened when the Nazi forces destroyed the extermination camps, but it is also happening as part of the ‘Russification’ of Russian-occupied cities in Ukraine, where ruins are either wiped from the earth completely or ‘restored’ as icons of Russian culture, with their own falsified history. The bloody business of destroying a sovereign nation or a people has to be washed from the hands of the aggressor.
Therefore, remembering, reconstructing, and reliving become acts of resistance and survival. A spectacular example of this was presented by Valera Prorizna of the Centre for Spatial Technologies. The group painstakingly reconstructed in a 3D model, how the Mariupol Drama Theatre had been used by thousands of people as a refuge from their bombed-out houses during the Russian siege of the city. By translating thousands of hours of testimonies, and hundreds of thousands of photos and movies into a 3D digital model, every bed, temporary studio, meeting space, kitchen, and hospital room that had been improvised inside the huge neoclassical building was recorded. Russia ultimately destroyed the building, by bombing it while the refugees were inside, and has now restored it as a Russian Theatre for Russian colonists who moved into the city, with all traces of the war and the thousands of dead erased. The whole world can however still visit the building as it was lived in by the refugees, by moving through the ghostly 3D model, with every towel, table and bed meticulously represented. It is a literal memory palace, a digital spatial interface to access endless hours of testimony of what really happened.
Reconstruction as a patient and humble work of remembrance is the polar opposite of the erection of monuments and icons. The Mariupol Drama Theatre shows that it is the minutiae of everyday life that carry the most weight in bringing back erased memories. Riwaq, a Ramallah based Palestinian organisation that has been doing restoration projects in Palestine for 35 years. Hiba Omari presented to us an overview of the many projects they have realised in Palestinian villages, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, painstakingly, indeed brick by brick, restoring and reviving Palestinian vernacular architecture. When restoration projects are bombed only months after being finished, it could seem like a Sisyphean task. But it is precisely in the process of research, redesign, and restoration that lies its value as resistance against the ongoing genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people, more than in a wholesale and definitive reconstruction of an idealised past. In its decades of sometimes futile seeming restoration of often lowly vernacular buildings and spaces, Riwaq has created an enormous knowledge bank about Palestinian culture, architectural typologies, building technology, and materials.
Riwaq reminded us that erasure of culture is the ultimate top-down strategy, operating through grand abstractions and the mythification of history. Resisting this erasure does not happen top down, however, but is a matter of affirming the lived-in reality of memories from the bottom up.
1 "For American Evangelicals Who Back Israel, ‘Neutrality Isn’t an Option’ Conservative Christians’ strong connection to Israel forms the backbone of Republican support, and is tied to beliefs about biblical promises and prophecy.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/us/american-evangelicals-israel-hamas.html
2 “Hechler unfolded his Palestine map in our [train] compartment and instructed me by the hour. The northern frontier is to be the mountains facing Cappadocia, the southern, the Suez Canal. Our slogan shall be: "The Palestine of David and Solomon.” Marvin Lowenthal's translation of The Diaries of Theodore Herzl (New York: Dial Press, 1956), p. 124 [citation copied from Haddad 1974]
3 Younes, A., & Al-Taher, H. (2024). Erasing Palestine in Germany’s Educational System: The Racial Frontiers of Liberal Freedom. Middle East Critique, 33(3), 397–417. https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2024.2383444