The darkness through which we are groping is too thick for us to make any pronouncements about it; we cannot even say that it is doomed to last.1
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955
Colonization reshapes both physical and psychic space. In situations of power asymmetry and profound helplessness, even the smallest acts become significant in restoring meaning to a shattered world. Reflecting on Gaza's recent experiences, particularly since October 2023, repair in the context of genocide emerges as an act of defiance—a means to reclaim significance through modest gestures, continuously affirming life amidst recurring trials.
In Arabic, the concept of repair differs markedly from its English counterpart in conservation. It is not about restoring something to its original state or achieving pristine recovery. Instead, it involves urgent, resourceful, and survival-oriented actions. The Arabic words رتق (ratq, to darn) and ترقيع (tarqeei, to patch) connote not meticulous preservation, but improvised mending of torn fabric. Here, repair signifies survival rather than nostalgia—a refusal to allow rubble to be forgotten or erased, born out of necessity.
This approach to repair challenges prevailing norms of disposability, where objects, structures, and even entire cities are demolished to make way for the new. In Gaza and other colonized regions, repair is not merely a choice but a tactic of resistance. It repurposes historical remnants, rearranges rubble, and asserts value where others perceive waste or a “demolition site.”2
The Architecture/Time Paradox
Gaza presents a profound challenge: How can one envision creation in a context where the future is systematically undermined and every act of rebuilding carries the risk of destruction? To repair is to reject the linearity of time and resist the inevitability of loss and disappearance. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, Palestinians are propelled forward while facing backward—yearning for a mythical time machine to undo things, “while the pile of debris before [them] grows skyward.”3 Here, reconstruction is not a symbol of progress but a return to ground zero—an insistence on cyclical labor despite the looming threat of devastation. They live their own “Tristes Tropiques,” where “nothing is possible, so all is possible,” as Lévi-Strauss once observed concerning Indigenous people facing tremendous colonial pressures.4 This ongoing, seemingly futile effort is a quiet rebellion: the will to persist, even when outcomes are all too predictable.
Post-genocide recuperation transcends mere recovery; it is not a quest to restore wholeness or achieve closure. It entails reclaiming space, reconstructing memory, and reshaping identity upon the ruins of displacement, the artifacts of misery. It necessitates redefining belonging—not as a territorial claim, but as an embodied, socio-spatial engagement.
Against Imported Dreams
Gaza is not a blank slate. Postwar visions—from AI-generated cities to Yasser Arafat’s dream of a “new Singapore”—erase its history, its scars, and its people. Colonial violence cannot be concealed behind glass towers or neoliberal urbanism. These speculative futures, often rendered by algorithms or borrowed from 1990s developmentalist fantasies, impose foreign urban templates onto a landscape shaped by siege, survival, and memory, attempting to overwrite layered histories with hallucinations of shimmering facades. But Gaza is not Singapore. Nor Berlin. Nor London. It cannot—and must not—be remade in another’s image.
Recuperation is site-specific, time-bound, and politically defiant. It arises from space’s geography, its people, and its pains. To rebuild is not to restore some imagined past, nor to chase someone else’s vision of modernity or enlightenment. Recuperation here is an act of decolonization: slow, fragmented, insistently local. It honors both what endures and what has been lost. In this context, repair is both traumatic and visionary. It binds grief and hope in the same gesture.
Purchasing One’s Own Belongings, Twice!
My wife has long dreamed of reclaiming her father’s house in Al-Ramleh—now within present-day Israel—which she fled during the Nakba at age four. Once, she joked about entering the lottery, fantasizing about winning enough to buy it back. Later, in a more pragmatic moment, she called our Jewish lawyer—who represented us in a family unification case before Israel’s Ministry of Interior—to ask whether purchasing the house would be legally possible.
Is it possible to buy the same belongings twice? Is it possible to construct a home twice? Is it possible to be displaced, dispossessed, de-territorialized twice? This is where hope meets absurdity, and longing becomes procedural. Even the most intimate dreams are haunted by colonial bureaucracies.
I still recall the words of a woman returning to her home in northern Gaza during the brief ceasefire at the beginning of 2025 telling an Al Jazeera reporter: “We will return to our beautiful destroyed homes.” The contradiction of this statement is staggering—and true. A destroyed home, yet beautiful. Memory resists logic. Beauty clings to what has been erased. Where neither the past nor the present can rightly be called beautiful, beauty only endures in memory.
Some twenty-three years earlier, in Jenin, Jenin, Mohammad Bakri’s 2002 documentary, a young girl stands amid the ruins of her refugee camp following the Battle of Jenin and says, “The [Jenin] camp is our soul. We will rebuild it.” There is no illusion of permanence in refugee camps—they were always meant to be temporary. Yet in that moment of devastation, rebuilding becomes a renewal of meaning amid senselessness. It is not the much-awaited return to the village of origin, but going-back in the sense of recognition and self-assurance. To rebuild is to assert presence and continuity in the face of intended erasure.
Why Repair Amid Genocide?
In the early days of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, reports began to surface about historical buildings being razed, archaeological sites being flattened, architectural memory reduced to smoke and dust. Each headline carved into my skin as the violence it reported on carved into the city. As someone trained in restoration, every destruction hit a nerve. These were not just structures—they were past times made visible in the present. Their erasure severed more than stone; it collapsed the continuity of memory.
Among the destroyed sites was the Al-Saqqa Mansion, which I had helped restore over a decade ago. When this Ottoman-era jewel, a living archive of domestic grace and communal artistry, was bombed, I could not bring myself to look at the photos. I refused to let the memory of its arches, its thresholds, be overwritten by a heap of debris. I needed to preserve the image of what once stood—not for nostalgia, but for the loyalty of what once was.
My colleague A. Saqqa, a descendant of the house’s namesake, sighed: “It seems they destroyed the house… The damage is massive. There may be nothing left to recover.” I answered, “We have the plans. We have the images. We have the rubble. We can rebuild.” And then: “We must—just as we must with all that was erased.”
In Gaza, reconstruction is not just spatial. It is existential. To reconstruct is to perform psychosocial repair. In a geography so compressed, where every stone bears witness, and where the human and nonhuman intermesh, repair becomes more than a technical act. The restorer becomes a social scientist, archivist, witness, healer. Not only stitching stone to stone, but threading memory, meaning, continuity. Reconstruction is not only physical, but also metaphysical.
Since early days of the war on Gaza, I kept thinking of Europe after the world wars—cities flattened, then painstakingly remade. In Leuven, where I studied restoration, buildings still bear the inscription “1920”—a quiet scar, a refusal to forget the rupture of World War I. I thought of Beirut. Mosul. Dresden. London. Stalingrad. Berlin. Warsaw. Cities made into palimpsests—trauma etched beneath reconstruction. I thought of Mostar Bridge, rebuilt stone by stone after its destruction in the genocidal wars of the Balkans. As if nothing had happened (destroyed). As if everything had (rebuilt).
Those cities were repaired. Wounded, yes, but rewoven into the cultural and national imaginary. Their centers restored not only for the past and history, but for the future and the present. So why not Gaza? Why must Gaza remain suspended in rubble, memorialized only in loss, never granted the dignity of reconstruction? Why must Gaza’s ruins be read only as ruins and the past, instead of openings onto restoration and the future? To repair in Gaza—indeed, in all of Palestine—is not to erase grief, but to sculpt memory into form. It is grief given a shape; hope given structure to be enacted.
This is because ruins resist, dust remembers, and rubble is not nothingness. Like Leuven’s inscriptions, like Mostar’s reassembled bridge, Gaza’s reconstruction must be palimpsestic—layering memory over ruin, refusing to concede to absence.
The Abnormal Normalized… the Ordinary Abnormalized?
When Gaza has been subjected to unrelenting warfare for over 600 days—its people exposed to nearly every imaginable form of inhumanity—the line between normal and abnormal begins to dissolve. The binary collapses. We, the ordinary humans, begin to think in extraordinary ways, grasping for logic in a landscape of the surreal.
Seven years ago, my wife Nur and I purchased an old Ottoman-era house in Birzeit, a nineteenth-century structure whispered to have once hosted the first Greek Orthodox school in the area. Some say Abdel Qader Al-Husseini, the famed Palestinian resistance leader who fell for Jerusalem during the 1948 war, once hid in its Roman tomb. We began with consolidation—securing the structure, gently peeling away the damage accrued over decades of natural and artificial deteriorations.
By October 2023, our restoration plans were complete. The architectural drawings were finalized. The permits secured. We were ready to begin work. Then came Al-Aqsa Flood, and everything ground to a halt. Not because we lost faith, but because the war swallowed every horizon. As Gaza burned, we asked ourselves: does it even make sense to restore a house in a collapsing world? Could we afford to pour our savings into stone and lime, when tomorrow might demand those same resources for food, for medicine, for rent—or for the bribes necessary to keep our family from being torn apart? What if the war reached the West Bank? Nearly a year passed before we picked up the work again.
My wife used to say: “If we leave our savings in the bank, they’ll vanish in the next economy collapse—or Israel will seize the deposits [just as it withholds the Palestinian Authority’s tax revenues under the 1994 Paris Protocol].” “Better,” she argued, “to bury our savings in the lime mortar and sand. In stone. Better to pay masons and carvers than bankers. And if the Israelis one day seize our home [like they did with my father’s house in Al-Ramleh in 1948], let them take it in perfect shape. Let them see how meticulously we cared for it. Let them never accuse us of neglect or squalor.”
Her words echoed the stories I’ve heard all my life—of homes left behind during the Nakba, immaculate and furnished, gardens still in bloom. Jewish militias, unable to reconcile this beauty with the myth of a barren land, convinced themselves these must be remnants of crusaders. Arabs, they reasoned, could not have built such refinement. A polished floor became a quiet act of resistance. A carved lintel, a rebuttal to a myth.
I was reminded, too, of my daughter’s driving instructor. One day, as I photographed historic Palestinian homes in Talbiya and Qatamon—neighborhoods now part of West Jerusalem—he glanced over and shook his head. “Fully furnished,” he muttered. “Cleaned. Food still warm on the stove. They just walked in and took it.”
Reconstructing a Homeland in a Refugee Camp
Genocide, destruction, and erasure can also ignite their opposites: survival, reconstruction, and remembering. These do not wait for the dust to settle; they emerge amid rubble and ruin. After all, what is archaeology if not the act of rereading and rearranging history when the records are lost and the bearers of narratives are marginalized or too consumed by survival?
In the heart of Jalazone refugee camp, a young activist named Mohammed once shared with me what he called “a wonderful project”: the reconstruction of his village of origin, Beit Nabala—now located in what is today Israel. He scrolled through hundreds of photos from Nakba Day, May 15, 2008. For Palestinians, this is a day of mourning; for Israelis, a celebration of independence. On that day, the youth of Jalazone transformed the camp’s playground into a memoryscape; a recreation of daily life in pre-Nakba Beit Nabala.
Mohammed had collected artifacts from the pre-1948 era: wooden plows, grain mills, embroidered dresses, copper coffee pots, and traditional tools. These were not museum pieces. For him, they were living threads of identity—tangible links to a past that continued to shape his exiled present. Some of these objects he displayed in his small coffee shop, a quiet sanctuary of preservation and pride.
At the center of the project stood a traditional taboon, a communal clay oven used for baking bread. Nearby, a miniature water well stood like a storybook relic: part fairytale, part memory, part defiance. On opening day, elders gathered around it for hours, telling stories to children who had never seen their ancestral land. Coffee brewed, bread baked, and stories flowed—suspended between nostalgia and resilience, between what was and what could still be. Artifacts became acts of resistance. Space became a communal suture.
“These aren’t just symbols,” Mohammed said. “They’re who we are. They anchor our memories in space. They give us a sense of belonging.” The taboon, the water well—these weren’t just forms; they were vessels of the village’s soul, containers of time and identity.
Reflecting on this, I came to see memory as more than a mental archive. It is lived and made material—through objects, gestures, rituals, and gatherings. Mohammed’s project wasn’t about preserving the past as frozen history; it was about activating it. Breathing it back to life. Gathering people around it. Bridging generations in the ruins of exile.
For the younger refugees—those who never walked the olive groves or drew water from the springs—the project became a portal. The well, idealized and scaled down, evoked memories of a time of abundance, standing in stark contrast to the everyday scarcity of camp life—including the scarcity of water itself.
The psychoanalytic take on memory as a gateway to the repressed and longed for was made concrete in that reconstructed water well. It was not just an architectural form; it was yearning. It materialized the dream of return, the demand for dignity, the desire for continuity. It channeled hope through reenactment.
Mohammed’s reconstruction of Beit Nabala shows us that places like the communal taboon and the village water well are not mere artifacts. They are foundations. They shaped social cohesion in the past, and they continue to shape identity and belonging in the present. They carry memory not as nostalgia, but as structure.
At its core, Mohammed’s work reveals how everyday practices—baking bread, telling stories, placing artifacts with care—can become vessels of resistance and rebirth. Memory persists not as sentiment, but as infrastructure. As collective resource. As living testament to a creative spirit that endures, even under siege.
Here, as in all acts of repair, a delicate thread runs between attachment and detachment—between honoring what was and what is. Driven by urgency, memory becomes a form of architecture, where community finds strength, unity, and a renewed sense of belonging. A homeland rebuilt in the heart of a refugee camp.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 260.
Khaldun Bshara, “Settler Colonialism Rebranded: Trump’s Gaza Plan and the Capitalist Logic of War,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, no. 142 (Spring 2025): 22–34.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257–58.
Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 260.
