Emilio Distretti: With Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza, and the parallel developmentalist plans being drawn up by foreign countries, what does it mean—and what does it take—to do the work of heritage preservation in Palestine today?
Shatha Safi: The conditions you describe are unfortunately not new to Palestine, or the region as a whole. What we do and how we do it lays the foundation for alternative visions, for alternative redevelopment plans to be made. And what that takes is creating facts on the ground. The high level of uncertainty that we work with requires us to remain level-headed. Protecting cultural heritage gives us a window of hope, but it’s also quite challenging, because it’s not uncommon for our work and our people to be directly targeted by settler colonial violence. On top of this, there are always present obstacles like mobility restrictions, limited access to heritage sites, and more.
Hiba Omari: Many of the plans you mention don’t include Gazans as leaders of the reconstruction process. We prepare for different scenarios that can be led by the experts and workers of Gaza, who are already trying as much as possible to preserve what can be preserved, to assess and document cultural heritage while also trying to survive. What has been beneficial over the past two years is communicating with different international bodies who are interested in supporting the reconstruction of cultural heritage in Palestine. Cultural Emergency Response (CER) and the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage (ALIPH), for instance, have contributed to damage assessments and emergency interventions, as well as supporting local workers in Gaza. This kind of international support can also help put pressure on their own governments.
Nick Axel: I love how you're speaking about your work as anticipatory work. What kinds of techniques do you use for this?
HO: Some of them are very technical. We generally rely on photos to document what's going on. We have some local partners in Gaza who have created building damage and risk assessment reports, but many of these sites are very hard to access. We also have a lot of archival material from the book by Nihad Al Moghani that we published back in 2007, The Architectural Heritage of Gaza. We're also using maps to try and map out where each heritage site is located and what has happened to it. We’re trying to use numbers, but we rely a lot on our local partners in Gaza. They not only have the knowledge but also the memories. They are the ones who know what it means to lose a building such as the Great Omari Mosque. They are the ones who know what it means to lose the Basha Palace. These are not just religious or historic sites. We have also been creating a guidelines booklet that is meant to help guide in the reconstruction process after a ceasefire. The booklet, which is still in process and under review, contains guidelines and examples of sections from cultural heritage in Gaza’s Old City, as well as different categorizations of neighborhoods, souqs, mosques, etc.
SS: In the context of Gaza, as we've been dealing with genocide, starvation, and daily mass killings, allocating resources for the protection of stones, artifacts, or manuscripts has at times felt insane. While we deeply and truly believe that cultural heritage is at the core of the Palestinian struggle, we also need a different approach for heritage rescue in Gaza, an approach that looks at the humans, the heritage practitioners, as a priority. Heritage is not just about preserving knowledge and narratives; it is also a tool for recovery and healing.
NA: Within a context of such extensive and extreme destruction and violence, has your thinking changed about what is heritage and what is not?
SS: I'm not sure it has changed dramatically. In some points, on the contrary, it has emphasized the way that we're already thinking and approaching heritage. We have never dealt with heritage as static stones; we're always looking at the what is behind the stone, what the stone means either for socioeconomic development or for cultural narratives or Indigenous knowledge. And at some point, we’ve found that heritage becomes the only thing that matters, because it has meaning not only for the past, but also for the future. When Israel first started attacking Gaza in 2023, our colleagues at the Municipality of Gaza City started sending us material from their archives—maps, tons of maps. They sent us the things they wanted to keep, because they thought they would be safer in the West Bank. This was really shocking to us, being confronted with this understanding of what is important to people.
ED: What has it been like to continue this work amid the widespread devastation and suffering in Gaza?
SS: Two or three months into the war, we really felt lost. We were unable to do anything. We would come into the office, talk to each other, support each other, cry sometimes, and also talk to people, our friends in Gaza, share the news with them, because we had internet. But eventually we started working with our teams in Gaza on specific projects, like mapping or site documentation. Some of those people were eventually able to leave to Egypt, and the first thing they said when they left was that we gave meaning to their daily life. They were unable to understand the meaning of their life until the moment we gave them tasks to work on, documenting heritage. We shouldn’t underestimate how important of a role heritage plays in our well-being and identification, not just as Palestinians but as humans.
HO: We restored a building in Gaza in 2014 (Al-Saqqa), a family home, which was almost completely destroyed at the end of 2023. Following this, members of the family started contacting us asking for images. Heritage is not just about mosques or churches, it's also about family homes. When we work on projects, we get so much information and memories from families, or merchants, or shop owners. They are the ones who tell us how important it is, for instance, to reconstruct their shops.
NA: Do you think that any of the buildings that have been rebuilt during previous reconstruction plans after previous waves of violence and destruction in Gaza will ever be considered heritage?
SS: This is something we need to consider not only because of the genocide in Gaza but also because of the rapid evolution of cities and villages in the West Bank following the Oslo Accords. We have always flexible on how we identify heritage. You can't understand the city of Ramallah just by looking at a building that was built in 1940 or 1932. Heritage has to do with the whole feeling of a place. It has to do with the language, the relation between what was built in the 1920s and what was built in the 1800s. The question is always how heritage has evolved over time and how it can be seen in the future. But there's an important element that is often forgotten or marginalized when considering heritage, which is beauty and the legitimate right to enjoy beauty as humans. In many cases of adaptive reuse of restoration, buildings give their inhabitants strength because of their beauty. The building that our offices are located in is a good example of this. It has been our shelter during the war because it is beautiful and respects our humanity. It has a garden, where we can witness the almond trees blossom. Another example is Basma Society for Culture and Arts in Gaza. Basma lost their premises in the war in 2021 and we restored another building for them in the same year. The building is still there, and they're still functioning as a place for theater, as a place providing food packages. They relate to this building as a shelter, and I really think that has to do with the fact that they find beauty in it because it is a beautiful building. So, heritage is also about having a decent space for people to live.
NA: I find it really important how you're talking about heritage as a pragmatic, basic thing. It's something that is felt on a very intimate level. But I'm curious, how is your work on documenting and preserving the heritage of individual buildings being complemented by a more legal framework?
SS: This has also always been the case because you don't have a real functioning government in Palestine. So there has always been a burden on civil society to work on a national level. There are no legal frameworks. Nobody's talking about heritage on the national level, and we're facing an increasingly fragmented geography that we need to challenge. One example of how we have been thinking on a national scale would be the documentation of 50,320 buildings across Palestine which started the Registry of Historic Buildings (1994–2004). At that time, we did not know what we had, what sort of heritage we were protecting. This set a base for further planning. The registry also set the vision of the 50 Villages project (2005–15), which looked on a national scale at how targeting historic centers of Palestinian villages would protect at least 50 percent of all cultural heritage, would serve as a socioeconomic drive, and would challenge the fragmentation of Palestinian territory. RIWAQ was also part of the group that drafted the national heritage law twenty or so years ago, which was put in the drawers of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities for years until UNESCO came.
NA: How do you see the relationship between these two scales, the local and the national?
SS: People see restored buildings; they don't see the plans. So we have never been driven solely by a theoretical or conceptual approach. We always test things on the ground, working with new and experimental approaches. This is how we envision the road ahead for cultural heritage. But when we started, there was documentation for historic buildings or centers. There was no legal framework for protection, and there was a lot of destruction. So, we were trained to document, reconstruct, and reuse, but without zooming out it’s difficult to know what you’re doing and how to organize it in a more effective manner.
ED: Where do we begin today in order to make a Palestinian archive and the story of ongoing resistance and survival? What will the memorials of the future be—what should we choose to preserve and protect?
HO: This makes me think of how and why we document buildings. Even we in the West Bank are still far away from the destruction that’s been taking place in Gaza. So, we haven’t really had to think of what to do, or what to bring, if I have to leave my house? This is an ongoing question. Sometimes we laugh about it, but it's not funny. It's also very real. Every time I ask myself this question, of course I would bring my legal documents, passports, money, whatever I have. But I would also bring an image of a family member or someone, you know, something from my house. Losing one’s house is a big deal. It's not only about losing family members; we should not lose the fact that those people have lost their homes, their rooms, their sense of privacy. We have also thought about our own documentation and what it would mean to lose RIWAQ as a building. This year, we have also focused on trying to preserve our archives, digitizing them. This has entailed looking back at all of the maps, all of the images that we have, thousands of images that document the West Bank in particular, but also Jerusalem, 1948 lands, even different localities around the region. This project is very important for us, and I think many institutions have also been doing it. After the Gaza municipality entrusted us with their material, we also felt this kind of urgency to protect our own archive. We don’t know what will happen with it, but at least we have started.
