From a tent in Gaza’s Al Mawasi, artist Raed Issa resorted to one of the oldest forms of storytelling. Using whatever tools he could find – charcoal salvaged from his studio destroyed in an air strike, hibiscus tea, pomegranate juice and scraps of cardboard – he set about drawing the scenes of every day life around him.
One drawing shows a father bending over to speak to his son, as the pair walk in search of water. The other is a portrait of an unknown woman wearing a traditionally embroidered Palestinian tunic, painted on used medical aid packaging.
The pictures are a nod to those painted by Palestinian modernists, who pioneered a nationalistic and nostalgic art that also preserved their fragile culture after the Nakba of 1948. But unlike his predecessors, Issa's images in a devastating war zone are anything but bucolic.
Issa is one of dozens of Palestinian artists, from Gaza and in the diaspora, to appear in Archiving Gaza in The Present, a new anthology of essays on Gaza’s art, culture, archaeology, environment and literature – and the need to preserve them from complete destruction and ethnic cleansing.
The book is edited by Venetia Porter, who recently retired from a long tenure as curator of Middle Eastern art at the British Museum, and Dina Matar, a professor of media studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. It is based on the papers of a conference held last year that tried to “make sense of the devastation of Gaza and its people”.
The concept of “archiving in the present” was developed. Records on paper, digitally and in private messages show the effects of the war, and by extension, a collective memory of Gaza that is coming close to erasure.
Matar and Porter describe it as “an everyday practice of care and commitment, a process of creative production and engagement", in their introduction to the 288-page book.
Also working under duress is artist Sohail Salem, who was in Gaza at the time of the book's publication where he was displaced to Deir Al Balah. There he lives in a storage room that he rents for $300. His frantic sketches produced in notebooks record the sprawling camps and the bloody war. One drawing recalls his attempts to save a 10-year-old girl's arm from amputation.
An archaeologist from Gaza, Fadel Al Utol, describes how he heard chilling explosions and gunfire from the site of the Roman cemetery in Jabalia where he was working on October 7, and how quickly the sites he was working on as director of excavations damaged by the war.
Preserving the memory of Gaza is not just confined to visual art and paintings. The book includes a contribution from open-source conflict investigator AirWars, and an analysis of the more than 16 terabytes of online data from social media accounts posting about the war. What emerges is the story of a conflict that has not only destroyed an area and its people, but also transformed digital culture.
Palestinian writers are already responding to the war, questioning the meaning of art when so much suffering is still going on. A new anthology of Palestinian fiction brings together 12 writers who reimagine events surrounding the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land during the formation of Israel in 1948.
The real events are fictionalised into literary devices typically associated with the horror genre: dreams, visions, ghosts, djinn, doppelgangers and divided selves. Called Palestine – 1, the anthology follows on publisher Comma Press’s earlier collection of science fiction short stories, Palestine + 100.
Yara Al Ghadban’s short story The Forest of Saffouryeh tells the story of a village that was ethnically cleansed in 1948. Its remains are buried beneath a pine tree forest surrounding a popular archaeological site of the same name, which Israelis call Tzipori.
“Once upon a time, I was a village. Lovers, rebels, poets came forth from my womb. A garden of languages breathed in my lungs … Beneath my feet geography folded, unfolded, layer upon layer of sand, rocks, rivers, hills, mountains, valleys. History has deposited the world’s dust upon my body,” the spirit says. “Remember I was neither victor nor villain. I was Saffouryeh. I slept at night, lulled to sleep by the voices of those who dwelled there.”
There are those who fear that the very fabric of society in Gaza has been irreparably destroyed, in addition to the widescale killing and devastation.
A new, “Dante-esque” Gaza was emerging from the “immense wasteland” that it was prior to the war, writes Prof Jean Pierre Filiu, a French historian of the Middle East and former diplomat, who spent more than 30 days in Gaza in December last year with the aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres.
“Abandoned human beings who come and go, often with the sole aim of waiting for hours for enough water or food to keep them alive for another day,” he wrote in A Historian in Gaza, a chronicle of his experience that was published last month.
“As soon as we start to talk, memories of the many ordeals they’ve endured come spilling out, dominated by descriptions of their lost home, back there, elsewhere, in the zones of combat and occupation, in the north, the centre, the south, until they found themselves cooped up in what used to be merely an immense wasteland,” he said.
This is Prof Filiu’s second book on Gaza, the first being a comprehensive history of the strip that is widely considered a classic. “I’d long understood that the Gaza I’d known and whose length and breadth I’d travelled had ceased to exist. Now this truth has come home to me,” he said.
The world had deluded itself in thinking it understood the war in Gaza and its society Prof Filiu insisted, during a talk in London this month.
“There is a big black hole called Gaza, where we let 2 million fellow human beings fall for nearly two decades, including two years of absolute horror in Gaza,” he said, speaking at Palestine House. “This is the first time I see a war zone without diplomats, without intelligence.”
Israel’s constant surveillance of the strip was no replacement for trying to understand the society, culture and political dynamics as a diplomat or journalist would. “Israel knows nothing about Gaza. Israel has no clue about Gaza … They have no human connection, no human source in Gaza. Everything they do, it's in the big fog,” he added.
“But because we are in a thicker fog than them, and because we tend to believe that they know, then it's really the blind and the one-eyed, and everybody's falling in the same trap."
Gaza voices
Gaza: the Dream and the Nightmare, by political scientists Julie Norman and Maia Carter Hallward, gives a detailed political history of the strip, focusing on the past three decades since the first Intifada.
The second half of the book is dedicated to the October 7 Hamas attacks and the war that ensued until the start of the second ceasefire in January 2025. The personal experiences of Gazans, who the authors interviewed at length, are woven into the history and placed “at the book’s heart” rather than those of “political elites”.
Among them is Noor, a student from Deir Al Balah who recalled how her family and countless others refused to leave their homes in the first weeks of war, fearing they would never be able to return. She and her family spent two weeks without access to fresh water, food and with the homes surrounding them “burned down". their home was eventually attacked as were others, as the Israeli military tried to coerce people to leave, she said.
Noor remembers the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and how her family moved southwards for the first time to visit family. Then, during the first Gaza war in 2008, she recalled how her parents used cardboard boxes to make an imaginary school for the children, and get them to forget the relentless bombing around them.
And during the Great March of Return, she saw how the Israeli military shot at thousands of non-violent protesters at the Gaza border, killings hundreds and leaving the others maimed for life. Gazans were keen to stress the vibrant culture of Gaza city, the strong sense of community in Gaza’s neighbourhoods and the “beauty and the promise” of its Mediterranean coastline,“ the authors write.
"These memories present more than mere nostalgia. Rather they comprise a historical record of what has been lost in the recent war."
Yet they add a chilling codicil. Their story is a living archive that itself has been depleted over months of widespread death and destruction.
