ReOrient Conference (Public keynote lecture)

Fighting Erasure: Digitizing Gaza's Genocide and the War on Lebanon is a comprehensive project documenting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and countering Zionist colonization and Orientalist myth-making by preserving local histories. Co-led by Drs. Jamila Ghaddar, Rami Zurayk and Hanine Shehadeh with local and global partners and collaborators, including Dr. Mariam Karim and Ghada Dimashq, the project includes advocacy and capacity building activities, archival rescue and recovery efforts, and the critical work of archiving and providing access to what may become one of the most thoroughly documented genocides in history. Outlining the radical decolonial feminist ethos underlying the project’s archiving in place framework (Ghaddar 2023), we consider how the destruction and remaking of all traces of the past – from archives and heritage sites to natural habitats and lived environments – are key to the process of indigenous erasure in Palestine and Lebanon. Home demolitions and the uprooting of olive trees are as iconic of Israeli colonization and genocide as checkpoints, torture and starvation. Such erasures include the 530+ villages and towns eradicated during the 1948 Nakba and the many more since; settlement expansion across the West Bank; and the wholesale levelling of Gaza along with the marginalization and building over of Palestinian lived environments within the 1948 borders. Similarly, the wholesale razing of Lebanese villages, historical and religious sites along with the burning of mountains, and appropriation of waterways is a decades’ old Zionist practice that seeks, unsuccessfully so far, to pave the way for the settlement and takeover of South Lebanon. We think through this contest over archives, land and memory to build on previous theorizing on working towards a decolonial archival praxis (Ghaddar & Caswell 2019) while emphasizing the need to cultivate hope in liberatory memory work.

Image credits: Detail of Europe from an Ottoman album (muraqqa’), 1730-1754. Chester Beatty Library, T 447; Recreation by Ibrahim Abusitta of an image of an IOF soldier posing for a picture in front of burning books, presumed to be the Central Library of the Islamic University of Gaza. Originally published in Briarpatch on July 23, 2024.