30/06/2025
In a lengthy article titled "Historicide in Gaza: Israel’s destruction of official and
personal archives is changing how Palestine’s story can be told", published in New
Historicide in Gaza - New Lines, Lynda Wilson, Cultural Editor at New Lines
Magazine, reminds us that:
“The total destruction of Gaza is hard to imagine, the numbers too astronomical to
comprehend. With more bombs dropped than the equivalent of six Hiroshimas,
schools, universities, government buildings, homes, hospitals, religious sites, and
infrastructure lie in ruins. As I write these lines, more than 57,000 people have been
killed, the vast majority of them civilians. Seven out of ten were women or children.
Tens of thousands more have been injured, and hundreds of thousands are
surviving in makeshift tents, desperately lacking food due to famine caused by the
destruction of crops and Israel’s blockade of aid. Hundreds of Palestinians,
including children, have been shot while trying to retrieve food from distribution
centers. ‘There is no life left in Gaza,’ wrote Neveen Nofal to me from the north of
the Gaza Strip. ‘.’Every day, death stares us in the face.”
She adds:
“To these well-documented acts of violence, I would like to add another form of
destruction inflicted upon the people of Gaza: the loss of their history – not the
heritage of their long archaeological and historical past, preserved underground and
in museums, but the history yet to be written, the archives upon which historians
rely to reconstruct past lives. We are witnessing what could be called historicide:
the attempt to eliminate any possibility of future historical work. Just as the last
twenty months of bombings follow the pattern of Israeli policy toward Palestinians,
the destruction of history follows a historical arc going back to the creation of
Israel.”
It seems appropriate to recall that, in December 2023, the CISH (International
Committee of Historical Sciences), then chaired by Professor Edoardo Tortarolo
(President of the Scientific Committee of the Luigi Einaudi Foundation in Turin),
decided during a meeting of its Executive Council to hold its centenary annual
conference in 2026 in Jerusalem (Occupied Palestine).
In response to my letter of resignation from the organization, should it maintain that
decision, I received a reply from Professor Antoon De Baets, President of the
ICHTH (International Commission of Historians of Theory and Historiography), of
which I was a member, stating:
“Nevertheless, the ICHTH will participate in the CISH Conference in Jerusalem in
2026. Until proven otherwise, the colleagues organizing the Conference are not
responsible for the current catastrophe and therefore do not deserve a boycott.
Moreover, they have been preparing the Conference for many years: I do not know
whether a transfer from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv is possible or desirable…”
Throughout 2025, the denials and justifications of CISH members eventually led the
International Committee to relocate the centenary meeting to Leipzig, Germany,
from August 27 to 30, 2026.
It remains to be seen whether, as critical historians, the members of this esteemed
Council will denounce the genocide suffered by the Palestinian people in Gaza and
the deliberate erasure of their memory through the destruction of archival
collections — a process that began in 1948 in Occupied Palestine and continued in
1983 in Beirut
(The "Nakba": Theft and Destruction of Palestinian Archives and Documents –
Belgian-Palestinian Association).
