Try as it might, Israel could not destroy Palestinian culture and joy in Gaza

Submitted by Gregory Shupak on Tue, 09/01/2026 - 20:00 Victims of the Gaza genocide include countless artists, poets, filmmakers, educators and musicians - but the enclave's collective spirit will never die

Children dance in the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees, in the central Gaza Strip, on 1 October 2024 (Eyad Baba/AFP) Off

In 2012, the United Nations warned that the Gaza Strip might not be a “a liveable place” by 2020. As scholar Norman Finkelstein often commented, the UN meant physically uninhabitable, not unliveable in a “poetic sense”.

But the genocide that Israel began in 2023 is different.

The extermination campaign is not only about pulverising the Gaza Strip and killing Palestinians en masse. It can also be understood as a war on joy and love - one seemingly designed to make Gaza unliveable in a poetic sense.

Genocide is defined in part as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Israel has been shown over and over again to be imposing that biological destruction on Palestinians in Gaza.

Yet it is also inflicting “conditions of life” clearly calculated to bring about Palestinians’ cultural destruction - to make the enclave spiritually dead, soulless. The aim, it seems, is to make life in Gaza so barren and atomised that the Palestinians living there will leave, submit or die.

In July, Israel killed Mohamed al-Wahidi, a Palestinian aid worker who organised World Cup watch parties. He was, according to his family, on his way to watch Egypt play Argentina at a screening of the game he helped make accessible to large numbers of people in Gaza City.

The Israeli air strike killed at least three other people, including brothers Fari and Hamza al-Deri, aged eight and 10, who were on their way home from playing football. In February, the Palestinian Olympic Committee reported that more than 1,000 Palestinian athletes had been killed, and 265 sports facilities damaged or destroyed, since Israel began its October 2023 offensive.

At their best, sports are about leisure, fitness, community, and individual and collective excitement - precisely the joie de vivre a genocide seeks to annihilate.

Assault on aesthetics

In the same vein, Israel has killed Palestinian artists such as Mohammed Sami Qariqa, Heba Zagout and Amna al-Salmi, in addition to filmmaker Ismail Abu Hatab. Israeli forces also snuffed out oil painter Dorgham Quraiqi, and Dina Khaled Zaarab, whose portraits immortalised Gaza’s martyrs.

They killed poets and novelists like Refaat Alareer, Hiba Abu Nada and Nour Hajjej, along with writers and actors like Inas al-Saqa and Rashad Abu Sakhila. Israeli snipers also gunned down Elham Farah, an 84-year-old musician and teacher.

Among the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed were guitarists Sha’ban al-Dalu and Yusuf Dawas, percussionist Akram al-Ajl, rapper Saree Ibrahim, 14-year-old violin student Lubna Alyan, and popular adolescent singer Hassan Ayyad.

These are attacks on sites of beauty, of collective enrichment and enchantment, of contemplation and tranquility - attacks on Palestinians as a people

Assaults on aesthetics can bring about conditions of life that threaten to destroy the population not only physically, but culturally and spiritually too.

The Israeli state has likewise slain dozens of academics, including the internationally renowned physicist Sufyan Tayeh, historian Nasser Ismail al-Yafawi, visual arts lecturer Nesma Abu Shaira of Al-Aqsa University, and gynaecologist Sirin al-Attar, a professor at the Islamic University of Gaza.

Israel has destroyed every university in the Gaza Strip, and damaged or ruined more than 97 percent of schools. The vast majority of all educational facilities will require either full reconstruction or major rehabilitation to become functional again, according to Unicef.

In addition, Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed hundreds of educators, including Ghada Rabah, a high-school English teacher at Holy Family School.

Learning and knowledge production are not only essential to cultural reproduction; they, and the labour that generates them, are among the greatest senses of reward, pride and satisfaction available to the human species.

Cultural heritage targeted

Washington’s beloved client state has also wrecked majestic mosques and churches. It destroyed the Central Archives of Gaza, home to 150 years of historical records; the Gaza Municipal Public Library; and the more than 700-year-old Al-Omari Mosque Library, among other libraries in the enclave.

Israel’s onslaught shattered Al-Qarara Museum, which housed roughly 3,000 artefacts dating back to the Canaanites, and left almost nothing of Pasha Palace, an 800-year-old museum with golden limestone walls.

US-backed Israeli attacks have additionally decimated Gaza’s contemporary art spaces, and levelled the Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center, a brutalist structure best known for its theatre.

They pulverised Al-Baqa Cafe, described in +972 Magazine as “a cherished seaside refuge in western Gaza City”. They turned Thai Restaurant, which had been the last restaurant still open in Gaza City, from a “bustling gathering place into a panorama of death”, according to a Drop Site News report.

Israeli strikes ravaged Al-Mathaf hotel’s manicured palm trees and cacti garden, bombed the Old Town Antique Store, and decimated the Samaritan Hammam, an ancient bathhouse. They transformed beaches from places of respite to places of despair and slaughter.

These are attacks on sites of beauty, of collective enrichment and enchantment, of contemplation and tranquility - attacks on Palestinians as a people.

Poetically liveable

Israel has, moreover, pounded Khan Younis’s historic Grain Market - once a bustling commercial space alive with the smells of spices and dried herbs - into dust and silence. It battered Al-Qaisariyya Market, a trading centre since antiquity that in the modern era became Gaza City’s economic heart, a place where brides often shopped for wedding rings and jewellery.

Occupation forces have struck bakeries, greenhouses and gardens. Food, of course, generates not only sustenance, but also pleasure and togetherness.

Archiving Gaza in the present: The quest to preserve Palestinian memory Read More »

Israeli soldiers have also fondled female mannequins, as well as women’s lingerie and underwear. They have looted bicycles, stolen and smashed toys, burned candy, and attacked playgrounds.

On one level, these crimes represent symbolic assertions of control over Palestinian women’s bodies and sexuality. They are assaults on childhood, functioning as displays of dominance over Gaza’s young; over its future. On another level, such barbarism exemplifies that this genocide is a war on love, on desire, on youthful revelry.

Despite Israel’s ferocious assault on all facets of Palestinian life, Gaza’s residents continue to find ways to create art, to make music, to perform theatre, and to play football.

While Palestinians endure mass funerals, they also have mass weddings: in Deir al-Balah this past April, 300 couples were married in a joint celebration.

Amid the carnage, Palestinians preserve books and heritage sites, restore houses of worship, and find ways to teach and learn. They have babies. They write literature, produce films, perform Dabke and breakdance, refusing to give up the struggle to create their own conditions of life - to make their world poetically liveable.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Israel's genocide in Gaza Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0