dIn the summer of 2015, the Islamic State (IS) organization carried out the demolition of two of the main temples in Palmyra, central Syria, which unleashed an unprecedented wave of condemnation around the world. Irina Bokova, director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), denounced “ “an intolerable crime against civilization” WHO ” It will never erase 4,500 years of history. “.
However, for the previous four years, the international community had not expressed comparable outrage at the devastation inflicted by Bashar Al-Assad’s regime on Syria’s priceless heritage: the ancient city of Aleppo had been disfigured, the historic center of Homs It was nothing more than ruins, the Roman site of Apamea was handed over to looters and even Palmyra had already suffered abuse from soldiers, although in much smaller proportions than under the jihadist yoke. In fact, these destructions were not perceived as a specific aggression, but rather as a consequence of the brutal repression by the Syrian dictatorship of all forms of opposition. This confusion was fueled by the fact that Bashar Al-Assad and his followers, unlike IS, did not claim such destruction, considered collateral damage of a campaign described as “anti-terrorist.”
It is the same record that allows the Israeli army to mitigate the impact of the blows to Gaza’s heritage, including it in the offensive that has been supposed, for a year, to lead to “total victory” against Hamas. We know that this offensive is taking place far from the gaze of the foreign press, which is prohibited from accessing Gaza, and that it has already caused the death of almost 2% of the local population, as well as the total or partial destruction of two thirds. of the buildings.
The war against heritage
Such bloodletting could only be carried out by reducing the Palestinian enclave to nothing more than a bastion of Palestinian Islamists, thus obscuring its centuries-old history. However, the oasis of Gaza has been since ancient times a commercial crossroads between Asia and Africa, coveted by all the empires that wanted, from the Levant, to take over Egypt, and vice versa. Since the end of IImy millennium BC, Gaza constitutes, with four other cities, today located in Israeli territory, a federation called Philistia, after the Philistine people that constitute it (it is an echo of this Philistia that, centuries later, the Romans will call the province which covers the south of the “Palestine” Levantine coast.
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