Palestine, war of memory. Palestina, memoria de guerra.

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The world is finally watching Palestine. But who gets to narrate its story?
Nour A Munawar, James Symonds, and Ihab Saloul
6 September 2026 

Photo: A woman holds a mobile phone during a film screening and entertainment event in Gaza’s al-Shati refugee camp, on 23 November 2025 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP)

As courts and sports stadiums turn towards Palestine, a quieter struggle runs beneath the headlines over memory, heritage and the right of Palestinians to speak for themselves

Palestine did not qualify for this summer's Football World Cup. It hardly needed to. Activists opened the tournament by forming a human Palestinian flag in Mexico City, and at the Egypt-Iran match in Seattle, Palestinian flags flew behind the goals while chanting for Gaza.

When Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nation that survived its own genocide, reached the knockout rounds, its supporters filled stadiums with choruses of "Free Palestine" for a people enduring another.

Palestine had no team on the pitch, yet became one of the tournament's defining presences. In the past three years, the Palestinian flag has emerged not only as a symbol denouncing Israeli genocide, but as a global gesture against victimisation, injustice and colonial oppression.

The tournament ended in July, with Palestine emerging as its true winner. 

That visibility now comes with a measure of accountability. Last September, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, where the health ministry has recorded more than 73,000 dead, around half of them women and children. Some 2,700 families have been wiped from the civil register.

The world's highest court is weighing a genocide case brought by South Africa and joined by more than a dozen states.

The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare.

Likewise, Palestine's growing visibility and support are reflected in global public opinion. Gallup found in February that, for the first time in a quarter-century of its polling, more Americans sympathise with Palestinians than with Israelis, while majorities in most of the 36 countries surveyed by Pew this spring view Israel negatively.

And yet, simultaneously, Palestinians are being exterminated; their homes and hospitals, schools, archives and universities are being destroyed - and with them the means to tell their own story.

This is the paradox of Palestine in a polarised world: never so widely seen, and never so thoroughly written about by others. The question is no longer only whether Palestine will be free, but who will have the permission and power to narrate it.

War on memory

Israel's destruction of Palestinian life has never been only physical. It has always carried a second purpose: to erase and unmake Palestinian memory.

As Munawar has argued elsewhere, the erasure of Palestinian heritage did not begin with this war. It reaches back to the 1948 Nakba and the villages emptied and renamed: an ongoing Nakba that Palestinian and Arab communities have long met with grassroots efforts to safeguard what state power seeks to erase.

By March 2026, Unesco had verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza - mosques, churches, museums and archives - though Palestinian officials put the true figure far higher. UN experts recorded the destruction of all 12 of Gaza's universities and the burning of the Central Archives of Gaza, and questioned whether it amounted to "scholasticide".

The assault also targets those documenting it: more than 200 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023, while the Committee to Protect Journalists says the Israeli military has carried out more targeted killings of the press than any other government's military on record. Foreign reporters, meanwhile, remain barred from Gaza.

Even the dead are not spared: Israeli forces have bulldozed and desecrated at least 16 of Gaza's cemeteries, unearthing bodies as they advanced. The UN's genocide commission likewise counted attacks on cultural and religious sites among the acts that constitute war crimes.

To burn a people's archives and raze their universities is not incidental to a genocide; it is central to their annihilation. In Gaza, that strategy has reached its most total form as an attack not only on the living and the dead, but on a people's capacity to speak for itself.

This is why Palestine has become the sharpest test of a term western universities use freely, often carelessly: "Decolonisation." As Munawar has argued, decolonising heritage means more than revising a syllabus or a reading list.

It requires redistributing the power to decide what is preserved, restored and remembered, and who does the remembering. No case makes that argument more starkly than Palestine's.

Competing narratives

The question of who does the remembering was central to the 12th annual conference of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, which we convened at the University of Amsterdam this June. Participants asked what decolonial thinking has disrupted, dismantled and dreamt anew - and whether those gains can hold as resurgent nationalisms press back.

One of the conference's two keynote panels, "Decoloniality in Palestine: Law and Narrative Sovereignty", brought together the international crimes scholar Alette Smeulers, the Genocide Convention specialist Marieke de Hoon and the Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb, author of Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible.

The panel proceeded from the premise that international law functions in Palestine not as a neutral arbiter but as another site of struggle. It also examined how the religious and cultural narratives of Christian Zionism, long used to justify dispossession, are themselves ripe for unsettling. Panellists challenged Europe's selective invocation of international law: quick to cite against adversaries, slow against allies.

What the conference kept returning to was a discomfort closer to home. For decades, western institutions have lent their authority to Palestinian erasure, too often treating Israeli accounts as taken-for-granted facts while dismissing Palestinian accounts as untrustworthy opinions, recasting a colonised people's dispossession as a quarrel between equals.

Panels on contested memories and competing narratives asked what it means for scholars, especially Arab and Palestinian scholars working in the West, to refuse that reflex and restore Palestinians as authors of their own knowledge.

That refusal is visible inside the lecture hall and beyond. From Columbia to Amsterdam, students have held protests and encampments demanding that their universities reckon honestly with the genocide.

The school has also launched a new book series, "Palestine: Past, Present and Future Narratives", edited by one of us (Saloul) and devoted to countering "Eurocentric, orientalist traditions and hegemonic modes of knowledge production" about Palestine.

For a place so relentlessly described by outsiders, no task matters more than reconstituting Palestinian authorship. Set against the scale of the loss, this is a modest instrument. But narrative sovereignty is built from exactly such work: the patient work of ensuring Palestinians speak in their own voice and are heard.

Rebuilding over the rubble

The question of authorship now hangs over Gaza's reconstruction. The so-called "Board of Peace", devised and chaired by Donald Trump with no Palestinian representation on its executive tier, has pledged billions and delivered almost nothing.

Meanwhile, glossy renderings of a "New Gaza" of towers and marinas circulate as if Gaza were a blank coast awaiting investors.

The consequences of that hierarchy have only become clearer since Hamas dissolved the committee through which it governed Gaza in July, passing day-to-day administration to a technocratic body that answers, ultimately, to the board.

Israel has even rejected the logo of that Palestinian committee because it resembles the Palestinian Authority's emblem. Not even the symbols of Palestinian administration escape the veto.

Gaza is not a blank coast.

To rebuild a place while killing the people to whom it belongs, and erasing what stood there before, is not recovery; it is ethnic cleansing by other means.

The region has been here before, and its rebuilt monuments offer both models and warnings.

Mostar's restored bridge and Mosul's al-Nuri mosque - rising again on its residents' terms - showed how reconstruction can support communal recovery. At Palmyra, by contrast, restoration was stage-managed into a spectacle of political power.

Rebuilding is always an argument over who owns the past, and it heals only when led by the people whose past it is.

In Gaza, narrative sovereignty has a concrete form: Palestinian-led reconstruction and heritage governance rather than a Palestinian-free board, the rescue and digitisation of archives, and communities deciding what is restored, what is memorialised and what is left standing as witness to Palestinian identity.

That work has begun in fragments, with Unesco mobilising $5.7m to stabilise damaged heritage sites, reopen learning spaces and support Gaza's journalists, against the $116.5m it says is needed.

The contest over Palestine's story will outlast this genocide, as it has outlasted every massacre and erasure before it. Walls can be levelled and archives burned; the demand to be remembered, and to do the remembering oneself, does not vanish with them.

The task, for scholars, students and the wider public alike, is to ensure that when Palestinians tell the story of what was done to them, and of who they mean to become, it is recognised, at last, as theirs to tell.

Nour A Munawar is a heritage and memory scholar at the University of Amsterdam and a Unesco expert on cultural and documentary heritage. He is lead editor of "The Politics of Post-Conflict Heritage Reconstruction" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and author of the forthcoming "Rebuilding Syria: Cultural Heritage and Memory After Conflict" (Edinburgh University Press). He is also principal investigator of "Decolonial Futures: Heritage, Memory, and Narratives in the Making in MENA", a project funded by the Dutch Research Council.

James Symonds is professor of historical archaeology at the University of Amsterdam.
Ihab Saloul is co-founder and research director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture and editor of the Central European University Press series "Palestine: Past, Present and Future Narratives".

Ihab Saloul is co-founder and research director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture and editor of the Central European University Press series "Palestine: Past, Present and Future Narratives".

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