Gaza’s erasure fuels Palestine’s fight for narratives

fight against – In a new issue of Esprit titled “Palestine: A future to rebuild,” writers turn to archives, testimony, and shared political imagination—showing how the destruction of Gaza is inseparable from the struggle to preserve history and reclaim a future.

The destruction of Gaza has played out in front of a global audience for months. Yet, in the pages of Esprit’s new issue, it is described as something stranger than spectacle: an erasure that keeps moving even as the world watches.

The issue. titled “Palestine: A future to rebuild. ” opens with a grim diagnosis from Hamit Bozarslan. Anne-Lorraine Bujon and Joël Hubrecht. At the heart of the crisis. they argue. is a political logic in which “the death of the other is presented as the only possible solution. ” feeding what they call a “race to the abyss. ” pushed forward by regional and international actors. And still. they insist that a different future beyond the war remains possible—if people can build it through “a series of reappropriations and a desire to unite.”.

That line—reappropriation, unification—threads through the issue’s cultural and historical concerns. The signatories of the Paris Call for the Two-State Solution declared that “Our histories are filled with pain. but our future is still unwritten.” Building that future. Esprit contributors write. depends on recognizing shared suffering and “breaking free of the theological-political framework shared by the warmakers.”.

In the struggle against erasure. Jihane Sfeir focuses on Palestinian history itself—how it’s written. by whom. and what happens when the raw material of the past disappears. For her. the central challenge is how to produce a historical narrative when archives are “scattered. confiscated. or destroyed” and access to the past becomes a question of power.

Sfeir traces the formation of a Palestinian national narrative to the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. when intellectuals and journalists helped make “Palestinian” a collective political identity and a “driver of cohesion. ” especially during the Great Revolt of 1936–1939. Then, after 1948, displacement reconfigured historical writing. The Nakba became a “year zero” that “profoundly transformed frameworks for understanding the past.”.

From that rupture onward. she argues. Palestinian experience—“expulsion. exile and the disappearance of a social world”—turns historiography into more than an academic project. It becomes “a means of combating erasure.” Even the pillaging of libraries. documents and cultural institutions is described as part of a broader effort to impose “a colonial narrative of the past. ” with archives themselves turning into sites of struggle.

Preserving testimonies and photographs is presented as resistance aimed at “keeping alive the very possibility of a Palestinian history,” with Palestine existing not only as an occupied territory but “within a fragmented collection of archives scattered around the globe.”

That insistence on keeping things from disappearing animates a documentary at the center of the issue. Nicolas Wadimoff’s film Qui vit encore is inspired by the conviction that survivors must “speak for those who no longer have a voice.” It features nine Gazan exiles in South Africa talking about lost homes and memories of Gaza.

The film’s structure repeats a choreography of survival and detail: each person draws a plan of their old home and describes what happened to them and their families. using a map of Gaza sketched on the ground for reference. In that process, the house becomes the central symbol—connected to Palestinian culture’s sense of home. As the issue quotes: “The home is family; it’s not just four walls and a roof.”.

Drawings, stories and shared recollections reconstruct a Gaza that has been physically destroyed but remains alive in memory. The issue frames testimony as more than emotion. It is an “epistemic and existential anchor”—a foundation for hope “not just” as a reflex. but as something people can live by. For those in the film, testimony is also resistance.

Haneen Harara describes her participation in similarly blunt terms: her motivation is to “challenge and counter false representations and widespread disinformation.” Even in the face of immense loss. the film argues for endurance. community and hope. Harara puts the stakes plainly: “to have a legitimate right is also to possess a narrative. and so the possibility of a future.”.

The issue does not stay inside the archive. It expands into a different kind of cultural practice—public space—and makes room for debate where stories about who belongs are fought over in real time. Hamit Bozarslan writes that national aspirations on both sides—Israeli and Palestinian—have been shaped by powerful expectations of statehood and historical justice.

For many Jews. he notes. the creation of Israel in 1948 fulfilled a centuries-long hope of return and marked a decisive break with the experience of diaspora. especially after the Holocaust. But he also places the cost beside the achievement: “the achievement of Israel’s expectation came to the detriment of the Palestinian people” in the form of the Nakba. inaugurating a parallel Palestinian expectation: the creation of an independent state.

Reconciling the two hopes. Bozarslan writes. requires Palestinians and Israelis to “think differently and come up with new ways of being and acting.” He adds that even if the situation seems hopeless. “while the present is determined. or even overdetermined by the past. the future is not a predetermined fate.”.

Bozarslan turns to the past for inspiration. drawing on progressive Zionist currents and Austromarxist models of shared sovereignty to explore alternative futures. In a bleak political context. the issue argues that “opening a space for public debate in Israel and Palestine” is essential—an attempt at renewing political imagination beyond domination. occupation and mutual negation.

A grassroots movement also appears in the issue as a response to the same question: what happens when conflict makes shared humanity feel impossible. Standing Together brings together Jewish and Palestinian Israelis opposed to war, occupation, and segregation. Emerging from protests in 2011 and formally founded during the 2015 intifada. it was built around the ideal: “we will not live by the sword. we will stand together.” Itamar Avneri and Amal Ghawi describe the movement as refusing the idea that conflict is inevitable. Instead, they say, it seeks a political community built on equality, solidarity, and common struggle.

Since October 2023, the issue notes, the genocide in Gaza has made the pursuit of a just peace more urgent. Standing Together rejects the idea that Israelis and Palestinians form “two irreconcilable camps.” It locates the real divide elsewhere: “warmongers on one side, and the people on the other.”

Its vision is presented through initiatives that include joint demonstrations. humanitarian convoys delivering aid to Gaza. and protective presence campaigns in the West Bank. The model of “one shared homeland and two states” is framed as a first step toward longer reconciliation. Avneri and Ghawi emphasize a familiar truth that has to be lived. not promised: “Where there is struggle. there is hope.”.

Across these essays and creative accounts, a single thread holds. Gaza’s destruction is not treated only as destruction of buildings. It is treated as pressure on memory. archives. testimony. and the right to tell a story that makes a future possible. In the issue’s language, the task is not only to rebuild what can be rebuilt. It is to prevent history from being erased—and to insist that narratives. like homes. are not “just” something that can be replaced.

Esprit’s issue “Palestine: A future to rebuild” is presented with translations reviewed by Cadenza Academic translations, and it is published in cooperation with CAIRN International Edition.

Esprit Palestine Gaza archives testimony documentary Qui vit encore Jihane Sfeir Nicolas Wadimoff Haneen Harara Standing Together Hamit Bozarslan Anne-Lorraine Bujon Joël Hubrecht Paris Call for the Two-State Solution