Too much has been made of origins. All origins are arbitrary. This is not to say that they are not also nurturing, but they are essentially coercive and indifferent.Footnote 1
The morning that I sat down to write this article, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, presented a report to the UN’s Human Rights Council, entitled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.”Footnote 2 The report documents “the role of corporate entities in sustaining Israel’s illegal occupation and ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza,” including through the construction of illegal settlements, through corporate and charity activities that have supported Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine, and through the involvement of particular commercial sectors, like tech, with the Israeli war machine. But at Section 82, Albanese turns to a contributing factor that seems, on the face of it, much less profitable:
In Israel, universities—particularly law schools, archaeology and Middle Eastern studies departments—contribute to the ideological scaffolding of apartheid, cultivating State-aligned narratives, erasing Palestinian history and justifying occupation practices.
And she goes on to compare this mode of historiography to the more often discussed complicity between science and technology departments and weapon manufacturers that supply Israel’s genocide, including Elbit Systems and Lockheed Martin.
It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that archaeology is a weapon. It has functioned as justification for occupation at least since Napoleon Boneparte set off to occupy Egypt in 1798, taking with him the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a motley crew of over 100 academics who would author the books that are sometimes known as the first works of professional Egyptology and find—though it was not lost—the infamous Rosetta Stone.Footnote 3 And Israel’s deliberate erasure of Palestinian history (illegal under the 1954 Hague Convention) is not new either, and certainly does not date only to Israel’s genocidal escalation after Operation Al Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023: accusations of looting and deliberate destruction have increased in the last 18 months, but the targeting of cultural heritage has been an acknowledged aspect of the occupation of Palestine, which has now been going on more than seventy years.Footnote 4 Here, I want to show that there is nothing particularly special about Israel’s use of an invented past as “ideological scaffolding” for apartheid—it is continuous with the way the past is curated across other projects of European colonialism.Footnote 5 And I want to argue that this use of the past is not just aimed at the historicide of the Palestinians, but at the death of history itself.
1. Zionism and other classicisms
One way to show that Israel’s control of the past in Palestine is continuous with other projects of European colonialism would be to focus on the way those other settler colonial projects are also characterised by deliberate destruction both of archaeological sites and as part of colonial archaeological practices. Such an argument could detail, for instance, the fact that under the French mandate of Syria, French colonial archaeologists destroyed the town of Tadmur in 1929 in order to “reveal” the classical ruins of Palmyra that lay beneath this living Muslim town.Footnote 6 But Israel’s control of the past—like many other European colonial projects’ attempts to control the past—goes far beyond the coloniality of archaeology. Israel weaponises the past through narrative as much as through destruction.
To understand this narrative control, let us briefly compare the historiographical claims made by the ultra-Zionist Temple Mount Faithful movement about the complex known as the Haram al-Sharif, which houses the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, with other European colonial historiographical narratives.Footnote 7 Once a fringe movement aimed at razing the Al Aqsa mosque and building a Jewish temple inside the complex, Temple Mount Faithful is increasingly becoming more mainstream. Israel’s Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau publicly declared in 2016 that he supported the building of a Jewish temple on the site, and in 2014, Israel’s now acting foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely remarked in a video that “Temple Mount must go back to being a place for Jewish prayer.”Footnote 8 This idea that Muslim presence is a perversion of the “truest” ancient form of a site (to which it should by rights go back) is not just a historiographic feature of Zionism’s control of the past; it is Europe’s hegemonic narrative of history—a narrative I have elsewhere called “Classicism.”Footnote 9
The 1929 French colonial archaeologists destroyed the town of Tadmur to restore what they saw as the “true” Greek and Roman past lying beneath. But Classicism is not only material destruction. It is also the curation of an ancient precedent for colonial projects. The idea that the Haram al-Sharif hides the site’s true, ancient, Jewish-Israeli meaning is a useful precedent for Israel’s settler colonial occupation of Palestine. It invents an ancient history for a state that is only as old as its declaration in 1948. This narrative was equally useful to Cecil Rhodes in his own colonial quest to occupy the land he would call Rhodesia, as is clear from the case of the archaeological site of Great Zimbabwe (Figure 1). Rhodes had, in the words of Shadreck Chirikure, an “obsession with Great Zimbabwe,” and many of the British colonial archaeologists who went to the site under his patronage came back with a story that was extremely helpful to his colonial project.Footnote 10 In their colonial fairytale, it was not ancient African people who had built this site (the colonisers’ racism would not allow them to believe that ancient Black people were capable of such a thing) but the Phoenicians.
Figure 1. The conical tower at the archaeological site of Great Zimbabwe, outside of Masvingo. Author’s own photograph.
British colonialism crafted an ancient precedent to justify its occupation of Zimbabwe, imagining the Phoenicians as early colonial occupiers, an “ancient race of hardy colonisers” who would serve as the legitimating ancestors of British occupiers.Footnote 11 The use of Classicism to fabricate an ancient precedent for European colonisation is not restricted to these two settler-colonial projects. Britain also invented an ancient fairytale to justify its occupation of India, and Patricia Lorcin has examined the way that French occupiers used Rome as a precedent for their colonisation of Algeria.Footnote 12 This narrative has particularly frequently been weaponised against Muslim populations, who are easily excluded from the ability to claim ancient precedent because of the fact that Islam does not come to the world until after the conventional end point of the classical period.Footnote 13 It is not only Muslims at risk, but all those on the underside of European colonialism who risk being “Muslimised,” that is, positioned as latecomers to a land that colonial occupiers claim to be theirs on the basis of a fabricated ancient precedent.
2. Killing with history and the killing of history
To understand the Zionist control of the past in Palestine as part of the historiographic project of European colonialism is to take our lead from Herzl himself, who famously argued that the Zionist project would provide an “outpost of Western civilisation in a sea of barbarism.”Footnote 14 Frantz Fanon and Edward Said agreed that colonisation is a “historical process,” and many others—among them recently Priya Satia and Schlomo Sand—have shown that the study of history itself serves to produce ideas of origin for ethno-nation state and colonial projects.Footnote 15 If the Zionist colonial project is a project of “Western civilisation,” then it is wholly unsurprising that it should depend on a Westernese narrative of history.Footnote 16 But Israel’s current weaponising of the past in the genocide of the Palestinians is not only something to be chalked up among the murderous mechanics of European colonialism: it is also taking place in a world where the so-called decolonial turn, in history as in other disciplines, is supposed to have already happened.Footnote 17
It was 1997 when Eric Hobsbawm famously wrote in On History: “I used to think that the profession of history, unlike that of, say, nuclear physics, could at least do no harm. Now I know it can.”Footnote 18 The idea that contemporary political projects use historical narratives as their “ideological scaffolding,” then, to repeat Francesca Albanese’s term again, has been well known for decades.Footnote 19 The question for this current moment is not so much how does Israel use the past as a weapon of occupation and genocide?—to which the answer would be in much the same way as other European colonial projects have always used history as a weapon of occupation and genocide—but rather what does it mean for attempts to “decolonise” history to have so categorically failed that Israel can continue to use the past in this way? Footnote 20 We need to imagine “historicide” as not just killing with history but the killing of history.
The term “historicide” is among the recent effusions of terms inspired by Raphael Lemkin’s term “genocide” (coined in Lemkin Reference Lemkin1944). Academics like Karma Nabulsi have been using the term “scholasticide” since 2009 to describe Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian schools and universities, and ecocide, urbicide, domicide, culturcide, and politicide also appear increasingly frequently to describe aspects of this genocide.Footnote 21 By analogy, historicide refers to the deliberate destruction of the past and—I will argue here—of historiographical enquiry itself. Because presenting the most ancient version of a site, lying beneath the feet of its later users, as its “most true” or the “original” meaning is more than just the weaponisation of the past for a particular ethnonationalist project. It is an epistemological land grab, an attempt to control what it means to do history.
And although this is a reflex of European colonialism, it is also simply the hegemonic way that many historians, as well as those not trained professionally in historical disciplines, do history. We search for the etymological root of a word, or the origin of democracy, for the inciting incident of a war, or the beginning of racism. The lure of an origin holds epistemic weight, even though the arbitrariness of origins has been apparent at least since Said wrote that “there is no such thing as a merely given, or simply available starting-point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows them.”Footnote 22
It is hard to ignore the fact that even as they legitimate so much violence against Muslims, Palestinians, refugees, and migrant people, and anyone else who can be positioned as latecomers to a land in Eurocentric and ethnonationalist discourse, origins put food on the table of the historian. The idea that the best way to know something is by privileged access to its origin is the argument many historians make to justify the continuation of their disciplines in the face of the existential threat of cuts to funding and resources. Origins are the ramparts of European colonialism, the world-making historiographic structures that—out of self-preservation—even the most self-avowedly decolonial historians do not touch.Footnote 23
This goes some way towards explaining why, as we have watched these imaginary origins be weaponised to justify the genocide of the Palestinians, subject organisations in historical disciplines have on the whole preferred to maintain a pretended “apolitical” silence. The American Historical Association voted in the majority for a resolution condemning the genocide of the Palestinians, but in January 2025, the resolution was vetoed by its Council, which felt that condemning this genocide was “outside the scope of the Association’s mission and purpose, defined in its Constitution.”Footnote 24 When I emailed the Liverpool Classicists Listserv, a mailing list that connects some 8,000+ colleagues across ancient studies, to inform them of an event I was chairing to discuss Albanese’s recent report, replies flooded in labelling my announcement “anti-Semitic hate mail” and “a disturbingly political hate massage” with “no connection to classical studies” (one senior professor even threatened that for drawing attention to the UN report I would be barred both from academic jobs in the United States and from visas to attend conferences there).Footnote 25
Those who pretend that historical disciplines are not political are aiding and abetting the use of archaeology as the “ideological scaffolding” of apartheid. They are allowing origin stories to masquerade as truth, rather than as retrojections of political projects in the present.Footnote 26 And they are standing by as historical and historiographical enquiry fades into irrelevance, no longer able to do anything except support the status quo politically and affirm the Eurocentric colonial ordering of the world. At least since Francis Fukuyama’s famous book in Reference Fukuyama1992, there have been those who have heralded—either in celebration or commiseration, depending on their political agenda—the so-called “end of history.” But Fukuyama (Reference Fukuyama1992) was wrong: what will really end up killing history is not the triumph of neoliberal democracy and capitalism, but rather those who claim to do “apolitical” history, while in reality simply doing history that serves hegemonic politics. It has been a hard pill to swallow these last 18 months since 7 October 2023, watching disciplinary organisations and the vast majority of historians, classicists, archaeologists, and other scholars of the past be unable to raise their voices against genocide. It will be an even harder pill to swallow years from now, once the dust has settled and the words “occupation,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” no longer carry personal risks, when I will no doubt be asked to peer review publications with titles that revel in an empty aesthetic of decoloniality, like “Archaeology for Liberation” and “Reading Homer After Gaza.”Footnote 27 Those works will be as irrelevant as they are complicit if we cannot find a way to decolonise the discourse of origins and stop the weaponising of the past for genocide in this present moment.
Acknowledgements
Qasim Alli and Azzédine Ben Abdallah read this essay before I submitted it, and I am grateful to them for being the kind of brothers who can clarify my thinking while giving me the confidence that I am saying something worth saying at the same time. Thanks, too, to the two anonymous peer reviewers, whose suggestions improved this piece, and to Jeff Wilson and Emlyn Dodd at Public Humanities for having the bravery that many others have lacked to seek out a contribution on this topic. I would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Refaat Alareer, and to everyone else whose Expo markers are the toughest thing they have, yet who fight for justice as best they can.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: M.W.
Conflicts of interests
The author declares none.
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