Culturicide in Gaza: the French National Library must oppose the systematic destruction of Palestinian heritage

We are cultural sector employees, in solidarity with the Palestinian people. On March 8, 2025, we sent an open letter to the president of the National Library of France (BnF) and to the Minister of Culture regarding their silence in the face of both the destruction of heritage and the massacre of human lives in Gaza, thus raising questions about culturicide.

The BnF’s colonial bias was denounced, particularly in its cultural programming and in its collaborations with Israeli institutions.

To this day, as the genocide perpetrated by the colonial State of Israel continues, neither the BnF nor the ministry has responded.

Source: ParisLuttes, April 27, 2025

Translation and notes between brackets: Alain Marshal

The National Library of France (BnF), a leading institution, plays a major role in preserving and transmitting global cultural heritage, not only within France but also abroad, and has stood out for its remarkable actions in defense of humanity’s shared legacy.

However, its silence regarding the systematic destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage — especially since October 7, 2023, and in particular the destruction of libraries, schools, and universities in Gaza — raises serious questions. The Israeli army, in the context of a war that international bodies have deemed genocidal, has systematically targeted Palestinian cultural infrastructure, reducing to rubble treasures of knowledge and memory. Among the most shocking examples is the destruction of Gaza’s public and university library, in front of which an Israeli soldier was photographed posing amid the flames — a widely shared image that sparked global outrage.

This methodical destruction of Gaza’s heritage is a culturicide happening before our very eyes: an attempt to erase the identity and history of a people by annihilating its remnants, archives, and cultural legacy.

A methodical process since 1948

Since the founding of the State of Israel and the forced exodus of the Palestinian population, Israel has systematically worked to erase both the material and immaterial traces of Palestinian identity: demolishing homes and entire villages; wiping out places of memory and cultural heritage such as mosques, churches, libraries, and archives; restricting access to historical sites [notably the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam], etc. — a strategy aimed at depersonalizing and marginalizing Palestinians, both geographically and culturally.

Following the Nakba of 1948, tens of thousands of books and manuscripts were looted from Palestinian homes by soldiers, closely followed by teams of librarians who catalogued them as the property of the National Library of Israel. [After the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel intensified its cultural repression: imposing systematic censorship, banning books and keywords such as “Palestine” or “return,” and isolating Palestinian artists in a cultural ghetto designed to stifle their creativity and identity.
In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Israel looted and confiscated the library and archives of the Palestine Liberation Organization, including the collections of the Palestine Research Center and the Palestinian Film Archive. During the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, libraries and archives were targeted, and numerous Palestinian cultural institutions were destroyed or severely damaged. In 2001, Israel seized the collections of the Orient House, a leading Palestinian cultural and political center, and shut it down. On February 9, 2025, Israeli police raided the international Palestinian bookstore Educational Bookshop, a cornerstone of cultural life in occupied East Jerusalem, seizing books and arresting its owners. [1] These examples are but a few grains in an endless string, bearing witness to decades of relentless efforts to methodically erase all traces of Palestinian identity.]

Since October 7, 2023, this destruction project has escalated into a campaign of total annihilation. Israeli bombings — which are the most intense in modern history relative to the size and population density of Gaza — have led to the destruction of countless monuments, museums, libraries, and educational and cultural institutions in Gaza. These acts have been documented in reports such as that by LAP (Librarians and Archivists with Palestine) and the mapping project Gaza, Bombed Heritage and Virtual Museum. UNESCO has recorded Israel’s destruction of around 100 heritage, historical, archaeological, and cultural sites [along with the deaths of many individuals working to preserve and transmit heritage], who — like doctors and hospitals — have been deliberately targeted by the Israeli army.

This indiscriminate targeting of Palestinian educational and cultural infrastructure — despite Israel being a signatory to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict — is part of a strategy of uprooting, denying, and appropriating the Indigenous Palestinian identity. It is all the more urgent, therefore, that French and international cultural institutions take a clear stand against these acts of systematic destruction.

[Double Standards]

Despite the extreme urgency of the situation, the BnF has adopted a posture of withdrawal with regard to Palestine, invoking a supposed “obligation of neutrality.”

This injunction to silence stands in stark contrast to the explicit and substantial commitment it has shown to Ukraine, where the BnF not only took a public stance but also mobilized its resources, network, and collections. Following the Russian invasion in February 2022, the BnF expressed its solidarity with the Ukrainian people through numerous actions, including aid to Ukrainian libraries and their staff. [2] These initiatives reflect the BnF’s active engagement in support of Ukraine, in sharp contrast to its deafening silence on the situation in Gaza. The BnF’s “obligation of neutrality” thus appears to be selectively applied.

This disparity raises serious questions about the consistency of the BnF’s commitment to the protection of global cultural heritage, exposing it to accusations of blatant double standards. All the more so as, despite Israel’s repeated violations of international conventions and UN resolutions, documented over decades, the BnF has not hesitated to showcase this state [through numerous collaborative, promotional, and partnership initiatives] [3].

[Even after October 7, this bias persisted — promoting the Israeli perspective while erasing the destruction of Palestinian heritage. Whereas an entry for the “October 7 Massacre” was created in the BnF’s general catalog, no such entry exists for the genocide or culturicide committed in Gaza. And on November 26, 2024, the BnF hosted a program on the history and present-day destruction of books and libraries, mentioning recent examples (Ukraine, Timbuktu, Iraq) without a single word about the methodical destruction of libraries in Gaza, despite the extensive documentation available.

All this is especially troubling coming from the BnF, which suspended all institutional collaboration with Russian state institutions following the invasion of Ukraine. One can only wonder whether, behind its proclaimed “neutrality,” there is in fact an alignment with the geopolitical choices of France and the West more broadly — unwavering allies of Israel — and the regrettable remnants of a colonial legacy that relegates Indigenous cultures and/or Europe’s responsibility for their destruction to the background.]

The Bias of a Colonial Legacy

“Palestine,” wrote Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, “poses a problem of conscience for the West. With the former British and French empires responsible for the division of the territory, finding a solution to the Palestinian question would require a complete revision of European colonial history.”

In its exhibition Le monde pour horizon (“The World as Horizon”), the BnF announced in a press release its intent to address the issue of destruction linked to French colonial conquests, promising a presentation of its collections illustrating the colonization of Africa, particularly Algeria. Some media outlets even hailed it as “an effort to distance itself from France’s heavy colonial history.” Yet this announcement has led to nothing: no such presentation has materialized — an absence all the more regrettable given that the Ministry of Culture has made cultural rapprochement between France and Algeria one of the priorities of the 2022–2027 presidential term. And yet the immeasurable devastation caused by French colonization, especially in Algeria, is well documented. From the earliest days of the conquest, Algerian libraries — both private and public — were devastated; their books and manuscripts either destroyed or looted. A significant portion of this looted heritage was donated to the National Library of France.

This dissonance was once again evident during the study day Détruire le livre? (“Destroy the Book?”), held on November 26, 2024, which claimed to explore the history and contemporary reality of book and library destruction in times of war. Yet again, the devastation wrought by Western imperialism — whether through French colonial conquests or, more recently, the destruction carried out by Israel — was completely ignored.

As the Brooklyn Museum Workers in Support of Palestine recently declared, “We also recognize the dissonance between the way cultural institutions historicize past justice movements and their failure to fully engage with movements of the present.”

Conclusion

As an institution entrusted with the preservation of universal heritage, the BnF cannot afford to ignore such a crime against culture and history. Its silence stands in flagrant contradiction to the values it claims to embody, calls into question the universality of its commitment, and contributes to erasing this genocide from the historical record. We condemn the passivity — if not complicity— of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in the face of this campaign of plunder and destruction, which undermines the very principles of preservation and transmission of knowledge and memory, which constitute its core mission.

Given the gravity of the situation and what has been set forth, we call upon the BnF to:

– publicly denounce this grave assault on world heritage, of which the destruction of the Edward Said Public Library is but one of the war crimes committed against Gaza and its inhabitants over the past fifteen months;
 — suspend its 2010 framework agreement with the National Library of Israel (BNI) and cease all cooperation with Israeli state institutions, particularly regarding the development of joint research and development programs in information processing, computerization, and digitization; the organization of conferences and seminars; and the mounting of exhibitions;
 — [take action, within its means, to safeguard and restore Palestinian historical and cultural memory.]

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