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The destruction of architectural and archeological sites by ISIS in 2014–2015 exposed conflicting, yet co-constitutive, perceptions of the historical past, its material remains, and the relevance of both for modernity. This claim is valid for ISIS’s destruction campaign, as it took place in sites already celebrated for their former ruination. Destruction emerges out of these sites as historically multi-layered, just like the loci it is inflicted upon. In this paper we thus argue that events of destruction should be similarly excavated to reveal their historical stratigraphy and to illuminate critical aspects not obvious to the first, shocked, glance. We demonstrate this argument through two events of destruction that occurred in the Great Mosque of Gaza in the twentieth century. Firstly, we examine the shelling of the mosque during the First World War to show how debris of war may be transformed into artistic and literary displays. Secondly, we analyze an intellectual debate over a Jewish candelabrum engraving on one of the mosque’s pillars and its later defacement. By so doing, we question the motivations preceding acts of destruction, especially in relation to their portrayal by the destructors themselves, and expose the making of historical relics into evidence of violence.

Ruins typically mark the endpoint of historical stories, regarded as objects worthy of attention only for the bygone times they represent. But what might a history reveal if it took ruins as its departure point? How would a history of ruins look? This article aims to write ruins into history by pondering the case of Gaza in the aftermath of World War I. The ruins of the city, it is argued here, were the site of a transformation in the modalities of urban change: what had been a ubiquitous and organic process of evolution in the cityscapes of the Middle East up to the late nineteenth century was replaced by top-down spatial convention, imposed by the modern state. This transformation deprived ruins from their long-standing role as essential elements of the urban landscape and flattened them into mere emblems of cultural decay. Consistent with the ontological stance of the progress/decline binary, by the early twentieth century, spatial ruination had become regarded as a unidirectional rather than multidirectional process. This modern framing of ruins proved especially significant for postwar Gaza, whose reconstruction efforts were consequently plagued by internal contradiction.

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