US President Donald Trump, never one for historical nuance, says the best plan for Gaza is to “level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings”, paving the way for an American takeover and redevelopment project.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has made equally ignorant remarks, imagining a Gaza with “casinos and nightlife”, speaking with the casual entitlement of a colonizer who believes history begins with his own indulgence.

This is the logic of conquest. First, invade and destroy; then, stand upon the ruins and declare the land empty.

The long, blood-soaked tradition of colonialism speaks through these politicians - settlers arriving on ravaged shores, massacring the natives, then announcing their discovery of a terra nova, a land with no past.

But Gaza is not empty. Gaza has never been empty.

What is unfolding before the world’s eyes is not just war, but cultural genocide - a calculated attempt to erase Gaza’s past, so that its people’s claim to the future can be denied.

Israel’s assault has targeted not only the living, but history itself. More than 200 heritage sites have been obliterated - not by accident, nor as collateral damage, but through a deliberate campaign to sever Gaza from its own past.

Wiped from the map

The harbor of Anthedon, dating back to 800 BC, from where Phoenician ships once set sail, has been wiped from the map. The Great Mosque, Gaza’s largest and oldest, survived empires but not this war.

The Church of Saint Porphyrius, where Christians have prayed for centuries, was bombed as civilians sought refuge within its ancient walls. Even one of the world’s oldest monasteries was damaged in the war.

More than 1,100 mosques in Gaza have reportedly been attacked, three-quarters of which were completely levelled. Three churches were also destroyed and 40 cemeteries were targeted, in addition to graves being unearthed and bodies stolen, Palestinian officials say.

The past itself has been dug out of the ground and desecrated. This is not just destruction; it is an attempt to erase the very idea that Gaza and its people have ever belonged to this land.

And yet, Gaza was ancient when Rome was young. It was thriving before London and Paris were even imagined. British archeologist Flinders Petrie has traced Gaza’s existence back 5,000 years, to Tell el-Ajjul, where Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Persians and Greeks all left their mark.

The Ma’in kingdom of Yemen, one of the earliest Arab civilizations, made Gaza a hub of trade in the first millennium BC. From here, goods flowed to the Mediterranean, Europe, Egypt and Asia.

After Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, the great-grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad, died in Gaza, it became known as Gaza Hashim in his honor. There, he secured the wealth of Quraysh, enabling the trade that would later make Mecca a center of commerce - a journey so vital that it was immortalized in the Quranic surah of Quraysh.

Years later, during the Prophet Muhammad’s expedition to Tabuk in the ninth year of the Hijra, the bishop of Gaza came to him with a remarkable account. He informed the Prophet that when his great-grandfather, Hashim, passed away in Gaza, his wealth was placed in the custody of the local church. The bishop returned the trust, which was subsequently distributed among the leaders of Banu Hashim.

This is one of countless anecdotes illuminating the age-old, intimate bonds between Christians and Muslims in Gaza.

Systematic targeting

Empires rose and fell. Byzantines built churches, Ottomans raised mosques and madrassas, and the Crusaders seized Gaza, only to be repelled by Saladin, who went on to liberate Jerusalem.

In Gaza was born al-Shafi’i, one of Islam’s greatest legal scholars, whose longing for his birthplace never faded: “I yearn for the land of Gaza, though after our parting, silence betrays me,” he once said.

Yet now, amid the relentless Israeli-American assault, a Fox News host dismissed Gaza’s Palestinians as “uneducated”, parroting the same colonial rhetoric that has always been used to justify genocide.

The aim is clear: dehumanize the Palestinians of Gaza - make them seem primitive, incapable, unworthy. By reducing them to nothing, the world is led to believe that when they are wiped out, no great loss has occurred.

But the truth exposes the lie. Palestine has one of the world’s highest literacy rates, at around 97 percent. Before this war, Gaza had 12 universities that produced world-class scientists, doctors, engineers and thinkers. All of these institutions have now been destroyed, because an educated Palestinian is a threat - not to the world, but to those who wish to see them erased.

In addition to targeting Gaza’s schools, Israel has systematically killed academics, scientists and scholars. The Israeli army has killed more than 90 university professors, along with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students.

'We will have to kill and kill'

Gaza is not just a city. It is the backbone of Palestinian national identity.

After the Nakba of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their towns and villages to enable the creation of the state of Israel, Gaza became the last refuge for hundreds of thousands of people.

From its camps and streets emerged the leaders of the Palestinian struggle: Yasser Arafat, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, among many others. And from its people came Said al-Muzayin, the poet of revolution, who composed the words of the Palestinian national anthem.

In Gaza today, a young boy sits amid the ruins, his small frame dwarfed by the devastation around him. His voice rises - clear, unwavering and beautiful. He sings: “My homeland, my homeland, my homeland is who I am.”

His poignant words cut through the silence, carrying decades of struggle and resilience. He is not just singing; he is declaring an unbreakable truth. Palestinians are the land. To erase one is to erase the other.

The destruction of Gaza did not begin on October 7, 2023. It was always part of Israel’s Western-backed plan.

Two decades ago, Israeli strategist Arnon Soffer gave a chilling prescription for Gaza’s future: “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

First, the Israelis sealed off Gaza. Then they starved it. Now, they are trying to wipe it out.

Cold calculus

Trump’s vision for Gaza is one of a colonial exterminator. This vision is not satisfied with mere death, the flattening of homes, the crushing of hospitals, or the silencing of classrooms where futures once took root. It is not enough to bomb the living; this vision seeks to erase the dead - to turn Gaza into a void, a land with no past, no memory, no people.

This is the same cold calculus that justified the slaughter of millions of indigenous people in the Americas; the same ruthless hand that wiped ancient nations from the earth in Australia, always in the name of civilization and progress. Cities were turned to dust, languages swallowed by silence, histories rewritten by the conqueror’s pen.

That is why Palestinians stay. Because to leave is to surrender to the lie; to allow history to be rewritten in their absence.

Every shattered monument, every torn manuscript, every silenced voice is part of an old, familiar crime - one that does not merely kill, but also denies that there was ever anything there to kill in the first place.

In Gaza today, a middle-aged man sits in silence on the ruins of his home, the dust of destruction clinging to his skin. When asked why he does not leave, why he remains in the shadow of devastation, his answer is quiet but unshaken: “My son has died here. His blood was spilled here. His bones lie beneath this rubble. Sitting here, I feel close to him.”

In that single sentence lies the weight of 1,000 untold stories.

To the world, Gaza is just debris, ruins to be cleared away. But to the Palestinians who live here, it is sacred ground, where memories breathe beneath the dust, and the laughter of the departed lingers in the silence.

How can they abandon what little remains of their loved ones? How can they walk away, when every shattered stone is a tombstone?

Exile and erasure

The people of Gaza do not stand only upon the ruins of their homes; they stand upon the ruins of a stolen history, upon the memories of cities and villages wiped from the earth to make way for another’s dream. “A land without a people,” they were told.

“There were no such thing as Palestinians,” declared former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, a woman who herself had carried a Palestinian passport before the state of Israel was born.

To be exiled is one crime; to be erased is another.

And that is why Palestinians stay. Because to leave is to surrender to the lie; to allow history to be rewritten in their absence. They stay because every stone, every street, every ruin whispers their name, and to abandon it would be to betray those who walked before them.

The world must not allow this cultural genocide to succeed. Gaza must be restored, not erased.

Gaza is not ruins. Gaza is not nothing. Gaza is human heritage.

Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer and expert in Middle East politics. Her journalistic work has appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, Corriere della Sera, aljazeera.net and al Quds. A selection of her writings may be found at: soumayaghannoushi.com and she tweets @smghannoushi.