The Ruins of Gaza, 1917: The Great War at the Gates of the Holy Land

This article discusses the initial phase in Palestine’s transition from the Ottoman Empire to British Mandatory rule: the destruction of the City of Gaza in 1917. The article depicts the forms in which this destruction was perceived and framed by its perpetrators and victims. The main argument presented here is that both sides utilized traditional exegetic frames in order to cope with this first performance of modern ruination on the soil of the Holy Land. These ruin gazers could thus “understand,” “interpret” or “frame” destruction and ruins but failed to spar with them. As a result, ruination became an aesthetic display, stripped from its terrifying and violent effect.

The first two sections of the article probe the fate of Gaza’s Great Mosque in the First World War and the human contending with the destruction of monumental constructions. Describing the embarrassment among British military staff following the shelling of the mosque and analyzing the artistic preferences of the British painter James McBey, the article shows how the destroyer manipulates ruins for the sake of his ideological cause. The third section explores the devastated side through the wartime experiences of the Gazan man of letters, Osman Mustafa al-Tabba. For him, the dilapidated town came to symbolize a collapsing Muslim-Arab world. Both perspectives, the epilogue asserts, were destructive in their own right: it took the town more than two decades to recover from its wounds