A tiny bronze snail and a little bronze mouse like a boardgame piece, both from Roman times (3rd - 4th century), caught my attention upon entering The Arab World Institute’s special exhibit, “Treasures rescued from Gaza – 5000 years of history”, in Paris until 2 November 2025. Compelled by their sweet littleness, the whimsy resting in an artistically lighted case, a visitor to this exhibit might relax in a quiet space of disconnection for just a second.
Maybe other visitors like me were jolted from their wonder with a recall of the day’s headline: "Israel kills at least 70 Palestinians in Gaza’s deadliest day at aid sites.” To delight in the whorls of a shell made by the hands of someone dead for a millennium felt wrong when Gaza fills with the mourning of so many recently killed. We lack the power to save those targeted by Israel’s vengeance today, and can only commemorate the ingenuity of their ancestors.
The museum website describes the show as being an exceptional collection “made up of objects of great value, which the hazards of history have saved from disaster and which reveal the density of its history, a priceless treasure whose complexity is revealed by this exhibition.”
The hazards of history and hazardous humanity have refused to save tens of thousands of Palestinian lives in Gaza, people killed by Israel’s genocidal rampage that began on 7 October 2023. This exhibit focuses the attention of its visitors on things of the past, on history’s glorious creativity and artistry crystallized in these ornaments, which made the relative silence about Israel’s killing spree blare.
Arranged in two small rooms was a sparse collection of some 100 objects dating from the Bronze age, through the Roman and Byzantine eras, to the Muslim dynasties, and a handful of photographs recording the efforts to rescue ancient items from bombed out sites in Gaza these days.
Among the first items a visitor sees are several large terracotta vessels, once used for transporting wine, and rows of beautifully carved oil lamps. The people of Gaza used to get to enjoy lazy drunken evenings lit by gentle flickers, and they supplied people throughout the Mediterranean doing the same.
A white statuette of a voluptuous woman was labelled “Aphrodite or Hecate”, from the Hellenistic or Roman period. Her hip jauntily cocked to the side, head coquettishly tilted downward, some hint of a smile under her partially missing marble nose. Or maybe it was an expression of ruefulness.
Hécate, the Greek goddess of magic, was also associated with crossroads, a theme of this exhibit. A map painted on one wall shows the arching lines of exchange between strategically placed Gaza and the rest of the world: down to the Hijaz and the far side of the Persian Gulf, swooping through Egypt and Nubia, to the rest of the Mediterranean, darting up to Cyprus and around Asia Minor, beyond Athens to Rome, to Carthage, and sweeping out to Leptis Magna, an important Roman city not far from the Tripoli of today’s Libya. The black strokes showing all this movement end in dotted lines, suggesting so many possibilities, from a time long ago when there could be exciting horizons to explore for the people of Gaza.
The hidden complicity of The West
Israel’s military occupation began in 1967 and its siege on Gaza began in 2007, stopping most Palestinians from moving out of that 365 square kilometres wide strip of land. These facts are left under-emphasized in the exhibit’s French-only wall panels. A young man in a red security guard uniform, circulating in a meandering, unintimidating way, is, I guess, one acknowledgment of the exhibit’s contemporary context. Another is the opening text describing the exceptional destruction by Israeli bombardment that began on 7 October 2023, after Hamas’s “terrorist attacks and the taking of hostages.” It also notes the extraordinary numbers of killed and wounded civilians, their Palestinianness unspecified.
The visitor is asked :“Who remembers that Gaza, which was born from the meeting of the sand and the sea, enjoyed an uninterrupted prestigious past since the Bronze age ?” The exhibit helps us learn some of this history, but little about western complicity in turning the “ancient oasis” into the scene of today’s “tragic events.” The most impressive piece in this exhibit is a beautiful Byzantine mosaic from a 6th-century church. Measuring six by three metres, larger than two family-size tents pushed together, the mosaic contains a variety of intricately depicted creatures: a rooster among other birds, exotic animals with cranky aspects—a giraffe, an elephant, a leopard—and a vicious dog, claws like nails, a collar around its neck. The border of regular, graceful waves give it all a disciplined, orderly peacefulness. The mosaic and the rest of the exhibit are a testament to the centuries of lively civilization that Gaza has hosted, and to the creativity of Gaza’s people.
The mosaic was found in today’s Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, which was home to more than 300,000 Palestinians until Israel forced tens of thousands to flee and killed countless others. Deir al-Balah also was home to 19-year-old Shaban al-Dalou, a student and eldest brother until he was burned alive onı 14 October 2024 along with his mother and others. The nightmare image of his struggle to escape the burning hospital tent where he was hooked up to an IV, his body engulfed in flames and smoke, has been seared into the memory of many of us onlookers.
A funerary stele from the Mamluk period, a Byzantine column used as a grave marker for a British lieutenant in 1917, and photographs of the dig at a necropolis of 13 tombs from the 1st to 3rd centuries in Jabalya could only bring to mind all the death filling Gaza daily now.
Many of the artefacts were originally in Jawdat Khoudary’s private collection, which the wealthy Palestinian businessman donated to the Palestinian National Authority. Some of the collection had been loaned for an exhibit at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva, where it stayed, since conditions for its safe return to Gaza never materialized. A photograph shows Khoudary’s garden before Israel’s latest genocidal assault on Gaza–-lush greenery flowing over and around an arbour, it exudes the mythical feel of a children’s story book. Posted next to it are photographs of what the garden and Khoudary’s villa and private museum have become: a dark, chaotic space of rubble. A chart tallies the tens of mosques, churches, monasteries, fortresses, archaeological sites, monuments, and buildings of historic and artistic interest that have been damaged since October 2023 according to UNESCO records.
Photographs in the exhibit’s second room downstairs highlight efforts to save Gaza’s archaeological riches; they show people in high-viz uniforms picking through remains. So much time, energy, money, put into rescuing things. There’s a lot to appreciate in these efforts—they’ve collected evidence of Palestinians’ inheritance, evidence of their expansive existence in that place, and it’s a way of showing their part in a universal human society. The 5,000 year stretch maybe evokes Palestinian steadfastness, too.
But it was hard to enjoy the celebration of that, when reality explodes with such ugly violence outside the hushed and respectful mood fostered inside the museum. All this archaeological care, the preservation of art, evidence of peaceful human exchange, the efforts to record all this history that’s now over—it jangles loudly against the lack of care for the lives of Palestinians trying to survive now.
When I had asked a French friend to see the exhibit with me, her face crumpled in pain. “For me, the ‘treasures of Gaza’ are the children,” she said. “The treasures that absolutely must be protected are the people. It makes me very uncomfortable to see ‘saved treasures’ being presented when Israel is relentlessly bombing Gaza and destroying everything.”