"We Want to Uproot You"

When I used to travel to Canada, I was always provoked by Israeli propaganda that claimed falafel, tabbouleh and hummus as part of traditional Jewish-Israeli heritage. It was an appropriation of culinary traditions that have belonged to the Levant for centuries, and not merely the theft of a patrimony: it was the confiscation of an identity and a memory.

No people in history has invested in memory as the Jews did in the aftermath of the Holocaust. They built one of the most powerful systems of memorial preservation the world has ever seen, turning memory into a total apparatus: material, pedagogical and legal, designed to be indelible. They catalogued personal belongings in museums, gathering thousands of objects that had belonged to the victims: shoes, bags bearing the names of their owners, eyeglasses, hair shorn from prisoners, clothing and small personal items (combs, watches, rings); all in order to attest that the victims were real individuals, and not merely numbers.

They turned to archives and documents, railway deportation records, nominal lists, official Nazi decrees, letters and diaries, to transform memory into a legal and historical proof that could not be denied. They preserved the sites of the crime, erected memorials, recorded survivors' testimonies in sound and image, then integrated all of this into school curricula, producing films and works of literature. They turned memory into a sensory and cultural experience, and protected it through the law rather than through sentiment alone.

Can someone who knows all of this about the power and importance of memory genuinely claim not to know what destroying it means for others? Is it not precisely because they know what destruction means that they "destroy" everything?

If memory is what gives a human being their name, their history and their right to say "I was here," then to erase it is the shortest path to reducing that person to a number, by the very people who once fought to turn victims from numbers back into names.

The destruction of villages and towns in southern Lebanon thus goes well beyond a military operation, and cannot be reduced to the language of statistics: the number of buildings razed, the cost of losses. What is happening runs far deeper. We are confronted with an organised attempt to strike at something more precious than stone: memory.

When the great mosque, the heritage houses and even the cemeteries are levelled, the purpose goes beyond the erasure of landmarks: it is the witness itself that is to be eliminated. This is not random destruction. It is a systematic assault against life as such: homes, schools, mosques, markets, and everything that testifies that human beings once lived here, loved, learned, built meaning for their existence, and were also buried here.

This is an openly declared act of uprooting: uprooting people from their places, and uprooting places from their memory.

It is the erasure of a collective biography: that of generations who lived and learned, of students' voices, of teachers who carried a vocation, of a local history that took shape in silence over decades and centuries. And when a mosque or a heritage house is destroyed, the loss cannot be measured in concrete, but in the history, the meaning and the sense of belonging that those walls contained.

Contrary to what is often assumed, memory is not an abstract idea. It is bound to place: to stone, to sanctuary and tomb, to the staircase and the neighbourhood, to names that repeat themselves from generation to generation. To destroy a place is, in its very essence, to destroy memory.

History teaches us that peoples who experience an unstable relationship with the land, as is the case for Israelis in occupied Palestine, tend to reshape place in accordance with their own narrative. Not only through construction, but above all through erasure. For the elimination of the other's traces is never accidental: it is a bid for control of the narrative. Who was here? And who has the right to say "this land is mine"?

We are witnessing a pattern of violence that surpasses war to reach something deeper: an assault against the human being, against their memory, against the values that make life in common possible. A moral collapse that redefines the relationship with the other on the sole basis of force and violence.

Attacks on civilian sites constitute a manifest violation of the principles of international humanitarian law. The destruction of cultural and religious property can only be characterised as grave violations, rising to the level of war crimes under internationally recognised standards.

There are, moreover, the acts of looting reported by Israeli media themselves: soldiers entering houses and leaving with personal belongings, jewellery, and even family photographs. Such acts cannot be dismissed as mere details.

What depth of moral degradation must be reached for a family photograph, a bedcover or a private keepsake to become a spoil of war? What is at issue here is not individual misconduct, but behaviour that reveals a mentality: treating a place as an emptiness, and its inhabitants as though they had never existed. International law names this act "pillage" (pillage), expressly prohibited and constitutive of a war crime under the rules of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions, because it touches not only on property, but on the dignity of civilians and their fundamental rights.

A family photograph is not a stolen object: it is a document of identity. Its theft goes beyond the material to become a violation of private life, and thus intersects with the violation of the right to human dignity.

The message, here, is unambiguous: we do not want only your land, we want to erase your traces upon it.

The most dangerous blow of all, however, concerns the disappearance of property boundaries, the erasure of landmarks and the destruction of cadastral records and land registries. The damage then becomes a long-term threat to rights, no less grave than the bombardment itself. Destruction becomes a future legal problem: who owns what? Where does property begin and where does it end? It is a systematic undermining and erasure of civil rights and private property, as though the war waged by the Israelis were not content with immediate destruction alone, but extended to sow lasting disputes within the society itself.

Once the destruction of memory asserts itself as a recurring pattern: targeting of civilian infrastructure, mass destruction with no discernible military necessity, systematic pillage, we are no longer speaking of mere excesses, but of acts that fall within the framework of crimes against humanity. And the question, at this stage, is no longer only technical or legal: it is moral. For the values supposed to govern the conduct of war, even in its most extreme circumstances, collapse the moment the civilian, their memory and their property become a legitimate target.

Yet these attempts run up against a fundamental truth: memory does not erase itself easily. Stone can be broken, but it is difficult to uproot meaning. Memory is admittedly like glass, its fractures resist repair, but neither does it disappear entirely. It endures in people, in language, in longing, and in the act of rebuilding itself.

The question lies not only in what is destroyed, but in how we respond. Repeating ready-made formulas like "we will rebuild better than before" is not enough; it may even be a form of flight. True reconstruction begins with the acknowledgement of loss: there is a real fracture, there are things that cannot be entirely repaired, there is something irreplaceable that has been lost.

What the South needs today, therefore, is not only reconstruction, but the protection of its memory: documenting what has been destroyed and recording the violations, preserving names and evidence, redrawing maps and consolidating rights through legal channels, safeguarding narratives and pursuing those responsible within international frameworks.

For the battle, in the final account, is not only over the land, but over the meaning of that land.

And whoever succeeds in protecting their memory succeeds in enduring.