On the very day that Israel and Hamas agreed to a proposed ceasefire, the World Monuments Fund (WMF) announced the latest additions to its running tally of endangered sites. Underwritten by corporate sponsors like American Express and the French hotel conglomerate Accor and updated biannually, the Watch, as the list is called, is designed to prod states and private actors into saving such wide-ranging repositories of heritage as sinking Maine lighthouses, aquaponic landscapes in southern Peru, and a modernist movie house in Angola’s Namibe province. Also on the 2025 Watch (out of a total of twenty-five new entries) were the Moon and the “Historic Urban Fabric” of Gaza, two places that currently share more or less the same level of habitability.
From what I’ve been able to find, the word Gaza last appeared on the Watch in 2012 and in 2004 before that. Since October 7, 2023, WMF has, in its various press communiqués, consistently made mention of Ukraine’s cultural heritage falling to Russian Federation bombers as well as other conflict-heavy regions, including Iraq and Afghanistan. On its Instagram, the organization has, over the past fifteen months, expressed “solidarity” with those impacted by the recent LA wildfires, “deep sadness” over the burning of Copenhagen’s historic Stock Exchange, and “dismay” over the proposed removal of 850 trees from a park in Toronto. It issued full-throated condemnations of the “genocidal campaign to eradicate the Yazidi people’s faith in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq,” the “full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine,” and the “ongoing civil war in Myanmar.” But up until last week’s livestream, it remained mum on the subject of “Gaza’s Historic Urban Fabric,” the phrase itself an eerie abstraction. Shatha Safi, director of the Ramallah-based Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation, broke WMF’s silence, saying, “This past year has had a significant effect on cultural heritage sites in Gaza, as well as its infrastructure and many historic sites have been completely destroyed.”
For her part, WMF head Bénédicte de Montlaur contextualized the selection within the broader “cradle of civilization” of the Middle East. She singled out the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, which partially survived a targeted shelling by the Israeli Defense Forces (a dozen people sheltering inside were killed), as a potential recipient of restoration work, provided a lasting ceasefire could be reached.
What exactly does WMF hope to accomplish by including Gaza on the Watch, after so conspicuously avoiding any reference to the destruction of Gazan lives in its regular messaging? On the conference call, de Montlaur and her colleagues spoke at length about the importance of cultural memory and tourism—and the lingering colonial character of tourist sites—but passed over a query about the organization’s prior avoidance of the war. It all felt like too little too late, as did subsequent reporting on the list, in which journalists entertained the plausibility of preserving Buzz Aldrin’s lunar footprints.
Perhaps when all is said and done, when the façade of the liberal rules-based order is demolished beyond repair, when refugees have no homes or cultural heritage to return to, and Gaza (should the pornographic real estate fantasies of Trump and Jared Kushner come to fruition) is redeveloped into a Middle Eastern Monaco, Accor, the Watch’s “Sustainable Tourism Partner” for 2024, will build a five-star resort overlooking the Med. In the meantime, the WMF can commend itself for telling the world what we already know.