Plaster Saints

On the very day that Israel and Hamas reportedly struck a deal on 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, …