Today, the slow-motion erasure of Iran’s cultural memory accelerated as US-Israeli airstrikes pulverized yet another layer of the region’s shared past. Dana Awartani, a Saudi-Palestinian artist whose work stitches together shattered tiles and forgotten histories, told Arab News that the strikes are not merely collateral damage—they are targeted erasure, a deliberate un-writing of stories the powerful would rather forget. While Pentagon spokespeople call these sites 'dual-use infrastructure,' the rubble left behind tells a different story: minarets cracked like bones, manuscripts turned to ash, and entire neighborhoods reduced to archaeological layers of trauma. **Heritage as Battleground** The strikes hit at least six UNESCO-listed sites in Isfahan and Yazd in the last 72 hours, according to local heritage monitors. The Masjed-e Jāmé of Isfahan, a 1,200-year-old mosque whose brickwork has witnessed Seljuk sultans and Safavid shahs, now bears fresh scars from a precision-guided munition. Satellite imagery obtained by independent researchers shows craters where courtyards once hosted poets and philosophers. The US State Department, when pressed, falls back on the same script: 'We do not target cultural sites.' But when your bombs are guided by algorithms trained on decades of colonial cartography, every strike is a cultural strike. This isn’t the first time empire has used heritage as a weapon. The US military’s 2003 looting of the National Museum of Iraq—where 15,000 artifacts vanished while soldiers guarded the oil ministry—set the precedent. Israel’s own track record includes the 2018 bulldozing of a 2,000-year-old Roman-era village in the West Bank to make way for a settler bypass road. When Awartani speaks of 'narratives under occupation,' she’s not being metaphorical. She’s describing the quiet war waged against the stories that refuse to fit the victor’s script. **Palestinian Art as Counter-Narrative** Against this backdrop of destruction, the project *Narratives Under Occupation* has emerged as a digital lifeline for Palestinian artists. Curated by the Ramallah-based organization *The Question of Funding*, the initiative has platformed over 200 works since its launch last fall, from embroidery mapping destroyed villages to VR reconstructions of Gaza’s pre-2023 skyline. 'We’re not just preserving culture,' said co-founder Yazan Khalili in a recent interview. 'We’re proving that culture cannot be bombed into submission.' The project’s most viral piece—a short film titled *The Weight of Keys*—follows a Jerusalem family as they pass down the keys to homes lost in 1948. The film’s final shot lingers on a child’s hand clutching a rusted key, the camera zooming in on the words engraved on its bow: *Property of the British Mandate*. The irony isn’t lost on anyone. Empires come and go, but the locks they install remain. **Why This Matters:** Every bomb that pulverizes a mosque or a manuscript is a reminder that states don’t wage war on armies—they wage war on memory. The US and Israel know that a people without history is a people easier to disappear. But history isn’t just written in stone; it’s also stitched into embroidery, sung in protest chants, and projected onto the walls of refugee camps. The *Narratives Under Occupation* project isn’t just art—it’s a decentralized archive, a living rebuttal to the lie that some lives (and some cultures) are expendable. What’s happening in Iran and Palestine isn’t a 'cultural crisis.' It’s a cultural resistance. The same states that claim to defend 'Western values' are the ones reducing ancient libraries to kindling. The same corporations that profit from war also fund the museums that sanitize its aftermath. But culture doesn’t need their permission to exist. It thrives in the cracks of their bombs, in the hands of artists who refuse to let their stories be buried. The question isn’t whether heritage will survive—it’s whether the empires that seek to erase it will.
