Following Israel’s first citywide evacuation order for the Lebanese city of Baalbek last month, thousands fled for shelter to the Ancient Roman temples and archaeological remains near the city. The UNESCO World Heritage Site within Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, once called Heliopolis in Greek, contains the famed first-century CE Roman Temple of Jupiter and the second-century CE Temple of Bacchus.
But hope that Israel will not bomb the city is rapidly waning. Baalbek’s provincial governor, Bachir Khodr, issued a warning to those seeking sanctuary and refuge within its ancient walls, saying that it was no longer considered safe from Israeli fire.
Many outside of the region have asked why Baalbek has been so heavily targeted by Israel in the past weeks. Hezbollah has long had strong ties to the Bekaa Valley near Syria’s border, a fact that the Israeli military has now used to justify its current campaign. However, civilian deaths are also on a steep incline in the wake of these heightened attacks. The BBC reports that Lebanese authorities have already recorded 60 casualties, including two children.
Laura Nasrallah, a Lebanese-American scholar of religion and Mediterranean antiquity at Yale University, explained what’s at stake in Israel’s ongoing assault on Baalbek.
“To endanger the archaeology of Baalbek is to threaten not only a treasure of the Lebanese nation, but also our understanding of the long, complex history of ethnicities and religious identities in the region,” Nasrallah told Hyperallergic.
“Baalbek offers Roman-period ruins with lavish architecture drawing from the traditions of Greece and Rome, and [representations of] local gods whose identities intertwine with Olympian deities,” Nasrallah continued. “And it’s nestled among farmlands and vineyards that supply food for the region. While the threat to Baalbek is real, archaeological sites and civilians in Sidon (Saida), Tyre (Sour), and elsewhere are also threatened.”
In early- and mid-October, an Israeli air attack reportedly destroyed Saint George’s church in Dardghaya and the shrine of the Prophet Benjamin in Mhaibib.
Many are also beginning to wonder whether Israel’s destruction of cultural heritage might be an objective rather than an unintended consequence of its military tactics. In Gaza, religious and cultural heritage has been decimated by Israeli attacks since last October. In mid-September, UNESCO reported that 69 out of the 120 sites it was able to assess via satellite imagery had been damaged. The agency’s report noted that this includes “10 religious sites, 43 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, 2 depositories of movable cultural property, 6 monuments, 1 museum and 7 archeological sites.”
Amid the horrendous human toll in Gaza — around 42,000 people have been killed (what’s thought to be an extremely low estimate) and 2 million displaced — historians and experts in cultural preservation have begun to probe whether attacks on cultural heritage are part of a broader, systematic attempt to carry out cultural genocide.
Pilar Montero Vilar, art historian and cultural preservation specialist at the University of Madrid, recently penned an article in the online magazine the Conversation about such attacks on Palestinian sites. She cited a recent report by Francesa Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, that points to the way in which cultural heritage destruction, combined with the killing of Palestinians, is erasing the past, present, and any future for Gaza. In the report, titled the “Anatomy of a Genocide,” Albanese concludes, “The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group.” It also determines that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”
Definitions of cultural genocide date back to the 1930s. A Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin minted the term in the wake of Hitler’s ascent to power. In a 2018 report on cultural heritage destruction in Syria, Iraq, and Timbuktu, commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Trust, the late foreign policy expert Edward C. Luck remarked that Lemkin began to formulate the notion for a presentation at the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law in Madrid in 1933. Emphasizing the need for increased cultural heritage protection, Luck related that Lemkin had earlier witnessed how “horribly symbiotic the combination of barbarity and vandalism — physical and cultural destruction — could become.”
In 1939, Lemkin was forced to flee to the forests of Poland before escaping altogether, an experience that informed his own understanding of the link between cultural and physical erasure. To Lemkin, the vandalism of a group’s material culture went hand in hand with active attempts at erasing the existence of a people altogether.
Questions are now arising as to whether these same tactics will be applied in the attacks on Lebanon. Lebanese archaeologist Nelly P. Abboud, founder of the Byblos-based organization MuseoLab, said cultural heritage in Lebanon has been in “a total state of disintegration” due to Israel’s attacks alongside years of Lebanese governmental neglect and corruption.
“It lacks the human and financial resources to manage and maintain itself, and it also lacks a policy that sets the guidelines for its management well,” Abboud told Hyperallergic. “Although Lebanon is quite rich on the archaeological and historical level with thousands of ancient sites and distinctive architectural heritage, there are no efforts put into protecting and preserving this heritage properly.”
So far, there has been no cohesive state plan for preserving or protecting the region. Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry has announced it is now in close talks with UNESCO to convene the World Heritage Committee and issue a statement in defense of Lebanon’s heritage sites.
When asked about whether she thought Israel would move to strike the site’s Roman temples, Abboud was cautious. “This is not something we can predict,” she responded. “What we can say is that years of neglect and corruption have weakened the site of Baalbek. The protection zone set by UNESCO was not respected due to political pressures, and the upper hand in the area of Baalbek is not for the state but for Hezbollah and Amal militias.” The provincial governor, Khodr, posted on X after the last strike near the site of Baalbek that Lebanese Armed Forces had secured it and made sure that it does not contain any Hezbollah weapons or missiles.
The Israeli army issued new evacuation orders on Sunday to Baalbek’s residents, of which 70 percent are now displaced. Lebanon must now hold its breath and hope that Baalbek’s ancient heritage will not be targeted. However, hope is itself a rapidly dwindling resource, particularly in the midst of Israel’s apparent lack of concern for civilians or cultural heritage sites.
“The Lebanese people stood against Hezbollah many times and got threatened and killed, losing prominent Lebanese figures because they demanded freedom from Hezbollah and challenged the status quo,” Abboud said.
“Nothing justifies the extent of damage the Israeli strikes are causing,” she continued. “We want to live in peace. But one can only wonder if the road to peace is on the corpses of thousands of innocent people and the ruins of a beautiful country: Would that peace be worthwhile and would it be sustainable?”
