In keeping with a United Nations report launched in June, Israel has destroyed greater than half of all spiritual and cultural websites in Gaza. The UN’s Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, stated of the findings that assaults on cultural websites, together with museums, mosques, and archaeological landmarks, hinder Palestinian self-determination and could have impacts for generations to come back. Though it’s identified that the destruction of cultural and non secular websites serves to erase historic connections to the land, the difficulty is never the main focus of nuanced reporting, in keeping with human rights journalist Mischa Geracoulis.
In her new ebook Media Framing and the Destruction and Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2025), Geracoulis, who’s the managing editor of the media literacy group Venture Censored, argues that the way in which during which assaults on heritage are introduced to the general public is crucial to linking these assaults to atrocity crimes, together with genocide and conflict crimes.
“There’s just been so little coverage,” Geracoulis stated in an interview with Hyperallergic, characterizing Western media stories on cultural destruction in these areas. “It’s been more of an absence of coverage than just glaring mistakes.”
Geracoulis pointed to a failure of main media organizations to border the destruction of cultural websites in each Gaza and Artsakh as human rights violations. Framing, referring to the journalistic perspective of sure occasions, entails each the journalist’s perspective and what’s included or excluded from a narrative. Her new ebook, which is geared primarily towards college students and lecturers, is a part of Routledge’s collection on media and humanitarianism.
Checking the framing of a narrative, Geracoulis stated, is equally necessary to plain fact-checking. Relying closely on official spokespeople to report on the destruction of cultural heritage may painting a actuality totally different from “on the ground” reporting, Geracoulis instructed Hyperallergic. As an alternative, journalists ought to present historic and geographic context and solicit data from the bottom.
Khatchkars within the Dadivank monastic advanced in 2015 (picture Yelena Ambartsumian/Hyperallergic) Credit score: All images by the writer
Geracoulis’s household emigrated to the US within the early twentieth century as a direct results of the Armenian Genocide from 1915 to 1923, throughout which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians had been exterminated below the Ottoman authorities. After the genocide, Ottoman-allied Azerbaijan razed Armenian heritage from Nakhichevan, a territory given to the nation by the Soviets, from which it expelled Armenians. By 1924, 10,000 medieval Armenian cross-stones, known as khachkars, situated within the largest historic Armenian gravesite, had been reportedly diminished to three,000. Khachkars comprise devotional depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion, and every one is exclusive. The Azerbaijani navy has reportedly been filmed deliberately destroying these stone crosses in Artsakh.
Azerbaijan seized the previously autonomous Armenian territory of Artsakh in 2024, displacing greater than 100,000 ethnic Armenians from the area. In 2022, Azerbaijan violated its ceasefire with Armenia and Russia by blocking the Lachin hall, the one street connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. The blockade prevented the stream of requirements, prompting the previous chief Worldwide Felony Court docket prosecutor to warn {that a} genocide was being dedicated. Turkey and Azerbaijan, that are carefully allied, deny the Armenian Genocide. (Biden grew to become the primary US president to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide in 2021.)
Geracoulis additionally traces the dearth of accountability for the Armenian Genocide as paving the way in which for Azerbaijan’s ongoing destruction.
Among the many landmarks in Gaza destroyed by Israel’s navy, in keeping with the UN, was the Nice Omari Mosque, the oldest on the strip. A quote from an nameless Israeli official cited in NPR’s reporting said that the mosque “contained a tunnel shaft used by militants,” an accusation incessantly made by the Israeli navy when it targets civilian hubs and heritage websites. The UN report fee additionally documented allegations of artifact looting from the Pasha Palace Museum, constructed within the thirteenth century and residential to artifacts of native archaeology, the Israa College museum, and a warehouse belonging to the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jerusalem.
Whereas worldwide human rights responses to those assaults may be restricted, media organizations can affect governments to behave on crimes of cultural destruction, Geracoulis writes.
“Language and stories around cultural heritage have geopolitical implications,” Geracoulis writes. “Because conflict is often justified through historical narratives, and because cultural heritage is tied to identity and homeland, stories around cultural heritage may be purposed to either legitimate or exploit geopolitical aims.”
