Israel targets Nablus administrative records for destruction

Prior to Wednesday, the muqata’a was a large government building in Nablus, Palestine, originally built by the British in the 1920s and used until this week for civil government functions. It contained the archives of civil documents of the region, containing “hundreds of thousands of file cases and documents — birth and death certificates, identification records, passports and other travel documents, ledgers of hand written information — a heritage of historical information about Nablus residents that covered more than 100 years of successive Palestinian occupations under the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, the Jordanian kingdom, and the current Israeli regime.”

On Wednesday, Israeli troops showed up and destroyed the building with explosives – after staffers offered them entry to the building in order to go after the militants they were seeking. Once the building was reduced to rubble, according to Gale Courey Toensing in “First, Destroy the Archives,” Israeli soldiers drove over the broken file cabinets with bulldozers, mixing their contents with the earth to prevent their recovery. Destruction of the enemy’s information infrastructure is strategically understandable as a way of further weaking their ability to function as an organized society, but strictly in terms of fairness and human rights it’s the kind of thing that makes sympathy with Israel’s position impossible for me. (And I say that without losing any of my great pride in my Jewish heritage. Israel does not represent me as a Jew.)