IT may seem an odd dilemma in a territory where more than half of families live below an internationally defined poverty line, but Jawdat Khoudary is wondering whether there should be museum charges in Gaza.
As the owner and creator of the Strip’s first purpose-built archeological museum, he has no doubt that the most prized patrons, the organized parties of schoolchildren already starting to flock to it, must come for free. And having sunk a small fortune — he won’t say how much — into building this elegant and air-conditioned space overlooking the Mediterranean just north of Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp, he certainly isn’t trying to make money from it. But the 48-year-old owner of one of Gaza’s biggest construction companies worries that if he doesn’t charge a couple of shekels for individual entry, Gazans may not realize the value of their heritage as much as he does.
“I believe in the importance of our roots, the importance of history,” he says. “The nation that forgot its history will not have a good future.” And what is a history? This cultured but repeatedly fought-over and serially occupied maritime civilization on the route from the Levant to Africa, is many thousand years old, flourishing long before the blinded Samson pulled down the temple of Dagon in the 12th century BC, killing himself and thousands of his Philistine captors. The artifacts that Khoudary has installed are only part of the personal collection he has built since telling his bulldozer drivers and laborers — and local fishermen — 20 years ago that he would pay for anything ancient they find in the course of their work.
But even Khoudary’s collection is only a small fraction of the dazzling archeological treasures of the Gaza, those already dug up and dispersed among collections round the world, those plundered and stolen, and those still waiting to be excavated.
However, this half of that fraction is rich enough to make the trip worthwhile. It ranges chronologically from sun-dried clay pots to mud-brick wall fragments from 5,500 years ago.
In between are hundreds of objects that testify to Gaza’s long and turbulent history from the early bronze age to the Ottoman Empire: Heavy stone anchors and more recognizable Roman ones; ancient Egyptian alabaster plates; clay jars and Corinthian columns from the Byzantine period; oil, water and perfume pots, and a clay wheel from a (now reconstructed) child’s toy cart from the Philistine period; glass bottles from the Hellenistic age and miniature sculptures in ivory. And “a very important piece”, says Khoudary, the clay coffin lid in the form of a man’s head from the 11th century BC. The museum is partly designed to shed a ray of cultural light in the gloom of a blockaded, impoverished and war-damaged Gaza.
Khoudary’s is the first attempt to establish a focal point inside Gaza to house treasures that would, in the past, have left it. “One of the purposes of my project is to alert the international community to the need for our heritage to be protected from political disputes,” he says.