Heritage is often used in policy and public discourse as a given: consider the frequent use of terms such as “heritage policy,” “cultural heritage,” and “heritage and preservation” by national and international NGOs and funding bodies. Yet, as many scholars have attested, heritage is a complex and contested terrain where history, memory, governmentality, and culture intertwine in multiple ways. Heritage can be as much about protection as about erasure; it can be as much about respect and intergenerational connectivity as about violence, disdain, or appropriation. The political complexity of “heritage,” and at times, its practical impossibility, is particularly acute in contexts of conquest, domination, and control—as is the case of those living (surviving, resisting, striving) under settler colonialism. This is why Chiara De Cesari's Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine is an illuminating study, useful for both a better understanding of life and struggles in Palestine, and for a broader discussion of the politics of heritage. The book offers a detailed account of Palestinian “heritage,” as a form of knowledge, as an inspiration for resistance, as a technology of state making, as a glue that can bind civil society, and as a form of governance.

Within the field of memory and preservation, one of the challenges in writing about heritage is that it is very easy to slip into a monolithic definition of “culture” to be documented, preserved, and passed on “as is”; often forgetting how the notions of culture or cultural legacy can be operationalized, adopted into political agendas, or dismissed. It is easy to forget that only some forms of material culture come to be valued (as are their bearers); and it is just as easy to forget that supporting heritage and preservation through donor funding, grants, and recognition is not enough, when political infrastructure is under constant attack, and when the materiality of culture is continuously destroyed. However, when the analysis of heritage is positioned within the scholarship and deep political understanding of settler colonialism, the scene becomes clear: politicide, we are reminded, takes many shapes and forms, and has many devastating consequences.

Heritage and cultural struggles in Palestine are approached by De Cesari with great sensitivity and attention to details. The book demonstrates how the ideas, practices, and institutional formations of heritage have been evolving and changing in the face of persistent and ongoing destruction brought by Israeli settler colonialism through the years, on economic, political, cultural, and material levels. De Cesari's book can be read chronologically, introducing us to the rich history of Palestinian heritage and how it was studied by Tawfiq Canaan and other early Palestinian ethnographers in the 1920s, exposing the relations between the intellectuals and the peasants (fellahin).

The history of Palestinian intellectuals and scholars takes us into a detailed account of class relations, as it shaped the relations between West-facing academics and the bearers of folklore (Chapter 1). This history shows “folklore” as an object of knowledge, and at the same time as a site of “Palestinian resistance compris[ing] of the world of scholars, activists, and everyday people who took over the legacy of Canaan's circle in an explicitly political way” (pp. 66–67). Folklore was also a political drive of the 70s and 80s activism of the Palestinian women's movement. Finally, it was a synecdoche for lost land, as shown in De Cesari's discussion of how the upper class women's relation to traditional embroidery has shifted from distancing (as it was the clothes worn by the peasant women) to affective connection. As one of the women put it: “when the Israelis came and took over the country… we got attached to [Palestinian] embroidery since we had nothing left [of Palestine]” (p. 57).

The book then takes us to the Olso and post-Olso developments, while moving back and forth through layers of history. For example, Chapter 2 focuses on Old Hebron and its residents. The chapter is anchored in the analysis of post-Olso efforts of “government through heritage,” which must be understood also in relation to “colonisation by heritage”—a phenomenon that characterizes much of the Palestinian historical-cultural landscape but is particularly acute in Hebron.

De Cesari's book can also be read geographically, as it is not located within one site, one neighborhood, one city, or one museum: the book moves from Hebron to Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Jericho, and elsewhere in the West Bank. We are taken to sites, neighborhoods, old and new buildings (Chapters 2 and 3), and museums, sometimes stopping to listen to vignettes of stories of one individual, one family, one house, one dress, one painting; and then back to the tracing of heritage as a language, an infrastructure, or an inspiration. The movement is never smooth, however. It is interrupted by the lack of territorial continuity or free movement, by borders and checkpoints, in other words, by a violent net of fragmentations—a direct result of post-Oslo plans coupled with multiple re-occupations and other expansions of militarized settler colonialism in the West Bank. The examples of such fragmentation are everywhere, and they indeed shape the jittery special movements of the book. A chapter that begins with the story of restoring the Old City of Hebron pauses with one resident's account of how “a lively historical centre turned into a violent and militarised space, a dead space” (p. 92). A chapter, dedicated to museums and “museum fever”, quickly takes us to the dispossession of Palestinian cultural property which is located (and displayed) in Israel and is physically out of reach for the Palestinians. How can one have national museums when the nation is “dispossessed of objects and entire museums” (p. 166)? Can there be museums without objects and without publics?

One of the hardest parts of the book is to learn just how all-encompassing and devastating the effect of Israeli settler colonialism has been on Palestinian cultural memory, material preservation and cultural heritage, through different periods (from the 1948 Nakba / establishment of the state of Israel; the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967; and to the Olso Accords of 1993–95 which only appeared to support the creation of an independent state in Palestine). At the same time, the book powerfully and carefully avoids the common pitfall of ethnographic writing—especially that done by outsiders—when it concerns communities and societies brutalized by political violence. Often these are narratives of victimhood devoid of agency, where ultimately, the brutalizer overshadows its victims not only in real life, but in the pages of academic writing. De Cesari's book does not center Zionist “memorycide” of Palestine, or the shifts and intensification of Israeli political control of the West Bank in Gaza after Olso. Rather, she focuses on the Palestinians: the creative spirit and resilience of heritage work as well as disappointment and despair; the political struggles of establishing a heritage infrastructure as well as the multiple tensions of the Palestinian art world and the society as a whole.

Ultimately, beyond being a guide to the politics of heritage, De Cesari's work is a celebration of Palestinian cultural struggle and survival. And this is where the truly crucial issues, raised by the book, are located. For example, how can we understand heritage work that is simultaneously about state-building and institutionalization and about resistance, about establishing authority and challenging authority? How can creativity open up a space for creating and negotiating statehood and political subjectivity in colonial spaces, when the state itself does not exist? And finally, how can museums, as an epitome of colonial knowledge, be reworked to counter colonialism—to use De Cesari's own words, “What does it mean to museumify something that is not past, not dead, even, at times, not yet existing?” (p.194)