Where Memory Lives in Rubble: Arafat’s Villa as Shelter and Story
There is a metal gate in Rimal that still carries a famous face. Arafat’s silhouette — keffiyeh wrapped, sunglasses on — stares from a faded poster bolted to a scorched door, and behind him, almost apologetically small, is another portrait: Mahmoud Abbas. The images, girls and boys running past them, the laughter and the bark of dogs, all feel oddly ordinary against a background of concrete teeth and skeletal buildings. The villa that once housed Yasser Arafat — once a museum, once a shrine — now shelters families who have nowhere else to go.
Walk inside and the air smells of dust, burnt paper, and a strange sweetness of resilience. Murals of the late leader, painted in the grand strokes of state memory, peer from partially collapsed walls. Children use the courtyard as a playground between sheets hung like flags to divide sleeping spaces. What was meant to preserve history has itself become history-in-use: a monument folded into daily life.
Rimal’s ruins: a neighbourhood rewritten
Rimal was always one of Gaza City’s more cosmopolitan strips — seaside cafes, narrow lanes, and blocks of sun-bleached apartment buildings. Today the neighbourhood is a map of absence. Buildings lie in piles; facades are gone; palm trees stand like blackened sentinels. The villa’s courtyard, Abu Salem says, was “largely destroyed and burned.” He and his fellow occupants moved in because when the war closed walls around them, the villa’s remaining rooms were the only shelter they could find.
“We belong to the generation of the first intifada,” Ashraf Nafeth Abu Salem told me, fingers trailing over a yellowed book with Arafat’s portrait on the cover. “We grew up throwing stones. For us, President Abu Ammar was a model and a symbol of the Palestinian national struggle.” His voice held the slow cadence of someone naming a lifetime; pride and grief braided together.
Families in a museum
On a cracked stairwell, a woman mends a child’s trousers with a thread rescued from a ruined sofa. “My name is Mariam,” she said, not offering her family name. “We slept in tents for a month. When we came here, it felt wrong and right at the same time — wrong because it should be kept as it was, and right because my children needed shade.” Her eldest son, nine, draws lines in the dust with a stick — lines that might be roads, or imaginary borders, or safe passages.
For many, the villa’s transformation is practical. But it is also profoundly symbolic: to sleep beneath the emblem of a national leader while the city itself is being unmade is to live in the tight seam between memory and survival.
When heritage and humanitarian crises collide
The scene in Rimal is not only a story about an old house. It is a snapshot of a wider catastrophe. UN agencies have tallied the human and physical toll: some analyses put the destruction of Gaza’s buildings at around three-quarters of the territory’s housing stock, producing over 61 million tonnes of rubble. That debris is not just an environmental headache; it is the residue of lives, livelihoods, and cultural anchors.
“Rubble is the physical manifestation of displacement,” said Dr. Lina Haddad, a historian who studies urban memory in the Palestinian territories. “When you clear the stones, you don’t just make way for new buildings; you make decisions about what memories are kept and what are erased. Sites like Arafat’s villa become contested ground: museums, homes, memorials, shelters — sometimes all at once.”
Humanitarian workers on the ground speak of a practical nightmare: clearing 61 million tonnes of debris is an engineering problem at an industrial scale, but it is also a question of politics, funding, and who gets to rebuild first. “There are pipes and live wires under that rubble,” said Omar Khalil, who coordinates shelter responses for a local non-governmental group. “You can’t just bulldoze everything. And even if you could, where do we put the people who lose their improvised dwellings?”
Portraits among the living
The villa’s oldest rooms smell like old books and cooking fires. Abu Salem turned pages of a heavy, yellowed volume bearing Arafat’s portrait and told me stories that read like chapters in a national epic — the first intifada, long nights of clandestine meetings, the scent of cigarette smoke in packed rooms where impossible decisions were made.
“He was not a perfect man,” said an elderly neighbor who asked to be called Umm Nasser. “But he was ours. When I look at that poster, I remember the time my son came back with a new idea, and how proud he was. Memory is not a clean thing. It is messy, like the dishes left in the sink.”
That messiness is what makes the villa feel alive. Visitors nod, sit, and tell stories. They repair what they can with what they have. A faded keffiyeh hung over a broken balustrade becomes both scarf and curtain. A child’s drawing of an airplane — perhaps a symbol of flight, perhaps something darker — is taped to a wall beneath a mural of Arafat’s profile.
Bigger questions: identity, resilience, and the future
When a national symbol becomes a shelter, what happens to the idea it once represented? Is the protection of heritage a luxury, or a necessity for collective healing? If rebuilding takes years — or decades — what will the memory of this time be for those born into its aftermath?
“You can build a city out of concrete, but you cannot build trust with concrete,” Dr. Haddad observed. “Reconstruction must be about people, not only facades. Otherwise, you’re restoring a postcard of normalcy while the lives that made that postcard possible remain displaced.”
Readers might ask: when we think of cultural preservation, whose voice do we privilege? And what does it mean to live inside a museum when your stomach is empty and your future uncertain?
Small acts, large meanings
Back in the courtyard, Abu Salem swept ash from a patch of burned tiles with a broom that had seen better days. “We clean the courtyard because we want a little dignity,” he said. “If we can make this place a little cleaner, my wife can hang our clothes. My daughter can play. She has to have something to remember besides bombs.”
That is the paradox of places like the villa: they are proof of ruin and of endurance at once. They raise questions that are local and global — about how societies care for their past when their present is under siege; about how we count the cost of war not only in human lives but in the cultural scaffolding that holds memory upright.
What will remain?
The gate with Arafat’s portrait will probably rust and peel. The murals will fade. New children will run through the courtyard, drawing new borders in the dust. Perhaps one day there will be a plan to restore the villa as a museum in the old sense — polished, curated, controlled. Perhaps it will become a permanent neighbourhood, a place where the artifacts of national memory are entangled with ordinary lives.
For now, it is both: a relic and a refuge. It asks us to decide what is more urgent — to preserve the past as an object, or to preserve the people who carry that past in their breath, stories, and small, stubborn acts of daily life.
So ask yourself as you read: when history and humanity compete for the same space, which do we save first? And how do we ensure that the answer honors both the dead and the living?
