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This article analyses UNESCO’s project of worldwide cultural heritage preservation. It does so through a double lens, an ethnographic and a textual one. I first look at the ways in which World Heritage works in Palestine/Israel. Second, I analyse the discourse of World Heritage, arguing that recent World Heritage reforms, stimulated by critiques of the Eurocentrism of its approaches, adopt the language of liberal multiculturalism. Building on critical accounts of this political discourse, I show how multicultural heritage policies not only risk affirming and solidifying cultural differences, but also the asymmetries between them. Furthermore, I argue that, paradoxically, World Heritage reinforces nation-states, and particularly state apparatuses’ reach and control over heritage sites and processes, often at the expense of the grassroots. By analysing a series of workshops in Jerusalem and Ramallah, I detail the ways in which highly innovative local Palestinian practices of heritage conservation tend to be silenced by the World Heritage mechanism, and trace a discursive process of erasure of politics and ‘locality’ from UNESCO’s representation of humanity’s heritage. I place this erasure in the context of expert anxieties regarding a contaminated universalism.

Beyond the commonsense dichotomy between art as radical practice and heritage as conservation, this article analyzes Palestinian heritage as the ambiguous terrain where these two practices meet, creating a language that is both locally rooted and cosmopolitan. By examining the recent Palestinian art biennales (biennials), I show how heritage-informed art functions as a platform for performing the future Palestinian nation-state. Organized by a heritage organization, the biennales highlight the creativity of a new generation of Palestinian heritage NGOs, which continue a local social-organizing tradition marked by the alliance between heritage, the arts, and liberation politics. This cultural production undermines a traditional dichotomy between heritage and counter-memory because it represents both part of a state-building project and an act of anticolonial resistance, suspended between what scholars term "transnational governmentality" and "counter-governmentality." I argue that Palestinian heritage practices constitute a form of nonstate governmentality. In this context, problems of representation acquire strong relevance.

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