We live in a block universe of spacetime, where nothing physically passes and vanishes, but where occasionally things withdraw due to surpassing disasters. Palestinians, Kurds, and Bosnians have to deal with not only the concerted erasure by their enemies of much of their tradition: the erasure by the Israelis of hundreds of Palestinian villages in 1948 and their renaming with Jewish names, and the erasure of hundreds of Kurdish villages during the Anfāl operation in Iraq, etc.; but also the additional, more insidious withdrawal of what survived the physical destruction. — Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster.