Madrid played host this week to a strange piece of theater. Ministers gathered to talk about rebuilding Palestinian culture — its cinema, its archives, its museums — at a conference bearing the bloodless title “International Conference on the Reconstruction of Cultural Sector in Palestine.”

Indonesia’s culture minister, Fadli Zon, came home with pledges: a Palestinian museum wing at Taman Mini in Jakarta, a cultural center in Jerusalem, a slate of literary translations into Bahasa Indonesia. All very warm. All very photogenic.

And all, frankly, beside the point while the thing that actually matters goes conveniently unmentioned.

What exactly is the point of restoring a people’s culture if you have no intention of restoring their country?

What exactly is the point of restoring a people’s culture if you have no intention of restoring their country?

Culture is not a museum piece. It is not embroidery under glass, waiting patiently for a foreign minister to admire it on a conference sideline. It is what a people build while they are living.

And Palestinians right now are living under siege, under bombardment, under a two-year campaign that the world’s most credible human rights bodies — and a growing number of Israel’s own former security officials — have stopped dancing around and started calling what it plainly is: genocide.

You do not answer genocide with a translation grant. You do not answer the flattening of a people’s universities, hospitals, and archives with a promise to co-produce a film.

You do not answer genocide with a translation grant. You do not answer the........

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