How Palestinians Are Building a Digital Archive That Can’t Be Erased

“We created this platform, the Palestine Museum Digital Archive, which is an unlootable archive,” Shomali explains.

What began with elemental door-knocking—visiting families successful the West Bank and asking support to scan aged photographs, letters and documents—has grown into 1 of the astir ambitious integer preservation projects successful the region.

The open-source archive present contains much than 500,000 digitized photographs, recognition papers, diaries, maps, films, and letters, galore of which were collected straight from Palestinian families and mightiness different person been mislaid forever.

The Palestinian Museum’s ngo is some preservation and access: to safeguard Palestinian past and marque it disposable to those incapable to sojourn Palestine.

Behind the archive is simply a squad of 3 full-time unit members dedicated solely to digitization, metadata, and research, supported by a wider web of volunteers. Funded done diaspora donations and partnerships with the University of California and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the task involves extended cataloging, translations, and linguistic proofreading. The depository is adjacent exploring a bot susceptible of speechmaking Ottoman Arabic to assistance process humanities records.

The effort reflects a broader displacement successful however communities nether menace are utilizing technology—not simply to sphere culture, but to physique resilient, distributed archives that tin outlive war, displacement, and carnal destruction.

For Shomali, the archive allows Palestinians to reclaim ownership implicit their history. “All of a sudden, you commencement to person this mesh, this web of accusation and data, and it allows you to rewrite the history, but interestingly, bottom-up successful the consciousness that it’s not a authorities archive.”

The depository has besides taken steps to guarantee the archive tin past integer attacks and adjacent carnal destruction. Multiple copies of the archive are stored astir the world, creating a distributed strategy designed to forestall the collections from disappearing entirely.

“We person antithetic backups, but we support getting cyberattacks connected the website,” Shomali says. “Almost each month, we get attacked, and the website goes down, and we reinitiate it based connected 1 of the backups we have.”

“We can’t support it from being hacked, but we tin support it from disappearing.”

The archive’s distributed quality means Palestinian past nary longer exists successful a azygous gathering oregon connected a azygous server. Even if 1 transcript disappears, others remain.

One inaugural turned the archive into what Shomali describes arsenic “an accumulation successful a box, Ikea-style.” Users tin download accumulation materials, people them, and signifier their ain exhibitions connected Palestine anyplace successful the world, careless of budget. The task has been exhibited much than 260 times, from Japan to San Francisco, and translated into 5 languages.

The archive has besides go a assets for artists and curators abroad. In May 2026, creator and curator Leyya Mona Tawil utilized its collections to make My Name is Palestine: Echoes from The Palestinian Museum’s Music Online Exhibition successful San Francisco.

“They’d travel retired mostly successful tears and conscionable beryllium like, convey you,” Tawil says astir the reception to radical visiting the exhibition.

Acknowledging the sheer standard of the archive, Tawil says she accessed conscionable a “fragment of what the depository holds.” But adjacent that had a profound interaction connected her arsenic an creator and her audience: “It’s not conscionable a past of music, it’s not conscionable a postulation of past objects; it’s a surviving archive that represents a nine that is nether threat.”