P
alestinian heritage and history
have often been buried or hidden by
the experiences of upheaval, uprooting, and
even looting and theft that occurred throughout the
occupation. The Birzeit University Palestine Archive Project
promises to remedy that by proposing a creative, critical
engagement with Palestine’s history and culture and
their role in preserving and shaping Palestine’s national
identity. The project inspires communication and cultural
connection across Palestine’s fragmented geographical and
historical reality.
What was once just a concept for preserving Palestinian
history, identity and culture, has blossomed at the
Ibrahim Abu Lughod Institute of International Studies at
Birzeit University. Today, Birzeit University’s Palestinian
Archive Project provides a reliable archive dedicated
to documenting the lives of Palestinians over the past
century, from Ottoman times until today. The project is an
essential resource for the history, politics, and culture of
Palestinians, wherever they have resided.
More than 25,000 documents are available on the open
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Al Ghadeer - Fall 2018
access website – and
around 50,000 are ready for
publishing once the website is updated –
including family papers, oral history accounts and
newspapers since 1909. There are also old post cards and
documents from the Arab National Committee since 1949,
and a number of Ottoman documents translated to Arabic.
A team of historians and researchers curate the collection
at the institute.
Addressing the Palestinian public’s feeling that its
existence is threatened, the Palestinian Archive Project
rejects the commodification of memory and presents
Palestine’s history visually, gathering the threads of
Palestine’s past and present, and shaping its future. This
archive has a direct role in the formation and preservation of
our national identity and prioritizes public access to its roots.
Birzeit University, through this project, seeks to prevent
the loss of Palestine’s history, culture and identity, but
it also aims to strengthen the multiplicity of Palestinian
narratives that are so often dismissed or marginalized in
their re-telling by international academics and journalists.
Palestinian Archive
Project Unearths
a Buried National
History
Renderings of Ethnically-
Cleansed Palestine Record,
Redeem Loss
By 1949, a year after the Palestinian catastrophe (the dispossession of the “Nakba”) and the establishment
of the so-called State of Israel was established, only 13.5 percent of Palestine’s land was under formal Jewish
ownership, either by private individuals or by the state. To create the State of Israel, cities such as Lydda were
ethnically cleansed and/or became segregated cities, and around 530 villages were destroyed.
Over the past year, Birzeit University Museum has organized and hosted exhibitions that shine a light on-
Lydda and the destroyed village Kafr Qasim, trying to reflect on the nature and difficulty of remembering
and exploring truths in history, politics, culture, art, and everyday life in general.
Remembering Lydda
Local and international artists grouped
together to examine the controversies
and analogies dealing with the
imported British colonial planning
paradigm and what that entails from
post- industrial spatial forms and ethos,
the transformation of Lydda to an
ethnically-cleansed and segregated
city, Lod to the benefit of Jewish
immigrants.
The Birzeit University Museum
inaugurated, in October 2018, the
Sixth Cities Exhibition “Lydda- a Garden
Disremembered,” in collaboration with
the A.M. Qattan Foundation under the
Fourth Qalandia International.
“I cannot myself go to Lydda,” said
Yazid Anani, one of the exhibition’s
curators and the Director of the
Public Program at the A.M Qattan
Foundation. The restrictions on
movement imposed by Israeli
authorities are the primary reason
for choosing Lydda. International
artists, and artists from Jerusalem,
according to Anani, are those allowed
to physically travel to Lydda to explore
the themes of the exhibitions, while
others learn about the city through
talks and oral narratives.
Documentary drawing
of the Kafr Qasem
Massacre - by Samia Halaby
Why “A Garden Disremembered?”
In the 1940s, before the Nakba, Lydda was planned as a garden city to
host British colonizers. The city was planned to be ethnically segregated, a
forerunner of the current segregation between Palestinians and Israelis.
The city was planned during the British Mandate by Clifford Holliday and Otto
Polcheck and was intended to host only the British; the style of planning,
however, had an Orientalist gaze and preserved the area’s underdeveloped
biblical landscape in areas where the local population lived. The modern
planning offered a strategic train junction that connected North Africa with
Birzeit University
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