The Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research

Akevot was founded in 2014 out of what it calls a recognition of the unique role archives can play in fostering fact-based discourse and supporting the work of human rights defenders. Its method has three parts: it researches and exposes the mechanisms, processes and events that perpetuate the conflict; it helps human rights defenders and civil society organisations obtain archival documentation relevant to their work; and it campaigns to widen public access to government archives. For Palestinian researchers this is the institute that goes into the Israeli state’s own files and comes back out with them.

The output is document-led, and the collections are the point. The Kafr Qasim Massacre Document Library gathers thousands of pages of digitised primary material on the massacre and the famous trial that followed, together with background on both — and, in Akevot’s framing, on “deliberate efforts to conceal the event and erase it from public memory.” Other published files cover suspicions of war crimes in 1948 and the cabinet protocols around them, the newly declassified records of “Plan Mole” in the Kafr Qasim trial, the surveillance of Palestinian teachers and students under military rule, the Negev Bedouin Siyag plan with its stated aim of “creating enclaves to break contiguity,” the flight of Golan Heights residents, and military rule as a system of what the documents themselves describe as discrimination on the basis of race.

The institute’s most quietly devastating product is not a document at all but a measurement. Akevot conducts annual monitoring of the level of access to materials held in the major Israeli government archives, and its most recent published finding is that only 4.06 per cent of the files are open for public access. That single figure is the necessary context for every claim about what the Israeli record does or does not show: the overwhelming majority of it has never been seen.

Practical notes. The English site is a full parallel of the Hebrew but not identical, and some articles exist only in Hebrew; the language toggle in the header is the reliable check. Article URLs have been restructured more than once, so links of the form /en/article/<slug>/ sometimes redirect through a stub page — follow the “Read more” link rather than assuming a dead end. And Akevot is an Israeli organisation working on Israeli records; it is a route into the archive of the state, not a Palestinian archive, and should be cited as such.

Sources

• Akevot Institute — home, including the annual archival access finding
• About — Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research
• Kafr Qasim Massacre: Document Library — Akevot