The Institute for Palestine Studies

The Institute for Palestine Studies was founded in 1963, and its library was founded with it, for a reason the Institute still states plainly: the preservation of Palestinian intellectual and cultural production, and the collection of documents and research on the question of Palestine. That library — named in 1984 for Constantine Zurayk, one of the Institute’s founders and for a quarter of a century its honorary president — now occupies four storeys of the Beirut headquarters and holds more than seventy-nine thousand volumes in Arabic, English, French and Hebrew, plus hundreds of periodical and newspaper runs. Its rare holdings include books issued by the British Mandate authorities, the official gazette and regulations of the mandatory government, and the volumes produced by the World Zionist Congresses.

For researchers who cannot get to Beirut, the Institute’s value is in what it has put online. The Journal of Palestine Studies is the field’s journal of record; a substantial number of its articles and documents are readable in full through the Institute’s digital projects portal, and it is often the fastest route to an authoritative English text of a Palestinian political document with scholarly annotation attached. The Palestine Chronology carries the Journal’s day-by-day event summaries from 1982 forward. The Congressional Monitor tracks every bill mentioning Palestine or Israel introduced from the 107th through the 115th US Congress. More recent projects document the targeting of Gaza’s health sector since 2024 and, through the Shireen Abu Akleh platform, assaults on Palestinian journalists and media institutions.

Two practical notes. First, the Institute is a publisher as well as an archive: some journal content sits behind the publisher’s paywall while other pieces are freely readable through the Institute’s own digital projects subdomain, so it is worth checking both before concluding that an article is unavailable. Second, the Institute is the content partner behind PalQuest, the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, which it built jointly with the Palestinian Museum — so a search that fails here may succeed there, and vice versa.

The Institute’s standing rests on something more than longevity. In a field where most of the primary documentation is held by the states that produced the events, IPS is the Palestinian institution that has spent six decades assembling the counter-record and, crucially, publishing it in the languages in which the argument is conducted.

Sources

• Library — Institute for Palestine Studies
• Digital Projects — Institute for Palestine Studies
• Journal of Palestine Studies full text, example article — Institute for Palestine Studies Digital Projects