The Palestine Poster Project Archives

The archive began as a private collection and became a research method. Its founder, Dan Walsh, started acquiring Palestine posters as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco in the mid-1970s; by 1980 he had about three hundred, and a small grant awarded with the support of Edward Said allowed him to turn them into an educational slideshow. The web archive grew out of a master’s thesis at Georgetown University and has kept the thesis’s two aims: a curriculum that uses the poster to teach the formative history of the Palestinian–Zionist conflict, and a searchable online archive in which each poster is translated and interpreted.

A note on the counts, because they matter and because they move. The site carries running totals in its own navigation, and it is growing continuously — in the five days between two archived captures in September 2025 it gained thirty-eight posters. The live site also returns 403 to every automated client, so this archive quotes the last captures it could actually read rather than a figure it cannot check: on 22 September 2025 the site listed 24,107 posters, 5,399 artists and 1,070 special collections, and on 27 September 2025, 24,145 posters, 5,410 artists and 1,071 special collections. Any number given for a collection like this is a reading taken on a date, and should be cited with the date attached.

The intellectual move that distinguishes it is the definition of the object. A “Palestine poster,” for the archive’s purposes, is any poster containing the word Palestine in any language from any period; any poster created or published by an artist or agency claiming Palestinian nationality or Palestinian participation; any poster published in the geographical territory of historic Palestine at any point in history, including contemporary Israel; any poster relating directly to the social, cultural, political, military or economic history of Palestine; and any poster relating to Zionism or anti-Zionism published after 31 August 1897. That last clause is why the archive holds Zionist and Israeli material at all — it is sorted into one of four “wellsprings” alongside Arab and Muslim, international, and Palestinian nationalist production, and displayed rather than suppressed. A researcher can therefore trace a visual argument and its counter-argument in the same catalogue.

Sources are correspondingly mixed: the Liberation Graphics collection at the core, plus items from the Library of Congress, the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Yale and the University of Chicago. The archive notes that the genre is unusual among twentieth-century political poster traditions in still being alive — more Palestine posters are produced now than ever, many of them born digital, printed locally in small runs, which is a real shift in how political poster art is made and circulated.

On UNESCO the archive is more precise than most summaries of it, and the precision is worth reproducing. The banner across its pages describes the Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters as “Recommended for Inscription to UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register in 2014 and 2016”; the collection’s own page refers readers to “the entire 2023-2024 Memory of the World nomination form,” and adds an explicit caution: “The entire contents of the PPPA website are not being nominated to the Memory of the World program: only the 1,600 posters featured in the Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters have been nominated.” The claim is the archive’s own, made in the first person by its founder; this archive has not been able to verify it against UNESCO’s register and reports it as the nominator’s account rather than as an inscription.

Practical guidance: browse by year of publication, country of publication, or artist nationality rather than by keyword, because the descriptive metadata is uneven across a collection this size and the faceted lists are more reliable. The archive sells nothing and reproduces nothing commercially — “The PPPA never sells any posters or reproductions of posters. The PPPA is a strictly educational site and does not engage in any commercial or merchandising activity whatsoever” — so requests for image use should be addressed to it directly. And note the conservator’s point in its FAQ: “Libraries and museums catalog posters as ‘graphic ephemera’ because they are fragile works-on-paper vulnerable to a host of threats such as moisture, direct sunlight, mold, ink-to-paper chemistry and vandalism, among others. As such they usually have very short lives and often disappear completely soon after being printed.” The archive exists because most of what it holds no longer does.

Sources

• About the Palestine Poster Project Archives — live site; returns 403 to automated clients
• About the Palestine Poster Project Archives — Internet Archive capture of 22 September 2025, with the collection counts
• The Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters / Memory of the World (Nominated) — Internet Archive capture of 27 September 2025
• FAQ — Palestine Poster Project Archives, Internet Archive capture of 27 September 2025
• Contact — Palestine Poster Project Archives, Internet Archive capture of 13 February 2024