PalestineRemembered.com

PalestineRemembered has been running since 1999, which makes it older than most of the institutional archives and explains both its strengths and its awkwardness. It was built by volunteers in the diaspora around a single organising idea: that the unit of Palestinian memory is the village, and that a website could hold a page for every one of them. The site is arranged accordingly — eighteen district indexes covering Acre, Baysan, Beersheba, Bethlehem, Gaza, Haifa, Hebron, Jaffa, Jericho, Jerusalem, Jinin, Nablus, Nazareth, Ramallah, al-Ramla, Safad, Tiberias and Tulkarm, each opening onto town pages that carry statistics, photographs, articles, videos and message boards.

The archive’s most substantial asset is the Nakba Oral History Project. The site reports more than seven hundred filmed interviews with first-generation refugees, amounting to over three and a half thousand hours of recorded testimony, all viewable online. Older pages on the same site still carry an earlier count of over 370 interviews and 1,350 hours, which is a useful reminder that the project has kept recording and that its own pages update at different rates. These are long-form interviews in Arabic, conducted in the vernacular, and they are the archive’s reason to exist: for many destroyed villages this is the only recorded speech of the people who lived there. The site also holds more than six thousand Google Earth placemarks locating destroyed towns, West Bank and Gaza towns, and refugee camps, and a large photographic and cartographic section.

Researchers should understand what they are using. PalestineRemembered is not a curated institutional archive with a finding aid and a provenance note per item; it is a volunteer archive with an explicit polemical wing. Alongside the village pages sit long argumentative sections — “Zionist FAQs,” “Facts Not Lies,” “Conflict 101” — whose tone is combative and whose sourcing is uneven, and the site prints a disclaimer stating that its documents and interviews “reflect solely the research and opinions of its authors.” Treat the testimony as primary material of real value and the surrounding commentary as advocacy; cite the interviews, verify the essays.

The practical route in is the complete towns listing rather than the front page, which is dominated by the argumentative material. From a district index you can reach a village, and from a village you can reach whatever oral history has been recorded from it — which is the search Palestinian family researchers most often need and which almost no other archive supports directly.

Sources

• A complete listing of all Palestinian towns grouped by district — PalestineRemembered.com
• Nakba’s Oral History Interviews Listing — PalestineRemembered.com
• PalestineRemembered.com home page