PalQuest — The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question

PalQuest was conceived by the Institute for Palestine Studies and built jointly with the Palestinian Museum: IPS is responsible for content and technology, and both institutions share promotion. Its own description of its posture is worth quoting because it is unusually candid for a reference work — the encyclopedia aims at a description of the Palestine question that is “simultaneously objective and committed,” presenting Palestinians “as they are — purposeful actors and not just victims.” That is a methodological statement, not a slogan, and it explains the shape of the thing.

The backbone is the Overall Chronology, a dated spine of events across war, diplomacy, culture and economy, from the end of the Ottoman era to the present. Individual events are then threaded into Thematic Chronologies, so that a single click isolates the milestones of PLO history, or the sequence of UN resolutions, or the negotiating rounds, without the surrounding noise. Around that spine sit four other sections: Highlights, longer interpretive essays commissioned from named academics; Biographies, which is the best free source in English for the lives of Palestinian political and cultural figures who have no English-language biography at all; Places, covering hundreds of villages destroyed in the Nakba; and Documents, several hundred historical texts, photographs, maps and charts.

For researchers, Documents is the section that repays the most attention. It is where you will find the complete English text of speeches that are otherwise circulated only as fragments — Haydar Abd al-Shafi’s opening address at Madrid on 31 October 1991, for example, is there in full, including the paragraphs about prisoners and refugees that are almost always cut from the quotation of his most famous sentence. Because the platform is fully bilingual, the Arabic and English versions of a document sit alongside each other, which matters when the wording is contested.

Two cautions. The URL structure is unstable enough that deep links occasionally break after site updates — if a link fails, search the title rather than assuming the item is gone; the /en/node/ form of an address often survives when a slugged one does not. And the encyclopedia is still being populated: coverage is deep on the political and diplomatic record and thinner on social and economic history, so it is a first stop rather than a last one.

Sources

• About the platform — PalQuest, Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• Speech of Haydar Abd al-Shafi at the Madrid Conference, 31 October 1991 — PalQuest Documents
• Haydar Abd al-Shafi — PalQuest Biographies