The brain of the archive
Ask the archive
اسأل الأرشيف
A guide that has read every page here — the timeline, the villages, the poems, the arguments, the names — and answers from them alone, showing you which pages it used.
It is not a search engine and it is not the open internet. Think of it as a librarian who knows this one collection extremely well, and who will tell you when the answer is not on the shelves.
Put a question to the record
Every answer is assembled from the pages of this archive and cites the ones it used. Where the archive holds nothing, it will say so rather than guess.
Try one of these
What it can and cannot answer is set out directly beneath this box.
Enter sends · Shift + Enter starts a new line · answers cite their pages — follow the citation and check anything you intend to repeat
What it can answer
- What a documented event was, when it happened, and who recorded it
- Who a person in the archive was, and what they did
- What a term means — Nakba, sumud, right of return, apartheid in law
- What a village was before 1948, and what the record says became of it
- What the documented answer to a common talking point is
What it cannot
- Today’s news — it reads this archive, not the live wire
- Anything outside these collections, including the open web
- Legal, medical, or immigration advice
- Predictions, or an opinion on what should happen next
- A lookup of one name among the 72,835 in the registry — search that directly
How an answer is put together
Your question searches the archive
The question is matched against every entry in the collections — no external index, no web search — and the closest handful of pages are pulled out in full.
A model reads only those pages
Those pages, and nothing else, are what the answer is written from. It is instructed to say plainly when they do not cover the question rather than fill the gap.
The pages come back with the answer
Every page it drew on is listed underneath, linked. Follow them. An answer you cannot trace to a page is an answer you should not repeat.
Where it can still be wrong
The retrieval step can miss the right page, and a language model can misread the page it was given. It is a way into the archive, not a replacement for reading it. For anything you intend to publish, teach, or argue from, open the cited page and read it yourself.
What it holds
56 timeline events · 82 villages · 32 glossary terms · 64 figures · 14 answered talking points — plus the poems, books, testimonies, places, culture and research entries.
Nothing is kept from your conversation on a server. The transcript lives in your browser and disappears when you clear it.