The Record
السِّجلWhat is documented, and by whom
The Land
الأرضGeography is the argument made visible
The Voice
الصوتWhat a people made, and go on making
The Majlis
المجلسThe room where the coffee is poured
The current exhibition
Gaza: Siege and Sumud
One of the oldest cities on earth, under the most documented siege of the modern era — and the people who keep teaching, writing, and reporting through it.
EnterEverything here is free, non-commercial, and cited. How this archive works →
Show me something at randomThe recording desk
كبارنا هم المكتبة
Record one elder. That is the whole ask. One afternoon, one phone, one person who was there — and a story that otherwise leaves with them.
Anyone who was alive in 1948 is now in their late seventies at the very youngest. What follows is a practical guide to doing this well, and a desk that will take the result and keep it properly.
Handing over a family’s memory is not a small thing to ask, so here is the whole process, with nothing left out.
Not a filter and not a queue. Someone reads the whole thing, and checks the places and dates against the archive.
If you left an email, you hear from us with anything we want to clarify — and with exactly what we propose to publish.
Your agreement is required for every part of it, including the photograph and the names. Silence is not a yes.
With the teller’s name, or without it if that is the choice — plus the place, the date, and who recorded it.
One message removes it. No reason asked, no form, no argument. This holds forever, not for a cooling-off period.
Photographs are held privately until publication is agreed. Your email address is used for that conversation and nothing else — never shown, never shared.
Not a template to copy — a real testimony already held here, with the five things that make it usable marked out. Yours does not need to be as long. It needs to be as specific.
Held in this archive
Lifta, Jerusalem · born 1940
We were only wearing the clothing we had on because we are coming back tomorrow. We are coming back. Now we just want to be far from the shooting.
An eight-year-old when Lifta was emptied in early 1948, he recalls fleeing with nothing but the clothes his family wore, certain they would be back the next day.
Recorded and published by MintPress News (republished by Aletho News)
Sit with an elder — a parent, a grandparent, a neighbour. Say you would like to record their story for the family, and, if they agree, for the public archive. Their comfort leads; some memories are heavy, and they choose what to share.
A quiet room, a comfortable chair, tea if that is the custom. Put the phone on airplane mode. A voice-memo app is enough — you do not need equipment. Place the phone near them, not near you.
Begin where memory is warm: the house, the garden, the market, the school, the songs. The difficult chapters will come when the teller is ready — or not at all, and that is fine too.
Ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Say names, villages, and dates out loud so the record carries them. If the phone rings or the tea arrives, pause — these are the sounds of a kitchen, and they belong to the story too.
The key, the deeds, the embroidery, the photograph on the wall. Use daylight near a window, no flash. Every object has a story attached — ask for it.
Transcribe what you can — even a summary in your own words, told as it was told to you. Bring it to the desk below, with any photographs.
The desk is not yet taking submissions
The submission desk is still being connected to its archive. That is our problem, not yours, and it changes nothing about the urgent part: the recording. Elders do not wait for software.
If you have a story ready now and want it looked at, say so on the community wall and someone will write back.
You are not starting from nothing. These archives have been collecting testimony for decades — listen to a few with your elder before you record. It is often what unlocks the telling.
A grassroots oral history collective founded in Lebanon in 2002 that has filmed more than 650 video interviews with first-generation Palestinian refugees about life before 1948 and the expulsions that made them refugees.
Open the entry →A long-running, non-commercial website documenting Palestine's depopulated villages, whose Nakba Oral History Project publishes hundreds of recorded interviews with refugees who witnessed the events of 1948 firsthand.
Open the entry →A searchable digital archive at the American University of Beirut holding more than 1,000 hours of audio and video testimony recorded with first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, drawn from over 150 uprooted villages and communities.
Open the entry →A free, bilingual interactive encyclopedia from the Institute for Palestine Studies and the Palestinian Museum, tracing modern Palestinian history through thousands of chronology entries, biographies, documents, and village profiles rooted in refugee and Nakba memory.
Open the entry →The open digital archive of the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, preserving photographs, documents, film, and audio contributed by Palestinian families and institutions in Palestine and the diaspora — a bottom-up record spanning more than two centuries.
Open the entry →An Israeli organization, founded in 2002, that documents the Nakba for a Hebrew-speaking audience through refugee testimony, tours of destroyed Palestinian villages, and filmed interviews with both displaced Palestinians and Israeli veterans of 1948.
Open the entry →This archive already holds 27 testimonies and 82 village pages for a story to be attached to.
These memories carry grief. Never press. If a teller wants a passage kept private, keep it private — including from us. Stop the recording the moment they want it stopped, and do not go back to it that day.
If they change their mind about publication a week later or a decade later, write to us and it is removed. The story belongs to the teller. We are only its keepers.
الحكاية لصاحبها
“The story belongs to the one whose story it is.”
