Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest) — Institute for Palestine Studies

The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question — known as PalQuest — is a digital project of the Institute for Palestine Studies, the Beirut-founded research institution that has published the Journal of Palestine Studies since 1971, developed in collaboration with the Palestinian Museum. Free and fully bilingual in Arabic and English, it traces the history of modern Palestine from the late Ottoman period to the present through more than 2,000 substantive chronology entries, thematic chronologies, biographies, and primary documents written for the platform by scholars.

For the study of displacement, its “Places” section is especially valuable: a geographic information system maps the 418 Palestinian villages destroyed and depopulated during the Nakba, each profiled from the description in All That Remains, the landmark Institute for Palestine Studies volume edited by Walid Khalidi, with profiles of Palestinian refugee camps linking them to their inhabitants’ villages of origin. The Institute’s wider publishing program has long treated oral testimony as central evidence of the Nakba — from Rosemary Sayigh’s work with camp women in the Journal of Palestine Studies to its documentation of projects such as the Palestinian Oral History Archive.

Why it matters

• It embeds refugee and village memory within a rigorous, cited scholarly framework rather than leaving testimony to stand alone.
• The destroyed-villages GIS makes the human geography of the Nakba navigable — each community locatable on historical maps of Palestine.
• Free access in Arabic and English serves students, researchers, and displaced families tracing their places of origin alike.
• It represents the institutional memory work of the oldest independent Palestinian research body, continuously updated.

Key resources

• PalQuest — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• PalQuest — History section
• Institute for Palestine Studies