Preserving Palestine: Visual archives, erased curriculum, and counter-archiving amid archival violence in the post-Oslo period

Abstract

This article tells the story of Palestinian visual archives in the post-Oslo period, specifically the archives of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and their whereabouts following the PLO’s departure from Tunisia in the 1990s. It also narrates the story of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) in the West Bank and Gaza and the challenges it encountered in preserving its visual archive. The article posits that the displacement, loss, and seizure of Palestinian visual archives did not result from the perceived threat they posed to Zionism alone. It underscores that the politics surrounding archives are imbricated in the broader social relations of settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and the neoliberal agendas that bourgeois national interests have produced in Palestine, as well as in the ideological differences between Palestinian political factions. The article then shifts to a discussion of the ways that archival violence maintains Israeli hegemony by erasing and silencing the anti-colonial curriculum and historiography of Palestinians to produce the settler state’s ideology, public memory, and discourses of state formation. The article uses Palestine as a case study to also tell the story of what we conceptualize as an erased curriculum. While Zionism undoubtedly produces both curricular erasures and historical silencing, we underscore how the vested interests of Palestinian political factions, specifically in the post-Oslo period, have contributed to archival violence and silencing as well. We show that despite archival violence, individuals and civil society organizations are enacting a politics of reclamation to trace, preserve, claim, and repatriate Palestinian archives, effectively practising a form of counter-archiving.

Keywords:

• Palestinian visual archives
• erased curriculum
• settler colonialism
• post-Oslo
• archival reclamation
• archival violence

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their exceptional feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Khalil Ra‘ad, Ali Za‘arur, and Hrant Nakashian being some of the notable photographers of the time.

2 The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), charged with overseeing humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians that were made refugees by the Nakba, also established a rich audio-visual archive, consisting of some 75 documentary films, 10,000 prints, 730 videocassettes, and 430,000 negatives, all of which are a record of the lives and histories of several generations of Palestinian refugees (UNRWA, n.d.).

3 Palestine Research Center (PRC)—a research institution and library of the PLO—was one of the few institutions that continued operating after the June 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In 1982, Israeli soldiers broke into the building and seized its records, documents, and visual collections. During a prisoner swap, the PRC archive was returned to the PLO office in Algeria and it remains in storage at an Algerian military base. It is important to note that this archive does not include the films produced by the PLO Film Unit or the visual materials that were lost or stolen in the 1982 Israeli invasion. The center in Beirut was damaged by shelling, several members of its staff were killed, and it eventually closed and relocated to Cyprus.

4 Noting the exception that some Palestinian citizens of Israel may have access to certain materials in the Israeli archives due to their citizenship status yet face numerous barriers to access archives.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chandni Desai

Chandni Desai is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She is working on her first book Circuits of Liberation: Palestinian Resistance Culture and Revolutionary Internationalism. Desai’s articles have been published in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Race and Class, Decolonization, Curriculum Inquiry, and several anthologies.

Rula Shahwan

Rula Shahwan is a manager of Policy and Conflict Resolution Studies center at the Arab American University of Palestine. She is an archivist and a PhD student at Goethe University.