The Archives & Heritage for Palestine series is a joint initiative of the Middle East Librarians Association (Archives & Heritage for Palestine Advocacy Sub-Group), the Archives & Digital Media Lab; and sponsored by the Lebanese Library Association, CUNY’s Archival Technologies Lab, Library Freedom, we here, Interference Archive, and up//root. 

The series responds to the urgent need to act in solidarity with Palestinian colleagues and institutions in Palestine and the Shetat (Diaspora) to safeguard the heritage, history, and memory of the Palestinian people under settler colonialism and genocide. Through education and advocacy, the series works to surface, connect, amplify, and promote the efforts already underway by Palestinians and supporters in Palestine and around the world in the archives and heritage sectors.  

Dr. Salman Abu Sitta in conversation with Ghada Dimashq

We were honored to host renowned scholar and historian, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, Founder and President of the Palestine Land Studies Center (PLSC) at the American University of Beirut, in conversation with Ghada Dimashk, PLSC librarian and archivist, for the first installment of Archives & Heritage for Palestine. “Against Genocide: Mapping the Future of Palestine, One Archive at a Time,” in Public Source includes a transcript of the main presentation; edited. More Details

susan abulhawa

susan abulhawa, author of the globally beloved novel Mornings in Jenin, founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, and director of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, spoke at the second installment of Archives & Heritage for Palestine. 

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Dr. Rana Barakat

This session of Archives & Heritage for Palestine draws upon Dr. Rana Barakat’s extensive work in writing a historiography of Palestine, which situates the Palestinian narrative outside of colonial frameworks in a celebration of indigenous resistance and nationalism. 

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Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury 

We are pleased to announce the 4th instalment of Archives & Heritage for Palestine, featuring  Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, and hosted by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Tam Rayan, in defence of Palestinian life, land, liberation, and return. This session will draw upon Dr. Sabbagh-Khoury’s extensive work in reading against the grain of kibbutzim records to narrate Palestinian history from the fragments found within settler colonial archives.

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Dr. Salim Tamari 

This session draws upon Dr. Tamari’s research into the archives, biographies, and diaries of Palestinians pre-dating the Nakba, to discuss how Palestinian society was reshaped through Israeli settler colonialism and its manifold, relentless violences. Against the colonial myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land,” Dr. Tamari’s work tracks a continuous line between Palestine’s rich cultural and political landscape during the Ottoman and British Mandate eras to the present. 

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Dr. Abdul Latif Zaki Abu Hashim 

Drawing on Dr. Abu Hashim’s extensive scholarship and archival interventions, this session will highlight the real history of Gaza as a center of learning, culture, and history as captured in its archival heritage. It will also showcase the incredible work that has been done throughout the wars on Gaza to safeguard the rich manuscript culture and archival heritage of the Strip, including over the last month as people began returning and resuming their archival interventions. 

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Dr. Haidar Eid 

As a leading Palestinian scholar at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Dr. Eid has been outspoken in advocating for liberation that is uncompromising on the Palestinian right to self-determination, return, and equality. This session draws from Dr. Eid’s recent book, Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind (2025), an urgent and uncompromising call for Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea, grounded in a fiery rejection of Orientalism and normalization, and a profound engagement with the South African experience.

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From Lebanon to Palestine: Fighting Erasure, Archiving against Genocide 

The event took place on Monday, May 19, 2025, at the Faculty of Information and Documentation at the Lebanese University in Beirut. Throughout the day, members of the Fighting Erasure project team presented projects focused on preserving archival and cultural heritage in Palestine and Lebanon contextualized within the broader framework of Israeli practices that have led to the systematic destruction of human lives and their social and cultural environments.

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Dr. Habib Sadek, Maryam Hariri, Amani Rammal & Fatima el-Bazzal in conversation with Shatha Hanayshe

Live from the renowned Beit Beirut Museum & Urban Cultural Center in Lebanon, the ninth installment of the Archives & Heritage for Palestine series marked 19 years since the 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon by bringing together noted Lebanese archivists, cultural stewards and academics. The event took place on July 12, 2025. While the aggressors seek to erase local history in Lebanon, Palestine, and across the region through acts of violence, all of us together—through committed, intentional work—can confront that erasure and breathe life back into what they seek to obliterate. More Details

Dr. Faiha Abdulhadi & Dr. Manal Hamzeh in conversation with Dr. Mariam Karim

Centered on Arab feminist resistant histories, the seminar explores Dr. Abdulhadi’s and Dr. Hamzeh’s liberatory research into Palestinian and Arab practices of bearing witness and collective memory work in defiance of Zionist erasure and Western colonial epistemic violence in and through the archive and academy. Rooted in Arabiyya epistemologies, this seminar situates haki and cultural heritage preservation in relation to land, place, and the body, as Dr. Hamzeh explores in her work on Arab Feminist Testimonies (2020, 2025). Through their body of writing and practice, Abdulhadi and Hamzeh have courageously redefined Arabyya methodologies through knowledge co-creation, grounded in Palestinian and Arab narratives across the past, present and future. Join us as we learn and work together toward decolonial horizons and liberatory futures.  More Details