In late November 2023, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)¹ targeted and destroyed the Central Archives of Gaza City. An administrative building located in a municipal cluster in Gaza City, the institution held records and historical documents that went back over 150 years. This attack was only one step in the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinian cultural heritage. “Erasure of Palestinian culture and history,” as reported by the organization Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP), “has long been an Israeli tactic of war and occupation, a means to further limit the self-determination of the Palestinian people.”²

In 1948, during the Nakba, 30,000 books and manuscripts were looted from Palestinian homes;³ in 1982, during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Israel looted and confiscated the library and archives of the Palestine Liberation Organization;⁴ libraries and archives were damaged during the Second Intifada,⁵ and have been repeatedly targeted⁶ in Gaza. Furthermore, the intentional destruction of cultural heritage has been recognized as a war crime⁷ and prosecuted in the International Criminal Court.⁸

In the same report, LAP heartbreakingly details not only the cultural heritage institutions destroyed but also the information workers martyred by the IOF: Abdul Karim Hashash, a “writer and advocate for Palestinian heritage, collector of Palestinian rare books,” martyred on October 23, 2023, with several members of his family; Bilal Jadallah, the director of the Press House, martyred on November 19, 2023; Doaa Al-Masri, a librarian at the Edward Said Library, martyred on December 7, 2023, with her siblings and parents; Dr. Jihad Suleiman Al-Masri, the director of Al-Quds Open University’s Khan Yunis branch, martyred on October 17, 2023; Iman Abu Saeed, a historian at the Tamer Institute for Community Education, date of death unknown but martyred alongside her children Joudi and Ziyad and her husband, Eyad; and Marwan Tarazi, the archivist of Photo Kegham, Kegham Djeghalian’s photography studio, martyred on October 19, 2023, “killed with his wife Nihad and infant granddaughter Alin while sheltering at the Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church.”⁹ Undoubtedly, more information workers have been martyred since the publication of this report, and more still have gone unnamed in the press—their deaths buried in the chaos or their work. The Central Archives’ proximity to Salah al-Din Road, the main thoroughfare in Gaza City, designated as an evacuation corridor by the IOF, is poignant. It would later become a “passage of death,” in the words of the witness Khamis Mansour, as the IOF opened fire on Gazans fleeing or collapsed from exhaustion and starvation.¹⁰

While the Central Archives contained records on Gaza’s history and its people spanning more than a century and on the urban development of Gaza City,¹¹ the municipal buildings would have contained more contemporary records, including information on those currently residing within Gaza. This kind of destruction follows a clear pattern. In the 2002 report “Damage to Palestinian Libraries and Archives during the Spring of 2002,” the librarian Tom Twiss details several municipal and records buildings targeted and destroyed during the Second Intifada. This ongoing death campaign is concurrent with the IOF’s targeting of hospitals and schools, which, in addition to their other lifesaving, life-giving, and life-building roles, also serve as repositories of information on the residents of Gaza.¹² The result is the loss not only of cultural heritage but also the ability to effectively quantify the impact of the genocide perpetrated by the Zionist regime. Without accurate census numbers and records, it is difficult to state the numbers of those murdered. To put it another way: without proof of life, it is hard to provide proof of death.

This difficulty makes it easier for Israel, the US, and other supporting actors to slander the Gaza Ministry of Health. In June 2024, the US legislature passed an amendment banning the State Department from using the Ministry of Health’s death toll statistics—a move that, as The Hill writes, “effectively halt[s] discussion of the war’s deaths” as “it is the only official entity tracking death data in Gaza.”¹³ But even the Ministry of Health’s estimates are likely too low; “the official toll does not take into account thousands of dead buried under rubble and indirect deaths due to destruction of health facilities, food distribution systems, and other public infrastructure.”¹⁴ A recent study published by the Lancet in June 2024 put forth a “conservative estimate” of 186,000 deaths at that time stemming from the conflict. The authors write:

Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths.¹⁵ Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7.9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.¹⁶

However, as Taylor Miller writes,

But we know that the genocidal rampage has not ceased since late June’s publication (al-nakba al-mustamirra, 76 years and counting). Quite contrary, hundreds of Palestinians have since been burned alive¹⁷ in tents and hospital compounds,¹⁸ bombed¹⁹ in schools-as-safe-zones, tortured²⁰ in prisons and sodomized to death, targeted²¹ for assassination… amidst the terror of ongoing evacuation orders, biological warfare,²² ecocide²³ and man-made starvation and dehydration. By August 15, 2024, it “passes”²⁴ 40,000 (passive voice, a political choice).²⁵ When we listen to and center the testimony of Palestinians, we know that a complete annihilation²⁶ of land and life is well underway, and we know this decimation of space/time/body/earth cannot and must not be quantified by Zionist settler colonial calculations.²⁷

Among the decimated are entire families, bloodlines: an Associated Press investigation identified at least sixty families in which twenty-five or more members were killed—sometimes spanning four generations.²⁸ This number is likely higher as investigations face the same difficulties as the Gaza Ministry of Health, which, as the Lancet reports, struggles to collect data due to the destruction of infrastructure—hospitals, morgues, and records buildings—responsible for recording not only death but also life.²⁹

What happens when a bloodline in Gaza is wiped out, and the census records confirming their existence—both contemporary and historical—are destroyed? How do we remember them then? An “archive against genocide” may be needed to counter the devastation wrought by the IOF. And this may necessitate a capacious understanding of archives beyond the official. If only Israeli archives remain, following the ruination of official Palestinian records, what narratives are constructed? Unofficial archives, composed of informal documents collected by affected subjects and those in solidarity with them, offer another way into writing history. This essay is not meant to be prescriptive to Palestinians, who have reiterated their existence time and time again through various means, and who continue to do so; rather, it is meant to archive these means—and those genocidal actions against them—as well as extend an invitation to those in solidarity on how to imagine—and thus archive—against genocide, toward a present and future otherwise.

To this end, this essay leans heavily on block quotations, as opposed to paraphrasing, as a means of archiving as a writing practice. As such, the footnotes (as they always should be) are especially important, extending this archive outward, toward other writers, toward other writings. These quotations also take the place of images, inviting us to look at these archived quotes as standing out against the page.

Unofficial Archives and the Everyday

In the face of the purposeful destruction of official archives, we may turn to creating unofficial ones to stand in the wake of their disappearance. In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida writes, “The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future.”³⁰ Though he is talking here of the archival medium and how it structures the archive (he continues: “To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives. It begins with the printer”), the meaning of this sentence exceeds Derrida’s ensuing analysis. Another way to read this sentence, less trivially: “What is no longer archived is no longer lived”—at least, not officially. Such a statement demands, of course, a capacious definition of archiving, limited not only to the official record or the brick-and-mortar arkheion that houses the archive, with which Derrida begins this book. But the absence—be it forceful repression or mere forgetting—of any archiving—through official or unofficial means—leads to a dearth of memory, a gap in the history that is always already being written. Let’s return to the initial sentence: “The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future.” A pledge, a promise—but to what? A token of the future—but which future? The archive, though it contains the past (or the present as it always already rapidly becomes—always already is—past) is a pledge to the future it actively creates—indeed, to actively create that future. That is because the past and the future—as well as the present—are necessarily intimately connected. To say that something has never existed is necessarily to disclose the possibility of its future; to say that something has always existed is to create a future in which it deserves to exist. To say that something has always existed while others have tried to erase it is to create a future in which it deserves not only to exist but also reparations.

The archive, as a hopeful thing, must thus be capacious in order to survive. This means we collect not only official documents but also voices, testimonies,³¹ gestures. Not only archivists, librarians, and writers must record, but everyday people, not only in repositories and in newspapers but in homes, in correspondence, on social media—wherever one can find a space to insert a memory, an idea, a hope. Piotr Sztompka identifies a “turn” in sociology, wherein the “seemingly trivial phenomena of everyday life” are studied.³² Though Sztompka wrote this in 2008, the start of this turn might actually be earlier, with the publication of The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau in 1974 (and its translation into English in 1984). De Certeau dedicates his text to

the ordinary man.
To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets.³³

Throughout this “turn to everyday life,” is a focus on commonness, on triviality—a decidedly Western vantage point of those free from the ravages of war and genocide. But what of the everyday in situations considered “exceptional”?³⁴ What of this quotidian?

Further, we must consider oral traditions, performance, dancing, movement—as forms of archiving. As Diana Taylor asks in The Archive and the Repertoire, recognizing that minoritarian histories are often transmitted through non-“solid” methods, “Whose memories, traditions, and claims to history disappear if performance practices lack the staying power to transmit vital knowledge?”³⁵ History must be claimed, existence must be demonstrated with every tool at our disposal, so that the future may follow accordingly.

This is especially important in the face of those who archive from a position of power. While archives of the everyday are available as a tool for writing history from below, it must not be forgotten that they have been and continue to be used to rewrite history from above—to codify, to erase. How must the destroyed archives in Gaza compare to those kept by the Israeli state? What does it mean for us to have only one of these categories left intact?³⁶

“I Am Building an Archive to Prove That Palestine Exists”

In “I Am Building an Archive to Prove That Palestine Exists,” Elena Dudum recounts her family’s history of archiving materials related to Palestine and to their family, who left Ramallah after 1948 to move to the Bay Area. Like her father and her father’s father before her, she writes,

I was building an archive as if I were putting together an earthquake kit—like the ones my parents kept in our basement in San Francisco—even though I didn’t know when this particular survival kit would be useful or necessary.

But my father knew. His father knew. Our liberation may eventually hang on these various archives.

Even more true: These archives validate Palestinians’ existence.³⁷

The validation of Palestinian existence is crucial in the face of those who try to erase it: both through genocide and through other forms of violence materialized in erasing histories. Dudum recalls incidents of Israeli denial of Palestinian existence from 1969 to as recent as February 2024:

In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was quoted in The Sunday Times of London: “[There is] no such thing as Palestinians… It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” This idea has been similarly reused for more than a century, evolving very little. As recently as February 2024, Israeli Minister of Settlement and National Missions Orit Strock repeated the sentiment during a meeting of Israel’s Parliament, saying,³⁸ “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”

Dudum further writes: “If Palestinians don’t exist, then who is dying? I fear that [Orit] Strock’s words may become true, that Palestinians soon will not exist, that slowly they will be made extinct. It’s a cruel self-fulfilling prophecy—claim that Palestinians were never there, and do away with them when they continue to prove otherwise.”³⁹ We must hold onto the continue to prove otherwise, to disallow the prophecy of which Dudum writes, to remember the Palestine of the past, to honor the Palestine of the present, to ensure the Palestine of the future.

This means not only creating informal archives but also documenting their destruction. On February 9, 2024, the poet Mosab Abu Toha posted a photo of books among rubble in north Gaza on Instagram.⁴⁰ Among the books was The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” as she introduced herself at public appearances, “doing my work, coming to ask you if you’re doing yours,”⁴¹ a radical whose commitment to Palestine was documented in her 1989 commencement speech at Oberlin College.⁴²Abu Toha’s Instagram hits like a flash in the pan, evidence of the IOF’s desire to destroy any revolutionary spirit it can find in Gaza, Palestine at large, and the international community. But the spirit remains. On April 27, Abu Toha posted another image, this time of a small bookshelf, two nightstands with books, and a plastic tub filled with zines, an assemblage capped with a sign reading “Refaat Alareer Memorial Library.” It is a tribute at the University of Pennsylvania Gaza Solidarity Encampment to the Palestinian writer, martyred December 6, 2023. Informal archives and libraries are destroyed; elsewhere, they are created. We must record, where we can, without the threat of rubble, the existence of Palestine; we must witness those martyred; we must fight for those still living.⁴³

“If Palestinians Don’t Exist, Then Who Is Dying?”

In “Fictions of the Return,” a chapter in Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons, Daniel Heller-Roazen details the ways in which the subject of death is put to the question when confronted with the archive. Heller-Roazen asks “an urgent question: How does a person become a nonperson, whether by disappearance, disenfranchisement, or civil, social, or biological death?”⁴⁴ “Fictions of the Return” highlights the importance of the archive in this question, summarizing various fictional stories in which a missing person returns, only to find they have been legally categorized as dead. What to do when, in the words of Honoré de Balzac, one’s “decease is an historical fact”?⁴⁵ Does one “negotiate” the question: “Am I dead or am I alive?”⁴⁶ Legal existence—and its accompaniment, citizenship—is dependent upon the archive. To put Dudum’s question another way: “If Palestinians don’t exist, then who is living?” A flesh-and-blood body is an indisputable fact; a recorded body, however, is not always. To destroy the legal records of a living person is essentially to destroy the official record that they are even alive—that they were ever alive.

This is especially troubling when one considers the citizenship status of Palestinians, denied a formal nationality on the world stage. Historically, post-Mandate and post-1948, they were disallowed both their rightful citizenship of Palestine and citizenship of Israel, which denied Palestinians the legal advantages citizenship affords, such as ease of travel and right of return. As Anif S. Kassim writes in “The Palestinians: From Hyphenated to Integrated Citizenship,” an essay published in Citizenship and the State in the Middle East,

When Israel came into existence, it commenced the endless agony for the Palestinians, both those who remained under the new Jewish state and those who were expelled. If the creation of a Jewish state was intended to “normalize” the status of Jews, it also ironically resulted in “abnormalizing” the status of Palestinians…

[T]o be a Palestinian means not to have a formal citizenship, with the resulting hardships that make the Palestinian life in various communities continuously dangerous; the legal status of a Palestinian in the Middle East is always in doubt and left to the political exigencies of each host country; and the absence of an internationally recognized State of Palestine will make this agony last indefinitely.⁴⁷

Kassim further states that, following Israel’s 1952 Nationality Law, Palestinians who wished to gain Israeli citizenship, having been denied Palestinian citizenship, had to prove a number of conditions, all of which were dependent on archives. They were:

to have been registered in the Inhabitants Registration in 1949, have been an inhabitant of Israel on 14 July 1952, and have been in Israel or in an area that later on became an Israeli territory between 14 May 1948 and 14 July 1962 or have entered Israel legally during that period. These conditions were in practice very difficult to fulfill. More significantly, they were cumulative conditions. As Professor Don Peretz (1958) recorded, most Palestinians at that time “had no proof of Palestinian citizenship,” and those who had identity cards were forced to surrender them to the Israeli army during, or immediately after, the war. In addition, Peretz noted, many Palestinians were excluded from the Registration of Inhabitants because often there was a “deliberate attempt not to register many [Palestinian] villages.”⁴⁸

As a result of these legal hurdles, very few Palestinians were able to obtain Israeli citizenship. Those who failed to satisfy the above conditions, and they constituted the majority, remained in Israel as stateless persons.⁴⁹

While those Palestinians residing in the land claimed by Israel are now granted Israeli citizenship, they are denied full access to the benefits citizenship should grant.⁵⁰

Many Palestinians have Palestinian Authority passports, but these passports do not grant them full ease of travel, nor do they confer citizenship status. But what of those whose passports have been destroyed or lost in the untold destruction waged since October 7, alongside other important personal archives? What is their legal status? In the face of the destruction of both official archives and personal records, Palestinians face a serious challenge, even when a free Palestine prevails.⁵¹ To combat this, it is necessary to imagine otherwise worlds—as Mahmoud Keshavarz points out in The Design Politics of the Passport, the passport as an inherent form of exclusion, as a tool of bordering regimes: “Passports are material evidence of exercising discrimination.”⁵² It begs the question: Toward what kind of world, beyond nation-states, are we archiving, for when we have a free Palestine?

Archiving Otherwise

To write history is to write the future. A free Palestine must be met by a counter-archival practice of a free Palestine that attests to both its existence and the atrocities committed upon its land and people in its past. In this process, we can also turn to official archives—not only Palestinian but Israeli as well—to read counter-narratives into them. Archives project a transparency and objectivity that belies their inherent exclusion-inclusion biases. As Hazel V. Carby writes in an essay about a trip to the National Archives of the UK,

The building precludes distraction, natural and artificial light illuminate inconspicuous interiors. This room is designed to promise transparency in all transactions: a promise that nothing will be withheld or concealed, that everything can be known… Uniform exposure to the light offers assurance that what is past can be recovered, made easily accessible and available to all who have the time to sit and stare. Revelation, however, does not ensure accountability.⁵³

Carby is in the archives to look for histories related to her ancestors in the transatlantic slave trade.⁵⁴ However, in the colonial archive,

This practice of dehumanization is preserved and reproduced, without end, in the language and structure of classification: the headings, subheadings and definitions. No one should imagine that entering this archive is journeying back in time to a history that is past, that is over. Traveling through the archive imposes an experience of time that is not linear, but circuitous. A passage through the living language of humans as property is an ever-present entrapment in, and assertion of the right to own, it is a continual imposition of subjection and endless possession. To enter this archive is to become conscripted into an ongoing process of trading in flesh.⁵⁵

As Carby writes, archives do not only record violence, they also reproduce it. But does this then not promise that they also have the power to fight it, through the faithful recording of what has been done, so that it may never be forgotten, and also through an active effort to undo patterns, to disallow history from repeating itself, to imagine—and thus effect—different futures?⁵⁶

One such example is the Atir-Umm al-Hiran legal case, in which Bedouins petitioned to have their villages recognized so as to not be demolished by Israel; though dismissed by the Israeli Supreme Court, it created a legal counter-archive using documents from Israeli archives that proved the Bedouins were there due to a 1948 order to move there,⁵⁷ despite the state’s claims they were “trespassing.”⁵⁸ Haneen Naamnih writes that “Nomads against Their Will,”⁵⁹ the report published by Adalah: The Legal Center For Arab Minority Rights In Israel in support of the case,

reintroduced those archival documents by endowing them an authority beyond the law. By joining them with social and historical references, legal expertise, and urban planning schemes, this report produced a counter-temporality; one that intersects with the lived experience of Umm al-Hiran and ‘Atir residents. By that it not only challenged the authority of state law in determining the rules of representation, but also the law’s force in constituting a-historical Palestinian subjectivity.⁶⁰

Creating such a counter-archive is crucial, writes Naamnih, in counteracting the legal timeline created by the Nakba:

The Nakba, a foundational temporality in the Palestinian ontology, has been constructed within the Israeli legal discourse as a non (legal) event. If we think of the Nakba as the representation of the “governance of the prior,” then the Nakba comprises a tacit epistemological element within a colonial legal system. As such, (colonial) law’s singularity can only posit the Nakba as an exterior temporality. It could be argued that the absence of a legal decision denouncing the existence of the Nakba is actually due to this exteriority, which invalidates the Nakba as a point of reference. There is no single legal decision that denounces or even reveals the Nakba—instead, traces of the Nakba are disseminated through thousands of “mundane” legal decisions, often but not always dealing with land dispossession.

This dissemination is what makes law a pivotal archive for the Palestinian ontological project, since it unfolds the Nakba into details that have been archived in legal procedures. Furthermore, despite the abstraction of the law, legal decisions introduce entries to real-life stories that produce, individually and collectively, narrations on pain, loss, hope, and endurance. If addressed as a process, then it is a matter for social sciences to reproduce these accounts as a counter-archive, which allow the Palestinian participants in Israeli law to affirm their agency and narrative separately from their imposed legal subjectivity.⁶¹

To archive thus is not to look back but to look forward. It is not the recording of something dead; it is the ongoing care of something living. The counter-archival practices writing the future of a free Palestine are many, and expand outside the state and its documents: Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library project not only recovers heirloom seeds from Palestine but also shares them with farmers across the world, encouraging a literal cross-cultural dissemination of dialogue; Sansour is joined by the Palestinians who plant against ecocide.⁶² Writes Sansour:

Part of the Fertile Crescent, Palestine has been considered one of the world’s centers of diversity, particularly for wheat and barley. This biodiversity, which has kept us alive for millennia, is being threatened by policies that target farmers and force them to give up their heirloom seeds and adopt new varieties. Heirlooms, which have been carefully selected by our ancestors throughout thousands of years of research and imagination, form one of the last strongholds of resistance to the privatization of our life source: the seed. These seeds carry the DNA of our survival against a violent background that is seen across the hills and valleys through settlement and chemical input expansions.⁶³

Of course, there are also those who, like in years before, burned their papers to hide them from Israeli eyes. Writes Mezna Qato, “What the Palestinians who destroyed their papers in 1967—and left historians like me frustratingly little to read—foretold is that sometimes resistance to colonization may require a disappearing act.”⁶⁴ For the other times, we counter-archive. As Elena Dudum writes:

This impulse [to archive] is reactive, yes, a response to the repeated denial of Palestine’s existence, but it’s also an act of faith—faith that one day all of this work will be useful, will finally be put on display as part of a new archive that corrects a systematically denied history…

Just as the compulsion to archive is contagious, so is hope…

“It’s all here,” my father writes. “We existed. We were there.”⁶⁵

Indeed, exist. Indeed, are there. Indeed, will always exist. Indeed, will always be there. As history writes the present, so the present writes the future. But the future—what we wish it to be—also dictates how we must act in the present. A free Palestine opens us to a world otherwise, and that world must have an archiving otherwise. As Adam Hajyahia writes in “The Principle of Return: The Repressed Ruptures of Zionist Time,”

We must not mistake Palestinian return as something that will occur in the future. Rather, it occurs and has been occurring throughout this present moment to enable a future—a future that escapes the economic speculation of racial capitalism into an indeterminate future that isn’t yet molded, one that could be retrieved, that could be emancipated from colonial financialization. With every shattered fence in Gaza, bombarded checkpoint in Jerusalem, clandestine escape from Tulkarm, surreptitious break out of the Gilboa prison, stealthy act of smuggling out of Jenin, and annual activations of Iqrith or Bir’im—physical, literal returns to places of dispossession despite military, legal and carceral prohibitions—we have been returning time and again, accumulating negative spells of time, no matter how short or fleeting they are, as returned beings. Some returns are spectacular revolutionary moments, others are conspicuous and modest in imagination, but they all bring us closer to liberation, feeding into one another. These moments accumulate in the negative, because we count them in reverse, we count them down.⁶⁶ Not from the point they begin, but towards the instance of their conclusion, awaiting their expiration time. We count them by the number of breaths we take until we are yet again captured, until we are detained, or shot, martyred, as if awaiting our renewed exile. “Death over indignity.”⁶⁷ We count them as beings whose freedom is future-oriented, as Palestinians who materially imagine a life in Palestine that is otherwise, and who remember the past not with depoliticized sentimentality, but as fuel for the imagination of the day of return. And so we are simply out of sync. These stockpiled moments await our cue to reappear eventually at the moment when a collective return is performed—when their sum is powerful enough to demolish the time limit, between fantasy and concrete fulfillment. It is then, when collective return is performed, that we no longer need to count because time will be on our side. Then, soon, we will live in a time that is ours.⁶⁸