Inside the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, fragile newspapers, fading photographs and handwritten family records are being transformed into something designed to survive beyond any building or border.
The museum is developing a vast digital repository of Palestinian social and cultural history, supported by copies stored in different parts of the world. Its purpose is straightforward: if one server is attacked, or one physical collection is destroyed, the records should continue to exist elsewhere.
The preservation effort has assumed greater importance amid the destruction in Gaza. As of March 24, 2026, UNESCO had verified damage to 164 cultural sites since October 7, 2023, including historic buildings, religious sites, museums, archaeological locations and repositories of movable cultural property. Its assessment combined satellite monitoring with limited inspections conducted where security conditions allowed.
Amer Shomali, the Palestinian Museum’s director general, told Wired that the danger was not confined to the loss of objects. When archives disappear, he said, communities also lose evidence of how people lived, worked, celebrated and understood themselves.
The museum began developing the archive in 2018. Staff initially visited Palestinian families and asked permission to scan private collections: photographs kept in drawers, identification documents, diaries, maps, letters, films and publications.
Those individual contributions have gradually formed a historical record assembled from below, rather than one determined solely by governments or official institutions.
The museum’s website currently lists 343,485 digitised items and 142,227 archival resources across 416 collections. Together, they document more than two centuries of Palestinian life. The publicly searchable material ranges from 19th-century property records to family journals, newspapers, political documents and photographs of cultural performances.
Digitisation, however, does not make an archive invulnerable. Shomali told Wired that the museum’s website was subjected to regular cyber-attacks, sometimes forcing it offline. The institution restores access using copies held elsewhere.
This system of geographically distributed backups means the collection has no single point of failure. Destroying a building, confiscating equipment or disabling one server would not eliminate every copy.
The physical work remains painstaking. Mohammad Rabae, who oversees digitisation, described handling torn documents, brittle newspapers and ink that has faded almost beyond recognition. Among the objects processed by the team were a 19th-century Bible printed in Jerusalem and a Palestinian newspaper dating from 1930.
Each object must be assessed, scanned, catalogued and accompanied by accurate information. The process also involves translation, linguistic checking and decisions about privacy, consent and the dignity of people represented in the records.
Only three staff members work full-time on digitisation, metadata and research, according to Wired, although volunteers and external partners support the programme. Funding has come from Palestinian diaspora contributions and international academic and philanthropic partnerships. The museum is also exploring whether software capable of interpreting Ottoman-era Arabic could help researchers process older documents.
Digital preservation has expanded access as well as security. Many Palestinians cannot easily reach the museum because of movement restrictions and checkpoints across the occupied West Bank. For Palestinians living abroad, the online collection offers access to family histories and cultural records that may otherwise remain inaccessible.
Material from the archive has also been converted into downloadable exhibitions. Organisers can print the supplied photographs, captions and curatorial material and stage an exhibition without transporting original artefacts. According to the museum, one such project has been presented more than 260 times internationally and translated into five languages.
The archive is growing against a broader dispute over control of Palestinian heritage. Israeli legislation proposed in 2026 would place a range of archaeological sites in the occupied West Bank under Israel’s Ministry of Heritage. Palestinian officials and Israeli rights organisations have described the proposal as an annexation measure, while its Israeli supporters say it is intended to protect ancient sites and does not alter the territory’s legal status.
For the archivists in Birzeit, the work is consequently about more than preserving old papers. By connecting thousands of personal collections, the project constructs a shared historical record that cannot easily be removed from one institution, rewritten by one authority or eliminated through the destruction of one place.
