LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyPalestinian culture has been looted, destroyed, and displaced for decades. Since October 2023, however, the destruction of Gaza’s cultural institutions has accelerated, prompting a team in the occupied West Bank to build something they hope cannot be seized or erased: a digital archive of Palestinian memory.
“Within a week, Israel bombed two art galleries, seven museums, two main archives in Gaza, and hundreds of archaeological sites,” says Amer Shomali, a prominent visual artist and general director of the Palestinian Museum. “This battle of trying to erase the Palestinian culture and Palestinian memory—it’s not something theoretical.”
Shomali says that roughly 80 percent of the country’s national collections have been looted, destroyed, or remain under Israeli control. Against that backdrop, the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit has become both a physical repository of Palestinian heritage and the center of an increasingly ambitious digital preservation effort.
Designed by New York–based Heneghan Peng architects, the same firm behind Egypt’s Grand Egyptian Museum, the building is home to numerous Palestinian collections, including photographs by Khalil Raad and murals by Vera Tamari.
The magnificent museum stands in defiance here, among gardens of native flowers and cascading terraces. Yet, Shomali says, the site sits between various checkpoints, making it hard for some Palestinians to access.
A 2025 report by the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem says at least 2,400 archeological sites in the West Bank have been taken over by Israel.
Israeli settlers, under the protection of the Israeli army, carry out a raid in the ancient city and the surrounding archaeological site in the town of Sebastiya, Nablus, West Bank, Palestine, on June 29, 2026.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported in June that Israeli lawmakers are advancing legislation that would place ancient sites in the occupied territory under the Israeli Ministry of Heritage, a move that Palestinians and Israeli rights groups say amounts to de facto annexation and could further expand Israeli control over Palestinian heritage sites.
As of March 24, 2026, Unesco had verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza since October 7, 2023, including historical buildings, religious sites, museums, and archaeological sites.
Many more cultural artifacts and personal histories have likely been lost amid the war, mass displacement, and the destruction of entire communities.
“It was a continuous battle all the time between us and them,” says Shomali about historical efforts to archive Palestinian artifacts amid Israeli aggression since 1948. “We document, they loot; but every time we document, we document with less vivid memory.”
It is one of the reasons the museum turned to technology. In 2018, the team began building what Shomali describes as an “unlootable archive”—a digital repository designed to preserve Palestinian history beyond the walls of any single institution.
“We created this platform, the Palestine Museum Digital Archive, which is an unlootable archive,” Shomali explains.
What began with simple door-knocking—visiting families in the West Bank and asking permission to scan old photographs, letters and documents—has grown into one of the most ambitious digital preservation projects in the region.
The open-source archive now contains more than 500,000 digitized photographs, identification papers, diaries, maps, films, and letters, many of which were collected directly from Palestinian families and might otherwise have been lost forever.
The Palestinian Museum’s mission is both preservation and access: to safeguard Palestinian history and make it available to those unable to visit Palestine.
Behind the archive is a team of three full-time staff members dedicated solely to digitization, metadata, and research, supported by a wider network of volunteers. Funded through diaspora donations and partnerships with the University of California and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the project involves extensive cataloging, translations, and linguistic proofreading. The museum is even exploring a bot capable of reading Ottoman Arabic to help process historical records.
The effort reflects a broader shift in how communities under threat are using technology—not simply to preserve culture, but to build resilient, distributed archives that can outlive war, displacement, and physical destruction.
For Shomali, the archive allows Palestinians to reclaim ownership over their history. “All of a sudden, you start to have this mesh, this web of information and data, and it allows you to rewrite the history, but interestingly, bottom-up in the sense that it’s not a state archive.”
The museum has also taken steps to ensure the archive can survive digital attacks and even physical destruction. Multiple copies of the archive are stored around the world, creating a distributed system designed to prevent the collections from disappearing entirely.
“We have different backups, but we keep getting cyberattacks on the website,” Shomali says. “Almost every month, we get attacked, and the website goes down, and we reinitiate it based on one of the backups we have.”
“We can’t protect it from being hacked, but we can protect it from disappearing.”
The archive’s distributed nature means Palestinian history no longer exists in a single building or on a single server. Even if one copy disappears, others remain.
One initiative turned the archive into what Shomali describes as “an exhibition in a box, Ikea-style.” Users can download exhibition materials, print them, and stage their own exhibitions on Palestine anywhere in the world, regardless of budget. The project has been exhibited more than 260 times, from Japan to San Francisco, and translated into five languages.
The archive has also become a resource for artists and curators abroad. In May 2026, artist and curator Leyya Mona Tawil used its collections to create My Name is Palestine: Echoes from The Palestinian Museum’s Music Online Exhibition in San Francisco.
“They’d come out mostly in tears and just be like, thank you,” Tawil says about the reception to people visiting the exhibition.
Acknowledging the sheer scale of the archive, Tawil says she accessed just a “fragment of what the museum holds.” But even that had a profound impact on her as an artist and her audience: “It’s not just a history of music, it’s not just a collection of past objects; it’s a living archive that represents a society that is under threat.”
In Spain, curator Pablo Llorca spent two months sifting through archival imagery before debuting To Tell My Story in Madrid in October 2025. Since then, the exhibition has travelled to around 15 locations across the country and is attracting interest from Spain’s Ministry of Culture.
The traveling exhibition To Tell My Story uses material from the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive to bring Palestinian history and identity to audiences in Spain.
Mohammad Rabae, who is responsible for the digitization process, tells WIRED Middle East that some documents are extremely delicate, featuring torn pages and faded handwritten ink.
Among the most delicate artifacts Rabae has handled are a 19th-century Bible printed in Jerusalem and a Palestinian newspaper from 1930 with brittle pages that had to be carefully unfolded before digitization. “Experiences like these show that digitization is not only about creating a digital image,” he says. “It’s also about preserving fragile historical material safely for future generations.”
“We always try to respect the privacy, dignity, and rights of the people represented in the records,” says Rabae. “We are not only creating digital files; we are helping to preserve historical evidence and cultural heritage.”
For Shomali, the archive is more than a database. Every scan, every backup, and every replicated copy is an act of resistance against erasure—and an attempt to ensure that Palestinian memory survives even if the places that hold it do not.
“Having the digital archive is a way of protecting our memory,” he says.
He often returns to the words of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “We who are able to remember are able to liberate ourselves.”
This story originally appeared on WIRED Middle East.
