How Palestinians Are Building a Digital Archive That Can’t Be Erased

“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.”