Preserving Palestine: Visual archives, erased curriculum, and counter-archiving amid archival violence in the post-Oslo period

Abstract

This article tells the story of Palestinian visual archives in the post-Oslo period, specifically the archives of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and their whereabouts following the PLO’s departure from Tunisia in the 1990s. It also narrates the story of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) in the West Bank and Gaza and the challenges it encountered in preserving its visual archive. The article posits that the displacement, loss, and seizure of Palestinian visual archives did not result from the perceived threat they posed to Zionism alone. It underscores that the politics surrounding archives are imbricated in the broader social relations of settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and the neoliberal agendas that bourgeois national interests have produced in Palestine, as well as in the ideological differences between Palestinian political factions. The article then shifts to a discussion of the ways that archival violence maintains Israeli hegemony by erasing and silencing the anti-colonial curriculum and historiography of Palestinians to produce the settler state’s ideology, public memory, and discourses of state formation. The article uses Palestine as a case study to also tell the story of what we conceptualize as an erased curriculum. While Zionism undoubtedly produces both curricular erasures and historical silencing, we underscore how the vested interests of Palestinian political factions, specifically in the post-Oslo period, have contributed to archival violence and silencing as well. We show that despite archival violence, individuals and civil society organizations are enacting a politics of reclamation to trace, preserve, claim, and repatriate Palestinian archives, effectively practising a form of counter-archiving.