Archiving Gaza in the present: The quest to preserve Palestinian memory Submitted by Dina Matar on Fri, 12/19/2025 - 19:24 By documenting oral histories, films, artwork and other cultural artifacts, we can resist Israel's ongoing attempts at erasure A woman holds a mobile phone during a film screening and entertainment event in Gaza’s al-Shati refugee camp, on 23 November 2025 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP) On What does “archiving Gaza in the present” - the title of a book I recently co-edited with former curator of Islamic and contemporary Middle Eastern art Venetia Porter - mean amid the live-streamed and still-unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza? And how do we address this labour as a productive process, without falling into arguments promoted by colonial knowledge institutions, which are incessantly asking who has the right to archive or what should be archived? In Archiving Gaza in the Present , I approach these questions as someone who began her career as a journalist before moving on to academia - and thus someone who has long been involved in storytelling and recording history as it develops. I also write as a Palestinian scholar based in the West, which means that my practices remain to a certain extent bounded by, and assessed through, colonial and racist approaches to what indigenous and non-white people, foremost Palestinians, can produce. Colonialism, race and paternalism all inform how Global South populations are allowed to narrate, imagine and think about themselves. And there is no doubt that Palestinians, in particular, face censure and excessive scrutiny - sometimes incredulity - even as they write about themselves. As I write this reflection on archiving, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has continued for more than two years, and it remains backed by imperial powers, mainly the US and major European states. The genocide, as has been discussed extensively, incorporates many different “cides” - not least of which are culturicide and memoricide, referencing the systematic destruction and erasure of cultural institutions, local history, and the people who hold and produce that knowledge. The erasure of lives, places, histories and people is not a new practice of the Zionist entity in its forever war against the Palestinian people. Indeed, it is a long-term practice of settler-colonialism, intended to control and push Palestinians from their homes. A new language Israel’s denial of genocide and its various components poses a challenge for cultural producers, artists and scholars, as they try to explain what it means to live through a genocide, or even to witness live-streamed genocide through various screens. For scholars like me, the effort sometimes seems overwhelming, requiring a new language to confront the cultures of cruelty facing us. Artists and cultural producers, too, must contend with the need for creativity and inventiveness; with developing a new language of imagination to make Palestinian experiences visible and comprehensible in different ways. In Archiving Gaza in the Present , Porter and I were fortunate to have the contributions of such artists and cultural producers. Their imagination and visual representations remain crucial for documenting, indeed archiving, the genocide in Gaza, while also offering a sober reflection on the production of art and culture amid a systemic battle against it. For us, and for our contributors, archiving also seems to be a collective caring practice - one intended not only to bring to light Gaza’s incredible cultural and historical significance, but also to fight the global silence around the destruction of its cultural and artistic heritage, knowledge institutions, and very fabric of life, memory and remembering. Archiving must be seen as an anti-colonial practice, bringing together artistic creation, storytelling and imagination to defy Israel’s deliberate erasure of Palestinians and our culture. Palestinian history tells us that such anti-colonial archival practices - whether in the form of oral histories, posters, films, artwork or monuments - have always constituted an archive-within-archives, or history-within-histories. Archival practices are about care and perseverance; as philosopher Frantz Fanon explained , they are about hope. Archiving also resists the Israeli practice of shutting down the internet, targeting knowledge producers such as scholars and journalists, and censoring en masse both Israel’s own victims and many anti-genocide voices. De-colonial practice Israel’s control over Palestinian communications and information spaces shows how new technologies can reinscribe old racisms and enact new global inequities. These purportedly “frictionless” high-technology mechanisms, as described by communications professor Helga Tawil-Souri, extend Israel’s techniques of surveillance, targeting, spatial control and cyber-warfare, which have been documented for decades by scholars of digital occupation . In these conditions, archiving becomes an existential de-colonial practice, combatting the erasure of knowledge produced by Palestinians. Israel’s policy of memoricide goes hand-in-hand with epistemic violence, involving the conscious and deliberate erasure or devaluing of a knowledge system, along with its creators and transmitters. Archiving is also a battle against forgetfulness, whether wilful or imposed. In his seminal prose poem Memory for Forgetfulness , Mahmoud Darwish described Israel’s 1982 siege of Beirut, exploring memory as resistance against erasure, and the paradox of remembering painful history. He used his writing to reclaim a narrative from war’s dehumanisation, contrasting personal recall against collective forgetfulness. This signifies the struggle between preserving identity through memory, and the need to forget trauma - a central theme in Palestinian experience and exile This signifies the struggle between preserving identity through memory, and the need to forget trauma - a central theme in Palestinian experience and exile, revealing memory as both a burden and a tool for survival and resistance. In the context of the ongoing genocide, it has sometimes been difficult to find a language in which to write and talk about trauma, exile and dispossession, and the incredible cultures of cruelty enacted over and over again on our screens - a continuous assault on our bodies, our psyches, our infrastructures, our ways of living, our histories and our futures. Alongside those who stand with us, we are faced with violence that silences, censures and attempts to criminalise our voices and our very existence - and what it means to be Palestinian. In these moments, the urge to document, record, perform and express - in short, to archive - Palestine is not created only in response to, or as a challenge against, violence, dehumanisation or silencing; nor does it exigently draw on historical points chosen by Zionism, Israel or others. Archiving traces roots and intertwines with practices outside hegemonic constraints in all kinds of ways. It is the ultimate de-colonial practice: in archiving, Palestinians have agency. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Israel's genocide in Gaza Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0