On June 4, renowned scholar and historian, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, founder and President of the Palestine Land Studies Society in London and donor of the Palestine Land Studies Center (PLSC), held a conversation with Ghada Dimashk, PLSC coordinator, librarian and archivist, for the first installment of Archives & Heritage for Palestine, a series hosted by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Tam Rayan, in defense of Palestinian life, land, liberation, and return.
The Archives & Heritage for Palestine series is a joint initiative of the Middle East Librarians Association, the American University of Beirut’s Palestine Land Studies Center, Publishers for Palestine, and the Archives & Digital Media Lab.
In his talk, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta drew on records, documents, and maps from the PLSC collection, illustrating and exploring the role of archives and heritage pertaining to Palestinian history and identity to counter epistemic violence, colonial erasure, and the cultural dimensions of genocide.
You can read a transcript of the talk here, at The Public Source.
Also, the talk included a call to action in the form of a statement titled, A Call to Archive Against Genocide: Archivists and Memory Workers in Solidarity with Palestine and Palestinian Colleagues, issued by members of the “A Documentary Nakba: A Reading Group for Archival Liberation In & Beyond Palestine, who read it aloud. It calls on professional and academic archival, information and memory work colleagues, departments, institutions, and associations to:
- Join the global movement for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the genocide on Gaza, and the liberation of Palestinian people everywhere.
- Teach and learn about Palestine in our professional and academic training programs, educational institutions, curricula, and courses.
- Center Palestinian experiences, perspectives, and voices in research and publications.
- Correct predominantly reductive and racist cataloging, archiving, and metadata standards, frameworks, and tools pertaining to Palestinian geographies, people, communities, culture, history and materials.
- Articulate new approaches that are informed by the work of Palestinian memory workers over the last century and beyond in key archival functions from acquisition and access to archival arrangement and description.
- Make a concerted effort to gather and platform materials from Palestinian people, organisations, and communities in Palestine and the Shatat (Diaspora/Exile).
- Support the return of stolen and displaced archives and records to Palestinian memory workers, institutions, and communities so that the Palestinian people can exercise self-determination over their own material worlds and story.
- Boycott and divest from all academic, cultural and other Israeli institutions and organisations complicit through acts of commission or omission in the genocide, including those who refuse to speak out against Israeli war crimes and apartheid, those that receive funding from or collaborate with the Israeli state, and those who work with or have relationships with the Israeli military.
- Support colleagues facing censure and institutional discipline for speaking up for Palestinian rights and against Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and occupation.
- Mobilize knowledge, expertise, skills, resources, and privilege to counter the cultural dimensions of the Gaza genocide with the goal of preserving Palestinian history and memory and, most importantly, of stopping the genocide and settler colonialism perpetuated on the Palestinian people.
- To archive against genocide.
Publishers for Palestine 