How the Palestinians Are Building an Indelible Modern Artifact

“We built this platform, ya Palestine Museum Digital Archivewhich is a permanent museum,” explains Shomali.

What started as a simple door-knocking – visiting families in the West Bank and asking for permission to photograph old photographs, letters and documents – has grown into one of the most ambitious digital preservation projects in the region.

The open museum now contains more than 500,000 photographs, identification documents, documents, maps, videos, and letters, many of which were collected directly from Palestinian families and would otherwise have been lost forever.

The mission of the Palestinian Museum is preservation and access: to preserve Palestinian history and make it accessible to those who cannot travel to Palestine.

Behind the archives is a team of three full-time employees dedicated to digitization, metadata, and research, supported by a network of volunteers. Funds supported by the diaspora and a partnership with the University of California are Gerda Henkel Foundationthis work includes translation, translation, and linguistic analysis. The museum is also looking for a bot that can read Ottoman Arabic to help curate history.

This effort represents a major shift in how vulnerable communities are using technology — not just to preserve culture, but to build robust, distributed databases that can withstand war, displacement, and destruction.

For Shomali, historical documents allow Palestinians to reclaim ownership of their history. “All of a sudden, you start having this grid, a page of information and information, and it allows you to rewrite the old, but interesting, history below because it’s not a government archive.”

The museum has also taken measures to ensure that the archive can survive digital threats and even physical damage. A number of archived copies are kept around the world, creating a distribution system designed to ensure that the collection is never lost.

“We have various backups, but we continue to experience cyberattacks on the site,” says Shomali. “About every month, we get attacked, and the site goes down, and we reset it based on the backups we have.”

“We can’t prevent it from being stolen, but we can prevent it from being destroyed.”

Archives mean that the history of Palestine is no longer in one house or on one server. Even if one copy is lost, others remain.

Another project turned the museum into what Shomali describes as “a show in a box, Ikea style.” Users can download presentation materials, print them, and post their presentations in Palestine anywhere in the world, regardless of budget. This work has been shown over 260 timesfrom Japan to San Francisco, and has been translated into five languages.

Archives have also become a resource for foreign artists and curators. In May 2026, artist and curator Leyya Mona Tawil used her collection to create My Name is Palestine: Echoes from the Palestinian Museum’s Music Online Exhibition in San Francisco.

“He was in tears and just like, thank you,” says Tawil about the reception of the visitors to the exhibition.

Acknowledging the size of the museum, Tawil says he only found “a fraction of what a museum has to offer.” But even that had a great impact on him as an artist and his listeners: “It’s not just a music history, it’s not just an archive; it’s a repository of life that represents people in danger.”