archives of bravery, and hope
via the Palestinian Museum
While scrolling on Instagram, I came across beautiful photos of Palestinian families on film: An older man helps adjust a younger man’s tie with shiny streamers in the background. A woman in a white abaya bent over cloth she is weaving. A wedding photo of a young couple. The man has a red tie and the sky is pale blue behind them. The woman wears a very 1980’s poofy white wedding dress. In another photo, young men with matching haircuts and outfits kneel to pose in front of a pale blue door for their picture to be taken. The caption beneath these photographs reads “Palestinians have continued to revive and preserve century old traditions, lose them to rubble, and start again. Family heirlooms, generational craftsmanship and archives from family-run bookshops lovingly patched together again after every bombardment, decade upon decade”.
The photos are from the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive. This project, as a part of the Palestinian Museum, self describes as “Over 200 years of Palestinian life portrayed through photographs, documents, letters, diaries, publications, and audio & video recordings.” The archive contains 343,485 digitized items across 416 collections from cultural centers, resistance posters, family collections, magazines, photojournalism, and more. There are filters within the archive for culture & arts, resistance & struggle, displacement & diaspora, social & organizational movement, everyday life, education & extracurricular activities, women. The archive is in English and Arabic.
Each and every document, photograph, and piece of physical paper, has been carefully scanned and organized with such sensitivity and dedication. All of this labor and effort in order to provide the public with access to scenes of Palestinian family life, social events, weddings, protests, city views, architecture, and so on.
This archive demonstrates that to merely exist as a Palestinian is to resist. To experience joy, experience hormonal ups and downs, fall in love, snuggle your pet, argue with a friend, go to the beach, gaze at the moon, take a drive in the car, is to resist. To continue to exist and resist in the face of such openly evil and powerful regimes is a form of bravery we should all aspire towards.
As Angela Davis put in Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement: “I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity…I don’t know whether I would have survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle.”
Actions:
1- Boycott Divestment Sanctiotream, Puma, HP, McDonalds, Dominos, and Burger King are just a few places that do not need your money
2- Follow Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) actions such as Shut it Down for Palestine on November 17th
3- Join a labor union and encourage them to participate in the PSL actions
4- Rather than waste your precious time and energy debating with people who have seen all of the evidence and still do not want to open their eyes, put your energy elsewhere, like in the ideas above and below <3
5- Take care of yourselves and each other <3
Reading:
1- Reading list compiled by the Palestinian Youth Movement
2- Read free eBooks on Palestinian liberation from Haymarket and Verso
3- Refusing Colonial Categorization and Claiming Fractal Possibility by Ayana Zaire Cotton particularly moving, an excerpt: “Where does the line of desire end and duty begin? The more I write, the more I remember they’re one in the same.”
4- They Don’t Want us to Know We Exist in which Palestinians across the West Bank describe what life has been like since October 7