Background

Since 2016, the Israeli government reclassified the documents relating to the Palestinian Nakba. What this meant in practice was that historians are prevented from accessing both new documents, and those used in the past by researchers. It is quite clear that the documents will not be released in the foreseeable future, and it is quite probably that they will be destroyed. ​

There is a direct link between this policy of erasure and the “Deal of the Century” of Donald Trump and the international political indifference to the question of Palestine. The basic idea behind “the deal” is to transform the Palestinian question from a political issue into an economic problem. This, the architects of the program hope will bury any Palestinian national aspiration for independence, freedom, self-determination and return.

One of the important means of achieving this is by delegitimizing the Palestinian narrative on the Nakba, and al-Nakba al-Mustamera, the on-going Nakba. Zionism is a settler colonial movement and Israel is a settler colonial state. What this means is that as long as Israel adheres to this ideology, the native and indigenous Palestinians are its main obstacle for taking over historical Palestine in its entirety. Scholars of settler colonialism noted that such movements work upon the logic of “the elimination of the native”, which in the past led to genocide of native Americans and aboriginals, apartheid in South Africa and ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

Israel is still faced with the presence of six million Palestinians inside historical Palestine and millions of refugees demanding to return (and having this right sanctified by various UN resolutions). Thus, the Zionist project is incomplete without the physical erasure of any Palestinian political demands and would seem impossible as long as the Palestinians themselves are present in Palestine, their narrative is still alive and their demand for return is still intact. ​

While many among the global civil societies understand the full meaning of the Palestinian predicament, mainstream media and academia, and in particular political elites, refuse to acknowledge both the Nakba and the ongoing “logic of elimination” of the Israeli settler state. ​

Proving the horrors of 1948 is therefore not just a project of salvation, but a moral imperative to show that the destruction of the Palestinians was and is a real prospect for the future. There is a need to collect the documents, already historians have, and create to begin with, An Indicative Archive of the Nakba. ​