Khazaaen, the Jerusalem Archive for Palestinian Social History

When Fadi Asleh started Khazaaen in 2016, he had one aim: to preserve the day-to-day stories of ordinary Palestinians.

Seven years later, the project has grown far beyond his imagination. Khazaaen’s headquarters are tucked away at the top of a steep hill at the end of a cul-de-sac in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. To get to the archive, one enters through a wrought-iron gate, passes a dusty garage, and continues through a garden full of birch trees to a two-story building. The first room is Fadi’s office, which is mostly a desk. Dozens of books lay piled up on top of each other, blanketing every spare inch of space. Khazaaen does not request books, but many people send them anyway. “So we have to donate all the books we receive,” Fadi says. “It’s not an easy decision, but we have no choice.”1

Khazaaen is both a digital and a physical archive. The team uploads all their documents onto their website to make it easily searchable. Now, thanks to its world-renowned reputation, the Khazaaen project doesn’t have much physical space. Thousands of documents are stored in a 15-square-foot room adjoining Fadi’s office. Each archive fits in one box, with the documents packed carefully inside white cardboard and tied up with a white ribbon. The boxes in the room are organized and categorized meticulously; each box is placed in chronological order with a number on it next to a little flag to show which country it arrived from. On the first shelf alone, there are flags of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria, as these countries have a high population of people with historic connections to Palestine.

Khazaaen is an Arabic word for “cabinets” that, as the organization’s website tells us, “was always used to refer to libraries in Islamic history. Bayt al-Hikmah Khazaeen in Baghdad, Qayrawan in Tunisia, and Andalusia’s Qurtubah.” Khazaaen stores documents that date from 1870 to the present, from all across the Arab world.

Because they do not have much space, the Khazaaen team is beginning to upload documents they receive online and send the original versions back to their owners.

Next to the storage room, there’s a light-filled office where Fadi’s team of five part-time employees work. The only team member here today is Amal Daoud, a soft-spoken young woman with kind eyes and a clear passion for the work. She handles the archives with care, gently taking down a box marked with a Palestinian flag. “This is the al-Dajani archive,” she says. Al-Dajani is a famous Jerusalem family with centuries of history in the city. “It arrived in plastic bags, the documents were crumpled and in bad condition, and some of them needed restoration. So we categorized the items and preserved them in acid-free folders.”2

She opens another box and unties one of the folders to reveal a letter written in beautiful Arabic calligraphy. It’s from Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab, one of the greatest singers in the Arab world, to Musa al-Husayni (the al-Husayni family is another prominent and deeply rooted Palestinian family in Jerusalem). “He asked al-Husayni to make a competition to change the names of one of his films,” Amal says. “You see, these archives highlight treasures that people don’t see because they’re kept inside private homes.”

It took time for Khazaaen to gain people’s trust to take care of their most valuable memories. Over his years of study, Fadi built many connections with activists and friends across the Arab world, who then shared Khazaaen’s mission to preserve Palestinian history with their communities. They succeeded in spreading the word across the Middle East with the message that anyone with material relevant to Palestine is welcome to send their documents to Khazaaen. Fadi continued the campaign by going on tours of universities and cultural centers in the Middle East, sharing his vision and goals and the significance of a social archive in Palestine. People either deliver their documents to Khazaaen by hand or send them via courier.

As Fadi’s network of trustworthy friends and volunteers collected material, more and more people came to understand the significance of the project. The thought that their prized possession would make their own story part of a larger history appealed to them.

Khazaaen is not a traditional archive. Rather, it is a social archive, which means it preserves everyday material. According to the website,

Documents and other ephemeral material, such as posters to announce specific events and other time-limited items, can be sent in and preserved in acid-free boxes and files or digitized and sent back to the owner.

“Khazaaen is transparent in its work, which makes it easy for people to understand and trust our aims, goals, and ambitions,” Fadi says. “We believe that Khazaaen is from people and for people; and we are all working together to create a Palestinian society that is aware of its culture, memories, and long-standing legacy, and capable of deciding and leading its own future.”

Since securing funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 2016 and launching the organization in October of that year, Khazaaen has preserved 191 personal archives in physical and digital form. Typically, PhD and master’s students visit Khazaaen and reference the material in articles, essays, and theses or request access online. Now it’s one of the most well-respected archives in the Arab world—Khazaaen won the Taawon Jerusalem Award and the Late Ragheb Kaloti Award—but there is still much more work to do.

Fadi is no stranger to digging through archives. Born and raised in a small town called ‘Arrabat al-Battuf in the Galilee, he has always been fascinated by the history of his people. As he read about the history of Palestine, however, he noticed the only available documentation was from elite families. He was curious to understand the experiences of day-to-day people with less political influence, so he attended Birzeit University in Ramallah to study history, followed by an MA in comparative literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He then moved to Berlin to study at the Freie Universität and completed an MA in archiving before moving back to Jerusalem to enroll in a doctoral program in Palestinian history and geography at the Hebrew University. By the end of 2023, he’ll be finished with his studies.

“The focus of my studies is on Palestinian villagers and their villages,” he says, “and how these books help us understand the history of these people; because it’s different from the national narrative and from the elite narrative.”

Fadi is interested in how regular people live their lives, how they experience different issues, and how they deal with suffering. “Even though both the villagers and the elite suffered, the villagers experienced the Nakba in a different way than the elites,” Fadi says. “But the elite narrative is the most prominent, because they knew how to read and write, and they built all the Palestinian organizations.”

So, in many ways, Khazaaen is an extension of Fadi’s research. “I want both narratives to be in history,” he says, “because history should be structured from all voices in society.”

A key purpose of Khazaaen is to preserve the archives of everyday Palestinians and ensure that their stories and perspectives will be included as part of history.

A second purpose is to address the lack of Palestinian archives in general. As Fadi researched his dissertation topic, he was surprised to find there weren’t many professional Palestinian archives—and none of them were documenting the stories of ordinary people. “Most of the elite families will publish a book or appear in a newspaper, but the people on the street aren’t documented,” Fadi says. “But every village will have lots of events—weddings, funerals—and this material can help us to understand more about the people in the villages and the camps.”

To access Khazaaen archives, people can book online consultations. Since the archive is housed in a small space, only a few visitors—researchers, students, academics, artists, reporters, videographers—can be accommodated at any given time. Fortunately, most of the material is digitized and archived online, making it searchable. To find items of interest, people visit www.khazaaen.org, enter their search terms, and see what results come up.

It’s a big undertaking, and not without its challenges. With limited space, Fadi has to turn down families who want to donate their archives to store in a physical space; however, they can be uploaded online. Fadi manages a network of volunteers who help document, restore, preserve, digitize, and categorize archives, but they have to work in shifts, because space is limited, so a lot of Fadi’s time is taken up with logistics and organizing shifts. However, he believes it’s entirely worth it, because documenting the social history of Palestinians adds entirely new perspectives and narratives that can never be erased.

“People feel that archiving their stories prevents them from death,” Fadi says, “because their story will be here forever. And in a Palestinian context, all of us are in danger—so this is a way of defending ourselves.”

The kinds of materials Khazaaen receives on a daily basis range from bus tickets to wedding invites, with love letters, cinema posters, house deeds, and family portraits tossed into the mix. Often, these artifacts lead to new discoveries about Palestinian history—for example, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s archive led to the discovery that Musa al-Husayni was also the director of the Palestinian al-Hambra Cinema in Jaffa. Thanks to this documentation, Khazaaen has been invited to travel to Qatar to showcase its findings alongside film posters in an international exhibition on Arab Cinema.

Khazaaen is even trusted with personal journals, hidden worlds that reveal the inner workings of everyday people during times of turmoil. For example, the staff received the diary of an 11-year-old Gazan girl during the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip during May 2021. “It’s so emotional,” Fadi says. “She wrote that she’s afraid to die. She wrote every day of the war, and afterward, she sent us the diary. It shows us how young people process these things.”

One family archive includes the diary of a trader who worked in the Old City. He used to document everything that happened on a daily basis, in a place that teemed with life. “Through this diary you can see the change in his writing style before and after the Nakba,” Amal says. “His world was full of life and enjoyment, he traveled to other Arab countries by train with his family, but after May 1948, he didn’t write for many days, and he returned to writing after a while. He was shocked, and he didn’t have the words to write.”

Amal is clearly passionate about the stories she preserves. She started working with Khazaaen after she finished her degree in media studies at An-Najah National University in Nablus. In 2019, she joined a Khazaaen training workshop, “Colonial History and Archiving,” and began working as an employee in 2021. Although she finds the work endlessly interesting, she says the act of archiving is also an act of faith.

“Sometimes it’s hard to work in archives, because I might not see their impact on other people and institutions during my lifetime,” Amal says. “But hearing all these stories about how people use the items makes me feel calm and confident, because I can already see that people are benefitting.”

Fadi says it was difficult to persuade families to send in their archives at the beginning of the project. “It was not easy to convince people, especially with modern material. But after we collected material, those people were killed or put in prison, so now people understand that they cannot imagine what will happen in the future, because life here is changing all the time, very quickly.”

Now, Fadi says, Khazaaen’s biggest challenge is keeping up with their growing reputation. They are now one of the most famous and respected Palestinian archives in the world, which means they’re getting sent more material than they can cope with. “Most archives are the opposite—they want more material—but we don’t have enough space,” Fadi says. “We donate thousands of books, and we have a list of 20 families who want to give us their physical archives, but we can’t accept them.”

The books they receive are donated to a safe space, such as the al-Aqsa Mosque library, Birzeit University, and other public institutions. “So we ensure these books are available to all the people,” Fadi says.

In the near future, Fadi hopes to have a media department and a research department and will change the shelving in the storage room to create more space. The team has plans to teach more organizations how to archive and to make films of their material to further cement it in history. Once Fadi finishes his PhD, he will dedicate his time to writing a curriculum to train others how to archive, so more can be done to ensure that Palestinian history and culture will live on.

Khazaaen also documents stories on its online blog, which from time to time shares perspectives of Palestinians during recent events, such as home demolitions in Sheikh Jarrah, the demonstration against the assassination of political activist Nizar Banat in downtown Ramallah, and the 2017 Lions’ Gate uprising.

The project is supported through funding and donations, with the aim of being a self-sustained, community-driven archive. To donate, visit the Khazaaen donation page or contact pr@khazaaen.org.

Khazaaen is a mammoth project, and Fadi knows it is worth the effort. “Nothing is guaranteed here,” Fadi says. “But whatever happens in the future, we’ve succeeded to build something positive. We’ve changed many things, so it’s already a great achievement.”

Visit Khazaaen’s website to learn more.