Palestinian culture has been looted, destroyed and displaced for decades. Now, a team in the occupied West Bank is building something they hope cannot be seized or erased: a digital archive of Palestinian memory.

“Within a week, Israel bombed two art galleries, seven museums, two main archives in Gaza, and hundreds of archaeological sites,” says Amer Shomali, general director of the Palestinian Museum. “This battle to erase Palestinian culture is not theoretical.”

The museum stands in defiance among gardens of native flowers, but access is difficult due to checkpoints. Meanwhile, Israeli lawmakers are advancing legislation that would place ancient sites under Israeli control, potentially annexing them.

“We created this platform, the Palestine Museum Digital Archive,” Shomali explains. The archive now contains over 500,000 digitized items and is used to stage exhibitions worldwide, even in remote locations like Japan and San Francisco.

The distributed nature of the archive means that if one copy disappears, others remain, ensuring Palestinian history endures.