In a recent webinar hosted by ActforPal, speakers Professor Dina Matar, Dr. Venetia Porter, and Dr. Claire Launchbury, with moderation by Professor Tahrir Hamdi, discussed the urgency of archiving in the present as a political and cultural process to confront Israel’s persistent genocidal erasure.

The webinar, marking the publication of Archiving Gaza in the Present, co-edited by Matar and Porter, emphasised this as a necessary process of resistance, resilience and determination by Palestinians to produce knowledge in their own languages and visuals.

Archiving, we were told, is a productive, creative process of documenting, witnessing and telling that is affirmative, caring and hopeful, while also speaking truth to power and the different forms and modes of silencing pervading global political spheres and academia.

Porter provided visual examples from the book, showing how artists, cultural producers and poets in Gaza are all involved in archival practices through their continuous production despite the horrific violence and destruction of the genocide.

Launchbury discussed Lebanese cultural production as archival practices in the context of the trauma and violence of the civil war and Israel’s repeated incursions, while Matar talked about archiving as countering memoricide, one of the many -cides of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

All speakers, prompted by provocative questions posed by Hamdi, spoke of the necessity of archiving in the present in opening questions about authenticity and legitimacy, terms and notions that continue to be framed and deployed by colonial powers in ways that exclude the marginalised and colonised.

The discussion raised serious questions about who has the right to archive. These are questions that lie at the heart of Palestinians’ subjection to the willfulness of the settler-colonial regime and that, importantly for people committed to de-colonisation, reveal how archiving as a practice and theory remains controlled by colonial epistemologies and methodologies that determine its process through legitimation criteria and methods.

Finally, the speakers emphasised that archiving in the present is actually about hope and rebirth, about Palestinians’ persistent determination to live and resist.