2025 Workshop

Falestin Naili

Assistant Professor, Middle Eastern Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland

Resistant archives against the (f)utility of history 

In the midst of the current genocide in Gaza, historians working on Palestine face the question  of the (f)utility of their work. Why look into the past when the present is so overwhelming in  its brutality and injustice? What can history provide in the face of the annihilation of a people and the obliteration of their collective home?  

Seeking inspiration from thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, this paper will attempt to articulate  how a different understanding of history could be an important tool in this moment. The  objective of genocidal annihilation includes a will to obliterate a people as a cultural group, as  a group that has created a life world, that has left material and immaterial traces, and has  provided inspiration. History documents all of those. Moreover, when history takes into  account futures that were aborted during the violent rampage of war machines, it can serve as  a safe-deposit box in which blueprints for the future can be conserved for later use. 

In the face of annihilation, record-keeping is an act of resistance, especially when it is not only  understood as related to the past. As Jacques Derrida wrote, archives are not primarily a thing  of the past, they are also stores for the future. They contain the potential that is targeted when  people are slated for genocidal elimination. Indeed, the survival of an oppressed and persecuted  people depends on its ability to reconnect with the potential their oppressor wanted to erase,  and so this is also where history can play its role.  

In the current context where most libraries and archival centers in Gaza have been destroyed or  severely damaged, record-keeping means the “documentation of disappearance”, as Mezna  Qato points out. She insists that the historian’s effort to tell the story in spite of lacking archives  shouldn’t cover up the violence of their disappearance. Thus the nexus of destroyed or looted  archives and digital-born ad-hoc archives put historians in front of profound epistemological  and ethical questions that might be the occasion to formalize new approaches and  methodologies. How do we tell the story of erasure – of people, places and memories – in a  way that opens a genuine space for resurrection?

Falestin Naïli is a historian specializing in the social history of late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and Jordan. She has focused much of her recent research on local governance and politics, particularly in Jerusalem.  Through her interest in collective memory and oral history she often reaches present-time issues, including the politics of heritage.