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Palestinians surrender after Israeli troops capture the Palestinian city of Ramla during the 1948 war, July 11, 1948. (David Eldan)

PODCAST: The Israeli researchers unearthing their country’s dark past

Lior Yavne and Adam Raz discuss the challenges they face in trying to tell the true history that successive Israeli governments have been so intent on hiding.

By Henriette Chacar June 30, 2021

Illustrative photo of Palestinian refugees fleeing during the Nakba.

Don’t wait for Israeli archives to prove what Palestinians already know

Israeli authorities are deliberately concealing historical documents to undermine evidence of the state’s dark and violent origins. And the world is still falling for it. The village of Safsaf (“willow” in Arabic) appears on page 490 of the newest edition of Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains, a seminal book that catalogues 418 Palestinian communities that were…

By Amjad Iraqi July 7, 2019

The Israeli state archives in Jerusalem on September 03, 2012. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

More than 100 files from the 1800s are still classified in Israel’s archives

Israel recently published its catalogue of some 300,000 classified files, including thousands of documents from before the state was even founded. The very existence of the files had been kept a secret until recently. By Asaf Shalev Israel’s State Archives unceremoniously published the contents of its catalog of classified archive documents this past summer, posting…

By +972 Magazine February 15, 2019

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Two IDF jeeps drive in a parade through Jerusalem, 1968. (A. Eisenberg/Lehava Kiryat Mozkin, CC 2.5)

1968 poll shows what Jewish Jerusalemites thought of Palestinians

A survey of Jerusalem’s Jewish residents just months after the end of the Six-Day War showed that, even back then, the majority wanted little to do with their Arab neighbors — and as few reminders as possible that they were there at all. At the close of the Six-Day War in 1967, Jerusalem’s Jewish residents…

By Dahlia Scheindlin June 1, 2017

Illustrative photo of the digitization of archives. (Lilyana Vynogradova / Shutterstock.com)

The end of history at Israel’s state archives?

As part of a welcome digitization process, the Israel State Archives will soon revoke access to original paper documents, and the documents it puts online will be subject to military censorship. But academics and civil liberties groups are fighting back. (Correction appended below) Israel’s State Archives (ISA) will no longer give researchers and the public…

By Haggai Matar April 12, 2016