To eradicate an archive is to destabilize lived presences, delegitimize extant lineages, and omit vital intellectual and socio-historical discourses from our understanding of the world. For over a decade, the international organization Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP) has stood witness to this fact, creating programs and resources that detail the ongoing destruction of artifacts, heritage, and knowledge institutions throughout the region. In connecting workers, academics, and activists from around the world and within Palestine, the LAP has steadfastly ventured forward in their efforts to establish solidarity with Palestinian resistance, document the limitations put upon literary access, and highlight the importance of cultural and historical material in the ongoing resistance against Israeli occupation. In their reports, records span the ruination of rare collections, institutions, publishing houses, and libraries that provided shelter for displaced citizens—a brutal enforcement of forgetting that will have reverberations long into the future.
In this interview, Maggie Schreiner, an active member of LAP, speaks to us about acting against erasure, the many losses that have incurred, and defining solidarity over charity.
Julie Shi (JS): Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP) describes itself as “a network of self-defined librarians, archivists, and information workers in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.” Could you share a little bit about how LAP came together, who you are, and the work that you do?
Maggie Schreiner (MS): We originally came together in 2013, and our original focus was on forming a delegation to go to the West Bank. We went as a group of twenty librarians, archivists, and information workers, and we spent two weeks travelling in the West Bank and Israel, which I will call ’48, in reference to the borders erected in 1948 during the Nakba. We met with Palestinian colleagues—librarians, archivists, and cultural workers—and, in the spirit of solidarity and collaboration, we learned about the work that they were doing and the struggles and challenges they faced because of the occupation.
When we came back, our initial work was really focused on what we’d learned on that trip. We did a lot of talks and lectures and we worked with the art book publisher Booklyn to create an art portfolio of posters, zines, and photographs documenting our trip. Eventually we decided that we wanted to become a more permanent organization to continue moving the work forward—and that’s when we became Librarians and Archivists with Palestine.
The “self-defined” language is because some people in our network are librarians or archivists for their day job, but other people might do this work primarily in a volunteer capacity, or they may do cultural work or information work writ large. We didn’t want the organization to be open to only those in professional roles; we wanted to have a wider range of people who could be involved.
JS: You mentioned that after the delegation to the West Bank, the group focused on sharing what you had learned. If you can recall, I’m curious to know what you feel were some of the most important things that you learned.
MS: We learned a lot. We were there for two weeks, and we travelled all over. Our days were very long, they were very full. We were taking in a lot of information and meeting a lot of people. We learned a lot about the ways that the Israeli occupation limits access to specifically Arabic-language books in ’48 and in the West Bank. It functions differently in those two places. Gaza also had its own set of challenges in 2013, but we couldn’t go to Gaza because of the blockade that was imposed in 2007.
We learned a lot about those limitations: the ways that the architecture of occupation limits the ability for people to move between and within Gaza, the West Bank, and ’48—and how that really impacts the ability of librarians, archivists, and information workers to have a professional community, to have conferences, to even have meetings and build work together. The occupation not only makes it hard in a literal way to get books; it makes it hard for people to be in relation to each other.
JS: How does LAP see libraries, archives, and other information spaces—both within and beyond Palestine—as supporting Palestinian self-determination? What can information and cultural heritage organizations outside of Palestine do to support Palestinian self-determination?
MS: As Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, we really start with the position that knowledge—knowledge about Palestinian history and the right of Palestinians to their cultural heritage—is a central part of Palestinian self-definition and Palestinian resistance. Projects focused on maintaining cultural heritage and Palestinian memory have really been central to the Palestinian project.
We really attempt to work in solidarity, not to provide charity. There are certainly organizations that attempt to address the issue of book access in the West Bank or Gaza, but often these books are not books that have been requested by libraries. In 2013, our delegation went to a library that had pallets and pallets of out-of-date textbooks that had been sent. These were not textbooks that were in use, these were not textbooks that had been requested, and now they had hundreds of books and nothing to do with them. That was really a good example of how not to do the work, and kind of exemplifies the difference between charity and solidarity.
Partially in response to that and also in response to the continued conversations we’ve had about these issues, we developed a project focused on book access called Matloub (Wanted). Librarians in the West Bank and Gaza identified lists of titles they were interested in for their libraries, and we then worked with the Tamer Institute for Community Education, an organization in the West Bank that would access those titles and distribute them in the West Bank and Gaza. We used our fundraising campaign for that project as an opportunity to talk about access to information in Palestine and the restrictions that librarians and readers in general face in gaining access to literature.
JS: In the longer, larger context of Palestinian history and struggles for freedom, what role did Palestine’s libraries, archives, and museums have in society and everyday life? And what did they symbolize on a more theoretical level?
MS: Gaza has this incredibly long history, spanning thousands of years, as an important city in the region. In addition to the really rich architectural and cultural heritage, there are just so many museums in Gaza, which I’m personally learning about through my research now that so many of them have been destroyed.
That destruction just underscores that, as I mentioned earlier, projects to sustain and retain memory—particularly memories of the Nakba and Palestinian cultural heritage more broadly—are really important. Retaining these memories and the material culture has become a really important part of the Palestinian resistance to more than seventy years of Israeli attempts to essentially deny and erase the history and the existence of the Palestinian people.
JS: In February 2024, LAP released a report titled “Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024.” What motivated you to create and publish this report?
MS: We at LAP really started to see a number of requests come in from people—journalists, academics, activists—wanting to know what was happening with libraries and archives in Gaza.
We had all seen a news report here and there. During the one-week ceasefire in November, there was a real uptick in information on this topic, but it wasn’t being organized anywhere. So that was a motive: people were reaching out to us asking for information that we felt like we should be able to provide, but couldn’t. Also, on a more personal level, our Matloub project had six partner libraries in Gaza, where we had helped fundraise for children’s books for those libraries. We wanted to know what was happening to these six libraries that we had a relationship with.
So, I decided to start keeping track and, because we’re a member network, I was able to assemble a team of volunteer researchers. We essentially combed the internet for information. We were aided in this project by the report put out by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture in early December about destruction to the cultural heritage sector more broadly in Gaza. That was a really important base for us to build our research on.
JS: Why is it significant to document these losses? What is at stake for Palestine and the world at large as Palestinian cultural heritage and information is destroyed?
MS: It’s important to document just to understand the scale of destruction that has been happening in Gaza. I think it’s very clear to many people now that the damage is very extreme, but in November, there was less widespread understanding of the extent of infrastructure destruction. There had been reporting on urgent issues, like damage to hospitals, targeting of journalists, damage to telecommunications systems, but less about damage to archives and libraries. Another motivation of the report was to make clear to the public that libraries and archives are another form of infrastructure being destroyed.
And I think that’s important for a few reasons. First, the archival and museum collections that are being destroyed—those materials are original, they’re irreplaceable. They document thousands of years of history in the region, so that’s a significant loss in terms of our ability to understand the history of the world, and more specifically, to understand the history of Palestine and Gaza and the Palestinians.
Infrastructure destruction is also important in that libraries are an important part of civic culture, and these libraries are being destroyed in an almost comprehensive fashion. While those books might be replaceable, there is an enormous cost and serious logistical considerations to replacing those resources due to the blockade of Gaza—books are on the list of materials entering Gaza that are controlled by the Israeli military, so it’s not easy to replace these books. And books are not the only thing destroyed when libraries are destroyed—it’s also a destruction of the work of librarians to build community around their library collections, cultivate reading, and cultivate knowledge.
JS: The report not only records physical spaces that have been damaged or destroyed but also honors Palestinian information workers who have been killed in the ongoing Israeli aggression.
The descriptions of these individuals are brief in the report, but alongside their names, professional roles, and dates of death, what about these workers—and about all those missing, injured, and yet to be reported—do you believe is most important to remember?
MS: I don’t know that it’s up to me to say what’s most important to remember. I wish that they were alive and that they could tell us what is most important to them about their life. I also wish we could include much more comprehensive information about the people who have been killed who we profile. This is something that we want to do in the report, but we don’t have that information right now.
Including information about other family members who they were killed with was a way of acknowledging a little bit about the fullness of these people’s lives. It was also a way to shed light on the extent of the violence and death that is occurring in Gaza: these are not people who are dying alone. They are often dying with their entire family. It’s a way of providing another window into the real extent of violence and death.
For us as LAP, including them was really important because they are our colleagues. We didn’t just want to write a report about buildings. Even as archivists and people who have really dedicated their careers to stewarding the historic record, people’s lives are more important to us.
JS: The introduction to the report reads: “This report is necessarily incomplete. . . it should be assumed that this report represents only a fraction of the extent of damage and death, not a complete picture.” It is devastating to think that this picture may never be complete. What was the research process like? What was the hardest part of gathering these stories of loss and destruction?
MS: It was really hard to find information. The six partner libraries that Librarians and Archivists with Palestine has worked with are not in the report. I never found any information about any of them. That’s one way that I know that the report is incomplete and not representative—the information just isn’t available or accessible right now. On the website, I’ve been adding information about additional institutions as it comes to me. It’s difficult for me to imagine that those six libraries are all unscathed at this point. So that was hard.
Our research team was majority English-speaking, so we had limited Arabic-language support. It does seem that almost all the information that is available in Arabic is also available in English at this point though. I feel pretty confident that we haven’t missed a big chunk of available information, but that was certainly a challenge that we had to figure out.
The hardest part, though, was finding information about information workers who have been martyred. I don’t think that we have yet found an effective way to do that research. It’s something that we are focusing on for a potential update to the report.
JS: I can’t imagine even where to start for researching that. There are no words for it. It must also be so hard to have those partner libraries with whom you had established relationships, and to have no way to find out about the libraries and those who worked there. That must be really hard, to grapple with not knowing.
MS: Yes, and even through the networks and relationships that we have, because of the extent to which people have been displaced, people aren’t able to check up on the institutions where they worked. And, frankly, it’s not a priority. We don’t want to be asking people to do that. Our approach has been to include information when it is available and comes to us, but we are not aggressively seeking that out.
And in terms of people’s ability to make those assessments and find that information, comparing the amount of information that came out during the one week of ceasefire when people did not have to focus all their energy on sheer daily survival to the amount that comes out otherwise is really stark. That kind of information has not emerged since the end of the ceasefire.
JS: In your 2023 Statement on Gaza, you also recognize that: “The steadfast struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom is sustained by the long-enduring Palestinian collective memory that decades of exile and repression have failed to eradicate. This memory is held in house keys still worn on chains around necks, is found in oral histories and family archives, is present in the work of artists and writers, and is heard in the calls of refugees now reverberating around the world.”
Alongside the many physical information spaces, there are countless personal stories—of individuals, families, communities, generations—that are being silenced and erased. At the same time, we also remember that Palestinian lives and Palestinian stories are more than oppression and relations with Israel.
In the face of such loss, what can we do to ensure we continue recentering and rehumanizing the Palestinian people in their own narratives?
MS: I think the most important thing is to uplift and listen to Palestinian voices. From the perspective of LAP and librarians, literature has been a very powerful tool for the question of how to centre Palestinian voices. Almost since the organization began, one of the campaigns we’ve worked on is “One Book, Many Communities,” where we pick a book of Palestinian literature and organize reading groups around the world to meet and discuss the book.
This has been a way to expose people to the richness of Palestinian literature; to educate them about the Nakba and the Israeli occupation, since those are often themes in the literature; and to build community. This is our seventh year, and we’ve hosted over one hundred reading groups in seven or eight countries through the campaign. This year we’re reading Mosab Abu Toha’s book of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear.
As I mentioned earlier, there is always the question of solidarity versus charity. For me, one of the defining differences between those two is really listening to Palestinian voices, trusting Palestinians to describe and to determine what they need and how those needs can be met.
In the context of information work, that means not imposing solutions. And right now, in the case of libraries in Gaza, it really means waiting. We can’t repair the library system of Gaza during the bombardment. The work right now is towards a ceasefire and more specific questions about how to rebuild are for a future conversation or struggle.
This piece is appearing as a part of the ongoing series, All Eyes on Palestine, in which we present writings and dialogues with insight on Palestinian literature and voices, and their singular value. We hear the Palestinian peoples, and we condemn the violation and deprivation of their human rights.
Maggie Schreiner is a PhD student in History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She has over a decade of experience working at the intersection of archives and public history, and was most recently the Manager of Archives and Special Collections at Brooklyn Historical Society (now the Center for Brooklyn History). Maggie has been an active member of Librarians and Archivists with Palestine since 2013. She holds a BA from McGill University and a MA in Public History from New York University, where she is an adjunct faculty member in the Archives and Public History program.
Julie Shi is Senior Executive Assistant at Asymptote and Digital Preservation Librarian at Scholars Portal, the technical services arm of the Ontario Council of University Libraries.
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