Palestinian Journeys is a collaborative project of the Palestinian Museum and the Institute for Palestine Studies. The Palestinian Museum is an independent institution founded in 1997 by the Taawon Welfare Association with the goal of promoting a dynamic vision of Palestinian culture engaged with new perspectives on history, society and culture. The Institute for Palestine Studies is an independent not-for-profit research institution founded in 1963 to document Palestine and and publish ground-breaking scholarship on historical and contemporary Palestine.
Powered by by Visualizing Palestine, whose productions we already highlighted on this blog (here), the Palestinian Journeys platform is continuously populated with valuable content.
Palestinian Journeys main page
The platform is discoverable via two main entries accessible from the left-hand side of the screen: the “Timeline,” and the “Stories.
The Timeline, “an ever-growing encyclopedic collection of historical events, biographies, themed chronologies”. Originally created by he Institute for Palestine Studies, it aims at highlighting historical, socioeconomic and cultural themes, relying on historical documents, and multimedia content. From within the timeline, various categories are available:
- Overall Chronology covering from 1500 A.D. to 2016 A.D.
- Thematic Chronologies browsable either by subject ( Colonization, Diplomatic, Institutional, Legal, Policy/Program, Sanctions, Violence) or by date
- Highlights pointing to significant events subdivided by subject (Biographical, Colonization, Contextual, Cultural, Diplomatic, Institutional, Legal, Policy/Program, Popular Action, Sanctions, Socioeconomic, Violence)
- Biographies sub-divided by profession (Artists, Businessmen and Economists, Clerics, Educators, Feminist Figures, Journalists, Poets, Political Leaders, Politicians, Revolutionaries and Activists, Scholars and Historians, Trade Unionists, Writers and Novelists)
- Documents sub-divided by type (Chart, Illustration, Map, Photograph, Text)
Overall Timeline
The Stories section, a continually updated collection of Palestinian testimonies and accounts, is an original creation of the Palestinian Museum. It aims at making widely available “marginalized and forgotten narratives about the Palestinian experience, highlighting unknown stories, personal accounts, oral histories, and undiscovered experiences” and “emphasizes how the Palestinian people took part in forging their own history. ” The Stories can be filtered either by theme (Arts & Culture, Economy, Society, War & Resistance, Women) or by by period:
- Ottoman Rule
- Early Mandate Period
- Second Mandate Period
- The Palestine War and the Nakba
- Reverberation of 1948 Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
- The Rise of the Palestinian Movement in the Wake of the 1967 Arab Defeat
- From a Sense of Victory to separate Peace and civil War
- Palestinian Defeat, Division and Survival
- The first Intifada and the beginning of Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations
- The Oslo process and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority
- The Aqsa Intifada and the end of an Era in Palestinian Politics
- A Palestinian Authority divided, Israeli Assaults on Gaza and Peace process Setbacks.
Stories
In addition, an “Inspire me” category allows visitors to discover the Palestinian Journeys through a selection of marking moments, events, and characters, and a search feature allows visitors to focus on a specific event or theme they are interested in.
Inspire me
A short description including source is available for each document, and sometimes related content is suggested:
The interface is bilingual English-Arabic.