Israel-Palestine Library Resources

The papers of the American Colony in Jerusalem, a non-denominational utopian Christian community, consist of approximately 16,600 items spanning the years 1786-2007, three-fourths of which have been digitized and made available by the Library of Congress.

The Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies has multiple research and preservation projects: Al Quds Archive, Edward Said Archive, Dreams of a Nation (film), Palestinian Village Histories, Families Interrupted (photography), The Nakba Files, Palestinians and the City, Oral History Project, Jerusalem Maps, The Steven Wachlin Postcard Collection, and Liberation Graphics Collection. Some of these projects include open access to digital primary sources.

This curated list of resources, published by the Society for Arab Music Research, is intended to provide university-level music and dance educators with relevant sources for understanding, contextualizing, and teaching Palestinian cultural practices. It includes links to digital archives for the study of Palestinian music, performance, and cultural expression.

The Israel State Archives have made available digitized documents across multiple collection types, such as naturalization files, marriage certificates, government and military documents, immigration records, and censuses.

This collection, curated by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, includes transcripts of speeches and first-hand accounts of Israel's wars from 1948 to 2012.

The Bella & Harry Wexner Libraries of Sound & Song and The Suzie and Bruce Kovner National Music Archives at the National Library of Israel document, preserve and offer public access to material relating to Israeli and Jewish music. Among the digitized materials are songs by Alexander (Sasha) Argov and Moshe Wilensky.

The archives at the National Library of Israel date back to 1927, with the arrival of the rich personal archive of Ahad Ha'Am. Today, the Library's Archives Department houses over one thousand personal archives, the majority of which bear testimony to the activities of Jewish personalities from a wide variety of spheres: writers and poets, humanists, rabbis, Zionist leaders, scientists, journalists, critics and others. The Historical Jewish Press, Bibliography of the Hebrew Book, Visual Memory photo collection, and more have been digitized.

The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive was launched to collect various documents including identification papers, official records, letters, diaries, manuscripts, maps, photographs, films, and audio recordings that were under threat of loss, damage, or confiscation. Such items were digitized and made widely available on a website open for users inside Palestine and abroad in Arabic and English, to shed light on the different aspects of Palestinian life, history, and legacy.

Based at the American University of Beirut, the Palestinian Oral History Archive is a project to digitize, index, catalog, preserve, and provide access to an archival collection of around 1,000 hours of testimonies with first generation Palestinians and other Palestinian communities in Lebanon. The Archive's main focus is personal accounts surrounding the Nakba, but it also contains life narratives of pre-1948 Palestine, folktales and songs, as well as stories of the women in Ein el-Helwe camp after its destruction in 1982.

The Wilson Center Digital Archive is a resource where students, researchers and specialists can access once-secret documents from governments and organizations all over the world. Constructed and maintained by the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program (Washington, D.C.), the Digital Archive contains declassified historical materials from archives around the world, including diplomatic cables, high level correspondence, meeting minutes, intelligence estimates, and more.

Ever since it was established, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has recorded all aspects of the life and history of Palestine refugees through film and photography. This has led to a rich audiovisual archive, containing more than 430,000 negatives, 10,000 prints, 85,000 slides, 75 films and 730 videocassettes.