| Abstract | The article drives from the Israeli colonial archives and seeks to crack their structure, foundations and imagination. It wishes to establish a counter postcolonial/decolonial archive, based on colonial sources, while taking into consideration the specific condition of the Israeli colonialism and settler colonialism, and mainly the repressive administration of the colonial archives. While colonial bodies and archives erase the indigenous history and past, the counter archive aims to return them to their original population and to the pubic-sphere, calling for democratization processes. It will be established on the ruins of the Israeli colonial archive, will tell the story of the Palestinian villages that their population was uprooted and exiled (before and after exile), the story of the Palestinian population who remained in Palestine under military regime, strangers in the house; the erasure and attempt to control Palestinian historiography and culture to support official Israeli narrative. The decolonial archive will also gather indigenous materials in colonial archives, point out the physical and interpretative forces exerted on them, cleanse them of their biased interpretation and focus on structuring a reading that differs from the original colonial designation. It will restore them to indigenous history, enabling the construction of an alternative multi- layered database, different from the one-sided characteristic of colonial archives. The proposal then is to turn the Israeli colonial archive–corrupt, oppressive and destructive, into a more autonomous site–not only the materials themselves but also the way they are contextualized, read and interpreted. |
