The Palestinian National Library is more significant than the state; it is the state of memory. By: Issa Qaraqe Whoever has no memory has no homeland, the restoration of the threatened Palestinian national memory as well as the expression of all its historical, humanitarian, cultural, and existential manifestations, is at the heart of the strategic objective and long-term vision of the project to establish the Palestinian National Library, which was decreed by President Abu Mazen in 2019.
The National Library is a cultural act resisting the physical and cultural project of Zionist extermination, which targets the entity and the national identity of the Palestinian people. Not surprisingly, the Israeli occupation established its own national library before founding its colonial state. It collected books and publications that stated the Zionist narrative of the Promised Land and the Land without a people. During the 1948 and 1967 wars, the occupation looted, concealed, and stole Palestinian cultural and intellectual treasures, modifying them to serve his imagined Zionist narrative, that tried to give historical legitimacy to his existence and occupation of Palestine. Those entering the Israeli library or many Israeli museums find hundreds of Palestinian cultural manuscripts and products confiscated, which they claim have been placed as backgrounds or shadows of Jewish history or ancient Israel, and that Biblical archaeologists are attempting to produce Israeli narratives through marginalization, concealment, and producing alternative knowledge systems that are overwhelmed and dominated by biblical time. The Palestinian National Library project is a state project, even greater than the state, because it represents a state of Palestinian memory that has been extended and profound throughout Palestine's long history.
It is a distinguished revolutionary project with a line of engagement with the Zionist narrative, which seeks to drive Palestinians out of consciousness, space, and time, so restoring the past is always for the sake of hegemony and control in the present. Furthermore, the National Library project is a sovereign project that has control over culture, history, language, and identity symbols. It aims to restore the Palestinian people's urban life, which has been obliterated by the extermination policy and the physical and cultural ethnic cleansing practiced by the Zionist occupation against the Palestinian people. The National Library project is a national project through which the nation regains the justification for its presence on this land. A nation that does not have a national library does not exist. It is the mission of the National Library to preserve the cultural and intellectual heritage of the Palestinian people and to protect them from destruction, looting, demolition, and forgery.
The library regains the past, holds the present, and builds the future. The National Library is the most visible manifestation of Palestinian patriotism and its many expressions in literature, theater, values, customs, traditions, and architectural design in dress, accents, tales, and individual and collective experiences. It is a national symbol and a testament to the quest for independence, liberation, national spirit strengthening, the process of perseverance, resistance, adherence to the right to self-determination, access to sovereignty, independence, and participation in the creation of human civilization. The Palestinian National Library is an incubator for Palestinian cultural identity and its manifestation in all of its aspects. It is a tool of resistance in the face of obliteration, abolishment, exclusion, and marginalization. Palestinian culture has proven to be essential in preserving Palestinian identity. It is inexorably connected to freedom as well as being a necessary component of identity, cohesion, and perseverance.
The pioneering National Library project requires support and motivation, empowerment, collaboration, and promotion. It is a historic, militant project that deserves every effort to succeed as a Palestinian civilizational landmark on Palestinian territory. The National Library faces numerous challenges in its work, including the restoration of cultural property looted and stolen by occupiers, the collection of our cultural heritage from diaspora countries and museums in foreign countries, the development of a unified narrative of the Palestinian people, and laws governing the National Library operation, National Number, International Number, Copyright Protection Act, Deposit System, Cultural Production publication and Distribution System, Museum Organization Law, etc.
Moreover, the Palestinian National Library is the state and national library, the leading library in charge of preserving, organizing, maintaining, and presenting the Palestinian people's cultural, literary, and human heritage locally, regionally, and globally, wherever they are at home and in the diaspora. It also serves as the permanent filing center for all issues in Palestine, producing the consolidated catalogue, collaborating among libraries, contributing to the development of standards, library legislation, informatics, study and research preparation, the establishment of the digital library and the national bibliography center, the development of a national database, the operation of a central electronic portal for all Palestinian museums, coordination with publishing houses and university libraries, and other tasks that make the national library the national, intellectual and cultural address of the State of Palestine. The National Library promotes the nation's belonging, values, and believe, as well as the preservation of its heritage and historical monuments. It is a mirror that reflects society's past and present.
By reflecting on society's past and present, the library promotes the components of cultural identity and their expression. As a result, the National Library is essential in protecting the Palestinian people's cultural heritage in the absence of Israel's recognition of the applicability of international law in the occupied Palestinian territories.