Harvard’s Israel archive reveals quiet fears about the state’s future

A shocking report from Haaretz reveals that Harvard University has been quietly building an immense archive of Israeli cultural, scientific, and political materials — described as a “backup of Israeli culture in case Israel ceases to exist.”  

Should I clean my computer screen? Is my vision ok? 

This “alternative memory system” — as Haaretz describes it — forms a collection of private artefacts. Items include political memorabilia, from memorial booklets for fallen soldiers to political pamphlets, as well as kibbutz newsletters, synagogue pamphlets, telephone directories, radio recordings and much more.  

The Harvard Israel archive is confession

Haaretz uses the term “Archive of Israeliana” in case, as it states, “Israel Ceases to Exist.” The word Israeliana stuck.

What does it mean? The term refers to Israelis or to ‘the modern inhabitants of Israel’. It feels reminiscent of Israelita used in Biblical contexts.

They basically though it would be important to differentiate between the settler-colonialists and the folks from the Bronze Age.

Back to the article in question. The existence of the collection speaks to the anxieties felt by its creators: the anticipated collapse of a state despite all it’s military might and colonial infrastructure.

An Israeli archive official, quotes by Haaretz, concedes that:

[officials] refused to hand over sensitive collections on the premise that the project appeared to accept that Israel might collapse.

This is sobering acknowledgment — rarely admitted in Zionist discourse — suggests that the settler-colonial system contains the seeds of its own demise.

This begs the question: are Harvard academics reading the Canary?

What is being archived — and why it matters

According to the report, the Harvard Israel archive now holds one million items. Among these are six million images and tens of thousands of hours of audio-visual recordings. The breadth of the collection matters.

It is not just official state records but everyday ephemera. These are the building-blocks of collective memory — without which identity and memory would perish.

By preserving that material, the archive implicitly acknowledges what many Palestinians, critics and scholars have long argued. The colonial regime is founded upon a fragile foundation of memory, not to mention, exclusion and displacement.

When the custodians of ‘collective memory’ relocate and preserve the repository of that memory, the question arises: who is ensuring the cultural survival of the colonised, when the coloniser is hell bent on controlling the historical narrative.

The political undercurrents

The archive’s existence sidesteps official Israeli institutions. As Haaretz notes, the project is “independent of Israeli government institutions” and located in a “politically stable environment” abroad. I’m not sure how they can use these words when describing America, bu that’s fine for now.

This detachment from the state reveals a profound insecurity: the architects of the archive recognise that the state’s institution are not considered fully reliable for preserving national memory.

It also raises ethical questions: whose ownership, whose memory, whose future? If Israel’s cultural output is being preserved abroad, what happens when Palestinians seek archival justice or restoration of dispossessed memory? Who archives the the colonised’s archive? Will the presence of this archive perpetuate some type of ‘war on memory’ or the rewrite of history simply because one is archived and one’s archive has been deliberately wiped out?

Epilogue to empire

The Harvard archive is more than an elitist intellectual endeavour. Beyond highlights Israel’s paranoia, is it an admission that even the most enduring systems of oppression and racism have an expiry.

For a state built on the denial of the local population’s rights, on indefinite expansion and exclusion, the insecurity of the memory-keepers may be the most telling weakness of all.

The archive says: we may have won many battles, but we fear the war of narrative.

In this sense, the archive is a ‘canary in the coal-mine’ — for settler-colonialism, for Zionism, and any supremacist regime that seeks to transpose the history of the population it violently occupies.

Because when ‘archive mode’ is activated, the coloniser has already conceded defeat.

Featured image via the Canary