About Us

Preserving history, fighting denial, and promoting Palestinian arts and culture

The Nakba Memorial Foundation is a charity formed in 2024. We are a group of scholars and activists who are dedicated to preserving the history of the 1948 Nakba and promoting Palestinian arts and culture. Our initial goal is to build the Centre for Documentation on the Nakba in London.

Our Story

The Nakba Memorial Foundation

The foundation, a registered charity in the UK, has the following objective:

For the public benefit, to advance the arts by the promotion of the art of the Palestinian people and to advance the education of the public in the subject of the arts, culture, and heritage of the Palestinian people including all aspects of their language, history, and traditions by any means as the trustees in their discretion shall determine.

To advance this aim, the Foundation will focus on specific projects relating to the Palestinian heritage, prioritised according to the needs of the time and the urgency imposed by changing conditions.

Our first project, which will remain crucial to subsequent activities, focuses on preserving the historical record of the 1948 Nakba in Palestine.

The urgent need for this project stems from the danger facing documentation on this topic, arising from the Israeli government removing many of the documents held in Israeli archives from public access, possibly with a view to destroying them, and from ongoing events leading to the destruction of documents held by private Palestinian individuals and by Palestinian universities and research centres.

To achieve this aim we urgently seek funding to establish a Centre for Documentation on the Nakba in London, housed in a building which will also be used for the wider activities of the NMF.

Our Trustees

Prof. Ilan Pappé

Chair

Zainab Abbas

Trustee

Prof. Tim Niblock

Trustee

Dr. Charlotte Kelsted

Trustee

Photograph by Anthony Dawton from Ten Days in Gaza

The NMF Perspective

The Critical Importance of the Documentary Record of the 1948 Nakba for the Palestinian National Narrative, which Underpins the Contemporary National Culture of the Palestinian People and the Survival of Palestinian Communities Worldwide:

It is an established practice of settler colonial regimes to embed themselves in the colonised territory not only by seeking the removal of the native population from the territory concerned, or the subjection of those who remain, but also to remove the historical memories and the historical narratives of the native population. History has to be the history of the incoming rulers. No other narrative must be allowed to survive which might challenge the supposed legitimacy of the settler-colonial regime. Key events in history, as experienced and remembered by the local peoples have to be denied. This practice was followed in virtually all territories where settler colonial regimes established themselves, from the Americas, to Africa and Australia. The historical memories and perspectives of the local populations were denied, and in some cases the documents and cultural relics which supported local narratives were destroyed. The same applies to the Israeli settler colonial regime which became established in Palestine.


In Palestine, the 1948 Nakba and its aftermath have constituted the fulcrum both for the denial of locally-experienced history and for the attempt to remove the local population physically from the territory. What has been widely described as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been presented as an unintended consequence flowing from the irrational intransigence of native communities. Yet there has been a wealth of documentation, and of historical memories, which point to the deliberation with which this process of ethnic cleansing was orchestrated.


The Palestinian national narrative has based itself on an understanding of the events of 1948 which draws on documents and memories from that time. The narrative lies at the centre of Palestinian identity and culture. There is now evidence that the government of Israel is undertaking what may be referred to as “Nakba denial”. This involves, on the one hand, the reclassification since 2016 of documents in the Israeli archives, such that access is no long given to a significant part of the documentary evidence on 1948 and its aftermath; and on the other hand destroying centres of documentation in areas controlled by Palestinians (as, for example, has been done with the deliberate destruction of Palestinian universities, research centres and libraries in Gaza).

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