Khajistan: Palestine Online

On a Geocities webpage created in 2002 titled “The holly land……Palestine”, a collection of still images, animated gifs, and text coloured in shades of green, red, and white is overlaid on a black background. At the top of the page is a 3D graphic spelling out بِسْمِ ٱللَّٰهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ in a stretched yellow font surrounded by two waving Palestinian Flags, and placed further down are defining scenes from the Second Intifada: Al Aqsa Mosque, Faris Odeh throwing rocks at IOF tanks, the killing of Muhammad al-Durrah, and Al Aqsa Mosque. Surrounding these visuals are links to audio recordings of the Qur’an, news websites, and “Islamic Web Search”. 

The emergence of the World Wide Web in the late 90s was bookended by two pivotal developments in Palestine – the signing of the Oslo Accords, and the second Intifada. As with the rest of the world, Palestinians were taking advantage of the web’s new capabilities to compile together text, images, and multimedia to express themselves and build new digital commons. Importantly, they also upheld their identity, history, and struggle for liberation, and ushered in a new era of documenting Palestinian life that set the groundwork for how they use the internet today in the face of ongoing occupation and genocide. 

“Palestine Online” is an ever growing time capsule of the internet Palestinians built during this early period. Within these websites, we find pages that interweave family photos, biographies, and hobbies, with news updates about the Intifada, memorials for martyrs, and maps documenting the histories of occupied villages. There is an abundance of educational and cultural materials, like a virtual tour of Al Aqsa, pages compiling Folklore and Proverbs, and tutorials for everything from Tatriz to HTML (in both English and Arabic). The project also traces early institutional efforts to establish a Palestinian Internet presence and infrastructure, such as at Birzeit University, where the first large-scale effort to compile a “complete” guide of the Palestinian websites took place.

Palestine Online identifies the web as a virtual placemaking and recordkeeping tool used by Palestinians to counteract the systematic denial of their physical, ancestral land via occupation, and the continued erasure and destruction of history to maintain this land. Some websites mark specific cities and villages in Palestine, and others mark structures that have been destroyed, such as the Gaza International Airport, which was bombed and bulldozed by the IOF in 2002. 

As the ongoing siege of Gaza is destroying historic archives like Gaza City’s Municipal Public Library, Palestine Online aims to compile and immortalise digital histories which cannot be wiped by bombs, while also honouring the rich technological tradition of Palestinians skillfully carving out a space for themselves on the ephemeral medium through visually stunning computer generated graphics, innovative layouts, and creative interactive design. To me, these websites contribute to Palestinians’ continued legacy of imagining and building new futures for themselves, against a constant attack on (denial of?) these futures.