How can scholars write histories of survival, resistance, and everyday life in conditions of destruction, absence, and the disintegration of archives and political institutions? Long before Israel’s war on Gaza in 2023, historians of Palestine faced the challenge of reconstructing histories from a landscape abjected in modern sources. In response, historians of Palestine and the intellectual and cultural traditions that inform their work have developed innovative strategies that do more than document the past—they craft worlds amidst catastrophe. This panel asks: how can historical methods account for life under siege?

Bringing together diverse methodologies and dispersed archives, this panel examines methods that produce historical knowledge amidst catastrophic obstacles. From oral history to life writing, each panelist will discuss how distinct methods and archival practices work against erasure by foregrounding Palestinians as theorists of power and producers of historical knowledge. Entangled as they are with local and transnational forces, these histories challenge dominant frames and narrative arcs forged by colonial powers who produced Palestinians as flattened historical subjects. More broadly, the panel considers how methodologies developed in response to erasure can reshape the writing of history.

Mezna Qato reflects on a decade of collaboration with Gaza-based archivists, positioning the archive as foundational to the claim of Palestinian peoplehood in a context of ongoing ruination and displacement. Qato asks: if archives are essential to historical reckoning, how can historians work without them? Confronting archival absence, Mark LeVine discusses the patchwork methodology that enabled him to write the history of pre-1948 Jaffa. Weaving together archival fragments, material traces, musical traditions, and oral histories, LeVine explores how historians can document dispossession and destruction without reinscribing the logics of loss upon which settler colonialism depends.

Qato and LeVine engage the problem of archival absence, while Alex Winder and Hazem Jamjoum explore how historical actors theorized power and experience in ways that challenge dominant historical narratives. Winder examines the career of a Palestinian officer in the British colonial police, resisting easy classification as hero or villain. His study centers Palestinians as historical subjects who navigated shifting colonial orders while forging connections to a broader Arab and Middle Eastern milieu. Similarly, Jamjoum draws on oral and life history narratives across four distinct contexts to ask: what do historians do with stories that refuse narrative arcs matching institutional or organizational prerogatives? From oral histories among women in the Wihdat refugee camp in Jordan to research on the global recording industry, Jamjoum reflects on the discrepancy between history as experience and historical narrative as a form of institutionalized power.

Taken together, these papers offer lessons to historians working against silencing and erasure. Thinking from the specificities of Palestine while engaging transnational and regional dynamics often occluded in dominant accounts, this panel highlights methodological practices of broad interest to historians of empire, decolonization, the Middle East, oral history, Indigenous studies, social movements, and the politics of knowledge production.