--- title: "Palestine Online: bringing the 1990s Palestinian web back to life" locale: "en" url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/palestine-online-ansari-en" markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/palestine-online-ansari-en.md" category: "people" tags: ["archiving", "web", "culture", "memory"] published_at: "2026-08-21T11:25:00.000Z" author: "Hugo Marchal" translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/palestine-online-ansari-fr.md" --- # Palestine Online: bringing the 1990s Palestinian web back to life With Palestine Online, Processing Foundation fellow Amad Ansari rebuilds the Palestinian websites of the late 1990s. An archive where every technical choice is also a political one. An archived page is not a memory. The Wayback Machine stores hundreds of billions of captures, but a capture freezes a document outside its context: no more navigation, no more neighborhood, no more meaning. That's the problem Amad Ansari tackles with Palestine Online, a project that became a Processing Foundation fellowship: not saving Palestinian web pages from the 1990s, but making them inhabitable again.[1](https://medium.com/processing-foundation/fellows-in-focus-digital-resistance-palestinian-web-archives-with-amad-ansari-7a5924ac9aa5) ## An engineer trained in art history Ansari is a software engineer, archivist and artist with a dual background in computer science and art history. His practice sits exactly at that intersection: reframing the web into free, accessible museums and archives, and replaying the aesthetics of earlier computing eras against the very idea of obsolescence.[2](https://processingfoundation.org/fellowships/fellowships-2024) His project gathers sites created by Palestinians — or about Palestine — from the late 1990s through the early 2000s: personal homepages on GeoCities or Angelfire, news sites, student online magazines, art showcases and memorials. A pivotal era, bracketed by the Oslo Accords and the Second Intifada, when the web became for Palestinians a space of expression and self-representation under occupation.[2](https://processingfoundation.org/fellowships/fellowships-2024)[4](https://www.dazed.me/khajistan/khajistan-palestine-online) ## Collecting, indexing, making navigable Collection starts from the Wayback Machine, but not only: Ansari also uses GIFcities, the Internet Archive's GIF search tool, to track down scattered media files and reconstruct whole pages whose originals have vanished.[3](https://www.vice.com/en/article/palestine-internet-preserved-90s-gifs/) Then comes the properly archival work: organizing the corpus into categories and subcategories — documenting and memorializing, culture, daily life — to make navigation intuitive rather than archaeological.[1](https://medium.com/processing-foundation/fellows-in-focus-digital-resistance-palestinian-web-archives-with-amad-ansari-7a5924ac9aa5) The interface embraces period aesthetics: tiled backgrounds, Flash animations, faithfully recreated Web 1.0 graphics. This isn't decorative nostalgia; it's a historiographical decision. Showing these sites in contemporary design would neutralize them; showing them as they were built conveys what their authors could say, and how, with the tools of their time.[1](https://medium.com/processing-foundation/fellows-in-focus-digital-resistance-palestinian-web-archives-with-amad-ansari-7a5924ac9aa5)[3](https://www.vice.com/en/article/palestine-internet-preserved-90s-gifs/) > **The Palestine Online method** > - Wayback Machine and GIFcities: Source > - GeoCities, Angelfire, AOL Hometown pages: Rebuild > - Categories and subcategories: Index > - Interface faithful to Web 1.0: Restore > Sources: Processing Foundation, Vice ## Technical choices turned political Every technical layer carries an explicit political decision. Sourcing from the Wayback Machine acknowledges that preservation depends on community infrastructure. Recategorizing means choosing what can be narrated: Ansari puts Gaza's history “front and center,” even as the siege destroys physical archives like Gaza City's Municipal Public Library.[1](https://medium.com/processing-foundation/fellows-in-focus-digital-resistance-palestinian-web-archives-with-amad-ansari-7a5924ac9aa5)[4](https://www.dazed.me/khajistan/khajistan-palestine-online) Ansari, who is not Palestinian, draws an explicit ethical rule from this: “This project is about amplifying voices, not imposing my own.” The sites and their creators speak for themselves.[1](https://medium.com/processing-foundation/fellows-in-focus-digital-resistance-palestinian-web-archives-with-amad-ansari-7a5924ac9aa5) The stated goal — “making the Palestinian experience as loud as possible” — runs through primary documents rather than commentary.[3](https://www.vice.com/en/article/palestine-internet-preserved-90s-gifs/) ## Preserving without freezing a living culture The project refuses static museumification. It is open source, designed as a replicable framework for other communities and contexts. During his fellowship, Ansari worked on interface robustness and accessibility, ran workshops with teenagers in Bay Ridge — who saw direct parallels with Instagram — and is preparing user-submitted content plus physical installations on period CRT monitors.[1](https://medium.com/processing-foundation/fellows-in-focus-digital-resistance-palestinian-web-archives-with-amad-ansari-7a5924ac9aa5) The archive exists online, and now as a book published by Secret Riso Club.[5](https://palestineonline.net/) That trajectory says something durable about web archiving: preserving is never a simple copy-paste. It means deciding what remains navigable, narratable and transmissible — and doing it with enough care that the preserved culture stays alive. ## References 1. [Processing Foundation, “Fellows in Focus: Digital Resistance & Palestinian Web Archives with Amad Ansari”](https://medium.com/processing-foundation/fellows-in-focus-digital-resistance-palestinian-web-archives-with-amad-ansari-7a5924ac9aa5) 2. [Processing Foundation, Fellowships 2024 — Amad Ansari](https://processingfoundation.org/fellowships/fellowships-2024) 3. [Janus Rose, “The Palestinian Internet of the 90s Is Being Preserved, One GIF at a Time”, Motherboard/Vice, November 29, 2023](https://www.vice.com/en/article/palestine-internet-preserved-90s-gifs/) 4. [Zein Karam, “Palestine Online”, Dazed MENA / Khajistan, May 22, 2025 (text by Amad Ansari)](https://www.dazed.me/khajistan/khajistan-palestine-online) 5. [Palestine Online — online archive](https://palestineonline.net/)