Correspondence · File IX/01
Is the Palestinian Historical Review satire?
The reply is kept, prepared in advance, at Notes & Queries № XII.
Room IX · The Director’s Office
About the Institute
A scholarly reference work on a subject which, on close examination, turns out to be brief.
Abstract
The Palestinian Historical Review, published since 2024, documents the history of sovereign Palestinian statehood from primary sources. Method: 47 archives consulted, 3,500 years surveyed, 14 empires catalogued, qualifying documents found: 0. Every date, treaty, and coin cited is real and checkable. The Institute is invented; nothing else is. Where the record is silent, the Review is silent.
The Institute for Palestinian Historical Studies exists to provide a rigorous scholarly archive on the history of sovereign Palestinian statehood, governance, currency, and national leadership. The Palestinian Historical Review, its quarterly organ, first appeared in autumn MMXXIV. We follow the canonical standards of the historical profession. We make no further commitments.
The collections proceed from antiquity to the present quarter. The documentary plates are gathered in the Evidence Gallery, the cultural record in Heritage, and the registries of government, currency, and national leadership each maintain their own pages. None of them took long.
Specimen: reference volume, sovereign-statehood series. Edition: unabridged. Our library is small but representative.
Methodology
The Statement of Method
Learned societies customarily describe their methods at length. Ours permits a complete statement in two words.
Charter of the Institute · Art. II · MMXXIV
Methodology, Complete and Unabridged
We looked.
We looked where states leave traces: constitutional registers, treaty series, mint records, postal issues, census returns, the lists of envoys received at foreign courts. We looked in the catalogues of the British National Archives at Kew, the Israel State Archives, the Library of Congress, and the forty-four further institutions enumerated in our search apparatus. We looked from the Merneptah Stele (c. 1208 BCE) to the present quarter. For the fourteen successive empires that governed the territory, the traces proved abundant — coinage, tax rolls, milestones, garrison payrolls. The corresponding catalogue for a sovereign Palestinian state has also been completed. It is the shorter of the two.
3,500
Years surveyed
14
Empires catalogued
47
Archives consulted
0
Qualifying documents
The Charter
Four Principles
Principle I
The Documentary Record Comes First
We work from documents. Claims unsupported by documents are not entertained; claims contradicted by documents are noted, with the contradiction identified.
Principle II
Silence Means Silence
Where the record is silent, we are silent. The temptation to supply, from inference or sympathy, content the record does not contain is the discipline’s most common failure. We resist it.
Principle III
The Standard of Authenticity
Documents are authenticated to ICA-ISAD(G) standards. Forgeries and items of doubtful provenance are excluded. To date this rule has cost the collection nothing.
Principle IV
The Independence of the Conclusion
Where a finding may, by inference, support or undermine a contemporary political claim, the Review records the finding without comment on its political bearing. Inferentia non est materia historiae.
1 “We looked” abridges the fuller formulation in the Institute’s charter: we looked, we looked again, and we recorded what was there. The third step was the quickest.
Citation
Citation Format
The Review observes the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. Two forms are provided. For articles appearing in the Review:
[Author], “Article Title,” Palestinian Historical Review, [Volume]:[Issue] ([Quarter Year]), [URL].
For the primary documentary record of sovereign Palestinian statehood prior to MCMXLVIII, the approved form is:
2 The Editorial Office confirms that the second example is complete as printed.
Submissions
Submission of Manuscripts & Documents
Manuscripts are reviewed under standard double-blind peer review. Median time from submission to decision: 9.4 months.
Notice · Posted MMXXIV
The Expedited Track
An expedited track is reserved for manuscripts documenting any sovereign Palestinian state, currency, head of state, or national institution established before MCMLXIV, the year the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded. Qualifying manuscripts are read the day they arrive and are guaranteed the cover of the following issue. The track has operated continuously since MMXXIV.
None Received
Standing Solicitation
The Department of Primary Sources continues to invite institutional and private holders of documentary materials qualifying for the classes catalogued in our Document Archives. The desk is open during regular hours. There is no charge, and there has never been a queue.
Office Hours
A Few Anticipated Questions
The Director’s Office maintains a correspondence file and has prepared its replies in advance. This has proved efficient.
Correspondence · File IX/02
So the contents are invented?
The Institute is invented. Nothing else is. Every date, document, census figure, and coin on these pages is documented in primary or mainstream scholarly sources, and the reader is invited to check any of them. The one item we could not document is the subject.
Correspondence · File IX/03
Does the Institute deny that Palestinians exist?
No; the full reply is filed at Notes & Queries № XI. In brief: the people appear in the record. What the Review catalogues are states.
Correspondence · File IX/04
How is the Institute funded?
By the modesty of its requirements. An archive holding zero documents is inexpensive to insure, climate-control, and guard.
Correspondence · File IX/05
Where are the offices?
The Institute maintains no premises. The complete sovereign-statehood holdings travel comfortably, and the reading room (pictured above) is open whenever the reader is.
Correspondence · File IX/06
Who sits on the Editorial Board?
The Board serves anonymously, in sympathy with its subject. Readers who wish to picture us are directed to the portrait frames in the National Leaders gallery, which are available.
Correspondence · File IX/07
I believe I have found an error of fact.
The Registrar of Corrections maintains a register of substantiated errors. It currently resembles our other registers. Correspondence is nonetheless welcome. The Registrar has cleared a shelf.
Correspondence · File IX/08
What would oblige the Institute to revise its findings?
One document. A constitution, a coin, a treaty concluded in the name of a sovereign Palestinian state before MCMXLVIII — any single item from the classes catalogued in the Archives. The expedited track above was built for exactly this purpose. It is not congested.
Correspondence · File IX/09
How do I submit a document to the archive?
Through the Archives page, where submissions have been accepted since MMXXIV and received never. The first would be, in the literal sense, historic.
Colophon
Concerning This Publication
The Palestinian Historical Review is published quarterly, in electronic form, by the Institute for Palestinian Historical Studies. It is set in Fraunces and Newsreader; the catalogue apparatus is set in Courier Prime. There is no print edition, no office, and no warehouse. The holdings did not require one. Any page of the Review, printed, will nevertheless set itself as an exhibition catalogue; readers are welcome to try.
Holdings: complete · Errata register: empty since MMXXIV
An International Standard Serial Number is issued on evidence that a publication exists. The Review supplied the evidence and was registered without difficulty. It commends the procedure to its subject.
Annual Report
Report of the Institute for the Year MMXXV–MMXXVI
The Institute renders its accounts annually and in full, and reproduces them below. The Editorial Board adopted the Report without amendment; the reading occupied four minutes.
| Head of Account | Report of the Officers | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| Accessions | Additions to the sovereign-documents collection, all twelve classes. The figure agrees with the Acquisitions Ledger to the last item. | 0 |
| Deaccessions | The Institute is unable to deaccession what was never accessioned, and has accordingly retained everything. | None |
| Visitor complaints upheld | Each complaint received was checked against the record. The record prevailed. | 0 |
| Errata published | The Registrar of Corrections reports a second consecutive year of uninterrupted accuracy. | 0 |
Opinion of the Auditor. The accounts balance. They usually do, at these amounts.
Adopted MMXXVI · To be read in conjunction with the registers, which will not take long
Where the record is silent, we are silent.