About Sumud

Sumud is an independent, non-commercial introduction to Palestinian history and culture. The history runs from Ottoman rule to the present in seven chapters. A separate culture page covers food, embroidery, literature and film. You can read from the beginning, look up an unfamiliar term in the glossary, or use the book list to find a longer account.

On sourcing and accuracy

This project draws on mainstream historical scholarship, UN and archival records, and reporting from human rights organisations across the political spectrum: Israeli, Palestinian and international. The full list of the kinds of sources used is on the sources page. Where historians disagree about what happened, or why, this site tries to say so rather than present one account as beyond dispute. Where casualty or displacement figures are contested, they are attributed to their source.

This is an overview, not a peer-reviewed academic work. If you find a wrong date, a misattributed quote or a superseded figure, please open an issue on GitHub. Include the page, the passage and a source that supports the correction.

On perspective

The focus is Palestinian history and experience. That emphasis does not remove the need to describe other perspectives accurately: the chapter on 1948 explains why Palestinians remember the Nakba and Israelis remember a War of Independence. It also describes the displacement and loss that followed.

How this is built

Sumud is a static-first site built with Qwik and TypeScript, styled with vanilla-extract, and hosted on Cloudflare Workers. It carries no advertising and no third-party trackers. See the privacy policy for the cookieless analytics it does use. The source code is public on GitHub.