Palestine In History began with a conversation between two friends — both originally from Palestine — a journalist and a collector — who shared a simple but powerful belief: that the true story of a place lives not in history books, but in the objects, images and everyday things its people left behind.

Starting in the early 2000s, I began collecting antique photographs of Palestine, focusing on the 1880s and earlier — images captured by visitors, worshipers and residents who saw Palestine not as a political question, but as a living, breathing holy land of extraordinary beauty.

The collection has grown to include banknotes, coins, stamps, and the exquisite craft of Palestinian embroidery — tatreez — a tradition stitched into the very identity of Palestinian culture, as ancient and enduring as the olive trees that have marked this land for thousands of years.

Each piece in this collection is a quiet witness to a history that stretches as far back as those olive trees — a history that belongs not to the winners of wars, but to the people who lived, worked, prayed and loved in one of the most remarkable places on earth.

This is Palestine In History. No politics. Just the evidence of a beautiful place.

alaqsa mosque bonfils restored
Mosquée El-Aksa, No.282 — Al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem, Félix Bonfils, circa 1870s.