This paper considers the politics of archiving and memorializing Arab anticolonial histories and Third World clandestine movements. It reflects on my experience at the American University of Beirut archiving the personal records of the Arab Nationalist and historian, Dr. Constantine Zurayk (1909-2000). Dr. Zurayk’s contributions have been pivotal to the anticolonial struggle in Arab World, and he is credited with coining the term al-Nakba (??????) with the publication of his book, The Meaning of the Nakba (1948). The paper outlines the challenges of applying the dominant western archival methods to such Third World archives while exploring alternative ways of archiving that can capture the liberatory potential of the many records, publications, documents, pictures and videos produced by anticolonial movements in the last century. To illustrate my argument, I consider Dr. Zurayk’s work and records about two intertwined moments of Arab political crisis and traumatic mass violence in the last century: the 1948 al-Nakba (??????, ‘catastrophe’); and the 1967 al-Naksa ( ??????, ‘setback’). Drawing on multilingual records from this collection, and UNESCO’s central archives in Paris, the paper introduces hitherto unknown information about his activities in the 1950s and 1960s at the United Nations. Ultimately, it highlights his influential interventions on Arab historicity, identity and heritage, which emphasized dynamism, change and solidarity as a counter to ahistorical tropes of oriental despotism and primordial sectarianism.