In March 1986, Lieutenant Issa from the Algerian armed forces accompanied Samih Shbeib, head of the Archives and Documents Section at the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Research Center, to Tsebe military base in the Algerian desert. Lieutenant Issa pointed towards rows of white boxes covered with tents and said, “this is the Palestinian Archive.” Little did they know that the archive would still be there nearly three decades later. This paper is an inquiry into the curious fate of the PLO Research Center’s archive. It reconstructs the way in which this archive was lost and why it was never repatriated, highlighting Israel’s seizure of Palestinian archives, the Palestinian leadership’s abandonment of their own records, and the ramifications of this archival absence on the writing of Palestinian history. In analyzing these ramifications, the paper turns to the archive established under the Palestinian Authority in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Agreements. This new national archive was established as the basis for the history of a re-imagined Palestine. The paper presents a reading into the difference between the pre-1993 archive and that of the quasi-state to explore the difference between two archivally constructed Palestines: the metamorphosis of the national movement from a liberation project into a state building enterprise. It aims to reveal that what is at stake in silencing one archive and championing another is silencing the history of one national project, and giving voice to another, thereby reshaping the boundaries of the production of modern Palestinian history.