It suffered damage from several attacks before a car bomb placed by an Israel proxy terrorist group, the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners destroyed the building in 1983.
[4][5] It occupied 6 floors[6] of a 7-storey building on Colombani Street[7] in the residential Hamra[8] district of Western Beirut, and was accorded diplomatic protection by the Lebanese government.
[6] Anis Sayigh, a Lebanese Palestinian who had obtained a doctorate from Cambridge University in Middle Eastern Studies in 1964,[13][c] replaced his brother Fayiz as director in 1966, a position he held until 1977.
[12] In September it was then occupied by Israeli soldiers for a week, and then was subsequently ransacked: filing cabinets, desks and other furniture were smashed, a strong box was rifled to take its contents,[9] and telephones, heaters, electric fans, a printing press and other fixtures were also stolen.
'[9] Jiryis quickly set about reordering books – his file cards for Hebrew publications alone were 10 inches high[g] – in order to rebuild the lost collection.
"We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state".
In the Palestinian reading of Jewish tradition, this document was taken as proof that the rabbinical authorities admitted that Jews were not a nation but citizens of the states where they belonged, and thus Judaism itself was a religion, not a project for nation-building or territorial repossession of the Holy Land.
Israeli officials argued that the PLC was more an intelligence gathering organization than an academic center,[h] and that the data could be exploited to plan terrorist raids into Israel.
[27] A month after the exchange, on 19 December, Resolution 38/180B of the 38th United Nations General Assembly, with 121 votes in favour, 1 against, and 20 abstentions, condemned Israel for having seized and removed the archives and documents.
[29] Due to internal squabbles among the PLO leaders, -Arafat wanted it relocated in Cairo, Abu Iyad in Algiers – the boxes were left in this final location and remain to this day, apparently, in Algeria.
After Israel restored the looted materials, the building was again bombed by Lebanese groups, killing or wounding several staff members, and damaging the structure.
[16] Jiryis continued to operate the center in Nicosia until his return to his native village of Fassuta in northern Israel in 1992,[30] He endeavoured to re-establish a Research Center in East Jerusalem but those archives too were again confiscated when Israeli police raided and in August 2001 closed down the PLO's headquarters in Orient House, on whose grounds, since 1983, the Arab Studies Society, founded by Faisal al-Husseini to document the Arab history of Palestine, had been housed.
[18] Antoon de Baetz classifies Israel's confiscation or destruction of Palestinian documents as an example of the censorship of historical thought practiced by many nations.
[28] The Israeli scholar Rona Sela views these incidents as part of an ongoing policy or practice since the 1930s to appropriate, conceal and thereby exercise control over Palestinian representations of their historical experience.