Art & Culture

Inside Beitna, Paris’ First Ever Center for Palestinian Culture

BYYassine Hariss

September 23, 2026

Paris is getting a little piece of Palestine. Set to open its doors in the French capital’s 18th arrondissement, Beitna, also known as La Maison de la Palestine, is an upcoming cultural and community space dedicated to celebrating Palestinian culture, bringing people together, and giving the Palestinian diaspora a place to call its own.

Nestled in arguably one of the city’s most culturally diverse neighborhoods, the 135-square-metre venue is the brainchild of La Palestine Nous Rassemble, an association that has spent the past 14 years organizing cultural events, supporting communities, and connecting Palestinians and friends of the cause across France. Now, for the first time, all of that work will have a permanent address. With a café, a specialty grocery and craft shop, dedicated workshop rooms, and an events space, Beitna is shaping up to be considerably more than somewhere to just grab a coffee.

Voir cette publication sur Instagram

Une publication partagée par Beitna – Maison de la Palestine (@maisondelapalestine)

Ahead of its opening— scheduled for November— we caught up with the team behind Beitna to find out more about the project, what visitors can expect, and what it means to finally give Palestinian culture a permanent home in the French capital.

Why does opening a Palestinian cultural centre in Paris feel important right now?

For years, a large part of our energy has been directed towards responding to emergencies, namely reacting to what is happening in Palestine. With increasing repression in France, more and more of that energy has also gone into responding to what we experience here as activists, but also simply as Palestinians or as people in solidarity with Palestine. Much of our work has therefore consisted of informing people, mobilizing, organizing solidarity, and responding to the violence continuously inflicted on Palestine.

At the same time, we have always sought to organize and sustain our Palestinian community in France: keeping our culture alive in exile, passing on our heritage through shared moments, but also through internal discussions about identity, memory, exile, and what continues to unite us here.

All of this is part of a longer history: that of migration shaped by colonialism and the continuation of anti-colonial struggles, particularly in countries such as France or Britain, former colonial powers in our regions. And for a long time, we have come to the same conclusion: we need to create our own spaces and our own infrastructure in order to be independent, free to organize ourselves, and able to establish ourselves for the long term as a people and as a collective.

That is only possible through the existence of a place of our own. This is actually how the name of our association came about more than fifteen years ago. “La Palestine nous rassemble” — “Palestine brings us together” — was first a slogan, a call to come together, before becoming an association under the French 1901 law.

The name Beitna responds to that same need today. Beitna, in Arabic, means “our house” — a house for all of us. It is not simply a place where we meet, but a place to which we belong and with which we identify. It carries the meaning of the English word “home”: not simply a house, but a place where we feel at home.

This need is all the more urgent today as our people are going through a moment of extreme isolation and violence: a genocide is taking place in Palestine before the eyes of the entire world, documented almost in real time, while the world’s powers and powerful turn their backs on it. At the same time, we have seen immense popular mobilizations everywhere and a genuine wave of solidarity with the Palestinian people. This contradiction makes spaces where that solidarity can come together, take shape and endure all the more necessary.

For us, then, opening a Palestinian cultural center in Paris, in a place so central to Western imperialism, is crucial to asserting ourselves in our identity and as people carrying a legitimate struggle. We also want to establish it for the long term, as a way of saying that our culture does not exist only in moments of tragedy or media attention.

Why did you settle on the 18th arrondissement specifically?

Choosing the 18th arrondissement was both the result of a very practical search and a choice that ultimately made a great deal of sense to us.

Finding a place in Paris capable of accommodating a project like Beitna was a long and difficult process. Of course, there were very practical requirements to meet — enough space, a rent the association could afford, a location that was accessible and suited to different uses — but our search also came up against the current political context. We had already experienced this with very short-term occupations of spaces: as soon as the word “Palestine” appeared, reluctance, concern or outright refusal could arise very quickly. The difficulty of finding a space therefore also says something about what it means to make a Palestinian project publicly present in Paris today.

In that context, being based in the 18th arrondissement makes a great deal of sense. It is an arrondissement with a strong working-class and migrant history, where different diasporas have built places, businesses, associations, and social spaces that are now an integral part of neighborhood life. It felt quite natural to us that a Palestinian cultural center should also become part of that history.

It is also a very accessible location, close to Gare du Nord and well connected to both Paris and its suburbs. That was essential to us. We did not want an isolated place, or one reserved for an already convinced audience, but a home where Palestinians can come together, where people in solidarity can come, and where neighbors and curious passers-by can simply walk through the door, eat, have a coffee, attend an event. and discover what we do.

Voir cette publication sur Instagram

Une publication partagée par Beitna – Maison de la Palestine (@maisondelapalestine)

At a time when so much of the conversation around Palestine is understandably dominated by war, occupation, and loss, how important is it to create a space where Palestinian culture can exist beyond those narratives?

Obviously, we cannot talk about Palestine without talking about war, occupation, dispossession, and loss. These realities have shaped Palestinian lives for generations and necessarily run through our culture. Traces of these realities can be found in our music, poetry, literature, craftsmanship, and imagination. Colonial violence is part of our history, and Palestinians have also transformed it, narrated it, and sometimes sublimated it through creation.

But the risk is that our culture ends up being seen — and seeing itself — only through that violence. Being Palestinian is a permanent struggle, still marked today by a duty to preserve our identity, food, expressions, songs, and know-how. We are constantly fighting to decolonize them — in other words, in a sense, to cleanse them of the traces of Zionist colonialism in the face of dispossession, erasure, and appropriation.

But preserving does not mean freezing. Our hope with Beitna is precisely to create a space where we can take that heritage as a starting point from which to build, experiment, and create new things. We talk a lot about abundance, not in an economic sense, but as a principle of generosity, hospitality, and creation. It means refusing to think of Palestine only through lack and deprivation, and making room for the richness that already exists as well as for what remains to be invented.

So this is not about leaving the war behind, but about refusing to let it become the only framework through which our culture exists.

What do you want someone who knows very little about Palestinian culture to understand after spending time here?

First and foremost, I would like people to leave with a much broader image of Palestine than the one they came in with. Palestine is often reduced to a handful of images, symbols, and dishes, and of course to war and occupation. We want to give visitors many more tools with which to grasp its complexity: its narratives, works, know-how, tastes, archives, discussions, and contradictions too.

To do that, we want to offer programming that is carefully curated, rigorous, and curious. Like a gallery or bookshop you love, I would like people to come to Beitna trusting that they will discover something new and of quality. Palestine is our standard of excellence, not a reason to lower that standard.

Above all, we want people to understand that Palestinian culture is not a frozen heritage that we are simply trying to preserve. It is alive, complex, funny, inventive, and sometimes contradictory; it belongs to the past just as much as it is still being built today. If someone who knew very little about Palestine leaves with more questions, greater curiosity and an image that is much harder to reduce to a single narrative, then we will already have achieved something.

Who do you see this space being for? Is it primarily a home for the Palestinian community in Paris, or do you want it to become a meeting point for a much wider audience?

For us, the two are not in opposition. Beitna must first and foremost be a home for the Palestinian community, a place where people can come in their everyday lives and feel at home. There will also be specific times and programming dedicated to the community, sometimes closed to the general public, because it is important to preserve spaces of our own. But this home is also very much open to others. And above all, we want the Palestinian community to take part in shaping what happens there.

We will know we have succeeded if people who would not necessarily meet elsewhere find themselves together at Beitna. That is also how we want to approach our programming: by creating opportunities for people to meet, while knowing how to preserve moments dedicated to the community.

Voir cette publication sur Instagram

Une publication partagée par Beitna – Maison de la Palestine (@maisondelapalestine)

What will the center actually look like in practice?

Beitna will be a hybrid space. During the day, people will be able to eat, have a coffee, discover Palestinian products, books, and crafts, see the current exhibition, or simply spend time there. In the evening, the space will host a rich cultural programme.

We want to welcome artists, craftspeople, writers, and researchers, and to organize exhibitions, screenings, music, discussions, and workshops. But above all, the idea is not to compartmentalize disciplines: an exhibition might lead into a discussion, a hands-on workshop or a screening; cooking can become a way of talking about history, territory, or transmission.

Collective practices and know-how, both traditional and contemporary, will also have an important place, as will programming for children and families. We want Beitna to be able to accommodate rigorous research just as much as a moment of celebration, and for these different forms to feed into one another.

Ultimately, what do you hope this space will come to represent for Palestinians in Paris?

We hope that Beitna will become part of the fabric of the 18th arrondissement, and that it will become an institution known throughout the neighborhood.

In the spirit of Palestinian hospitality, we want to open a generous place where people love to gather, somewhere that truly feels like home. A place where you bring the people close to you, where you welcome someone who has just arrived in Paris, where you come on ordinary days as well as for important moments. A place where we can organize as a community, but above all where we can belong and support one another.

Ultimately, we hope Beitna will represent a form of permanence—a Palestinian presence in Paris that is visible, independent, generous, and deeply rooted in the city.

Inside Beitna, Paris’ First Ever Center for Palestinian Culture

Related Stories

More From Art & Culture

Newsletter

The only newsletter you won't unsubscribe from

Follow Us