1978 marked the beginning of declassification of state records in the Israel State Archives (ISA), lifting the veil of secrecy that had shrouded over them for decades under the “Thirty Years Law”. This mass exposure of state records paved the way for a thorough review of Israel’s turbulent years of state formation and threatened to reshape the national memory of the 1948 Palestine War. Indeed, a decade after these records became available, a group of local scholars, the so- called “New Historians”, began to publish critical, revisionist studies, sparking a fierce historiographical debate. Seemingly technical and straightforward, declassification was a complex, involved process. Like all archival records, the documents that fed into the debate underwent a long and fateful journey before landing on the historian’s desk. They moved between facilities, changed hands, were inspected, categorized, redacted, and, in many cases, reclassified and concealed. Along the way, the archive itself had changed. Focusing on the administration of the archive during that period, and on its personnel, this article examines the reshaping of the ISA during the 1980s. I argue that the opening of official records for public scrutiny and the narrative wars that ensued in its wake, fundamentally changed the ISA’s cultural status and the meanings associated with its repository. Turning it from a backstage administrative mechanism into a central historical archive for the study of the Israeli State, declassification placed the ISA at the heart of heated public debates, which continue to this day. The paper shows how archivists negotiated this rapid politicization: how they navigated between the needs of different interest and pressure groups, while struggling to maintain their professional standards and protect their own organizational needs.