ART IN PALESTINE:
A NARRATIVE, MOBILISATION TOOL AND A NECESSARY MEANS OF SURVIVAL
BY SHAHD ABUSALAMA
The well-known Palestinian artist and art historian Kamal Boullata has passed away in August 2019 but left behind a wealth of art and research, rooted in questions of identity, resistance and exile. In his 2002 essay “Art under the Siege,” he asked:
“How does one create art under the threat of sudden death and the unpredictability of invasion and siege? More specifically, how do Palestinian artists articulate their awareness of space when their homeland’s physical space is being diminished daily by barriers and electronic walls and when their own homes could at any moment be occupied by soldiers or even blown out of existence? In what way can an artist engage with the homeland’s landscape when ancient orange and olive groves are being systematically destroyed? When the grief of bereaved families is reduced by the mass media to an abstraction transmitted at lightning speed to a TV screen, what language can a visual artist use to express such grief? (Boullata, 2004)”
These questions have long troubled Palestinian artists as they attempted to process and challenge a precarious and dehumanising reality shaped by military occupation, apartheid and siege. I make a humble effort to understand drawings I created in my late teens and early twenties, in relation to these questions, situating it within a wider history of Palestinian cultural resistance.
Since my birth in Jabalia Refugee Camp in the north of the Gaza Strip, the biggest and most densely populated refugee camp in Palestine, I have never known what life is like without occupation and siege, injustice and horror. Growing up in a refugee camp was the window to understanding our reality under Israeli colonial occupation. Art has been the way I naturally sought since a very early age to describe what I felt was indescribable.
I was only nine years old when my parents noticed my drawing skills that were limited to black warplanes, pillars of smoke in the sky and crying eyes. This coincided with the eruption of the second intifada in September 2000 when I used to accompany my mother and aunt to the martyrs’ funeral tents to offer our condolences. I used to hate the green colour, as it was associated in my memory with loss and mourning; the martyrs’ funeral tents, which were disturbingly visible in Jabalia refugee camp’s landscape, were mostly green. The first poem I ever learned to memorise by heart was one by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish entitled, “And He Returned …In A Coffin”. As a nine-year old girl, I stood in front of many mourning families in in those green tents, looked into their tearful eyes, and in a powerful but shaking voice, I recited,
THEY SPEAK IN OUR HOMELAND
THEY SAY IN SORROW
ABOUT MY COMRADE WHO PASSED
AND RETURNED IN A COFFIN
DO YOU REMEMBER HIS NAME?
DON’T MENTION HIS NAME!
LET HIM REST IN OUR HEARTS.
LET’S NOT LET THE WORD GET LOST
IN THE AIR LIKE ASH
It was moments like these, during the tumult of the second intifada, that fundamentally shaped my consciousness about the land and my place in it. Since childhood, the scenes of war, the faces of martyrs, the injured and political prisoners, the weeping of the martyrs’ relatives over the loss of their beloved, have been haunting me with a desperate wish for this injustice to end. These scenes pushed me to seek art as a way to process those extraordinary surroundings, to reconcile with my wounds, to express my emotions, memories and experiences, much of which is collectively shared amongst the Palestinians.
Creativity in such a context is not only a necessary tool for survival in a taxing background of violence but, as Boullata contented in several articles, an expression of survival. For example, 100 Shaheed—100 Lives exhibition, by Ra’ed Issa and Muhammad Hawajri from Bureij Refugee Camp in central Gaza, commemorated the first one hundred victims of the al-Aqsa intifada. The exhibition grew out of their intimate contact with the bereaved families and violence. Using a blend of abstract, metaphoric and representational language, their artwork expressed “the state of being a survivor of and eyewitness to daily death.”
Personally, observing more Palestinian children being born in such difficult reality that subjugates them to terror and trauma at very young age is the most painful. As a result, most of my drawings are of Palestinian children whose innocent facial expressions I find most telling of our shared cry for justice.
PALESTINIAN ART AS A VISUAL
INSTRUMENT OF RESISTANCE
Since the twentieth century, in their encounter with Zionism and European imperialism, Palestinians, like other colonised people, understood early on that “questions of culture... are absolutely deadly political,” in harmony with Stuart Hall’s thinking. We saw in practice how the Zionist negation of the Palestinian people is interwoven with negating everything they represent, including Palestinian culture. The great robbery of tens of thousands books, manuscripts and artifacts that coincided with the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a testimonial event, which repeated itself numerous times across the history of the Palestinian struggles. Without culture, Israel can claim more easily that, to use the infamous words of its Iron Lady Golda Meir in 1969, “there was no such thing as Palestinians.”
Just as colonizers used culture as a weapon of domination, colonized people tended to use culture as a weapon of resistance, for culture is also “a critical site of social action and intervention” which has the potential of destabilizing power (Procter, 2004). Although art, music, and literature, and every other form of cultural expression of a people under a settler-colonial reality are often sidelined by the more pressing and life-threatening issues of daily violence and survival, this does not imply their absence. Palestinian cultural production has historically engaged with the politics, suffering, and challenges of the particular era, and attempted to use these spaces, however, limited, to express resistance against British and Zionist colonialism, to represent their struggles, pain, and political aspirations, and to solidify a national and cultural identity undergoing an existential threat. In such a harsh reality where the boundaries between the personal, the collective, and the political blur, Palestinians found it
hard to separate the aesthetic from the political in their cultural and artistic expressions.
This is especially true of Palestinian art, which historically served as a visual reflection of the Palestinian struggle. It aimed to depict the reality of the Palestinian people, our struggles, hopes, aspirations, and urge for mobilization at an international level against injustice. It also acted as a tool to provide a self-representational counter-narrative to the hegemonic Zionist one which is largely based on the demonisation and the negation of the Palestinian history and people to justify their colonial domination. Art for many Palestinians was seen as a way to participate in writing their own visual narrative, to critically and creatively engage with their socio-
political surrounding matters, to express their identity, and to amplify the Palestinians’ political demands. Against the humanitarian imagery that reduced Palestinian refugees to victims or colonial representations that slammed them as terrorists, Palestinian artists, such as Ismail Shammout and Naji Al-Ali, sought to transform the image of the Palestinians into active agents of revolutionary change.
Over the course of the Palestinian struggle, the Palestinian people increasingly regarded artworks that expressed and challenged their living conditions under Israeli control as a means of resistance. Many Palestinian paintings displaying the ‘forbidden’ colors of the Palestinian flag have been confiscated, and many artists faced interrogation or even a prison sentence due to their art that Israel perceived as ‘an act of incitement. Let us not forget the late Palestinian influential exiled artists Ghassan Kanafani and Naji Al-Ali, whose artistic and literary production led to their murder.
Chains Shall Break
Being a daughter of an ex-detainee means I have grown a unique attachment to the plight of the Palestinian political prisoners, not only from a political perspective but also from a personal one. As a 19-year-old boy, my father spent a total of fifteen years in Israeli jails, but he is only one amongst over a million Palestinians who experienced detention since 1948, including children, women, and elderly people. The stories of resistance, resilience, and repression that I grew up hearing about his stolen youth have made me develop a particular passion for this cause. Currently, over 5 thousands of Palestinian detainees are in Israeli captivity with no access to their most basic rights by the Israeli Prison Service, including fair trial, proper medical care, and family visits.
The plight of Palestinian political prisoners and their families, however, is not given the deserved attention in the political arena, especially at an international level. They are not only marginalised, but also dehumanised in a media discourse that tends to reduce them to mere statistics or defined their resistance in terms of ‘terrorism,’ similar to the way Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists in South Africa were represented.
Throughout my upbringing, I have witnessed their families’ immense pain as my family joined their weekly protests in front of the Red Cross in Gaza, calling for dismantling the Israeli prison system and freedom. As I developed more skills of expression, I coupled drawings with writings that recorded stories of Palestinian detainees and their families with whom I developed an intimate relation after years of weekly protests. Many expressed their pain as a form of imprisonment in time, another theme that inspired my drawings in my attempt to communicate the families’ longing for a reunion with their beloved ones without barriers in between.
I tried to depict their determination to break their chains which they expressed repeatedly in legendary hunger strikes. “Hunger strike until either martyrdom or freedom” is a motto that many prisoners adopted across the history of the Palestinian Prisoners Movement.
AN ONGOING NAKBA
My generation, the third-generation refugees, was already blueprinted with the traumatic events of the Nakba, which for Palestinians, is not only a tragic historical event, only to be commemorated once a year with events such as art exhibits and national commemorations. “It was never one Nakba,” my grandmother used to say asserting that ethnic cleansing was never a one-off event that happened in 1948 when Palestinians became stateless refugees. The Nakba is experienced as ongoing; an uninterrupted process of Israeli settler-colonialism and domination that was given continuity by the 1967 occupation, the violent invasion of Beirut and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the two intifadas of 1987 and 2000, and the siege on Gaza and the constant bombardments and demolitions across the shrinking occupied Palestinian territories.
Growing up hearing our grandmothers recount the life they had before, the dispossessed lands that most would never see again, has formed the collective memory of the Palestinian people. My grandmother described a peaceful life in green fields of citrus groves and olive trees in our original village Beit-Jirja, one of 531 villages that were violently emptied of its inhabitants and razed to the ground in 1948. The landscapes, the tastes of their fresh harvests, the sounds of peasants’ dances, the joy of family gatherings and traditional weddings, all burdened her traumatic memory in a sudden rupture that turned our existence into non-existence. She found consolation in storytelling that cultivated inside her children and grandchildren a burning desire for return and a life of dignity.
The continuity of our liberation struggle, from one generation to another, resembles hope for the Nakba generation and their descendants, another theme that several of my drawings attempted to express –. They were my response to several Zionist leaders who assumed that “the old will die and the young will forget.” The drawings come to assert that the old may die but the young will keep on holding the key until our inalienable right to return is implemented. In 1948, most refugees fled in haste and fear, taking whatever they could carry at a moment’s notice. They carried the keys of their homes in their exodus, and although many know that their homes no longer exist, they held onto their keys, passed them to their children, making the key become a symbol of the undying Palestinian hope that return is inevitable. The young generation is perceived as those who will carry the burden of the cause and continue the struggle of the previous generations until freedom, justice, equality and return to the Palestinian people. Thus, Palestinian children became the symbol through which “We nurse hope”, as Mahmoud Darwish said.
A Recapitulation...
The majority of Palestinians have become politicised due to their complex and intense political reality that shapes every aspect of their lives. I am no exception. David Gauntlett suggested that creativity is a part of showing connectedness and participation that can affect artists’ lives positively as it can lead to greater general happiness and consequently less depression and better physical and mental health (Gauntlett, 2010). Drawing was a tool in which I found empowerment in my voice. It served as a tactic to overcome the state of siege and occupation imposed on us, to escape the feeling of helplessness that can be easily felt in such suppressive and oppressive life conditions that the Palestinian people endure. It was also a tool that I used to engage politically and socially with the harsh surrounding. With the internet becoming accessible, I resorted to online social networks to reach out to the international community, believing that the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation is a central global issue.
The turning point of my life was at the age of 17 when I lived through “Cast Lead,” a 22-day massacre that Israeli forces committed in Gaza. During that dismal period, as Christmas and New Year celebrations were being marked around the world, we all had a terrible sense of alienation from the rest of the world as we remained in darkness amidst continuous bombing and mass killing. Around 11 am on the 27th of December 2008, we were attending the mid-term exams. It was a normal day until Israeli warplanes started shelling all over the Gaza Strip, announcing hundreds of victims from the first hour. The chaos that ensued at school and the living horrors that followed for 22 days of being stricken by military machines from land, sea, and air, left a lasting impact on everyone.
There was no safe place in Gaza, and when people fled their dangerous areas to UN schools as a make-shift shelter, such as Al-Fakhoura where my father worked as a security guard, they were bombed by white-phosphorous ammunition, internationally-banned weapons. A few families then sought refuge in our home, believing that it was relatively less dangerous. One of them was the family of my childhood friend Aliaa Al-Khatib. On the morning of 5 January 2009, her father Ali left to check on his elderly parents who lived through Nakba, refused to leave their home. He promised to be back before night fell with more food and clothes for his family. In the evening, my father received a phone call, carrying unbearable news to his wife and 6 children: he was walking near his home when an Israeli helicopter shelled him, tearing him to pieces. That morning was a goodbye none of us had anticipated but death was closer than we thought.
One night, I was sitting in a blackout, surrounded by my mother and siblings in one small room of our house under one blanket. No voice could be heard, just heartbeats and heavy, shaky breaths. The beating and breathing grew louder after every new explosion we felt crashing around, shaking our home and lighting up the sky. Then suddenly, the door of our house opened violently and somebody shouted, “Leave home now!” It was my dad rushing in to evacuate our house because of a bomb threat to a neighbour. I remember that my siblings and I grasped Mum and started running outside unconsciously, barefoot. For three days we stayed in a nearby house, powerless as we sat, waiting to be either killed, or wounded, or forced to watch our home destroyed. Thankfully, that threat turned out to be a tactic of psychological warfare Israel used to break people’s will for liberation.
This merciless and inhumane attack killed at least 1417 men, women, and children. I wasn’t among them but what if I had been? Would I be buried like any one of them in a grave, nothing left of me but a blurry picture stuck on the wall and the memory of another teenage girl slain too young? Would I have been for the world just a number, a dead person? I refused to dwell on that thought.
Many drawings of mine were inspired by memories attached to this traumatic event and similar experiences that proceeded. The trauma was relived whenever an attack was repeated. Most importantly, resorting to art was a necessary means that helped me preserve my sanity amid traumatic events that I experienced throughout my life in the suffocating blockade of the Gaza Strip. It allowed me to engage with the politically fueled reality and express the suppressed voice and denied rights of the Palestinian people in visual forms that can communicate universally. ✳
ART IN PALESTINE:
A NARRATIVE, MOBILISATION TOOL AND A NECESSARY MEANS OF SURVIVAL
BY SHAHD ABUSALAMA
The well-known Palestinian artist and art historian Kamal Boullata has passed away in August 2019 but left behind a wealth of art and research, rooted in questions of identity, resistance and exile. In his 2002 essay “Art under the Siege,” he asked:
“How does one create art under the threat of sudden death and the unpredictability of invasion and siege? More specifically, how do Palestinian artists articulate their awareness of space when their homeland’s physical space is being diminished daily by barriers and electronic walls and when their own homes could at any moment be occupied by soldiers or even blown out of existence? In what way can an artist engage with the homeland’s landscape when ancient orange and olive groves are being systematically destroyed? When the grief of bereaved families is reduced by the mass media to an abstraction transmitted at lightning speed to a TV screen, what language can a visual artist use to express such grief? (Boullata, 2004)”
These questions have long troubled Palestinian artists as they attempted to process and challenge a precarious and dehumanising reality shaped by military occupation, apartheid and siege. I make a humble effort to understand drawings I created in my late teens and early twenties, in relation to these questions, situating it within a wider history of Palestinian cultural resistance.
Since my birth in Jabalia Refugee Camp in the north of the Gaza Strip, the biggest and most densely populated refugee camp in Palestine, I have never known what life is like without occupation and siege, injustice and horror. Growing up in a refugee camp was the window to understanding our reality under Israeli colonial occupation. Art has been the way I naturally sought since a very early age to describe what I felt was indescribable.
I was only nine years old when my parents noticed my drawing skills that were limited to black warplanes, pillars of smoke in the sky and crying eyes. This coincided with the eruption of the second intifada in September 2000 when I used to accompany my mother and aunt to the martyrs’ funeral tents to offer our condolences. I used to hate the green colour, as it was associated in my memory with loss and mourning; the martyrs’ funeral tents, which were disturbingly visible in Jabalia refugee camp’s landscape, were mostly green. The first poem I ever learned to memorise by heart was one by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish entitled, “And He Returned …In A Coffin”. As a nine-year old girl, I stood in front of many mourning families in in those green tents, looked into their tearful eyes, and in a powerful but shaking voice, I recited,
THEY SPEAK IN OUR HOMELAND
THEY SAY IN SORROW
ABOUT MY COMRADE WHO PASSED
AND RETURNED IN A COFFIN
DO YOU REMEMBER HIS NAME?
DON’T MENTION HIS NAME!
LET HIM REST IN OUR HEARTS.
LET’S NOT LET THE WORD GET LOST
IN THE AIR LIKE ASH
It was moments like these, during the tumult of the second intifada, that fundamentally shaped my consciousness about the land and my place in it. Since childhood, the scenes of war, the faces of martyrs, the injured and political prisoners, the weeping of the martyrs’ relatives over the loss of their beloved, have been haunting me with a desperate wish for this injustice to end. These scenes pushed me to seek art as a way to process those extraordinary surroundings, to reconcile with my wounds, to express my emotions, memories and experiences, much of which is collectively shared amongst the Palestinians.
Creativity in such a context is not only a necessary tool for survival in a taxing background of violence but, as Boullata contented in several articles, an expression of survival. For example, 100 Shaheed—100 Lives exhibition, by Ra’ed Issa and Muhammad Hawajri from Bureij Refugee Camp in central Gaza, commemorated the first one hundred victims of the al-Aqsa intifada. The exhibition grew out of their intimate contact with the bereaved families and violence. Using a blend of abstract, metaphoric and representational language, their artwork expressed “the state of being a survivor of and eyewitness to daily death.”
Personally, observing more Palestinian children being born in such difficult reality that subjugates them to terror and trauma at very young age is the most painful. As a result, most of my drawings are of Palestinian children whose innocent facial expressions I find most telling of our shared cry for justice.
PALESTINIAN ART AS A VISUAL
INSTRUMENT OF RESISTANCE
Since the twentieth century, in their encounter with Zionism and European imperialism, Palestinians, like other colonised people, understood early on that “questions of culture... are absolutely deadly political,” in harmony with Stuart Hall’s thinking. We saw in practice how the Zionist negation of the Palestinian people is interwoven with negating everything they represent, including Palestinian culture. The great robbery of tens of thousands books, manuscripts and artifacts that coincided with the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a testimonial event, which repeated itself numerous times across the history of the Palestinian struggles. Without culture, Israel can claim more easily that, to use the infamous words of its Iron Lady Golda Meir in 1969, “there was no such thing as Palestinians.”
Just as colonizers used culture as a weapon of domination, colonized people tended to use culture as a weapon of resistance, for culture is also “a critical site of social action and intervention” which has the potential of destabilizing power (Procter, 2004). Although art, music, and literature, and every other form of cultural expression of a people under a settler-colonial reality are often sidelined by the more pressing and life-threatening issues of daily violence and survival, this does not imply their absence. Palestinian cultural production has historically engaged with the politics, suffering, and challenges of the particular era, and attempted to use these spaces, however, limited, to express resistance against British and Zionist colonialism, to represent their struggles, pain, and political aspirations, and to solidify a national and cultural identity undergoing an existential threat. In such a harsh reality where the boundaries between the personal, the collective, and the political blur, Palestinians found it
hard to separate the aesthetic from the political in their cultural and artistic expressions.
This is especially true of Palestinian art, which historically served as a visual reflection of the Palestinian struggle. It aimed to depict the reality of the Palestinian people, our struggles, hopes, aspirations, and urge for mobilization at an international level against injustice. It also acted as a tool to provide a self-representational counter-narrative to the hegemonic Zionist one which is largely based on the demonisation and the negation of the Palestinian history and people to justify their colonial domination. Art for many Palestinians was seen as a way to participate in writing their own visual narrative, to critically and creatively engage with their socio-
political surrounding matters, to express their identity, and to amplify the Palestinians’ political demands. Against the humanitarian imagery that reduced Palestinian refugees to victims or colonial representations that slammed them as terrorists, Palestinian artists, such as Ismail Shammout and Naji Al-Ali, sought to transform the image of the Palestinians into active agents of revolutionary change.
Over the course of the Palestinian struggle, the Palestinian people increasingly regarded artworks that expressed and challenged their living conditions under Israeli control as a means of resistance. Many Palestinian paintings displaying the ‘forbidden’ colors of the Palestinian flag have been confiscated, and many artists faced interrogation or even a prison sentence due to their art that Israel perceived as ‘an act of incitement. Let us not forget the late Palestinian influential exiled artists Ghassan Kanafani and Naji Al-Ali, whose artistic and literary production led to their murder.
Chains Shall Break
Being a daughter of an ex-detainee means I have grown a unique attachment to the plight of the Palestinian political prisoners, not only from a political perspective but also from a personal one. As a 19-year-old boy, my father spent a total of fifteen years in Israeli jails, but he is only one amongst over a million Palestinians who experienced detention since 1948, including children, women, and elderly people. The stories of resistance, resilience, and repression that I grew up hearing about his stolen youth have made me develop a particular passion for this cause. Currently, over 5 thousands of Palestinian detainees are in Israeli captivity with no access to their most basic rights by the Israeli Prison Service, including fair trial, proper medical care, and family visits.
The plight of Palestinian political prisoners and their families, however, is not given the deserved attention in the political arena, especially at an international level. They are not only marginalised, but also dehumanised in a media discourse that tends to reduce them to mere statistics or defined their resistance in terms of ‘terrorism,’ similar to the way Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists in South Africa were represented.
Throughout my upbringing, I have witnessed their families’ immense pain as my family joined their weekly protests in front of the Red Cross in Gaza, calling for dismantling the Israeli prison system and freedom. As I developed more skills of expression, I coupled drawings with writings that recorded stories of Palestinian detainees and their families with whom I developed an intimate relation after years of weekly protests. Many expressed their pain as a form of imprisonment in time, another theme that inspired my drawings in my attempt to communicate the families’ longing for a reunion with their beloved ones without barriers in between.
I tried to depict their determination to break their chains which they expressed repeatedly in legendary hunger strikes. “Hunger strike until either martyrdom or freedom” is a motto that many prisoners adopted across the history of the Palestinian Prisoners Movement.
AN ONGOING NAKBA
My generation, the third-generation refugees, was already blueprinted with the traumatic events of the Nakba, which for Palestinians, is not only a tragic historical event, only to be commemorated once a year with events such as art exhibits and national commemorations. “It was never one Nakba,” my grandmother used to say asserting that ethnic cleansing was never a one-off event that happened in 1948 when Palestinians became stateless refugees. The Nakba is experienced as ongoing; an uninterrupted process of Israeli settler-colonialism and domination that was given continuity by the 1967 occupation, the violent invasion of Beirut and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the two intifadas of 1987 and 2000, and the siege on Gaza and the constant bombardments and demolitions across the shrinking occupied Palestinian territories.
Growing up hearing our grandmothers recount the life they had before, the dispossessed lands that most would never see again, has formed the collective memory of the Palestinian people. My grandmother described a peaceful life in green fields of citrus groves and olive trees in our original village Beit-Jirja, one of 531 villages that were violently emptied of its inhabitants and razed to the ground in 1948. The landscapes, the tastes of their fresh harvests, the sounds of peasants’ dances, the joy of family gatherings and traditional weddings, all burdened her traumatic memory in a sudden rupture that turned our existence into non-existence. She found consolation in storytelling that cultivated inside her children and grandchildren a burning desire for return and a life of dignity.
The continuity of our liberation struggle, from one generation to another, resembles hope for the Nakba generation and their descendants, another theme that several of my drawings attempted to express –. They were my response to several Zionist leaders who assumed that “the old will die and the young will forget.” The drawings come to assert that the old may die but the young will keep on holding the key until our inalienable right to return is implemented. In 1948, most refugees fled in haste and fear, taking whatever they could carry at a moment’s notice. They carried the keys of their homes in their exodus, and although many know that their homes no longer exist, they held onto their keys, passed them to their children, making the key become a symbol of the undying Palestinian hope that return is inevitable. The young generation is perceived as those who will carry the burden of the cause and continue the struggle of the previous generations until freedom, justice, equality and return to the Palestinian people. Thus, Palestinian children became the symbol through which “We nurse hope”, as Mahmoud Darwish said.
A Recapitulation...
The majority of Palestinians have become politicised due to their complex and intense political reality that shapes every aspect of their lives. I am no exception. David Gauntlett suggested that creativity is a part of showing connectedness and participation that can affect artists’ lives positively as it can lead to greater general happiness and consequently less depression and better physical and mental health (Gauntlett, 2010). Drawing was a tool in which I found empowerment in my voice. It served as a tactic to overcome the state of siege and occupation imposed on us, to escape the feeling of helplessness that can be easily felt in such suppressive and oppressive life conditions that the Palestinian people endure. It was also a tool that I used to engage politically and socially with the harsh surrounding. With the internet becoming accessible, I resorted to online social networks to reach out to the international community, believing that the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation is a central global issue.
The turning point of my life was at the age of 17 when I lived through “Cast Lead,” a 22-day massacre that Israeli forces committed in Gaza. During that dismal period, as Christmas and New Year celebrations were being marked around the world, we all had a terrible sense of alienation from the rest of the world as we remained in darkness amidst continuous bombing and mass killing. Around 11 am on the 27th of December 2008, we were attending the mid-term exams. It was a normal day until Israeli warplanes started shelling all over the Gaza Strip, announcing hundreds of victims from the first hour. The chaos that ensued at school and the living horrors that followed for 22 days of being stricken by military machines from land, sea, and air, left a lasting impact on everyone.
There was no safe place in Gaza, and when people fled their dangerous areas to UN schools as a make-shift shelter, such as Al-Fakhoura where my father worked as a security guard, they were bombed by white-phosphorous ammunition, internationally-banned weapons. A few families then sought refuge in our home, believing that it was relatively less dangerous. One of them was the family of my childhood friend Aliaa Al-Khatib. On the morning of 5 January 2009, her father Ali left to check on his elderly parents who lived through Nakba, refused to leave their home. He promised to be back before night fell with more food and clothes for his family. In the evening, my father received a phone call, carrying unbearable news to his wife and 6 children: he was walking near his home when an Israeli helicopter shelled him, tearing him to pieces. That morning was a goodbye none of us had anticipated but death was closer than we thought.
One night, I was sitting in a blackout, surrounded by my mother and siblings in one small room of our house under one blanket. No voice could be heard, just heartbeats and heavy, shaky breaths. The beating and breathing grew louder after every new explosion we felt crashing around, shaking our home and lighting up the sky. Then suddenly, the door of our house opened violently and somebody shouted, “Leave home now!” It was my dad rushing in to evacuate our house because of a bomb threat to a neighbour. I remember that my siblings and I grasped Mum and started running outside unconsciously, barefoot. For three days we stayed in a nearby house, powerless as we sat, waiting to be either killed, or wounded, or forced to watch our home destroyed. Thankfully, that threat turned out to be a tactic of psychological warfare Israel used to break people’s will for liberation.
This merciless and inhumane attack killed at least 1417 men, women, and children. I wasn’t among them but what if I had been? Would I be buried like any one of them in a grave, nothing left of me but a blurry picture stuck on the wall and the memory of another teenage girl slain too young? Would I have been for the world just a number, a dead person? I refused to dwell on that thought.
Many drawings of mine were inspired by memories attached to this traumatic event and similar experiences that proceeded. The trauma was relived whenever an attack was repeated. Most importantly, resorting to art was a necessary means that helped me preserve my sanity amid traumatic events that I experienced throughout my life in the suffocating blockade of the Gaza Strip. It allowed me to engage with the politically fueled reality and express the suppressed voice and denied rights of the Palestinian people in visual forms that can communicate universally. ✳