WWI + British Mandate
1914 - 1922

A mix of historical and art context for a formative period of transition in Palestine.

Ottoman Empire Transition
Since 1516, the land of Palestine had been under control of the Ottoman Empire over the course of four centuries.

Ayşe Betül Aytekin describes this in an article for TRT World as “a period marked by peace, harmonious coexistence and flourishing of local culture.”

In particular, it was a time when three monotheistic religions coexisted without conflict.

“For the Ottomans, Palestine’s importance stemmed from its historical capital Jerusalem, which is regarded as Islam’s third holiest city after Mecca and Medina. For the Ottoman dynasty, which already held the Islamic Caliphate, the stewardship of these lands was viewed as a sacred duty.

And yet, given Jerusalem’s position as sacred to the two other Abrahamic religions, it never tried to disturb the harmony that existed between believers of different religions who lived in the Holy Lands.”

However, the Ottoman Empire had weakened by the end of the 19th century, including losing areas like Algeria, Tunisia, and Kuwait.

In 1914, World War I began. The Ottoman Empire fought as part of the “Central Powers” aligned with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria. They faced the “Allied Powers” of France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Canada, Japan, Great Britain, and later the US.

In 1917, the British invaded Palestine, where significant fighting took place in Gaza at first. The British then headed towards Al Quds and eventually won. In December, mayor Hussein Salim al-Husseini announced the surrender of the city.

One of the paintings that Nicola Saig did shortly after was based on a photograph taken of the moment of the city’s surrender. This work is described as a turning point in Saig’s career for showing that he was not only able to work within religious iconography but also compete with any modern way of reproducing images of reality, including of those in the local community.

This photo-to-painting rendition was not meant to just be a direct copy. Though Saig clearly had the ability to be fully accurate, he chose to make it his own as well.

“At first sight, the alterations introduced into Saig's painting appear to be negligible. They include the reduction in the number of people appearing in the original photograph and the elimination of all the shadows of people stretched in its foreground.

At closer examination, one sees that Saig's slight alterations recompose the group in such a manner as to dislodge the centrality of the British officer in the photograph and show that Jerusalem's mayor has become the central character in the painting.”

British Control & Mandate
The Ottoman Empire did indeed fall, stopping their fighting at the end of 1918, losing control of their territories that included regions of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, parts of Saudi Arabia, and of course Palestine.

The Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919 formally ended World War I, where The League of Nations was created as an international organization in the guise of maintaining world peace. As Susan Pedersen writes in her book The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, this “in effect internationalized colonial rule” and “affirmed rather than repudiated imperialism.”

The League of Nations created “mandates” for countries who were deemed as not yet ready to govern themselves, often with ulterior motives.

With the British Mandate of Palestine, made official by the The League of Nations in 1922, they designated themselves control over the land. As part of it, they adopted the 1917 Balfour Declaration that had publicly declared Britain's position of "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

This was aligned with the goals of the Zionist movement, which had formally been established in 1897 with Theodor Herzl at the helm. As noted in Al Jazeera:

“In the 1880s, the community of Palestinian Jews, known as the Yishuv, amounted to three percent of the total population. They were apolitical and did not aspire to build a modern Jewish state.

But in the late 19th century, the Zionist movement - a political ideology - grew out of Eastern Europe, claiming that Jews were a nation or race that deserved a modern ‘Jewish state’. The movement, citing the biblical belief that God promised Palestine to the Jews, began to buy land there and build settlements to strengthen their claim to the land.”

In the forthcoming years, the British would encourage many Jewish settlers as they pursued a path that sought to implement the goals of Zionism and ignore the actual desires of the Palestinian community.

In The Origins of Palestinian Art, Bashir Makhoul and Gordon Hon write:

“The land on which (Palestinians) had lived and that they had cultivated for generations had become political real estate in a political economy from which they were excluded. Even legitimate ownership of the land carried little weight in that kind of economy. The urban Palestinian political elites that had grown under Ottoman rule and through which the Palestinians had gained some access to the international stage found themselves, under the British, reduced to restless natives.

What was really meant by 'a land without a people’ was a land without a state. The Zionist movement from the beginning understood what was meant by the modern Western construct ‘nation-state.’ They knew that ultimately it did not matter how many people lived there or how deeply entwined their cultural roots were with the history of the land. Without a state, the Palestinians had no sovereignty over their land and, within particular readings of the definitions of this construct, were not therefore a people.”

Art Across Time
In 1920, Nicola Saig did a painting that spoke to both the past and present moment. The goal was to share what Saig had experienced through his life prior to the British Mandate, an equilibrium between the local religious communities.

The painting featured Caliph ‘Umar, described as an early convert of Islam and one of the close companions of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad who reigned from 632 to 634 CE, during the Seige of Jerusalem in 637 CE.

Boullata writes that it brings to mind Byzantine icon depictions of Christ's Entry to Jerusalem, which typically show him in profile riding on a donkey as people go out to greet him at the city gates among palm leaves. “In his attempts to express his experience of Jerusalem’s interfaith harmony,” Boullata writes, “Saig endowed the image of the Muslim conqueror with the Christian traits of the Prince of Peace.”

The painting found great success and was looked at as an iconic representation of Islam's pacifist conquest of the city. The work would go on to be reproduced in schoolbooks.

Nakba: A Defining Time
1947 - 1950

Mostly historical information to provide context around a time that changed everything for Palestinian life altogether: the 1947 UN Partition plan and 1948 Nakba.

World War II
During the second world war, less than three decades after the first, Germany carried out a holocaust of six million Jewish people. It was, unquestionably, a tragedy.

Jews who fled persecution from the late 1930's through the early-to-mid 1940's were admitted – in limited numbers – to countries such as Spain, Switzerland, Portgual, and the United States. Many also attempted to go to Palestine.

After WWII officially ended in 1945, there was also the question of where all of the displaced Jewish people would go. At this time, the U.S. tried to persuade Britain to allow 100,000 of the ~250,000 total displaced Jews to go to Palestine, which was rejected.

Over this period, Britain went through a series of attempts to figure out next steps as they tried to temper the waves of illegal immigration and the Arab response to it.

Ultimately, they weren’t able to find an agreed-upon solution. As a result, they decided to pass the responsibility on to the United Nations.

UN Partition Plan
The United Nations had been created in 1945, succeeding the League of Nations, under the declared goal of protecting international peace and security.

In 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181. This got rid of the British Mandate on Palestine, replacing it with a plan for partitioning the land into two states – an Arab and a Jewish state. (This also included declaring Jerusalem and Bethlehem as part of an international zone and to be administered by the UN.)

At this time, Jews owned about 6% of the land and were barely a third of the population. However, the UN partition allocated them 56% of land.

There was immediate pushback that the amount allocated for the Jewish state was unjust. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs (both Muslims and Christians) would be forced to live in this Jewish State. It would also leave the designated “Arab State” without important agricultural lands and seaports.

The decision was rejected by the Arab community, who still wanted an independent, singular, and self-governing state – including full rights for both the country’s Arab majority and for the Jewish people who had already been there as legal citizens.

The plan continued in spite of the opposition. As the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question notes, “it gave international legitimacy to the Zionist conquest of Palestine by force of arms.”

Nakba
Immediately after the UN plan in November 1947, Zionist forces began to target Arab villages and residential quarters.

This included forcibly displacing Palestinians from their homes both within the new “Jewish State” lines and outside of the UN border lines.

Zionist had several militias ready to fight and had already been importing a massive amount of arms throughout the British Mandate period. Palestinians, on the other hand, had no major official fighting groups at this time.

In the Spring of 1948, attacks ramped up dramatically after the official adoption of Plan Dalet, which was essentially a call for ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinian Arabs through the destruction of villages.

One of the most notable attacks was the Deir Yassin massacre at the start of April 1948 that left over 100 Palestinian martyrs. This was also used as a Zionist propaganda tool to spread fear. They wanted to get as much land as possible before the British Mandate reign officially ended, so they continued to attack villages.

On May 14, 1948, the British forces withdrew. Afterwards, the “Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” was announced by David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister and former head of the World Zionist Organization. The United States also recognized the “State of Israel” on the very same day.

Neighboring Arab countries, who were harboring many refugees, went to war with Zionist forces after the self-proclaimed state declaration. Fighting continued into 1949, ultimately to no avail. By the end, more than 500 villages and 10 cities were depopulated. There were invasions, bombings of homes, looting, and destruction all around these areas.

This period of ethnic cleansing is referred to as Al-Nakba, which loosely translates as “The Catastrophe” from Arabic to English – though that does not do sufficient justice to what happened. (It is often referred to in English-language context just as the Nakba.)

15,000 were martyred and over 750,000 Palestinians (around two-thirds of the Arab population) were ethnically cleansed from their homes to either refugee camps within Palestine or to other neighboring countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.

Zionists had taken up 78% of historical Palestine. Overall, there was over four million acres of Palestinian land estimated to be stolen at this time.

There were around 150,000 Palestinians who remained inside the “Israeli” borders after, a quarter of whom were internally displaced. These Palestinians were technically given “Israeli citizenship” but lost most of their land and were subjected to a violent rule after.

From the territories remaining outside of these “Israeli” borders, those did not even become an independent Palestinian state either. Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip and Jordan took control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both places then becoming home to many refugee camps.

In December 1949, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was established. In what was supposed to initially be a temporary program, the UN sought to provide temporary humanitarian assistance, education, work programs, refugee camp infrastructure, and more. However, this was a drop in the bucket after the damage of the UN Partition decision that led to the nightmare in the first place.

In addition to the immense human tragedy, Kamal Boullata writes about the impact of the previously-growing art scene after the Naka:

“Much of the art objects produced over the four decades preceding those bloody months were rendered irretrievable in the wake of the victors' widespread looting.

All traces of the cultural enterprise of Palestinian modernity were obscured, as its advocates were dispersed and the accomplishments of a century and a half of development in a native pictorial art were doomed to oblivion.”

Naksa: Further Occupation
1967 - 1970

Mostly historical information to help provide some context around how the years after the Nakba in 1948 led to the Naksa in 1967 – and the first few years that followed. Plus, some art developments after the initial impact.

The Decades Leading Up To 1968
For the 750,000 Palestinian refugees from the Nakba, many hoped to come back to their homeland. After all, UN Resolution 194 had affirmed the refugees’ right of return under international law.

However, that right of return would not be honored by the occupiers. Not only that, a law by the new “state” was passed in 1950 to give the right for Jews and their spouses to come to Israel and acquire citizenship if they had one or more Jewish grandparent.

For Palestinians, they could not come back to their homeland. Anyone who tried also faced grave danger. Between 1949 and 1956 alone, Israeli soldiers shot several thousands of Palestinians who continued to try to cross the border back into their own country. However, some managed to be able to sneak in, raising the Palestinian Arab population by an increase of about 30% again in the early 1950s.

For those who had stayed in their homeland after the Nakba in ‘48, they were supposed to be treated as citizens with full rights. However, the Israeli imposed a military rule over Arabs, using discrimination to keep strict control over movement of people and organization, including striking down any efforts to resist repressive policies. Any independent collective action – public, social, or cultural – was banned.

Palestinian Arabs were also isolated in select villages and towns as the Israeli miliary aimed to take over more land. In 1959, some of the restrictions slightly lessened as the Zionist occupiers needed more workers they could cheaply pay, which required an increase in freedom of movement.

Arabs were treated as inferior, with limited rights. Israeli military permission was needed for anything from education to health care to commerce, and even marriage or divorce. Israel controlled their life with a strict occupation.

And for those in exile, refugee camps were difficult as well. As UNRWA notes: “The lives of the refugees were turned upside down; they were faced with disease, lack of food and water, life in unfamiliar places and overcrowding.”

Fighting for Liberation
Israeli Occupation Forces continued massacres of Palestinian Arabs in the country.

In 1953, for example, massacres included attacks on Qibya in the West Bank and al-Bureij refugee camp in Gaza – leaving over 100 Palestinian martyrs in the process.

Israeli soldiers would keep targeting these areas in the years that followed, like in 1956 when hundreds of Palestinians were martyred in Gaza during Israeli attacks in Khan Yunis and Rafah.

Organizations like the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) continued to provide assistance on certain levels – such as with shelter, food, medical aid, education, work programs, and more – but it didn’t change the fact that there was a military occupation.

In order to combat continued Israeli aggression, Palestinian armed resistance fighters – otherwise referred to as “fedayeen” at this time – formed paramilitary groups around the early 1950s to be able to defend their people and homeland.

This also evolved into a more formal Palestinian fighting organization that would be independent from Arab governments. Thus, Fatah was born in the late 1950s, its name an Arabic acronym in reverse for “Harakat al-tahrir al-watani al-Filastini” which translated to “The Palestinian National Liberation Movement” as part of its self-declared mission. Yasser Arafat was one of its founders. As The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question notes:

“Fatah was the first national liberation movement since 1948 to be started by Palestinians themselves and that brought together Palestinian activists from different ideological and intellectual backgrounds. It called on all politically active Palestinians to abandon their party affiliations and to be united under its banner as a movement to ‘organize a vanguard that would rise above factionalism, whims and leanings to include the entire people.’

The Arab nationalist slogan prevalent at the time was ‘Arab unity is the path to the liberation of Palestine.’ Fatah reversed it, contending that ‘the liberation of Palestine is the road to Arab unity’; it acknowledged the pan-Arab dimension of the Palestinian cause but insisted that the Palestinian people had to rely on themselves in their struggle for liberation. For Fatah, the Palestinian revolution would be ‘Palestine in origin and (pan) Arab in its development.’

The movement's leadership saw armed struggle as its primary means of liberating Palestine. It modeled itself after the revolutionary struggles in Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam.”

Cells of Fatah began to form in Gaza – but also in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, there was also an interest by others to create a Palestinian political entity. This came to fruition with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) after a Palestinian National Congress was called in June 1964.

The PLO was officially recognized at the second Arab summit that September, though with the explicit agreement they would not try to arm Palestinians in Jordan or attempt to gain sovereignty from Jordan in the West Bank.

“The establishment of the PLO prompted Fatah in particular to accelerate the consolidation of its presence on the ground, by establishing its military wing, al-Asifa (the Storm), and launching its first military operations in January 1965,” notes The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question.

1968 Naksa
Since the Nakba in 1948, Israel had continued to fight against the neighboring Arab countries – especially since the West Bank was under Jordanian sovereignty and the Gaza strip under Egyptian sovereignty.

This included attacks against in Egypt in 1956 (with Britain and France as Israel’s allies) and diverting the Jordan River in 1963 (with Syria as Jordan’s ally).

In June 1967, Israel started a new stage by launching a surprise attack on Egypt. More attacks followed that were primarily against Jordan, Syria, as well as within Palestine.

In what is sometimes referred to as the Six-Day War, Israeli Occupation Forces took control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. They also took control of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria.

This became known as Al-Naksa, which translates to the setback.

The Naksa displaced another 300,000 Palestinians from their homes – including some who had already been expelled during the Nakba – bringing the total to over a million Palestinians driven out of their homes between 1948 and 1967.

The overwhelming majority of the newly displaced Palestinians sought refuge in Jordan. Many crossed into Jordan through the river, and did so on foot with very few belongings.

The size of land that now made up “Israel” had significantly grown and the entire historical Palestine territory had now been seized. On the eve of the initial June 5 attack, Israeli Labor minister Yigal Allon wrote: “We must avoid the historic mistake of the War of Independence (1948)… and must not cease fighting until we achieve total victory, the territorial fulfillment of the Land of Israel.”

Their intention was clear: to fully take control of all the land, so there could be no Arab sovereignty in any territory. The Zionist mission to establish a so-called “Jewish state” at the harm of the local Palestinian Arab population was in full force.

Immediately after, UN Resolution 242 called for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied during this battle, among other requests.

Israel not only ignored the UN, but they actively encouraged and supported Zionist settlers to move into these areas, building homes on land they did not own. This went directly against international law.

They also illegally annexed East Jerusalem and different parts of the West Bank, which they self-deemed part of the “state of Israel” – which was not recognized as true by the internal community.

The feyadeen resistance fighters who had already formed became even more determined in armed struggle, feeling a heightened need to take Palestine back as there was insufficient help from the rest of the Arab world or extended international community.

As The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question writes:

“The defeat brought about the realization that counting on the Arab regular armies was unrealistic and that the Arab governmental approach exemplified by the creation of a PLO of notables was unlikely to yield positive results. The Palestinian national struggle was liberated from the bonds of official Arab sponsorship.

The phenomenon of guerrilla action became widespread, and new Palestinian organizations were formed. The fierce resistance demonstrated by the Palestinian fighters and the relatively heavy losses suffered by the Israeli army in the Battle of al-Karama in March 1968 significantly boosted the movement, leading to the enrollment of thousands of Palestinian (and Arab) volunteers and setting the stage for the transfer of PLO leadership into the hands of the guerrilla organizations, especially the most powerful among them, Fatah.

This was achieved at the fourth session of the PNC, held in Cairo from 10 to 17 July 1968. There a new Palestine National Charter was approved, devoted to Palestinian nationalist (rather than pan-Arab) ideas. The fifth PNC session, held in Cairo in early February 1969, further solidified this trend with the election of Fatah leader Yasir Arafat as chairman of the PLO Executive Committee, a position he was to hold until his death in 2004.”

In addition to Fatah taking the lead of the PLO after the defeat in 1967, other factions also continued to pursue their efforts. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was also formally organized around this time and initially became a faction of the PLO in the late 1960s. The group itself split soon after, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) was born from the separation of members due to differences in strategy.

Amman’s Refugee Art Community
The 1967 events only further pushed artists to get more serious – both in Palestine and in neighboring countries – to make work about the Palestinian struggle.

Amman, Jordan – where many displaced from the Naksa fled – then also became a home and center for Palestinian artists in exile. It didn’t take long for there to be exhibitions with themes of liberation, appearing in Amman as soon as 1968.

Jordanian ceramist Mahmoud Taha said that "it was not possible to show artwork that had no connection to the movement.”

A 1969 exhibit in Amman, making the Battle of Al Karameh from the previous year, featured many types of art – children's drawings, photographs, paintings, sculptures, maps, prints, books, records, songs of the revolution, stamps, clothes, and more. It featured artists from all over the Arab world and other international countries.

Beirut and Amman both played important roles during this time for those displaced outside of the country.

In Palestine, with the homeland entirely taken over, there was one shift in particular that impacted artist relations. Those in Gaza and the West Bank and previously been unable to have contact with those in the territories taken over as part of the ‘47 UN Partition and ‘48 Nakba. However, once again, artists across all these areas were able to have communication, for the time being.

Palestine Film Unit
After establishing the Art Department of the PLO in 1965, there were more additions to come.

The Palestine Film Unit (PFU) came in 1967 to make films that took back the narrative into their own voice. The goal was to document the revolution and create a historical archive.

It was done in conjunction with Fatah, making it the first cinema unit working under a Palestinian military organization.

Leading this department were filmmakers Mustafa Abu Ali, Hani Jawharieh, and Sulafa Jadallah.

Mustafa Abu Ali had just graduated in 1967 after studying in the US and UK. He stated at the time that “the Palestinian resistance believes that action through cinema is a natural extension of armed action.”

Sulafa Jadallah had also studied, but closer to home. She was the first woman admitted to the Higher Institute of Cinema in Cairo, where she excelled. Jadallah is also referred to as the first female cinematographer in the Arab world in general.

Jadallah’s impact was significant, but her career was cut short in the middle of 1969 when she was unfortunately hit by friendly fire. She survived but was unfortunately paralyzed, never able to shoot a film again.

Hani Jawharieh was involved with both the Film Unit as well as the PLO Photography archive.

Samia Halaby writes about his role in her book, Liberation Art of Palestine:

“Jawharieh was the first photographer to accompany Palestinian freedom fighters to the Jordan River Valley during the late 60s.

In 1967 he created a film called Exodus (different from the American film of the same name), which told of the evictions of the Palestinians from their homes and lands during the war of that same year.

Many of the films, which he made in Jordan just before leaving to Beirut, document the destruction by Israel of agricultural lands in the Jordan Valley. These films were followed by a series of films and photographs documenting the life and struggle of the Palestinian refugee.”

In 1970, filmmaker Jean Luc-Godard – a pioneer of the French New Wave movement – traveled to Amman, Jordan to spend time with their team at Palestinian refugee camps. While there, he and colleague Jean-Pierre Gorin also captured footage that was supposed to be a film about feyadeen.

However, Black September – otherwise known as the Jordanian Civil War between Jordan and the PLO – led to mass casualties. This included many of the fighters who had been the focus of Godard’s documentary, and he ultimately abandoned the project. (The footage was later re-purposed in his experimental film Ici et ailleurs, or Here and Elsewhere.)

With the Film Unit, “After the horrific events of Black September, Mustafa Abu Ali, along with the rest of the PLO left Jordan and went to Beirut. Hani Jawharia and Sulafa Jadallah were (at the time) unable to get out of Jordan,” wrote Emily Jacir in a later article for The Electronic Intifada.

Lebanon Invasion &
Banning of Colors
1980 - 1987

Artists tackle restrictions while Palestinians in the diaspora face attacks in Lebanon.

Cinema Steps & Lebanon Invasion
Outside of a documentary approach, the film world also started to expand with the first fictional Palestinian movie, Return To Haifa (1982). It was based on a novel of a similar title, Returning to Haifa, by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani.

The movie was shot in Lebanon. The PFLP raised the money and it was directed by an Iraqi filmmaker, Kassem Hawal, who had been politically exiled and become a longtime contributor of the PLO Film Unit / Cinema Institute.

Shortly after the film was completed in 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon that same year.

As summarized in The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question:

“The 1982 Lebanon War was a three-month conflict precipitated by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, designed to militarily and politically debilitate the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and turn the Lebanese Civil War in favor of Israel's right-wing allies...

The war was immensely destructive in terms of both lives and property, worsened the Lebanon's already civil war-torn political fabric, and led to an Israeli occupation of parts of Southern Lebanon that lasted until 2000.

The war also proved a massive setback for the PLO and its leader, Yasir Arafat, who was forced to leave Lebanon and establish new headquarters in Tunis.”

The worst of the attacks was the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut, where Israeli forces attacked the joint Palestinian refugee camps – leaving around 3,000 martyrs over a three-day period.

During the overall invasion on Beirut, the PLO buildings there were intentionally attacked.

As a result, most of their cinema archive was never to be seen again, leaving behind few traces of all the great work they’d made over that time. It is unclear how much of the vast archive – reportedly over 100 films – was destroyed, stolen, buried, burned, or lost. But very few works were left, or have since been recovered, in the hands of Palestinians.

The Palestine Cinema Institute, otherwise referred to as the PLO Film Unit, had made an impact with capturing and sharing moving images of their people’s struggle. Palestinian filmmaker Emily Jacir later wrote for The Electronic Intifada:

“Over a period of fourteen years the PLO Film Unit recorded Palestinian history and created films. They documented military actions, revolutionary events, the Palestinian resistance, everyday life in the refugee camps and they promoted the Palestinian national cause…

Unlike the national cinema that emerged out of Cuba after the Cuban Revolution, and out of Iran after the Islamic Revolution, the Palestinian national Cinema was created and documented life during the revolution.”

International Art Collection Attacked
Also targeted by airstrikes during the 1982 Lebanon invasion was the recently-started Museum of Palestine in Beirut collection, which included all the artworks from the 1978 International Exhibition for Palestine.

Curator Mona Saudi and her sister did their best to rescue pieces that had not been initially damaged and continue to find safe homes for them. However, more would later be stolen and ultimately the majority of the art was destroyed or taken, in one way or another.

Outside of the exhibit or PLO aspects, the end of this period in Beirut had a broader effect. For over three decades, the Lebanese capital had served as a hub for both Palestinian refugees and the larger Arab world.

Kamal Boullata writes in his book, Palestinian Art:

“Beirut may be invisible in the works of Palestinian artists who lived there for almost three consecutive decades, yet nowhere outside the Lebanese capital could their art have evolved in the way it did there.

Seemingly oblivious to Lebanon's landscape, the focal subject of generations of Lebanese painters, Beirut's Palestinian artists were haunted by the experience of their displacement and the memory of a birthplace that was overnight rendered beyond reach.”

With the Israeli invasion, however, the PLO and most Palestinian artists in exile were forced to leave Beirut and things were no longer the same.

Censorship Rises Further in Palestine
In the early 80’s, Sliman Mansour and other Palestinian artists in the country were told by Israeli head officers that every piece of art would have to be given a stamp of approval. If it didn’t meet their standards, it would be confiscated.

The most egregious form of censorship came in 1980 when the basic colors of the Palestinian flag – red, white, green, and black – were put under a strict ban in artwork. This was after the flag itself had already been “banned” since 1967.

When Israeli officers gave Mansour and other Rabita artists these guidelines, Isam Badr asked about painting a flower in those colors. Badr was told it would be taken. The officer then added “Even if you do a watermelon, it will be confiscated.”

The suppression, confiscation, and targeting of any form only made it stronger. The watermelon, for example, became a symbol of resistance at the time, and has remained one to this today. Other hidden symbols were also placed in the artworks to evade censorship and reach the people.

Badr himself had been targeted for his art and was ultimately arrested three times and had many works taken. Israeli soldiers also beat him in front of his students, in the streets, and in front of his house – all multiple times. Between this and the several periods of jail time, Badr ended up having a heart attack at thirty four years old, though he survived. Due to his health, he decided to withdraw from any activism.

Others decided to take the risk of continuing to fight through their art.

When Israeli soldiers martyred the nephew of Rabita artist Fathi Ghaben, he made the decision to paint the boy wrapped up in the Palestinian flag. The artwork went on display at Ghaben’s exhibit in 1984, where the show was abruptly closed. The painting of his nephew, along with six other works, were permanently confiscated by Israeli Occupation Forces.

The Israel military court found Ghaben guilty of breaking their color ban law. They also claimed his painting created incitement (while they were, of course, the ones responsible for the violence against his nephew in the first place).

Ghaben was imprisoned for several months as a result. Overall, he would eventually be jailed three times.

After getting released at one point, Ghaben is said to have painted the image of a mass demonstration and two arms rising into the air, along with a broken chain, and a horse with a subtle Palestine flag on its neck.

Handala & Naji al-Ali
After his family was displaced from his family’s Al-Shajara village in Palestine during the 1948 Nakba when he was a child, Naji al-Ali had started experimenting with art in Beirut. He tried to find a unique way to have his art communicate the Palestinian experience, including using materials like mirrors to involve the viewer.

However, he eventually abandoned painting as a medium and instead became a political cartoonist in the 60s – a leap he was encouraged to make by Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer who had came to Beirut in 1960.

Not only did switching paths free Ali up from his menial jobs to make some money, but it changed his way of communication. Kamal Boullata wrote in Palestinian Art:

“Ali saw his cartoons as a communicative form of expression that allowed him to integrate verbal and visual means without the affectations that plagued 'art' in his environment.

As cartoonist for the widely read Kuwaiti dailies al-Siyasa and al-Qabas and the Beirut daily al-Safir, he achieved widespread popularity, reaching thousands of readers throughout the Arab world on a daily basis. With biting humour, he summed up the position of the common Palestinian of the refugee camp vis-à-vis the endless political compromises reached in the region.”

Ali would go on to become known for his cartoon character of Handala, a perpetually 10-year-old boy representative of Ali himself. Specifically, the age refers to the age he was when his family was displaced in the Nakba.

The character in its final and most-well known form, with his back to the viewer, started in 1973 after the October war that year. It showed Ali’s disdain for political actions of foreign nations for Palestinians.

The name connects to a local Palestinian plant – Handala in Arabic, or Colocynth in English – which bears bitter fruit. Its deep roots ensure it always grows back when cut, making it a metaphorical symbol for Palestinians. As described in Middle East Eye:

“For centuries, Palestinians have used this plant as a metaphor for their deeply rooted connection to their land, as well as their strength and right of return.

The plant became a symbol which personified the pain and loss of displaced refugees following the Nakba, with its thick and deep roots representing their link to their land.”

In the 1980s, Ali had been detained by Israeli Occupation Forces during the invasion of Lebanon, and soon was displaced briefly to Kuwait in 1984 before then being displaced again to London in 1985. His life was often under threat.

He criticized everyone: Arab governments, the PLO – and of course Israel and the US. He gained widespread attention for his work.

In August 1987, Ali was assassinated while walking to work at the London office of al-Qabas newspaper, a publication he had worked for as a political cartoonist. The still open case technically remains “unsolved” to this day. (There is some speculation it was even a PLO attack, as Ali had received a call from within the organization after he was critical of their leadership in his cartoons.)

Ali may have become a martyr, but the life of Handala as a symbol for Palestinians would continue to make an impact.

Oslo Accords
1993 - 2000

Historical context on the agreement that was presented as a solution for the “conflict” to move forward, which was doubted by many from the start. In the short term, there were some benefits to it for artists.

Leading Locally vs. From Exile
The efforts of the first Intifada were spearheaded by the freshly-formed Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), whose communiqués led political, social, economic, and cultural strategies and messages. There were also popular committees established in villages, camps, and city neighborhoods.

The UNLU was a coalition which included representatives of PLO-affiliated groups – mainly Fatah, PFLP, DFLP, and Palestine Communist/People’s Party.

There was also Palestinian Islamic Jihad, founded earlier in the 1980s, who “organized itself around the principle that defeat of Israeli occupation and subjugation could only be achieved through armed struggle, and it sought to merge the secular and Islamist strands of the Palestinian political landscape,” as Jeremy Scahill later wrote for Drop Site News.

At the same time, 1987 saw the formation of Hamas (an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement). They were an offshoot wing of The Muslim Brotherhood – which had started in 1928 in Egypt. Hamas started to become involved during the First Intifada and had separate communiqués, too.

Over the course of this period, many leaders from all of these different groups were deported from Palestine.

There was also the PLO, already in exile, who was caught off-guard by the First Intifada’s start and rise. From abroad, at this time in Tunisia, they tried to stay involved and use the moment for their political purposes.

Kalil al-Wazir (also known as Abu Jihad) – a Co-Founder, top member of Fatah, and close aid of Yasser Arafat – dealt directly with UNLU and strengthened PLO connection between them. However, he was assassinated by Israel in April 1988 at his home in Tunisia.

A couple of months later in June 1988, the PLO gathered at that year’s Arab Summit.

As noted in The Interactive Encyclopedia of The Palestine Question:

“Building on the political assets provided by the Intifada, and on the reactivation of diplomatic efforts to find a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the 19th Palestine National Congress adopts two texts.

The first is the Declaration of Independence, legitimized internationally by UN General Assembly Resolution 181 and by the Palestinian right to self-determination.

The second text is a political communiqué in which the PNC states its acceptance of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis of the international peace conference, and enumerates the principles that were put forward by the Arab Summit, Algiers, 1988.”

Others like Hamas and Islamic Jihad did not align with this decision as they saw the PLO accepting the UN resolutions as concessions that gave in to Israel, ignoring the loss of land since 1948 and only focusing on what was taken in 1967. In their eyes, freedom from occupation did not only mean the West Bank and Gaza.

In 1990 during the Gulf War, Iraq invaded Kuwait and promised to evacuate on condition that Israel evacuate the occupied territories, receiving support from the PLO in the process. However, after an Iraqi defeat, it left the PLO more powerless –despite the momentum Palestinians in the homeland had built in the Intifada.

International pressure for “peace talks” built, taking more shape in 1991 at the Madrid Conference, which was organized by the US and Soviet Union. However, it wasn’t until a couple of years later that discussions grew deeper. Secret talks started in early 1993 between the PLO’s Yasser Arafat and then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin led to a next big step, with the United States acting as an eventual mediator.

In September 1993, the Oslo Accords agreement was reached. Overall, Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians (previously they had designated them as a terrorist organization). Meanwhile, the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace – like it had already established by recognizing UN Res. 242 – and they also renounced Palestinian “terrorism.” The agreement opened with the statement:

“The Government of the State of Israel and the PLO team (in the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to the Middle East Peace Conference) (the ‘Palestinian Delegation’), representing the Palestinian people, agree that it is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process.

The aim of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations within the current Middle East peace process is, among other things, to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority, the elected Council (the ‘Council’), for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement.”

A coalition of ten Palestinian groups – including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, and DFLP – issued a statement after that the agreement “meant perpetuating the Israeli occupation, transforming the Palestinians into its instruments, and establishing a Palestinian police force to protect Israeli security and repress the Palestinian people.”

They weren’t alone. Well-known Palestinian academic and philosopher Edward Said wrote a detailed reflection, The Morning After, where he called Oslo “an instrument of Palestinian surrender” and essentially described it as a slap in the face.

Amir-Hussein Radjy later wrote an article for the publication Foreign Policy, Edward Said Saw the Future of Israel and Palestine, where he spoke about Said’s research, work, and legacy. When describing his reaction to the agreement, Radjy writes:

“Said described the protests, strikes, and boycotts of the First Intifada in the late 1980s as ‘surely the most impressive and disciplined anti-colonial insurrection in this century.’ Instead of building on it, he felt Arafat signed away any gains in the nationalist cause for the U.S. government’s flimsy promises of being an honest broker. It was, he repeated over the next few years, the only time an occupied people had agreed to negotiate with their occupiers before a withdrawal had happened or been agreed on.”

Physical Spaces for Art
To look at the initial impact of the Oslo Accords on visual art, the conversation starts just before it was actually signed. In Palestinian Art, Kamal Boullata writes:

“The 1990s ushered in a new era in the visual arts. With peace talks that seemed to hold out new promise for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, the cultural scene was infused with a new energy. For the first time since 1967, new institutions devoted to the promotion of the visual arts provided proper exhibition space.”

Multiple spaces opened in East Jerusalem, continuing its history as an art hub.

One of these was the Al-Wasiti Art Centre in East Jerusalem, founded by Sliman Mansour and other Rabita artists in 1992. It hosted solo and group exhibitions of local artists and offered courses to young kids. It also started a photography archive to document locally-produced art.

The other was Gallery Anadiel, founded the same year by artist and curator Jack Persekian, along with his brother-in-law, who had been born in Al Quds / Jerusalem. While they also exhibited local artists, they also invited diaspora Palestinian artists to visit – several who had never been to their homeland before, such as multimedia and installation artist Mona Hatoum.

After the signing of the Oslo Accords and influx of international donations for cultural projects, many NGOs for visual arts were founded to solicit grants for Palestinian artists from an increase of international and diaspora contributions. This included NGOs organized by artists themselves.

The majority of cultural spaces instead shifted towards Ramallah – where the newly-established Palestinian Authority had their West Bank headquarters.

In Ramallah, one of the main openings at this time was the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in 1996 – initially as a branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. The first director was Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, who oversaw its transition to become an NGO.

Laïdi-Hanieh also developed programs across the visual arts field to host exhbitions for artists across the West Bank and Gaza, including a focus on young artists in particular.

Along with exhibitions, the venue also hosted other events such as lectures, screenings, concerts, and more. It became a key cultural hub in the West Bank. There were also literature programs and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish even had an office there.

An important institution that opened in 1998 was the A. M. Qattan Foundation that operated through a family endowment and helped to fund other cultural institutions and programs throughout Palestine, in addition to creating its own programs.

Universities & Art Programs
There had been no art schools available to study at prior, so Palestinians who were interested in studying the craft had to go to neighboring countries – such as Egypt, Iraq, and Syria – if they were even permitted or able to travel.

Not until the early 1990s were art programs and student exhibition venues able to pop up more at schools like Al Najeh University and Al Quds University, though it would be another decade before the first art academy would be established. This would be the start of an increasing amount of such university arrangements over time.

These schools also assisted in the larger art field development. Tina Sherwell wrote in an article for IEMed:

“(Universities) took on different roles, hosting solo shows for artists, documenting Palestinian art, creating websites, producing publications, promoting contemporary and avant-garde practices, creating bridges between Palestinian artists inside the green line and in diaspora, creating links between international artists and Palestine, organizing international exhibitions of Palestinian art, hosting international artists, creating residency programs, and facilitating the work of international curators.

In time, these institutions have become cultural mediators and set the agenda for cultural activities through their strategies and programs.”

Breaking Recent Traditions
After such a long stretch of art that often tied to political contexts and nationalist symbols, the 1990s saw a shift to exploring more personal themes. They still were rooted in the history and informed by the political context, “but did not revert to the use of the established visual iconography and popular symbolism of identity representations of previous decades” as Tina Sherwell wrote for IEMed.

Sherwell also notes that the mediums changed:

“Painting and sculpture had been the dominant modes of expression but this began to shift with younger generation artists, who began to use photography, video and installation, and experiment with performance.

With a lessening of a direct political agenda in art practice over the mid-to-late 1990s, as well as of the need to create national representations, younger artists in particular began to engage with more complex investigations of questions of identity and location.”

Cinema Continuing To Grow
One medium that was seeing increasing popularity was filmmaking. After the PLO had been at the forefront of Palestinian cinema from the end of the 1960s through the start of the 1980s, with films often tied to national Palestinian organizations, this changed after the Lebanon invasion and withdrawal of the PLO from Beirut. Instead, it became more independent with individuals making their own work, while still often speaking to the Palestinian struggle.

One notable example was Wedding in Galilee (1987) – the first-ever fictional, feature-length movie that was made in Palestine by a Palestinian director. Directed by Michel Khleifi, the film won the International Critics Prize, or FIPRESCI, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987.

From the new filmmakers who started to emerge during the ‘90s, one of them was Rashid Masharawi, who released حتى إشعار آخر (Curfew) in 1994. It was about Palestinians living in al Shati refugee camp in Gaza, the same camp he had been born and raised in.

Masharawi also established the Cinema Production and Distribution Center (CPC) in Ramallah in 1996. The goal was to organize workshops and present opportunities to learn, hands on, for young Palestinian filmmakers. The CPC also ran a Mobile Cinema, with screenings at refugee camps during an annual Kids Film Festival.

The first Palestinian movie to receive a national release in the United States came in 1996, with Elia Suleiman’s film (Chronicle of a Disappearance (سجل اختفاء).

The movie, starring Suleiman himself, also won the Best First Film Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It features vignettes that are meant to convey the reality of daily Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.

Suleiman himself had lived in New York City for a period but had moved back to Palestine in 1994 and taught at Birzeit University in the West Bank, here he worked on developing a Film and Media Department at the school.

The Agreement Unfolds
The first Oslo Accord, known as Oslo I, was signed in September 1993. As noted in an article from The Middle East Institute for Understanding:

“The Oslo Accords established the Palestinian Authority (PA) to govern Palestinians in pockets of the occupied West Bank and Gaza under the control of Israel’s occupying army.

The PA was supposed to be an ‘Interim Self-Government' and only last ‘for a transitional period not exceeding five years.’

The final status agreement was supposed to be based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which called for Israel to withdraw from the territories it occupied during the June 1967 war, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

As a result, most Palestinians believed that the Oslo Accords would create an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories alongside Israel, as part of the so-called ‘two-state solution’ in Palestine/Israel advocated by the international community.”

A second accord, Oslo II, was signed in September 1995. It included more details on steps for the process. Notably it divided the West Bank into three areas: Area A (complete PA authority), Area B (shared security agreement), and Area C (“Isreali” authority).

It had been agreed that a general election would happen for the West Bank and Gaza. In January 1996, the PA held elections and Arafat’s Fatah party won with 88% of the vote.

There had been a deadline of May 1999 for a permanent resolution of the Oslo matters to be reached.

However, by the end of the decade, no final peace treaty or semblance of peace was achieved. There was a large increase in settlements, with more than double in the West Bank.

In addition, other original aspects of the deal were not kept.

One notable element that also had consequences was the way the Palestinian Authority (PA) was run. As mentioned in the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question:

“The PA also became increasingly authoritarian. It cracked down on opponents, especially from Hamas, and often ignored court rulings or resorted to special military courts.

In addition, with Arafat and Fatah focused on running the PA and continuing the process of negotiations with Israel, and with the Damascus-based groups seemingly permanently alienated, the PLO as representing also the diaspora Palestinians virtually ceased functioning. Many Palestinians, even refugees in Syria and Lebanon, who had initially supported the Oslo accords and welcomed the establishment of the PA as a step toward Palestinian independence saw little hope in the whole Oslo process.”

When the US invited both parties for a Camp David Summit in July 2000, Israel said it would not make any concessions about the return of refugees, nor any changes to the status of Jerusalem. The Oslo “peace process” was resulting in a failure for Palestinians.

Shifting Strategy
2005 - 2010

After the Second Intifada, both the political and artistic ways of life would be altered.

Hamas Gains Control of Gaza
Legislative elections were held in January 2006 for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Hamas won both a majority of the vote and a majority of seats in the assembly.

After Fatah and leader Mahmoud Abbas were defeated in this election, they did not acknowledge the results. The internal conflict between them came to a head in June 2007, when Hamas expelled Fatah out of Gaza and took over full control there.

The West Bank was now split off, politically and administratively, from the Gaza Strip. The separation more generally had been a long time coming, as an electronic fence and concrete wall around the Gaza had already been implemented by Israel in 1995, as part of longtime restrictions on the territory.

In reacting to Hamas’ 2007 control of Gaza, Israel reacted by implementing a full-on land, air, and sea blockade. (Egypt also contributed to keeping the borders shut through the southern Gaza crossings.)

As Al Jazeera notes, “Israel claims that its occupation of Gaza ceased since it pulled its troops and settlers from the territory, but international law views Gaza as occupied territory since Israel has full control over the space.”

In the West Bank, Israeli settlements continued to be built on Palestinian-designated territory and the Apartheid Wall continued to be constructed, annexing more land away as well.

Humor & Absurdity
While the initial time after the Second Intifada is not as clearly defined artistically, there are a couple of themes that can be pointed out.

Sascha Manya Crasnow, Lecturer of Islamic Arts, wrote in her 2018 dissertation, The Next Generation, that there had been a shift that started with the turn of the century:

“With the signing of the Oslo Accords.. poster production declined due to the breakup of a unified politicized art department in lieu of NGO-funded local projects and the advent of the internet supplanting poster dissemination as the most cost-effective option for circulating information and imagery.

By the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the disillusionment with the Accords had set in, and artists began to take on new approaches in their artistic expressions — ones which appropriately articulated their frustration at the inter-Intifada period and the quotidian realities with which the failure of Oslo had left them.”

Crasnow pointed out recurring themes like absurdity, humor, and time. (A focus of humor and absurdity is also recognized in The Origins of Palestinian Art book and the contemporary art reflection website page from The Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question.)

Humor in this period, Crasnow argues, served as a tool to highlight and critique the cyclical realities they were forced to endure – particularly with the failure of the Oslo peace process and the empty promises it presented.

This seemingly started to become more heightened once the Second Intifada had formally ended in 2005. One artist who made a piece engaged with this concept was Raeda Saadeh in her 2007 short film,Vacuum.

In it, Saadeh herself is shown vacuuming as a representation of Palestinian women within the ongoing occupation and their long history to the land. Crasnow notes:

“Recorded in the Palestinian desert between Jericho and the Dead Sea, Saadeh’s two-channel 17-minute video depicts the artist dressed in a simple black abaya vacuuming the seemingly endless desert. The audio contains the actual sound of her vacuuming as Saadeh connected the device to a generator with over 1,000 feet of cable to allow her to actually engage in the act of vacuuming the desert, rather than simply mimicking the absurdist action.”

Saadeh had been the first ever winner of the Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) by A.M. Qattan Foundation, held in 2000, and Vacuum continued the evolution of her work.

At the Sharjah Art Foundation where this was exhibited in 2007, they also note:

“In displacing a mundane domestic task and performing it in an absurd context, Saadeh emphasizes the inanity of our tendency to preoccupy ourselves with tedious, repetitive tasks that distract from deep-seated issues which are not as easy to ‘clean up’.

Aside from engaging with the personal sphere, the nonsensical and impossible task of vacuuming the naked hill highlights the ineffectualness of attempts at tidying up political realms as well. The work, in a sense, confronts the popular Zionist slogan, ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’, demonstrating that, just as it is futile to try and ‘clean’ a mountain of all the dust and rocks that form the essence of its composition, it is infeasible to erase – completely – the memory of a people from its homeland.”

The theme of time can be seen in other artist’s work, such as artist Sharif Waked’s 2010 video, Beace Brocess.

Some artists in this period used humor to engage with foreign audiences in a new way outside of the traditional distribution of information about the Palestinian people. Waked, however, instead uses well-known imagery to make a point.

The three-minute video of Beace Brocess loops footage from the Camp David Summit negotiations in 2000 between Palestine and Israel, featuring Yasser Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister at the time. However, the figures are turned into black and blue silhouettes against a plain backdrop. It utilizes whimsical and generic royalty-free piano music in the audio, seemingly nodding back to the time of silent films and their absurdity.

In general, Crasnow notes how the use of humor was also perhaps implemented to fight back against the negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims – and increased Islamophobia – more broadly in a post-9/11 context.

“In addition to bypassing compassion fatigue, these humorous works present an alternative image of Palestinians—one of a people who are able to make jokes and laugh about their situation, rather than simply the dichotomous images of the aggressive keffiyah-clad ‘terrorist’ or helpless victim which are frequently depicted in international mass media.”

Evolution of Cinema
After making his first feature-length narrative film in the 1990s, Palestinian director Elia Suleiman continued to make more in the 2000’s – with Divine Intervention (يد إلهية ) in 2002 and The Time That Remains (الزمن الباقي ) in 2009.

The trilogy of these features served an important role in Palestinian cinema, as noted in The Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question:

“The consensus among critics is that through these three films Suleiman brought about a qualitative leap in Arab filmmaking, in narrative technique and in cinematic style and language, a leap that made it possible to make out details of the Palestinian cause and follow its course, in a language that does not drift into the revolutionary rhetoric that Palestinian filmmaking had adopted in the 1970s.”

The NGO of Shashat, which translates to Screens, was set up in Ramallah in 2005 to help nurture the growth of Palestinian women in cinema – including training, mentoring, production support, and exhibitions. They also started The Women’s Film Festival.

One woman who made a big impact was Annemarie Jacir, who in 2007 became the first Palestinian female director to release a feature film: Salt of this Sea (ملح هذا البح).

The story is about a the daughter of Palestinian refugees who returns back to her homeland. It went on to win the International Critics award (FIPRESCI) at the Cannes Film Festival that year, in addition to other acclaim. However, she was banned from returning to Palestine after the film was made.

Filmed in the West Bank, Salt of the Sea had 80 locations and was logistically complicated given the checkpoints, blockades, rejection of permits, and more obstacles. "In some cases we just filmed anyway. We put the actors in a real situation and we just did it guerrilla-style. That's how most Palestinian filmmakers are managing to do their work," Jacir told CNN in a 2009 article.

While Palestinian cinema was developing in a growing direction, it still faced many obstacles with the complications of everyday life and general Israeli military occupation.

On the viewer side, this also included a severe lack of movie theaters – with only one in the West Bank, and none in Gaza, at this point.

Even the West Bank’s singular theater was attacked during the Second Intifada, but its recovery and maintenance still persisted afterwards.

Artist Support in Gaza
While many of the art organizations had been operating out of the West Bank, a similar system in Gaza had not yet been able to be setup.

However, two leading groups emerged in the early 2000s. One was Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art, which was founded in 2002 by seven Palestinian artists. The intiative and gallery space put on workshops, offered exhibiton space, and helped with art education.

The other was Shababeek for Contemporary Art – or translated in English to Windows for Contemporary Art – which opened in 2009 as a nonprofit arts education center and gallery space. It was established in Gaza City, nearby Al Shifa Hospital. They sought out to give artist grants and host residencies, exhibitions, student initiatives, and more to help with public art programming in the Strip.

Gaza Genocide
2023 - 2024

A modern day holocaust is being carried out against the people of Gaza, which is still continuing after 400+ days.

The “Calm” Before The Storm
The Fall of 2023 in Palestine marked 30 years of when the Oslo Accords were originally signed, but Palestinians were still stuck under a 75-year-long occupation and things had gotten worse as a result of that failure.

In the West Bank, attacks continued and Palestinians remained unsafe. The apartheid wall and military checkpoints made life more difficult and miserable. While settlements in Gaza had been removed in 2005, they only continued to increase in the West Bank.

Gaza had been under siege and blockade for over 15 years. The UN and Human Rights Watch declared Gaza as an open-air prison. Yet nothing they could do to try to change that was seen acceptable or a path to a solution of independence.

Peaceful protests were attempted, most notably with the start of the Great March of Return in particular, and were only met with violence from Israeli Occupation Forces. Diplomacy was attempted by Hamas, to no avail.

With the normalization of the Abraham Accords, Gaza was essentially being told they were going to continue to subjugated. It was a dead issue, there was no long term future planning.

That all changed in October 2023.

Al-Aqsa Flood
This all led up to the Al-Aqsa Flood mission on October 7, 2023 – led by Hamas’ military group, Al-Qassam Brigades – to confront the Gaza Division of the Israeli military.

Hamas wanted to return the Palestinian cause to the forefront and re-establish their people’s rightful demands for their own state, freedom, and future. “We tried every path. We didn’t find one political path to take us out of this morass and free us from occupation,” said senior Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzouk told The New Yorker.

The Israeli Occupation Forces are equipped with endless more resources of technology, weapons, and money. But this operation, planned by a very tight-knit group of Hamas and Al-Qassam top members, took advantage of discovered vulnerabilities in Israeli surveillance systems and perimeter defenses.

The overall goal was to breach the wall and capture Israeli soldiers, bring them to Gaza, and put pressure on an exchange deal for all the Palestinians political prisoners (which at the time were around 6,000). After all, Yahya Sinwar – reportedly a leader of planning Al-Aqsa Flood – was himself released in a prisoner exchange deal. Back in 2011, there over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners exchanged for a single Israeli soldier. Sinwar, who had been in prison for 22 years, was one of them.

Despite Israeli security reportedly being internally warned about an upcoming operation, they disregarded what was on the horizon.

Over a thousand Al-Qassam fighters in Gaza initially gathered at assembly points at 6:00am on the morning of October 7, but none had details about the operation beforehand. At 6:30am, there were 5,000 rockets launched – more in half an hour than they fired during the entire 2014 war. The intention was to push soldiers and civilians back into their safe rooms, under the threat of those rockets.

Drones were also sent to take down IOF communications through their electromagnetic spectrum so that each of the military bases couldn’t know what was happening at the other. At the same time, resistance fighters broke through the iron wall that blocked Gaza from “Israel” – with many different breaches along the wall. Paragliders also flew in under the rockets.

Immediately after getting through the wall, resistance fighters went to take over the military bases of the IOF’s Gaza Division during the upcoming hours. Those bases also had a skeleton crews on that day, which happened to be a holiday. Al-Qassam was successful in capturing all commanders of IOF’s Southern brigade immediately. The Erez checkpoint was also stormed right away. Overall, Israeli military bases were completely unprepared for the operation.

They did not plan for it to have been as easy in getting through the border without a fight. Once word quickly got out of the operation, it didn’t take long for additional fighters from other factions – like from Palestinian Islamic Jihad – to join as well.

As this was an unannounced operation, even within Al-Qassam, Hamas could only control the mission of their own military wing. This added to more activity than they expected, including entering settlements that were further away. Other civilians or factions made their own decisions, which including some looting and additional hostage-taking.

It’s clear that the unexpected scale of ability to go back into the ‘48 territories on that day was a surprise to Hamas, and they were only able to focus on their objectives. Hamas said that “if there was any case of targeting civilians, it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces.” Al-Qassam’s mission was to target IOF soldiers and military points, to inflict a defeat on the army of their colonizers, and to work out an immediate exchange deal.

The area near the Gaza border was mostly surrounded by these bases and settlements, but three miles away from the Gaza border there was also a music event happening that Hamas was not previously aware of. When the operation happened in the early morning hours, the Nova festival was still ongoing. Israeli settlers attending ran away when they realized what was happening. Some were taken hostage, while others were killed. Yet is often not acknowledged that many of the deaths from this, and in general on that day, were by their own country.

During October 7, as the Israeli military was caught by surprise and struggling to reclaim their imposed security grip, they are said to have implemented a specific protocol.

Known as the Hannibal Directive, it declares the IOF would prefer a soldier (or in this case, a civilian as well) to be killed rather than taken hostage.

On that day, Israeli apache helicopters fired recklessly at many people, not being able to tell who was who, and merkava tanks shelled the homes in the kibuttz settlements.

While it is still not acknowledged by most of the mainstream Western media to this day, independent outlets like The Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss have been reporting on this since early on. There were indeed Israeli casualties, that is not denied, but a quarter of the current 1,189 figure were security forces and many of the other 796 were seemingly killed through the Hannibal Directive.

Lies about the actions of that day – such as there being 40 beheaded babies or claims of mass sexual violence – have no evidence and been repeatedly debunked.

Al Jazeera also released a documentary on YouTube in March 2024, simply titled October 7, that goes through a timeline and much footage of the day to lay out many of the events that happened.

“Israel” and the West have aimed to present Hamas’ actions on October 7 as that of monsters, instead of a planned military operation of oppressed people living in an open air prison under the control of a settler-colonial, apartheid state that had stolen their land, crushed their rights, injured and martyred their people, and carried out decades of constant crimes.

In a Drop Site News profile on Hamas leadership around the decisions of the operation, one person who they spoke with was Dr. Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’ political bureau and former government minister. Naim says they took lessons from history – such as with Vietnam, Somalia, South Africa, and Algeria – observing that fights for liberation did not end by peaceful NGOs or the oppressor suddenly deciding to leave. You had to fight back, or be left to pay the price. It was a seen as a righteous rebellion against an occupation force, one which had imposed collective punishment on Gaza’s civilians.

It took the IOF multiple days to get back the Gaza envelope and have it under their self-proclaimed control again. There was no denying the Al-Aqsa Flood as an anti-colonial revolt was a failure for Israeli forces to protect their own perimeter.

In the aftermath, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – and the many others in power – decided to seek endless revenge.

The Endless & Ruthless Reaction
Within the first days after October 7, Hamas put out offers to to work out a deal right away for the Israeli hostages. However, these discussions were rejected by the Israeli government and military, who would later make it clear that those hostages taken were never a true priority. The attacks started right away on Gaza, the very same day martyring hundreds of Palestinians in airstrikes.

Quickly, there was verbal expression of genocidal intent. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for example, said on October 9: "We are imposing a complete siege on the city of Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."

He’s just one of many members of the government, army, and public figures making statements declaring their goals against Palestinians to starve, ethnically cleanse, and make them incessantly suffer. Law for Palestine collected over 500 examples by January 2024 alone.

One notable early attack was on October 17, 2023, when the IOF attacked Al Alhi Baptist Hospital in central Gaza, which was sheltering many displaced Palestinians already. Around 500 were martyred and several hundred more wounded. Yet as Israel blamed it on resistance forces, claiming it was a missile that misfired from Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Western media ran with it and tried to obfuscate the horrific act.

Since then, despite clear evidence of perpetration, the IOF has received continued cover from both Western media and governments as they commit war crimes – including against a large majority of the hospital system, which also has no supplies able to enter and have been severely limited in their capacity.

Forensic Architecture is a research group who “uses architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world.” On October 25, 2024, they released an 827-page report that details their data collection of IOF operations in Gaza since the genocide began.

They have picked out patterns from these attacks, which comprise of the following categories:

“Spatial Control – the physical shaping of Gaza according by a strategic design;

Displacement – the repeated, forced displacement of civilians and an assessment of Israel’s ‘humanitarian measures’;

Destruction of Agriculture and Water Resources – the destruction of fields, orchards, greenhouses, agricultural and water infrastructure;

Destruction of Medical Infrastructure – the systematic targeting of hospitals and healthcare workers;

Destruction of Civilian Infrastructure – the targeting of public utilities, roads, schools including those acting as shelters, religious buildings, and government buildings;

Targeting of Aid – the systematic targeting of infrastructure and personnel necessary for the transport and distribution of humanitarian aid and the preparation of food.”

Forensic Architecture’s findings across these fields were summed up in an article on their website. It’s worth keeping in mind that no amount of data, no matter how expansive in data or areas of coverage, can come even come close to covering the scale of destruction and inhumanity on Palestinians in Gaza.

To describe all of the atrocities of Israel’s genocide on Gaza so far would require a whole website, and even then it would be insufficient. The IOF has inhumanely destroyed all semblance of life in the Strip, continuously blocked aid from coming in, targeted journalists, destroyed all the universities, most of the buildings and roads demolished, closed the border crossings for medical evacuations, targeted civil defense workers in addition to healthcare professionals, bombed UNRWA schools sheltering displaced refugees, and a never-ending list of war crimes.

In addition to the media, the governments of Western countries – such as the US, UK, Germany, France, and more – have provided endless funding and diplomatic cover for the genocide during this time.

In early July 2024, the oldest medical journal in the world, The Lancet (founded 1823), conservatively estimated that there were around 186,000 martyrs in Gaza. Things have only gotten worse since then. It’s an impossible task to truly keep track of all those killed, from unidentified people who lay under the rubble to those who are simply unidentifiable, or whose bodies have just disappeared into thin air after an attack.

In addition to the martyrs, there are the hundreds of thousands wounded – including a large amount of amputees – who have been deprived of medical supplies for even basic treatment.

The grave health effects this will leave on people in Gaza and the environment can only begin to be understood now, let alone when the dust first settles. It feels foolish to even attempt to describe all of the devastation, as the vastness is unquantifiable.

Endless examples of this genocide have been livestreamed to our phones, despite the targeting of journalists and difficulty for power and electricity. There has arguably never been such a proliferation of evidence available to the masses every day and yet both government leaders and regular citizens who claim to care about human rights have no concern for all of the horror stories showcased of this daily Gaza reality.

Each day that passes without a stop is harmful to the remaining Palestinians, as well as the legacy of the martyrs.

As Palestinian lawyer, public speaker, and This Is Palestine podcast host Diana Buttu has repeatedly said in conversation recently, we are told “nothing justified October 7th, but October 7th justifies everything.”

There is no red line for Israel’s “right to self-defense” that Western leaders proclaim, as they pretend to express sympathy for those in Gaza while continuing to send the weapons and political cover to kill them.

Hamas is labeled by these same people as “terrorists” and every airstrike on hospitals, refugee school shelters, bakeries, and more are all excused by the IOF saying that it’s a Hamas operating base without any evidence. International law has been broken hundreds if not thousands of times, but just mention the word “Hamas” and they’re a scapegoat.

The racism of this labeling has played into the lack of action and condemnation from large swaths of the general public to refuse this designation. However, large percentages of Arabs and Muslims – as well as the younger generations – recognize the truth.

As Jadaliyya co-editors wrote in a joint statement at the first year mark of October 7:

“A year into this genocide, the learning curve when it comes to understanding Palestine as a liberation struggle remains steep. Similarly, far too many refuse to see Hamas as a sociopolitical phenomenon integral to Palestinian society and politics, now and in the future.

This failure to understand Palestine as a site of anti-colonial struggle makes it impossible, even for those who might feel some ‘sympathy,’ to effectively resist the statist logics and justifications of counter-terrorism… armed struggle is a right of colonized peoples and the liberation of Palestine requires multiple forms of resistance, armed and otherwise.

History has shown that the logic of Zionism and the policies of successive Israeli governments is to obtain the maximum amount of Palestinian land with the minimum number of Palestinian people. Palestinians, Lebanese, and Arabs have the right to self-defense and to realize self-determination. Israel and the US fully understand that the Hamas attack sought to shatter the status quo, and have responded with a determination and ferocity that shed all pretenses of proportionality.”

Artists Under Genocide
Less than a week after October 7, 2023, Heba Zagout was the first known Palestinian artist to be martyred in the genocide, with her home hit by an Israeli airstrike. She was 39-years-old and had been born in the Bureij refugee camp, in the middle of the Gaza Strip.

Zagout was a mother of four children, two of whom were martyred at the same time. She had been an art teacher and worked with UNRWA, while continuing to make her own paintings for personal work.

Her sister, Maysaa – also an artist – has also been in Gaza, and is thankfully still alive. (You can find a list of Gaza-based artists who are raising money, including Maysaa, through a list of GoFundMe campaigns on the Donate for Gaza page of this website.)

Another notable artist martyred during this time is Fathi Ghaben, who passed away in February 2024 while suffering from chronic chest and lung illness in Gaza, seeking medical treatment. His calls to evacuate were denied. Fellow artist and friend Sliman Mansour wrote a tribute on Instagram:

“The artist Fathi Ghaben died this morning while waiting for the occupation authorities to allow him to travel for treatment abroad.

Fathi was born in the village of Harbiyya in 1947 and was forcibly displaced with his family to Gaza, where they lived in the Jabalia refugee camp. He learned art by doing, and in the seventies and eighties of the last century, he became one of the most essential artists in Gaza through his expression in his paintings of nostalgia for Palestine before the Nakba and his drawings about identity and liberation.

He was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison for drawing the Palestinian flag in 1984. Fathi was a unique, funny, and generous personality who loved life and left his mark on Palestinian art. He enjoyed great public popularity. May God have mercy on him, and our deepest heartfelt condolences to his family, the artists of Gaza and Palestine, and to all who knew and loved him.”

Mansour also spoke about him in a feature on Savior Flair, where he also painted a portrait of Ghaben as a tribute.

On October 18, 2024, after a year of genocide, 32-year-old digital illustrator Mahasen Al-Khateeb was another artist martyred from Israeli airstrikes on Jabalia refugee camp. This was during a heightened siege on Jabalia and all of the North that started that month.

Khateeb had previously worked for a decade prior with international companies in motion graphics, specializing in character design and storyboarding. In a profile on The Electronic Intifada, she is described as “a prominent figure in Gaza’s digital art scene, captivating both children and adults” who had opened her own office with her life savings before the genocide. She also taught and mentored others.

Her office and their family’s home were then destroyed after October 2023 and her father had passed, leaving her as the main provider for the family. They were all reported as martyred in the attack. But she refused to flee south and became a voice for the people of northern Gaza, telling the stories of those around her, capturing moments of both joy and pain. This included interviewing everyone from doctors to street vendors to journalists.

Khateeb’s last drawing was of Sha’ban Al-Dalou, a 19-year-old who was still connected to an IV when he was engulfed in flames after an IOF airstrike on tents for displaced refugees by Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Outside of individuals, Israel has destroyed art spaces – just like they have mosques, universities, and more.

In December 2023, an Israeli airstrike targeted and destroyed Eltiqa Gallery in downtown Gaza City in the North. It had been founded in 2002 by a handful of Palestinian artists across different mediums. Eltiqa held exhibitions, workshops, and provided art education.

In April 2024, they also destroyed Gaza’s last contemporary art space. The Shababeek (“Windows”) for Contemporary Art – a nonprofit arts education center and gallery – had previously helped the community in several ways. As co-founder Shareef Sarhan told Hyperallergic, they gave artist grants, hosted residencies and exhibitions, taught university students about different types of media, and created public art programming across Gaza.

Unfortunately, these kinds of attacks on cultural spaces were not new.

For those artists still alive in Gaza, most have been displaced many times and they have primarily had to focus on survival like everyone else. In addition, supplies that were already difficult to get before have become nearly impossible.

However, some artists have found an outlet in continuing to make work.

Maisara Baroud is one Palestinian artist in Gaza who has worked on daily drawings, luckily able to have access to ink and paper to capture the life under daily attacks and uncertainty.

One of Baroud’s illustrations was also used on the opening cover page of a 300-page report by Amnesty International, an international human rights organization, detailing their research into the genocide over the nine months from October 2023 - July 2024. The report explores the mass violations of international law, intent laid out, the targeting of civilians, deadly patterns, and more.

One painter, 38-year-old Palestinian artist Maysaa Youssef, has continued amidst the rubble and destruction after IOF shelling of her home.

Others, like 17-year-old Hussain Al Jerjawi, have taken to truly using whatever they have, such as working on UNRWA flour bags.

Another example is a young girl named Sarah who was displaced from Beit Lahia to Gaza City, with no materials left. Instead she found charcoal to use and drew on their tent.

These are just some of the many examples, like 20-year-old Nur Al Rimlawi who drew in her invalid PA passport of all the places she wants to go.

Graffiti of different kinds on the buildings still standing, or just among the rubble, has also been another form of expression.

Palestinian Artists Outside of Gaza
As a Palestinian artist of the newer generation who was born in 1999 into a post-Oslo world, Malak Mattar had found an outlet in art following the 2014 war on Gaza. After, she continued to create and found an audience through social media. In Spring 2023, Mattar had been accepted into the prestigious Central Saint Martins school at the University of the Arts London for the Fall semester.

While not everyone had a chance to leave Gaza for their studies due to the siege, she was able to eventually make it out – though not before Israeli authorities impeded her ability to travel, missing the first month of her course. When Mattar eventually arrived in London on October 6, 2023, little did she know how history would change for her home on the very next day.

Since then, she has not been able to go back to Gaza again. This led to feeling artistically paralyzed from creating while she saw the genocide unfold in the first couple of months. After a couple of months, this turned into many sketches of martyrs on brown paper.

After accepting an artist residency in London to start 2024, Mattar chose to focus on one giant piece – her largest painting to date at roughly 7 x 16 feet. This became No Words, a compilation of scenes from the genocide. Notably, Mattar was an artist who had previously been drawn to bright colors. This piece, however, was limited to black-and-white.

Since then, Mattar has presented the painting in exhibits in several countries – saying that since the atrocities are still happening, the best time to be showing the painting is now. At the launch exhibit opening, she commented about the painting:

“It’s a documentation of the most barbaric and the most horrific genocide in our century.

When I painted this, it didn’t really start in 2023. It triggered so many memories of my life as a war survivor since the age of eight. So this painting really unfolds many of the memories I had as a child.

But let me say this painting is not a celebration. This exhibit is not a celebration. It’s a reminder that we have failed. We’re all a failure, humanity has failed.

This is not only my painting, it belongs to Gaza, to the people of Gaza. I hope it really disturbs you, I hope it haunts you forever… I hope you will never forget it. You’re all complicit, I’m sorry. The fact that you’re living a normal life, I’m so angry.”

Another notable (smaller-scale) piece Mattar made after the two-week IOF raid on Al-Shifa Hospital in March 2023, completely destroying the biggest medical complex in Gaza and torturing people along the way.

Another artist living outside of the country, Samia Halaby, had grown up in Palestine but her family was forcibly expelled to Lebanon after the 1948 Nakba, which then led to them moving to the US in 1951. After going to school in the Midwest, she eventually landed in New York City, where she has been based for the past 50 years. Halaby is one of the great Palestinian painters, an undeniable figure in the world of abstract art.

While she hasn’t received enough recognition in the art world, February 2024 was meant to be her first Western retrospective exhibit. It was scheduled to open at her alma mater, Indiana University, but they canceled it a month before. The decision was made after three years of planning, making it even more insulting. It was a continuation of the anti-Palestinian censorship that Halaby has faced throughout her career.

Over 15,000 people signed a petition to get the exhibit re-instated, while IU students and faculty spoke out against the decision and put together community actions in support. In the end, it went to Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum a few months later, where Halaby had got her Masters degree. (Though MSU later censored a piece being shown at the same time by Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid, Piquete en el capitolio, and they canceled the Fall opening party)

Additionally in the Spring of 2024, Halaby had been one of 26 Palestinian artists featured in an exhibit that Palestine Museum US submitted to the Venice Bienniale. It was called Foreigners in their Homeland: Occupation, Apartheid, Genocide – which was a response to the biennial's theme of “Foreigners Everywhere.” It was rejected for the official showcase, again demonstrating bias. But they were not deterred and the exhibit ran unofficially nearby in Venice anyway. Halaby contributed a new, 10-foot-wide abstract piece on Gaza.

Artistic Censorship
Samia Halaby’s IU exhibit or the Venice Bienialle rejection of Palestine Museum’s exhibit submission are far from the only uses of censorship in the field during the ongoing Gaza genocide. Artwork itself, or even artist statements, have been frequent targets. There are also cases of artists being censored simply for posting their support for Palestine on social media, or signing solidarity letters, among other instances.

In a November 2023 article from The Markaz Review about some of the initial acts of suppression, art historian and teacher-researcher Rose-Marie Ferré spoke about the need for artists to be welcomed. “Even if you don’t agree with them. They have the right to express themselves in a dialectical discourse. That’s how knowledge is built,” she said. Ferré also noted: “Curators and collectors construct art history. As they are committed, they will promote certain artists in line with political positions. Geopolitical unrest therefore has a direct impact on the orientations, discourses and images promoted at events.”

Art platform Hyperallergic has been covering many of the cases, and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) also created The Art Censorship Index: Post-October 7th that documents dozens of these instances.

Below are just some of the many examples (in no particular order of importance or timing):

• Keffiyeh usage - Native American artist Danielle SeeWalker had a summer 2024 artist residency canceled in Vail, Colorado, after locals complained about a painting she made of a Native woman wearing a keffiyeh. The work was titled “G for Genocide” and it was not even part of her work in the program, just a personal painting she had made on her own.

• On a similar note: Christie’s art auction house had agreed to sell paintings featuring a figure in a keffiyeh from Lebanese artist Ayman Baalbaki in its Middle Eastern Art sale prior to October 7, 2023, but then removed it due to the request of a very highly placed in the company. “I did not expect this decision from Christie’s, as they have previously sold similar works of mine,” Baalbaki said. “They also look for this specific theme in my artwork to include in their auctions.”

• Children’s exhibits - The United Nations had a public art exhibition in Fall 2024 The Global Peace Flag: Uniting the World in its General Assembly Lobby in New York City. The UN caved to Zionist complaints from Israel’s Permanent Representative to the UN, who said of Pro-Palestine art that “they promote hate in those drawings.” This included a map of the country as a watermelon. It was one of many cowardly acts by the UN, who accommodated this demand while the IOF has killed at least tens of thousands of children in Gaza in the year prior alone.

• From The River To The Sea - A 8-by-14-foot fiberglass installation in the design of a watermelon was forbidden from Burning Man for its title of From The River to the Sea. Using that same slogan – which is not anti-semitic, as its critics claim – also drew censorship in Miami, in Brooklyn, and beyond.

• Digital crackdown - Photographers and graphic designers have been censored on Meta’s platforms, especially Instagram, such as for certain images from protests or designs that feature resistance figures, for example. Platforms like Twitter have also censored voices like in Novemeber 2024 indefinitely suspending the account of Palestinian-American filmmaker Lexi Alexander.

There are too many examples to list them all, but these shed a light on a fraction of it.

Elsewhere in the art world, museums have been protested for their complicity – such as the Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern in London, and more. Overall, there have been many continuous actions against cultural institutions, demanding that they take a principled stand with Palestine.

Student Intifada
While many around the world stayed silent or inactive in response to the genocide, one group of people who decided to rise up was university students.

From the start, the smallest acts were faced with repression. At Detroit’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, for example, university administrators confiscated Palestinian flags from students’ studios and other campus spaces. At an open house after in November 2023, art students boycotted it and blocked the windows and entrances to their studios – “basically denying the school access to their experience as a way to sell the academy” according to one prospective student artist who went to tour the campus that day.

Repression continued across the world for students who wanted to showcase solidarity as Palestinians were being martyred en masse. At Columbia University, the Students for Justine in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace organizations were unjustly suspended that November. This also led to the previously-established Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition to be re-ignited afterwards.

Over the next few months there, Columbia students were doxxed and harassed. At a protest in January 2024, several students were even sprayed with a dangerous chemical substance by Columbia School of General Studies students who were former IOF soldiers. Yet the university neglected handling this appropriately, to put it mildly, and tensions continued to grow. Meanwhile, other students internationally continued to be punished, arrested, and targeted as well for any signs of solidarity with Palestine.

This set the stage to be ripe for CUAD students at Columbia to launch the Gaza Solidarity Encampment that began on April 17, setting up tents on a campus lawn at 4am, on the morning that university’s President Minouche Shafik was testifying before Congress. They called for disclosure and divestment from the university. However, instead of the administration engaging in good faith talks, they sent in the police for mass arrests.

That first action at Columbia University would go on to inspire over 170 other encampments across the world, primarily in the United States.

Art played a role in the encampments in different ways. For one, graphic design digital flyers, posted to social media (primarily Instagram), were a way for organizers to draw fellow students and community members to be aware and join in. Other times, multi-post image carousels were used to convey messaging around intentions, repression, or other topics.

There were also art builds as community-building activities, as well as dedicated areas to make signs, banners, and other mediums.

The Palestine Solidarity Committee at Indiana University named different areas after martyrs of Gaza, and for the art center/tent they dedicated it to the memory of Heba Zagout.

In April 2024, Hyperallergic published an article “Art Takes Center Stage at Growing Student Protests for Palestine” about the role of visual arts at the encampments. In the article, writer Mukta Joshi cites Ash Moniz, an artist and member of The New School community – a university who describes itself as a place where “your intellectual and creative journey moves seamlessly between the classroom and the city of New York.”

Yet as Moniz points out, he “observed a tension between universities’ push for socially engaged work and its actions toward students” when the enrolled students there launched one of the many encampments to demand divestment.

“Art is more valuable the more political it is. There is a historical relationship between art and social change, but the capitalist system has hijacked that historical moment. This capital shapes the market in a way that encourages students to embody a type of radicality that the market prefers, rather than the type of radicality that has influenced social change throughout history.”

Back at Columbia, the encampment stayed up after two weeks filled with arrests and more failed dialogue with the school. On April 29, there was a threat of the administration carrying out a police sweep. A smaller group of around 50 Columbia students from the much larger encampment had been feeling a need to escalate their protest further. With a sweep looming, that contingent decided the time had come for another planned step.

Just after midnight April 30, this group of Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall, a building Columbia students in 1968 had occupied in protest against the Vietnam War.

Students re-named it Hind’s Hall in honor of the six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was martyred in January 2024 by the IOF in Gaza while alone in a car. Her phone call with emergency teams to try to save her was heard around the world, just before she was shot with 355 bullets.

As part of the building occupation, a banner was dropped that featured Handala – carrying on the legacy of Palestinian artist Naji al-Ali his and iconic symbol of the Palestinian people.

Unlike in 1968, when then Columbia President pushed for “maximum leniency” of the hundreds of students arrested in the building occupations, this time President Minouche Shafik and New York Police Department had other plans. The next day, a violent police raid on that night of April 30, happened first at Columbia University and then twenty blocks further uptown in Harlem at CUNY City College.

This was an extreme yet mostly emblematic representation of the brutality that protestors at encampments or otherwise faced across the country and world in Spring of 2024. In addition to police brutality, there has been violence from Zionist agitators against students – most notably at UCLA – as well as general harassment.

In another art-related example, a group of couple dozen students from the SJP chapter at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) also occupied an admin building on campus a week later in May 2024. They renamed it Fathi Ghaben Place after the artist who had recently passed in Gaza after not being able to evacuate for treatment.

Inside, the RISD student group also painted a mural of Ghaben. In their case, their four-day occupation eventually ended after the students were threatened with expulsion if they did not leave by a set deadline.

RISD administration, unlike other universities, said they did not want to bring in law enforcement to engage with students, perhaps not wanting a repeat of the bad PR that came with aggressive deployment or just wanting to avoid any potential litigation. Or, maybe as universities should, they didn’t want their students physically harmed if they could avoid it.

The spirit of the encampments also inspired creatives from around the world to make their own art in solidarity – with either specific schools or the student movement more broadly.

Just as the encampments were not limited to America, neither were the actions of art students. Dazed Magazine published a piece in July 2024 entitled How UK art students used their degree shows to protest for Palestine that covered actions from schools such as the University of Arts London and Goldsmiths' College. Students have been persistent in protests and using their own shows as spaces to exhibit art tied to Palestine and demand divestment, as well as putting on workshops and other educational efforts.

Goldsmiths for Palestine (GFP) students also occupied the Goldsmiths Centre of Contemporary Arts space and staged their own guerrilla exhibition, with specific attention given to the work of Palestinian artists, entitled And Still We Rise: A People’s Exhibition for Palestine.

“We chose to occupy the CCA due to the existence of the ‘Candida and Zac Gertler Gallery’, which we have since renamed the ‘Walid Daqqa Gallery’, in memory of the Palestinian political prisoner who was murdered by the Israeli state this April,” said one student. (For context: Daqqa was refused a release from prison after being held for 38 years, despite having cancer at the end of his life. To this day, Israeli courts have refused to even release Daqqa’s body to his family, saying it can be used as a bargaining chip in hostage negotiations.)

Following Goldsmith’s students demands to remove Gertler’s name and ties to the gallery – due to the family’s ties to funding Israel – the university later agreed in October 2024 to take Gertler off the gallery, exhibition notes, and donor board.

In November 2024, a Columbia students also launched an art exhibition to look back on the encampment under the name of “Hind’s House” – a nod back to Hind Rajab and the Hind’s Hall name – by a group also named the Hinds House Collective (HHC). In their statement, they said art building during the encampments served as a vital outlet for community, a means to come together and stand against genocide. The installation also happened again in December 2024 at another location and appears to be the start of a recurring event.

Overall in the Fall 2024 semester, encampments specifically may have been less frequent (though still going, like at Sarah Lawrence College) but students have continued to disrupt in many ways. They have to navigate a level of crackdown and repression that is even higher than the Spring, with university administrations continuing to be beholden to donors and their investments. Even activities as simple as students doing a study-in at their library with keffiyehs or solidarity signs on their computers have proven “the Palestine exception” of free speech at universities is arguably more enforced than ever.

Design & Photos for Protests
One aspect to the student encampments in Spring 2024 was that they often called on community members to come and support, especially when they were being targeted by the school’s administration and/or police. To answer calls from the students, there were local protests in solidarity.

Sometimes it was just assorted residents who showed up. Other times, local Pro-Palestinian groups helped to organize people to help support the universities.

One example of this was from Within Our Lifetime (WOL) in New York City, who organized frequently outside encampments at different NYC schools like Columbia, CUNY City College, and more.

WOL is an organization that actually grew out of starting as a New York City chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine around a decade ago. It then grew into its own community-based organization, in particular for Muslims and Arabs in New York City. It was renamed in 2019 with its own points of unity as a way to continue organizing after and outside of the school system.

They are one of the groups around the world who had been organizing protests for years, but received heightened participation from more people joining the cause in the streets after October 2023, due to the ongoing genocide and further exposure of the long history of Zionist violence against Palestinians.

The international protests have been persistent during the year and counting, often met with police repression as well.

Throughout protests in several areas like New York City and Berlin, photography has been a medium used to capture the actions through different lenses and perspectives. Captured in them are also visual staples of said actions – such as keffiyehs, the Palestinian flag or related flags, sign art, banners, and other forms of representation.

Poster Resurgence
The art of posters had never officially died out, but there was certainly a decline in their means of getting messages out between the signing of Oslo and the start of the genocide. While the Palestine Poster Project is not a fully comprehensive archive that covers anything, it does give a general sense of trends in production.

At a time when social media allows everyone to share their work, it is an unprecedented time when considering both the amount of visual art made in support of Palestine internationally and how easy it is to share it digitally.

One can look to Flyers for Falastin as just one example of all of the artwork that people around the world have been making and sharing daily in this period. They also work with artists to make designs available online to print out physically and distribute widely.

There are also plenty of great individuals and teams doing great work as well. One independent example is Studio Salud, who has crafted their own style of mostly black-and-white posters that have a carefully crafted style. The person behind the studio, Monica, is a Jewish-American artist and Creative Director who has for years rejected the occupation.

Local resistance groups in Gaza and the West Bank have continued the historic tradition and used posters as well. And since they’re deemed by Western countries as “terrorist” groups, those factions are banned from having direct accounts on major social media platforms.

However, through other methods online, the digital poster designs are able to be distributed – along with other materials, including videos that document their own operations against the IOF through GoPro and SLR digital cameras. They have shown throughout the genocide that they continue to carry out successful missions against the IOF, inflicting more casualties than are reported in Israeli official numbers, and showing that the resistance has remained steadfast throughout the genocide.

It’s especially worth noting the poster side of this because of the tradition displayed across this page of Art History, of which resistance art is an undeniable part of. Even publishing the work on this page presents a risk, but it would not be sufficient to speak to the visual art of this moment without speaking on it for educational purposes.

Since the 1960s there has been a significant use of the poster as a propaganda tool. The significance and distribution today is different, of course, but clearly they are still part of a messaging strategy – one that shouldn’t be ignored. And some day these posters may belong in a museum, along with others from the Palestine Poster Project archive.

From a design perspective, most of their posters follow a more digitally-heavy look, but occasionally there are other types of approaches.

As a side note, resistance fighters have also referenced Handala, Naji Al-Ali’s character, in at least once instance – part of a broader approach in communicating Palestinian history, people, culture, locations, fellow or past fighters, and anything representing the reason why they’re dedicated to the liberation of the country.

Impact in the West Bank
For artists in the West Bank who are not going through this genocide, they still have their own system of apartheid filled with repression. Yet the pain they feel for their fellow Palestinians have placed a heavy weight on their hearts. Sliman Mansour – who remains in the West Bank – has said his work has taken a hit in the past year.

“Many artists, myself included, are unsure of what to do at this moment. I can say this is the most challenging period I’ve ever experienced. As an artist living under occupation, not knowing what to do is incredibly difficult. Our work and production have significantly decreased, but for now, we continue to try, hoping that change will come through persistence.”

Within the first year after the genocide began, there were over 11,000 Palestinians arrested in the West Bank. Another 4,500 have been displaced. The conditions have continued to worsen for everyday life, even more dramatically than before, for people of all ages.

Most notably, at the end of August 2024, Israeli Occupation Forces launched “Operation Summer Camps” – their largest military operation in the West Bank since the Second Intifada, more than 20 years earlier. Jenin was under siege for 10 days, including massive destruction of infrastructure and dozens martyred, as well as in other areas nearby like Tulkarem and Tubas. Since then the aggression has continued from both settlers and enlisted IOF soldiers.

Local journalist Mariam Barghouti said in November 2024: “We are so heavily surveilled in the West Bank. From drones to at least five cameras at every junction, infiltration to our phones, to settlers controlling Palestinian movement. Israeli soldiers are always stationed at the edges of every single village or town in the West Bank with guns and watchtowers. Every move is watched… It’s truly like a big torture camp, and the prisons are our own homes.”

Dazed Magazine also published an article in October 2024 entitled Israel’s relentless war on culture in the West Bank, highlighting how the repression in the West Bank has also targeted arts organizations and individuals. This includes Dar Jacir, as well as its nearby Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, which has been forced to shift its heavy efforts on creative projects to those of medical and food programs, with little time left for art.

The article talks about how some people feel so distraught over the luck they have to be in the West Bank, despite their own conditions, because they look to the people of Gaza and can’t bear what they’re forced to go through at the same time. Around this point, the article also notes:

“For people in the West, it might be comforting to think of art and culture as something which endures even in the bleakest circumstances: maybe it makes us feel less guilty about the crimes being committed with the support of our governments; maybe it appeals to some sentimental ideas about the indomitability of the human spirit.

In the case of Palestine, this idea is to some extent true: people are still making art, still preserving their culture, and still fighting for liberation. Palestinians are not passive victims. You don’t have to look hard to find humbling acts of courage or collective care. But the reality is more complicated.

As Emily (Jacir) says, some people are so distressed that they cannot continue to function as normal, and this is not a mark of weakness or a failure on their part, but a profoundly human reaction to slaughter on a mass scale.”

While this page primarily focuses on Palestine, it’s worth noting the heightened Israeli aggression on Lebanon that ramped up at the end of September 2024, which is still ongoing. This included the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an attack on Beirut in an attack that killed many Lebanese civilians.

As Israel claims to be targeting Hezbollah everywhere, just like they do with Hamas, there have been endless airstrikes on civilians and mass displacement of millions of Lebanese. Around 37 villages in southern Lebanon were demolished as of early November 2024.

There have also been Israeli airstrike attacks elsewhere in the Middle East – such as in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran – that are not as extensive yet, but still harmful.

The people in Gaza have expressed their appreciation for their allies, like with a mural that went viral by 22-year-old Palestinian artist Jameel Al-Baz.

One Year & Counting
Around the year mark of the ongoing genocide, at the start of October 2024, the IOF enacted a so-called “General’s Plan” of heightened ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, intended to pave the way for future settlements and continue the displacement of the Nakba.

The IOF imposed a complete siege of Jabalia – as well as Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun – described as a “genocide within a genocide.”

As they committed war crimes in the North during this time, there was also a notable moment down South in Rafah on October 16, 2024, an area that has been destroyed beyond measure. After seeing some movement in a location, Israeli Occupation Forces targeted a building with a drone strike. The people in there, who were resistance fighters, survived as more fighting ensued.

Eventually, an Israeli drone entered the building and found a fighter sitting on a chair, down to one arm, with a keffiyeh wrapped around his head. The fighter threw a wooden stick at it as a last sign of struggle. Right after, the building was bombed.

The next morning, IOF soldiers came back to check on the body and realized it had been Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas, who fought until his very last breath. They had martyred him by accident, not even knowing who it had been in the moment.

Sinwar’s final moments, documented in footage released by Israeli Occupation Forces for their own PR purposes, led to many emphasizing this in fact gave him an even greater legacy as a result – including by artists who paid tribute to him in the immediate days that followed.

Despite Israel’s publicly-claimed goals of “eliminating Hamas” or “bringing home the hostages” – which they claim Sinwar’s death is a vital blow for – nothing changed about their approach after. Their aggression only further increased.

After a month of an escalated and ongoing siege on northern Gaza, including against hospital and civil defense infrastructure, an IOF General said on US Election night that “Palestinians will not be allowed to return to homes in northern Gaza.”

This has been a common tactic, of carrying out attacks – or in this case announcing strategy – while there is a big distraction like American holidays and major cultural events.

Later in the week, the IOF put out a statement to back pedal, but it seems clear that their intention is to take over the North, potentially to try to build settlements there (which haven’t existed in Gaza since 2005) for Israeli settlers to live.

No matter what their next plans truly are, there needs to be an arms embargo by the US and other Western countries to end the genocide. Even the International Criminal Court has finally ordered arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant as of November 2024.

It’s been over 425 days and Israeli forces continue to act with impunity. When will the modern-day holocaust end?

Last updated: December 2024