Second Intifada
2000 - 2005

After the “peace process” of Oslo proved to be a failure, another rebellion began.

Bursting The Bubble
In what were supposed to be the transition years of Oslo from 1993-2000, things had only gotten worse.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) put in place had proven to be not just incompetent, but ultimately seen as corrupted collaborators in implementing the same system of Zionist oppression. In the West Bank, the amount of settlers doubled from 200,000 to 400,000 in this period.

By the time the Camp David Summit in the United States wrapped up in the summer of 2000, a last ditch effort with no resolution for Palestinians, there was no lack of clarity in where things stood.

Any initial optimism for the Oslo Accords had vanished, those like Edward Said who predicted its shortcomings were proven correct, and the momentum from the first Intifada had been weakened by the agreement.

A couple of months later, things would take another turn when Ariel Sharon paid a visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque. Sharon served as a longtime IOF military leader – dating back to being a platoon commander in the 1948 Nakba and being involved in many of the major attacks until his transition to politics with involvement in the Israeli Likud party in the 1970s. When the party held government power during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Sharon was deemed personally responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees. In 1999, he had become the leader of the Likud party.

On September 28, 2000, Sharon stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque with more than 1,000 armed Israeli officers, a blatant show of disrespect for Palestinians and Muslims alike as the ultimate holy location of the land.

Immediately after, Palestinians began to protest. They were immediately met with violence by Israeli officers. From some civil disobedience and stone-throwing by Palestinians to the IOF using rubber bullets and live ammunition.

On September 30, only a couple days into protests, 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah was martyred by Israeli military fire at the Netzarim junction during the midst of protests in Gaza. He was hiding behind his father, Jamal al-Durrah, who survived. Captured by Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, the scene has remained embedded in the minds of many.

The Israeli army and government would, for years, try to push lies about the footage. But it was a window into the world of the violence that foreshadowed the upcoming IOF aggression.

Within the first week, there were dozens of martyrs and almost two thousand injured. A majority of those attacked were just civilian bystanders, not even part of the demonstrations. Over the first month, over a million rounds of Israeli ammunition were reportedly fired.

This proved to be a landmark point, and the Second Intifada was born – also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

Only a few months earlier (in May), Hezbollah forces in neighboring Lebanon had achieved a victory in getting the Israeli Occupation Forces to evacuate out of southern Lebanon, ending what had formally been 15 straight years of occupation there. Hezbollah, which had been born out of Israel invading the southern part of their country, had demonstrated another example of the power – and necessity – of armed resistance against occupiers.

With this new uprising, Palestinians under attack and ongoing occupation were hardly left with an alternative to armed struggle continuing to play a central role. Certainly this was the perspective of the coalition of Palestinian groups who had rejected the Oslo process from the very beginning – including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP. There were only some like Mahmoud Abbas who felt that military confrontation would only result in an Israeli victory, and repeatedly tried to propose a reduction of military operations. They were in the minority. Within Fatah, the Tanzim group led by Marwan Barghouti felt that more negotiations would just be a pretext for more annexation.

This time, however, the heightened intensity of Israeli crackdown meant that popular protests among civilians was not possible in the way it had before. As noted in The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question:

“The intifada had already shifted in late November 2000 from mass demonstrations to shooting attacks by Palestinian activists (mainly by Fatah in the first stage) as a response to Israel's harsh repression, and levels of violence varied during the following months.

Israeli actions took the form of shelling PA administrative offices and security compounds, conducting incursions in areas under PA's jurisdiction, closing off these areas, imposing curfews, carrying out targeted assassinations of militants, leveling houses, uprooting agricultural lands, and erecting hundreds of checkpoints to hinder Palestinians' movement.

Palestinian militants resorted to detonating road-side bombs, firing at Israeli soldiers and settlers, launching mortar attacks (mainly against Israeli military positions and settlements in and around the Gaza Strip), and, starting late May 2001, carrying out suicide bombings (principally by Hamas, followed by Fatah and Islamic Jihad).”

The suicide bombings were “weapons of the last resort” according to Abdel al-Aziz Rantisi, a Co-Founder of Hamas (then assassinated in 2004), and this method was primarily just implemented for a stretch during this period.

“The Palestinians did try to conduct the Aqsa Intifada along the lines of the former intifada. But the Israeli army left them no choice but to react to the much deadlier and superior Israeli violence,” wrote Ilan Pappé, a well-known historian who lived in Israeli-designated territory.

Pappé also added that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak “offered the Palestinians a take-it or leave-it deal at Camp David. The Palestinians didn’t take it, and the Israeli response was: If you don’t accept our offer, you are going to get crushed and severely punished.”

Ariel Sharon, who had lit the spark was for the Al-Aqsa Intifada, succeeded Barak as Israeli Prime Minister in February 2001. This only solidified the uprising, which would spread beyond just the West Bank.

During this time – to try to further restrict movement for Palestinians – there were hundreds of Israeli roadblocks, closures, and an overall blocking of travel between villages, camps, and cities. Even in emergency situations, such as pregnant women needing to reach hospitals, it did not matter.

This included the destruction of the Gaza International Airport, which had just opened in 1998. It was seen by some as a step towards future independence, though Israeli security was in complete control of who flew, as well as managing security checks at the airport. As soon as the Second Intifada kicked off, flights from Gaza were halted on October 7, 2000. Starting in 2001, Israeli planes targeted the airport with airstrikes and their tanks tore up the runway.

In March 2002, Israeli Occupation Forces decided to invade Area A of the West Bank. They brought in snipers, attack helicopters, armored bulldozers, and tanks – resulting in over 500 Palestinian martyrs during the two months of attacks. This included the 10-day battle in the Jenin refugee camp. After a month of sustained attacks, forces removed some troops while continuing to launch attacks.

Right after this, in June 2002, the Israeli government approved the initial construction of the Apartheid Wall, aka the Separation Wall, annexing more land to Israeli control – which was later determined by the International Court of Justice to be violating international law.

While the West Bank was the focus in the first years of the Second Intifada, the Gaza strip became a more focal point later. The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question notes:

“By 2003, the main battlefield had shifted to Gaza, with skillful camp-based resistance, an extended territorialized version of the Jenin strategy. Israeli settlements were regularly blockaded by Palestinian fighters and presumed to be surrounded by treacherous deadly explosive devices hidden in the sands: Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers were blown up. Israel assassinated Palestinian leaders, particularly those of Hamas, which resulted in deadly revenge attacks, in turn occasioning Israeli airborne reprisals, causing heavy civilian deaths and injuries.”

The Eyes of Cinema
In the Spring of 2002 immediately after the Battle of Jenin, director Mohammad Bakri snuck into the closed-off Jenin refugee camp with a camera and sound person. They filmed interviews with the Palestinians of the camp, who shared their experiences about the Israeli Occupation Forces attacks.

Bakri had been living in the ‘48 territories – where he was technically an “Israeli citizen” though he was not treated equally because of his Palestinian background. Bakri was tired of only seeing the “Israeli” side being covered. He wanted to give his people a voice. This became the documentary of Jenin, Jenin (2002).

After premiering in October 2002, the film quickly drew the fury of the Israeli army, government and public, receiving a ban until later in 2003. It would go into a relentless legal battle in the coming years, particularly with legal action pursued by IOF soldiers who felt their actions in the film “portrays us as war criminals and murderers, as the perpetrators of a massacre, and effectively, without explicitly saying so, as Nazis.”

This is not an assertion that Bakri himself makes in the film. It’s viewed a documentary for capturing moments of real life, but it does not have a narrator who explains everything that happened, nor does it try to be a definitive record. Rather, it just embraces his mission to give Palestinians an outlet after the Battle of Jenin.

While in modern day everyone has a phone camera where images and videos can be easily shared across social media channels, that was not the case yet at this time. Jenin, Jenin gave Palestinians a chance to share their side and describe in their own words how they’d been affected.

Separately, an up-and-coming filmmaker in the diaspora at this time was Rosalind Nashashibi, who was was born in London to a Palestinian father and Irish mother but often took trips back at a young age to visit family in the West Bank.

During the early 2000s, Nashashibi started to make short films in Palestine – Dahiet al Bareed, District of the Post Office (2002) and Hreash House (2004). Those two shorts showed her early interest in ways to capture her family homeland, and each had a personal connection. Dahiet al Bareed was where her father grew up. More notably, the town was actually conceived and built by her grandfather, who had ran the Palestinian Post Office.

The neighborhood itself eventually floated into a grey area of sorts. “It is technically West Bank but it has never been under the control of the Palestinian Authority — it’s under the administrative division of the Israeli military,” Nashashibi said of the featured area “Nobody was really looking after the place so the kids seemed to be ruling the streets. A place defined by the checkpoint down the road and its position as neither Occupied Territory nor the West Bank.” She ended up making the self-titled Dahiet Al Bareed, District of the Post Office (2002) and simply documented some moments of everyday life.

Nashashibi’s next Palestine-based short film, Hreash House (2004), was inspired by visiting a family friend in Al-Nasirah – aka Nazareth – where she wanted to capture the collective living and community inside this one home. It ended up being filmed over four weeks, including a big dinner during Ramadan.

''My father grew up in that situation,'' Nashashibi said. ''My mother also grew up in an extended family in Belfast, and she talked about it a lot, what she had that we didn't have: big family dinners that went on for ages, big discussions around the table. I didn't have that when I grew up. Most of the world is still structured like that, although it is changing; the extended family has a much larger significance than just Palestinians or Arabs.''

Art Veterans Transition to New Century
As the Second Intifada began at the end of 2000, established Palestinian artists from the prior decades and half-century continued to make important work, many opening themselves up to continual experimentation.

Artists like Sliman Mansour had, since the First Intifada, began to experiment with new mediums or techniques. Mansour continued to do that into the 2000s, working with mud in what would become a permanent tool in his creative kit.

The experimentation was not exclusive to those part of the New Visions group, of course. Samia Halaby, for example, was in New York City and had become interested in the Amiga computer – exploring the creation of digital, animated paintings. Both Mansour and Halaby continued to also make work in their more traditional painting style at this time of the century change as well.

Vera Tamari went even further outside of her previous comfort zone. She had been part of the League of Palestinian Artists and a member of the New Visions group during the First Intifada, as well as a founding member of Al-Wasiti Art Center. Along with her brother, Vladimir Tamari, their family had cemented themselves as part of the Palestinian art world.

During the Second Intifada, in 2002, Tamari took her work outside the traditional scope by creating a special installation – entitled Going for a Ride? – her most notable and discussed creation of this period.

In the installation, she took a group of cars and lined them up in an intentionally-designed way at a field by her house as a commentary on the continual destruction of the cars (and other property) by Israeli Occupation Forces.

However, it was upon the art opening that it really took on its final form. After the launch festivities, with a celebration that lasted late into the night, Tamari then woke up at 4am to loud noises. What she saw, and captured on video, was Israeli tanks who eventually decided to run over the whole exhibit repeatedly before shelling and urinating on the wreckage. Tamari felt this realized her concept better than she could have even imagined – the “ultimate metamorphosis” for the piece. For example, before she had tried to make the illusion of tank tracks in the dirt, but now she had real ones as the Israeli forces proved her point.

Tamari’s usage of “found” objects was one of several installations during this time, particularly in Ramallah, as artists continued to expand their imagination – both as a means of necessity and survival, as well as just finding new ways to communicate their ideas.

Other established artists such as Ismail Shammout and Tamam Al-Akhal, who had come from a generation prior, stuck more to what they knew at an older age. That is not to say it in a negative light, as in fact they were arguably at the top of their game. The end of the ‘90s into the early 2000s was a key time as they finished and exhibited their series – Palestine: The Exodus and the Odyssey. Both also continued to make paintings. Shammout created until passing away in 2006 from his ongoing health issues, leaving behind an important legacy.

Developing & Showcasing Creativity
After there were finally a group of art spaces established in the 1990s, particularly in the West Bank, they continued to play a role in cultural development.

This wasn’t without difficulties during the Second Intifada, when several of these institutions were shelled and ransacked by Israeli forces. The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center was one of these places impacted, but they continued to do important work during this period.

Often the center featured solo exhibitions of many different Palestinian, Arab, and other artists across mediums – such as Samir Salameh, Rudanya Qasrawi, Dina Ghazal, Husni Radwan, Mohammad Saleh Khalil, Rashid Koraichi, and many more.

This also included an exhibit in February 2001 where Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, Director of Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center at the time, wanted to put together an exhibit that honored the martyrs, give families a place to grieve, but also a place where they could get to know who these people were. This became a show entitled 100 Shaheed, 100 Lives where everyday objects important to each civilian victim were brought in to represent them, along with a personal photograph.

“The objects included a woman's unfinished piece of embroidery, a favorite cup from which a young man used to drink his morning coffee, a candle holder a youth had brought back as a souvenir from Egypt, a schoolboy's tie and jacket, a wedding photograph, jeans, headphones, a key chain, worry beads, an amulet, a schoolbag, a t-shirt, a cap, a pen,” wrote Kamal Boullata in his book Palestinian Art.

The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center also contributed to fostering creativity in even younger kids by hosting art workshops after the end of normal public school hours. In addition, they created booklets after featuring images of the students work, their names, and the names of their schools.

Another institution that was making an impact with a younger generation was A.M. Qattan Foundation, which started the Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) as an ongoing biennial program in 2000.

They were focused on artists slightly older than just students, as it was open to artists in their twenties. The only requirement was to have at least one Palestinian parent, but you could be living anywhere in the country or diaspora.

The idea was for group of around a dozen finalists to be selected and then a jury of both local and international artists would evaluate the work. It was a program designed most importantly to nurture the developing artists.

Mediums included drawings, paintings, film, photography, video, installations, and more. This included a mix of Palestinian artists from across the country and sometimes from the diaspora. From the start, even just being chosen as a finalist led to more attention on an artist’s work and several were then invited to exhibit abroad.

During the 2002 exhibition, it was observed that artists did not desire to reflect the ongoing violence or make traditionally nationalistic paintings – though several still made work through the lens of their Palestinian identity and reality. Each artist focused on their own personal perspectives.

Kamal Boullata, who himself was part of the jury at one point, writes in Palestinian Art:

“To the young artists who participated in the 2002 Biennial Exhibition, and those who attended the workshops, the very act of creating a work of art was experienced as an expression of defiance and an assertion of the will to resist the bleak reality of everyday life in the ghetto where indiscriminate violence continued to be waged against their besieged people.

As to the audience that was able to view the exhibitions, the artists' works declared that no one stands alone, be they artists or viewers. Through the wide range of art works created by the youngest generation of Palestinian artists, a whole new horizon seemed to loom beyond the walls being raised around them.”

End of Second Intifada
Mahmoud Abbas had been a longtime Fatah member, recruited in 1961 soon after Arafat co-founded it, and was the PLO signatory for the Oslo Accords.

Yassir Arafat was serving as President of the Palestinian Authority (PA) during the Second Intifada, and in 2003 he faced U.S. and international pressure for a shift in leadership to try to work out a deal. He had strategic differences with Abbas, but reluctantly agreed to appoint him to a Palestinian Prime Minister position. However, Abbas attempts at peace talks bore no results and he resigned later that year with no success. He and Arafat struggled over their political perspectives and power distribution. Arafat passed away from health issues in late 2004 and it was Abass who took over as the PLO Chairman.

Elections for the Palestinian Authority were soon held at the start of 2005 to officially determine Arafat’s successor.

However, it was an election that was boycotted by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, with few other known candidates able to compete. Abass then became the PA President with the Fatah party.

He had been against Palestinian militant operations from the beginning. After being elected, Abass was able to come to an agreement with the leadership of Hamas and other Palestinian factions to stop military operations until the end of 2005. Afterwards, legislative elections would be held. This allowed for Abass to then sign a ceasefire agreement with Ariel Sharon at the Sharm El Sheikh Summit in February 2005.

The deal included the "redeployment" of the Israeli forces from Gaza to the borders, a plan that had been devised by Sharon in the previous years, where Israeli forces controlled the Gaza strip in a new way. The terms also included the retreatment of four settlements in the northern West Bank. The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question notes:

“The disengagement (carried out in August–September 2005), combined with the construction of the separation barrier in the West Bank, marked an important step in Israel's strategy to separate the Gaza Strip from the West Bank and to consolidate its control over the West Bank.”

The agreement formally marked the end of the Second Intifada / Al-Aqsa Intifada. There were around 5,000 Palestinian martyrs reported from this time, a quarter being children. In addition, a higher number of other Palestinians were injured.

After the agreement, IOF troops evacuated the Gaza Strip and over 9,000 Israeli settlers living in 25 settlements across the area were evicted. By the end of September 2005, their had been a complete withdrawal from Gaza. This was a notable victory in the moment, as the first Palestinian land to be secured again.

Culture Under Occupation
2010 - 2023

The arts and life in general tried to continue while Gaza remained under an air, land, and sea blockade – including amidst several attacks from Israeli Occupation Forces.

Picasso in Palestine
Another arts organization that had been founded in 2006 was The International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP), the first institution dedicated exclusively to the study of visual art in Palestine, based out of Ramallah in the West Bank.

One of the co-founders of the The International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP) was Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani, who was then General Director from 2010-2013.

His most well-known project is bringing a Picasso painting to be temporarily exhibited in Ramallah. The artist choice was less for his notoriety purely as an artist but as one who engaged in topics of politics, war, peace, and conflict. Picasso himself once said:

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

In 2011, Picasso’s “Buste de Femme” painting (worth $7.1 million at the time) was brought from the Van Abbemuseum in The Netherlands to Ramallah in Palestine. The specific piece was voted on by Hourani’s students.

This had been a two-year process to make happen. As Al Jazeera notes, “Because of the occupation and inherent limitations on Palestinian sovereignty, what is ordinarily a straightforward loan from one museum to another suddenly took on a political, diplomatic and military character.” This included insurance, which presented a real risk from Israeli Occupation Forces invasion(s) into the area.

A representative from an insurance company in The Netherlands looked into it and saw the Oslo Accords had no basis of understanding for how it could travel to the country, noting “Oslo missed out on one of our basic fields of work: art and culture.” Eventually, they worked out the logistics.

The International Academy of Art Palestine’s gallery was actually located at the same place where Sliman Mansour had opened Gallery 79 for The League of Palestinian Artists a few decades prior, which had been forcibly shut down.

Mansour himself was the first person invited to be on hand for the arrival of the Picasso. It was exhibited in a very small area that had all sorts of regulations for the room, 24/7 security, limited people at a time, and more.

Hourani saw the project was a way to point out the realities of Palestinian life, and how bringing a painting like this could be so difficult. “What should be normal is bringing a Picasso,” he said. “The thing that should stop is the occupation.”

The Dutch museum who had provided the painting felt it was important, too. “Our Picasso will be changed by its journey to Ramallah, it will take on extra meaning and the story will remain a part of the history of the painting from this moment on,” said Charles Esche, then director of the Van Abbemuseum. “It feels like we are constructing new histories with such a project.”

Another aspect of it was that Hourani hired a filmmaking crew to document the journey of the idea, as he wanted to capture whatever happened – even if it hadn’t been successful in bringing over the painting. This footage turned into a documentary that was then released in 2015 about the whole process.

In addition, Hourani also later created his own paintings tied to the exhibit as well.

Community of Arts Groups
In 2012, the Qalandiya International was founded as a biennale exhibit that was described as a culmination of efforts from seven significant Palestinian cultural institutions who focused on contemporary art and the cultural landscape of Palestine.

This included A. M. Qattan Foundation, Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, The International Art Academy of Art Palestine, Palestinian Art Court – Al Hoash, Riwaq, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, and the Nazareth House of Art and Culture.

The choice of the name and location in Qalandiya had significance, too:

“For the past decade, Qalandiya has been associated with the Israeli checkpoint that continues to suffocate the West Bank, disconnecting it from Jerusalem and the rest of the world. This checkpoint has been highly pervasive in the media and in the visual and literary works produced in and about Palestine. Countless stories about daily suffering and subjugation take place there, offering sad but true glimpses of the oppressive regime of the Occupation.”

In 2014, other art groups also joined as partners – such as The Palestinian Museum, Arab Cultural Association, Etiqa Group, Shababik for Contemporary Art, and more. It took place across multiple Palestinian towns and villages including Al Quds, Haifa, Ramallah, and Hebron. It also took place in Gaza, only a few months after the nearly two-month IOF invasion there in the summer of that year.

In 2016, the third and so far final rendition of the exhibition took place in multiple areas including inside Palestine but also outside of it (Beirut, Amman, and London). There was also a 2018 exhibition. It’s unapparent if it stopped in 2020 due to the breakout of the coronavirus pandemic or other reasons.

The A.M. Qattan Foundation, one of the founding partners, also continued their own efforts – including their own biennale program of the Young Artist of the Year Award that had started in 2000. It ran through 2020, awarding 11 artists in total over that time.

Another important initiative is Dar Jacir, otherwise known in full as Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research. The location is the Jacir’s family’s 19th century home in Bethlehem, which had been built in the 1880s and often became a place for neighbors and travelers to get free meals, developing a reputation for the saying of “the food is at Dar Jacir.”

The house was lost to bankruptcy in 1929, after which it was used as a prison and army base by the British during the Mandate period. It was later bought again by another Jacir family member in 1980. Then in 2014, Yusuf Nasri Jacir had become sole owner of the property and wanted to turn it into a cultural center. His daughters, artist and filmmaker sisters Annemarie Jacir and Emily Jacir, became Co-Founders of the space. (Currently, is Emily is co-director with Aline Khoury.)

Since the Apartheid Wall started going up in the early 2000s, it has severely cut into and divided Bethlehem – in particular right near the Jacir home. The building is a couple hundred feet from the wall and close to a checkpoint, an area where there have often been groups of protestors against the occupation. As of 2017, the area nearby – including the Aida refugee camp – was deemed the most teargassed location in the world.

Dar Jacir initially opened as a space for art and culture and then in 2018 they started offering residence programs for artists, giving Palestinian and international artists the chance to work in the area while working on their own projects.

The IOF has since raided the Dar Jacir facility multiple times – kicking doors in, breaking windows, and stealing equipment. Despite the property destruction, expenses, and inhibited lifestyle – the Jacir family refuses to move.

The artists also interact with the community through workshops, tutorials, collaborations, and more. Dar Jacir helps "facilitate and foster cross-cultural exchanges building bridges between participant and local artists as well as diverse organizations, community centers and school internationally.” They also have a research center devoted to their Ottoman archives.

It operates independently, without funding from governmental agencies and others, in order to maintain full freedom for the artists.

In addition to being a Co-Founder of the space, sister Annemarie Jacir continued to make her own personal work. She followed up her aforementioned debut feature film Salt of the Sea (2008) by making two other features in the decade – When I Saw You (2012) and Wajib (2017).

Emily Jacir, in addition to her work at Dar Jacir, has made art across a variety of mediums. Noteworthy here, she released a documentary called Letter To A Friend (2019) that looked at the history of the family home and surrounding area. For Emily, Dar Jacir is “the root, the very anchor — indeed foundation — to my entire practice as an artist. You could say everything radiates out from here. This is my center.”

In 2015, Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem also started the annual Ismail Shammout Fine Art Award, which was arranged and named in honor of Shammout’s legacy to Palestinian visual arts. and is still ongoing. These are a selection of the way arts groups further emerged during the 2010s.

Internet and Social media
At the time of publishing The Origins of Palestinian Art in 2013, Bashir Makhoul and Gordon Hon had written that “Palestinian artists are using the internet in lieu of official, institutional territorial networks and adequate gallery and studio space, and also as a site or medium for the production of art.” They also acknowledged that the same existing power structures still brought some issues of censorship and control. They proposed that “virtual spaces may become more valuable as sites of cultural development.”

This was evident with artists like a young Malak Mattar, who began to share her work online – making her first post in 2015, when she was 15 years old, after started to pursue art intently after the 2014 attack on Gaza by the Israeli military. Mattar soon developed an audience online that translated into other real-life opportunities, many of which she was limited due to her life and rights to travel as a Palestinian in Gaza.

Looking back at the archive of timing for Palestinian artists sharing on Instagram, it seems younger artists like Mattar were organically quicker to embrace the medium – whereas some older artists began posting to it in the latter years of the 2010s, showcasing an ongoing mixture of past and new work. Some of these artists who are particularly active, like Sliman Mansour, have found an entire new generation of viewers.

In the 2018 dissertation of Sascha Manya Crasnow – The Next Generation: Shifting Notions of Time, Humor, and Criticality in Contemporary Palestinian Art – she also writes that this period impacted both the distribution of Palestinian artist’s work as well as their exposure to other art and information from around the world.

“The rise of the Internet has made the exhibition of digital works internationally possible with the click of a button, even if the artist cannot cross the transnational borders. In the same way, exposure to international work, cultural references, and audiences has increased because of the accessibility of media and sharing opportunities made possible by the Internet. Whether or not artists can travel in and out of Palestine, their accessibility to arts production around the globe is a greater possibility in the post-Oslo world than ever before.”

Crasnow points out that artists grew to have a specific emphasis on digital media forms, too, due to the ease of transfer and transportation. That being said, the visual art produced still included a range of mediums such as painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video.

Art During Attacks
British-Palestinian filmmaker Rosalind Nashashibi had taken a trip to Palestine to make a new short film. Previously she had created works in the West Bank, where her family came from, but this time Gaza was her subject matter. It took her a long time to receive permission to be able to enter, but finally in 2014 she made it there.

However, her time filming was cut significantly short by the start of the next Israeli military assault on Gaza – the largest of the decade, lasting for two months that summer.

Regardless of not being able to complete the production process, Nashashibi managed to capture a variety of great footage that became Electrical Gaza (2014). The short also contains brief animation sequences that are sprinkled in, reflecting scenes from the actual film.

Another Palestinian artist, Nidaa Badwan, started to create her 100 Days of Solitude series of self-portraits in 2013, the name a nod to the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez.

In particular, Badwan cited Márquez’s use of magical realism, which she aimed to infuse the spirit of in her work. Each image would take weeks to devise and find or create the resources for.

Over the course of 20 months, Nidaa Badwan did not leave her 100 square foot room to face the outside world. Inside, in her war-imposed withdrawal and isolation, she created-and photographed-an immersive world of her own. Safe and free in this small oasis, she produced a series of stunning self-portraits, a project she calls 100 Days of Solitude, an homage to the landmark novel of magical realism by Gabriel García Márquez.

The 2014 invasion had brought damage to 20 cultural centers in Gaza from the Israeli military attacks.

Four years later, in 2018, there was a targeted airstrike on the al-Meshal Foundation cultural center in Gaza – which was primarily a theatre space, but also a hub for all artists to come together.

Then 18-year-old photographer Alaa Qudaih told Middle East Eye that she would go often.

“I used to visit the al-Meshal centre regularly because I am interested in art and theatre, especially since there are no real cinemas in Gaza. Instead of watching movies on the internet, I always loved to go there and watch people my age performing and simulating our reality in Gaza.”

After the airstrike, another 18-year-old singer Hazam Gusain led his twelve-man band in a performance on the center’s ruins.

The Middle East Eye article also mentions Alaa al-Gherbawi, then 26, who was working as an activity coordinator for the Palestinian Culture Palace, based on the fourth floor of the al-Meshal building. Gherbawi said it was not only a building, but a "cultural landmark" for the community.

Later, in August 2022, an Israeli airstrike on Gaza resulted in the martyring of 22-year-old artist Duniyana Al-Amour in her home in Khan Yunis, where she was in her bedroom.

Al-Amour was a visual arts student at Al-Aqsa University, where she was just about to graduate from.

In a tribute to her peer on Instagram, Malak Mattar wrote:

“To be a painter in Gaza is to expect death at any moment, while knowing that your paintings will live forever; to seek the safety of your paintings before that of your own self. It is to carry the pain of those around you from the moment you awake till the moment you sleep; to escape through paper and paint that the Occupation barely allows entry. It is to paint the anxiety, isolation and joy on the faces of the people around you, exhausted by siege and war.”

Both Mattar and Al-Amour grew up in Gaza amidst the myriad of attacks, unaware of a life of anything else.

Al-Amour once wrote on her Facebook page: “I am not making anything amazing. I am merely trying, amidst this isolation, to make life bearable.”

Film Censorship, of Past & Present
In January 2021, after nearly two-decades of ongoing trials, the Israeli Supreme Court banned all future screenings of Mohammad Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin – the aforementioned 2002 film.

This was part of the a defamation and libel case by Israeli soldiers, who claim they were inaccurately portrayed as committing war crimes – despite Bakri simply allowing Palestinians to have a voice in telling their story from the Jenin invasion at the time. But the Israeli court nonetheless ordered Bakri to pay $70,000 in compensation to a military officer.

Additionally, this came after a similar defamation case that had been dismissed in 2003 by five Israeli soldiers. Yet 18 years after that, this decision was made against Bakri, a Palestinian filmmaker and actor who lives within the 1948 green line in “Israel.”

As Ramzy Baroud wrote in Mondoweiss:

“The background of the Israeli decision can be understood within two contexts: one, Israel’s regime of censorship aimed at silencing any criticism of the Israeli occupation and apartheid and, two, Israel’s fear of a truly independent Palestinian narrative…

To ensure the erasure of the Palestinians from the official Israeli discourse, Israeli censorship has evolved to become one of the most elaborate and well-guarded schemes of its kind in the world. Its degree of sophistication and brutality has reached the extent that poets and artists can be tried in court and sentenced to prison for merely confronting Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, or penning poems that may seem offensive to Israeli sensibilities…

But the case of Jenin, Jenin is not that of routine censorship. It is a statement, a message, against those who dare give voice to oppressed Palestinians, allowing them the opportunity to speak directly to the world…

Jenin, Jenin is a microcosm of a people’s narrative that successfully shattered Israel’s well-funded propaganda, sending a message to Palestinians everywhere that even Israel’s falsification of history can be roundly defeated.”

Later that year, in September of 2021, a feature film named Farha premiered at the Toronto Film Festival (TIFF), directed by Jordanian-Palestinian filmmaker Darin J. Sallam.

The coming-of-age film takes place in 1948 and tells the story of a 14-year-old girl in Palestine around the time of al-Nakba, who is hidden away by her father as the Israeli Occupation Forces invade their village and target civilians everywhere.

The grandparents of director Darin J. Sallam were exiled in the Nakba, but the story is based not their experience specifically. Instead, Sallam told TIME Magazine:

“There was a girl named Radieh who lived in Palestine in 1948, and she was locked in a room by her father to protect her from Israel’s invasion at that time. Radieh survived and walked to Syria where she shared her story with another girl. That other girl grew up, had a daughter of her own, and shared Radieh’s story with her own daughter—who happened to be me.

Because I’m claustrophobic, I kept thinking about what happened to Radieh. I felt for her. I related to her. Like every Jordanian of Palestinian descent, or any Arab, we grow up listening to stories about Palestine, of the Nakba. All these stories that I heard from my grandparents, families of friends, patched together to create the character of Farha, a name that means joy in Arabic. I chose the name because of how they talked about their life before the Nakba—to me it was life before their joy was stolen.”

Sallam wanted to focus on the character of the young girl who is filled with dreams, only to be forced to abandon everything in her existing life – including her father. She also felt that “There are no movies about this specific time in Palestine. It’s missing in cinema.”

Over a year later, at the start of December 2022, Farha began streaming on Netflix worldwide. That was when it started to be attacked by Israeli officials and general public for the truth it shared about the Nakba, the founding basis of the “State of Israel.”

Israeli officials and social media influencers at the time condemned the movie, saying that its "whole purpose is to create a false pretense and incite against Israeli soldiers." Actions after included online smearing attacks against Sallam’s social media accounts as the director, a coordinated mass stream of negative reviews on IMDb, calls for a boycott of Netflix, and attempts to cut funding for a movie theater in Jaffa who snowed the film. These were among a variety of attempts to paint the film as fictional, antisemitic, and anything they could try to diminish the Palestinian narrative.

Sallam said she was not surprised by the reaction, but sees the refuting of the historic reality as a continuation of the crime. “Denying the Nakba is like denying who I am and that I exist. It’s very offensive to deny a tragedy that my grandparents and my father went through and witnessed, and to make fun of it in the attacks that I’m receiving,” she said in TIME Magazine. “I’m getting hateful, racist messages about who I am, where I come from, and about how I dress. This is not acceptable.”

A Pro-Palestinian campaign to support Farha was launched counteract the Zionist smear attacks, and it continued to receive praise from both viewers and critics alike. The film was also Jordan's submission for the Oscars that year in the Best International Feature Film category, though it was not selected as one of the 15 finalists for the award of the 93 worldwide submissions.

Overall, Palestinian films had picked up momentum in the digital area, since it became more accessible and affordable. According to the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, there were 799 films made between 1916 and 2005 – but then 547 films made between 2006 and 2019. While there was still continued difficulty of filming in the country, and raising funding, the progress was showing no signs of slowing down.