This chapter will explore Palestinian identity and how it is developed and represented through art from the region. The biggest factor that affected art production is the political changes that led to the loss of home and the attachment to the land.
Introduction:
This history of Palestinian art is difficult to trace. It is a reflection of the fragmentation that the Palestinian people experienced as well as a reflection of their resilience. The history cannot be discussed in chronological order, but should rather be studied in relation to and as a reaction to the political environment surrounding it. Palestinians can be defined as those born in the country, those residing in the West Bank and Gaza, Arabs living in Israel today, or those who migrated to other parts of the world. Families that migrated to different parts of the world adopted new nationalities, yet strongly hold on to their Palestinian identity. Despite the various experiences and geographic differences, a natural culture is commonly shared between them. Those living in Palestine or in Palestinian communities in Israel are “cherished as Palestinians ‘already there,’ so to speak, Palestinians who live on the edge, under the gun, inside the barriers and kasbahs, entitling them to a kind of grace denied to the rest of us” (Said, 1998). However, those that remained experience displacement in different ways as they became second class minorities in a primarily Jewish state.
The identity of Palestinians develops depending on place and time. Palestinians experienced life under occupation or exile in various ways. Those in exile told their children and future generations of life in Palestine, passing on the hope of returning home to their children. Through these stories, the ‘Golden Era’ of modern Palestine was born, where children were raised with a sense of identity to a nation that was being erased. Today, the UNRWA provides aid for more than five million registered Palestinian refugees in different parts of the Arab world. UNRWA allows Palestinians to pass on their refugee status to their children, keeping the right of return for Palestinians alive and ensuring that the hope of return doesn’t change with the death of the original refugees.
While Palestinian artists reside in various parts of the world and lived through different experiences of the occupation, their art grew out of their ‘Palestinian experience.’ Artist and art historian Kamal Boullata discusses the hardships of tracing “the budding art movement that was taking root in the country before the national catastrophe that precipitated the deracination and dispersal of the Palestinian people and the looting of art works from abandoned urban homes after their inhabitants fled in panic following the onslaught of the Jewish forces” (Boullata, 2009).
The creation of the Jewish state led to a fragmentation in a nation as well as a thriving art movement. Built on undermining the history of Palestine, Israeli leaders worked on “supplanting Palestine’s Arab heritage with a Jewish one” (Dajani, 2007). This is seen in the censorship and banning of culture and even more blatantly with the renaming of towns and villages from their original Arabic names to Hebrew names. During the Nakba, 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. Jewish immigrants newly arrived to the land were given emptied homes of Palestinians which were seized by Israeli officers. New Israeli communities were built over Palestinian towns and villages. This continues today in the form of settlements on Palestinian land despite the UN resolutions and the condemnation of the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Those that remained witness “the daily transformation and discrimination that have rendered them strangers in their own land” (Sherwell, 1999).
The creation of Israel also divided Palestinians into two regions, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Also immobilised and restricted from entering other parts of the country, locals were separated from their families who were pushed to Gaza or Ramallah and are unable to visit one other. This divide also led to a fragmentation in the art movements. “The loss of land, occupation and displacement has always affected the work of Palestinian artists, be they refugees living in camps in the diaspora or in the Israeli-occupied territories, citizens of Israel or migrants interacting with different cultures around the world” (Kadi, 2015).
The complications behind work that is Palestinian raises questions. One would consider whether all art that is related to Palestine is rooted in nationalism and the struggle for freedom. How does the current global understanding of Palestine affect art, and how do artists affect the development of art both the in region and elsewhere? The intense global discussions of Palestine has implicated the art world in different ways.