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Art as the Palestinian Land: Reflecting the Dynamics of Palestine and Israel
September 11, 2023
Hala Himzawi
The fragmentation, denial, and persistent repression of the Palestinian identity and territorial independence is part of Israel’s mechanism of utilizing nationalist art. It strives to cleanse the Palestinian culture and derive slogans that misrepresent the Palestinian experience.
Introduction
The history of Palestine is one plagued by geopolitical instability and interracial conflict. Bounded by the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the disputed region is at the crossroads of opposing interests, notably due to Palestine’s religious significance as both the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity as well as Islam’s ‘Holy Land’. Since 1948, Israel has pursued the colonization of Palestinian lands and implemented apartheid policies limiting the opportunities and welfare of its non-Israeli citizens. And amongst the most daunting tasks for Palestinians has been to make the justice of their ancestral claims to homeland heard against Israel’s claim of territorial divine right and defensive privilege; the latter claim predicates on the nullification of Palestinian identity. The fragmentation, denial, and persistent repression of the Palestinian identity and territorial independence is part of Israel’s propaganda to impart information to alter values. Israel's mechanism of utilizing art strives to cleanse the Palestinian culture and derive slogans that misrepresent the Palestinian experience, by extension, making them not entitled to their own experiences.
Utilizing Art for Ethnic Cleansing
Jewish settlers and, later, Israelis manufactured posters in order to retrace their aspirations and assert their presence on the land, legitimizing claims not only to the indefinite extent of property but to the very “land of Israel” with the aim of employing propaganda in the cause of nation-building. They utilized some ringing slogans on a similar note to justify ethnic cleansing, as that Palestine was hollow at the base, barren, desolate and primitive prior to Zionist colonization and needed to be cultivated and cultured. Everything outside of Europe at the time was seen as devoid of civilization and empty of nations that colonialists deemed worthy of being nations. Zionist slogans have fabricated and distorted the Palestinian experience with derision, including sparking propaganda posters.
“The Rebirth of Our Land Through Hebrew Labor”
Before the establishment of Israel, the propaganda poster titled as The Rebirth of Our Land Through Hebrew Labor was published in 1917 in Russia to boost Jewish settlement in an expectant Palestine. The caption text of the poster says “Jewish workers, storeowners, salesclerks, all who suffer from exile and misery, your friends are the Zionists, who call for a home of their own for the Jewish people.” Hebrew Labor became the new slogan of the socialists, who put pressure on owners to employ only Jewish labor and at higher wages to exclude Arab peasants. According to Aaron David Gordon, this was not a discriminatory ideology stating that “labor is the only force which binds man to the soil, it is also the basic energy for the creation of national culture. This is what we do not have but we are not aware of missing it”. The idea that heartens “for Jewish labor, for Jews to employ only Jews” became the main symbol of the new society which emphasizes the need for shared Jewish identity and common nationalistic ideals.
“When political identity is under threat, culture becomes a resistance tool in the face of attempts to obliterate, annihilate and exclude. Resistance is a form of memory in exchange for forgetting.”
— Salah Bisar
Jewish artists consider it honest that Palestine was associated with the ancestral Jewish homeland. Nevertheless, the Tourist Development Association and the artist Franz Krausz simultaneously proclaimed the iconic Visit Palestine poster to promote Jewish immigration to create Palestine as a homeland for Jews and strengthen their feeling of nationhood. The ambiguity stems from Krausz’ choice to make the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine built in the seventh century, and the area around it the most detailed and recognizable part of the poster. His design and the aesthetically appealing imagery of the Visit Palestine poster, the view from the Mount of Olives looking west toward the Old City framed on one side by a mature tree does much to explain its popularity. The poster disappeared into archives until it was revived in 1995 by David Tartakover considering it as a gesture of hope for a future of coexistence in the post-Oslo environment. The utilization of art carries on as David Portal mixes the Zionist, pre-state past of Visit Palestine poster with the current anniversary of the emergence of the Israeli state. Placing “Israel 57” at the top, he breaks up the word “visit” to read “is it” Palestine, wording that “they say there is a land, where is the land”. Taking this idea of Israel and Palestine, two artists living in Vienna, Austria, Osama Zatar and Tal Adler used the Visit Palestine image to announce the declaration of OneState Poster in June 2009 which believes that in this OneState “everyone lives together with equality, benefiting from cultural diversity and respect.”
Original Poster:
David Portal’s Version:
As the Zionist propaganda arises, the implementation of contemporary fine art in Palestine works in the favor of the politico-cultural affirmation and the ethical reclamation against occupation, both through imagery and nationalistic hopeful depictions. Aya Ghanameh, the young Palestinian artist behind the artwork reclamation, appropriates the original propaganda poster titled The Rebirth of Our Land Through Hebrew Labour with a poster that arouses much discrepancy between the propaganda's intended subversion and the slant reality of palestinians. She plays on the Zionist belief which justifies ethnic cleansing as a way to cultivate a desert empty of civilization and breathe life into it. But Aya knew this land was not empty. The remains of her mother’s village, Miska, was depopulated and destroyed by an underground Jewish militia in 1948. Her text, which builds on a long history of Palestinian struggle, reads: “My parents, along with Miska’s other inhabitants, were forcibly expelled on the order of the Haganah, the primary Zionist force prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. The village, with the exception of an elementary school and a mosque, was destroyed. Today it’s covered with citrus groves, past the apartheid wall. We’ll never be allowed to return.” Aya holds her family’s truth up to it as a looking glass and finds it lacking. Aya wishes to provoke a reflexive ethical response to human suffering at unjust hands and convey that her work responds to a long history, and voices a collective Palestinian past.
The tradition of artistic reappropriation quickly takes on a new purpose, as a symbol of resistance and a proclamation of Palestinian existence. The origins of Visit Palestine, the simplistic interpretations of it, and the complex remixes of it over the last twenty years reveal the continuously changing ways that individuals and communities create and seize on images, the importance of remembering and forgetting in that process, and the role played by visual representations. With that being said, in 2021, Aya Ghanameh produced a Visit Israel poster, where the trunk of the olive tree is now in the desperate embrace of an elderly Palestinian woman. The Dome of the Rock – the Islamic shrine clearly visible among the buildings of Jerusalem in the original poster – is then replaced with the West Bank wall and a watchtower which separate Palestinians from Israelis. The red text on the poster reads: “When the war planes came the shelling and bombing did not stop until they took everything from us”. The poster was reinterpreted by Amer Shomali in 2009, placing the Israeli separation wall in front of the viewer. The wall, built in the 1990s and 2000s runs through the West Bank, effectively absorbing Israeli settlements into Israel and limiting access of West Bank Palestinians to Jerusalem except through a number of restrictive checkpoints. Thus, its placement here symbolizes the Israeli restrictions on Palestinians entering Jerusalem, capturing the historic transformation of Palestinians’ relationship to the city over the decades.
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In Conclusion,
Aya Ghanameh’s Reclamation Poster
Propaganda has been a defining feature of Israel’s political and cultural landscape, which tends to metamorphose Palestine’s social fabric and its culture. As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lingers, Palestinian nationalism renews its appeal to accentuate both the will of the Palestinian people for self-determination and their strive to resist the cleansing of their culture. And just as Palestinians inhabit the segregated margins of a state which denies their statehood, they continue to grapple with the fragmentation, denial, and persistent suppression of their identity and sense of existence. The history and story behind the poster-making that’s ethically embedded in Palestine demonstrates being more than a just reflection, a profoundly transformative project that sought to restore justice, dignity, equality and sovereignty. As the conflict thunders on in a recent haze of violence, such politically engaged art is notably essential in keeping dialogue alive and communicating the power imparity that lives up between Palestine and Israel.
References
Al Ama, G., & Atrash, N. (2015). Along the Path 150 Years of Palestinian Art. Dalloul Art Foundation.
Alım, E. (2020). The Art of Resistance in the Palestinian Struggle Against Israel. Turkish Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 7(1), 45-79. 10.26513/tocd.635076
Anstruther, M. (2021, April 21). The Ethical Reclaimation of Zionist Propaganda with Palestinian Artist, Aya Ghanameh. Panoramic Magazine. https://www.panoramicthemagazine.com/post/iss05_palestinian-propoganda
Bisar, S. (2021, May 24). Palestinian Art Proclaims a People’s Identity in the Conflict With Israel. Al-Fanar Media. Retrieved September 9, 2023, from https://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2021/05/palestinian-art-proclaims-a-peoples-identity-in-the-conflict-with-israel/
Fisher, J. (2012). Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present. Third Text, 24, 481-489.
