Fronts of Resistance: A Love Letter to Palestinian Culture
The image is from A Palestinian Fashion Zine that explores the fashion of different Palestinian cities, while drawing attention to the cultural heritage of Palestinians around the globe.
What’s the point of any of this work?
It’s a question batted around by Palestinian artists, archivists, musicians, designers, historians, librarians, writers, poets, and more Palestinians working in the fields of culture, art, and history. As a historian, writer, and archives worker, I ask myself the question a few times a day.
We ask the question, not because we don’t know the answer, but because the answer differs depending on the mood of the room, whether we’re on a zoom call or sitting together. Sometimes, it’s a cynical reply: more than 18,000 Palestinians are dead in Gaza and more will likely be murdered by the Israeli state. Those who are left are displaced and are facing a future living in a decimated landscape or worse, total expulsion. None of our work is worth it if Palestinians are being arrested en masse in Tulkarem, Khalil, Tubas, Nablus and if Massafer Yatta is under constant threat from Israeli settlers. None of it is worth it if Jenin is being violently raided daily by the occupation’s armed forces. None of it is worth it if we’ve been watching genocide our entire lives. But we are capable of holding two thoughts in our minds, even if they seem to oppose each other. Even on cynical days, sometimes, even as we take our death counts, another response emerges, one that veers in the opposite direction.
It is this: We remind ourselves that documenting and creating culture is a form of resistance against the Israeli occupation. The occupation and settler colonialism are fundamentally based on the principle of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land and with it, the destruction of the culture created by Palestinians on that land. Settler colonialism is meant to exhaust us to the point that we do not create art, that we focus solely on the material violence around us. Sometimes, it means we can’t document the true extent of occupation, only that which draws blood. Then, settler colonialism also fragments us through borders and walls, making it difficult to work together. At times, the Israeli occupation directly targets sites where culture and memory are produced: raiding cultural centers, destroying historical sites censorship of online posts, and murdering writers, in addition to claiming Palestinian culture as its own. Allies of the Israeli state like Germany and the US perpetuate this as well, actively persecuting Palestinians –including artists and culture workers– who exist outside Israel’s territorial grip.
Most of all, the occupation destroys the lives of Palestinians: it is all of us who create culture.
The persistence of culture, art and history –be it in a song that echoes jafra, a jacket with tatreez cleverly integrated into the collar or a history book focused on the Palestinian economy during the mandate era– is evidence of not only a connection that is interwoven with Palestine’s dynamic landscape, min al mayya lil-mayya, but also a deep love and commitment to sustaining that connection to our land and the peoples who have nurtured the land. Art, culture and history grow out of that connection to the land. This is a threat to the Israeli state, not only because it asserts that we belong to Palestine as Palestinians. It is also because, as we create art, culture and history, we actively document the occupation as we paint tableaus or archive cassette tapes.
Art, history and culture are also our resistance against the Israeli state because it represents a future for the Palestinian people. Documenting the past, and creating new culture and art means that there is something for Palestinians to continue building in the future. New art will engage with the old: It might praise it or argue with it. It might ignore it all together. Things will combine in ways we don’t expect: A song might be inspired by eating falafel in your neighborhood or a book on the history of Palestinian folk art. By preserving history, by creating culture and art, we create a tapestry for new culture to latch onto and build upon as we continue to be Palestinian. In whatever form that takes.
The question of humanization comes up in these conversations with my friends and colleagues. It’s what motivates some of them, to humanize Palestinians for others. So, as we talk, I try to carefully express that I believe there is immense political value in producing art, culture and history for Palestinian audiences and always centering their engagement with art and culture. We deserve culture made for us, not to try to convince Western Europe and North America that we are worth saving.
I also fear what constantly seeking to humanize ourselves does to our psychology. It neglects our other needs and stifles our voices. I want Palestinians to not only enjoy film and literature but to find an outlet for sorrows big and small too. And with a centering of Palestinian audiences, comes a representation that cannot be argued with: We will document the Israeli occupation because it is all around us. We can find ways to weave it into complex stories about our lives.
If we create for the present, we must also be concerned with our cultural and historical work for our community. We must build roads and paths upon which our history, art and culture can flow to reach as wide an audience as possible. Even if they exist in ‘open’ resources like online archives, digital museum catalogs or on Instagram, we must consider the barriers Palestinian communities face in finding these resources and build mechanisms that break down those walls. Otherwise, the work is meaningless. If there’s no one to be inspired by a painting as they write a poem or to base a design on an archival photo, then the work may very well have failed. The work isn’t worth it if it never makes it back to our Palestinian communities.
I see my peers doing this work. It is important and critical that the work is done by us, the Palestinian community. It reduces the exploitation and extraction that we’ve experienced through the continual genocide of the Palestinian people at the hands of settler colonialism and its allies, an exploitation perpetuated by North American and European academia and journalism. But it also gives us something to offer other communities seeking liberation. It is an offering, not with the expectation that it be used without engagement or significant adaptation. Rather, as we exchange notes on how to build equitable businesses around Palestinian art like ceramics or woodworking, we discuss these things with other marginalized peoples. We exchange the pros and cons of using a certain type of archival database to house copies of historical documents online and warn each other of the dangers of the internet for culture workers. Our allies do that work for me: They read my drafts and send me voice notes on systemic violence in cultural spaces. I try to do what they ask of me.I try to reciprocate, sometimes by reading their drafts, sometimes by sending them writing by Palestinians.
I see my peers doing this work. It is important and critical that the work is done by us, the Palestinian community, wherever we may be. By doing the work, we weave into it the Palestinian experience. When the work is done by Palestinians, it allows us to not only build the systems we need to access culture, history and art, but to express whatever it is we need to express: Palestinian experiences of the occupation, of each other and more. It allows us to reckon with the pain and to build upon it, slowly stitching our wounds into new skin. Doing the work of culture and art finds itself into our fiction, journalism, and the way we write history. If the moment that made us Palestinians was the nakba and its long continuation, we weave our joys and pains into our work, whatever it may be, many of them shaped by the occupation.
I see my peers doing this work. Despite the fragmentation of our community, despite the media blackouts. It’s why one answer we come back to constantly when we ask “What’s the point of our work” is that our work brings us together as Palestinians. The settler colonial entity, Israel, ultimately seeks to divide us from one another so that we wither away. It seeks to deny our connection to the land and the culture we built upon it, a culture that grows and changes wherever Palestinians may live. So that is the goal of our work: To be together as a people and to laugh, bicker, and engage. The goal of our work is to resist the Israeli occupation of Palestine. So that we can be together.