he book, Palestinian Art 1850-2005, has a chapter named Art From The Ghetto. The title is ironic, because a ghetto, historically, was “the Jewish quarter in a European city. In a typical East European town, followers of the Jewish faith were marginalised and contained in the neighborhoods separated from the main [mostly Christian] community. They were subjugated, demonised and hated. These attitude and actions culminated in the Holocaust, a pogrom that exterminated six million Jews in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

On the opening page of this volume, the author, Kamal Boullata, a Palestinian painter and writer, thanks Eyal Sivan, “who explained one evening how the writing of the ‘Zionist story’ has constantly depended on the erasure of ‘Palestinian history’ [and] would not spare traces written on any field in the history of Palestinian culture.”In his preface, John Berger reminds: “For thirty years, every Palestinian living on Palestinian territory has been obliged by the Israeli authorities, who illegally occupy those territories, to carry, at all times, an ID card, either an orange one or a green one.” This condition resonates with Nazi Germany’s orders for Jews to wear yellow stars to identify and segregate them from their fellow Christian citizens.

Sadly, the horrendous situation Jews encountered before the World War II, is not different from the Palestinian population’s ghettoisation by Israeli Jews (victims of a not-so-long-ago past). Israel’s Separation Wall and its military checkpoints are attempts to control and confine a people within their homeland. The book on Palestinian art was published in 2009. Fifteen years later, the inhabitants of Gaza Strip are still targets of a genocide; under thunderous torrent of rockets, bombs and missiles; causing deaths, injuries, destruction, displacement, disabilities and deprivation.

When latest atrocities are shown on international news channels and reported in the global press, the media outlets sympathising with Israel project Palestinians as instigators of terror, extremists, fanatic conservatives, suffering due to their own ignorance, orthodox positions and a savage streak. It is time probably to recall and reaffirm that Palestinians are as civilised, cultured, sensitive, sensible and creative, as those belonging to the Western hemisphere. In recent years alone, this land has produced great novelists, poets and prose writers. Edward Saeed, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Emile Habibi, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Anton Shammas, Susan Abulhawa, Najwan Darwish, Adania Shibli and others have crossed the borders of their native land through their writings, which have appeared/ been translated into several languages. Palestinian filmmakers, musicians, actors and visual artists are also widely recognised, respected and represented.

The publication suffixes examples and commentary on art of different eras, subject matter, technique and genres from the late Nineteenth Century icon paintings of Virgin Mary and the saints, to Mona Hatoum’s videos; from naturalistic paintings of local figures and landscape of the early decades of the Twentieth Century to stylised and abstract compositions created till the end of the last century – analogous to the chronology of pictorial production of other nations.

Palestinians are as civilised, cultured, sensitive, sensible and creative as those belonging to the Western hemisphere. In recent years alone, this land has produced great novelists, poets and prose writers.

If one compares the maps of Palestine since 1948 to present times, one realises how the Palestinian territory was chopped and occupied by the Zionist state with every Arab Israel war. Artists surviving in their native land and living in exile have dealt with displacement and dispossession, employing metaphors and various strategies. Some have connected with modern Palestinian prose in their imagery. For instance, Abed Abedi, in his wood engraving, Land Day (1974-75), was inspired by Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun, a story about three Palestinians from a refugee camp, who dream of finding work in oil-rich Kuwait. To cross the border, they have to be smuggled in the empty water tank of a truck. While the driver hurries to complete the border formalities in the scorching sun, the men in the airless tank suffocate and die.

Abedi drew the agitated figures struggling to free themselves from the solid structure. The work, rooted in a literary source, can be a simile for Palestinians in the occupied territory who strive to demolish barriers and liberate themselves and their homeland. The struggle continues. Displacement, mostly forced, is a part of their story. The author and artist, Kamal Boullata, in a line drawing from1989, sketched a four wheeler becoming a children’s pushcart, with a child at the steering wheel. Palestinian children – like those from other societies – forge this plaything with available and affordable materials, but the artist appropriated the form of the toy as a manifestation of desire to escape from an atmosphere of restrictions, military scrutiny and state violence.

The journey from one border to another is not very long – in terms of time or distance. However, it is a challenging task. Crossing the line between Israel and the self-ruled territory, nominally between occupation and freedom, is travelling from one land to another. However, in reality, the two are indistinguishable. This is illustrated by Gaza-born (1966) Tayseer Batniji in his installation Suspended Time, 2006. An hourglass placed horizontally reflects the freezing of history for Palestinian population; it is also related to Batniji’s “recorded performance, Impossible Journey, 2002, which shows the artist incessantly moving a pile of sand from right to left, a reference to the myth of Sisyphus.

The flow of similar sand from one piece to the next, stored in similar amounts, may allude to the perpetual process of migration from one part of land to another, segregated by some political/ ethnic divide. This is a split reflected in identity markers like language, literature, and national flag; which occasionally turn into tools of resistance. After Israel’s prolonged war on Palestinian citizens of Gaza Strip, one has frequently seen the Palestinian flag in all sorts of forms: painted on faces; projected at buildings; waved in the air; carried in hands; wrapped around bodies; as profile pictures on social media; and background for Zoom screens, besides appearing in artworks from Palestine and other parts of the world.

This is not an entirely new phenomenon. Kamal Boullata, in the chapter, Visual Expression Inside a Cultural Ghetto, recounts: “Over the first two decades of Israeli military occupation, a new generation of artists, cut off from their predecessors, had been emerging and defying all sorts of absurd restrictions imposed by the military rulers, such as the ban on including in their paintings the four-coloured combination of the Palestinian flag.” The prohibition is linked to the embargo on the freedom of movement for Palestinians, a condition addressed by Vera Tamari in her installation, Going for a Ride? [June 25, 2002]. The work “reacted to Israel’s brutal destruction of hundreds of private cars in Ramallah. The artist requested that five of the crushed cars be polished and lined up on the road she created in a soccer field next to her house.” The scenario has become a frequent sight since October 7, 2023.

Mahmoud Darwish, the celebrated Palestinian poet (1941-2008) had predicted, “We will become a people when a Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races and on the day of the Nakba.”

The writer is an art critic, curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore