The Palestinians ask of the West: see us, hear us, listen to what we are saying, look at what is being done to us. Mediums that lend themselves to the first person, to testimony, to the documentation are theoretically most suited to this call. The noeme of photography, as Barthes wrote, is that was there. There is, in the photograph or the film reel or the sourced news report, a truth claim, one which ought to suffice. One which, indeed, doessometimes suffice in other conflicts.
Palestinian visual art is, in the west, primarily known through two mediums: documentary cinema and photography. To be sure, Palestine has made immense contributions on both these fronts (for instance, Taysir Batniji’s harrowing photobook Disruptions, or the work of Leila Shawa, or the documentaries Scenes of the Occupation From Gaza; Jenin, Jenin;or the form breaking Foragers). Indeed, first among the reasons for the primacy of documentary cinema within discourses on Palestinian art is Palestine’s outsized contribution to the artform, not just in Palestinian cinema’s incredible political clarity, but in its adventurous formal innovations (often under conditions of immense deprivation).
It is no accident that these two forms have come to dominate the discourse around Palestinian art: they have something testimonial about them, and the extremity of the Palestinian’s oppression (the word hardly suffices) seems to require testimony above all else, at least on the aesthetic front. In Palestine itself, the situation manifests as murder, as dispossession, as subjugation. The armed struggle grinds on, as it must, but since the majority of the Arab states’ relative abandonment of Palestine—or outright collaboration with the Zionist regime—and the small but significant shift within US establishment politics from enthusiastic to maniacally scorched earth support for Israel, the struggle has largely been waged in informational and media terms (which is not to say the armed struggle ever completely subsided).
There is a Levinasian ethics undergirding all documentary work: confronted by the face of the Other, we become responsible to them and, before them, for ourselves as well. .The face of the Other enacts a “a discourse before discourse,” a “relationship of command without tyranny, which is not yet an obedience to an impersonal law, but is the indispensable condition for the institution of such a law.” That is, it is through the face-to-face encounter with the Other that ethics is formed—but it is a pre-discursive, pre-rational ethics, one which creates the necessary ground upon which all other moral and ethical considerations might take place. The face of the Other demands, “you shall not kill.” And here is the prescient phrase Levinas uses, at least in one interview: “In ethics, the other’s right to exist has primacy over my own, a primacy epitomized in the ethical edict: you shall not kill, you shall not jeopardize the life of the other.” (Italics mine).
The dialectic the Palestinian visual artist confronts is one in which the extreme violence they face requires testimony, which is met with a distinct and almost pathological unwillingness to see or listen by Zionists and their supporters (and by a Western public—supportive or not, mostly blind—which has lived under Zionist ideological hegemony for decades). A pathology that runs so deep that it does not stop at mere ignorance or turning away, but extends to the active “debunking,” or real-time “falsification” of the images of Palestinian life (the term used by Zionists here is “Pallywood”). Art as testimonial, however, is confronted by the need to be cognizable by that same Western audience, pre-corporated, if even subtly, by the political valence of seeing (or lack thereof). But to be pre-corporated or cognizable in this fashion means to attempt to meet an audience, even if ever so slightly, on their own profoundly and unreflectively hostile terrain.
Which is to say: there is a presupposition underlying the Levinasian presupposition: when I look at the face of the Other, I am capable of recognizing it as such. But it is precisely this capacity for recognition which the Western observer, after so many years of successful Israeli, European, or American—or some combination thereof—propaganda has more or less successfully occluded in the West (often playing on discourses exploited during the so-called “war on terror,” with their debt to classically racist “clash of civilizations” tropes). I recently wrote in Parapraxis that “Chief among the marks of inferiority stamped upon the Palestinian by the Zionist is the canard: they lie. They cannot belong to the community of rights because this community is constituted through the intercourse of language. Rights and law are a discourse dependent upon expectations of truth and communicability. Palestinians can speak, and the world can hear and understand them, thus unintelligibility must be constructed after the fact.” This enforced unintelligibility, however, functions as a precursor to complete dehumanization. While enforced unintelligibility excludes Palestinians from the community of rights, in also excluding them from the intercourse of language, it functions further to exclude them from the human community entirely, to the point where even the pre-rational pre-linguistic demands of the face of the Other cannot be recognized. To the Zionist, the face of the Palestinian not only fails to demand the injunction against murder, but in its very resistance to the radical self-interestedness of blind self-preservation elevated to a mania, inspires the very opposite effect.
For the Zionist, and for the indifferent West, to see the face of the Other at all is to see an existential threat to decades of domination. It is the face of the Other which must, at all times, be obscured so that the gaze cannot leak through.
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Direct visual testimony, then, is not entirely fit for the purpose of persuasion of those who, in their refusal to see the Other, have yet to fully realize the humanity of the Palestinians. The form of the documentary or photographic mediums are themselves partially responsible for this failure. As Alberto Toscano and Brenda Bhandar note in “Representing Palestinian Dispossession,” “photographic images can serve as forms of legal evidence, military instruments, or complex ‘events’ in which relations beyond those of appropriation and dispossession, and beyond the juridical frame, may become partially visible.” Partially visible: crowding out the humanity of the image are the juridical and martial modes of seeing which have become, even in—or perhaps due to—our image-saturated society, the predominant modes of seeing. The same tool, the same images, which they use to document their lives are co-opted by those who wish to snuff them out. At the time of writing, “all eyes on Rafah” is the new call. Meanwhile, every eye of the Zionist war machine is turned there as well: surveillance (and attack) drones emit a constant buzz above Gaza. Each camera is at once the promise of self-construction and the threat of annihilation. What’s more, as images proliferate on social media—removed from their context, reworked, picked over, disputed—they cease to operate as singular works. The images of the dead commingle with AI images of Jesus as a shrimp. Images of bombed buildings sit above ads for health supplements. To the extent that our lives are mediated through online images, and our own lives and the lives of others are increasingly met only with a disinterested aesthetic distance, then the image-world offers only a rapidly vanishing prospect of human feeling, of regard for the Other qua Other.
Early in May, Uri Kurlianchik—a particularly disgusting peddler of Hasbara—posted an image to X (née Twitter) captioned: “Gorgeous photo from Lebanon. Could be a movie poster.” The image depicted plumes of smoke and dust erupting from Lebanon’s green hills, the products of an Israeli bombing run. Birds take flight in the foreground. For some people, death is only an abstraction. Or consider State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller’s recent comments on Israel’s bombardment of Rafah: “We are deeply saddened by the tragic loss of life…Those images were heartbreaking.” The images, not the act. People join the chorus: I will never forget this image, as if inscribing the image into history might redeem the victims. History belies the thought.
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I do not want you, reader, to think that I am suggesting that breakthroughs are not possible. I don’t want you to think that documentary or photographic projects are futile or without artistic or political merit. Nor do I mean to suggest that the difficulties faced by Palestinian documentarians or photographers mean that Palestinian art is in any sense doomed. But we must be clear about the limitations with respect to its reception in the West.
Art will not free Palestine, and while we must continue the important work of persuading the West to cease its material and political support for Israel, it is far from sufficient. Indeed, both the impotence of art and the complicity of the world in the face of atrocity have demonstrated that armed, decolonial struggle never lost its urgency or necessity, despite what the triumphalists of the “end of history” would have hoped. People will free themselves by any means necessary.
In the artistic realm, however, the maxim changes: by every means possible. Because of their dehumanization in the West, the challenges faced by the Palestinian artist are different from those faced by the (white) Western artist, who do not need to establish their humanity prior to speaking. The nature of the ethics of seeing suggests that painting, a relatively neglected facet of Palestinian cultural production, may bear the most fruit (the poster-form, which I will not be discussing here, is perhaps the most well-known and celebrated form of Palestinian visual art, but the form has its own set of aesthetic concerns and its own more explicitly political intentions, has a more fraught relation to capital “A” Art as commonly understood and has, in any event, largely been an endeavor undertaken by Palestinian painters themselves). Indeed, we can see the relative lack of attention paid to Palestinian painting in the West as a symptom of their dehumanization, the flip side of the imposition on the Palestinian artist to prove their humanity at every turn.
Painting faces the opposite challenge of photography and documentary cinema: it is oblique, opaque, non-testimonial (or, at best, very indirectly so). But it is precisely this opacity that renders painting so suited to the unique challenges of Palestinian art: namely, humanization and cultural continuity.
At its best, art is capable of exploding its own boundaries, of exceeding itself, of creating the distance necessary for thought to take place. Adorno and Horkheimer situate the construction of the subject in the interplay between “sense datum” and judgment, in the way in which the subject must “give back to [the object] more than it receives from it” in the form of judgments and concepts in order to reflect to itself “the thing as it is.” In this interplay, subjectivity learns how to give a sense of identity and unity both to outward impressions and inward ones that separate themselves from the outer, and in this differentiation, the subject begins to constitute the self. But when the only sense datum offered is a congealed mass of images, when life presents itself merely as a series of repetitions, as sense datum are made indistinguishable by ubiquity and homogeneity (the situation of cultural life under capitalism), then the subject enters a crisis. A crisis which has as much bearing on the subject’s own formation as its ability to recognize the subjectivity of the Other. This is, in short, a crisis of thought.
What art offers is a way back to thought—indeed, its capacity to exceed its own facticity mirrors the form of human consciousness. When confronted with an artwork, one which, crucially, resists immediate assimilation into pre-existing concepts or mass-culture, a distance is created between the viewer and the object whereby a space is opened in which the viewer must return something to the object, must, through the act of reflection necessary to experience the alien object in the first place, create more than it was given. Art is not an object-form, but a charged space.
But for the art-object to create this space, it must resist the viewer. It must, like the face in Levinas’ phenomenology, present us with an opacity that makes demands. Photography and documentary are of course capable of creating this charged space, but painting faces fewer structural challenges. Unlike photography or documentary cinema, painting is not imbricated in the surveillance and juridical architecture of the world and does not make any reality or truth claims. It is thus not “falsifiable” or subject to similar scrutiny and obfuscations. It retains, then, an interiority often unavailable to photography or documentary—an interiority that is, in mainstream Western discourse, entirely denied to the Palestinians.
Painting’s interiority—the form and content of depiction located within the subject themselves—is more capable of making the first demand from which ethics springs: recognize me as human. It should, then, have a more primary place in discussions of Palestinian art and political-aesthetics in the west. It is, of course, not incumbent upon the Palestinians to fashion their art for Western audiences—it is, rather, incumbent on those of us in the West to seek out and look at and understand the work of these artists.
Outside of Mona Hatoum—possibly the most well-known Palestinian artist working today (an artist of undeniable genius, she is better known for her sculptural and video work than her painting)—my first real contact with Palestinian painting was at the library of the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts and the galleries of the Darat al Funun, both in Amman, which I visited in 2022 as a stopover on a trip to Palestine that never materialized (Israel closed the border just as I was trying to cross, and then a medical emergency prevented me from trying again). Like all national or regional arts, it is a world unto itself, with its own formal motifs. Palestinian art, as art historian Alessandra Amin notes, has long utilized folk idioms as “central to the Palestinian struggle against erasure in ways both rhetorical and concrete,” a means of combating the Zionist appropriation of “elements of Palestinian material heritage from its earliest days, ensnaring everything from clothing to graphic arts” in service of establishing legitimacy in its quest to replace the Palestinian as the indigenous figure of the land. Certain symbols and scenes recur: the dove, the key, the olive tree, the jaffa orange, the pastoral, the forced march, Al-Aqsa. As the brilliant painter Mustafa Hallaj, who melded canaanite and Egyptian mythological symbolism with Palestinian folk symbols and the concrete experience of occupation and resistance, noted (via Amin, again):
the role of the Palestinian artist, who carries his ancient cultural heritage within him … is inseparable from armed struggle. In the circumstances to which the Palestinians are exposed, circumstances of self-denial … and the suffocation of their historical heritage, memory, presence, and future, this past awakens in that same Palestinian artist, in every fiber of his being and every form of his work.
But Palestinian painters threaten the Zionist regime. As painter Suleiman Mansur stated in a 1998 interview with the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics Economics and Culture:
To reach as many people as possible, and due to the lack of galleries, we decided to print our work in the form of postcards and posters. The Israeli authorities started confiscating the posters, fining the sellers, confiscating works from exhibitions, even from artists’ homes. Then in 1981, they revived a British law that called for the censorship of anything that was presented to the people. We, of course, were against sending our work to the censor. That same year, an exhibition for a Palestinian painter was held in Ramallah. Three days later, the authorities came and closed the gallery. The accusation was that the paintings were inciteful, but the real reason was that they wanted to fight and suppress Palestinian culture, in light of their denial of the existence of the Palestinian people. Thus, in the West Bank we were subjected to all kinds of raids, even imprisonment. The situation became quite dangerous.
Palestinian painting, then, even in its more opaque or difficult formulations, remains a threat. Indeed, it is my contention that formalism, or otherwise more difficult works, represents a greater threat to established orders, and it was these works that most drew me in at the National Gallery. Hassan Khater’s Between Black and Grey (1999), an abstract silkscreen print of blotchy shapes rendered in deep, luminous purples veering on black , sticks with me as a work evocative of an incredible sadness and softness: mourning as submersion into an inky pool. Or Ahmad Nawash’s Picasso and Miro-inflected paintings of humanoid yet disproportioned creatures that, even in their childlike fantasy, still make room for the reality of armed resistance. In The Epic (1989), a scene of exile in motion, in which one figure (comprised of two human torsos and heads, a horse’s body and head, four human legs, three horse legs, and two human “arms”), appears to have a gun as an arm. The folk idioms and resistance symbology of prior eras of Palestinian painting remain present, if subdued, but emerging in a number of contemporary works was a new formal preoccupation—jagged or gridded forms repeated and metamorphosed across different painters’ works, the breaking up of the picture plane and the figures within it into a shattered geometry. In The Question of Palestine, Edward Said writes that the Palestinians’ “history and contemporaneity are cubistic, all suddenly obtruding planes jutting out into one or another realm, culture, political sphere, ideological formation, national polity. Each acquires a problematic identity of its own—all real, all claiming attention, all beseeching, demanding responsibility.” The physical discontinuity of the Palestinian people, dispersed among the West Bank and Gaza and ’48 Israel as well as the various neighboring Arab States and, to a lesser degree, the rest of the world creates not only a “wildly multiple Palestinian actuality,” but also a sometimes overlapping, sometimes diverging set of political concerns for each diaspora and non-diasporic community. As Said also states, “When we speak today of the Arabs, or the Lebanese, or the Jews, or the Israelis, we seem to be speaking about stable entities whereas in reality we are talking about interpretations that are highly volatile and even more highly speculative.” We should hesitate to speak about, let alone for, any group as a unitary entity. Again, a shattered geometry—political, spatial, personal.
There are a number of painters we could turn to in order to explore this turn, but I want to focus on the work of one of my favorite artists working today, Mohammad Joha. Joha was born in Gaza in 1978, where he attended Al-Aqsa University (now destroyed, along with every other university in Gaza, in the course of Israel’s genocidal campaign). Though he currently lives and works in Italy, his work and attentions remain rooted in Gaza: the indelible subject of his art.
Joha’s work, at least since 2018 (it is, alas, difficult to find a full catalogue of his career), has been marked by rectangular shapes, rendered in a muted and dusty palate, which overlap, stack atop one another, break apart, and fill the canvases as they divide its plane into so many individual yet inseparable parts. In Solidicity 04 (2022), for example, earth tones—browns, military fatigue greens, and muddy yellows—color the bottom half of the canvas. It is difficult to discern the outlines of buildings among the shapes—a series of four bluish squares with white tops, resembling rags hung from a clothesline, provide the visual cue. Once we are situated—we are in a city—the background looms larger: a thick smattering of orange paint dominates the top third of the canvas. A sunset, maybe—but, no, that doesn’t seem right, note the blackened space just above. Flames, then—rising from the earth, coloring the sky. A bombing has taken place, or rather, the perpetual bombing of Gaza’s recent history has left a permanent afterimage on the horizon. “Solidicity”—a prayer for, as much as a description of, the buildings below.
In two series from 2017–2018—Fabric of Memory and Housing—Joha began utilizing colored textile and paper scraps alongside paint on his canvases. The two series prefigure the forms of the Solidicty series (which also utilizes textile collage). Palestine has long been known for its fabric work (tatreez embroidery; a rich tradition in weaving and textile industry, disrupted by the privations of the Israeli occupation) and certain pieces of fabric recur: in particular a grayish-blue piece bearing a print of olives. Despite the domestic connotations of the fabric, the scraps are arranged in much the same way as Joha’s veiled cityscapes. Irregular quadrangles stack atop and beside one another, overlapping even as their borders remain defined. The interior world mirrors the exterior, or rather: the interior media permeate and penetrate the outside forms.
Looming over Joha’s forms is the Israeli occupation, which has divided Palestine into an archipelago: cities internally divided by checkpoints, villages cut off from neighboring villages by Jewish only roads. Ibtisam Ilzghayyer, born near Bethlehem in the village of Battir, stated in Palestine Speaks (a collection of first-person testimonies from Palestinians living within the West Bank and Gaza) that the children she teaches at the Ghirass Cultural Center in Bethlehem “don’t have a good sense of distance because of the restrictions. They might say they live ‘far away,’ and I’ll ask, ‘How far?’ And it’s a ten-minute car ride away, if not for checkpoints. That’s far for them, because that fifteen minutes might actually be an hour or two most days.” The divisions imposed by the occupation not only divide the land, but disrupt the peoples’ concepts of distance and geography. As in Joha’s work, Palestine has been turned into a series of irregular, overlapping, but strictly bordered shapes, a non-contiguous territory that, in its irregularity, becomes difficult to recognize as a territory at all. But still, as Joha’s work shows, the constituent parts, though they may be separated, exist within the same frame, are cut from the same cloth. There is, in the hands of the artist, a longed-for unification realized from the scraps.
This theme plays out as well in the grids of blurred, shadowy faces of Talib Dwaik—as in Faces (2004). Here the separations are individual instead of geographical, and the structure of the painting evokes the prisons, both metaphorical and literal, to which Palestinians are increasingly confined. Or in Bashir Makhoul’s work, particularly the Preoccupation series (2023), which exchanges Joha’s scraps and dusty palette for brightly colored, more defined forms, or his Concealed series (2023), which depicts the geometry of occupation now in stripped-down form, the outlines of buildings are only suggested by a series of overlapping black lines.
In Landscape (2008), a painting which Joha recently posted to his Facebook page, the work takes on a more violent, more devastating form—almost certainly a response to Operation Cast Lead, the 2008 Israeli onslaught on Joha’s native Gaza. Here, the painting takes a childlike turn, redolent of the work of the C.O.B.R.A. artists (I see Karel Appel and Asger Jorn most of all). Gone are the rectangles and scraps of fabric—instead Joha has created a pulsating mass of blues, purples, and reds applied in small daubs (have they been applied with his fingers?) and swirls of paint in an almost cloud-like formation. They are bounded by a mustard yellow and, at the top, a streak of orange. Within this density of color, small expressionless faces emerge. Given the finger-painting C.O.B.R.A. quality of the work, the immediate suggestion is that these are children. Israel’s war against Gaza has always been a war against children, an (ongoing) attempted destruction of the future of the Palestinians. It has also been a war against infrastructure, with entire cities reduced to rubble and almost every person in the Gaza Strip forced from their home and into tent encampments in the south (where the bombings continue). The forced, rigid geometry of the occupation gives way to the chaos of destruction. There are no borders here, and all space becomes a formless public in catastrophe. The only borders are those delineating the murderous zone of interest. The frame of the painting, the walls around Gaza. Caught within, children, bodies—which the work of bombs and missiles render into a mass.
There is a precursor to both works: To the Children of Gaza (2011). Here, Joha synthesizes the sharp divisions of occupation with the chaotic indistinction of Israel’s bombings in the form of a lone child in the center of the canvas, framed by the colors of the Palestinian flag. The figure in the center appears to be bundled in tarp, a bluish-gray (again) redolent of a body-bag or a prison outfit, its limbs twisted into a tightly wound knot. Within each segment of the figure, lines, like folds, divide the figure’s geometry further. But still, the figure’s head rises above the knot, and like Janus, splits in two directions: one pointed towards the gray, the other towards orange and liquid green. In either direction, a crop of red faces the figure at eye level.
The binding of the figure is clear enough in the context of Gazan children, but I’m not sure what to make of the bifurcated head. Is Joha suggesting a horizon of liberation as against occupation, the split between childhood and the forced maturation of war, or something more metaphysical?
It’s unclear, but this lack of clarity is the promise of painting. You are the Other confronting me, and it is because I cannot assimilate you into me, because I cannot penetrate your consciousness, that I am confronted, that the ethical arises. You cause me to stumble in my forward march, you meet me in yours. Our inertia ceases and we stop, a distance between us. It is in this distance that consciousness does its work. I cannot disprove your existence, so I am faced with the choice: myself alone, or myself and yourself. The stakes of humanity exist in that distance: coexistence (literally, that we might both exist at the same time) or murder, society or the fantasy of the untroubled self. Israel has chosen the latter. Art represents the former: I see you, in your Otherness, and return more to you than you offer to me, and vice versa. It is in this middle distance that revelations are to be found. It is in this middle distance that liberation can be imagined.
Jake Romm
Jake is a New York-based writer and the associate editor of Protean Magazine. He can be found on twitter at @jake_romm.