Imaging Palestine

The Artwork of Palestinian Affairs

Rochelle Davis and Emma Murphy

The work of Palestinian artists appears in the homes and offices of every Palestinian, hung in framed reproductions on walls, reworked into school projects, and placed on the covers of Palestinian magazines, journals, and books. In most contexts fine art is the realm of the elite, but in the 1960s and 1970s, Palestinian artists joined the emerging Palestinian liberation movements and inserted the rich vocabulary of images they were part of developing into the struggle for Palestinian independence and self-determination. Artist Samia Halaby expressed that to be an artist in the 1960s was "the most political thing I can be as a Palestinian." Through their artwork, these artists participated in building and defining Palestinian culture, revolutionary struggle, and artistic taste. They regularly made posters and graphics for the liberation movements, and reproductions of their work were sold in bookstores and seen on street corners every day.

One of the reasons for the popular appeal of these artists' work was that they took the traditional imagery associated with Palestinian handicrafts, folklore, music, and poetry, and combined it with the potent symbols of Palestinian resistance. Using techniques and methods gained in their fine arts training, they created a new visual representation of Palestine in oil, watercolor, and gesso. The popularized usage of these fine art works was facilitated by accessible reproduction technology and the absence of copyrights.

One Palestinian journal, Palestinian Affairs (Shu'un Filastiniyya in Arabic), provided a showcase for the work of Palestinian artists from the early 1970s through the 1990s. It pioneered the use of fine art works as cover illustrations, and featured Palestinian — but also other Arab and international — artists and graphic designers who exemplify both the trends in representation of the Palestinian struggle and broader currents in the art and design of the era.

Palestinian Affairs was a publication of the Palestine Research Center (PRC), which was founded in 1965 by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PRC began publishing Palestinian Affairs in Beirut in 1971 as a monthly journal that specialized in publishing articles and research related to politics, culture, economics, and international relations, along with monthly reports on Palestinian and Israeli issues. The cover art of Palestinian Affairs provides a window into the work of Palestinian artists during this period as well as the political events that shaped Palestinian history.

It is important to note that the political environment depicted on many of the covers of Palestinian Affairs affected the publication of the magazine itself. In September 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Israeli troops confiscated the records and library of the Palestine Research Center and carried them back to Israel, to be returned to the PLO later as part of a prisoner exchange deal. Although the PLO moved from Beirut to Tunis as a result of the Israeli invasion, the PRC continued its work in Beirut. In February 1983, the PRC was the target of a car bomb that killed eight employees. These events and harassment by the Lebanese authorities pushed it to relocate to Nicosia, Cyprus, in the summer of 1983. The PRC published 245 issues of Palestinian Affairs from 1971 until September 1993, when it was closed for financial reasons. In 2011, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas decided to revive the PRC and start publishing the journal again. To date, eight issues have been produced.

Art and the PLO

Artists' participation in the institutions of the PLO began with its founding in 1964. The Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout set up the PLO's Arts Section (qism al-thaqafa al-faniyya) in 1965 and drew in a broad swath of Palestinian artists, including those who were already members of the PLO and the resistance movements. According to artist and art historian Samia Halaby, in her study Liberation Art of Palestine, "The artists had become sufficiently organized by 1964 that one day after the meeting of the Palestine congress to establish the PLO, they opened an exhibition in al-Quds (Jerusalem) to celebrate the occasion. The show had such an impact that people began to think of art as part of the liberation movement."

In addition to heading the PLO Arts Section, in 1969 Shammout was elected president of the General Union of Palestinian Artists (alittihad al-'am lil-fananin al-filastiniyyin) and the Union of Arab Artists. The PLO also established an Arts and Heritage Section, which was headed by Tamam al-Akhal, Shammout's wife and an accomplished artist in her own right. Pioneers in the world of Palestinian art, both al-Akhal and Shammout were incredibly prolific, and their art took on strong nationalist symbolism. This is the political environment for artists in which Palestinian Affairs, what became the PLO's main intellectual publication, created its covers.

Born in the coastal city of Lydda (Lyd/Lod) in 1930, Ismail Shammout was trained in his hometown by artist Daoud Zalatimo. Following the 1948 war, Shammout worked as a street vendor in a Gaza refugee camp prior to moving to Egypt, where he attended art school. Over his long career and involvement with the PLO, Shammout's work both drew on and simultaneously helped create the visual symbolic vocabulary of Palestinian nationalism. The dynamic flow of his canvases contrasts with the more static and stationary images of similar subjects that other artists pictured (see n.129–131, 1982; n.208, 1990; n.221–222, 1991).

Tamam al-Akhal (b. 1935 in Jaffa) was trained in Lebanon and Egypt, and is both an artist and an art educator. She maintains that she first started painting realistic representations of life and landscape, then shifted to painting "stories of Palestinian heritage" using "the historical style of Arab painting." Her art was used on the covers of almost a dozen issues, each deploying different aspects of her work, from abstracted scenes from refugee camps to recreations of embroidery (n.158–159, 1986) to detailed mythological representations of Palestinian landscapes.

The Early Years

For many Palestinian artists, their work is a means of voicing the struggles of their people. As evident in the selection of artwork chosen for Palestinian Affairs, the ever-recurring visual theme is that of resistance. Through representations of armed...