What thoughts, prayers or laments do Palestinian parents utter as they retrieve their shattered children from wreckage and prepare them for burial? Are their words something we can comprehend? What recollections are carried by those who manage to survive an Israeli missile’s obliteration of a Palestinian road, scattering the locals far and wide? When Palestinian newlyweds contemplate their future, do they envision their offspring heading to foreign countries such as Dubai, New York or Toronto? Is it possible to articulate such fears? Even when they are given the chance to tell their stories, can the full breadth of Palestinian experience ever truly be grasped?
To many in the Middle East and beyond, the Palestinians have represented a longstanding annoyance—seen as a stumbling block to a Jewish-majority state by Zionists and as the flame for broader conflict in the Middle East by the US and EU. According to Christian evangelicals, they personify an inconvenient fact that disturbs the envisioned ideal of the promised land, synonymous with the establishment of a Jewish Temple and the Second Coming. In the eyes of most Arab nations, they form an obstacle to the “normalisation” of relations with Israel, serving as a potential spark that could enflame their own subjugated populations. The objective espoused by many is that the Palestinians should subside and blend into the shadows of history. However, ever defiant, generation after generation of Palestinians have resisted this fate.
To their allies, the Palestinians epitomize resilience, a capacity to withstand every invasion, displacement, contempt, and earth-shattering event. They are seen as the Charlie Chaplins of the region, seemingly always overwhelmed by superior powers yet continually managing to rise, dust themselves off and restart. At times, they appear to embody modern Vladimirs and Estragons, seemingly waiting for what? Humanity to intervene or perhaps the Godot-like one- or two-state resolutions?
Yet, personifications of resistance do not have worries like educating children, dealing with health scares, surviving bomb injuries, enduring amputations, or battling hunger. There exists a human limit to how long Palestinians can continue to embody resilience. The grim truth, known to both Palestinans and Israelis alike, is that entire populations can be eliminated, either gradually or hastily—sometimes one village at a time, occasionally in a mass devastation.
Yet, as a blood stain the size of a cloud on the fabric of the world, the message is clear: I will endure.
Taha Muhammad Ali, born in 1931, was brought up in Saffuriya in Galilee. At 17, he was displaced to Lebanon in 1948 due to the destruction of his village by Zionists. He settled in Nazareth, adjacent to abandoned Suffuriya, which was reportedly Mary’s birthplace, mother of Jesus. This area was replaced by the Tzippori, an Israeli settlement. After acquiring minimal education as a youngster only up to fourth grade, Taha made his living out of selling souvenirs to tourists in Nazareth. He educated himself as an adult, and his first poem was published when he was 40. Anton Shammas, a Palestinian-Israeli writer in exile, translated his collection, So What: New & Selected Poems into Hebrew, and it was translated into English by Peter Cole, a Jewish American poet.
A nurse aids another in a just-bombarded hospital,
A frightened tomcat cries,
One body shelters another.
An overturned, unharmed flower vase,
Reminiscent of the bomber returning to base.
These verses are excerpted from The Last Target by Sami al-Qasim. Born into a Druze family in 1939, Al-Qasim grew up in Rameh, like Suffuriya, also in Galilee. His teaching role in Israel was terminated over his political beliefs. He was imprisoned numerous times. He had written six collections of poetry by the age of 30, gaining fame throughout the Arab world. In 2014, he passed away due to cancer in Rameh.
Suheir Hammad was born to Palestinian refugee parents in Amman, Jordan, in 1973. When she turned five, her family migrated to New York, and she grew up in Brooklyn. An excerpt from her Gaza Suite reads:
Here, a great wonder occurred
A parade of lights
Lead rained upon children
An army feasting on revelation…
A woman grieving the loss of her family shrieks
I’ve lost my sister, I long for death
Her eyes were the sweetest honey, her voice my own
Only god can bear this, only god – my sister
Attacked medics, targeted schools, bombed convoys
The injured perish, the dead interred within three hours
Together, the people pray and curse.
These words weren’t penned by Hammad in 2023 or 2024, but rather during the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead: “lament aloud and softly, always excessively loud, never sufficiently”. Recordings of her recital of the Gaza Suite are available online.
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat first saw the world in Beirut in 1980, born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. In 2022, Fady Joudah translated her assortment of poems, You Can Be The Last Leaf, into English. From Fear, the anthology’s sixth poem, these initial lines emerge:
The rifles are aimed at me because I exist.
Is it because I think, that I exist? Or, is it because they aim their guns, that I exist? And about these gun aiming predispositions, I pen my poetry.
Where do we journey to, post the final frontiers?
Where will the birds explore past the final horizon?
These verses are excerpted from Where Should the Birds Fly After the Last Sky? by Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). Edward Said (1935-2003) borrowed this poem’s title for his own groundbreaking depiction of Palestinian existence, battle, and demise, After The Last Sky (1986). Black and white captures by Swiss photographer Jean Mohr were added alongside Said’s prose. Jean Mohr (1925-2018), a son of refugees from Hitler’s Germany, captured these images.
Does Darwish’s inquiry allow a reply? Indeed, where do Palestinians venture to post the final horizon? Into additional refugee settlements? Into exile? Into AI-monitored reserves? If these are their only choices, it is no surprise that they persistently hold on to every plot of land, every ancestral home. Regardless, every coming generation witnesses them losing terrain, forced to retreat by new colonies, by financial strain, by armed forces or settler armed groups. Their predicament manages to amass hundreds of thousands globally to express their concerns during times of disaster. However, during “normal” times, they are neglected. For many sections of the media, their narrative remains too “volatile”, their past too “complicated” to be portrayed sincerely.
Will visual arts function as the definitive realm where Palestinians would finally find freedom? It seems unlikely. Despite the substantial interest their plight invokes, the display of dramas centred around the Israeli-Palestinian scenario is rarely seen in our significant theatres or film festivals. How frequently are artworks by Palestinian artists displayed in prominent galleries? Where are prime-time TV broadcasts about the disagreement? Seemingly, for Palestinians, navigating through security checks to access the arts is comparable to entering other areas.
Aren’t those in creative professions the ones shaping the nation’s vision, plaiting societal consciousness? Shouldn’t our educational establishments and art institutions devise ways to foster Palestinian intellectual achievements, literature, and arts, especially considering the predicament of the universities in Gaza and West Bank? Voicing opposition against inequality is crucial, but it becomes optimally effective with the inclusion of continuous constructive efforts. And in this matter, the society has as much obligation as the government.
Sometimes, it appears that music is the sole domain where Palestinians engage and impact a considerable Western audience:
Emel Mathlouthi’s Naci en Palestina sculpted in Spanish and Arabic unfolds with hauntingly sorrowful melodies:
I don’t call a place mine,
Nor do I have a landscape,
I don’t possess a homeland,
Using my fingers, I ignite a fire,
And pour my heart into singing for you,
My heartstrings, distraught, weep:
I took birth in Palestine,
Yes, in Palestine,
Emel’s operatic tone dynamically oscillates between visceral Arabic laments and acerbic defiance, it can hard to distinguish between her exilic mourn and resilient protest.
Emel was welcomed into this world in Tunisia in 1982. American protest music from the sixties motivated her early-career shift to politically charged songs. When she was blacklisted by the Tunisian government in 2008, she moved to Paris. From there, one of her songs, Kelmti Horra, escalated to become the tune of revolt during the Tunisian revolution and Arab Spring of 2011.
Today, Emel finds scant offerings to spark inspiration in either Europe’s or America’s modern pantheons of rock or folk music. The once vibrant voices of rock and folk have largely paused, except for a few outliers like British rapper Lowkey (aka Kareem Dennis) and American rapper Macklemore (Birth name: Benjamin Hammond Haggerty). These exceptions punctuate the resounding quiet in the music scene.
Notable figures in American rock and folk from the more artistically credible echelons who have dared delve into controversial topics include Tom Waits (born in 1949) and Patti Smith (born in 1946).
“The Road to Peace”, a song by Waits with his Irish-American spouse Kathleen Brennan, features in his 2006 album, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. The story of Abdel Mahdi Shahmay, an eighteen-year-old Palestinian youth who becomes a suicide attacker, is encapsulated in the song’s verses. The tragic tale incorporates elements of authentic details and vehement retaliation, beautifully put together with a compelling mix of perfect and slant rhymes, and presents a stark picture of continuing atrocities.
Smith’s musical piece “Qana”, narrates the 1996 devastation in the southern Lebanese town of Qana during the IDF’s Operation Grapes of Wrath. 106 people died and another 116 were injured when the IDF bombarded a UN compound that was providing shelter to the Lebanese citizens.
Similar to Waits, Smith’s poignant ballad visualises the horror, describing innocent victims laid out in public spaces, encapsulating the harsh realities of the Middle East. The two offer a break from the silence that currently permeates the music industry.
The alarming aspect of these lyrics and verses is their uncanny reflection of current times. The scene of lifeless little forms draped in plastic, sprawled in the open, with bombed out buildings and ravaged innocent bystanders is an image that’s become all too familiar in our daily news. Constant fatalities and injuries: rehashed sorrow, old headlines.
For ’tis a journey I’ve started in blood,
Advancing so deep, that returning would be equally laborious,
So echoes the conscience-weary Macbeth penned by Shakespeare. Stranded in a river of blood, sinking into madness, it may seem easier to brave through and continue to the further banks of terror, the point of no return. One murder leads to another, fostering nihilism. Nihilism fuels bloodbath, which then gives birth to war, spawning genocide, and then genocide ushers in…
But, do we truly desire a darker reality?
Joe Cleary, who serves as a lecturer of English and Irish literature at Yale University, has recently published the books ‘Modernism, Empire, World Literature (2021)’ and ‘The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization (2021)’.