Palestinian Culture and Expressions of Identity

 And Identity? I asked.

He said: Self-defense…

Identity is the daughter of birth, but in the end

she’s what the owner creates, not an inheritance

of a past […]

so carry your land wherever you go,

and be a narcissist if you need to be.

 

-Mahmoud Darwish, “Counterpoint: For Edward Said” (tr. Fady Joudah)

 

Introduction

In his pamphlet Maʿna al-nakba (The Meaning of the Nakba), published in August 1948, historian and intellectual Constantine Zurayk provides what was then a fresh, foundational description of the harsh situation for Arabs after the defeat of 1948; he refers to it as the Nakba, or catastrophe, due to the tragedies, forced displacement, material dispossession, and general state of disorientation that it created. All this was in the shadow of an Arab political entity that was fractured and falling apart, and in a global context where the Arabs found no one to support them, which led to a creeping despair in the hearts of the peoples, shaking their confidence in their governments and leaders. Zurayk notes the significant and rising power of the modern Zionist movement and the quick growth of its influence, in contrast to an Arab nation oppressed by a long history of tyranny and colonization. He argues that the Nakba has also led to the displacement of people's thoughts and opinions and that a state of confusion has taken hold among them, especially among the youth, who at that time seemed incapable of figuring out a path to deliverance.

In the years following the 1948 war, Palestinian intellectuals worked in a general climate of national shock, dispersion, and despair. To cultivate the will to persevere, to resist and return, required an endeavor within Palestinian culture in parallel with the Palestinian struggle for national liberation, a struggle through which contemporary Palestinian national identity took shape.

In his book On Issues of Palestinian Culture, Palestinian poet Zakaria Mohammad argues that in past decades, a distinctive Palestinian identity was in the early stages of flowering. However, what delayed its development and pushed it toward clinging to its general pan-Arab character was the power of the Zionist settler movement and the ever-greater threat it posed, especially in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration, as Palestinians sought to stave off this danger from their land.

The task of the cultural activity taken up by individuals following the Nakba was not limited to only helping Palestinians deal with the harsh existence that they suddenly found themselves living in, but also to protecting their past, which too had become vulnerable to being occupied and plundered or erased and distorted at the hands of the colonial present, which had begun working to displace and expel the Palestinians not only from their physical geography, but also from their history, by forcefully imposing its own narrative onto their history; armed with a sense of divine right, it also mythologized this narrative.

Early Expressions of the Nakba as Theme

The state of shock caused by the Nakba led to a period of a stunned silence, which explains the delay in cultural expressions that addressed this harsh collective experience. Early visual expressions of the Nakba’s tragedies can be seen in paintings done in a realist style, such as the 1953 works Jurʿat maʾ (A Gulp of Water) and Ila ayn? (Where To?) and Sanaʿud (We Will Return, 1954) by Ismail Shammout, a pioneer in Palestinian visual art after the Nakba. Tamam al-Akhal captured the scene of the uprooting and forced displacement of people from her city Jaffa, while the paintings of Ibrahim Al Bayyari depicted Jaffa emptied of its people. Shammout held an exhibition of his paintings in Gaza City in 1953, which can be considered the first Palestinian art exhibition after the Nakba (although it was preceded by an impromptu exhibition in Khan Younis). In 1954, he organized a new, joint exhibition along with al-Akhal and Nuhad Sebasi, under the title “The Palestinian Refugee.”

The Nakba also manifested itself in different ways through the works of poets Fadwa Tuqan in her 1949 poem “Ruqayya: Min suwar al-nakba” (Ruqayya: A Portrait of the Nakba), Abd al-Karim al-Karmi (a.k.a. Abu Salma) in his collection al-Musharrad (Homeless, 1953), Haroun Hashim Rashid in his collection Maʿ al-ghurabaʾ (With the Strangers, 1954), from which Lebanese diva Fairouz sang the poem “Sanarjiʿu yawman” (One Day, We Will Return). That collection also contained the poem “Innaa aaʿidun” (Return We Shall), which was also set to music and subsequently became widely known through radio after the June 1967 war (the Naksa). The Nakba featured prominently in the poems of Muʿin Bseiso, whose collection al-Maʿraka (The Battle, 1952) carried an early rejection of the reality thrust upon Palestinians by the Nakba, calling for engaging in struggle and resistance, and Khalil Zaqtan in his collection Sawt al-jiyaaʿ (The Voice of the Hungry, 1953) as well as others such as Hassan al-Buhairi, Youssef al-Khatib, and Kamal Nasser.

The Forefront of Palestinian Poetry under Israeli occupation after 1948

The Nakba left the Arab minority that remained in occupied Palestine in total isolation from the rest of the Arabs and their language and culture under threat. It created a profound, seismic shock that ripped into their social fabric, followed by a profound silence. However, as Ghassan Kanafani put it, this silence was soon broken by an eruption of colloquial poetry, which by its orality was able to bypass Israeli military censorship. Well-known colloquial poets and oral reciters of improvised poetry (zajal) such as Yousef Hassoun, Abu Saʿid al-Hittini, and Mohammad Abu al-Suʿoud al-Assadi, whose poems became widespread throughout Palestine, played a key role in preserving Arab identity after the establishment of Israel. Intellectuals in the diaspora emerged from their silence and become active only in the mid-1950s. For instance, writing from exile, short-story writer Samira Azzam dealt with the tragic sense of loss among Palestinians before then beginning to chart out the arduous path of resistance and return. Palestinian intellectuals who had remained in their homeland, such as Emile Habibi, Hanna Abu Hanna, Tawfiq Toubi, Saliba Khamis and Jabra Niqula, took on the task of confronting attempts at cultural erasure and effacement through their political, media, and literary activity. In his short story “Bawwabat Mandelbaum” (Mandelbaum Gate, 1954), Habibi depicted the Palestinians’ attachment to their homes and homeland as the place of one’s earliest memories, thus making memory and the act of remembrance a weapon to be used to counter attempts at erasure. During this period, there emerged the image of the Palestinian refugee, uprooted from his/her land and wandering endlessly while suffering the demoralizing pain and humiliation of being made homeless. Early calls also began to appear to rekindle the spirit of hope, to engage in struggle and return to the homeland.

In the late 1950s, a number of remarkable poets from the younger generation began to emerge inside occupied Palestine, their poetic voices resounding in a defiant tone that rejected the occupation. The most prominent among these were Rashid Hussein, Samih al-Qasim, and Tawfiq Zayyad. Their patriotic poems began to spread among Arabs throughout the Arab world. They were soon joined by Mahmoud Darwish with his spellbinding poetry readings that swept everyone off their feet; the poems in his debut collection Awraq al-zaytun (Olive Tree Leaves, 1964) would be passed down through several generations of Palestinians, especially “Bitaqat huwiyya” (Identity Card), whose impact went far beyond occupied Palestine. Its opening line “Record, I am an Arab!” sounded like a defiant, confident cry that was foundational for proclaiming identity in the face of the occupier; it became deeply engraved in the Palestinian and Arab psyche. These poets would often communicate directly with their Arab audiences by reciting their poems in public spaces on various occasions, which contributed to their rapid spread and circulation, making them into spokespersons whose poems spoke on behalf of the Arab masses.

These three poets—Darwish, Zayyad, and al-Qasim—had a profound influence on the Palestinian collective psyche; they managed to resoundingly break through the walls of isolation and alienation that Palestinians inside Israel felt trapped behind, their poems giving them back their sense of humanity, restoring their pride in their identity as Palestinian Arabs, and reconnecting them to the rest of the Arab world from which they had been cut off.

Palestinian poet Ahmad Dahbour saw the Nakba as a watershed moment in the path toward cultural modernity, in that it represented a break with the cultural discourse that led to it, as well as being the early birth pangs of a new discourse. He also believed that the sense of profound loss was a common denominator between many different literary writings, even if they subsequently were further classified into sub-genres that focused on more specific themes such as “tent literature” (the early experience of living in refugee camps), “nostalgia literature,” and “rage literature.” He mentioned examples of writers who cannot be so neatly categorized, such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, especially in his novel Hunters in a Narrow Street (1960) which follows the life of an intellectual exiled after the Nakba who strives, in his existential angst, to achieve self-realization, and the poems of Tawfiq Sayigh who at the time appeared radical in his prose style. In addition to its more immediate role as a means of mobilizing people, Dahbour noted, the literature that followed the Nakba also helped in outlining a distinctively Palestinian personality.

Ghassan Kanafani was the first to draw critical attention to the growing poetic and literary movement inside the occupied territories. In his book Adab al-muqawama fi Filastin al-muhtalla 1948–1966 (Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948–1966), he introduced to Arab readers its most important voices at the time and articulated the concept of adab al–muqawama, or resistance literature, and the concept of iltizam, or commitment. Kanafani’s writings laid the foundation for resistance literature, emphasizing that being human in and of itself is a worthy cause, even if his early works, such as his short story collections Aalam laysa lana (A World Not Ours, written between 1959 and 1963) and Mawt sarir raqm 12 (A Death in Bed No. 12, 1961) were cloaked in pessimism and philosophical reflections on death, exile, and being a refugee. At their core, these early works still urged the reader to engage in resistance in the most profound sense of the word. His eventual involvement in the armed struggle movement, and his assassination in the prime of his youth and creative peak, showed his ideas to be consistent with his actions. In the words of Mahmoud Darwish, the ink of Kanafani’s pen had in it the force of blood, making him one of the most influential writers in molding the defining features of the Palestinian individual’s character.

The spirit of resistance found within Palestinian poetry was soon transferred to the visual arts and began to manifest itself in the works of many artists such as Ismail Shammout, whose style moved toward symbolism in paintings such as Taqa tantazir (Young Men Waiting, 1961), Arusan ala-l-hudud (Newlyweds at the Border, 1962), and al-Tariq (The Road, 1964). Other artists whose work expressed this spirit were Bashir al-Sinwar, Mustafa al-Hallaj, Abdul Hay Musallam, Tawfiq Abdul-Aal, and cartoonist Naji al-Ali, first in al-Hurriya magazine in Beirut and later in al-Taliʿa in Kuwait.

As poet Zakaria Mohammad observed, Palestinian intellectuals found it seemingly required of them to provide pieces of cultural evidence and proofs of the existence of the Palestinian people and of their right to their stolen homeland, Palestine, after the "Other" had rewritten it as a divine myth that was above any criticism, in Darwish’s words. This led to a growing awareness and sense of responsibility of the necessity of preserving Palestinian memory and of crafting a Palestinian narrative of the conflict that would safeguard and affirm Palestinians’ historical rights. In this context, and as part of this endeavor, the Institute for Palestine Studies was established in 1963, and its long history reflects the significant contribution of one of its founders, historian Walid Khalidi, to the preservation of Palestinian memory.

The Founding of the PLO

After the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of all Palestinians in 1964, it became possible to speak of a unifying Palestinian culture for the state of fragmentation that befell the Palestinians following the Nakba, which had hindered the process of interaction and engagement between different forms of Palestinian culture in its various political geographies. Literature transcends borders and creates shared symbols to counter the state of dispersal and brutal isolation that Palestinians were experiencing.

The PLO played a central role in leading the burgeoning cultural movement as a way to uplift the project for national liberation. This began to create a degree of cultural and psychological unity among Palestinians, as well as creating a framework that fostered most forms of cultural work and expression. These efforts became an active laboratory in which a national consciousness and markers of a collective identity were developed to bring together the various parts of Palestinian existence that were scattered across the geographies of the homeland and the places they had been exiled or had emigrated to. Furthermore, a narrative began to be constructed that would come to refute the Zionist narrative that nullified Palestinian existence, its past, and its history, by confronting it head-on with a Palestinian narrative that would spread the spirit of resistance and sumud, or steadfastness, needed to successfully realize the project of national liberation.

Under the aegis of the PLO, the Palestine Research Center was established in Beirut in 1965, with the goal of fostering intellectual and scholarly knowledge production on the Palestinian cause through its quarterly publication Shuʾun Filastiniyya (Palestinian Affairs). In the same year in the West Bank, the Inʿash al-Usra (Family Revival) Society was launched as a charitable organization whose goal was to strengthen the resilience of the Palestinian people through empowering women and preserving heritage. Following these initiatives, more new associations and institutions were started to preserve the fragmented Palestinian collective memory and to collect and revitalize Palestinian heritage in all its forms.

The Naksa of 1967

The Naksa was an important turning point in the course of Palestinian history, reflected in the rise of the fidaʾi (guerrilla resistance fighter) movement, which was accompanied by a burgeoning secular nationalist Palestinian identity. It also led to the first meeting since the Nakba between the Palestinians of 1948 (often referred to as Arabs/Palestinians of the interior) and their brethren in the West Bank and Gaza Strip now occupied by Israel, but who themselves were now cut off from the larger Arab world. This marked a new era of cultural activity that became open to multiple forms of expression that were more interactive and interlinked, as well as more cohesive and capable of laying the foundations and features of a collective identity, despite attempts at domination, co-optation, or isolation this cultural activity faced.

The literature produced in 1948-occupied Palestine took a leading role in speaking for Palestinians, significantly imposing its presence in various domains of cultural expression. In 1968, Emile Habibi published his short story collection Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (The Sixtet of Six Days), whose stories were primarily about the aftermath of the June 1967 defeat. The shuʿaraʾ al-muqawama or “resistance poets,” as they came to be collectively known, also continued to maintain their strong and growing presence. In his collection Ashiq min Filastin (A Lover from Palestine, 1966), Mahmoud Darwish cemented the powerful metaphor of the land as fused with the beloved, which itself symbolized the inseparable bond between the personal and the collective. This metaphor then began to be reproduced in the visual arts as well. Darwish also introduced the image of “the Palestinian wound" as a metaphor for the impact that the Nakba left on Palestinians. Meanwhile, a powerful new poetic voice emerged in the West Bank, that of Izzeddine al-Manasira, whose poems gave resistance poetry an even greater boost. Manasira’s debut collection Ya inab al-Khalil (O Grapes of Hebron, 1968) marked the beginning of a long career in both cultural work and political activism.

These and other writings had a great impact on Palestinians by deepening their sense of being a collective and motivating them to continue to rise up, resist, and remain steadfast. The literary language and artistic symbolism and the perceptions it carried of the Palestinians and Palestine were able to bore deeply into the collective psyche, by introducing a new terminology that the Palestinians began to make use of to express their hopes and inner sense of being. Such expressions cemented within them a collective spirit and force and created new traits that would come to define Palestinian identity.

In the field of cinema, the 1957 film Siraʿ fi Jarash (Struggle in Jarash), a Jordanian production which dealt with themes of freedom and liberation of the land, can be considered the first Palestinian feature film made after the Nakba. This was followed by several cinematic attempts in Egypt and Syria that took romanticized artistic approaches to Palestine. Later, documentary cinema took on the role of compatriot to the Palestinian armed struggle; it recorded on camera the sumud and resistance practiced by the Palestinian people in their refugee camps, military training camps, and on the frontlines of battle. This began when Sulafa Jadallah Mersal, Mustafa Abu Ali, and Hani Jawhariyeh set up a photography and film unit within the PLO that was launched with a photography exhibition that documented the heroism during the Battle of al-Karama of March 1968. This later evolved into the cinema organization called the Palestine Film Unit, opening the door for the production of films that captured key acts of resistance and its milestones, with widespread participation from non-Palestinian Arab and international filmmakers.

Ghassan Kanafani may have been the first to pose the question of identity in such an existential and unprecedentedly sharp way in his novella ʿAyid ila Haifa (Returning to Haifa, 1970), in which the protagonist’s son Khaldoun, Palestinian by birth and blood, was transformed into Dov, the Israeli soldier, demonstrating that a person’s identity “is what is injected into him.” Prior to this, he had also driven the characters of his novel Rijal fi-l-shams (Men in the Sun, 1962) to confront their inevitable doomed fate together, stressing upon the idea of ​​collective deliverance by posing the major question to them in the plural: “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why?” With the same intensity, he painted an iconic image of the strong Palestinian refugee mother in his novella Umm Saad (1969). In critic Fakhri Saleh’s opinion, Kanafani was able to depict the historical transformations in the Palestinian experience as embodied in the characters of his novels, with all their concerns, hopes, and longings and the dreams that they carried within them.

The Refugee Camp

The refugee camp holds a significant place in Palestinian consciousness as one of the most vivid, enduring, and painful manifestations of the Nakba. Through it, the Nakba is patently visible as an ongoing reality, where its meaning and what it embodies continue to be reproduced. The camp has kept the stories of the Nakba alive and present, passed down and retold from one generation to the next, reproduced just as one generation breeds the next. This allows for the creation of the images and for symbols of the homeland to continue to be produced, which in turn continues to fuel Palestinians’ nostalgia and collective longing for return. The camp figures prominently in the writings of Kanafani, who made it play an essential role in crafting his characters’ traits and determining their destinies. His writings express a rejection of the camp's painful reality as a representation of Palestinians’ loss of both their land and their dignity. In this way, Kanafani was the first to pose the transformation of the image of the camp from being a site of misery, poverty, and theft into a wellspring of revolutionary spirit to continue on the path to return to Palestine.

The refugee camp also appeared powerfully in the poetry of Ali Fouda and in the cartoons of Naji al-Ali, which echoed the voice of the Palestinian street through the words spoken by his recurring iconic refugee characters. There was Fatima, strong, forbearing, and sharply perceptive; her kind-hearted but overwhelmed husband, crushed under the weight of his grief, pain, and wounds; and the boy Handala, named after the bitter colocynth plant, the child of the Nakba who never ages, his back always turned to the viewer and a witness to its bitter experience. The camp formed the lens through which the Palestinian refugee viewed the outside world and judged the actions and words of the people living outside it according to the extent they served to bring him closer to his goal of return or how much they hindered him.

Ismail Shammout painted tableaus from camps in Lebanon, such as Nabatiyya and Tal al-Za‘atar, with (in the words of Palestinian writer Farouk Wadi) a photographic like neutrality, and portraits of the camps can be found in the works of other artists such as Fathi Ghaben. On the whole, however, depictions of the refugee camp in the visual arts remained limited in comparison to the dominance of imagery of the stolen homeland. Perhaps this was out of repression or a lack of desire on the part of artists, most of whom had endured the harsh experience of becoming refugees, to dwell upon that experience, preferring instead to overcome it with either nostalgia for the past prior to the Nakba or a longing for the future, as in the act of return.

Emile Habibi, who had started to establish himself as a major figure in Palestinian fiction alongside Kanafani and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, published his novel al-Mutashaʾil in 1974, translated into English as The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist. In this work, he utilized elements from oral tradition to look at the lives of Palestinians in Israel with both depth and black humor. Habibi explored their oscillation between pessimism and optimism and their crisis of identity—caught between denial, hostility toward their identity, and reclaiming it. Theater director Mazen Ghattas later adapted the novel for the stage, turning it into one of the most iconic, most widely performed and longest running plays in the history of Palestinian theater.

Connection to the Land and the Pulse of the Street

During this period, visual and plastic art also began to flourish in the land occupied in 1967. Many of the artworks were centered around the land and the Palestinian individual’s connection to it—often symbolized by the figure of the fallah and fallaha (the male and female peasants). Artists focused on depicting villages with their natural scenery, their homes, olive trees, and various customary rituals, as seen in the works of Ghaben, Sliman Mansour, Nabil Anani, Issam Badr, Taysir Sharaf, and Kamel Al-Mughanni. Many artists from the West Bank ventured out to the countryside around them to paint these villages, viewing them as the wellspring of an authentic Palestinian existence, one deeply rooted in the land and a source for many of the symbols of this authentic identity. As for the artists in the Palestinian diaspora, they conjured up imagery of the land from their memories, in an attempt to reconstruct their past there through a mix of memory and imagination. They produced pastoral paintings that depicted Palestine as a lost paradise, overflowing with hope, ecstasy, and a state of harmony between the Palestinian and the natural landscape with its fields, orange groves, and harvest seasons. Examples include the works of Shammout, Ibrahim Ghannam, Tamam al-Akhal, Tawfiq Abdul Aal, and Ibrahim Hazimeh, among many others.

This approach by artists may be seen as part of an effort to construct a Palestinian narrative establishing the authenticity of Palestinians’ relationship to their land and their history and to debunk the narrative of the outsider Zionist project. In this vein, some creators of art and scholars went as far back as the Canaanite roots to look for a distinct Palestinian identity. However, this approach was not without its critics. Zakaria Mohammad, for example, argued that it risked falling into the trap of mythologizing, thus making Palestinians fit into the Zionist narrative, which often puts forth myth and legend as history. He saw it as a distraction from viewing the Zionist project as one of European intruders and claimed it inadvertently reinforces claims of people like Meir Pa’il that the Zionist movement, which initially sought to create an Israeli national identity, played a role in creating a Palestinian national identity as well.

Artistic and literary works that celebrated the Palestinians’ connection to the land—whether through farming it or defending it, as an arena of struggle or as a cause for struggle—also acquired a prominent status in the process of constructing and defining national identity. As part of its trajectory, this trend also firmly enshrined the depiction of the Palestinian woman as a beautiful, physically powerful peasant wearing the traditional Palestinian thawb, present within the natural landscape and working the land alongside the men, reaping whatever fruit it bears and harvesting its crops. Alternatively, she appeared as the beloved alongside her fidaʾi lover. The photograph of the militant Leila Khaled holding a rifle with her head draped in a Palestinian keffiyeh enshrined her image as the most iconic representations of the Palestinian woman as a fidaʾiyya during the era of the Palestinian revolution in Beirut. Additionally, women came to embody the experience of the refugee camp (Kanafani’s Umm Saad, for instance), or as symbols of the village or the land (as in Sliman Mansour’s painting Sahwat al-Qarya, The Village Awakens, 1987), or as the land itself, as in the poems of Darwish's early collections that equated the land with the beloved.

Many expressions of Palestinian culture came to focus on folklore, invoking its symbols, rituals, and practices, as well as manufacturing new symbols (such as the olive tree, the orange, the cactus, the key, and the map) in an attempt to clutch at worlds long lost. Poster art, due to its reductive nature and ease of circulation, made the spread of many of these symbols overused and hackneyed. This constituted a burden on the creative process and its aesthetics, which had consequences when it came to the taste of the general public.

The visual arts from this period were also rich in figurative depictions, aiming to assert the presence of Palestinians as human beings expressing their Palestinianness in situ, in terms of their connection to the land and their defense of it and the capacity of the figures depicted to carry a spectrum of symbols, gestures, signs, and emotions.

The field of visual arts in areas of Palestine occupied in 1948 had a limited impact during this period due to the state of isolation in which it was evolving, along with its problematic relationship to the Israeli art world. This remained the case until the signing of the Oslo Accords, when it became possible to learn about the work of artists such as Asad Izzi, Ibrahim Noubani, Asim Abu Shaqra, Sharif Waked, and others and how they addressed complex questions of identity.

In terms of cinema, the films of the Palestinian revolution were largely documentary, with the exception of the film Returning to Haifa (1982), an adaptation of Kanafani’s novella directed by Iraqi filmmaker Kassem Hawal. Distributing these films was challenging, yet they became a key medium for creating and disseminating diverse images of resilience, resistance, and the figure of the fidaʾi fighter, particularly outside Palestine. This revolutionary cinema also served as a broad platform that attracted many Arab and foreign filmmakers, effectively expanding the sphere of pro-Palestine solidarity.

Most Palestinian cultural activity demonstrated an ability to critically engage with the pulse of the street and keep pace with the events and transformations that Palestinians everywhere were experiencing. Writers and artists took turns playing the role of guide, visionary, and clairvoyant of the path to take, as well as the role of commentator on the events of the moment and on the Palestinian journey and experience. This can be observed in many important occurrences such as Land Day (launched on March 30, 1976), which represented the beginning of the articulation of Palestinians within Israel of their national consciousness as a single entity. This generated a new surge in cultural activity that focused on the Palestinians’ attachment to their land and Palestinian identity, such as the Land Day memorial monument by Abed Abdi and Darwish’s poem “al-Ard” (The Land, 1988), in addition to songs and poems that have commemorated its anniversary over the generations. This newfound consciousness is evident in the response to the 1976 shooting death by Israel of Lina al-Nabulsi as she walked home from school. Artistic responses to her killing appeared that same year and demonstrate the making of an icon: Sliman Mansour painted her, Fadwa Tuqan wrote a poem about her, “Lina luʾluʾatun hamraʾ” (Lina the Red Pearl) was set to music and sung by the iconic Egyptian singer Sheikh Imam, and Hassan Daher wrote a poem “Ya nabad al-daffa” (O Pulse of the West Bank), set to music and sung by the progressive Lebanese singer Ahmad Kaabour.

The same applies to creative responses to the Tal al-Za‘atar massacre of Palestinians during the Lebanese civil war (also in 1976), which Ismail Shammout portrayed in a series of watercolor paintings that were extremely harsh and unflinching. The massacre was also immortalized by Darwish in his poem “Ahmad al-Za‘atar” (from the collection Aʿraas, Weddings, 1976). In this poem, Darwish validated the Palestinians’ pain and their sense of betrayal and being conspired against by their Arab brethren; the poem’s cry ah, ya wahdi (How I am alone!) came to be the collective cry of all Palestinians. This cry would subsequently be abbreviated into wahdana (we, alone) in Darwish’s epic poem “Madih al-zill al-aali” (In Praise of the High Shadow, 1983) and then in “Ana Yusuf, ya abi” (O father, I am Youssef) from the collection Ward aqall (Fewer Roses, 1986), all of which were carved into the Palestinian collective soul and identity. “Ahmad al-Za‘atar” also established the image of the refugee camp as both a continuous journey back to the homeland, and an open gateway to the sea, toward exile and the unknown, as well as a place where the Palestinian clashes with his antithesis. Palestinian-American scholar Nadia Yaqub has observed that in the aftermath of the Tal al-Za‘atar massacre, as many as seven films were made documenting what ordinary people did during the massacre, which represents a shift away from a focus on the image of the fidaʾi with a gun toward ordinary people and a broader understanding of the concepts of resistance and sumud.

Palestinian society continued to mobilize its latent power through the growing role taken on by grassroots movements, student organizations, and labor syndicates. Many new associations were established and started to take initiatives in fields such as culture, healthcare, and agriculture, while cultural activity at the local level carried on its work dedicated to preserving memory, cultural heritage, and spurring Palestinians to remain resilient and resist. In this context, the Palestinian popular dance troupe al-Funoun was established in 1979, and it made a significant contribution to revitalizing folk heritage on stage, using it as a tool of resistance and as a means to uphold aspects of Palestinian identity having to do with connection to the land.

The era of the thawra, or Palestinian Revolution (a term that refers to the family of institutions, political parties and armed groups that operated under the institutional umbrella of the PLO until 1982) also saw an increased presence of imagery of the martyr in Palestinian cultural production. Darwish reinforced this imagery in his collection A‘raas, where the martyr’s image was associated with that of a bridegroom, and the act of martyrdom with that of a wedding celebration and procession, where ululations and henna are omnipresent. This imagery was recycled in numerous songs that were widely heard during the First Intifada and visual artworks overflowed with it, where the martyr is often depicted during the funeral procession, with his or her body shrouded in the Palestinian flag and borne by the mourners.

Cultural Work of Palestinian Intellectuals in the West

Palestinian intellectuals who had begun to rise to prominence in the West for their various intellectual, cultural, literary, and artistic production also contributed to the expansion of Palestinian presence in international academic, cultural, and artistic forums. Their presence offered a more diverse set of images of Palestinians that also had a resulting impact on the image of Arabs and Arab culture and its relationship to the world. The most prominent of these Palestinians was Edward Said, the Palestinian-American who remained haunted by that wound within his identity, his language, and his very name; Ibrahim Abu Lughod, who carried his struggle in the United States to promote awareness about the justness of the Palestinian cause through his seminars, articles, writings, institution-building, and other initiatives; Salman Abu Sitta who has made it his life’s work to document the land of Palestine and its people and to develop a practical plan to implement the Palestinian right of return; and Salma Khadra Jayyusi, with her monumental efforts in introducing Arabic and Palestinian literature to Anglophone readers in a comprehensive way, through the Encyclopedia of Palestinian Literature.

The Palestinian cultural presence continued to grow steadily on a global level, taking increasingly diverse forms that would, in later decades, reach unprecedented dimensions.

Artistic Expression vs Political Commitment

The trajectory of the formulation of the national identity was influenced by conservative cultural and social structures or rigid political and organizational frameworks that did not give much leeway to individual expression outside the collective framework and thus were, by definition, incapable of being critical of the contexts in which they were )re(produced. These frameworks also did not pay proper attention to the question of diversity and difference, which sometimes led to the deliberate overlooking and marginalization of important artistic works that bore aesthetics, preoccupations, and questions that were at variance with the priorities of the era that prioritized the homeland and its liberation above all other matters, including that of individual freedoms; in the 1970s, there was no room for individual voices that dissented with the voice of the collective.

This sometimes put artistic freedom at odds with the duty to serve the task of national liberation, as happened for instance with the writer Rasmi Abu Ali in his short story “Qitt maqsus al-sharibayn ismuhu Rayyis” (A Cat with Trimmed Whiskers Named Mr. Prez, 1977), which amounted to infringing upon the taboos of the Palestinian Revolution and the idealized image of the Palestinian resistance fighter. Mahmoud Darwish, then editor of Shuʾun Filastiniyya, declined to publish it despite being greatly impressed by it. Abu Ali and others, including Ali Fouda, continued their attempts through writings that were different and aimed to shock, to change reality, and start a revolution within the Revolution by rattling the foundations of its ossified bureaucracy. The poetry of Taha Muhammad Ali had a proselike language and tone; in one of his poems, "Abdul Hadi yusariʿ dawlatan uzma” (Abdul Hadi Fights a Superpower, 2006), Taha portrays the Palestinian Arab as simple, good-natured, and hospitable to the point of being naive. The dominating power of mainstream Palestinian poetry delayed attention to the uniqueness and importance of this poetry, something that had already happened previously with Tawfiq Sayigh.

It would happen again, to varying degrees, with other creators, especially in the field of the visual arts, whose artistic work opened other horizons and aesthetics that were far removed in their features from those that reigned over Palestinian visual art during this period. The most important of these artists are Kamal Boullata, Samia Halaby, Laila Shawa, Mona Hatoum, Vladimir Tamari, Paul Guiragossian, Juliana Seraphim, and Sophie Halaby. The Palestinian cause was present at varying levels in the works of all these artists, and while there are complex reasons behind this variance having to do with questions of aesthetics and identity, it was nevertheless still deeply rooted, implicit, and latent in many of their works that showed an openness to a wide range of personal and artistic influences and to a contemporary and universal artistic language.

Cultural Symbols, Icons, and Folklore

The seemingly firm alignment between the cultural sphere and the national liberation project led to the creation and consolidation of a number of iconic images and symbols, which began circulating widely among Palestinians as elements of a universal vocabulary, evoking for them a sense of oneness of their past, present, and future destiny. Thus, the olive tree, the keffiyeh, and the key gained high symbolic value in the Palestinian semiotic domain, while the traditional dabke (dance) and tatriz (embroidery) were elevated to the status of sacred cultural practices. Oranges and orange trees also came to hold significant symbolic value, as they embodied the Palestinian coastal cities, especially Jaffa, in contrast to the olive tree that stood for the mountainous regions of Palestine. Thus, the presence of the orange tree alongside the olive tree symbolically united the mountains and the coast as two parts of one homeland. Similarly, the prickly pear cactus also came to occupy a high symbolic status in various forms of Palestinian cultural expressions as a perennial witness to the destroyed Palestinian village, and for its symbolic association with the motifs of waiting and return, as seen in the works of Tawfiq Abdul Aal and Asim Abu Shaqra.

The tribulations of Palestinians and how they suffered on their via dolorosa toward freedom also drove artists to invoke various representations of the imagery of the cross and Jesus Christ and to draw from its lexicon of symbols and its semiotic and metaphoric field. This led to an increasing appearance of the motif of crucifixion and bearing the cross in many works of poetry and literature and in visual production. Likewise, the experience of imprisonment, especially in Israeli jails, became a recurring theme in literature, art, posters, and folk songs, given that prison was considered yet another critical arena for the liberation struggle, where there was direct confrontation with the occupier. As such, it became an essential component of Palestinians’ consciousness and the different permutations for the existence of this consciousness.

The use of folklore and its symbols in Palestinian cultural production hit its peak during the 1970s. Zakaria Mohammad believes this phenomenon became an obsession and a symptom of how disconnected the nation was as a community from its past. The cultlike worship of folklore flourished during this time of disconnection.

The village had an overwhelming presence in post–Nakba cultural expression as a symbol of the past that stood for roots and authenticity. It took up the most space in the process of forming and defining Palestinian identity, often at the expense of the city, which was seen more as a project for the future. The Nakba had devastated the Palestinian coastal cities, which had once stood for the project of Palestinian modernity, particularly Jaffa, which rivaled Jerusalem in importance as a metropolis. Alongside Haifa, which received special attention in literature and art—particularly in the writings of Emile Habibi, the poems of Darwish, and the paintings of Abed Abdi—Jerusalem remains the most frequently portrayed city across various forms of Palestinian cultural and artistic expression, which has made it a symbol that unites all Palestinians. Jerusalem as a symbol has come to represent a cornerstone of Palestinian existence and a glue that gives it cohesion, as well as a bridge over which to inspire global solidarity, especially with the Arab and Islamic worlds, but also beyond them at the global level.

Theater, Music, and Poster Art

Jerusalem was where the Hakawati Troupe was created, considered the most important theatre company in Palestine. It emerged from a fledgling theater movement that started in the twin cities of Ramallah and al-Bireh in the early 1970s, out of which several other theatrical troupes emerged, all of which were involved in producing politically and socially committed art, capable of posing uniquely Palestinian questions from a complex artistic and human perspective. The Hakawati Troupe was headed by Francois Abou Salem along with theater artists of his generation, who worked together as a collective at one with the spirit of resistance in the 1970s. Al-Hakawati performed many plays in different parts of Palestine and also abroad; for example, the play Mahjoub Mahjoub had a run of more than 120 performances. This experience culminated in the establishment of the Palestinian National Theater in 1984; it was eventually named after the troupe. The playwright and theater artist Khalil Tafesh is considered the founder of Palestinian theater in the diaspora (Amman first, then Damascus) after the Nakba.

Music too played an active role in shaping and expressing the Palestinian psyche during the era of the thawra, by keeping a spirit of struggle and resistance alive and glorifying martyrdom. Much of this music was like a chorus that echoed the voice of the collective, as was the case with groups like Firqat al-Ashiqin and the songs of the Revolution broadcast on the PLO’s Voice of Palestine radio. The lyrics of many of these revolutionary songs were composed by renowned poets such as Ahmad Dahbour and Mohammad Hasib al-Qadi. Popular zajal poets such as Abu Arab, Rajeh Salfiti, Suʿoud al-Assadi, and Musa al-Hafez helped to keep the Palestinian cause alive over the generations with their powerful verses and voices recited at various political, social, and cultural forums. Two remarkable instances from the field of music also came out of Jerusalem, the first of which was the work of Mustafa al-Kurd, while the other was that of George Qormuz (dates unknown) through his band al-Baraʿim [The Blossoms], with the spirit of protest and resistance in defiance of the occupying power that they both brought with them, as well as the singular quality of their music.

In music, the band Sabreen released its first album Dukhan al-barakin (Volcano Smoke) in 1984; the songs featured a number of poems by the “resistance poets” set to music composed by Said Murad and sung by Kamilya Jubran. Their second album, Mawt al-nabi (The Death of the Prophet, 1987), which was released shortly before the outbreak of the First Intifada, focused on various facets of Palestinian life during that period and its songs carried an explicit incitement urging Palestinians to rise up against the reality they were living in: the living conditions imposed upon them by the occupation and their lives as refugees in camps. Just as al-Funoun sparked a large wave of folk dance troupes and music groups, leading to a renaissance of this form of creative expression, the work of Sabreen represented a kind of musical breakthrough that contributed to the evolution and modernization of Palestinian song, spreading Palestinian music beyond their immediate local context, as well as establishing a new musical taste that offered listeners a more complex portrait of Palestinians and the reality they lived under. Sabreen’s music also set the stage for a renaissance and a popularization of Palestinian music, fostering an openness to influence from diverse forms of musical expression that brought with them a multiplicity of themes centered on questioning and reshaping identity.

Overall—but particularly in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967—the arts scene witnessed a surge in cultural production that incited people to resist and revolt. For example, Fathi Ghaben’s 1984 painting al-Huwiyya (Identity) is considered by some as prophesying the outbreak of the First Intifada. This painting, along with many other iconic pieces, was reproduced on postcards, which greatly facilitated its circulation en masse.

Songs were not the only vehicle for the widespread dissemination of many iconic poems that became deeply etched into the collective Palestinian consciousness. Poster art enabled the spread and dissemination of iconic visual works and served as an effective tool in building a visual lexicon and a symbolic language capable of addressing the Palestinian people, one that drew from the symbolic and semantic inventory that the cultural project had assembled as it kept pace with the Revolution and the Palestinian nation-building project. Through poster art, Palestinians commemorated important national and cultural occasions, events, and personalities. Posters were also an effective space in which to demonstrate acts of participation and solidarity, and the Palestinian national liberation struggle and its accompanying cultural movement accumulated an exceptionally massive tally of posters that chronicled significant themes and events in the history of the Palestinian people and the path they took in building their national identity.

The Role of the Beirut Period

The institutions under the PLO attempted to consolidate cultural and media work, especially following the organization’s decision to establish the Unified Information Office in 1972, aimed at bringing together the until then uncoordinated work of the different Palestinian factions in the fields of media and culture. However, this did not last long after the Palestinian adoption of political settlement [with Israel] was put forth as a possible solution.

With its location and cultural standing within the Arab world, as well as the cultural openness and freedom it offered, Beirut gave Palestinian cultural activity a great boost and opened it up to the rest of the Arab world and the broader world outside. This contributed to Palestinian culture’s growth and the broadening of the sphere in which it operated, the tools and vocabulary it used, and the way in which it represented itself, which in turn led to a greater openness in Palestinian identity to the Other, making Palestinian culture acquire a more universal, humanist dimension. Thus, the understanding of being Palestinian broadened and came to mean a conscious choice to belong to the Palestinian cause for the values of freedom and justice it stood for. The holding of the International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine in Beirut in 1978, of which Ezzeddine Kalak, the PLO’s representative in France, was one of the principal organizers, was a massive demonstration of worldwide artistic solidarity with the Palestinian cause at the time.

The Palestinian cultural milieu in Beirut represented a vibrant space and a sophisticated front for joint work and transnational, cross-border solidarity. This raises an important question about the concept of Palestinian culture during this era in view of the contributions made to it by many non-Palestinian writers and artists, such as Elias Khoury, who dedicated most of his literary career to writing about Palestine to the extent that his novel Bab al-Shams, Gate of the Sun, is considered the grand novel about the Palestinian cause, for which he is regarded as one of Palestine greatest novelists. In addition to cinema, poster art, and scholarly research, the works brought out by the children’s publishing house Dar al-Fata al-Arabi show us yet another facet of cultural production that was directed toward children and young adults that was able to acquire a relative level of independence. Its aim was to shape the identity of a new generation of Palestinian and Arab youth that would grow up to be seen as the generation that would bring about liberation. Funded by a large group of wealthy Palestinians, its publications were produced by mobilizing the creative energies of many Palestinian and Arab intellectuals and writers such as Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Kamal Boullata, Ihsan Abbas, Zakaria Tamer, and Sonallah Ibrahim and visual artists such as Helmi al-Touni, Muhyieddine al-Labbad, Burhan Karkoutli, and Sliman Mansour.

In its Beirut phase, the Palestinian nation-building and cultural identity-building projects succeeded in bringing together a scattered people under a common identity, an identity whose soul was imbued with the spirit of resistance, and with an optimism in its yearning for freedom, an identity that was not inward-looking, but rather open to the broader Arab world and to the rest of humanity around it in its quest to carry out the national liberation project, albeit remaining conservative in its basic components. While the artwork made by Palestinians from the 1948-occupied areas focused on the Palestinian in terms of his ties to the land as a peasant, the thawra in its Beirut phase worked to consolidate the image of the fidaʾi and Palestinians overall in their longing for liberation and return through armed struggle and resistance, with a particular focus on making women visibly present in the Palestinian people’s march of resistance and revolution.

The exodus of the Palestinian Revolution from Beirut marked a tragic moment in the journey of the Palestinian struggle, distancing it even further from the promised land of Palestine. It caused a hush in the voices of those articulating this dream, while more pessimistic voices grew louder. After the city was besieged by the Israelis in 1982, the PLO’s relocation to Tunis and the destruction and looting of the Palestinian Research Center dealt yet another setback to Palestinian cultural activity at the time. It lost its most important base and those who had been living and active in Beirut were again forced to disperse. Darwish expressed his anguish at seeing the Revolution now having to live out of hotel rooms on the beach in Tunis. The loss of the Palestine Film Unit’s cinematic archive also led to a halt in the progress of Palestinian cinema. PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat attempted to swiftly rebuild his institutions in Tunisia by re-launching Shuʾun Filastiniyya there, continuing the work of the PLO’s Information and Culture Department, and inviting Darwish to resume publishing his literary magazine al-Karmel, of which he was editor-in-chief. Darwish worked on publishing it out of Cyprus, while he took up residence in Paris. During this period, his larger personal project as a poet blossomed, with his poetry expanding into wider humanistic and aesthetic horizons, through which he laid the origins for his concept of exile as one of the geographies of Palestinian identity and components of its consciousness, given that memory for Palestinians is inherently linked to the experience of being a refugee and living in exile. (Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was perhaps one of the first Palestinian writers to address the theme of exile in his writings from his voluntary exile in Baghdad.)

Several texts and books by Palestinians were published that dealt with the Palestinian experience in Beirut, among them Ah Ya Beirut (O, Beirut!, 1983), a collection of essays by Rashad Abu Shawar; Beirut: Waʿi al-dhat 82 (Beirut ‘82: Self-Consciousness, 1983) by Ahmad Abu Matar; and Nashid al-hayat (Hymn of Life, 1985), a novel by Yahya Yakhlif. But perhaps the most famous writing about this period are by Darwish: his memoir of the 1982 siege Dhakira li-l-nisyan (Memory for Forgetfulness, 1986) and his two epic poems, “Madih al-zill al-ʿaali (In Praise of the High Shadow, 1983) and “Beirut” (1984) for the memories they carry of the Palestinian presence in Beirut, how the Palestinians had to bid farewell to the city, and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was yet another gaping wound in the Palestinian consciousness.

During this time, the West Bank and Gaza Strip experienced an increase in settlement activity, and Israeli military control spread more deeply into all aspects of life. A growing number of Palestinian laborers from both regions worked inside Israel, which brought about a sense of alienation and frustration at living within a harsh reality and its manifestations on the ground. This also led to the beginning of a disintegration or breakdown within Palestinian society, the earliest effects of which would later surface during the First Intifada in the phenomenon of killing collaborators. Sahar Khalifeh explored this aspect of Palestinian reality in her novel Bab al-Saha (1990), where she examined the status of Palestinian women, portraying them, in the words of critic Fakhri Saleh, as marginalized individuals stripped of all rights in a society whose social and political structures are influenced by the occupation. The novel also addresses the complicated relationship between these women and the resistance against the occupation and the role they play within it.

The most prominent Palestinian universities were established in the 1970s, and through their student and grassroots organizations, they began to play a pioneering role in both the national liberation struggle and in advancing Palestinian society, which made them arenas for an active, effective influential movement for Palestinian culture and the political struggle. The 1970s witnessed a growing poetry movement in the 1967-occupied territories. The writer and poet Hussein Barghouti touched upon this phenomenon in his early book Azmat al-shiʿr al-mahalli (The Crisis of Local Poetry, 1979) in which he pointed out the modest quality of that poetic output as a whole.

The First Intifada

The Intifada brought the Palestinian cause back to the attention of both the Arab world and the international community with unprecedented force, thus ending an era of fear that the cause was being submerged under the hegemony of an ossified cultural discourse overburdened with hollow rhetoric and symbolism. The Intifada contributed greatly to liberating cultural activity from that historical obligation, so a large segment of Palestinian creators outside of Palestine felt a sense of release from the pressure they felt by the sense of duty to their nation on their creative freedom and artistic choices.

A new generation of important Palestinian poets also began to be more visible, reflecting essential transformations in Palestinian poetry. Their voices acted as a transitional bridge toward liberating poetry from the oppressive prevailing poetic aesthetics, evolving toward a quieter, subtler style of poetry more attuned to the spirit of the age. In this new wave, the individual poets’ personal world and experience had primary importance, where each poet’s main priority was with developing their own unique idiom and tone. The leading poets in this trend included Zakaria Mohammad, Ghassan Zaqtan, Walid al-Khazindar, Youssef Abdel Aziz, Taher Riyad, Zuhair Abu Shaib, Youssef Abu Louz, Khaled Darwish, and Rasem al-Madhoun. There were other poets whose work went in different trajectories, such as Mohammad al-Qaisi and Ibrahim Nasrallah, further expanding the diversity of Palestinian poetic expression.

The Intifada allowed the streets, not the poets, to have the final say and take the lead in all action, even as Samih al-Qasim released “Taqaddamu” (Advance!, 1988) and Mahmoud Darwish published “Ayyuha-l-marruna bayna-l-kalimat al-abira” (To those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words, 1988), which he interrupted his self-imposed retreat in Paris to write. (At the time, Darwish was focused on expanding his larger personal poetic project. In fact, his more creative and measured engagement with the Intifada came a little later in his 1990 poem “Maʾsat al-narjis, malhat al-fidda” [The Tragedy of Narcissus, the Comedy of Silver].) Sliman Mansour also unveiled his famous painting, the aforementioned Sahwat al-qarya, in which he depicted a giant Palestinian woman occupying part of a scene from a Palestinian rural landscape, with peasant men and women emerging from between her legs, their features showing a clear sense of confidence, determination, willpower, and knowledge of their mission and the direction they were taking. Artists like Fathi Ghaben, Abdulhadi Shala, Fayez Elhasani produced powerful paintings full of tremendous expressive power that depicted the Intifada and the heroic presence of the Palestinian people in a multiplicity and diversity of forms, along with the new tools with which they were conducting their struggle, such as stones and slingshots. This could also be seen in the contributions of many other artists.

During the first Intifada, Palestinian women participated extensively in all forms of resistance and community action alongside men, youth and children; the Intifada opened up avenues for their potential for action and taking initiative. Alternative forms of cultural and artistic practice that could be disseminated more rapidly under the state of repression and siege by the occupation became more prevalent; thus, mural and graffiti art spurring popular resistance flourished, and songs recorded by local musicians like Thaer Barghouti and Walid Abdel Salam echoed the pulse of the street and gained popularity. There were also significant works by bands such as Sabreen, which had released its second album The Death of the Prophet, considered as revolutionary in terms of its lyrics, musical composition, and performance; the group Yuʿad from the Galilee, which performed hundreds of shows all over Palestine and abroad, narrating through music the story of the Palestinian people’s uprooting and their dreams; and al-Rahhala, a group founded by the musician Jamil al-Sayeh and Hussein Barghouti at the start of the Intifada, which released its first album Rasif al-madina (City Sidewalks) in 1989. Many other artistic and literary contributions came from inside Palestine and abroad, such was the sweeping nature of the Intifada’s impact and the way its incredible spirit was able to unleash tremendous creative energies that had lain dormant.

The Intifada caused transformations in the work of some Palestinian visual artists, the most significant of which was a collective that called itself al-Tajriba wa-l-ʿibdaaʿ (Experimentation and Creativity), that included Sliman Mansour, Nabil Anani, Vera Tamari, and Tayseer Barakat. The collective members sought to adopt a more revolutionary approach by working with local and organic raw materials and boycotting materials that came from the Israeli market. This period also saw the birth of new institutions such as the Popular Arts Center (founded in 1987), which focused on building popular dance and song troupes and amplifying their role in building Palestinian national identity, and the Tamer Institute for Community Education, founded in 1989 and led by educator Munir Fasheh in response to the need of local communities for new tools that would make them more productive. Many folkloric groups doing dabke and other kinds of traditional dance and song also became active during this period, among them the Sariyyet Ramallah Troupe for Music and Dance, the Juzour dabke troupe, and the Sharaf al-Tibi dabke troupe (named after the first student martyr at Birzeit University). They all tried to awaken in their audiences a communal spirit of cohesion and belonging to the land. Theater also had an active presence during the Intifada, especially with al-Hakawati Theater, which produced and put on several plays: Kufr Shamma, al-Asafir (The Sparrows), Mawta bila qubur (Dead with no graves), and Ansar, which talked about those jailed by the Israelis in the Ansar prison in the Negev desert for participating in the Intifada. During this period, new names in theater began to emerge whose work was important and notable in terms of their vision, aesthetics, and concerns that they were preoccupied with, such as the works of theater director Yaqoub Ismail, who founded al-Rahhala theater in 1984 in Ramallah and who can be considered a pioneer of experimental theater in Palestine, as well as the works of playwrights Sameh Hijazi and Mazen Ghattas. These theatre directors, along with others, began to present important new work inspired by texts or adaptations from around the world, in an effort to make Palestinian theater evolve and enrich its aesthetics, concerns, human approaches, and questions about identity.

During the Intifada, there was a rise in Palestinian feature films. Michel Khleifi’s film Urs al–jalil (Wedding in Galilee, 1987) is considered to be the first full-length feature film shot within Palestine occupied in 1948; it offered a fresh understanding of resistance through the story of a wedding celebration in a Galilee village during the period of military rule (1948-66). Khleifi followed this up with his docudrama Nashid al-hajar (Canticle of the Stones, 1990), which explored a new understanding of the idea of sacrifice. Elia Suleiman and Lebanese Canadian Jayce Salloum jointly made Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990), which examined the representation of Palestinians and Arabs in Western cinema, followed by Suleiman's Homage by Assassination (1991), which critiqued the Second Gulf War and its aftermath that led to the Oslo Accords in 1993. This was followed in 1993 by Rashid Masharawi’s first feature film Hatta ishʿar aakhar (Until Further Notice but internationally titled Curfew), set in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip toward the fag end of the Intifada and looked at the solidarity between ordinary people while under curfew imposed by the occupation army and their practice of sumud.

In 1992, Mahmoud Darwish published his collection Ahad ashara kawkaban (Eleven Planets), where he invoked the fall of Arab rule in Andalusia and the fall of Granada, in a reference to what he sensed was on the verge of being toppled and lost. The collection also included his lengthy poem “Khutbat al-hindi al-ahmar ma qabl al-akhir amaam al-rajul al-abyad” (The Red Indian’s Penultimate Speech to the White Man), which was his way of creating a reference point from which to interrogate the historical moment the Palestinians were living through at the time, namely the Madrid peace negotiations and conference (1991), which set the stage for the signing of the Oslo Accords (1993). which were a turning point in the history of contemporary Palestine.