Where would Palestinian art be without politics?

Many cities in the West Bank are well known for their graffiti. The success of internationally recognized street artists like Banksy, Sam3 and Blu have helped promote this growing trend.

	Graffiti on a section of the West Bank separation fence in the town of Bethlehem on Sept. 2, 2010.
	Photo by: AP

The motives behind Palestinian graffiti are expressly political. Nearly all artwork is outwardly dissenting and oppositional. The inherently political objective of Palestinian graffiti can be explained by the historical structure from which it developed.

Faris Arouri, 28, is a member of the Palestinian Peace & Youth Forum (PPYF). His brainchild, the "Send a Message" project was featured in Time Magazine, CNN and Haaretz last year.

According to Faris and most scholars, Palestinian graffiti has undeniable political origins. “When street art was developed, it was mostly for political reasons. It is impossible to take it out of its context," Faris says, referring to the graffiti of the first intifada, when it served a broadly communicative purpose. Resistance groups utilized graffiti as a political canvas, detailing impending strikes, rallies, and general messages of defiance. Political groups also used graffiti to mobilize the population and persuade them to support the resistance.

By spraying messages of resistance onto private and community surfaces, the people undermined the efforts of Israel to closely control and guard their activities. Faris points out that at this stage graffiti was barely even an art form: “This was the first step of Palestinian graffiti. It wasn’t meant to be art. It was just scribbling on the wall."

The political nature of graffiti is perhaps best illustrated through the double role of artists during the 1960s and 1970s. When the modern Palestinian revolution started, artists, writers, poets, film-makers and cartoonists were all members of the PLO. Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafni, Mustafa abu ali, Ewil Habibi, were all fighters, and artists, at the same time.

Majd Abdel Hamid, 22, is a Palestinian artist and graduate of the International Art Academy of Palestine and the Malmo Art Academy in Sweden. He argues that Palestinian street art has always retained its political focus: “The Western development of graffiti, particularly in New York, was a reaction to urbanizing. It was an individual act. Here it is collective. You don’t have famous Palestinian graffiti artists signing their names. It’s an anonymous act”.

The collective culture of graffiti is very much a symptom of its unified political nature. It avoids the culture of competition more symptomatic of Western scenes, in which artists vie for individual fame and aesthetic credit.

“When you have this politically charged conflict, the aesthetics of street art are never the main factor. It’s mostly about the conflict, the Palestinians, and the occupation," Majd explains.

According to both Faris and Majd, the dissident voice of Palestinian graffiti has its real origins in the establishment of the PLO and its general strategy for resistance. This strategy, which has since then become the national rhetoric, has prevented Palestinian graffiti from developing its own cultural, social and aesthetic mores, and has consequently thwarted the expansion of cultural development in a more general sense.

Faris argues that some time after the establishment of the PLO, the national focus shifted from individual human beings to the cause: “The slogan which I am always fighting against is ‘I am willing to die for Palestine.' You shouldn’t want to die for Palestine, you should want to live for Palestine. What is more important, the place or the human being? Is it the society or the actual land?"

"When Yasser Arafat first entered Palestine, instead of kissing a Palestinian child, he kissed the soil," Faris continues. "The soil is not the sacred part, it is the people that matter."

“The slogan of the Zionist movement was ‘return and build’. The Palestinian slogan was to ‘return and enjoy.’ People have come to believe that once the conflict ends, everything else ends. You don’t have a struggle for development, for civil rights, for human rights, for a proper environment. The whole environmental issue in Palestine is nonexistent. The entire mentality of the Palestinian people has been framed into…getting an independent Palestinian state,” he says.

According to Faris, the PLO formed a national rhetoric and an identity encircled by conflict. The effect this had on art is carefully described by Fatima Abdul Karim, another PPYF member: “There is no gray area in Palestinian art. There is either the victimized image or the image of a hero."

The political narrative promoted by the PLO translated every aspect of life into political themes. As an artist, this is something Majd is also acutely aware of: “Palestinian art in general was also preoccupied with the fact that there was an occupation. Art's function was to tell Palestinians that we exist,” he says.

Majd argues that, in becoming so political, Palestinian graffiti, and art in general, has missed out on a lot. He argues for the necessity of self-criticism in art movements, and in society in general: “Coming closer to a Palestinian state, there are many social aspects that art has to criticize, question and talk about. We have to tackle social aspects. For any type of development you have to criticize your own society. Whether you are occupied or not occupied, artwork is not merely and strictly political; to just repeat the Palestinian rhetoric is damaging.”

Last month, Majd participated in a video conference between Paris and Gaza. The focus of the meeting was Palestinian art, and what making art in such a context really meant. During the meeting, a theoretical question was posed: if, one morning, Israel and the occupation were gone, then where would this leave Palestinian art, literature film and cinema? The question sought to examine where Palestinian art could be without its politics.

Majd argues that occupied people tend to rank their socio-political agendas in order of importance. He laments this strategy: “It simply doesn’t work like that, its not simple mathematics- you have to work on both sides. We don’t have to work all our lives saying we need to get liberated - we have to have differences in order to develop independence.” For Majd, the question of how the Palestinians are going to define themselves is crucially important. And to do this, he argues, they must examine themselves.

Indeed Faris, Majd and Fatima all argue that the development of graffiti culture requires self-criticism. By placing this lack of identity so deep within the political and historical context of the Palestinians, they also acknowledge the difficulties which artists, writers, poets, filmmakers and cartoonists all face.

There are however, some aspects of Palestinian graffiti and art which do have their own extra social dimensions, however small they may be. In Gaza. for example, when somebody goes to the Hajj, often ‘welcome home’ slogans will be graffitied onto the walls. In the West Bank, a small group of feminist artists has emerged, which tackles women's issues in a Muslim society. And there is also an ongoing project called Picasso in Palestine, initiated by Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani, which aims is to bring a Picasso masterpiece from the Van Abbemuseaum in Eindhoven to the Palestinian people. The piece would be the first of its kind to be on display in Palestine.

Fatima says: “I am very much in love with the Picasso Project. The point is about what Palestine would be without occupation - with their own museums and sets of procedures." This vision, shared also by Faris and Majd, is of a Palestine with identity, richly self-critical and thoroughly self-involved.