Resistance in Palestinian Art: The Role and Significance of Culture in Our Struggle
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Art and culture have long enabled us to confront dispossession, assert identity, and resist erasure by colonization and now genocide. Cultural resistance emerged amidst pervasive repression, becoming essential to our attempts to preserve and assert our narrative.
Literature/poetry, the visual arts, music, film and theater have contributed accessible cultural practices with the potential to inspire resistance and steadfastness. In Palestine, art powerfully communicates Palestinian narratives and lived experiences of suffering under colonial rule.
Sliman Mansour, the renowned artist, author, cartoonist, painter and sculptor, recalls how, in the First Intifada, Israeli authorities routinely harassed Palestinian artists, shut down their exhibitions, and banned the production of political art. Artists prohibited from using the colors of the Palestinian flag were by no means spared if they painted a watermelon instead, with their work still confiscated. Today, the watermelon is as a national symbol for Palestinians and solidarity movements worldwide, simultaneously attesting to continued repression and the enduring creativity of our resistance.
In Palestine, cultural resistance was not an accessory to political struggle and was instead woven into its fabric. Embroidery, music, poetry, theater, and visual art became lifelines, sustaining communities in the face of censorship, curfew, and military violence. They preserved identity when public expression was criminalized and carried the uprising’s rhythms into homes, refugee camps, and streets.
When Israel tried to suppress cultural activism by closing theaters, canceling events, and erecting checkpoints, artists and audiences persisted, often walking long distances to attend performances. Art and culture became forms of steadfastness, ways of insisting that Palestinian cultural life would not be extinguished.
The Ongoing Destruction of Palestinian Culture
The assault on Palestinian cultural heritage, which seeks to erase cultural memory and presence, extends back to the Nakba. The destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage is, however, very much ongoing, with Israeli airstrikes on Gaza damaging or destroying more than 200 cultural and archeological sites, including the Omari Mosque in Jabalia, a fifth‑century Byzantine church, St Porphyrius Church (the oldest in Gaza), the Rafah Museum, and a 2,000‑year‑old Roman cemetery discovered in 2023.
Airstrikes that hit St Porphyrius Church also killed Marwan Tarazi, along with his wife and granddaughter, as part of a broader assault on Palestinian cultural continuity, heritage, and memory. Tarazi was the Photo Kegham collection archivist, overseeing the preservation and celebration of the work of Kegham Djeghalian, photographer of the Strip between 1945 and 1970.
Resistance in Palestinian Art
Literature inspires action. In January 2013, activists established the Bab al‑Shams protest village on confiscated land in the E1 area around Jerusalem, drawing inspiration from Elias Khoury’s novel of the same name. Symbolic and material, a literary world made flesh and embodied on an erasure-threatened landscape.
Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun captures the profound helplessness of Palestinians, clearly showing how passiveness and silence deepen the wounds of displacement. His haunting question (‘Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank?’) is a collective challenge to inaction, urging Palestinians to confront, rather than succumb to, their fate. This call for agency resonates deep within the heart of our cultural resistance.
Paintings and the visual arts embody our struggle and sacrifice. Heba Zaqout, painting through siege and genocide, refused to surrender her world to destruction. In her words: ‘My paintings are full of Palestinian houses, minarets, domes and churches to emphasize the Palestinian identity and Palestinian existence.’ For her, resistance was not just an act of survival rooted in endurance but a form of breathing, a reiteration that in Palestine, existence is in itself an act of resistance. Heba and her son were killed by an Israeli airstrike on Gaza on 14 October 2023.
Poetry, always the backbone of Palestinian cultural resistance, is also a living archive, with Samih al‑Qasim’s verses recited from memory across generations. The musician Marcel Khalife embodied them in new forms, with his Muntasib al‑qamati, amshi (Upright I walk), widely acknowledged as an anthem of dignity and defiance. Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Identity Card’, written in 1964, is still one of the most enduring declarations of Palestinian presence: whenever Palestinians hear its refrain echo, they gather together, asserting who they are.
Even imprisonment could not sever artistic collaboration, with poets smuggling verses out of cells that then became songs. Waseem Kurdi’s lyrics for ‘The Sun Danced on Our Swords’ traveled even further, going from his prison to the el‑Funoun troupe, and then on to another prison, where an imprisoned artist contributed the melody. This chain, testimony to a creativity that refuses containment, gave the world ‘Marj Ibn Amer’, now widely regarded as one of el‑Funoun’s most iconic works.
Music, the soundtrack of our struggle, is politically charged, with patriotic songs and even poems by Mahmoud Darwish banned by the occupier. Composer Raid Awwad, whose music became synonymous with the First Intifada, was arrested and tortured without charge, before the occupation confiscated thousands of his tapes from shops and public spaces. Years later, the actor and filmmaker Mo’min Swaitat digitized and re‑released his work, restoring a soundtrack once almost erased.
Theater and film are also part of our resistance. Palestinian cinema can be traced back as early as 1935, when Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan filmed King Saud’s visit to Palestine. Sirhan later co‑founded Studio Palestine in Jaffa in 1945, before Zionist militia forced him out of Palestine three years later. Many of his films later vanished, most likely destroyed or seized in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The Israeli scholar Rona Sela’s 2017 documentary Looted and Hidden reveals how Israeli forces systematically looted Palestinian visual materials, burying them in military archives.
Palestinian filmmaker Azza Al‑Hassan has critiqued Sela’s work for reproducing Israeli perspectives when Palestinians cannot access their own archives. Her documentary Kings & Extras (2004) chronicles the disappearance of Palestinian films and raises ethical questions about researching Indigenous archives under settler‑colonial conditions.
In a later Electronic Intifada article, Sela accepted Al-Hassan’s criticism by acknowledging her privilege. She acknowledged that her access was only possible because her nationality gave her a privilege denied to Palestinians.
Resistance is also recovering what was lost, with Nadi Lekol Nas, founded in Beirut in 1998, restoring more than 70 films. The Israeli filmmaker Karnit Mandel’s A Reel War also extracted previously unseen footage from seized archives. Sela later criticized this film for perpetuating and feeding into colonial perspectives.
When Mohammad Bakri left us on 24 December 2026, we lost a remarkable voice in Palestinian theater. A member of the Palestinian community in Israel (PCI), he used his art to expose the contradictions and violences embedded in daily life. His one‑man show ‘The Pessoptimist’, adapted from Emile Habiby’s novel of the same name, captured the absurdity and resilience of Palestinians navigating a system built to erase them.
His 2003 documentary Jenin Jenin, based on survivor testimony from Israel’s assault on Jenin Camp in the Second Intifada, was fiercely contested by Israeli soldiers in the film, who filed a 2016 defamation lawsuit against him. Five years of protracted lawsuits followed before an Israeli court ruling banned the film, issued an order for all copies to be seized, and ordered Bakri to pay heavy fines. Bakri’s appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court was rejected one year later. However, activists continued to defy the order by circulating the film widely online. In this and other instances, cultural production was a terrain where truth itself was fought over.
Throughout the course of their post-1948 development, Palestinian art and culture have not existed in esoteric isolation and nor have they been solely appreciated for their aesthetic beauty; rather, they have been deeply invested in the Palestinian struggle, coming to function as a resource in the hands of our people against the backdrop of pervasive and far-reaching repression. Deeply embedded in the struggle’s past history, they are also directly invested in its future development and continued challenge to colonial power.
THINKING PALESTINE
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