The Image of Palestine in the Palestinian Art Scene after 1948

Cairo Papers in Social Science, 2012

This essay examines the proposition that landscape representations both reflect and endorse national ideology. By studying in detail selected landscape paintings by Jewish artists in pre-State Israel some of the assumptions linking landscape and nationalism will be revisited. In particular, I shall challenge received notions in Israeli art historiography that interpret the numerous landscape paintings of the 1920s as directly expressing the identification with Zionism – the Jewish national movement. Analysis of the subject repertoire reveals that artists usually ignored images of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. They preferred instead to depict oriental countryside or ancient cities in an emblematic idealistic manner supported by stylistic borrowings from contemporary French painting. The country in these paintings is more an idea than a reality. Yet they evoke neither the biblical past nor a Zionist futuristic vision, but rather an oriental Arcadia of an unspecified time.

2021

The contributions of this volume are framed by the overlooked context of the British Mandate, providing a significant overview of photography and the social histories of the period. They cover a wide range of themes based on a re-reading of social history through several archival collections (American Colony, École Biblique, National Geographic), institutional records of service (mission schools, orphanages, monasteries and charities), family albums (Jawhariyya, Luci, Mushabek), portrait photography (Raʿad, Whiting, Scholten), urbanscapes and aerial photography (Scholten, Bavarian State Archive, Australian War Memorial). Added to the rich archival material, is the consideration of how we read and restitute images and their histories. This includes debates on methodologies for decolonising and indigenising photography as well as reexamining and 're-narrating' photographs that have not been published. Reading social history through photography has been a crucial antidote to the absence and loss of Palestinian material patrimony through wars and conquests. Alongside professional photographers, family albums constituted the portable artifacts of memory that is used today to reconstruct the daily life of bourgeois quotidian. Among the case studies in this volume dealing with archival fonds and conceptual approaches to photography, it celebrates, and in one case, resurrects from oblivion, the work of four outstanding photographers of Palestine. Lars Larsson, John D. Whiting, Frank Scholten and Khalīl Raʿad. Both Whiting and Larsson were pioneering photographers associated with the American Colony, and both traversed the Ottoman and Mandate periods. The leading figure in their photography was Lars (Lewis) Larsson, head of the photographic department in the American Colony and, later, the Swedish consul in Jerusalem. Larsson was the author of the iconic picture of the surrender of Jerusalem by Mayor Ḥusayn Hashim al-Ḥusaynī in the hills of Sheikh Bader on 9th December, 1917 which was reproduced all over the world signalling the fall of Ottoman rule, and the capture of Palestine by the British. Biblification of these photographic collections is a major theme that is examined by a number of contributors. One of the richest of those compendiums is undoubtedly that of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, whose main focus has been the documentation of archaeological excavations and sites in the late 19th century and Mandate period.

Spiritual Homelands: The Cultural Experience of Exile, Place and Displacement among Jews and Others edited by Asher D. Biemann, Richard I. Cohen, and Sarah E. Wobick-Segev., 2019

Global media journal, 2015

Films from or about Palestine are frequently programmed at international film festivals. They are sometimes released in cinemas and quite often presented in special screenings at various institutions all over the Western World. Due to the scarcity of screens and the boycott of Israel, they are seen to a lesser extend in Arab countries. Compared to screenings of other Arab films or the presentation of movies from other former colonies and mandatory territories, Western audiences often react highly emotional to the images from Palestine. In debates questions for a better understanding of the films' subject or context are barely ever asked. Rather the foreign spectators seem to have a sense of belonging and to claim the right for co-determination. Where do these emotional ties originate from? In recent years a large number of films shot in Palestine during the late Ottoman period and the British mandate were made accesssible online, mainly by the Steven Spielberg Film Archive in Jerusalem and the British War Museum in London. Libraries like the Library of Congress in Washington digitized parts of their photographic collections. Based on them as well as on the films I work with as distributor and programmer for Arab film series, in this article I look at images on and from Palestine and ask for what purpose, in which context and by whom they were made and distributed.

Third Text, 2006

This article is a published lecture delivered at the "Edward Said: A Continuing Legacy" conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. October 3, 2004.

2015

Films from or about Palestine are frequently programmed at international film festivals. They are sometimes released in cinemas and quite often presented in special screenings at various institutions all over the Western World. Due to the scarcity of screens and the boycott of Israel, they are seen to a lesser extend in Arab countries. Compared to screenings of other Arab films or the presentation of movies from other former colonies and mandatory territories, Western audiences often react highly emotional to the images from Palestine. In debates questions for a better understanding of the films' subject or context are barely ever asked. Rather the foreign spectators seem to have a sense of belonging and to claim the right for co-determination. Where do these emotional ties originate from? In recent years a large number of films shot in Palestine during the late Ottoman period and the British mandate were made accesssible online, mainly by the Steven Spielberg Film Archive in Jerusalem and the British War Museum in London. Libraries like the Library of Congress in Washington digitized parts of their photographic collections. Based on them as well as on the films I work with as distributor and programmer for Arab film series, in this article I look at images on and from Palestine and ask for what purpose, in which context and by whom they were made and distributed.

Imaging and Imagining Palestine, 2021

Cash Flows are inflows and outflows, i.e., the movement of cash and cash equivalents.