The Nakba is not over. To this day, 75 years after the ‘creation of Israel,’ and 105 years after the Balfour Declaration was issued, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues and the Palestinian Nakba is ongoing.
That is the message of Mathematics of the Palestinian Nakba 75 an exhibition in London’s P21 Gallery which opened on the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel. Through videos, prints and photography the story of the Palestinians expelled from their homeland is told in a sobre testimony to the injustices which are still continuing.
The Nakba, Arabic for ‘catastrophe’, refers to the 1948 Palestinian exodus where an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee from their homes and villages that came under the attack of Zionist militias in a bid to establish a Jewish state. Almost 1 million Palestinians were displaced in 1948.
The exhibition begins with a summary of the facts relating to the Nakba. The emphasis is on the numbers: By the end of 1948, 25 documented massacres were committed by the Zionist underground gangs. The most infamous of these was Deir Yasin in April 1948. And by the time the Armstice Agreements were drawn up in 1949 for the cessation of hostilities, the Zionist gangs, now under the official status of the newly declared State, had occupied 77percent of historic Palestine while the world looked on.
Yahya Zaloom the artistic director at the P21 Gallery and an artist in his own right turns the numbers into works of art through 14 digital prints which depict 418 locations which have been destroyed in Palestine.
Under each graphic are the names of some of the destroyed villages. Using the letters from the names of the places that have been destroyed art works are produced saying that these localities still exist and will never be forgotten and there is no justification for the Zionist slogan a land without a people for a people without a land.
For six months in 2022 Ahmed Al-Bazz, an independent photojournalist, and documentary filmmaker based in the Palestine region, who focuses on Palestinian-Israeli affairs, documented over 500 Palestinian villages across Mandatory Palestine that were depopulated during the Nakba and subsequently destroyed by the Israeli state. He has produced an amazing collection of photographs with the then and now theme showing the destruction of the villages alongside structures built by the Zionists.
“Witnessing first-hand what we Palestinians have been reading about all our lives has been an emotional experience. Within almost every Israeli town inside the Green Line, or at the very least next to them, lies a Palestinian village that was erased by Israel. Walking around the country, I have seen graveyards surrounded by electric fences, mosques that are used as animal barns, homes that were turned into artist villages, and many other forms of dispossession.”
The film Rosetta made in 2013 by Gil Mualem Doron depicts Maram, a Palestinian teenager from Jaffa, whose grandmother’s house was demolished soon after the 1948 War. Her grandmother is one of the 300,000 Palestinian internal refugees whose land and houses were confiscated in 1948 and who have been banned from returning to the places they had to leave.
For a long time, the beach north of Old Jaffa had no name. Its border is made out of the destroyed houses of the village of Al-Rasid (Rosetta, in English) that existed until the 1948 war. The village was built outside Yafa’s walls by Egyptian soldiers from the village of Al-Rashid, on the banks of the Nile, who remained in Yafa following the withdrawal of their leader, Ibrahim Pasha, who ruled Yafa from 1831 to 1834. The Egyptian village of Al-Rasid was the place in which the Rosetta Stone was discovered.
Until 2011 a small part of the beautiful large house still existed at the edge of the beach. The only other structure that was left was renovated and turned into Biet-Gidi – a museum that celebrates the occupation of the area by the Israeli’s Etzel forces in 1948. The film goes forward and back between Biet Gidi and the last remnants of Al-Rasid neighbourhood. The final remnant was destroyed by Tel Aviv municipality a few days after the film was made.
Gil Mualem-Doron is an award-winning transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and curator whose work investigates issues such as identity and place, histories of displacement, embodied experiences of migration and the legacies of colonialism.
He also presented photographs from the Present Absentees Project which depicts the issue of “Present Absentees” or Internally Displaced Persons (IDP’s) in Israel. Present Absentees are Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their home in Mandatory Palestine by Jewish or Israeli forces, before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, but who remained within the area that became the state of Israel. They are regarded as absent by the Israeli government because they were absent from their homes on a particular day, even if they did not intend to leave them for more than a few days, and even if they left involuntarily. IDPs homes, property and lands were seized by Israel. 274,000 Arab citizens of Israel (25%) are IDP.
The project was created during an Artist’s Residency at Umm El Fahem Gallery, Israel and the photographs were taken in the gallery as well as in the Elderly House in the town. Local residents were invited to a photoshoot in which their photographs were taken against the background of historical photos of Al-Lajoun – a nearby village where they or their ancestors were born.
Naim and Wadee’a a documentary by Najwa Yasmine returns to Yaffa (Jaffa) before 1948 by way of a portrait of the filmmaker’s grandparents Wadee’a Aghabi and Naim Azar. Using the oral histories recounted by the three daughters of Naim and Wadee’a to tell the story of Jaffa’s social life, Najjar builds a compelling account of life before the Nakba in a prosperous urban centre. Visually striking, the film’s use of archive photographs and mementos of the city and the couple through which its story is told make it an intimate and captivating journey into the life of one couple, and one city, before the Nakba.
Mathematics of the Palestinian Nakba 75 P21 Gallery until June 10
