[[link removed]]

THESE STUNNING IMAGES SHOW PALESTINIAN LIFE BEFORE THE NAKBA  
[[link removed]]


 

Suyin Haynes
April 10, 2024
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Zionist propaganda refers to pre-1948 Palestine as a “land
without a people.” A new photographic collection pushes back against
this erasure of Palestinian history — and shows the vitality of its
society before the Nakba. _

Palestinian delegation departing from Lydda to participate in the
First Conference of Arab Women in Cairo, October 12, 1938., (The G.
Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection)

 

Review of _Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before
the Nakba_ edited by Teresa Aranguren and Sandra Barrilaro; foreword
by Mohammed El-Kurd (Haymarket, 2024)        

The photograph almost looks like a test shot, its subjects assembling,
not quite yet ready for the camera. A group of Palestinian women stand
in front of train carriages, preparing to depart. They are the
Palestinian delegation to the First Conference of Arab Women in Cairo,
and it is mid-October, 1938. Over four days, these twenty-seven
delegates will join women from Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Iraq
in discussing support for Palestine — the conference’s central
theme.

The photograph here shows the delegation departing from Lydda. Some
wear sunglasses, others squint into the sunlight. Most wear heels and
carry handbags and papers. Some look at the camera while others look
behind them to the left, perhaps calling to a latecomer to join. The
conference they are bound for eventually resulted in support for
Palestinian demands for the cancellation of the Balfour Declaration,
and condemnation of the British police’s brutal repression of the
Palestinian population.

The image represents one glimpse of life in Palestine before the
Nakba, appearing in _Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of
Palestine Before the Nakba_ (recently published
[[link removed]] by
Haymarket). Comprising nearly 230 photographs, with the majority
dating between 1898 and 1946, the book’s images show several facets
of life in Palestine sourced from a range of collections, including
personal family photographs, studio portraiture, and the archives of
the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in
the Near East (UNRWA).

[[link removed]]

Girls pushing their belongings in strollers and wheelbarrows and
fleeing Jaffa, 1948. (UNRWA Archives)

_Against Erasure_ was originally published in Spanish in 2016, having
been conceived and edited by journalist Teresa Aranguren and
photographer Sandra Barrilaro. “The genesis for this idea and the
main motivating factor behind it is to contradict the Zionist slogan
that this is ‘a land without a people for people without a
land,’” Barrilaro told me via Zoom.

The pair worked with Haifa-based professor and historian Johnny
Mansour. He had over some years assembled a broad range of photographs
and oral histories, building relationships with the families who had
been able to remain and survive in that city, and who preserved their
photograph albums. “I firmly believe that while the people of
Palestine lost their land, they refuse to lose their history,”
writes Mansour in an opening essay for the book.

In the context of Zionist denialism of Palestinian existence, memory,
and history, the photographs presented in _Against Erasure_ are
monochromatic, physical reminders of an existence that settler
colonialism has attempted to destroy multiple times over. Men, women,
and children work to prune olive trees and, cross-legged on the
ground, press their produce. The outstretched hands of a group of
young women reach toward the sky in pursuit of a basketball. A family
of three prepares for a portrait, encircled by foliage. A group of
women’s eyes are trained down at their laps as they concentrate on
crafting, sitting in front of a sign that reads “Arab Women’s
Union of Ramallah.”

As Mohammed el-Kurd writes in the foreword to the 2024
English-language edition, “Our eyes seldom encounter Palestine
before the Israeli regime; a Palestine not defined by its ailments but
defined by its industries and cultures.”

[[link removed]]

Women and children working in the Women’s Union workshop in
Ramallah, 1934–1939. (The G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph
Collection)

The ordinariness of the everyday presented in many of these
photographs is striking, particularly given their own contemporaneous
context, and also the contemporary context today. “There’s
something arresting, always, about efforts to make any people who are
regarded as somehow monsters into humans again,” said historian of
modern Palestine Dr Mezna Qato at _Against Erasure_’s launch on a
damp London evening earlier this month, the venue humming with energy
and soundscapes. “And it’s despite the everydayness of these
images that they are still arresting, and we have to grapple with why
they’re arresting.”

Perhaps this is intertwined with the fact that we view these
photographs with the knowledge that soon after they were taken, the
destructive ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948 would strategically and
systematically work to annihilate and displace many of the very people
and places photographed. And the present context is also unignorable;
we are viewing these images during the renewed iteration of an ongoing
genocide, in which Israeli attacks have killed more than thirty-three
thousand Palestinians
[[link removed]] since
October 7.

Yet, as el-Kurd urges in his foreword, “It is important to resist
the urge to romanticize that era.” In looking at the images
of _Against Erasure_ and viewing the fragments of this time, one
mustn’t forget that this curated collection of photography is
exactly that: fragments.

What We Do and Don’t See

Among others, _Against Erasure_ includes three key photographic
collections: the Johnny Mansour collection, comprised of Mansour’s
work compiling family photograph albums; the Matson Photograph
Collection [[link removed]] created
by the American Colony Photo Department and its successor firm the
Matson Photo Service, which operated in Jerusalem from 1898 until the
early 1950s and was mainly targeted toward the tourism trade; and the
UNRWA archives. The images from each collection were created for a
specific purpose and function at the time. In _Against Erasure_, they
are woven together with varying levels of textual exploration or
attribution alongside them on the page.

[[link removed]]

Postcard featuring a photograph by Karima Abbud, titled “Two Girls
from Nazareth,” 1928. Karima Abbud was the first female Palestinian
professional photographer, with studios in both Jerusalem and Haifa.
(The Mansour Collection)

“The intention in the selection of the photographs was to gather as
broad and complete a picture of Palestine in this moment, especially
one that portrays the advance of the Zionist movement into historic
Palestine,” said Barrilaro in an interview with _Jacobin_. Indeed,
as well as the quieter images of the everyday family albums, there are
other moments that speak to the “capital P Politics” of the period
and depict life under the British colonial occupation — including
the marching of British troops at Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem on December
11, 1917, which marked the start of British military control of
Palestine.

Importantly, too, there are images that speak to Palestinian political
and economic organizing during this time; such as that of the
women’s delegation departing from Lydda, or shots of boatmen and
dockworkers at the end of a monthslong general strike, which was
the longest general strike in modern history
[[link removed]] and
brought economic and commercial activity in Palestine to a standstill.

[[link removed]]

Boatmen in Jaffa at the end of the general strike, 1936. (The G. Eric
and Edith Matson Photograph Collection)

“What I’m trying to think about, and what I think the book is
inviting us to think about and challenging us to think about, is how
do we fight against denialism but at the same time, do so in a way
that does not constrain the Palestinian story to a series of
counternarratives,” says Qato. “That in fact, the Palestinians
have a story to tell, but more importantly, have a political project
that they need to advance, which is one of freedom and liberation.”

 

At the same time, Qato points out that the collection is constrained;
in part because of what is available given the mass destruction of
archives and material. Due to the status and costs of photography in
early twentieth-century Palestine, certain regions and demographics
are more represented than others in the book. The production of
certain images within contexts; including the Matson Collection and
the UNRWA archives, raise questions around who is and is not featured,
not only within _Against Erasure_ but in archives more broadly.

“I would love, for example, for there to be a book called ‘Against
Erasure: Photographs of the Palestinian Working Class,’ or
‘Photographs of Palestinian Peasantry,’” says Qato. “But
it’s always just the Palestinians. And there’s a reason why that
is: because the peoplehood of Palestinians is denied.”

Qato connects this back to the current moment, when Palestinians
across the diaspora are searching for and consuming literature of
their homeland’s past to understand the present. She outlines that
there can sometimes be a “tricky slippage” when it comes to
photographic and archival projects, sometimes limited by the material
available, or limited by the audiences they believe that they are
speaking to. “They’re in fact, histories or photographies of
Palestine and not the Palestinians. And there’s something fragmented
about the way we tell those photographic stories of_ Against
Erasure_ that centers Palestine and the countries enveloping around
it, but not the broader diaspora, and in fact, not everyone inside
[Palestine] either.”

Listening to Images

As I spent time with these images, the work of black feminist theorist
and academic Tina M. Campt came to my mind. In her 2017
book _Listening to Images_
[[link removed]], Campt invokes the
act of listening to glean meaning from photography; in particular,
historically overlooked and dismissed photographs of black subjects
taken throughout the black diaspora across time and space. By using
hearing as a means to interpret imagery, Campt outlines how we create
new relationships with such photographs, understanding them at
different frequencies and in different ways. Some images may be
“quieter” than others, but that doesn’t mean they are any less
revealing than others that may be “louder.”

Some of the archival images Campt includes in _Listening to Image_s
are stylistically similar to photographs featured in _Against
Erasure_, in particular the photographs documenting young black men in
both everyday life and studio portraiture for passport photographs in
postwar Birmingham, in Britain’s Midlands. For Campt, these
depictions of everyday life, lived by those under systems of
oppression and colonialism, are crucial clues to the past.

“What is the relationship between the quiet and the quotidian?”
Campt asks in _Listening to Images_.

Each term references something assumed to go unspoken or unsaid,
unremarked, unrecognized or overlooked. . . . Yet the quotidian is not
equivalent to passive every day acts, and quiet is not an absence of
articulation or utterance . . . the quotidian must be understood as a
practice rather than an act/ion. It is a practice honed by the
dispossessed in the struggle to create possibility within the
constraints of every day life.

How does this then relate to the photography of _Against Erasure_, a
collection of varying styles of photography, at varying points before
the Nakba? The idea of quotidian as an ongoing practice rather than a
completed action is certainly visible through several of these
photographs. There is a power, rendered quiet as it may be, in simply
existing when wielded by those living under the command of a colonial
project.

_Suyin Haynes is a London-based freelance journalist covering stories
at the intersections of identity, culture, and underrepresented
communities._

* Palestinian territories
[[link removed]]
* photos
[[link removed]]
* Nabka
[[link removed]]
* Civil Society
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]