FURY on the front line of OCCUPATION
Image of a young Palestinian in a pitched battle with Israel embodies the turbulent energy and a sense of disenfranchisement felt by many
Agiven: Ideas, along with the words used to express them, carry weight in our world and leave a transformative impact on our lives — but only when our lives and the world we inhabit are commonplace, governed by everyday norms.
That is not so for Palestinians today, who live fractured lives in an unsettled world where the words we employ to describe their struggle are by now tired and shopworn (peace process, separate state, United Nations resolutions, national rights, and the rest of it), used often with a diminishing return of fresh insight.
Images of that struggle, on the other hand, captured at a serendipitous moment by a competent photojournalist, can speak compellingly, and at times even movingly, about it.
That is so not just because a picture is worth a thousand words — a claim anchored in cliche — but because an artful picture creates a gap in temporal reality through which the viewer is given a moment, separate from time, as it were, to commune with, react to and feel what he or she is viewing.
So it is with that startling, politically charged photo, shot during a Great March of the Return demonstration at the Gaza border, on October 22, by Palestinian cameraman Mustafa Hassana. The photo depicts a bare-chested, 20-year-old Gazan, Aed Abu Amro, holding aloft the Palestinian flag in one hand and swinging a slingshot with the other, while smoke from burning tyres and tear-gas canisters billowed behind him. The image, according to the BBC, went viral, with Twitter users likening it to the great 1830 revolutionary masterpiece, Liberty Leading the People, by Eugene Delacroix.
That it drew comparison to a famous painting by the French Romantic artist is not surprising. In La Liberte Guidant le Peuple, as the painting is called in French, Lady Liberty strides barefoot and barechested, holding aloft the national flag in one hand and brandishing a musket in the other, with a string interplay between the bright colours of the flag and the smokefilled, gloomy greys of the background. The optical effects in Delacroix’s painting match to a tee the optical effects in Hassana’s photo caused by the smoke in the background of the frame. Both photo and painting depict iconographic action, and foster a feeling of dynamism in anyone viewing them. In a word, the resemblance is uncanny, perhaps even otherworldly.
Delacroix, of course, is one of the most celebrated artists in France, and Frenchmen revere his iconic painting. Before the country switched to the euro, for example, Liberty Leading the People was featured on the 100 franc banknote and is said to have inspired the Statue of Liberty.
Left leaderless
Rarely had there been a photo in which the symbolic resources of the Palestinian people been so completely reconciled, integrated and made to reinforce each other, save, perhaps, for that other one, shot during the Second Intifada in 2000 — later to grace the cover of the Economist — showing 14-year-old Fares Odeh, standing alone in the middle of the road, using his slingshot to hurl a stone at an Israeli tank. (Fares was shot and killed two weeks later by Israeli occupation soldiers.)
Because Palestinians today are left virtually leaderless, they are left with a reservoir of turbulent energy. So they keep coming, in the thousands, every week, to take part in the epic Great March of the Return, at the border separating Gaza from the land of their forebears, to assert an essential trait about the innermost meaning of our human being: Denied freedom, men and women will burn down their master’s house, even where they barely possess a wet match.
And let’s face it, how could it be otherwise? Living as a Palestinian today, having nothing and nothing to lose, you are imbued with a spirit that proclaims that there is something in us that loves struggle, which is less afraid of the terrors of combat and the finality of death than the affront of submission and tedium.
Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders, if leaders they are, are out to lunch as this whole saga plays out.
■ Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.