NASO x Mathqaf: Palestinian Art & the Nakba
Naso Art Journal and Mathqaf Collaborate on a Special Feature Highlighting Palestinian Art & the Nakba
This article examines the development of Palestinian visual arts in relation to the Nakba of 1948. Rejecting a linear narrative of its history, it situates Palestinian artistic production within the shifting conditions of colonialism, displacement, and dispossession. Prior to 1948, Palestinian art was in the process of negotiating its position between inherited religious iconography, imported European techniques, and the cultural politics of emerging Arab modernity. In urban centres such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa, a small but growing group of painters began to experiment with secular subjects, new techniques, and modernist forms of expressions. These early developments marked the beginning of a Palestinian visual language that was gradually taking shape.
The Nakba, however, marked a rupture that fundamentally reconfigured the landscape of cultural production. More than the mass displacement of people, it entailed the systematic dismantling of the material and institutional conditions under which art could be practiced, displayed, and remembered. The expulsion of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians, the destruction of homes and archives, and the erasure of cultural infrastructure severely hindered the very possibility of continuity. In its aftermath, Palestinian art was reconstituted under new and often complex conditions: in refugee camps, in diaspora, and under occupation. Across these dispersed geographies, artists have produced a visual language shaped by the experience of exile, the politics of resistance, and the need to preserve cultural memory.
The aim of this article is twofold. First, it seeks to examine how the Nakba transformed the conditions of art-making—subjectively, materially, institutionally, and geographically. Second, it considers how it helped define a shared visual lexicon rooted in national identity and resistance. Through case studies of artists such as Ismail Shammout, Tamam Al-Akhal, and Nabil Anani, the article examines how recurring symbols such as the key, olive tree, and Tatreez (embroidery) have become central to Palestinian art. Ultimately, this study argues that Palestinian art is not defined solely by loss, but by its enduring capacity to assert continuity and belonging under conditions of ongoing displacement, exile, and occupation.
Palestinian Visual Arts Before 1948
lestinian visual arts in the pre-Nakba period evolved from deep-rooted religious traditions, particularly the Orthodox Christian iconographic practices hailing from Jerusalem. Precisely, the ‘Jerusalem School’ of icon painting represented a localised adaptation of Byzantine models, distinguished by its vernacular elements, Arabic inscriptions, and syncretic motifs that fused Christian and Islamic visual languages.
The mid and late 19th century witnessed the gradual secularisation of cultural production, facilitated by the influx of European missionaries and the modernisation of Ottoman governance in Palestine. European artistic techniques—particularly oil painting and realism—were introduced through educational institutions, most notably by Russian and British missions. These new forms found resonance among Palestinian urban elites who were eager to align themselves with broader currents of Arab nationalist modernity.
As a result, this period marked the birth of a pictorial language in Palestine, as artists began to transition from religious commissions to landscapes, portraiture, and scenes of everyday life. This shift mirrored the rising Arab nationalist sentiments that sought to assert cultural identity against both the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the Western colonial presence.
Before 1948, Jerusalem functioned as the centre of Palestinian visual arts. It was here that the dialogue between traditional iconography and modern secular painting flourished most vibrantly. Artists such as Nicola Saig exemplified this hybridity, blending Western techniques with motifs rooted in Palestinian social and rural life. This period's artistic production not only reflected aesthetic modernity but also contributed to the formation of a Palestinian cultural identity that was both locally grounded and cosmopolitan in its aspirations.
1948 and its Aftermath: Displacement & Cultural Disruption
The Nakba of 1948 catalysed a rupture for Palestinian society and, by extension, its artistic communities. The dispersal of artists, the looting of artworks, and the physical destruction of cultural institutions obliterated the infrastructure necessary for the continued evolution of a coherent national art movement. Consequently, the flourishing cultural centers of Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa were irreparably damaged by these events.
Following the Nakba, Palestinian artists found themselves scattered across the fragmented geographies of exile: within the newly formed State of Israel, in the West Bank, and Gaza under Jordanian and Egyptian administration, and throughout the broader Arab world and diaspora. These disparate conditions profoundly shaped the nature of post-1948 artistic production, fostering both continuity and radical innovation.
In the immediate post-Nakba decades, Palestinian artists turned to art as a vehicle for articulating memory, loss, and resistance. Artists in Beirut, such as Ismail Shammout, Michel Najjar, Abder-Rahman al-Muzayyan, Naji al-Ali, and Mustafa El Hallaj became central to the visual culture of the Palestinian liberation movement, producing works that were explicitly figurative and narrative-driven, often drawing upon socialist realism or graphic art to depict the suffering and resilience of the Palestinian people.
Artistic production during this period was marked by a dual imperative: to preserve memory and to mobilise political consciousness. The refugee condition and the reality of exile became central motifs, with artists across the Arab world creating works that conveyed the Palestinian struggle and, in turn, fostered solidarity across the world.
Thematic Shifts within Post-Nakba Palestinian Art
As Palestinian artists navigated the post-1948 landscape of exile and cultural rupture, their work began to take on new visual and thematic forms shaped by the conditions of displacement. In the words of Gannit Ankori, “the first phase of historiography of Palestinian art, constructed by Palestinian artists during the post-Nakba period, was moulded by an urgent political agenda.The desire to emphasize a secular national Palestinian identity was the prism through which they viewed their own art as well as that of their compatriots, creating a narrative that subordinated art history to the pressing nation-building imperatives.”
What solidified this emerging narrative was the development of a shared symbolic vocabulary—one that gave visual form to collective experiences of exile, loss, and political resistance. Among the most prominent of these symbols was the key, representing the right of return. Often tied to the lived experience of refugees who kept the physical keys to homes they were forced to flee, the key became a powerful emblem of grief and the hope of return. Similarly, the olive tree, long embedded in Palestinian cultural and agrarian life, came to symbolize both rootedness and continuity. When depicted uprooted or burning, it also served as a visual shorthand for land dispossession and settler violence. The embroidered thob, with its regionally specific patterns, functioned as a kind of wearable geography—each stitch mapping a village, a region, a history. In post-Nakba art, its representation often stood in for erased landscapes and became a means of asserting identity through cultural continuity.
Artists also frequently depicted scenes of pre-1948 village life, drawing on memory and shared cultural references. These images, while not literal reconstructions, functioned as assertions of presence—reinstating places and ways of life that had been violently erased. By portraying village architecture, agricultural work, and communal rituals, artists reclaimed a visual space for Palestine within the context of exile. These representations, alongside recurring national symbols, formed a shared visual lexicon through which artists like Ismail Shammout articulated a collective narrative of continuity, resistance, and belonging.
Artist Case Studies
While many artists contributed to the shaping of a distinctly Palestinian visual language in the post-Nakba period, a closer look at individual practices offers deeper insight into how personal experience, collective memory, and political context intersected in their work. The following case studies examine how three artists—Ismail Shammout, Tamam Al-Akhal, and Nabil Anani—each navigated the aftermath of 1948, using art as a means of documentation, resistance, and cultural preservation.
Ismail Shammout
Ismail Shammout (1930-2006) occupies a foundational position in the history of modern Palestinian art. Expelled from Lydda during the Nakba, Shammout drew directly on his experience of forced displacement to create a body of work that combined social realism with a strong didactic impulse. His painting Where To…? (1953) captures the trauma of expulsion through a composition centered on a mother and her children walking away from their destroyed home, conveying both grief and dignity. Shammout’s broader practice—rich with national symbols such as the key, the olive tree, and the peasant figure—helped to codify a visual narrative of Palestinian identity rooted in exile, resistance, and collective memory.
In addition to his painting, Shammout published Art in Palestine in 1989—one of the earliest English-language texts on Palestinian art—providing his own theorization of the aesthetic development of national visual culture. As head of the Department of Arts and National Culture within the PLO from 1965 and Secretary-General of the Union of Palestinian Artists, he was instrumental in linking artistic production with institutional nation-building and cultural education across the diaspora.
Tamam Al-Akhal
Tamam Al-Akhal (b. 1935) was born in Jaffa and displaced with her family during the Nakba. Her work, like that of her collaborator and spouse Ismail Shammout, emerged from the shared experience of exile but developed a distinct perspective, particularly through its emphasis on women’s roles within national and cultural narratives. Al-Akhal’s paintings frequently center female figures as symbols of endurance, continuity, and cultural transmission. In the mural series Palestine: The Exodus and the Odyssey, created with Shammout, Al-Akhal participated in constructing a sweeping visual chronicle of Palestinian displacement and struggle. Her individual work often combines figurative clarity with symbolic layering, foregrounding themes of loss, resilience, and the generational transmission of memory.
Nabil Anani
Nabil Anani (b. 1943) emerged as a leading figure in the post-1967 generation of Palestinian artists, whose work responded to the ongoing conditions of occupation and exile that followed the Nakba. Trained in Egypt and active in the West Bank, Anani’s practice combines painting, sculpture, and multimedia forms, frequently incorporating Palestinian folk motifs and craft traditions. His work often centers on the land—as symbol, memory, and contested terrain—through recurring depictions of village architecture, agricultural scenes, and stylized topographies. Anani played a key role in the establishment of the League of Palestinian Artists and was involved in developing an aesthetic rooted in sumud (steadfastness), aimed at resisting cultural erasure under occupation. His art expands the symbolic vocabulary established by earlier artists while drawing attention to the spatial and material dimensions of Palestinian belonging.
Conclusion
Palestinian visual art has come to embody both the memory of what was lost and the ongoing struggle to remain visible. The Nakba disrupted not only lives and landscapes, but also the very conditions under which culture could be made and sustained. In its wake, artists reassembled meaning from fragments; creating work that is grounded in the particularities of place, yet unbound by geography.
Figures like Ismail Shammout, Tamam Al-Akhal, and Nabil Anani shaped a shared symbolic language that could travel across camps, cities, and generations. Their use of recurring motifs—the key, the olive tree, the embroidered thob—transformed art into a repository of memory and a tool of resistance. Through their practices, the boundaries between the personal and the political, the aesthetic and the historical, became deliberately fluid.
Yet this is not a story of loss alone. Palestinian art continues to evolve, adapting to new technologies, audiences, and contexts. It bears witness to history, but also reaches toward what lies beyond it. In asserting presence within conditions of absence, and in giving form to what has been displaced, Palestinian visual culture remains not only a testament to survival, but a means of articulating belonging, aspiration, and the hope of return.