“Thank you so much for coming,” Mohammad said, pausing mid-sentence and continuing in a softer voice,“ to Palestine at this time. Israel is trying to isolate us, so by coming you are helping us stay connected to the world.”
I can only give you his first name, Mohammad. If I were to give you his last name, he would not be safe. Mohammad is an artist living in Ramallah, and he has been to Norway (my country) several times to perform his art. “Art is more important than ever,” he continued. “It is our last line of defense for our culture. It keeps us alive.”
“You are the first group to come visit since October,” said the receptionist at The Jerusalem Hotel, “only journalists have been here.” We are not journalists. We are Norwegian artists and cultural workers visiting the West Bank to witness what is happening in Palestine. Erik Hillestad, Pål Moddi Lue, Knut Reiersrud, Marthe Valle, Kari Veiteberg, Hans Olav Baden, and I flew from Oslo to Amman and then drove into occupied Palestine in February 2024. Rafah, the southern part of Gaza, is Israel’s next target. The people we met here said the West Bank is next.
I grabbed my camera and walked outside. I had promised the group I was traveling with not to walk by myself until we knew more about the situation in the city, but I couldn’t help it – the photographer in me needs to see. I had heard the rumours and, true enough, there were no people in the streets. Last year, I was in this exact same spot, and Jerusalem was buzzing. People were everywhere: street vendors shouted for customers, shops were open, people prayed, cars lined up. Now I walked alone with the pigeons. The birds are here, I thought, right before I saw that the Old Town was guarded more heavily than before. I looked in the direction of the Israeli soldiers, but they didn’t notice me. I was not a threat to them. I went closer with my camera lowered, a thing I do when I silently protest, to show them that they are not my story.
“For you to understand what is happening, historically and in this present moment, I will start here,” Khalil Toufakji told us at Qalandia Airport outside Jerusalem. Toufakji is a very well known Palestinian cartographer and an expert on the city. He stood on a rock and pointed towards what used to be a runway for airplanes. With my camera close to my left eye I saw how nature had taken over. Red flowers were growing out of the ground on what used to be the tarmac. These were not just any flowers. Symbolically enough, they were poppies, the national flower of Palestine and a symbol of resistance.
“No plane has landed there since 1967, when the Israeli army closed it down. Why is this important now?” he said, rhetorically, and continued: “This was our dream, a gateway to and from our sacred city, only ten kilometres from Jerusalem.”
I stood on the runway remembering a photograph my dad took of this very airport. The year was 1958, ten years after the first Nakba. He was 19. He entered Palestine in uniform as part of the UN peacekeeping troops stationed in Gaza. That was sixty-six years ago. Now there is no Qalandia Airport. There is, however, a Qalandia Checkpoint. It’s the one that you have to pass through when going to and from Jerusalem to Ramallah. Here, you are met by Israeli military with automatic weapons. You need a special passport to cross. Our red Norwegian ones are among those that will open the gate.
There are over 650 checkpoints or movement obstacles that divide the West Bank into over two hundred separate parts. “We cannot get in and out of Palestine, and we can’t move freely within it,” Toufakji said. “We can’t move or live freely on our land.”
For me, the word “land” evokes the essential knowledge that is embedded in the land of a people. How the culture is stored in the trees and in the air. In the way the sun rises behind the hills and sets at sea. In the native plants tended to by generations and then, at the exact time, carefully picked. As Andy Warhol put it in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), “I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want.”
Ramallah felt like spring the morning after as I looked over the golden hills from Samer’s balcony, facing west. Samer is a well known Palestinian musician. He made Marthe and me Arabic coffee. I have never liked coffee in my entire life, but for some reason I love it with just a touch of cardamom. Samer tours the world to play his instrument. He is the kind of artist the whole world want to hear. He told us how, lately, it has been very hard to get travel visas. “The Israeli government wants all these new documents that are hard to find. They ask all kinds of new questions, personal ones, like my relationship to my wife. It makes it very hard for me to tour and play my music,” he said.
As I write this, I want to tell you everything about him, but I am afraid to share too much – afraid he will be punished in some way. Everyone we met has either been arrested or knows someone who has been arrested without charge and indefinitely detained. He told me about how a new law that took effect in November 2023 whereby social media posts can now get you arrested.
“Art has become the last defender of freedom of speech, and at the same time artists cannot move or speak freely,” Samer said with a sigh. Their songs and the way they play them become their resistance, the art within the art.
As I write this, I am getting messages from the people we met that new laws are being implemented to restrict the movements of Palestinians. It is happening really fast. As Sima Khoury, the executive director of the National Conservatory of Music, told us, “if they close one more road, I won’t be able to come to work.” Israel’s latest military order is to close down certain roads in the West Bank between 5:00–9:00 so that illegal Jewish settlers can drive to work without seeing Palestinians.
The first family we visited was the Khouri family. I sat by the fireplace in their living room listening and watching, holding my camera in my right hand and covering my mouth with my left, for sometimes it just so hard to fathom the truth. I listened to the voice of 16-year-old Shadi, the son of Rania and Suhail Khouri, two prominent cultural workers in Palestine. Their story is public, so I can share their full names. One early morning, Shadi was taken from his home by Israeli police. They beat him unconscious and dragged his body outside with so much blood loss that his mother thought he was dead. For forty-one days he was interrogated and held in prison. He told us how they tried to break him by saying his mom was in the room next door and showing him a tea cup she had supposedly drunk from. His answer was: “There is no lipstick on that cup.” At 16, he already knew their methods and did not believe their lies. These are the conversations Palestinian parents have to have with their children. Most likely, they will need them.
Shadi is still under house arrest, waiting for his trial dates on 16 April and 6 May 2024. You are probably wondering what he did; he is too. Shadi is accused of throwing a rock at a settler car, but he was not even close to the location where it took place.
Rania and Suhail, Shadi’s parents, established the Yabous Cultural Centre in Jerusalem in 1995. Yabous means “holy,” and was the first name given to the city by the Jebusites. Yabous Cultural Centre is called the centre of cultural life in Palestine, but more than that, it is the guardian of Palestinian culture. The centre was the first and largest to be built in the city since its illegal occupation by the Israelis in 1967. It is now the last of its kind. As Rania walked into the beautiful concert hall, she told us she slept there for three months as the centre was built, just to make sure it was ready in time. She looked at the stage, which is large enough to hold an entire orchestra, and told us how art is censored. They cannot play or say what they want. “If any political statements are spoken out loud on that stage, we would be shut down immediately. And there is this man,” she continued, “he comes to ʻvisitʼ often. He knew the layout of the whole building when he was first here.” She didn’t have to say much after that. We knew what it meant. “Our rent has increased to an amount so high, we might not make it,” she said, showing us the art gallery. She told us that the Israelis were also building a cultural centre close by, and this was to be free for all visitors, in direct competition with Yabous.
Shadi’s father, Suhail, is a leading musician in Palestine and the director of the women’s choir Daughters of Jerusalem. He wrote the song ‘Salute to Gaza’. We spent an evening at a choir rehearsal. As they performed that song for us, they stood up, put their hands over their hearts, cried and sang like there was no tomorrow. The only thing I could do was to stand with them and put my camera over my heart. I recorded it, and as I write these words I am playing the music as loud as I possibly can. I hear the strength, the grief, the power, the devastation – it is all there in their voices. It is all there.
Last year, I sat by a fire in Bethlehem and had a long, rare conversation about art, our time, and hope. I mostly listened because the one talking was Dr. Mitri Raheb, the founder and president of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem. He is also the most widely published Palestinian theologian to date. Mitri is one those people you don’t doubt.
“There is art before Gaza and art after Gaza,” he told us that week. I knew what he meant.
Gaza is a magnifying glass. It has shown us who we truly are. A genocide can take place and those who want to stop it can’t. And those who can won’t. That is the truth. This leaves us with a new understanding of who we are as humans. Of what is possible and what we allow. If this is possible now, it can happen again. To anyone. The story of Palestine is our story. It’s our shared story of humanity. The Palestinians have risen time and time again. We in the West can only hope to learn from their resilience. As an artist, I must mirror their courage. I grieve the quiet life I used to have in the woods because I loved it. At the same time, I know that I have been able to recreate my life time and time again. This time, I must do it not for myself, but for the world. This time, time demands it. History demands it. Humanity demands it.
“The artists and activists in the streets are doing the most important work right now,” Mitri continued. A few days later, his words were mirrored by those of Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. “This is the movement that can create the change we need and hope for. The solution will not come from within Israel,” Levy said, “that makes you – the activist artist – essential.”
Activists are often described as angry and one-sided. I assure you, I am not. A colleague in Norway asked me if I was a demo-photographer now, after four months of documenting the Palestinian solidarity protests in Oslo. I replied: “No. I don’t even know if I am an activist.” The word is tainted. Artist Lana Bastasic said it best: “I don’t like being called an activist. It makes it seem as if caring for the world around you is somehow separate from your life, your work, your idea of yourself, and the community you belong to. I am not an activist. I care.”
All I know is that I am not an artist if I do not tell the truth. The two are essentially linked for me. If I am not courageous, I feel completely empty, and my art will reflect that.
Where do you find the truth at this time? In the mainstream media? On social media? Podcasts? Radio? Art? We found ourselves in the West Bank having difficulty finding Norwegian broadcasters that were interested in what we witnessed. Interviews got cancelled several times. Newspapers refused articles. I believe that artists are expert storytellers and truth-tellers; musicians are experts in listening. As a photographer, I am trained to observe. You can’t find a more qualified witness. Who will amplify what we saw and heard? Who is responsible for telling the truth? I believe we all are. Truth is the ground that hope rises from. We rise because we experience that no one is in the lead. We rise because this situation can not be who we are.
Art is prayer, I thought. It’s what I’ve got. My camera freezes time so we can see more clearly what is going on. As I pressed down the shutter to capture the boy on the bike, right in the middle of the street – a refugee camp on the left and a wall separating us on the right – I thought to myself: “This is my truth visualised.”
This is art. The boy whose father is in jail, still. His stance is as strong as it gets.
That is spirit. He is art. You can’t kill that.
On my last day in Jerusalem, I woke up to birds singing. “They still sing,” I thought. Their song was a stark contrast to the woman’s screams the night before. I will never forget her screaming because even though I did not know what it was for, it was clear that her pain was unbearable.
We asked everyone we met what was the most important thing that we could bring home and share with the world. Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, one of the most important Palestinian activists, and the former minister of information for the Palestinian unity government, said it in three words:
“Tell the truth.”