The Politics of Everyone and Everything
Some people have the privilege of going their whole lives without needing to intertwine every life decision within a political context. Not Palestinians however – not today and not ever before. Within the Palestinian context, a person’s existence is often closely tied to the national liberation struggle; representing it, raising awareness of it, and most importantly, fighting for it. Palestinian resistance is everywhere, despite Western media attempts at painting it simply as an armed movement. Palestinians use every tool at their disposal to resist, with the most powerful of these being art. I myself use poetry as a form of resistance, letting my words tell a story I could not otherwise tell.
The use of art as resistance began in the early days of the Israeli occupation, when there was little that Palestinians could do to keep their national identity alive without the risk of violent consequences. In an era when even raising the Palestinian flag became a criminal offense, Palestinian women turned to an artform they already knew well, in order to tell their stories, and communicate discreetly amongst each other. Through Tatreez – the art of intricate traditional embroidery – women began to tell and preserve their stories and heritage.
The Met Museum website describes Tatreez as the “cultural practice of embroidery”, which tells the tale of the artists life and deep-rooted personal connection to the land through “an illustrative medium of colourfully stitched motifs,” (Ghnaim, 2025). Patterns were used to represent the flora, fauna, and traditions of different communities and to signal which village the embroiderer belonged to – in itself a form of resisting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages. While the occupation wiped out entire communities and Hebraized their names in order to create a new reality, Tatreez became a “living archive” (Maraya Art Centre, 2026), documenting the details of Palestinian life on garments designed to be passed down from one generation to the next.
After the Nakba and following the Palestinian uprising of 1987, Tatreez took on a more political role. It was reimagined in the newly-formed refugee camps as a form of active resistance. Garments began carrying the colours of the Palestinian flag, in defiance of the laws banning it. They carried messages from the embroiderer to family members in other camps and Israeli prisons, informing them of updates that otherwise could not be shared. Outside of Palestine, Tatreez holds an equally important role, with those in the diaspora using it as a way to connect with their national identities. Bayan Fares, founder of the Badan Collective, shared with me what Tatreez means to her as an Arab-American, “When, as Palestinians we’re not able to visit our homeland as often as we’d like, we start to crave items we can physically touch – something, anything to prove that our identity as Palestinians still exists”.
Other forms of art also play a role in liberation movements around the world. Multitudes of artists use drawing to represent political ideologies and to speak up against oppression. Banksy, an English street artist and activist, gained worldwide fame for his outspoken messages about global issues. In the Palestinian landscape, Banksy contributed to raising awareness of the struggles of occupation through his Walled-Off Hotel in Bethlehem, his artwork on the ‘Segregation Wall’ within the occupied territories, and more recently on the streets of London. Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Banksy’s efforts were described by his hotel manager as a, “commitment to sharing the stories that must be heard and to offer a space where art continues to speak when words cannot” (Shaw, 2025).
Palestinian artists are equally if not more active in the use of art as resistance. From household names such as Sliman Mansour and Bashar Alhroub to up-and-coming artists, the objective remains the same. As described by Alhroub on his platforms, “the work often shows threatened self-identity… and looks for meaning not in the individual sign but in the context of exile and fragmentation” (Bashar Alhroub, 2023). Mansour’s work on the other hand is described as “illustrating the Palestinian people’s connection to the land and their hopes for the future… his images have helped shape the iconography of Palestinian resistance” (Artsy, 2026).
A young artist I recently had the privilege of speaking to about these issues is Sultan Jawad, a Palestinian-Canadian artist specialising in drawings and poetry. “I use art to strengthen my Palestinian identity in a world that is constantly pushing me to erase it.” Through simple and catchy cartoon-style images, Jawad tries to capture moments in time that would otherwise go unnoticed or forgotten. He added, “Art is important for silenced demographics because the noise it creates is timeless. You can only scream for so long and hope that in the moment someone hears you. But art can scream forever, and our hope is that when the world is finally ready and willing to listen, they will know what we endured through our art”.
Bibliogrpahy
Artsy (2026). Sliman Mansour – Palestinian, b. 1947. [online] Available at: https://www.artsy.net/artist/sliman-mansour[Accessed 12 Jan. 2026].
Bashar Alhroub (2023). Bashar Alhroub. [online] Available at: https://www.basharalhroub.com/ [Accessed 12 Jan. 2026].
Maraya Art Centre (2026). Sila – All That Is Left of You. [online] Available at: https://maraya.ae/exhibitions/view/sila—all-that-is-left-to-you/137#:~:text=Date:%20Sunday%2021%20Sep%2C%202025,against%20the%20threat%20of%20erasure [Accessed 9 Jan. 2026].
Ghnaim, W. (2024). Tatreez in Time. [online] The Met. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/tatreez-in-time [Accessed 9 Jan. 2026].
Shaw, A. (2025). Banksy’s Bethlehem hotel, closed following 7 October attacks, reopens as ‘cultural platform that carries the narrative of Palestine’. The Art Newspaper [online]. Available at: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/12/12/banksys-bethlehem-hotel-closed-following-7-october-attacks-reopens-as-cultural-platform-that-carries-the-narrative-of-palestine [Accessed 12 Jan. 2026].