These Stunning Images Show Palestinian Life Before the Nakba
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)
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 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).
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 translated by Róisín Davis, “Our eyes seldom encounter Palestine before the Israeli regime; a Palestine not defined by its ailments but defined by its industries and cultures.”
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 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 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.
“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 and brought economic and commercial activity in Palestine to a standstill.
“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, 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 Images 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.
In contrast to the family photographs featured in Against Erasure, saved and sacred tributes to a time passed, images are now everywhere, and everyone is a photographer. How do we relate this to the current context, in which Palestinians and Palestinian bodies are so dehumanized? The ongoing genocide has been the first such atrocity streamed through phone screens, made inescapably visible through Instagram feeds, photographs of bloodied bags of flour and body parts, impromptu press conferences held by children outside hospitals. “There’s something around the way Palestinian bodies have been so violated that beggars belief,” says Qato. “There is insistence from Palestinians that we do see too, that this heinous moment is etched within us too.”
Yet Qato also points to a tension and interplay in this way of looking at images. This can be seen in a recent Instagram post by photographer Dean Majd, born in Queens, New York, to Palestinian immigrant parents. “I urge people to consider the real lives at stake at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, and to disassociate the Palestinian experience from just images of violence,” insisted Majd’s caption accompanying his 2018 photograph sunset over Nablus, his favorite city.
Against Erasure wears its politics on its sleeve and in its title. “The sacred quality of these photos are testament to Palestinian existence and also Palestinian resistance,” says Barrilaro. “I think they are beautiful images, and they’re worthy in their own right,” agrees Qato. And yet, there is something more to consider, she says, referring to the need to go beyond standing “against” erasure, to think about the “for.” “I’m thinking about the politics of it, but also its limits as a politics. . . we’re so in this moment that has to do this work.”
In listening to some of the images in Against Erasure, we can hear some hums of political organizing, of resistance and defiance; heard in the triumph of striking laborers, raising their fists and fishhooks up high, or the bustle of the women at the train station at Lydda. Yet too, what is not present in Against Erasure represents missing possibilities: of the past, of what’s been lost, and of what may once again be.