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When pro-Palestinian scholar protesters took over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University final month and renamed it “Hind’s Hall,” the banner they unfurled contained pictures of a cartoon character created over 50 years in the past that symbolizes the resilience of Palestinians.
On both facet of the textual content had been two pictures of a barefoot boy with tattered garments and spiky hair, his again turned to us.
The character known as Handala (variously transliterated as Hanzala or Handzala), a reputation derived from a local plant that’s deep-rooted, persistent and bears bitter fruit, and has turn into a potent image of the Palestinian battle. The picture was created by the Palestinian political cartoonist Naji Al-Ali in 1969, one of the broadly learn cartoonists within the Arab world, who was murdered in London in 1987. (The case stays unsolved.)
Handala is 10 years outdated, the identical age that Ali was when he grew to become a refugee in 1948.
After the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973, also referred to as the Yom Kippur War, Ali solely depicted Handala along with his again turned, a gesture that reworked him right into a silent witness of the horrors and outrages happening round him. The stance, in response to the cartoonist, represented a rejection of the political machinations of overseas nations when it got here to the destiny of strange Palestinians.
Margaret Olin, a spiritual research scholar on the Yale Divinity School and co-author of “The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine,” has been photographing Handala’s look in murals and as graffiti throughout her visits to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank over the previous decade. “It’s turn into a logo of the entire Palestinian motion to return to their former properties,” she mentioned in a phone interview.
Handala, she defined, “has the resonance of Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus,” which Walter Benjamin described because the angel of historical past. “He’s dealing with the ravages of time and catastrophe, however he’s circled so that you just see the disasters too.” She added that the character “additionally has a tinge of Günter Grass’s Oskar in ‘The Tin Drum,’ a toddler who additionally refused to develop whereas the disasters of Germany passed off round him. He’s the kid as witness, the kid who’s caught witnessing, simply ready for the disasters to cross.”
The determine of Handala, she noticed, is “plastered on homes in East Jerusalem, the place residents are being pressured out by unlawful settlements. He’s carried into protests. He’s in all places.”
The picture has appeared within the United States — “my son’s in-laws are Iraqi, and so they have a bumper sticker on their automobile,” Olin added. “One of the explanations the character is so ubiquitous is that Ali made him very simple to attract.” She mentioned that youngsters in West Bank refugee camps have drawn smiling faces on the again of Handala’s head once they encounter him in murals, turning his struggling into pleasure.
Ali was recognized to be an equal alternative critic, as prone to take purpose on the failure of Arab nations within the area to help Palestinians as Israel and the U.S. He even took purpose on the Palestine Liberation Organization at instances in his Handala pictures.
Peace activists in Israel have additionally adopted the determine of Handala over time, displaying him embracing one other cartoon boy — Srulik, created by the Israeli cartoonist Kariel Gardosh, which grew to become an embodiment of Israel. But Handala is just not frequent there. Nizan Shaked, a professor of cultural research at California State University at Long Beach, grew up in Haifa, Israel. She mentioned in an e mail interview that she solely encountered the character in 1998, when she moved to the U.S.
The character has been re-embraced by activists and artists alike within the final seven months. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, a grass roots solidarity motion that works “to finish the unlawful Israeli blockade of Gaza,” in response to its web site, has christened one among its ships Handala. A publishing home in Italy and an artist’s group in Japan have created posters by which the character has been reinterpreted for at this time.
And Handala has even made it to Venice, in a solo exhibition not affiliated with the Biennale. At the Roberto Ferruzzi Gallery in Dorsoduro, the Palestinian artist Malak Mattar’s work are on view till June 14. The present options “No Words” (2024), which the artist describes on Instagram as “the most important documentation of the unfolding genocide on Gaza.” The canvas, the most important she has ever tried, at over 16 by 7 toes, is a nod to Palestinian mural tradition. Handala seems close to the highest of the portray, taking a look at a wall. Unlike Mattar’s earlier work, that are intensely colourful, this work is rendered in somber grey, black, white and brown.
Mattar, who was born and raised in Gaza City, was residing there till Oct. 5, when she left to pursue a grasp’s diploma in London, she mentioned in a phone interview. Her portray focuses on the individuals who have been pressured to evacuate to flee the Israeli navy bombings of Gaza, the place, she mentioned, a lot of her pals, members of the family and colleagues have been killed.
“When I used to be a lot youthful as an artist, Handala was very important in my work,” Mattar mentioned. “Growing up in Gaza, he was a really emotional image — he’s a boy all of us associated to, he’s a boy that spoke for all of us and our emotions.”
“He is a toddler who was displaced, who your complete world failed.”
Last month, Hadi Eldebek, a Lebanese American musician and educator and member of Silkroad Ensemble, labored along with his collaborators within the Brooklyn Nomads to create a multimedia live performance at Roulette in Brooklyn devoted to Naji Al-Ali and his ubiquitous character of resistance. Musicians and dancers carried out whereas animations of Ali’s cartoons had been projected above them. “To me — as a Lebanese, as an Arab, as a Muslim, as a human being — Hanzala represents me,” Eldebek mentioned.
What appears to unite the artists who’re re-embracing Handala is a way of his enduring relevance.
“Some members of the viewers on the present requested me if we had commissioned a up to date cartoonist to make the pictures we confirmed, since they appeared to symbolize all of the horrors we’ve seen on the information since Oct. 7,” Eldebek mentioned. “But they’re pictures made within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, when Ali was wanting again already on a long time of struggling.”
