Last month, when pro-Palestinian student protesters occupied Columbia University's Hamilton Hall and renamed it 'Heinz Hall,' the banner they unfurled contained an image of a cartoon character created more than 50 years ago symbolizing Palestinian resilience.
On either side of the text were two images of a barefoot boy with tattered clothes and spiky hair, his back to us.
This character is called Hanzala (variably transliterated as Hanzala or Handzala), a name derived from a native plant with deep roots and persistent, bitter fruits that has become a powerful symbol of the Palestinian struggle. The image was created in 1969 by Palestinian political cartoonist Naji Al-Ali, one of the most widely read cartoonists in the Arab world, who was murdered in London in 1987. (The case remains unresolved.)
Handara is 10 years old, the same age that Ali was when he became a refugee in 1948.
After the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Yom Kippur War, Ali portrayed Handala with his back turned, turning him into a silent witness to the fear and anger happening around him. According to the cartoonist, this stance represents a rejection of foreign political machinations regarding the fate of ordinary Palestinians.
Margaret Olin, a scholar of religious studies at Yale Divinity School and co-author of “The Bitter Landscape of Palestine,” has been photographing Handala's appearance in murals and graffiti during her visits to Gaza and the West Bank over the past decade. came. . “She has become a symbol of the entire Palestinian movement to return to her former homeland,” she said in a phone interview.
She explained that Handala “has echoes of Paul Klee's 'Angelus Novus,' described by Walter Benjamin as the angel of history.” “He faced the ravages of time and disaster, but he turned around so you could see disaster too.” She said the character “also has the feel of Günther Grass’s Oscar in ‘The Tin Drum,’ a child who refuses to grow up even as German disaster unfolds around him.” “That child is a child as a witness, a child who clings to witnessing and waits for the disaster to pass.”
She said Handara’s image “is plastered on houses in East Jerusalem, where illegal settlements are forcing residents out.” He participated in protests. He is everywhere.”
The image was posted in the United States. Olin added, “My son's in-laws are Iraqi and she has a bumper sticker on her car.” She said, “One of the reasons the characters have become so widespread is because Ali made them easy to draw.” She said children in a West Bank refugee camp turned his pain into joy by drawing a smiling face on the back of Handara's head in the mural.
Ali is known as an equal opportunity critic who is likely to target Arab countries in the region that fail to support the Palestinians like Israel and the United States. He even took aim at the Palestine Liberation Organization at times in his Handala images.
Israeli peace activists have also adopted Handala's likeness over the years, showing him hugging another cartoon boy, Srulik. The boy was created by Israeli cartoonist Kariel Gardosh and became the embodiment of Israel. But Handala is not common there. Nizan Shaked, a professor of cultural studies at the University of California, Long Beach, grew up in Haifa, Israel. It was only after she moved to the United States in 1998 that she met the character, she said in an email interview.
Over the past seven months, activists and artists alike have re-embraced the character. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, a grassroots solidarity movement working “to end Israel's illegal blockade of Gaza,” has named one of its ships the Handala, according to its website. An Italian publisher and a Japanese artist group created a poster that reinterprets the character for modern times.
And Handala made it all the way to Venice with a solo exhibition unrelated to the Biennale. At the Roberto Ferruzzi Gallery in Dorsoduro, paintings by Palestinian artist Malak Mattar are on display until June 14. These shows include “No Words” (2024); The artist describes it on Instagram as “the greatest documentation of the genocide unfolding in Gaza.” ” The canvas, the largest she has attempted, measures over 16 by 7 feet and is a nod to Palestinian mural culture. Handala appears near the top of the painting, looking at the wall. Unlike Mattar's earlier paintings, which were intensely colourful, this work is rendered in sombre greys, blacks, whites and browns.
Matar, who was born and raised in Gaza City, lived there until Oct. 5, when he left for London to earn a master's degree, he said in a phone interview. Her paintings focus on people forced to flee the Israeli military's bombing of Gaza, where she said many of her friends, family and colleagues lost their lives.
“When I was much younger as an artist, Handala played a very important role in my work,” Mattar said. “Growing up in Gaza, he was a very emotional symbol. He is a boy we all relate to, a boy who represents all of us and our emotions.”
“He is a refugee child whom the whole world has failed.”
Last month, Hadi Eldebek, a Lebanese-American musician, educator, and member of the Silkroad Ensemble, collaborated with collaborators from Brooklyn Nomads to create a multimedia concert honoring Naji Al-Ali and his universal character of resistance at Brooklyn's Roulette. Musicians and dancers performed while Ali's cartoon animation was projected onto it. “For me, as a Lebanese, as an Arab, as a Muslim and as a human being, Hanzala represents me,” Eldebek said.
What unites artists who are re-embracing Handala is a sense of his continued relevance.
“Some audience members at the show asked us if we had commissioned a contemporary cartoonist for the images we showed, because they seemed to express all the horrors they had seen in the news since October 7,” Eldebek said. “But it is an image created in the 1970s and 1980s, when Ali was already looking back on decades of pain.”