Palestinian Refugees in their "Hope and Despair

At the Sony Gallery exhibition "In Hope and Despair," Swedish photographer Mia Grondahl introduces people whom the world has long ignored-Palestinian refugees, people not allowed to be seen, people almost sunk, unceremoniously, into oblivion.

The Palestinian refugees are the victims of an evil Nakba ("Disaster"), unsurpassed in modern times, when a land was occupied by a minority of foreign immigrants, emptied of its national majority, its physical and cultural landmarks obliterated, and its destruction hailed as a miraculous act of God and a victory for freedom and civilized values. These are the people that Grondahl wanted the world to see through her photographs, for "if nobody sees you in this world, it is almost as if you do not exist," as Grondahl declares in the introduction to the catalogue. The 28 photographs exhibited in the Sony Gallery are a selection from her book In Hope and Despair, published by AUC Press.

The exhibit was inaugurated on September 21 by Peter Hansen, commissioner general of the United Nations Works and Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA), who believes that "photography is an important element in telling the story of the Palestinian refugees, as the Agency has taken it upon itself to maintain an unequaled photographic record of the lives and history of those in its care." The documentary record of the Palestinian refugees, who were put in the care of UNRWA in 1949, Hansen asserts, "runs to over 30,000 still images and hundreds of hours of film footage, spanning decades and many generations of refugee experiences."

Grondahl's fresh collection of colorful, lively photographs is, however, more than a simple record of poverty, overcrowding, and despair. They represent, more effectively, an attempt to make the world "see" those people who were almost made invisible by Western media which "focused on the victors, the colonialists and immigrants who in the end managed to take over Palestine and turn it into Israel," asserts Grondahl, who grew up in a world that sympathized with the Israelis. "The shadow of the Holocaust was still hanging over Europe and we, the generation born after the war, were raised in the belief that the Israelis were still victims."

It was now time for the world to recognize the victims of the Israel's own holocaust-the 1948 Nakba. For even if Jewish fear of gentiles is understandable considering the European Jews' history of oppression, when this fear is translated into active policy it becomes dangerous and bloody. Such was the case for Palestine. The expulsion and expropriation of Palestinians as a precondition for establishing the State of Israel was a result of this paranoia. Ben Gurion's doctrine of transfer and ethnic cleansing, which is now fully documented by historians and which is still followed to date, calls for committing an actual act of murder for fear that the victim, if allowed to survive, might harm the murderer.

Grondahl was disillusioned earlier in her life through a journey to "the young and vibrant state" as the propaganda portrayed Israel, when she went to live and work in a kibbutz. "Many years later I learnt that the Kibbutz of Maagan Mikhael was built in 1950 on land that belonged to the Palestinian village of Kabara, which was one of the almost 500 Palestinian villages destroyed by Jewish forces in 1948-1949. Its 120 inhabitants were among the nearly one million Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in neighboring countries." The State of Israel was declared in 1948 on territory captured from Palestine that did not exceed 11% of the land. Israel then managed to confiscate or steal the remaining 90 percent, which belonged to the Palestinian refugees.

In the refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank and Gaza, home to the now over 5 million registered Palestinian refugees (unregistered refugees raise that number to well over 6 million), Mia Grondahl met the people she asserts she will never forget. Amid the ugly chaos, poverty, over-crowding, and despair in the camps, she still found "an abundance of beauty. . . . It belonged to the people. I found it in their faces and the way they carried themselves: a proud yet friendly stature. I still wonder from where the refugees are drawing their friendliness, hospitality and willingness to open their hearts and houses to my camera and questions."

Grondahl cannot help thinking of eighty-year-old Mahmoud Zigari who still keeps the keys of his old house in Zakharia, the village where he was born and which is only a couple of kilometers from the refugee camp he was expelled to on the outskirts of Bethlehem . Despite more than half a century of suffering and exile, Palestinians remain adamant in their determination to return to their homeland, in pursuit of the most elemental principles of justice. After all, about 92 percent of the refugees live in Palestine and its environs, with 48 percent in British Mandated Palestine and 44 percent in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, within a 100-mile radius of Palestine . Only 8 percent reside further away, in Arab and foreign countries.

Israel has advanced all kinds of false claims against the right of these refugees to return and has made feverish attempts to import as many immigrants as possible to fill their place, offering, on the other hand, about a hundred schemes for resettling Palestinian refugees anywhere but in their homes-plans to transfer, resettle, and exchange, lands. All of these ideas confuse the issue of sovereignty and the issue of the inalienable right of refugees to return home, which is restated in UN resolution 149 and has been affirmed by the international community 135 times in the period from 1948 to 2000.

To acknowledge Mahmoud's and other refugees' right of return, would be for Israel to confess to the crime it committed in 1948 and admit that there were people living in Palestine, contrary to the myth of "a land without people for a people without a land." If it were to grant the sisters Fatma and Hamda, who were expelled from their home in 1948, their lifetime wish to return home, Israel would be admitting its responsibility for expelling them in one of the thirty-odd Israeli military operations, accompanied by 35 reported massacres of civilians, half of which took place before any Arab soldier set foot in Palestine. The most well known of these massacres was that of Deir Yassin, the largest that of Dawayma, and the most recently disclosed (by Israeli scholar Teddy Katz) that of Tantoura.

Fatma and Hamda are living proof of the ethnic cleansing plan: "From their mud hut in the Jordan Valley they can see their own homeland on the other side of the river," says the caption. The photographs of these and other Palestinian refugees in Mia Grondahl's exhibit implore the world-as she puts it-to "look into their eyes, to meet people who deserve not only our sympathy and understanding but also our voices to help them fulfill their right of return to their homeland," which is not only legal but also, according to recent research by Palestinian researcher and activist Salman Abu Sitta, possible in practice and applicable without the infliction of real harm on Israel. Furthermore, the return of refugees can bring real peace to the region. It is in effect the key to lasting peace in the Middle East.

Until the world decides to stand by justice and inalienable human rights, and until Israel realizes it has to shed its racist policies that deny the right of return, work such as Grondahl's will be necessary to support UNRWA's efforts to maintain the identity of the Palestinian people for future generations.

Maha Shahbah