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Since October 2023, the world has been made aware of what is happening to Palestine and its people. But it did not start in 2023 nor is it just confined to just Gaza. It is in all of historic Palestine. Palestinians have been struggling against displacement, fragmentation, erasure, and now genocide for a century.
As the opening piece by Egyptian Canadian journalist and writer Omar El Akkad notes, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” The truth of this statement has been proven countless times throughout the Palestinian experience.
Mainstream narratives have painted Palestinians either as aggressors in their own land or as passive victims of endless war: both of which deny the full humanity, agency, and political reality of Palestinian life and identity. The history and testimony of the Palestinian lived experience is possible because of those who “record for future generations to tell them this is what truly happened,” as Asmaa Abu Mezeid writes in Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire.
Throughout the decades, Palestinians have been creating a “record”, whether through documents, objects, art, literature, poetry, music, storytelling, photographs or video and a long diary has been created by those who are well-known, ordinary people and those not yet discovered.
This exhibit highlights pieces of this long diary, dividing it into three main themes: 1) the original 1947 – 1948 ethnic cleansing plan culminating in the displacement of the Nakba, 2) fragmentation of occupation, apartheid and genocide, and 3) the hope of return and future visioning. Hope and resolve to remain is the heart of the resistance against erasure.
