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Remembrance through the Arts: Political Posters of the Palestinian Revolution during the 1960s in Jordan
Abstract
In 1968, Palestinian artist, Mustafa Hallaj, created a powerful image titled “Battle of al-Karameh,” which depicts a Feda’i woman standing tall and brandishing a weapon. The powerful image, produced in response to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) victory against Israel during the battle of al-Karameh, asserts Palestinian revolutionary armed struggle and stresses its significance in the plight for national liberation. This battle was a monumental episode for the Palestinian Revolution and ignited the enthusiasm of the revolutionaries and their commitment to the liberation struggle. Hallaj lived in Damascus at the time but closely followed the events in Jordan and traveled to Amman on different occasions to be with Palestinian revolutionaries. Many artists and anti-imperialist revolutionaries viewed Amman as a central revolutionary site where fighters, artists, filmmakers, and journalists ascended to fight, document, and engage with the Palestinian revolution. Similarly, during the events of Black September in 1970, when the Jordanian monarchy crushed the Palestinian Revolution in Jordan and expelled the PLO from the country, many revolutionaries, artists, and volunteers from across the world were either in Jordan partaking in the revolution or following from afar, commenting, writing, and deeply engaging with the revolution. Despite the severity of the event and its significance as a turning point for the modern history of Jordan and the Palestinian revolution alike, the revolution’s experience in Jordan receives little attention by scholars and has yet to be fully explored as a significant episode in the history of Palestine and Jordan. As such, this paper aims to answer the following questions: how do we explain the absence of Jordan from the geographies of the Palestinian revolution when the country was central to revolutionary practices and aesthetics? What does this absence have to teach us? In doing so, this paper aims to firstly, demystify long-held beliefs around Jordan which is perceived as an artificially constructed place created by colonial powers to serve a political purpose and therefore considered a place empty of history. Secondly, it will show how studying the Palestinian revolution’s experience in Jordan points us towards the transnational connections that emerged between the Palestinian revolutionaries and anti-colonial movements across the world starting in the 1960s. This paper utilizes political posters and images produced by Palestinian factions and their supporters as archival documents that are a testament to Jordan’s forgotten revolutionary past and the connection made between Palestinian revolutionaries and other anti-imperialist groups during that period.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Jordan
Sub Area
None