Ukraine’s defence minister says delayed shipments of arms lead to losses of troops and territory.
Half of promised Western military support to Ukraine fails to arrive on time, complicating the task of military planners and ultimately costing the lives of soldiers in Russia’s war, the Ukrainian defence minister has said.
Speaking at the “Ukraine. Year 2024” forum in Kyiv on Sunday, Rustan Umerov stressed that each delayed aid shipment meant Ukrainian troop losses, and underscored Russia’s superior military might.
It has been two years since Russia invaded Ukraine and while commemorations to mark the second anniversary brought expressions of continued support, new bilateral security agreements and new aid commitments from Ukraine’s Western allies, Umerov said that they still needed to deliver on their commitments if Kyiv was to have any chance of holding out against Moscow.
“We look to the enemy: Their economy is almost $2 trillion, they use up to 15 percent official and nonofficial budget [funds] for the war, which constitutes over $100bn annually. So basically whenever a commitment doesn’t come on time, we lose people, we lose territory,” he said.
In recent weeks, fighting has intensified on parts of the front line. On Sunday, Russian shelling and rocket strikes continued to pummel Ukraine’s south and east, as local Ukrainian officials reported that at least two civilians were killed and eight others were wounded in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces.
Moscow and Kyiv also continued to trade nightly drone attacks, with Ukraine’s air defences shooting down 16 of 18 Iranian-made Shahed drones launched overnight by Moscow and a Russian drone on Sunday morning struck an unspecified facility in Ukraine’s western Khmelnytskyi region, the regional military administration reported without giving details.
Russian troops also appeared to be pressing on west of Avdiivka, the strategic city whose capture this month handed Moscow a significant victory.
Umerov and the Ukrainian military’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, toured front-line combat posts earlier Sunday amid a worsening ammunition shortage and dogged Russian attacks in the east.
They heard from front-line troops and “thoroughly analysed” the battlefield situation on their visit, Syrskii said in a Telegram update. He did not specify where exactly he and Umerov went but said that “the situation is difficult” for Ukrainian troops and “needs constant control” along many stretches of the front.
Europe has admitted it will fall far short of a plan to deliver more than one million artillery shells to Ukraine by March, instead hoping to complete the shipments by the end of the year.
Umerov highlighted that such delays put Ukraine at a further disadvantage “in the mathematics of war” against Russia, which the West has said is increasingly building a war economy.
Kyiv has also been weakened by the blocking of a vital $60bn US aid package amid political wrangling in the US Congress.
US President Joe Biden said the hold-ups directly contributed to Ukraine being forced to withdraw from Avdiivka.
On Sunday, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said he was “deeply convinced that the US will not abandon Ukraine in terms of financial, military and armed support”.
Meanwhile at the forum in Kyiv, besides highlighting issues in military deliveries, Umerov insisted that Ukrainian forces were doing “everything that’s possible, and also what’s impossible, to secure a breakthrough” this year.
The defence minister said that a “strong” military strategy is already in place for the coming months, but did not disclose details.
Two years ago, Ukrainian teenagers were busy with friendships, falling in love and trying out new things, just like their peers in other countries.
But plans and dreams were quickly shattered by the Russian invasion that began on February 24, 2022, forcing many young people to flee their homes, friends and schools and build a new existence in a strange country.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainian teens ended up in neighbouring Poland, some with their families and some without, among the millions of refugees who fled to other European countries. Nearly six million Ukrainians remain displaced outside the country, a World Bank study shows.
Two years on, many of them have settled into new lives. But some struggle with anxiety, anger and despair, as well as a sense of limbo as they contemplate the possibility of returning to Ukraine one day if the conflict ends.
Transitioning to adulthood can be a tough ride, and the danger and disruption caused by the war have made it harder.
Marharyta Chykalova, who turns 17 in March, left her hometown of Kherson in southern Ukraine with her mother in April 2022 after sleeping in a basement for weeks – and fearing for her life – as Russian troops occupied the city.
They fled to Moldova, then to Romania before settling in the Polish city of Gdynia. Marharyta started learning Polish, trying hard to fit in at her new Polish school, but the first six months were tough.
She says she kept in contact with some of her closest friends at home, but felt lonely nevertheless.
To help cope with depression, the soft-spoken student joined theatre classes that allowed her to express her emotions on stage and helped her make new friends.
“Some people say that home is not a place where you live, but home is a place where you feel good,” she said. “I feel good on the stage, with people close to me. This is my home.”
Around 165,000 Ukrainian teenagers between 13 and 18 years of age are registered as refugees in Poland, according to January data from the Office for Foreigners.
Some gather at Blue Trainers, a community space in a shopping mall in Gdansk where they play board games, billiards and table tennis. Most of all, they connect with their Ukrainian and Polish peers.
Signing up for sports was a particularly popular way of coping with the shock of the war among youngsters.
Andrii Nonka, 15, from Kharkiv, arrived in Poland on his birthday, March 6, 2022, with his mother. His father stayed in Ukraine. Occasionally, he feels a strong desire to go back home to see his friends and father.
Joining a boxing club helped him find new friends and now he looks at Poland increasingly as an opportunity to find a good job, possibly in IT.
“I think because of the war, I have matured quicker,” Andrii said. “For now, it is hard to tell where my home is. For now, my home is in Ukraine.”
Dariia Vynohradova, 17, also from Kharkiv, left her parents behind and says she no longer wants to return.
“I don’t want to go back because Kharkiv is destroyed so much, there is nothing to go back to,” she said. “I will go back to visit my parents sometimes, but I want to stay here.”
On February 26, the World Trade Organization (WTO) will hold its 13th ministerial conference in Abu Dhabi. While few would make the connection between the proceedings at that summit and the plight of impoverished farmers across the world, there is indeed a direct and clear link between the two.
On that day, we, members of the European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC), an international organisation representing small-holder farmers in 21 European countries, will be protesting against the neoliberal policies in agriculture the WTO has been promoting for decades which have led to the systematic impoverishment of farmers.
This tragic state of affairs has been highlighted by the continuing protests of farmers who have been taking to the streets, blocking motorways and logistics platforms across Europe since January.
These are people who produce Europe’s food – whether conventionally or organically, on a small or a medium scale. They stand united by a shared reality: They are fed up with spending their lives working incessantly without ever getting a decent income.
We have reached this point after decades of neoliberal agricultural policies and free trade agreements. Production costs have risen steadily in recent years, while prices paid to farmers have stagnated or even fallen.
Faced with this situation, farmers have pursued various economic strategies. Some have tried to increase production to compensate for the fall in prices: They have bought more land, invested in machinery, taken on a lot of debt and seen their workload increase significantly. The stress and declining incomes have created a great deal of frustration.
Other farmers have sought better prices for their produce by turning to organic farming and short distribution channels. But for many, these markets collapsed after the COVID-19 pandemic.
All the while, through mergers and speculation, large agroindustrial groups have gotten bigger and stronger, putting increased pressure on prices and practices for farmers.
ECVC has actively taken part in the mobilisations of farmers in Europe. Our members have also been hit hard by dwindling incomes, the stress linked to high levels of debt, and the excessive workload. We clearly see that the European Union’s embrace of WTO-promoted policies of deregulation of agricultural markets in favour of big agribusiness and the destructive international competition are directly responsible for our plight.
Since the 1980s, various regulations that ensured fair prices for European farmers have been dismantled. The EU put all its faith in free trade agreements, which placed all the world’s farmers in competition with each other, encouraging them to produce at the lowest possible price at the cost of their own incomes and growing debt.
In recent years, however, the EU has announced its intention to move towards a more sustainable agricultural model, notably with the Farm to Fork Strategy, which is the agricultural component of the Green Deal.
Farmers’ organisations welcomed this ambition, but we also stressed that the sustainability of European agriculture could not be improved without breaking away from the logic of international competitiveness. Producing ecologically has huge benefits for the health and the planet, but it costs more for the farmers, and so to achieve the agroecological transition, agricultural markets need to be protected. Unfortunately, we were not heard.
European farmers were therefore faced with an impossible mission: delivering an agroecological transition while producing for the lowest possible price. As a result, differences between farming organisations have clearly resurfaced.
On one side, the big farmers and agribusiness organisations, linked to Copa-Cogeca, want to maintain the neoliberal orientation and have therefore asked for the withdrawal of environmental measures set in the EU’s Green Deal.
On the other side, ECVC and other organisations affirm that the environmental and climate crises are real and serious and that it is vital to give ourselves the means to combat them in order to ensure food sovereignty for the decades to come. For us, it is the neoliberal framework that must be challenged, not environmental regulation.
In particular, we denounce the free trade agreement between the EU has been concluding with various countries and regions. One of them is the deal negotiated with Mercosur countries (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay). A final text was drafted in 2019, but it has not been signed or ratified by either side.
If it comes into effect, it would be a disaster for European livestock farmers, as it will lead to increased imports of meat, among other products, from Mercosur countries. This could potentially drive down prices, putting even more economic pressure on already struggling European livestock farmers.
Additionally, the deal could result in the importation of products that do not meet the same strict standards for food safety and environmental sustainability that the EU has embraced.
While we are not against international trade in agricultural products, we advocate for trade to be based on food sovereignty. This means allowing the import and export of agricultural products, but under the condition that it does not harm local food production and the livelihood of small-scale food producers.
Instead of protecting their farmers and helping them transition to agroecology, the EU has chosen to respond to the demands of big farmers and agribusiness organisations by reversing a key provision of the Green Deal: halving the use of pesticides by 2030.
Some European countries have also decided to address this crisis by abolishing environmental measures while maintaining neoliberal policies. France, for example, paused the Ecophyto pesticide reduction plan, while Germany abolished its plan to scrap tax breaks on farming vehicles and watered down legislation to lift subsidies on off-road diesel fuel.
Removing environmental regulations is a very risky choice because it does nothing to permanently solve the essential problem of dwindling farmers’ incomes. So we can be sure that farmers’ protests will continue to escalate in coming years.
All of this is happening at a time when the far right is on the rise across the world. Rather than solving the problems by ensuring a better distribution of income, the far right designates minority populations as scapegoats (migrants, women, LGBTQ, etc) and increases the violent repression of popular movements.
In the Netherlands, farmers’ anger was exploited by the right-wing Farmer-Citizen Movement party (BBB), which leveraged anti-system and anti-ecology rhetoric to secure more votes. As a result, the BBB made significant gains in provincial and national elections, increasing its seats in parliament from one to seven.
With the EU’s incoherent reaction to the farmers’ protests, there is a real risk that this trend will continue in the elections for the European Parliament in June.
The farmers’ unions within ECVC maintain that the real solutions for European farmers are policies to regulate markets and promote food sovereignty, in cooperation with the countries of the South. At a time when capital income is exploding, we, as farmers, are standing with the workers’ unions and the climate movement to demand a fair income for all workers and coherent policies to respond to the global climate emergency.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
The overall expansion of North Field from 77mtpa currently to 142mtpa by 2030 represents an 85 percent increase in production.
Qatar has announced new plans to expand output from the world’s biggest natural gas field, saying it will boost capacity to 142 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) before 2030.
The new North Field expansion, named North Field West, will add a further 16 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per year to existing expansion plans, Qatar’s Energy Minister Saad Sherida al-Kaabi said at a news conference on Sunday.
“Recent studies have shown that the North Field contains huge additional gas quantities estimated at 240 trillion cubic feet, which raises the state of Qatar’s gas reserves from 1,760 [trillion cubic feet] to more than 2,000 trillion cubic feet,” said al-Kaabi, who also heads the state-owned company QatarEnergy.
These results “will enable us to begin developing a new LNG project from the North Field’s western sector with a production capacity of about 16 million tonnes per annum”, he said.
This will bring Qatar’s production capacity to 142 million tonnes once “the new expansion is completed before the end of this decade” – a nearly 85 percent rise from current production levels, al-Kaabi added.
The QatarEnergy chief said the firm will “immediately commence” with engineering works to ensure the expansion is completed on time.
Qatar is one of the world’s top LNG producers alongside the United States, Australia and Russia.
Asian countries led by China, Japan and South Korea have been the main market for Qatari gas, but demand has also grown from European countries since Russia’s war on Ukraine threw supplies into doubt.
The latest expansion plans follow a flurry of announcements for long-term Qatari gas supply deals.
Earlier this month, Qatar said it would supply 7.5mtpa of LNG for 20 years to India’s Petronet, with the first deliveries expected from May 2028.
At the end of January, QatarEnergy announced a deal with US-based Excelerate Energy to supply Bangladesh with 1.5mtpa of LNG for 15 years.
Last year, Qatar signed LNG deals with China’s Sinopec, France’s Total, Britain’s Shell and Italy’s Eni.
Global price collapse
Competition for LNG has ramped up since the start of the war in Ukraine, with Europe, in particular, requiring a large quantity to help replace Russian pipeline gas that used to make up almost 40 percent of the continent’s imports.
The Qatari announcement came as the US gas prices trade near an all-time low if adjusted to inflation after a decade of meteoric rises in output which made the US one of the top oil and gas exporters.
Prices of gas in Europe also fell steeply despite a drop in Russian supplies after the US and Qatar helped replace lost volumes.
Despite the price drop, all leading gas producers, including the US, Australia and Russia, want to increase output betting on further demand growth and worries that their gas might not be needed decades from now if the energy transition makes green energy cheaper.
The latest expansion may not be the last for the Gulf energy giant as al-Kaabi said appraisal of Qatari gas reservoirs would continue and production would be further expanded if there is a market need.
On partnerships for the new trains, al-Kaabi said QatarEnergy will go ahead and begin the engineering phase of this project on its own without seeking partners and then take a decision on partnerships later.
The North Field is part of the world’s largest gas field, which Qatar shares with Iran, which calls its share South Pars.
Gaza’s medical infrastructure was woefully inadequate, but now even that has been destroyed by Israel’s war.
The Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis was the last big medical facility in the Gaza Strip destroyed by Israel’s war.
The World Health Organization says Israel killed 627 doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and other healthcare workers between October and January.
With almost no supplies entering Gaza, what is next for the 2.3 million Palestinians forced to live in inhuman conditions?
Host Steve Clemons speaks with Dr Thaer Ahmad, an emergency room physician in Chicago who recently returned from volunteering at Nasser Hospital; and with Dr Muaiad Kittaneh, a haematologist/oncologist who co-founded the Palestinian-American Medical Association.
Self-described ‘political dissident’ Donald Trump mocked Joe Biden and praised Argentina’s confrontational populist leader at CPAC, the largest annual gathering for conservatives in the US. Here are five unfiltered moments.
Occupied East Jerusalem– Fakhri Abu Diab had no time to pack his belongings when the Israeli authorities arrived on his doorstep in occupied East Jerusalem on February 14. The police first evicted his family and then ordered a bulldozer to demolish his home.
“All of my memories were in that house,” said Abu Diab, 62, who was born and raised in that home. “I even had a picture of my mother holding me as a child. It was hanging on our wall, but now it’s gone.”
In the wake of Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, the Jerusalem municipality has stepped up home demolitions on the east side of the city, which Israel annexed from the occupied West Bank in 1967 and where most of Jerusalem’s 362,000 Palestinians live.
During the first nine months of 2023, Israel demolished a total of 97 Palestinian homes. But 87 homes have been bulldozed in East Jerusalem since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israeli communities and military outposts in southern Israel on October 7 last year, according to Ir Amim, a local non-profit which monitors home demolitions and advocates for Palestinian rights.
The acute uptick in demolitions suggests that Jerusalem’s municipality is exploiting the global attention on Gaza, where nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, to try and uproot more Palestinians from East Jerusalem, activists and experts say.
“These [demolitions] are done under the guise of law enforcement – as if it is a bureaucratic measure – but it is actually a form of state violence and it serves as a mechanism of Palestinian displacement to drive them from the city,” said Amy Cohen, the director of international relations and advocacy for Ir Amim.
Systemic violence
Israel justifies demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem by claiming that they have been built without permits. The municipality typically only allows majority Jewish neighbourhoods to build new homes.
The legal discrimination has forced Palestinians to build without permits, rendering 28 percent of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem “illegal”.
The Israeli authorities have issued orders to demolish most of them, according to Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who specialises in legal and public issues in East Jerusalem.
“Before the war, there were roughly 20,000 outstanding demolition orders and those orders never expire,” Seidemann told Al Jazeera.
Home demolitions are prohibited under international law unless they are necessary for military operations. But Omar Shakir, the Israel-Palestine director of Human Rights Watch, said that Israel has created a legal structure to allow it to demolish Palestinian homes.
“There are different mechanisms (to enforce demolitions), each of which ultimately furthers the same objective of forcing Palestinians off their land and maximising land for Jewish Israelis,” he told Al Jazeera.
Since October 7, Seidemann said Palestinians in East Jerusalem have become noticeably more afraid of losing their homes. He cited the perceived increase in racist rhetoric and violent harassment that Israeli politicians and security officials have shown Palestinians.
“The tense atmosphere at the moment is causing [Palestinians to think that] if they have a demolition order, then their home could be [destroyed] next,” he said.
Sending a message
The demolition of Abu Diab’s home has compounded this fear, experts and activists say.
Abu Diab, is, himself, a human rights activist and the elected spokesperson of Silwan, a district that represents about 60,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Residents trust him to speak out against home demolitions and other forms of systemic discrimination that Palestinians face from the Israeli occupying authorities.
“This is not the first time that the Israelis have targeted him,” said Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, the Israeli co-director with Abu Diab of Jahalin Solidarity, a local organisation trying to prevent the forced displacement of Palestinians. “He was put in prison on one occasion and, another time, his son was arrested. The message was to ‘Tell your father to shut up’.
“I asked Abu Diab after [Israel] demolished his house if he would stop speaking out. He said, ‘I’ll speak out even more now,’” Godfrey-Goldstein told Al Jazeera.
Fakhri Abu Diab drinks tea and greets friends at Al-Aqsa Mosque [Mat Nashed/Al Jazeera]
Palestinian and Israeli activists believe that advocacy to protect Palestinian homes is needed now more than ever. With municipal elections approaching on February 27, Abu Diab believes that candidates may be deliberately calling to demolish more homes to appeal to their constituents.
He said he fears that the far-right candidate, Arieh King, who is currently deputy mayor of Jerusalem, could become the next mayor. King has previously stated that he aims to limit the building of Palestinian homes in order to protect Israel’s character as a Jewish state. In December, he posted on X, calling Palestinians “subhuman”.
“If King becomes the next mayor in the coming elections, the situation will become quite difficult. He has openly threatened to demolish Palestinian homes and kill Palestinians,” said Abu Diab.
‘There will be a reaction’
Abu Diab said that he owes his life to Godfrey-Goldstein and other activists for quickly notifying journalists and human rights organisations when the police stormed his home. He believes the police may have seriously injured or killed him had it not been for those arriving to video the demolition.
“My wife was sleeping when about 20 or 30 officers stormed in. We are traumatised from what we experienced,” he told Al Jazeera.
But while Abu Diab survived, he and his family – children and grandchildren – are now homeless. He told Al Jazeera that he is sleeping in the homes of friends and relatives in his community, often moving from one residence to another.
Abu Diab is also concerned that he may not be able to afford the demolition. Israeli authorities typically require Palestinian residents to pay for the bulldozing of their homes as well as the salaries of police officers who are deployed to evict residents and secure the premises.
Abu Diab expects the total bill to amount to $20,000 or $30,000. However, his immediate priority is to try and find a new home for his grandchildren, who are too young to understand why they are homeless.
His two-year-old granddaughter recently asked him why the police destroyed their house. He said he had no idea how to answer.
Although he’s trying to remain strong for his family, Abu Diab worries about the future, and warned that Palestinians in East Jerusalem will eventually erupt in anger if Israeli authorities continue to step up home demolitions.
“There will be a reaction,” he told Al Jazeera. “People can’t stand this for long.”
I first encountered Sliman Mansour, whose paintings portray the daily and historical struggles of the Palestinian people, last year at Art Cairo in the pharaonic enormity of the Grand Egyptian Museum. The event brought together some of the most acclaimed painters, photographers, graffiti artists, and other creatives from across the Middle East. Mansour, who has famously helped to shape the contemporary art of Palestine for over half a century, was participating in a discussion about censorship and violence against artists and journalists.
At that time, Mansour’s panel was considering the issue of future attacks on artists through the lens of those that had already occurred. Initially soft-spoken, his tone became fiery in response to another panellist who suggested that artists should toe the line in response to governmental censorship because one could not produce art if imprisoned or dead. This was unacceptable to Mansour, who asserted that it was the job of the artist to create art honestly regardless of the consequences.
When I spoke with Mansour almost exactly one year later in January 2024, for Palestinians the matter was once again no longer historical or hypothetical, but all too present: The number of journalists and artists killed was continuing to skyrocket amid the latest eruption of violence.
“I’m sad and angry,” Mansour told me when I asked him about the high rate of journalist casualties. “But it fits the thinking of the Israelis. For them, the narrative is very important. And who tells the narrative — it should be them only, because that’s the truth for them. Anybody who speaks another narrative should be put in prison. Or now they are killed.”
Sliman Mansour [Courtesy of Sliman Mansour]
Mansour spoke with me via Zoom from his home in Jerusalem, with the end to the violence nowhere in sight. He smiled amicably throughout our talk, but his eyes were sad and he seemed somewhat tired.
When I asked him about the atmosphere in Jerusalem, he considered the question for a few long moments, then shrugged. “It’s very tense,” he said, “but there’s no physical threat [in Jerusalem]. It’s only tense because of the war and so on.”
That “and so on” was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
A lifetime of artistic resistance
Seventy-seven-year-old Sliman Mansour has spent half a century expressing the perseverance and resistance of the Palestinians through his painting. Born in rural Birzeit before spending his formative years in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, his youth was marked by what he saw as the active erasure of Palestinian identity; various elements of Palestinian culture, such as the flag and even its colours, were repressed or outright banned. In 1973 he co-founded the League of Palestinian Artists, which brought a new sense of political urgency to the art of Palestine. Since then his singular style — which fuses elements of realism, abstract expressionism, and Surrealism — has given rise to some of the most powerfully emotive images to emerge from the movement’s cultural opposition to oppression.
Mansour’s most recognisable works speak directly to the plight of Palestinians. In Rituals Under Occupation, a sea of forlorn people carry a cross, the pillar of which is a Palestinian flag that stretches off into the horizon. In Perseverance and Hope, a trio in traditional Palestinian dress looks up at a dove, their hands bound behind their backs, the backdrop a collage of terrible calamity. And of course, there’s Camel of Hardship, one of Mansour’s earliest works to find widespread acclaim, which portrays a man staggering forward with the burden of Jerusalem on his back.
Rituals Under Occupation by Sliman Mansour [Courtesy of Sliman Mansour]
The persistence of ‘sumud’
There is an almost pastoral stoicism to Mansour’s work that implores contemplation rather than cries out for attention. These paintings are some of the most internationally recognised works to present a concept known as sumud, a Palestinian concept that has also been captured by artists and writers such as Ismail Shammouth, Mahmoud Darwish, Issam Badr and many others.
“The meaning of it in English is steadfastness,” explained Mansour. “For me, sumud is to not forget who we are and to fight all the time for our liberation. Not to give in to the demands of Israel — that if we want to live in this land, we have to live like a second-class people. That is mainly what Israel wants of us — to accept that they are the rulers of this land. Sumud, for me, means that I don’t agree with that. And I will fight that. That — in short — is the meaning of sumud.”
And in the case of Mansour’s art, that fight is characterised by existence rather than violence. His painting, Memory of Places, for example, shows a man dressed in traditional Palestinian garb standing before a painting of an olive grove. The destruction of Palestinian olive groves on the part of Israeli settlers has been a fierce point of contention in recent years, and Mansour’s meta-portrayal of such a grove — which we presume has been destroyed, for the old man is standing before a painting rather than actual trees — insists that the view consider the obliteration of Palestinian identity.
“A painting shouldn’t be full of force and bloody violence. If I paint just a beautiful landscape or people working in the field, it’s part of the sumud thinking.”
From the River to the Sea is a 2021 painting by Sliman Mansour [Courtesy of Sliman Mansour]
Red, green, black, and white
In the 1980s, Mansour was among the artists who began using what is today a well-known symbol of the Palestinian movement — the watermelon — after Israel passed legislation censoring political art.
“They gave us rules like that we should not paint in certain colours,” said Mansour. “That we should not paint in red, green, black, and white. This rule was published in newspapers and everywhere, including in Israel.”
According to Mansour, when Israeli authorities asserted the colour ban, painter Issam Badr asked if the colours could still be used to paint flowers. No, said an officer, flowers were forbidden. Nothing in red, green, and black. Not even a watermelon.
“They wanted to fight the notion of a Palestinian identity,” explained Mansour. “Because our existence here, for them, is ‘antisemitic’. That we exist, only. It’s not what we do — just our existence here is something that they hate. It does not fit their narrative about Israel. What are these people doing here? We came to a land that should be empty. So our existence here is something that makes them angry. Existence as workers — that we work for them in the fields or in factories and so on — that’s okay. But existence, existence as a national identity, as Palestinians — that’s what makes them mad.
“And that’s the reason they forbid us to paint in these colours. Because these colours are the colours of the Palestinian flag and the flag is a symbol of the people.”
Because the colours of a watermelon tested the bounds of the ban, it became a symbol of resistance among artists and is now commonly displayed at pro-Palestinian protests and by supporters online.
Peace, by Sliman Mansour, was created with mud and wood. [Courtesy of Sliman Mansour]
When I told Mansour that the idea of banning colours from a painter made about as much sense as banning a musician from playing certain notes, he nodded, adding that painting against the ban could also have very real consequences.
“In 1982 to ’84, many artists painted everything in red, green, black, and white,” he said. “A landscape, a portrait — anything. And in 1984, an artist from Gaza painted the Palestinian flag and they put him in prison for six months. His name is Fathi Ghabin. He’s now in Gaza running away from the bombs and so on, but he spent six months imprisoned in ‘84.”
Mansour recalls that the ban even inspired a number of Israeli artists to back their Palestinian counterparts by collaborating on exhibitions held throughout the early 1980s.
“A group of Israeli left-wing artists came to Ramallah to support us and we became friends with many of them and we started making exhibitions,” explained Mansour, “and always the main title of the exhibition was, Down with the Occupation, and, For a Two-State Solution, and things like that. I understand the feelings of the Israeli artists who came to support us at that time. They were very embarrassed. They told us very frankly that they were embarrassed.”
The dangers of contradicting the narrative
There has been a historically high number of journalists killed in the latest war on Gaza, along with scores of writers, poets, and other artists. Mansour asserts that this is all part of an effort on the part of Israel to not only diminish Palestinian culture but eliminate threats to an enforced narrative.
“The whole idea of Israel is narrative,” said Mansour. “It’s a story, and they are building over that — stories, stories — and they want to keep these stories alive, and they hate anybody who tells another story. So that’s why they hate writers and poets and people who speak another side of the story. And now the journalists.”
And he’s quick to point out that the current violence is far from the first instance, and that these wordsmiths have faced even greater retaliation than the painters both today and in the past.
Mansour noted the assassination of author and politician Ghassan Kanafani, who along with his niece was killed by a car bomb in 1972, with the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad claiming responsibility.
“They were afraid of artists who dealt with the mass media, newspapers, and so on,” Mansour recalled. “ A visual artist was not such a great threat to them. They were angry with the people who wrote.”
Palestinian refugee school children sit by a wall painting featuring Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated in 1972, in the Dheisheh refugee camp in the outskirts of Bethlehem on January 4, 2001 [File: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters]
The struggle for humanity
It is no secret that there is a stark narrative divide dominating the question of Palestine and Israel. When I asked Mansour how we can overcome this division, he said that it must start with the basic recognition of human rights.
“If they accept our existence then there is another way of connection. If Israelis respect our existence here and accept it, then it would be much easier to talk to each other and to make a bridge between these narratives.
“We have to decide first that everybody has the same rights here. We have to come to some kind of agreement.”
How, I wondered, can that be achieved?
“It’s a big question,” Mansour said, “But at the end, I think our fight is to rehumanise ourselves. There is a kind of dehumanisation of the Palestinian people — that these people, the Palestinians, are not fully human beings. They are less than human beings, so they don’t deserve full rights and so we can take the land and we can kill them. The formula is very clear.
“I think the people of the world should understand that we don’t fight because we like to fight. We hate to fight, even. But we have to. It’s like a cage that we are put in, and we have to get out of that cage. It’s a trap and history put us in this trap, starting from the big wars. England, France, and all these imperialist states wanted to create a state here, and they write the history. Because history is written by the victorious, and we Palestinians are lost in this formula.
“Then the United States took over from France and Britain as the big imperialist country. So it’s a big game and we Palestinians feel very small. We are not strong enough to fight this fight. Big powers stand in our way — we need the support of ordinary people in the world.”
Three Cities Against the Wall, an exhibition that protested the separation wall construction by Israel in the occupied territories of Palestine, was held simultaneously in Ramallah, Tel Aviv and New York City in November 2005. Mansour helped to organise the event in Palestine [Courtesy of Sliman Mansour]
The ultimate aim
When it comes to the US, I asked Mansour what he wanted Americans to know about the situation, when their government has been supporting Israel militarily, financially, diplomatically and in shaping its narrative.
“This is the big problem because the United States is the main factor here. And if they change their policy, everything could be changed here. But there is a policy of keeping the American people uninformed. You keep them in the dark all the time. And the Americans I know tend to think that the United States is the world. So they don’t care about anything else. But for us, this is a big problem. This attitude of theirs is killing us.”
And if Americans do recognise their complacency and push for a change of policy, what does Mansour hope will be the outcome?
“The future is peace. Peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Maybe starting with the two-state solution with the help of Egypt and Jordan. I personally don’t care how, I just want peace. I’ve been living all my life in this turmoil and slaughter and it’s too much for the people in it. Everybody wants a break. But I’m sure at the end it will be one state that people are living in with equal rights. I think this is the main objective for every wise human being, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian. This is the only way we can live on this land.
“I have feelings about Jaffa, about Haifa, about Acre, about the sea, and I wouldn’t live in a country where I couldn’t visit these places. And I’m sure the Jews have feelings about the sea and many places in — they call it Judea and Samaria — in the West Bank, and so on. We Palestinians understand that here there were Jews before. We don’t deny their existence as they do our existence.”
Despite the violence of Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7 and the brutal Israeli invasion of Gaza that followed, Mansour holds on to that hope for peace and equality.
“I’m not Hamas. Hamas came yesterday and I’ve been here for many years. Hamas came because of the occupation. And my friends and the Palestinian people — they are very peaceful. They hate fighting. They hate war. It’s not that we love to make wars. We hate it and would love to live as normal human beings — in peace. That’s our ultimate aim.”
So what is the artist to do in times of conflict or war, I asked him. He’s been at it for 50 years, capturing the spirit of Palestinian struggle and sumud.
“In my case,” he replied, “I think I’m siding with the right side of history and I’m doing my best in my ability to show that. I don’t think there is a formula for what artists should do. But they should be truthful with their feelings, and they should feel with other people. I can easily go and work in my studio and forget about anything else and make flowers and nice girls and make exhibitions and sell and so on. But that’s not how I am built. And artists should not do that. They should be more active in their society.
“I believe in art as a social instrument, not as decoration for wealthy people’s houses.”
The artist, Sliman Mansour, in 1992 [Courtesy of Sliman Mansour]
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