Photographs and text by Adam Rouhana
Mr. Rouhana is a Palestinian American photographer
See full project at nyt.com.
In one of my earliest memories, I am sitting in my teta’s (grandmother’s) lap. The scent of ripe figs fills the air with the calm satisfaction of late summer. We’re in the shade of our cool limestone veranda surrounded by the family’s verdant mountain farmland in a village that is now in Israel but to me has always been Palestine.
Our hands work together to pull apart grape leaves we had picked from the vines in her garden. My teta would use the leaves to cook my favorite dish: warak enab, or stuffed grape leaves. My grandparents were fellahin (farmers). They worked the land, and the land worked them.
I was born to their son, who married an American from New York. Raised in New England, I grew up an American — I read Steinbeck and Baldwin and listened to Bob Dylan — but returned to visit my family on Mount Carmel every year. When I picked up a camera at age 12, I began taking photos of what was around me: Palestinian life.
As I got older and developed my practice, I noticed a dissonance between the West’s conception of Palestinian society and the images I was making — the life I was living. In the news media, Palestinians were often portrayed as masked and violent or as disposable and lifeless: a faceless, miserable people.
But that’s not what I see when I am there. Instead, what I photograph is unconditional communal love, a rootedness and sense of historical belonging in the land, and a daily generosity and collective spirit that I rarely experience in America. Over the years, I’ve heard an endless number of stories passed down through generations that underscore a mosaic of social, cultural and religious pluralism.
Many of the photos of Palestinians I see today reflect the image of us as a suffering people. I see pictures of parents holding their ashen children in front of a pile of gray rubble or men being arrested by heavily armed Israeli soldiers or starving children with hands extended for food and water.
On the one hand, this type of photography documents the brutal reality of Israel’s indiscriminate violence in Gaza. But it also makes it easier for the viewer to see Palestinians as silhouettes who have always been this way instead of as people with entire lives, histories and dreams.
When images like these become the dominant depiction of a people, preconceptions become embedded in the minds of those who view them. In the case of the Palestinians, these insidious representations have paved the way for Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza, for which Israel is now facing accusations of genocide in the international community’s highest court. In the context of violence and destruction, inflicting more violence and destruction becomes routine.
But this structure is changing. Social media is circumventing the traditional flows of information and providing space for more accurate representations to form in the Western imagination. As I write, the few remaining heroic Palestinian photographers in Gaza — at least six of them have been killed since Oct. 7, in addition to at least 70 other journalists — are releasing an unmediated version of their reality, all too often at the price of their own lives.
Now, instead of Gaza’s beauty, they’re left with little to document other than landscapes of death. “I desperately dream of the days before, when I documented my people and my land,” the photographer Motaz Azaiza, who has been documenting the war in Gaza for millions of his Instagram followers, said in an interview. “I miss taking photographs of children playing on the swings, the elderly smiling, families gathering, the sights of nature and the sea, my beautiful Gaza.”
Long before Oct. 7, Palestinian photographers like me have been building a contemporary Palestinian visual language, inscribed with an ethic of self-determination. If photographs tell the stories of people, our images tell the story of our people.
Some have argued that Zionism is built on the myth that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land. My photography subverts this myth: Palestine is our homeland. Photographing Palestinian life stands against forces of erasure.
Images like these can help reorient us toward a just future — a Palestine where we can all live together with equality and freedom. A home where I can one day sit with my granddaughter. A place where she has a past and a future.