Hunar's position on Palestine

 Hunar Symposia is a collective of academics, artists and cultural producers learning from knowledges embedded within the artistic expression of publics who have experienced the attempted erasure of their identities, histories, languages, cultures and communities through the violence of colonisation and armed conflict. We stand in full solidarity with the Palestinian people, who remain steadfast in the face of 76 years of attempted erasure of their Palestinian identity, history, culture and community following the brutal and ongoing colonisation of Palestinian land. Hunar respectfully acknowledges the Palestinian indigenous cultural value of sumud, or steadfastness, as a form of resistance to the ongoing attempted erasure of Palestinian identity by Israeli dispossession and occupation, and considers the preservation of Palestinian culture and memory as an indispensable act of sumud. 

We express our horror at the catastrophic violence inflicted by Israel at an unprecedented and dizzying scale and rate in Gaza. We consider the warnings given by over 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies as well as the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, and the recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) orders which held that the current situation could amount to plausible genocide, as extremely grave. As a result, we recognise the categorisation of this violence as acts of genocide, and note that leading professors of holocaust and genocide studies including Amos Goldberg and Raz Segal have publicly categorised the current violence as amounting to genocide. 

We see the current genocidal attack on Gaza as the latest chapter in a larger story involving many chapters before it, chapters including the European colonisation of Palestineand the ensuing mandate system during British rule, the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians who were violently uprooted from their land in 1948 known as the ‘Nakba’, the subsequent establishment of a settler-colony on stolen Palestinian land, the 57-year illegal occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem characterised as unlawful by the ICJ in its landmark Advisory Opinion, the almost 17-year blockade of Gaza, and 15 wars waged on Gaza in the preceding 75 years. 

We understand that truth telling, of the whole story with all its many chapters, is a form of remedy and resistance. Rather than view these chapters as single isolated events, or as “historical artefacts”, we understand the current violence enacted on Palestinians and their Occupied land, to be part of a ‘continuing Nakba’, as described by numerous Palestinian scholars. We stand in solidarity with scholar and lawyer Rabea Eghbariah whose academic scholarship on the ‘continuing Nakba’ as a legal concept was censored by both the Harvard Law Review and the Board of the Columbia Law Review. 

Any attempt at relaying numbers of Palestinians injured and killed, homes decimated, schools destroyed, hospitals attacked, will never explain the true depth and breadth of the loss that has been inflicted. Statistics are not truth-telling, statistics do not tell the whole story. However, as a collective of academics and art workers, we feel compelled to write of our despair at Israel’s deliberate destruction of cultural and academic life within Gaza since October 2023, including (at the time of writing) the destruction of at least ten religious sites, 195 sites of historical and/or artistic interest, two depositories of movable cultural property, three monuments, one museum, and three archaeological sites. We feel anguish at the wholesale scholasticide of Gaza, with the destruction of 12 universities, the murder of three university presidents, more than 95 university deans and professors and countless teachers and students. 

The Israeli military has deliberately bombed destroyed the Gaza Municipal Library as well as a number of Gaza’s other public libraries including the Omari Mosque and Library, Ataa Library, IBBY Children in Crisis Library, Diana Tamari Sabbagh Library in the Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center, Edward Said Library, Enaim Library, Al Kalima Library and Publishing House, Kana’an Educational Development Institute and Community Library, Lubbud Library, Al-Nahda Library, the Al-Shorouq Al-Daem Library as well as the libraries of Gazan universities, destroying their entire collections. 

Israeli forces also incinerated the Central Archives of Gaza City, which contained over 150 years of archival material documenting the urban and social Palestinian life of Gaza. The obliteration of residential areas in Gaza has meant the further destruction of Palestinian collective memory with the loss of personal archives, photos and personal documents. 

Gaza’s two main contemporary art spaces have been wiped out by Israeli forces. 

Shababeek for Contemporary Art, a non-profit art space which housed a thirty-year archival collection of more than 20,000 Gazan art works, was completely razed by the Israeli military during their two-week siege on Al-Shifa Hospital and its surrounds. Despite severe funding constraints and the challenges of daily life in Gaza (including a lack of art materials, often entirely banned by Israel), Shababeek organised and hosted numerous exhibitions and residences, ran workshops and seminars, and collaborated with more than 500 artists for its public art programming across Gaza. After the destruction of Shababeek, co-founder Basel El Maqousi sought shelter in Rafah and turned his tent into ‘Little Shababeek’, where art workshops are run for Gazan children. Co-founder Shareef Sarhan has said, “Shababeek is not just a place; it is an idea”. 

Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art, an artist collective and gallery space in Gaza City which featured in Documenta 15 in 2002, was completely destroyed by Israeli air strikes. Following the destruction of their gallery, the Eltiqa collective were told that Gazans had used paintings and furniture salvaged from the rubble to make fires to provide heat and bake bread, to which the Eltiqa artists stated:

they are sad to know that their artworks have been burnt, but they also asked: what is the meaning of art now? Aren’t peoples’ lives far more important? In a genocide, the wooden frame of a painting becomes much more essential than the canvas. What is art in the time of genocide?

Hunar asks ourselves, what is art in the time of genocide?

The indispensable contribution of artists, cultural practitioners, scholars and students globally in addressing this occupation and envisioning alternative possibilities is invaluable. We firmly uphold the principles of artistic and academic liberty, denouncing any efforts to stifle or limit open discourse concerning Palestine's history, current state, and future. 

Within this framework, Hunar:

· Stands in unwavering solidarity and with the utmost respect for Palestinian artists, cultural practitioners, scholars and students who endure unprecedented levels of violence, intimidation, harassment, and wrongful detention both in Occupied Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem, and within Israel, as well as in refugee camps across the region, and in the wider global diaspora;

· Stands in unwavering solidarity with global artists, cultural practitioners, academics, and students who have faced targeted harassment and threats to their person and livelihoods, for expressing their perspectives on Israel and Palestine within not only their professional and educational capacity but also in their personal life;

· Commits to supporting the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)movement , which is founded on principles of international law and universal human rights, while upholding the stance against boycotting individuals based on identity;

· Denounces all forms of pressure, notably the application of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which is aimed at suppressing truth-telling and activism, particularly within educational and cultural spaces;

· Stands in unwavering solidarity with student encampments and actions on education campuses globally and strongly urges our affiliated institutions to divest from Israeli companies and weapons manufacturers;

· Echoes global calls for an immediate and complete ceasefire, sanctions and arms embargoes on Israel, and the urgent facilitation of humanitarian aid and medical support for the Palestinian people, provided within Gaza where possible, and with an end to the illegal transfer of the Occupied Gazan population;

· Joins calls for the release of all hostages and political prisoners, including the 9000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, over 3,400 of which are in administrative detention and of which around 400 are children;

· Urges the Australian government and its authorities to support the efforts of both national and international legal institutions, including the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, as they seek to create pathways for justice and accountability and end impunity for international crimes.