Everyone knows the figure of the former leader of Fatah and then of the Palestinian Authority, who died in 2004 at the age of 75. A museum bears his name in Ramallah, the capital of the West Bank, this Palestinian territory of more than three million inhabitants. On Sunday, January 23, an exhibition was officially inaugurated there by Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayeh. More than 350 drawings and paintings on Palestine and the Palestinian cause, with around a hundred artists involved from 43 countries. The event is presented as an international mobilization in favor of the Palestinian cause.
Shtayyeh opens Yasser Arafat cartoon exhibit in Ramallah, Palestinians upset over cartoons they call insulting pic.twitter.com/su1j6FMKHx
— pat (@natypatou) January 25, 2022
Only here, in the lot, there is a series of caricatures (35 in total), of Yasser Arafat. And it is not to everyone’s taste in Palestine: in the wake of the inauguration, social networks were invaded by protests denouncing an attack on the “icon” Arafat. The museum has tried to defend itself by pointing out that these drawings “represent only the point of view of their authors”. But, Tuesday, January 25, he had to resolve to remove the caricatures. The exhibition is therefore still there, but no more drawings show Yasser Arafat.
It’s quite worrying about the state of freedom of expression, especially since these 35 drawings are not very bad (you can still find several of them on the Internet). These are basically close-up cartoons of the face of the former Palestinian leader, a little like the street cartoonists who offer you to paint a portrait of you by magnifying your features: in this case, Arafat’s slightly flat nose or slight squint, with of course always in the foreground the keffiyeh, the famous Palestinian scarf. Nothing aggressive, let alone a form of profanity.
But even that, it does not pass with some Palestinian activists and leaders: we do not touch Yasser Arafat. This did not fail to trigger ironic comments on Israeli sites and social networks. An example : “They want to manage a state, but they are not even capable of managing an exhibition in a museum”.
All this is happening in a confused political context in the West Bank, against a backdrop of internal rivalries within the Palestinian Authority. The estate of the very aging Mahmoud Abbas, 86, is still not settled. And above all, there are still no general elections in Palestine. Nothing since 2005, apart from municipal elections here and there, the next theoretically in March in the cities of Nablus and Hebron.
The presidential and legislative elections, scheduled for last year, have been postponed indefinitely, amid both competition with Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and also within Fatah itself, which controls the West Bank via the Palestinian Authority. In addition, the West Bank is at the end of its rope financially. Disputing the memory of Arafat is also a way for the different Palestinian clans or caciques to distinguish themselves from each other.