Appearing in the imagery of Palestinian resistance and international solidarity, the child cartoon character Handala is a symbol of steadfastness and anti-imperialism. The life and death of Handala’s creator Naji al-Ali encapsulates the revolutionary fight at the heart of the Palestinian liberation movement. Gunned down in broad daylight on a London street on 22 July 1987 and pronounced dead on 29 August, al-Ali’s fate exposed the role played by British imperialism in the colonisation of Palestine. In times of blatant, ongoing British collaboration with Zionist genocide and the silencing of pro-Palestine voices by the Labour Party-run policing establishment, Naji al-Ali and Handala continue to represent principled, revolutionary political culture.
Drawn on 4 July 1987, one of the final caricatures in al-Ali’s prolific artistic career is that of a bloated, gun-toting member of the Arab bourgeoisie, depicted pasting up a ‘wanted, dead or alive’ poster of Handala, only to realise that he has been surrounded by an army of identical children. Al-Ali was clearly aware that his life was in danger. While Palestinian author and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leader Ghassan Kanafani had been killed directly by the Zionist government of Golda Meir in 1972, al-Ali’s assassination was carried out by a combination of Zionists together with Arab and Palestinian collaborators.[1] British police did little to investigate al-Ali’s assassination, despite recovering the pistol and creating a sketch of the suspect from witness statements. Some of those questioned in the aftermath were simultaneously working for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Zionist Mossad agency. The case was reopened in 2017 but has remained dormant.
Expulsion and artistic resistance
Like his mentor and comrade Ghassan Kanafani, Naji al-Ali was assassinated by the reactionary forces he had confronted throughout his life. His village of al-Shajara, northern Palestine, was ethnically cleansed during the Zionist Nakba, or mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948. Though there had been resistance, the village was totally depopulated as Haganah and Golani paramilitaries blew up houses and massacred civilians. By 6 May 1948, a 10 year-old al-Ali was among over 890 forced to flee, ending up in the impoverished conditions of Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon.
Al-Ali reports being involved in demonstrations from a young age, marching for the right of return and demanding provisions and working rights for the refugees. The limits of Lebanese refuge were as clear in the 1950s as they are today: he could study mechanics and electricity, but was barred from working in these fields, ending up as a low-waged fruit picker. Al-Ali would later admit his ‘class bias,’ and always placed the poor at the centre of his political thought. While asserting that his ‘compass always points to Palestine,’ he saw that this meant standing with ‘the just cause’ wherever it appeared, joining protests during this period in solidarity with international revolutionary movements in Egypt, South Africa and Vietnam.[2] He joined the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), the forerunner to the PFLP, and faced constant arrest and imprisonment alongside other activists.
As a youth, al-Ali discovered the power of his artistic talents:
‘I used to draw on the walls, based on the cause and causes that had political content. I had no time to work in humorous ways. Or rather, the pressure on the emotions of the people was such that there was no place for jokes aimed at the reader, for example. The opposite was true, and my drawing was quite dark, sharp and dry, on the level aimed at someone drinking morning coffee… to move them or express the horror of the camp.’[3]
Al-Ali credited Kanafani with being ‘the first person who encouraged me.’[4] Working as a journalist in Lebanon, Kanafani frequently visited the refugee camps and analysed their revolutionary potential. On one trip in 1961, he stumbled across a scruffy young artist exhibiting political paintings under the zinc roofs of Ain al-Hilweh, and took four artworks back to Beirut. Al-Ali was taken aback when his paintings were published days later in the ANM newspaper al-Hurriyya (Freedom). They were accompanied by an article entitled ‘Waiting for us to come,’ where Kanafani described the ‘sharp lines’ of al-Ali’s drawings, with ‘terrifying, harsh colours’, expressing the vivacity of the Palestinian ‘who rages in his chest’.
This burning desire to contribute his talents to the Palestinian and anticolonial Arab cause led al-Ali to work for progressive newspapers in Kuwait and Lebanon. Based at the Kuwaiti ANM weekly al-Tali’a (The Vanguard) from 1963, he described his role as ‘editor, designer, artist and office cleaner all at the same time’.[5] It had originally been his intention to save up to pursue art studies in Italy, but the artist decided to prioritise his political work: ‘I postponed my personal ambitions of self-expression and said that, when our country is returned to us, if I am still alive, I will have made progress.’[6] In a short career, al-Ali committed himself to this mission, producing over 40,000 cartoons and illustrations – a rate of over four per day. He depicted the harsh realism of the camps and allied his critique of Zionist figures and pro-imperialist Arabs to socialist imagery. In a time of intensifying armed struggle, many examples of his work show the AK-47 rifle as the route to feeding the hungry and liberating the land.
Handala and the Palestinian movement
For many in the region, the June 1967 defeat of the Nasser-led Egyptian forces by a more prepared and well-armed Zionist state was a wake-up call. In this Naksa (setback), the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem were directly colonised, along with swathes of Syria, Lebanon and the Egyptian Sinai, forcing another mass displacement of Palestinians. The Palestinian armed resistance gathered strength in this period and al-Ali raced back to Beirut – dubbed the ‘Arab Hanoi’. Contributing to the growing consciousness of the Palestinian masses, he created Handala, a child refugee appearing in hundreds of his drawings in the years to come. He explained:
‘He was the age I was when I had left Palestine and, in a sense, I am still that age today, and I feel that I can recall and sense every bush, every stone, every house and every tree I passed when I was a child in Palestine.’
Spiky-haired and ragged, turning his back on the world, Handala was the child witness to oppression, standing steadfast in the face of the horrors of colonial repression. In al-Ali’s cartoons, Handala saw Zionist soldiers building settlement walls to hide the door of ‘peace talks’, refugee girls nailed to the cross, ragged workers pushing Sisyphean cannonballs uphill and US bombs destroying Iran and Iraq during the 1980-88 war. Handala took part in the stone-throwing against the Zionist occupation and affirmed on the eve of the 1987 intifada that ‘what is taken by force can only be returned by force’.
These caricatures contained stinging critiques of Arab rulers, depicted as gluttonous, suited men spending their lives in conferences and finding themselves in the pockets of imperialism. During the failed Camp David ‘peace’ process in 1978, a barefoot peasant threatens these bourgeois men, who are seen elsewhere rocking a screaming baby in an overflowing oil barrel. Al-Ali criticised Palestinian collaboration with imperialism and predicted the authoritarianism of Yasir Arafat’s post-Oslo Palestinian Authority, with the words ‘Yasir, Yasir, yes sir’. In June 1987 al-Ali was telephoned by a senior PLO figure and told, ‘You must correct your ways’.
The cartoonist faced constant attack from collaborationist regimes. He was arrested by the occupation during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and in 1985 was expelled from Kuwait, ending up at the London offices of al-Qabas newspaper. Though it meant constant danger and moving his family from country to country, al-Ali’s wife Wedad affirms that: ‘He didn’t compromise on his position in any way.’
British imperialism has no interest in revealing the truth of who shot Naji al-Ali and no serious investigation has ever been carried out into his murder. Yet his legacy endures in art, resistance, and opposition to the phoney peace processes of all those who seek to silence the Palestinian cause. As the children of Gaza face the brunt of Zionist war crimes today, the steadfast example of Handala lives on.
Louis Brehony
[1] Fadle al-Nakib in Ghassan Kanafani, al-Dirasat al-Siyasiyya, 2015, p25.
[2] Interview with Radwa Ashour, 1984.
[3] ّInterview with Kuwait TV.
[4] Ashour, op cit.
[5] Kasim Abid, An Artist with a Vision [Film], 1999.
[6] Ashour.
