On the Meaning of Watermelons:

An Exploration of Imagery in Contemporary Palestine

          In Palestine, the visual realm is a contested space where images are created, disseminated, manipulated, and suppressed by various actors — deliberately or unintentionally. Drawing on examples from contemporary Palestine, this essay examines how images acquire meaning, becoming instruments of resistance and representation, and whether their interpretation ultimately lies in the hands of their creators or those who consume them.

          French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (author of Simulacra and Simulation) believed that by their very nature, images are fabrications. In many cases, an image can certainly pretend to be a copy of reality, imitating a moment which no longer exists, but it is never a faithful representation. This applies even when moving beyond the artistic and documentary realms into scientific and medical applications of photography which produce hyperrealistic reproductions of the world. It can be argued that these reproductions are not “true” copies, but rather influenced by the subtle biases of the machine and its operator. For Susan Sontag (2004: 21), the distinction is immaterial: photographs are “an objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality.”

          More beneficial than lingering on the nature of copies and reality is determining the extent to which an artist’s purpose and intent influence the ultimate meaning of an image. Literary critics Wimsatt and Beardsley famously came up with the ‘Intentional Fallacy’ in a 1946 essay. Considered controversial at the time, they claimed that the author’s intention was irrelevant to any interpretation or judgment of their literary work. Their argument was twofold: first, that we might never know the true intention of the author, and that even if we did, it should have no bearing on our understanding of their work — “critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle.” (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946) Many of their contemporaries argued against the theory, stating that the artist or author’s intent is the only one that matters. They would not have done so as enthusiastically today. When applied to an image, perhaps the question of who “should” decide what it means remains unsettled, but it is clear that regardless of whether a so-called correct way of interpreting images exists, it is often the viewer who decides the meaning. This is doubly true today.

          Historically, most people could only access a piece of art in a sanitised location: a carefully curated gallery or magazine article with the photographer and editors having control over the context in which the photo is presented and its accompanying text. In the age of globalisation, the internet and social media, viewers are exposed to a barrage of images, often devoid of context. While the Intentional Fallacy was concerned with the difficulty of discerning the true intentions of the creator, it is now becoming increasingly rare to know the identity of the creator at all without further investigation. As such, each viewer has no choice but to assume the responsibility of prescribing meaning, influenced by their own experiences and biases.

          Figure 1. Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli Soldier by Abbas Momani (AFP/Getty Images)

          In 2022, during the early stages of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a video showing a young girl confronting a group of soldiers was viewed and shared by millions of social media users. It was described as depicting a Ukrainian girl standing up to an occupying Russian soldier and hailed as a symbol of bravery and resistance. (Reuters Fact Check, 2022) In reality, it was taken 10 years earlier and shows Ahed Tamimi, a young Palestinian activist, confronting occupying Israeli troops in the West Bank — where it was also hailed as a symbol of bravery and resistance against occupation. This is nothing new. Photographs have long been misrepresented in times of conflict, either intentionally as a tool for propaganda or simply out of ignorance (recently, some North American celebrities have unwittingly used photographs of the destruction in Gaza to share messages of support for Israel (Abueish, 2023). In practice, neither the truth nor the intentions of the cameraman (who gave up his control over the narrative as soon as he decided to capture a moment intime) are relevant here. For the Palestinians, Ukrainians, and any others affected by the clip, its power and the feelings it evoked remain, regardless of what the reality is.^[1]1 While the above example is the product of misinformation or propaganda, such distortions of 1 reality can also be effectively employed for artistic purposes. The entire ‘mockumentary’ genre of … Continue reading

          This is not to say that images lack inherent value; rather, their power primarily stems from the interpretation of each of its viewers, even if that interpretation is affected by the inherent meaning of the image itself. In our current example, contributing to the impact and spread of the video is the fact that the scene shows a young girl confronting armed men —an observation that requires no further knowledge of the geographical, political or historical context in which it takes place. Remarking on Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, in which the writer looked at and analysed photographs from the Spanish Civil War, Susan Sontag (2004: 3-4) makes the point that “war is a man’s game — that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male”. Consequently, images depicting women and children, who have historically been seen as unwilling victims in wars conducted by men^[2]2 An exception to this rule, the armed forces of Israel have always employed women in combat roles, an exception they have been keen to utilise for their own propaganda imagery., elicit more sympathy. The uncomfortable truth, of course, is that the other catalyst for the spread of the clip is its depiction of a blonde and fair-skinned girl; it is logical that for the primarily Western users of the social media platforms in question, someone with Ahed’s appearance is found to be more relatable.

          Sontag posits that to be aimed at a global audience, not just those who already sympathise with the plight of a small nation or stateless people, images must be shocking. These shock-pictures act as a “means of making ‘real’ matters that the privileged and safe might prefer to ignore”. (ibid) Equally powerful as images of bodies on the street, she argues, such as the aforementioned Spanish Civil War photographs, are those of destroyed buildings. The examples given include Grozny, Manhattan on September 11 and, from Palestine, the refugee camp in Jenin during the second intifada. Recent images from the war on Gaza (the scale and recency of which make choosing one representative image to display here impossible) contain no shortage of bodies or destroyed buildings; instead of only being relevant to Palestinians and those neighbours who relate to them, they have managed to shock the world into sympathy. The unprecedented scale of violence has led to a formal accusation against Israel at the International Court of Justice for violations of the Genocide Convention, with photographs from Gaza being cited as evidence within the application. (International Court of Justice, 2023) That the reader is more likely to be familiar with the events in Gaza than the ongoing genocides in, for example, Darfur or Tigray is a somewhat depressing testament to the power of images in documenting and even shaping reality.

Figure 2. From the series Palestinian Right of Return Protests by Mustafa Hassona (Anadalou Agency)

          Many photographs that have grown to be considered ‘iconic’ or to symbolise something greater than a captured moment in time have a habit of mimicking other images that came before them. Photos of freed Bosnian prisoners at Omarksa recall the photos taken at Nazi death camps in 1945 (Sontag, 2004: 73). In Egypt’s January Revolution, an anonymous photograph of a lone protester standing down a Central Security Forces truck came to be a symbol of the Egyptian people’s rejection of tyranny; its resemblance to the images of “Tank Man” following the violent dispersal of the Tiananmen Square protests is too great to be a coincidence. Perhaps it is this phenomenon which has led Mustafa Hassona’s striking composition of a Palestinian protester (Figure 2) to be seen as a symbol of the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom and justice against all odds.

          The award-winning photograph depicts 20-year-old A’ed Abu Amro taking part in the “Great March of Return” demonstrations in 2018, demanding an end to the siege of Gaza and the right to return to the territories from which Palestinian families were expelled during the events surrounding the formation of Israel. Bare-chested and rising from the smoke with a sling in one hand and the Palestinian flag in another, the photograph was widely shared on the internet and quickly drew comparisons to Liberty Leading the People, Eugene Delacroix’s iconic painting of the French Revolution. (Al Jazeera, 2018) Similarly bare-chested and rising above the destruction around her, the painting’s subject replaces the sling for a musket and the Palestinian flag for the French tricolour — but their personification of the struggle for liberty remains the same. Abu Amro was shot in the leg by an Israeli sniper during a later protest; perhaps intentionally targeted, news articles reporting the event described him as “the icon of Palestinian resistance”. (Saeed, 2018)

          The image is controversial. Praised by many, others criticised it as glorifying violence or being counterproductive to the cause. In an opinion piece for The Independent, Louis Staples (2018) demands an end to the romanticisation and fetishisation of the image, which he claims distracts from the very real suffering of Palestinians and speaks to a worrying trend of detachment from the pain of others — “there is nothing beautiful or poetic about the oppression of Palestinians” he writes. Depictions of human suffering and conflict can be beautiful and have formed recurring themes since the earliest records of artistic expression. Stripped from its surroundings (to the best of one’s ability, that is, few can claim to view art devoid of context after being made aware of said context), it is hard to argue that Hassona’s photograph is not “beautiful” at the very least on a purely technical level.^[3]3 In Beauty in Photography (2009a: 31-32), Robert Adams makes this very argument. For him, focusing on technical aspects like composition is to deny the importance of the subject matter —while … Continue reading Whether the feelings elicited by this form of beauty are ones of detachment and distraction or ones of sympathy and solidarity is not up to any one person to decide.

          Neither the photographer nor his subject, who was not aware he was being photographed at the time, knew the status their future photograph would achieve or the debates it would generate, nor did they have much of a say over the outcome of said debates. Describing the experience of having one’s photo taken, Roland Barthes (1993: 13) writes, “In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.” It is clear by now that there is a 5th, one of infinite possibilities: what each viewer of the resulting photograph thinks you are. 

Figure 3. The Story of Watermelon by Khaled Hourani

          Images such as those of Abu Amro, Ahed Tamimi or before them, the live broadcast killing of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah, which brought worldwide sympathy to the plight of Palestinians during the second Intifada, are temporary. While undoubtedly powerful, they represent a specific event or period in time, and despite varying degrees of llongevity will eventually fall out of popular imagination. Those that do not risk losing all original meaning. Recall Guerrillero Heroico, Alberto Korda’s ubiquitous portrait of Che Guevara, now ironically synonymous with mindless consumerism and sported on bumper stickers and t-shirts everywhere by those with little more than a passing familiarity with the person represented. More lasting symbols of the variety organically adopted by revolutionaries and movements of independence and social change around the world tend to be abstract and more easily adapted by future generations of artists. In its many variations, the raised fist, for example, has a hundred-year history as a symbol of solidarity with social movements, from striking textile workers in 1913 to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. (Stout, 2021) This has filtered into popular culture, and similar symbols are present throughout contemporary fiction: the mockingjay in the popular Hunger Games book series, the rebel alliance phoenix symbol in Star Wars or the Guy Fawkes mask in V for Vendetta, which has filtered back into real life and been used as a symbol of resistance in protests globally. In Palestine, the chosen symbol is the watermelon. Obviously, a fist is not ‘just’ a fist, a bird is not ‘just’ a bird, and a watermelon is not ‘just’ a watermelon.

          Following the 1967 war, during which Israel seized effective control of territories in Gaza and the West Bank and illegally annexed the Palestinian capital of East Jerusalem, public displays of the Palestinian flag were criminalised for three decades. (Syed, 2023) The popular story goes that to protest the law, Palestinian activists began carrying around slices of watermelon, a fruit bearing the red, black, white and green of the Palestinian flag. More recently, the fruit has featured heavily in Palestinian art as a symbol for Palestine itself and as a commentary on the absurdity of censorship.

          An early example is Khaled Hourani’s deceptively simple 2007 silkscreen series titled The Story of the Watermelon (Figure 3), and his subsequent 2013 print aptly named The Colours of the Palestinian Flag. Following the evictions of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Jerusalem in 2021, students and activists at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam hung a poster featuring a painted image of a watermelon accompanied by the text “Ceci n’est pas une watermelon” after the university took down a previous poster featuring the Palestinian flag. (Palestine Poster Project, no date) This is a reference to both the work of Hourani, which it mimics, and René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, which cautions against mistaking art (and imagery) for reality. Similar posters featuring watermelon illustrations and the text “This is not a Palestinian Flag” were hung in 2023 by activists in Tel Aviv to protest a decision by Israel’s far-right Security Minister giving police the power to confiscate Palestinian flags. Countless other artists, designers and photographers have since used watermelon imagery in artworks engaging with Palestine, and some social media users have taken to replacing the Palestinian flag with the watermelon ‘emoji’ amidst allegations of online censorship.

          The usage of the fruit as a symbol of Palestine is not only an aesthetic choice that is the result of a coincidental resemblance to the colours in a flag. As an important crop in the region, it is a metaphor for a native people’s connection to the land. Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2008) is a moving story of a land and its people, describing a series of hikes taken over 30 years in the changing landscape around his hometown of Ramallah. Once unviolated by human activity, the included photographs evoke a sense of melancholy, showing the area irrevocably changed by the rapid construction of barriers and settlements (in one of his essays, Robert Adams argues that this feeling of melancholy or sorrow, and the implication of something more than just a piece of terrain, are major aspects of the landscape photography genre as a whole (2009b)). Shehadeh’s Walks leave the reader with an understanding of the distinction between those who belong to a land and those who profess to own it. It does this subtly, by highlighting an attunement between the landscape itself and its olive trees, its pines and its people. His latest book features a watermelon on the cover.

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Momani, Abbas (2012) Ahed Tamimi Confronting Israeli Soldiers [photograph] At: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/02/ahed-tamimi-israel-occupation-palestinian-trauma

Figure 2. Hassona, Mustafa (2018) 13th attempt to break the Gaza blockade by sea [photograph]
At: Getty Images http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/1052757074

Figure 3. Hourani, Khaled (2007) The Story of Watermelon [Silkscreen] At: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPNiXl0NhoL/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Painting Courtesy of artist Fahed Mohamed Shehab