Naji al-Ali

Nayi al-Ali (in Arabic: ﻧﺎﺟﻲ ﺍﻟﻌﻠﻲ, can also be found transcribed as Naji al-Ali or Naji Ali), born in 1936, was a Palestinian cartoonist born in the Galilee in 1936 and assassinated in London in 1987. Famous for his political criticism of the Arab regimes and Israel, he has been described as the best Palestinian cartoonist and is probably the best known and most respected cartoonist in the Arab world.

He produced more than 40,000 comic strips, often reflecting Palestinian and Arab public opinion and rich in sharp, critical commentary on Palestinian and Arab policies and leaders in general. His best-known work is the character of Handala, drawn in his strips as a young witness to the policies or situations he satirized, and who has since become an icon of the Palestinian resistance. Time magazine wrote that "this man draws with human bones", while the Japanese newspaper Asahi claimed that "Naji al-Ali draws using phosphoric acid".

On 22 July 1987, al-Ali was shot in the neck and mortally wounded while waiting outside the London offices of al-Qabas, a Kuwaiti newspaper for the who drew political cartoons. Naji al-Ali died five weeks later at Charing Cross Hospital in London.

Biography

Childhood and youth

Naji al-Ali was born in about 1938 in the Palestinian village of Ash-Shayara (present-day Moshav Ilaniya), between Tiberias and Nazareth, in the northern province of Galilee (present-day Israel). In 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli war, the village was completely destroyed and its inhabitants expelled from the territory of the newly created State of Israel in what became known as the Nakba. Naji al-Ali's family settled in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp near Sidon in neighboring Lebanon. There he attended the school of the Union of Christian Churches and, after graduating, he worked in the orchards and fields of Sidon before moving to Tripoli, where he attended the Carmelite vocational school for two years.

Nayi later moved to Beirut, where he lived in a tent in Shatila camp while working in various factories. In 1957, having acquired the title of car mechanic, he traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he worked for two years.

Maturity

In 1959, Naji al-Ali returned to Lebanon and joined the Arab Nationalist Movement (AMM), from which he was expelled four times in one year for lack of party discipline. Between 1960 and 1961, along with other MNA comrades, he hand-published the political daily Al-Sarkha (& # 34; the cry & # 34;). In 1960 he enrolled in the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, but was unable to continue his studies due to his imprisonment for political reasons shortly thereafter. After his release, he went to Tire, where he worked as a professor of drawing at the Ja'fariya University.

Palestinian political activist and writer Ghassan Kanafani noticed Naji's strips on a visit to al-Hilweh camp, printing his first drawings (accompanied by an article) in the pan-Arabist magazine Al-Hurriyya, in number 88 of September 25, 1961. However, it was in Kuwait, a country to which he emigrated like many other Palestinians in the early 1960s, where he really began to develop as a cartoonist. At that time, the Arab journalistic cartoon had been limited to dealing almost exclusively with social issues. Naji al-Ali, aware in his own words of the agitator potential of the cartoonist's work, began to systematically touch on political issues such as the Palestinian question, oil and its illegitimate use, Arab unity or the general political situation in the Arab world, emphasizing the lack of freedom, state terrorism, poverty, bureaucracy and corruption, and directly criticizing characters such as Anwar el-Sadat or Hosni Mubarak. In the years he spent in Kuwait, Naji al-Ali acquired renowned as a cartoonist throughout the Arab world. His original intention in traveling to Kuwait in 1963 was to save money so that he could move and study art in Cairo or Rome. However, there he worked as editor, cartoonist, designer and editorial producer of the Arab nationalist newspaper Al-Tali & # 39; a . From 1968 he went to work at Al-Siyasa , to return to Lebanon in 1974 and start working at the Lebanese daily Al-Safir . In the late 1970s he directed much of his criticism at the Egyptian leaders who had signed peace with Israel & # 34; renouncing solidarity with the Palestinian people in favor of relations with President Jimmy Carter & # 34;.

That same year civil war broke out in Lebanon and Naji al-Ali joined the Palestinian fedayeen, entrenched in West Beirut. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Naji, along with other inhabitants of the Ain al-Hilweh camp, was briefly detained by the occupying forces. When Israel put a siege on Beirut to force Palestinian forces out of the country, numerous Palestinian personalities, including Naji al-Ali, opposed it, considering that the absence of a fedayeen would leave hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilian refugees without protection from to the Lebanese Phalanges, an organization allied to Israel. Despite this, the PLO negotiated with Israel the withdrawal of its forces and just a few days later the Lebanese Phalanges began a persecution against the Palestinian refugees with the connivance of Israel, the climax of which was the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, two camps refugees on the outskirts of Beirut. Naji al-Ali spent six months hiding in the city's underground until he was finally able to return to Kuwait.

In 1983, the year in which he finally returned to Kuwait, he began to collaborate with Al-Qabas and shortly after, in 1985, he moved to London and began working in the international edition of this newspaper until the day of his death. In 1984, The Guardian had described it as "the closest thing you get to an Arab public opinion".

Jobs, political positions and awards

Handala on the Israeli separation wall in the city of Bethlehem.

In his career as a newspaper cartoonist, Naji al-Ali produced more than 40,000 cartoons. In general, his works deal with the situation of the Palestinian people, whom he describes as suffering but resisting; They harshly criticize the State of Israel and the illegal Israeli occupation, as well as Palestinian leaders and Arab regimes. Naji al-Ali was always strongly opposed to any peace agreement that did not include the right of the Palestinian people to all of historic Palestine, something that is reflected in many of his strips. Unlike what is often the case with cartoonists for the press, Nayi did not draw specific politicians in his works because, in his own words, "I have a class perspective, which is why my strips have this shape. The important thing is to draw situations and realities, not to draw presidents and leaders".

Naji al-Ali published three books of his strips in 1976, 1983 and 1985, and was preparing another when he was assassinated.

In 1979, Nayi was elected president of the Arab Cartoonists League. In 1979 and 1980 he received the first prize at the exhibitions of Arab cartoonists held in Damascus. The International Federation of Newspaper Publishers awarded him the "Golden Pen of Freedom" posthumously in 1988.

Handala

Handala painted on a wall of Bilin.

Naji al-Ali's cartoons are often linked to Handala (Arabic name for a bitter desert plant), sometimes spelled Hanzala or Handhala (Arabic: حنظلة‎), the most famous of his characters. Born in the Kuwaiti magazine Al-Siyasa in 1969, he is a ragged and bald ten-year-old boy who is a silent witness to the scene being represented and who since 1973 always appears with his back to the reader., hands clasped behind his back.

According to Naji al-Ali, Handala represented the age of the author himself when he was expelled from Palestine and would not grow up until he could return to his land. His posture with his back to the reader and his clasped hands symbolize the character's rejection of the "external solutions". Handalas threadbare clothes and bare feet symbolize his bond with the poorest. In his final period strips, Handala is shown actively participating in the action rather than simply playing the role of an observer.

Handala became the signature of Naji al-Ali's strips and remains to this day an icon of Palestinian identity and resistance. Handala has also been used as the symbol of the green movement in Iran or the Palestinian movement BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions). The artist himself commented of Handala that "he was the needle of the compass, permanently pointing towards Palestine. Not just a Palestine in geographical terms, but Palestine in its humanitarian sense, the symbol of a just cause, whether it is in Egypt, Vietnam or South Africa".

Other characters and themes

In addition to Handala, Naji al-Ali used to draw a scrawny, squalid-looking man who represented the Palestinian as the defiant victim of Israeli oppression and other hostile forces, as well as a fat, legless man who symbolized to the leaders of the Arab regimes and to the Palestinian political leaders: fat because they led an easy life and accepted political compromises that al-Ali rejected outright, and without legs because "they do not respect the roots." The crucifixion as a symbol of Palestinian suffering and the throwing of stones as a representation of the resistance of ordinary Palestinians are other frequent themes in his work.

Murder

The shooter who shot Naji al-Ali on 22 July 1987 at the entrance to the offices of the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Qabas in London near the London headquarters is still unknown. Victoria & Albert. The shot hit his right temple, so Naji had to be rushed to hospital and remained in a coma until his death on August 29, 1987. Although in his will he had asked to be buried in Ain al-Hilweh Along with his father, this proved impossible and he was eventually buried in the Brookwood Islamic Cemetery, just outside London. British police arrested Ismail Sowan, a 28-year-old Jerusalem-born Palestinian researcher at the University of Hull, and found a stockpile of weapons in his apartment that they said were intended to be used for terror attacks all over the world. Europe; however, he was only charged with possession of weapons and explosives. Police initially said that Sawan was a member of the PLO, although the organization denied any connection to him.

Sowan later confessed that he had been working for both the PLO and the Israeli spy service Mossad. A second suspect arrested by Scotland Yard also confessed to being a double agent. working in PLO cells in London and therefore knew in advance of the plans for the assassination of Naji al-Ali. The Mossad's refusal to provide this information to their British counterparts caused unrest in the United Kingdom, which it responded by expelling three Israeli diplomats, one of whom was an embassy deputy and supervisor of the two agents. A furious Margaret Thatcher, then British Prime Minister, ordered the closure of the Mossad headquarters in Palace Green, Kensington. The pistol used in the murder, a 7.62 Tokarev, was found by police on 22 April 1989 at the Hallfield Estate in Paddington.

The Force 17, following orders from Yasser Arafat, has also been accused of being responsible for the death of Naji al-Ali.

In August 2017, thirty years after the murder, a group of Scotland Yard detectives reopened the investigation into the death of the Palestinian cartoonist. In the note announcing the reopening of the case, the British police revealed that Nayi had received several death threats in the years leading up to his murder.

Tributes

Statue

At the northern entrance to the Ain al-Hilweh camp, where Naji al-Ali spent most of his youth, there is a memorial statue of him by sculptor Charbel Faris. The making of this glass-reinforced plastic and colored polyester statue lasted five months. It is 2.75 meters high, with an average width of 85 centimeters and an average depth of 45 centimeters. The statue carries a stone in its right hand and a sketchbook in its left.

Shortly after its installation, an explosion of unknown authorship seriously damaged the statue; In addition, she was shot in the left eye, similar to what happened with Naji al-Ali himself. The statue was repaired and re-erected soon after.

Movies

In 1991, Egyptian director Atef el-Taieb directed the film in which fellow Egyptian actor Nour el-Sherif played Naji al-Ali in a biopic titled after him, Nagi el-Ali.

Exhibitions

An exhibition based on his works was held in Nazareth in 2008. The Palestine Museum's inaugural exhibition in August 2017 reserved a hall of honor for the work of Naji al-Ali.