Campus demonstrations, batons and rubber bullets … rockets destroying hospitals … refuges drowning in the Sea … thousands surviving for years in camps … children scrambling for flour and water … convoys and hospitals bombed … the death toll rising with every moment.
⇒ See also: “The Global Refugee Crisis, Region by Region.” New York Times, 2015.
Refugee: a term from the 1680s, “one who flees to a refuge or shelter or place of safety; one who in times of persecution or political disorder flees to a foreign country for safety,” from Old French refuge “hiding place.” from Latin refugium “a taking refuge.
The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as a person who “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of [their] nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail [themself] of the protection of that country.”
Current statistics [1]
- There are today 35.3 million refugees worldwide (close in number to the Canadian population of 38.9 million).
- An estimated 41 per cent of the world’s refugees are children.
- While the majority of refugees want to return home once it is safe to do so, in 2022 only a fraction, 339,300, were able to.
Who are the people behind the headlines?
Where do they come from?
What are they leaving behind?
These photos and commentaries shed a glimpse at one region in the news [2].
Historian Johnny Mansour who lives in Haifa and has spent years collecting oral histories and photographs of the Palestinian experience. He speaks about what such photographs mean to him: “I firmly believe that while the people of Palestine lost their land, they refuse to lose their history. As one of the children, the survivors, of this people, I know how sincere our relationship is with the land, its past, its history, its images, its documents. Taken together, they return to us what we need the most: our homeland.” [2]
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“This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire [3] reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and initiatives.” [4]
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A caution against reading photographs like these as nostalgic, “a reading that suggests the loss and erasure of Palestine as a historical and present fact”. Rather, as images to “illuminate Palestine as a lived and living social fact”. [5]
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[1] UN Refugee Agency I[2] from Photographs of Life in Palestine (ca. 1896–1919). Retrieved from The Public Domain Review on May 5, 2024. The Review is “dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions.” [2] Ottoman Empire (c. 1300 – 1922). [3] Salim Tamari. (2017). The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine. [4] Teresa Aranguren & Sandra Barrilaro. (2024). Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba. [5] Nassar, I et al. 2022. Camera Palæstina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine. California: University of California Press, https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.1
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