Picturing History: Palestinian Political Cartoons, 1967 to 2009

This dissertation argues that Palestinian and Arab political cartoons participate in building the Palestinian nationalist project in opposition to "the Israeli occupation" through their dissemination of patriotic feelings across deceptively simple cultural symbols. My dissertation focuses on cartoons published in two Palestinian newspapers and three neighboring Arabic newspapers. These cartoons deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the aftermath of the 1967 War until the end of the Gaza War in 2009. While acknowledging that political cartoons are fundamental to construct what Benedict Anderson calls "the imagined community" of the nation, this dissertation explicates the reading of these cartoons' manifest content by looking at the image-text interaction to reveal their latent content. This latent content is illustrative of the social, political, and aesthetic values underpinning the cartoons. The cartoons surveyed utilize several strategies to foster the growth of the Palestinian nationalism, such as tapping into historical events such as al-Nakbah (The Catastrophe) and al-Naksah (The Setback). Al-Nakbah and al-Naksah provide the basis for Palestinian nationalism to flourish by connecting the Palestinians to their past while opening up the wound of Palestinian plight since 1948. Women also have a central importance in the selected Palestinian cartoons, as the cartoons underscore the association of honor spearheading a nationalist drive. In addition, the cartoons show that the Palestinian struggle against Israel to be of an alienating governing presence over Palestinian lives. They visually construct the Palestinian national identity, radicalized and severely critical of the discourse of the "Other," "the Israeli colonial rule.".