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I am a journalist; storytelling is my art.
Words are the tools I turn to, time and time again, to make sense of events and craft them into stories that do them justice. And yet, when it comes to the genocide in Gaza, where I was born, language feels inadequate.
There are limits to what words can say. At some point, the instinct to describe, explain and understand what has happened begins to break down under the destruction and pain.
One event from the beginning of the war I no longer remember: a bulldozer burying 111 unidentified bodies, wrapped in bright blue bags, in a mass grave. It was briefly seen in the constant scrolling of social media before disappearing again, replaced by other terrifying events. And another one.
One hundred and eleven people about whom we knew nothing; not their names, not their dreams or what their last moments were. A New York Times headline said: More than 100 Bodies Are Dumped in Mass Graves in Southern Gaza. Leaving the perpetrator aside, can that show the magnitude of such an event?
Any attempt to describe in words what Israel has given to Gaza and its people has felt diminished, forcing something vast, continuous and terrifying into a language that cannot hold it. What is left is a conflict in the heart of the act of telling oneself; knowing that no story can be enough, how do you tell such unspeakable horror stories?
This debate is at the heart of the Gaza Genocide Tapestry, which I am associated with and which will be exhibited at this year’s Venice Biennale. It is an art project that brings together Palestinian women in Palestinian camps and refugees in Lebanon and Jordan to document the destruction of Gaza in real time. He tells these stories in the way he knows best: Needle and thread.
Through 100 decorated panels, each made of 55,000 stitches, these women have created a testimony that refuses to let the world forget what has been done and for whom.
Each group tells a part of what happened: A journalist mourns the dead body of his son; young girls with empty pots being crushed in the soup kitchen; a child cries as his world crumbles around him.
Some of these pictures forced themselves into the public eye, if only for a moment; Khalid Nabhan hugging his dead granddaughter, “the life of his soul”, for the last time before meeting her the following year, or Dr. Hussam Abu Safia they are walking towards the tank under the orders of the Israeli soldiers, so that they will not be seen again.
But most of the pictures from Gaza are not given a stop there. They pass without names, stories or goodbyes.
The tapestry contradicts this. Sorting and choosing the right thing to do – hours, days and weeks of work. This is an insistence that it is not lost with the number of images that briefly pass before our eyes.
National Archives in the thread
Gaza Genocide Tapestry is a new award-winning title History of the Palestinian Tapestry The project, which I co-host with Gaza-born designer Ibrahim Muhtadi. Following in the tradition of the famous Bayeux Tapestry and the Great Tapestry of Scotland, it is the largest collection of Palestinian tapestry depicting the history of Palestine and its people.
The tapestry was started in 2011 in Oxford by Jan Chalmers, a British nurse who lived and worked in Gaza for two years in the 1960s.
Recognizing the ancient Palestinian traditions, the tatreez, Jan believed that the Palestinian archeology was appropriate. I met Jan in 2013 in Oxford during my undergraduate studies. It was then that I began to participate in this important work.
Tatreez, recognized by UNESCO in 2021, has been showing Palestinian heritage and belonging. Its goals define identity, place and culture. After the Nakba of 1948, it became a way to preserve Palestinian culture in an attempt to eradicate it. Today is something else: Evidence.
Not long after Israel launched a devastating military offensive in Gaza in 2023, the museum gained new strength by joining the Palestine Museum US, an independent organization founded and led by Palestinian businessman Faisal Saleh. The paintings are now kept in a museum in Woodbridge, Connecticut, and travel from there to exhibitions around the world.
It was within this expanded framework that the Gaza Genocide Tapestry was created. Jan, Ibrahim, Faisal, and I got together to discuss the best way to write about genocide. We first created two panels to depict this dark period in Palestinian history – Gas on the Fire and Palestine Phoenix. Faisal then told us to do 100 panels looking only at Gaza.
The challenge of creating in one year what had taken ten years was daunting, but it was the urgency of the genocide that had taken place and the potential of the museum’s size, scope and global reach.
United in pain
Women in Gaza were once among the main contributors to the Palestinian History Tapestry. Their work was strong and careful, and they gave them a way to help. But as the bombing intensified, many became unreachable, often moving multiple times. Materials could not enter Gaza, and finished panels could not leave.
The women of Gaza became the subjects of this story, not its narrators.
But the painting, at its core, is a kind of “lam shamel” (Arabic for family reunion), as one embroiderer put it. Despite their limitations and forced displacement, the work of Palestinian women everywhere transforms into a single image of the Palestinian experience.
For Iman Shehabi, Basma Natour and twelve women in the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp, embroidery is their source of income. But photography, they said, “restored” part of their “dignity”.
They wrote to us after they finished writing their letter, they said: “It was the place where our heritage grew, and where our needles lost our pain and our hopes.”
And it wasn’t just the carpenters who helped out. One of the panels in the Gaza Genocide Tapestry, decorated by Shahla Mahareeq in Ramallah, is based on a picture of Price Rajab photographed by London-based artist Khadija Said.
A group of blindfolded men, illegally arrested by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, was photographed by Haifa lawyer and activist Janan Abdu, a Palestinian citizen of Israel. It was decorated by Bothaina Youssef at the Lebanese refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh.
Some of the paintings of the Gazan artist, Mohammed Alhaj, depicting the exodus from Gaza, were also decorated in Lebanon by Kifah Kurdieh, in front of a million people. southern Lebanon they were transferred themselves.
The process of putting together the Gaza Genocide Tapestry has been difficult. For more than a year, Faisal, Jan, Ibrahim and I held weekly meetings to research and select representative groups on various topics and coordinate projects. Each group had to be translated by Ibrahim into a pattern that could be embroidered, then sent to a woman to sew to the field supervisors at each location.
There were formal, ethical and practical questions. What do we choose to have, and what is left? What does it mean to interpret suffering as a way to go astray?
At the Venice Biennale
Starting May 9, the Gaza Genocide Tapestry will be publicly displayed at Palazzo Mora under the title:
“- – – – – – – – – – – -” *
*Gaza – No Lyrics – See Show
It will be available for viewing until November.
When we were told in November last year that our biennale submission had been selected, I felt a difficult realization. On the one hand, it is an honor and a privilege for this work, and the women behind it, to be seen on one of the most famous platforms in the world.
On the other hand, it captured the paradox of a country that is eager to name what is happening in Gaza, to look it in the eye, to call it genocide, yet unable or unwilling to stop it. What does it say about humanity when art becomes the primary source of real evidence because political systems have failed?
I don’t have an easy answer. All I know is this: Palestinian women continue to tell these stories and demand accountability. That is a public response to my mentor Refaat Alareer’s final advice before becoming to be killed: “If I must die, you must live to tell my story.”
