Hundreds of Palestinians have arrived in Australia looking for an opportunity to live in peace, after fleeing the hell of war in the Gaza Strip over the past year.
Settling in a new country is not easy, especially for Palestinians fleeing their beloved homeland. In the case of artist Fayez Elhasani, it has been especially hard.
Elhasani once ran an art gallery in 2019 in Gadigal Country/Sydney. His paintings, characterised by primitive style smooth colours and shapes, depicted his Palestinian heritage and expressed life under Israel’s occupation.
They also express his resistance to that occupation and the Palestinian people’s insistence on liberation.
Elhasani is not just a talented artist. After graduating with a degree in fine arts from Egypt in 1979, he taught fine arts in UNRWA schools in the Gaza Strip, as well as in Algeria. He was a cartoonist for Amwaj magazine for mental health from 1998 to 2017.
He has helped skill up young talent to depict, in a simple way, their views to a wide audience.
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He has helped develop a union for Palestinian artists, Union of Fine Artists, and has held local and international exhibitions and presented at conferences.
He heads the Higher Committee of the Palestine International Festival (On the Road to Jerusalem) for the sixth consecutive year, and has received many national and international awards and honors.
He founded the Rawasi Palestine Foundation for Culture, Arts and Media in Gaza and served as its General Director.
He has come to be recognised as a preeminent Palestinian resistance artist for whom preserving Palestinian heritage is very important.
Because Elhasani is not a member of any political party, there were few obstacles to his relations to other artists, regardless of their political affiliation.
Elhasani also founded new artistic institutions, such as the Roots Foundation for Modern Art, through which Palestinian artists had an opportunity to display their work in art galleries, as well as develop their talents.
He also promoted Palestinian artists’ work in Arab and Islamic countries.
He has devoted his life to preserving Palestinian heritage and culture, including the art of Palestinian embroidery which was developed in ancient times, and illustrates the Palestinian keffiyeh’s connection to that of the life of small farmers.
His Rawasi Palestine Foundation for Arts, Culture and Media has played a major role in developing the work of Palestinian artists. A recent project was to teach mosaic art, reviving the methods of the Canaanite ancient indigenous peoples, both settled and nomadic pastoral groups.
In his “On the Road to Jerusalem” project, which travelled to more than 20 Arab countries, was launched to expand Palestinian resistance art to include all Arab and foreign artists.
Elhasani arrived in Sydney after being injured by the Israeli Occupation Forces’ bombing of a house, where he and his family had taken refuge. He lost most of his family members and when he arrived here he had to be hospitalised.
He lives with his daughter’s family, but desperately wants a place of his own to resume his art.
He wants to create a new gallery in one room and is trying to find ways to exchange experiences with visual artists in Australia.
However, Coalition Senator James Patterson wants him removed from the country, questioning why he passed the security check, on October 25.
Patterson has seized on a photo of Elhasani standing with members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad at a funeral for his own son and brother, saying “a picture speaks a thousand words”.
Patterson admits that Elhasani is not a member of the group but that didn’t stop him on Sky News on October 9 from describing the artist as “antisemitic” and someone who “glorifies terrorism”.
Elhasani is nothing of the sort.