The Palestinian struggle has long produced troubling and tragic but no less arresting images of a people resisting the seemingly insurmountable power of an occupying force. Images of young Palestinians, usually men, hurling rocks at the Israeli military are readily associated with Palestinian rebellion. The picture of Faris Odeh (Figure 4.1), for instance, captured in October 2000, facing an Israeli tank with a rock in hand, quickly became the iconic image of resistance during the Second Intifada (2000–5). Odeh himself, killed shortly after the picture was taken, has become a symbol of a defiant Palestinian rebel.

Odeh’s image has been more recently joined by other iconic photographs of Palestinian rebels, notably taken during Gaza’s Great March of Return, which began on 30 March 2018. Two in particular were widely circulated on social media: the first was of Saber al-Ashqar (Figure 4.2) who is captured in his wheelchair twirling a slingshot toward Israeli forces; the second was of A’ed Abu Amro (Figure 4.3), shirtless, emerging from heavy smoke with a Palestinian flag in one hand and a slingshot in the other.

Odeh, al-Asqar and Abu Amro can easily be assimilated into the plethora of engaging and powerful images of Palestinians demonstrating against Israeli brutality and occupation. These rebels and many others are rightly assumed to be fighting for statehood, but the recent image of Abu Amro points to a further goal that is tied closely to the quest for statehood. Abu Amro’s image has been associated with liberation and thus presents an opportunity for us to probe further how the assumption that the prime goal of Palestinian rebellion is statehood is related to or bound up with liberty. Abu Amro’s picture was quickly compared to Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (Figure 4.4), an 1830 painting of the French people’s fight for freedom during their revolution. Liberty, personified as a woman by Delacroix, is, like Abu Amro, surrounded by smoke, bare chested and clutching her nation’s tricolour flag.

The positioning of Abu Amro’s body, the smokiness of the scene and his similar triple-striped flag made the comparison all the more poignant. Abu Amro himself welcomed the resemblance because Liberty Leading the People is widely seen, especially in the West, as symbolic of the right to freedom.