03-09-2026 - Maureen speech

I want to say a few words today about Sliman Mansour, the great Palestinian artist who died recently at the age of 79. Sliman Mansour was born in 1947. He was born before the occupation. He grew up in Birzeit, in the hills and fields of Palestine, and later lived in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Through his life, he painted the Palestine he knew — and the Palestine that was being lost.

Mansour was much more than a painter. He was a keeper of memory. For more than fifty years, he created a visual language through which Palestinians could see themselves, their history and their culture. He painted olive trees, orange groves, stone terraces, village houses, farmers, women in traditional embroidered dresses, children and Jerusalem. These were not simply beautiful images of Palestinian life. They were acts of remembering.

Because Mansour understood something very important: Culture is not separate from politics when a people’s identity and history are under threat. If you can make a people invisible, you can make their dispossession easier to accept.

And history has shown us how powerful the suppression of cultural identity can be. During the Third Reich, the Nazis did not only persecute and murder people. They sought to control culture, art, literature and historical narrative. Jewish artists and writers were silenced. Books were burned. Artworks were confiscated. Jewish culture was deliberately excluded from German cultural life.

And there is another history that is much closer to home for me. I am Irish. Ireland experienced 8 centuries of colonial rule in which Irish language and culture were increasingly marginalised. English became the language of power, education and opportunity, while Irish was pushed towards the margins. And yet Irish has survived. Our language has survived. Our music, our poetry, our stories and our traditions have survived. And cultural revival became part of the struggle for Irish independence.

There is a lesson that crosses Palestinian and Irish history: When a people’s identity is threatened, preserving culture can itself become an act of resistance.

And this makes Mansour’s work particularly poignant today. Because Palestinian identity does not exist only in a flag or a political slogan. It lives in the land. In the olive tree. In tatreez, the traditional embroidery. In music and poetry. In food and agricultural traditions. In family photographs and stories. And in the buildings, archives, libraries, museums, mosques and churches that carry the physical memory of generations.

Today, as Palestinian cultural heritage is being devastated, that question of memory has become even more urgent. UNESCO has documented extensive damage to cultural heritage sites in Gaza and the West Bank. And when a library, an archive, a museum, a university or a historic building is destroyed, we lose more than bricks and stones. We lose part of the physical record of a people’s history.

This is why Mansour’s work matters so much. Because he understood that to preserve culture is itself an act of resistance. He made Palestinians visible. And importantly, he did not paint only suffering. He painted life. The farmer. The village. The olive tree. The woman in traditional dress. Jerusalem. He painted a people rooted in their land and carrying their culture forward. This is sumud — steadfastness. The refusal to disappear.

One of his most famous paintings is Jamal al-Mahamel, the Camel of Hardships. It shows an old Palestinian man bent beneath the weight of an enormous burden. But the burden he carries is Jerusalem. The city is almost literally carried on the back of the Palestinian people. The image became enormously powerful. It was reproduced as posters, cards and stickers and circulated far beyond the original painting.

This is what Mansour understood about visual narrative. A single image can carry an entire history. It can carry a homeland. It can carry loss. It can carry longing. And it can carry hope.

During the First Intifada, Mansour and fellow artists formed the New Visions movement. They boycotted Israeli art materials and began using materials from the Palestinian environment — mud, clay, coffee, henna and other natural materials. Think about the symbolism of that. The land itself could provide the materials with which Palestinians represented themselves. The earth of Palestine could become the substance of Palestinian art.

And then there is the watermelon. Today we see the watermelon everywhere as a symbol of Palestine. But its story begins with censorship. In the 1980s, Palestinian artists were prohibited from exhibiting work using the four colours of the Palestinian flag: red, green, black and white. Mansour recalled an Israeli official telling artists that they could not paint in those colours. They asked: What if we painted a flower in those colours? No. And then they asked: What about a watermelon? The answer, according to Mansour, was: Even a watermelon would be confiscated.

Think about that. A watermelon. A piece of fruit. And yet it had become political because, when cut open, it contained the colours of the Palestinian flag.

This is the power of visual narrative. When a flag is forbidden, a watermelon can become a flag. When a symbol is censored, an artist creates another symbol. When you attempt to silence a culture, culture finds another language.

And Mansour himself began painting watermelons after this experience. His 1987 painting Watermelon Boy became part of this visual history. The image then travelled far beyond the gallery and beyond Palestine. It became a symbol of Palestinian identity and resistance recognised around the world.

And that is the extraordinary thing about art. You can confiscate a painting. You can close an exhibition. You can forbid four colours. But you cannot easily confiscate a memory. You cannot destroy a people’s identity simply by preventing them from representing themselves.

Sliman Mansour did not simply paint Palestine. He helped create a visual vocabulary for Palestinian identity. He gave people images through which they could say: This is who we are. This is where we come from. This is what we remember. And we are still here.

That is his legacy. And perhaps that is why his death should not only be a moment of mourning. It should also be a moment of recognition.

Because Mansour showed us that resistance can take many forms. It can be a demonstration. It can be speaking out. It can be refusing to accept injustice. But it can also be an artist taking a brush and painting an olive tree. It can be preserving an embroidered dress. It can be painting Jerusalem. It can be telling the story of a watermelon. It can be refusing to allow a culture to disappear.

Sliman Mansour spent his life doing exactly that. And his paintings will continue to say:

We remember. We belong. We are here.

Free Palestine from the river to the sea.