By Basel Zaraa
A version of this text was read at the opening of What Will We Do Without Exile? by Basel Zaraa in Bowling Park, Bradford, 31 May 2025
We stand here together this morning as Israel continues in its attempt to violently erase Palestinian life, a year and a half since the beginning of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and 77 years since Israel began the Nakba against Palestinians in 1948 – the catastrophe, the theft of Palestinian land, which has been continuous since then, and is ongoing today.
Israel continues to force Palestinian people from their land and homes and into tents like this one, generation after generation. Today around half of Palestinians across the world are refugees, many living in camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. And in Gaza a tent is not a safe refuge. Israel bombs families in their tents, and if they survive they are displaced again and again and again.
This ongoing Nakba is an attempt to erase Palestinians’ past – their history, their collective memory, and also their future – their hopes and their dreams. We see this in the occupation’s deliberate destruction of cultural and heritage sites, and in its deliberate killing of an unbelievable 17,000 children – more than 17,000 children – a number that is unparalleled by any conflict in recent times.
But in all this darkness, as we grieve our sisters and brothers in Palestine every day and every moment, we also take our strength from them.
In their hardest moments, we see videos of people singing in their tents, rebuilding with what they can find around them, and dreaming of the future.
One image that played a big role in inspiring this installation was an old Palestinian woman in Gaza, who had been forced to move again and again, from tent to tent, and every time she did, she took her collection of plants with her in her trailer and made a little garden, a space to sit outside the entrance of her tent.
And when the person filming asked her, ‘why are you taking these plants around with you, isn’t it tiring?’, she said, ‘we will plant wherever we go, and we will rebuild whatever they destroy’.
We don’t know what happened to this woman or where she is. We hope she is safe, in as much as anybody can be safe in Gaza today. But her words planted the seed of this installation – in the midst of the hell that she was living through, she was still dreaming of the life she wanted to live, and of being free.
‘What Will We Do Without Exile?’ is a tribute to the Palestinian imagination, which stretches beyond the apartheid wall, beyond the siege, beyond all the trauma and grief, in defiance and in resistance to the occupation.
As you enter from the outside, you see a refugee tent, representing the precarious shelters that Palestinians have been forced into for generations and where more than 1.5 million people in Gaza woke up this morning, and a washing line hung with pieces of fabric died with flowers, each one representing one of the 58 Palestinian refugee camps registered with the UN (the actual number is higher than this).
And when you step inside, you step into the dream of a liberated Palestine, and are invited to imagine a future where the wall and checkpoints are gone, and Palestinians are reunited with their olive groves, where previously Israel destroyed Palestinian citrus trees and its citrus industry, but now the orchards are full of oranges and lemons again, where families that were separated are reunited, and where neighbourhoods that were turned to rubble are rebuilt and full of life once more.
It is an invitation to imagine liberation, to hold that dream within us and to work towards it together, knowing that together we are powerful, and all the small things, the simple acts we do each day will eventually change history. They are already changing history.
‘What Will We Do Without Exile?’ is dedicated to all the Palestinians, those we have lost and those who are still with us, who have struggled and are struggling to be free. Their freedom will come.
