08/27/2026
Sliman Mansour was Palestine’s painter, weaving its memory, scars, and dignity into his paintings. It is difficult to convey to outsiders what he was to Palestinians — his works dominate the walls of Palestinian grandparents, he contributed to the creation of the watermelon as a Palestinian icon of defiance, and his work reverberates across decades and generations as the Nakba mercilessly marches on.
Swipe to see a few of his works (explanation of each in caption).
Sliman Mansour was born in Birzeit, a town north of Ramallah, in 1947 — one year before the Nakba. He would spend the rest of his life with the occupation as his subject, giving visual form to Palestinian dispossession and steadfastness (sumud). His art was driven by an unshakeable connection to the land.
Mansour studied fine arts at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in occupied Jerusalem. At the age of 26, he painted “Jamal al-Mahamel” or the Camel of Hardship: an old porter carrying all of Jerusalem on his back. It became one of the most reproduced images of the Palestinian reality, printed thousands of times and hung in homes from the West Bank, to Gaza, to the refugee camps of the diaspora.
Because occupied Palestine had almost no permanent galleries until the mid-1990s, Mansour’s images were disseminated as posters and postcards. The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) distributed Jamal al-Mahamel as a poster in 1975.
When the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed Lina al-Nabulsi, a schoolgirl from Nablus in 1976, they forbade anyone from photographing her. Her martyrdom inspired a poem by Hassan Daher, which prompted Mansour to realize her story on canvas, and it became one of his most iconic paintings. His work held the faces and names of martyrs that the occupying forces had meant to disappear.
Throughout the 1980s, Israeli forces would come to Mansour’s exhibitions and routinely confiscate paintings that they deemed constituted “incitement. “I would watch what they would take, and it was silly things, like a peasant woman wearing nice embroidery and working in the field,” he said in an interview with Middle East Eye in 2023.
In 1988, Mansour painted a series on the dest
