Sakir Khader: Taking an axe to the frozen sea 

On a crisp night in February, a cobblestone street resting on one of Amsterdam’s famed canals is pulsating with the chatter of people eagerly awaiting to be let into Foam, the oldest and most established photography museum in the Netherlands. The slightly chaotic line seems never-ending, stretching beyond the street, so long that it curls around the corner. 

Dotted with the black and white of kufiyas, the throng is punctuated by a massive Palestinian flag fluttering in the wind. One can hardly imagine this scene unfolding in what can be easily considered the most pro-zionist country in the world after the usual suspects—the US, the UK, and Germany. 

Every person is here to see an exhibition called Yawm al-Firak [The Day of Farewell]. But these people have not travelled from all over the country and beyond to merely witness art or even meet the artist behind it; they are here to see Palestine come to life. They are here to see the raw, unflinching reality of almost a century of occupation. To bear witness to the truth. 

This queue symbolises a shift—a seismic shift that was a long time coming. 

But the person almost reluctantly thrown into the centre of it all, visual artist Sakir Khader, cannot help but feel overcome with a sense of unease despite the smile dancing around his lips. The heart-shattering exhibit – eerily reminiscent of an actual wake – sets the scene for the absolute worst humanity has to offer. The photos and videos displayed are of all the martyred friends with whom he has broken bread, sang odes to the resistance, and been relentlessly chased by drones on pitch black nights, protected only by the light of the moon. 

Other exhibits show their mothers mourning them, torn between primal pain and visceral pride. Their sorrow haunts you long after, echoing in your ears even. Khader finds himself lost between a crowd eager to share in his suffering but incapable of ever approximating it. He has recently returned from Jenin where he, yet again, buried even more of those he came to consider his brothers. They died – or rather, were ruthlessly murdered – to allow the next generation to exist. To continue the fight for a liberated Palestine. Yet, by a twist of fate, Khader is somehow still among us, existing to capture both loss and longing while awaiting his own inevitable death. “The living martyr,” they call him. 

“It’s a name the boys from Jenin bestowed upon me—half-jokingly at first, but then as a sign of respect, of trust,” Khader recalls, smiling faintly at the memory. He falls silent. “Most of them are gone now.” 

Khader grew up in a rough working-class neighbourhood in Vlaardingen (near the port city of Rotterdam), where his grandfather Fayez was one of the first Palestinian immigrants “handpicked” in Nablus by a Dutch overseer to come work in a butter factory. His jiddo – an avid photographer, as Khader found out long after his death when he serendipitously stumbled upon his camera and a treasure trove of photographs on a trip to Nablus – returned to Palestine as soon as he was able to retire. The class clown, Khader was also a curious kid, spending hours in the library reading history books, mesmerised by the black-and-white images of occupation, war, and landscapes. “Your son will never amount to anything,” a teacher once told his mother, pigeonholing him as a troublemaker. 

“That moment was seared into my soul forever,” he recounted last year during the prestigious programme Zomergasten, a live three-hour interview on Dutch public television featuring who they consider to be the year’s most prominent people behind the headlines. During the interview, it was revealed that, although they initially debated whether Khader was too young to be invited onto the show, their hesitation was quieted with a sense of urgency to feature him. By then, Israel had already killed over 150 journalists and media workers in Palestine and Lebanon since the beginning of the genocide. The marathon tête-à-tête was widely discussed in the media afterwards as the interview, which usually revolves around an intimate and intellectually challenging conversation, suddenly turned hostile. 

The interviewer, a former MENA correspondent, told Khader that what he “missed” in his reporting was “the other side”, that a journalist should always embrace the possibility that they could be wrong. This sentiment echoes the widespread prejudice that journalists ‘of colour’ are fundamentally incapable of objectivity, a standard fallacy in the world of journalism—and beyond, for that matter. 

Khader’s response was as damning as it was effective in exposing the interviewer’s hypocrisy: “That might be the case if you’re a white man, like yourself, if you have the privilege to fly there as a Dutchman who comes between the two parties and takes a look. My situation is different. I am from there. I am one of them,” he shot back. “What do you think will happen to me when I arrive at a settlement in Nablus? Do you think the security guard of that settlement will say, ‘Hi, welcome’?” 

The answer lingered in the air for a moment like a bomb about to detonate. “No. He’ll shoot me,” he declared. The interviewer’s eyeroll in response to Khader’s argument was widely circulated—it reeked of condescension and the superiority complex demonstrated by western journalists all too often. 

Adding to the emotionally charged moment was the scene projected behind the two men: an interview from 197o during which Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani similarly counters an inane question by journalist Richard Carleton with barely hidden contempt. “You do not exactly mean peace talks; you mean capitulation, you mean surrendering,” Kanafani famously sneered. “That is kind of a conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean!” 

“For me, that alone was worth it,” reflects Khader, recalling the incident almost a year later. “To be able to show and comment on a piece of Palestinian history that has guided me throughout my life—the sheer intellectualism and indefatigable pride shown by Kanafani in that moment, and during his whole life, is something I remain in absolute awe of. To stay so eerily calm in the face of disingenuous racism, to fight with words and imagery, and expose the hypocrisy of western media and its political elite.” 

How little has changed in over 50 years is striking. In fact, seeing Kanafani in the background, almost angelically blessing Khader, seems prophetic. It’s like one comrade warning another in the future: keep fighting the good fight, but trust no one, especially those who suddenly claim to respect and honour you—but only in the moment they decide you are somehow useful to them. 

On 7 October, 2023, while on vacation in Morocco,  Khader was immediately inundated with calls from talk shows. “Barely anyone showed interest in my work on Palestine before that—they just wanted a Palestinian whipping boy for zionists to spit on on live television.” He understood that the world was deliberately being prepped for a manufactured justification of Israel’s genocide, and dissent would not be tolerated. “Everyone on TV was only talking about the Israeli casualties, and Palestinians were only invited to condemn what Palestinians were doing. No one was even remotely concerned about the fate of the Palestinian people. Even an atomic bomb would have been considered warranted.” 

But Khader knows it’s precisely those talk shows that influence public opinion. He believes that one of the most important things Palestinians in the public eye can do for the cause is to never waver in their integrity, to always remain true to their principles. “Because the very moment we stop doing that, we give others permission to trample all over us and everything we hold dear, too.” 

In fact, he finds it unforgivable that some Palestinians – and other Arabs – use their public platform as some sort of ego parade: “Why are you joking around with those who profit off the pain of our people? Why are you shaking hands with the enemy? What are you doing?” He doesn’t understand why any Palestinian would condemn the resistance. “You cannot fight for a free Palestine without resistance, so how do those people distinguish themselves from the enemy?” 

Condemning resistance while believing that Palestine will be liberated through demonstrations is purely an illusion. “Freedom always involves resistance,” he insists. “Algeria, Indonesia, Lebanon, Vietnam, Syria, Ukraine. But resistance is somehow only justified when it’s against a system that doesn’t align with contemporary western norms and values.” 

Calling out the prescient western duplicity, he lays bare a withering double standard: “In Ukraine and Russia, we encourage resistance. We facilitate and finance it. Why? Because ‘we’ believe it’s a right to resist occupation.” The “we” Khader uses here is very loaded—it’s a “we” that those of us in the diaspora are acutely aware of. 

“And they want us not to resist, to silently plead for attention, and to simply accept the knife being shoved deep down our throats while we bleed to death and watch lifelessly. Peaceful resistance doesn’t exist when you’re staring down the barrel of a gun, and the smell of death dominates your brain,” he asserts, fervently. “Then cameras are useless. The question is, what drugs are they using to believe that images bring change and label cameras as an effective weapon of resistance?” 

His ethos is reminiscent of revolutionary intellectual and activist Basel al-Araj’s words: “Never spread panic; be supportive of the resistance and do not spread any news broadcast by the occupation. Forget about the ethics and impartiality of journalism; just as the zionist journalist is a fighter, so are you.” 

“Through almost a century of occupation and heartache, the one thing they’ve never been able to take from us is our pride,” says Khader. “The very moment we give an inch, we lose everything. We can’t afford to lose more than what we have already lost. And that is absolutely worth foregoing opportunities for. No so-called opportunity is worth even a drop of our blood.” 

“Do not believe that man grows. No; he is born suddenly—a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood onto the ruggedness of the road.”
– Ghassan Kanafani, in a letter to his son Fayez 

Khader vividly remembers the exact moment when he was hurled onto the ruggedness of the road, so to speak. It was the summer of 2002. He was 11 years old, sitting on the living room couch, the TV set to Al Jazeera and ablaze with images of the Second Intifada. The phone rang, his father answered. “It was the first and only time I saw my father cry.” 

His cousin Kosay, his best friend and troublemaker-in-crime during summers spent in Palestine, had been peering through a hole in his garden’s fence, as the IOF went on a rampage in the neighbourhood. “Eleven years old. They shot him with two bullets, right in the heart. The face of an angel and the heart of a rebel.” From that moment onwards, Palestine would never be the same for Khader, nor would life in general. He vowed that day that he would spend the rest of his life showing the world what Israel and its supporters had done to his family and homeland. 

The shirt worn by Kosay‘s father that day, stained with his son’s blood as he died in his arms, was one of the most chilling centrepieces in Yawm al-Firak. Many stunned tears were shed by strangers in front of it, barely able to comprehend such cruelty while standing in a sterile, white-walled art gallery. It felt almost wrong to appreciate the aesthetic allure of the exhibition, the loving attention paid to the minutiae, the devastatingly deliberate placement of each detail. 

Khader is currently working on about a dozen projects at once, spurred by an insatiable longing and urge to archive everything he encounters from Idlib to Jenin, from the Netherlands to Nablus and everything in between. Two of his projects, both currently taking shape, revolve around the sea: the many Mediterranean shores leading to Gaza and the sea as a liminal space—a haunting heterotopia. 

“I consider the sea to be the ultimate symbol of our freedom; the moment we float in the sea, half submerged, the other half gasping for air, is the moment we determine our own fate. We decide whether we keep swimming, keep breathing, or let go and drown. But at least it’s not the occupier who robs us of the choice. In the sea lies our self-determination, our dignity.” It’s quite telling that so many Palestinians – a people so deeply, historically, and existentially connected to the sea – have been robbed of access to it for decades by Israel. 

To be in Khader’s presence is to inevitably go through the entire spectrum of emotions known to man. He is a tad restless, but with the unparalleled enthusiasm of a kid roaming free—every creative idea he conjures up immediately births a dozen more. Yet, when speaking of Palestine, he oscillates between serene and solemn. “I am never not there. She is my constant companion wherever I go.” 

It sounds almost romantic: Palestine, his homeland, positioned as the love of his life. But it’s the Palestine that he, like millions of others, so often dreams about. The real Palestine lies broken and bleeding, even with her head held high in perpetual defiance. “Everything changed since 7 October. I can’t really enjoy anything anymore. I often feel like I’m suspended between worlds, observing my life but not really experiencing it—how can I enjoy, for instance, getting awards for my work when my people are being slaughtered by the minute? Or eat when my kin is intentionally being starved as a weapon of subjugation?” 

The only word to describe our collective ache, he says, is qahr. “It cannot be adequately translated into English, but everyone who feels it will recognise it,” he murmurs. “It’s like a prickly pear is nestled in my soul but the thorns have nowhere to go, so they remain deeply etched into me, into our collective psyche.” As it happens, one of his most precious childhood memories is of his teta lovingly picking prickly pears, the thorns of which he would carefully tweeze out of her hands. “Back then, it still felt like there was a way to soften the sting.” 

While it’s become impossible to experience life in Palestine as it once was, its elders still safeguard the mystique of Palestine, a small reprieve from the reality of what’s happening yet simultaneously a reminder of what is lost and what must be regained at all cost. They hold the secrets to the land, to the sea, to every precious detail, connecting generation after generation of the dispossessed. Palestine’s roots extend through a multitude of tetas not only in the invocation of the motherland, but also for the culture and crafts they pass down, bestowing the land with their indelible signs of life. 

“My grandmother Najmeh is the proud sister of one of the first shuhada who died while defending Palestine,” he says of his teta, whose name incidentally means ‘star’. His [saqr] translates to ‘falcon’— the star, that ancient compass, always guiding home the soaring falcon. “Her brother became a shaheed while defending their hometown against zionist attacks in Tulkarem as they advanced towards Nablus, around the area of Cacun, where he is buried. That fighting spirit has always been in our family.” 

To Khader, his teta’s memories are so much more than a glimpse into his family history; she embodies the fighting spirit of the Palestinians, holding the key to liberation. “To me, my grandmother is Palestinian, but she is also Palestine. She breathes the DNA of the land, she encapsulates the right to exist and, despite everything, she perseveres. When my grandmother will fall, when her time comes, something new will take her place—then my mother will be Falasteen. For us, women are the land. And without women, there are no defenders of the land because it’s our women, of course, who give birth. And it’s our women who raise our children. Our women hold Palestine aloft.” 

“An image – as opposed to a symbol – is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite.”
– Andrei Tarkovsky 

Khader’s film work is firmly grounded in cinéma vérité and neorealism. His is a vast archive of often instinctively recorded conversations and ad hoc tableaus. Transcending reportage, his documentaries still leave ample room for artistic expression. No word or movement ever feels staged or directed—perhaps also because he inserts himself, although not too prominently,  in the story. A floating voice asking a question from behind the camera. 

Here, it’s worth noting that he never formally trained as a photographer or filmmaker. Khader applied to film school, but didn’t get in, he says. “Syria was my film school. I brought a cinema camera, a limited yet solid setup, and just started filming out of curiosity.” 

Recalling the visuals he once pored over, he says, “It was like what I used to see in war books when I was a kid, but infinitely worse—buildings all destroyed, houses without any glass. Syria was a war of unprecedented scale. What you saw on the news was an incredibly inadequate depiction of reality. It was as if I had left this universe through a portal and entered into another dimension.” 

He ended up spending four months in the trenches with footballer-turned-rebel Abdelbaset al-Sarout, about whom he made his first photobook, Martyrs’ Brigade. Khader is now dedicating his first full-length documentary film to the late protest leader. 

What is often glaringly missing from discussions about Khader’s oeuvre – perhaps because its themes are always undeniably urgent and unapologetically political – is how he developed his signature style. Of course, the fact that he usually shoots in monochrome and his almost innate ability to capture intimacy in its most understated form is sometimes mentioned. But he is rarely asked about his lack of formal education and wide array of influences. 

“I’m not saying this is done intentionally per se, but it’s interesting, to say the least, that it doesn’t really come up. In fact, when I was asked to do Zomergasten, I was looking forward to discussing my work, my style, who has influenced me, and what inspires me.” Khader did share some of those influences through clips and excerpts from films and interviews. Still, the interviewer was so intent on hijacking and politicising the conversation that he barely got the chance to discuss the artistry of his visual practice. 

He showed clips from the two Abasses who played a big role in his life: Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Close-Up and an excerpt from the 2019 documentary Abbas on Abbas about the late fellow Magnum photographer. “I really really wish I could’ve met him,” Khader says with a tinge of melancholia. He also reflected on Jean-Luc Godard, Mahdi Fleifel’s A World Not Ours, and the visceral power of documentary films. His own cinematic work intertwines the melancholia of Béla Tarr and the tender everyday poetry of Kiarostami with the introspective, philosophical touch of Werner Herzog and the profound effect of the “monomial metaphors” that Andrei Tarkovsky spoke of. 

One day, out of the blue, Khader received a call from a Dutch investigative journalist who was working on a story about Dutch people placed on the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database. After searching Khader’s full name and date of birth, the journalist called back: “I got a hit.” His name was nestled between the likes of Bin Laden and Anders Breivik. 

Overwhelmed by flashbacks, finally connecting a litany of dots that made certain moments from the past five years of his life feel like a 70s espionage thriller, Khader found himself walking around in a daze. Snippets of conversations seeped back into his mind. “You’re a terrorist,” a Turkish border agent yelled at him in broken English. “You’re going to join Daesh and kill people!” 

For years, Khader kept this information to himself, not just because he didn’t know the extent to which he was being surveilled—who was he supposed to trust with this information? The odds were already stacked against him; people were calling him a terrorist because of his looks and his outspokenness anyway. “I’ll never change anything about myself to be accepted because I’ll always be seen as the other.” 

It takes little for him to be transported back to that small, suffocating room where he was interrogated and manhandled at only 23 years old, still a student. “People see me as this chill guy, always up for a laugh, but they have no idea what goes on in my mind,” he admits. “I’m always in fight or flight mode. Acutely aware. Hypervigilant.” He doesn’t, for instance, like to sit on a couch wedged between two people, nor does he like to have his back to an entrance. This is not only related to the interrogations and inclusion on the terrorist watchlist, but also what growing up in occupied territory does to a child’s psyche. 

“Even as a young kid in Nablus, and in the mountains, I was always aware of the Israeli soldiers and settlers. Of the limitations of our movements. We saw people get arrested over nothing, and return weeks, months, sometimes years later, if at all.” 

It’s hard to explain, he says, to those who haven’t experienced it. “To me, Palestine is the ultimate symbol of freedom because it is my homeland,” he says. “It’s where I truly belong. My entire body and psyche are rooted in the land.” But it simultaneously epitomises captivity, and not just literally—thousands of Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons, many of whom are children. “On every street corner, in each house, even the farmers working our land may be killed at any moment. Fishing in the sea makes you a target. Nowhere is safe for Palestinians. Anywhere.” 

As the past two years – and almost a century – have taught us, merely being Palestinian is deemed a threat by the zionist occupation and a legitimate target according to their warped genocidal logic. But to be a Palestinian man is simply unforgivable in their eyes and those of many in the west. 

From Gaza to the West Bank and abroad, Palestinian men serve as the west’s favourite bogeyman, systemically stripped of their humanity and reduced to grotesque caricatures in order to justify Israel’s settler colonial project. Khader’s work provides a counterbalance precisely because it doesn’t aim to do so. There is no deliberate attempt to show the ‘other side’ of Palestinian men, but rather a layered and brutally honest look into their complexity. 

“I refuse to buy into this idea that I have to humanise my own people,” he avows. “When I capture a photo of a smiling teen in Jenin camp or a doting father holding his son’s hand, I am not doing that to somehow convince the world that my people are human—least of all those who have waged a deliberate campaign for almost a century to strip us of it.” 

He has further peeled off the hypocrisy, layer by layer, by remaining true to himself within an industry that still predominantly shrouds itself in silence and rewards the apolitical. One of the largest photography festivals in the world, Arles, for example, paid no significant attention to the ongoing genocide during its past two editions. “Exposing the truth is my primary goal; nothing is more important. Above all, what I see is that the community still chooses not to be too outspoken; it must still colour within the ‘acceptable’ lines,” he says. 

In addition to Khader’s “visual letters to the homeland”, the unfiltered and bordering-on-manic soliloquies that he posts on Instagram have resonated with an audience outraged by Israel’s oppression. He’s moved by how wide and far his voice echoes. “For many decades, Palestinians were, with a few exceptions, always spoken about. Articles and books were dedicated to us, we were pitied and our bodies weaponised, not always in our own interest. But most of all we were silenced, even by those who were supposedly on our side,” he says, barely suppressing a hint of indignation. “But to be rendered mute, when everything else has already been taken from us, is yet another form of dehumanisation. We are perfectly capable of narrating without permission; we come from an incredibly long line of storytellers and intellectuals.” 

Still, now that Palestinian voices have become more prominent – largely due to carving out their own platforms on social media – it’s all the more infuriating that they’re essentially screaming into the void. It’s nearly impossible not to become overwhelmed by a dystopian sense of dread when you look at their fate. Who can still harbour any faith in the decaying veneer of liberal human rights institutions that were supposed to protect them? 

“Palestinians can’t afford to be hopeless despite having witnessed the glaring hypocrisy from one generation to the next,” says Khader. “We’re constantly trying to walk the tightrope between resistance and reality—there is no other option than to resist occupation and the larger project of erasure. Palestine was abandoned a long time ago, and we will never forget.” 

He seems lost in thought for a moment. “It becomes more surreal with each day that passes. Everyone copes in a different way, and mine is to turn my grief and rage into something tangible. I have no choice but to remain eager in my fight against occupation and, God willing, liberation.” 

Even on days when the relentless stream of heart-wrenching images, of cries for help nearly paralyse him, he neither allows himself to be held hostage by grief nor be blinded by nostalgia. “I no longer have the luxury to linger in dreams. There is no time. I always have to stay in motion. To document the truth. To archive our history, present, and future. To show that Palestine was, is, and always will be. We will always remain committed to her right to exist.” 

“Whether you fight or not, you will get killed, so you might as well fight. The sword has been put on people’s necks anyway, so the only option is to resist. Or accepting that the sword will cut our necks, slowly but surely.” In the words of Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata: “It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”