Farah Filasteen
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About: I am easy going, a free spirit, a good listener, critical, analytical, and observant but negligent, indifferent, aloof and clumsy, quiet but very sociable, young and an old soul at heart, detached and unemotional but sensitive, I am simple but complex.

I do not conform to anything that is the slightest bit 'the norm' or 'the dominant.' I am quick to question anything that is 'a given' or anything that appears to be a 'just because -' It is part of my analysis of the world. I am not pessimistic, just inquisitive and always on the quest for the multiple truths that make up the world.

Photos - Ethnically cleansing #BabAlShams last night. 

“You don’t simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away. I prefer to advocate a more positive policy… to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave.” —ARIEL SHARON , quoted in David Bernstein (reporting from Jerusalem), “Forcible removal of Arabs gaining support in Israel”, The Times (London), August 24, 1988.

Many Palestinians still carry around their neck the key to their homes in Palestine - homes that they were forced to leave and cannot return to.

Al Nakba is the name Palestinians give to 15th May, 1948 when the State of Israel established itself on the lands, homes and lives of the Palestinian people.

Al Nakba translates to “The Catastrophe”.

Al Nakba was the moment when the Palestinian people became a nation of refugees. 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and forced to live in refugee camps. Many who were unable to flee were massacred.

Al Nakba remains in the Palestinian consciousness as the time when their freedom was stolen and to this day it is yet to be returned.

Al Nakba is the soil in which many Palestinian stories are buried, and it is the aspiration of this project 1948 to bring some of these stories to the surface.

What has kept the Palestinians alive since Al Nakba is the dream of return to their land. It is their survival and determination that we also wish to celebrate.


This was last year’s project dedicated to the Palestinian Catastrophe.  

These refugee boys were sitting around enjoying a warm late summer afternoon day in the Al Fara’a Refugee Camp. It looks as though they might have been trying to repair the white bike because it was turned upside down. These refugees are generational refugees many of whose grandparents or great-grandparents came to live in the refugee camp. For this reason Palestinian refugee camps have become permanent with concrete buildings and they do own some limited material possessions. Al Fara’a Refugee Camp is more peaceful, with less incursions, and has more living space than other refugee camps, but also there is more unemployment because it is not connected to a major Palestinian city and it is now quite difficult to get a work permit for Israel. Work in Israel used to be a mainstay of the Palestinian economy, but it has dried up.

These refugee boys were sitting around enjoying a warm late summer afternoon day in the Al Fara’a Refugee Camp. It looks as though they might have been trying to repair the white bike because it was turned upside down. These refugees are generational refugees many of whose grandparents or great-grandparents came to live in the refugee camp. For this reason Palestinian refugee camps have become permanent with concrete buildings and they do own some limited material possessions. Al Fara’a Refugee Camp is more peaceful, with less incursions, and has more living space than other refugee camps, but also there is more unemployment because it is not connected to a major Palestinian city and it is now quite difficult to get a work permit for Israel. Work in Israel used to be a mainstay of the Palestinian economy, but it has dried up.

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