by MV Perry
Ismail,
I took off work on June 30th in observance of your martyrdom, and I went to the lakefront at Chicago’s Montrose Harbor, the place I was at the time of our last conversation. Your final word to me was, “Yes.” Yes, a word of affirmation and possibility. But the context of that yes is more important. I’d just sent you a picture of the Chicago skyline from the harbor, and you responded with a short video of the Mediterranean from your view at Al-Baqa Cafe. It was at sunset, above the sea was an astonishing blend of blues – sky blue, stone blue, cerulean, Aegean, sapphire – and oranges – coral and red oranges sweeping over the horizon and meeting at the sun, which was small as a pinpoint and wore a halo of amber and yellow oranges. It was a gentle sea, with no signs of turbulence despite the violence it has witnessed. Kids were splashing and diving into the waves, people met at the beach in astonishing numbers. “Wow. Gaza is so beautiful,” I said. “Yes,” you said.
One year ago, within hours of that exchange, the Zionists martyred you at Al-Baqa Café, a place where you and Gaza City’s artists, journalists, and other creators and conservators of truth and beauty gathered. Amongst the others martyred in the attack was your dear friend Frans Al-Salmi, an artist whose work was becoming attached to yours and who I was slowly becoming acquainted with. I wish there was more I knew about Frans and the others present that day at Al-Baqa. They all deserve honoring.
Unlike previous atrocities, the Israelis did not attempt to repel condemnation by fabricating a story of a combatant at the café, like one of their cynical inventions of a terrorist hiding operations amongst ordinary people. They didn’t say anything about it, actually. Perhaps there was a brief statement about the Israel military looking into an “incident,” but they otherwise moved from it so casually that it was like they were demonstrating the insignificance of the bombing, or flaunting to the world that they could get away with anything they pleased. If so, that is a hubris they will painfully regret.
The thought of a 500-pound bomb landing on a café of artists recalls similarly profound and pointless destructions throughout histories of war and genocide, where the destroyer wrecks things that are beautiful in order to attack a people’s capacity to make, appreciate, and live amongst things that are beautiful, and in so doing aim to destroy their identities, consciousness, and culture as a people. When they killed you, this is what they killed you for.
At the time I did not think of this as a targeted attack on you (my default assumption was that it was an arbitrary display of force) but now I see enough reason to believe it was. It happened not long after Al Jazeera published an interview with you, in which you presented Between Sky and Sea and your vision for ByPa. Your first words in the interview announced your goals clearly: I want to let the world know that there is a voice in Gaza. A Palestinian voice. Shortly thereafter, you said this: When Israel first began its attack on the Gaza Strip, it struck cultural and artistic centers in the Gaza Strip. Israel is trying to erase the energy of the artists, erase the energy of Gaza, erase any means of expression. That statement contains everything you need to know about June 30th, 2025.
The tragic but beautiful irony of your martyrdom is that your name and art have flourished since Israel’s attempt to kill it. Your work has been shown and recognized in cultural centers across the world, receiving awards and accolades that only gain momentum with time. For me personally, you continue to live as an instructive force of faith, peace, and focus that I lacked when we first met. Then, I struggled with deep feelings of futility. Having watched unending violence, I lost my spirit and found it almost impossible to envision an alternative to Zionist domination. In this mindset, I believed that art was an indulgence – a performance that presents itself with importance but is ultimately useless to do anything for the people it addresses. But these are not the feelings of someone prepared for a world after Zionism, as they have already conceded to the inevitably of Zionist triumph.
The writer Hamid Dabashi wrote a powerful corrective to this in his book After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization, a text that deals heavily with questions of art and intellectual life in brutalizing times. Dabashi presents and then rejects an oft-repeated dictum (oft-repeated by Western artists and intellectuals, that is), which says, “There is no poetry after Auschwitz”; meaning, there are some things so horrible that there is no possibility of an art that can represent it. To Dabashi, however, this idea has less to do with reverence for suffering than it does with Western guilt and complicity. In his rebuttal, he says, “Poetry after genocide is not barbarism. Quite the contrary: it is the supreme sign of ennobling civilization, the sign of life and liberty of a people to fight against barbarism.”
You, my friend, are one of the poets in this story.
After working with you for several months – a period in which your motivation accelerated and your vision expanded – you started saying something to me: We are going to win. I acknowledged you saying this, but on a deep-set psycho-emotional level, I could not believe it myself. This showed my distance from Palestinian life and resistance. Having never walked in complete darkness, I could not understand the determination of moving to where you intuit the light to be. I’ve grown from this, and when my mind retreats to nothingness, I return to your photographs and remember that refrain – we are going to win – and there is life again.
These are photographs of lasting quality. If justice serves, they’ll become regarded both for their aesthetic value and as archival documentation of this incomparable chapter in Palestinian life. I struggle for an easy description of your work, for in your photography of Gaza, you accomplish something master storytellers do when they depict a setting and make it feel that everything that happens in the universe happens within that place. Of course, the reality is that Gaza is the most important place in the universe, though world powers make great efforts to obscure just why that is. They enclose Gaza from everyone else so it can never occur to them that what you show to be happening in Gaza is happening. And I am not referring here solely to its oppression – I am referring also to the many walks of life that images of oppression cannot show. People get surprised when they see a beautiful video from Gaza or a box of strawberries with “Made in Gaza” written on it. They say, “you have strawberries?” Gaza exports flowers, we have all kinds of roses and the most beautiful roses. Did you know that Gaza smells like Jasmine? We simply want to live. At the end, we love life.
This sentiment threads all of your work. The sum of your art is a depiction of fully-realized, complex energies, each of them alive and well after the Zionist plot to end it. Even in photographs of intense grit and hardship, you achieve an evocative depth of color and movement towards life. In images of mundane life, there is a transcendent force at play. Things are alive with grace – the capacity to bring blessing and greater purpose out of suffering.
It is not by accident that this is the effect of your art. You had an amazing understanding for cycles of despair and transformation. No matter the destruction, there are two themes that take priority in your art: regeneration and continuity. You talked about this in that interview. I liken Gaza and Palestinians to whales. Because when a conflict occurs, only whales survive. I see a future for Gaza no matter how hard (Israel) tries to erase cultural centers or kill creative youth. Legacy remains and is inherited. The cause of Gaza is inherited and the cause of Palestine is passed down from generation to generation. In your art, there is always a new chapter coming into being. Even when that chapter is coerced into existence, certain features of life carry on.
This shows in the way you capture everyday life, in deceptively simple scenes of labor, custom, food, gathering, and, most importantly, of children. You balance these images with those of occupation, siege, and genocide, which are present in the physical demolition of Gaza and dispossession of your people, but are otherwise reduced to backstory and given no human form in your artistic world (Zionists are only implied as an unstated nuisance in the distance). So, it is not just about life and loving life, but life in close juxtaposition to death. When I suggested everything that matters in the universe happens in your Gaza, this is what I meant.
My faith in the undefeatable nature of this lineage strengthened as we neared the opening of Between Sky and Sea. It was my role to print photos for the exhibition. On a whim, I thought of your mantra - We are going to win - and decided to surpass our expectations and print two photos in as grand of a size as possible, which ended up being five feet tall by six and a half feet long. I did this with futility in mind and wanted to overwhelm any feelings of doubt, depression, or otherwise debilitating energy, both in myself and viewers. I also considered the intensity of Zionist pesticides to sterilize minds with these things. If we were going to say something, then say it boldly and definitively. The viewer should come out of the experience feeling like none of that ever existed.
The first photo I selected for this print was of the boy jumping into the sea. He has a large, central presence in the photograph, levitating midair over the Mediterranean, and his arms are spread like he is about to soar. Your usual poetic layers in the photo. In the far distance, there is smoke from a recent bombing, you see a series of tents and shambles along the coastline, buildings stand in varying degrees of composition and disassembly, and at its edges there are signs of commerce and social life (sit with any of your scenes long enough, if only to examine a part of a setting you did not attend to before, or to consider the facial expression of a secondary character, and you’ll find another story, and then another story within that story on the next viewing). Why this photo? Because where other people saw all of the sad elements and felt morose, I could only see triumph. It’s the one that most makes me feel that thing you always said.
The second photo was that of the woman and child standing above the beach. This one is sort of an inversion of the previous in that while the mother and child hold the focus of the camera, they appear diminished by the vastness of the rows of refugee tents across landscape, which portrays the gravity of displacement. This photo tricked me. Because of the mother’s placement overlooking this scene, I always attributed backwards-looking emotions to her. I saw her as a pensive, trepidatious figure, reflecting on the Gaza that used to be. Looking closer, however, there is no evidence of that in her. The child has a disconcerting look on their face, yes. He is uncomfortable with something, and with good reason, but the mother does display any worry. She has one hand uplifting the child from below him, the other firmly holding him upright. And she looks at him emanating assurance and tranquility – a Madonna and babe between sky and sea. Legacy remains and is inherited. The cause of Gaza is inherited and the cause of Palestine is passed down from generation to generation.
The poet Saul Williams said something I think about often. He said, “I’d be more careful about banking on the martyrdom of Palestinian resistance. When the authorities killed that dude from Nazareth, they believed they had crushed his whole movement – now we count time from the year of his birth.” It is a funny thing to say, since it is usually religious Zionists – both Jewish and Christian – who invoke Biblical prophecies in anticipation of Messiahs and second comings. What they lack the self-awareness to realize is that in this analogy they exist in the role of the Roman occupiers and the hypocrites who jeered the righteous Palestinian to his death. That death, however, would sanctify him in a line of spiritual prophets whose combined followers would count enough people to inhabit most of the world, while the empire that killed him lived out a prolonged decline through a decadent succession of kings.
I am not proclaiming a new religious order, but what I am saying is I do not have difficulty imagining a future where the Palestinian cause is just as widely celebrated as a momentous occasion in the dawn of a new life. How that may happen is not for me to say, but it is going to happen, and as it does, I will do my part to enshrine your name and art within it. Your martyrdom will be fulfilled.
I want to conclude with the final scene of your film. In this scene, children – bright, playful children – sing and spin one another up and down a miniature red Ferris wheel. The wheel has seats that are green, pink, and blue, and, while showing decay, it maintains color as it stands before a Gaza City building that has been shelled to colorlessness. You and your camera approach from a distance where the outline of the wheel is mostly contained within that of the demolished building. As you get closer to the wheel, its borders expand, and soon it is the building that is contained within the wheel, not the other way around. A drone flies by but soon fades to silence. Its lifespan is short. After that, all you hear is children laughing. We watch them play and the wheel spin, then the screen goes black for about 65 seconds. It leaves much for viewers to work through. These extremes of youth and ruin are not easy to reconcile. Is the debris supposed to shade these lives with tragedy? Is it a representation of the demons of occupation who come for their spirits? Maybe it’s a middling, matter of fact element – the destruction is an unavoidable part of the environment in which these children learn to be children. If it is so great, why does it become less significant as the scene develops? I’ve felt all of these things at some point, and the interpretation with the most staying power is the one that sees transience in the wreckage and something eternal in the children.
We are going to win.
Your brother,
Matt
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Ismail Abu Hatab was a decorated photographer and filmmaker from Gaza City. He curated his photography into an exhibition called Between Sky and Sea, an immersive experience that also included a film, a soundscape based on the ambience of Gaza, and a recreation of a tent like those in Gaza city. The exhibition was based on resilience and ordinary life in Gaza through siege and displacement. His photography can be characterized as artistic photojournalism – equally valuable for their aesthetics as for their documentation of Gaza at the time.
Ismail was martyred by Israeli forces on June 30, 2025, just one week before Between Sky and Sea was originally set to launch in Chicago. This was also not long after he had appeared on Al Jazeera + to publicize his work. Earlier this year, his film for Between Sky and Sea won "Best Documentary Short" at the Chicago Palestinian Film Festival. This coming fall, his photography will be included in an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center called Resisting the Long War, as part of a veteran arts triennial that confronts US militarism through arts.
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MV Perry is a Chicago-based social worker and writer. He has published one novel, A Revolution of the Mind, a sociopolitical work of literary fiction about psychiatric disability in the US.
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The below photos are from Ismail's exhibition, Between Sky and Sea.
