Fundraiser for Shatila Camp
Text, artwork + links
My comrade Manar at Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp has asked for financial assistance to support her community. I spent time at Shatila with Manar and the Shatila Women’s Group in May 2022.
Families from the camp are currently in urgent need of mattresses, bedding, soap, menstrual hygiene products, milk and nappies.
Moukhayam1 Shatila is located in a residential suburb of Beirut. Currently, families from the camp have been displaced from Shatila due to the ongoing Zionist bombardment and colonial invasion of Lebanon. These families remain in great danger as Israel’s attacks continue.
Shatila camp was established in 1949 for Palestinian refugees dispossessed by the Zionist regime’s campaign of genocide in 1948. Shatila residents still carry the memories of their beloved villages, the massacres that forced their exile, and the following decades of Zionist colonial and US imperialist wars on Lebanon.
Shatila also housed Syrian refugees and some of Lebanon’s poorest communities.
Visit my online store to purchase an archival pigment print of my recent Lebanese flag watercolour, a sketch from Shatila made in 2022, or to select a small donation option in easy increments of $5.
I’m sending all funds raised direct to Manar via international money transfer every few days, with receipts posted to my instagram stories.
‘The word Moukhayam means “camp” in Arabic. However, the Moukhayam is more than a place of shelter, it has a unique political identity. It is the headquarters of our exile and our struggle for return. A person of the camps — the Moukhayamji — is part peasant, part urban revolutionary. Moukhayam is resistance. It carries people who are on a homeward journey towards liberation.’
This definition was provided by Palestinian filmmaker and Nakba researcher Rihab Charida for Issue 2 of The Sunday Paper, May 2022.