Naji al-Ali
1936–1987
Naji al-Ali, creator of “Hanthala’ in c. 1969, was born in al-Jalil (Galilee), Palestine, in the village of al-Shajara. When the Nakba (catastrophe) struck in 1948, al-Ali became a refugee, along with the vast majority of Palestinians, growing up in the south Lebanese refugee camp of Ain al-Helweh. In 1961, Palestinian writer and political activist Ghassan Kanafani noted the creative artistry of al-Ali and published three of his works in al-Hurriyya magazine. Two years later, al-Ali moved to Kuwait, where he drew for a variety of newspapers over the next eleven years; in 1969, his most celebrated creation, the witness-child Hanthala, appeared for the first time.
Through the gaze of Hanthala — this refugee child with his ragged, patched clothes — al-Ali criticised the brutality of Israeli occupation, the venality and corruption of the regimes in the region, and emphasized the suffering and resistance of the Palestinian people. Resolutely independent and unaligned to any political party, he strove to speak to and for the ordinary Arab people; the pointed satire of his stark, symbolic cartoons brought him widespread renown, many powerful enemies, and the respect of a wide audience both in Palestine and throughout the Arab world.
In 1974, Naji returned to Lebanon, where he witnessed the civil war and the 1982 Israeli invasion. Moving back to Kuwait Naji took up a post with the daily newspaper al-Qabas. Constantly harassed and censored by the authorities, Naji was finally expelled from the country; relocating to London, where he continued to draw for the international edition of al-Qabas. On 22 July 1987, he was shot outside the newspaper’s Chelsea offices, dying five weeks later. He was posthumously awarded the Golden Pen of Freedom award of the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers.