ABSTRACT
Hanzala is by far the most famous persona in Palestinian visual and emotive vocabulary—a curious and persistent figurine who stands witness to the suffering and struggles of his people. The Palestinian history of invisibility, of denial, is at the heart of Hanzala's visual fixation. Not many non-Palestinians know who Hanzala is. Hanzala is the legendary creation of Naji Salim al-Ali, a Palestinian cartoonist, known, loved, and celebrated for a sustained body of works that has survived him with astounding power and tenacity. A racist rumor is now roaming through the streets of Tehran—that among the security forces beating up on the demonstrators are people who do not speak Persian, that they speak Arabic, that they are dark skinned and thus not Iranian—from Lebanon, Palestine, or Iraq. The whitewashed imagination of those who make up these stories has habitually dismissed Iranians from the southern climes of their homeland as "Arabs", as if being Arab was a misdemeanor.
