When Franco's fascists accused Pablo Picasso of being the author of the pictorial work Guernica, Picasso replied, "I didn't do Guernica, you did it".

It was the Spain of the Second Republic that was facing Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler. Picasso was a Republican, and he portrayed Guernica from his diaspora in Paris. It is an oil on canvas, which shows, among other things, the appalling human suffering after the bombing of the civilian population of Guernica by German and Italian forces, in coordination with Franco's regime.

Subsequently, this work was taken to the International Exposition of Paris in 1937. Then it had to be protected and found shelter in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA). After the death of the bloodthirsty Francisco Franco, the work was transferred to Spain in 1981. For many, it was the return of the last exile.  

In the world, there are innumerable works of art, symbols, archives, and errant documents that have been kept, stolen, or extracted from peoples, and these peoples are clamoring for the right to have them returned to their homeland.

In the case of the Palestinian people, it was the people who were extracted, it was the people who became wanderers. 80% of the native population was expelled and 5% killed in 1948, in order to impose from Europe a colonial regime known as “Israel”; an “Israel” that has no link with the ancient Israelite tribe.  

In Palestine remained their works, manuscripts, scrolls, documents, and archives, as well as their tombs and fossils. An accumulation of traces in which many were burned by the current colonialism. They destroyed the history of a people that has been in the light of human history for more than 11,000 years. One of the monumental destructions was accompanied by the perverse and attractive lie: A land without people for a "people" without land. Some works are hijacked by the colonial power and others were usurped to be represented as their own, as a false ancestor, and thus falsify, disguise, and hide the nature of that colonial anachronism.

On the other hand, the Palestinians keep and safeguard in their memory the existence of valuable works, objects, and documents scattered around the world since long before their massive expulsion in 1948. An example of this is the great collection that the Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia) treasures of pieces carved in mother-of-pearl, art that was born and developed in Beit Lahm (Palestine), as well as the collection kept by the Ethnological Missionary Museum, in the Vatican Museums. Other important collections can be found in English and Spanish institutions. Likewise, Palestinians who have emigrated to Turkey, Chile, Colombia, Jordan, Lebanon, and other Arab countries have preserved family legacies or have made up collections acquired at auctions and antique dealers in Europe. In addition to these actions, in a desperate attempt to preserve identity, there is the Israeli colonial collector who bids for those pieces in the international auction system.

In the book El arte palestino de tallar el nácar (The Palestinian art of carving mother of pearl), an approach to its study from the Colombian Caribbean, published in Colombia in 2005, gives an account of the evolution of the art of mother-of-pearl from its origins, and one of its authors, Enrique Yidi Daccarett, is still working on the preservation (through his enterprise called Taller Palestina), curatorship, and cataloging of the Palestinian works of mother-of-pearl scattered around the world with the help of one of the co-authors of the book, Karen David Daccarett. The ultimate intention is that the existing pieces, in the different museums of the world and other institutions, will be identified as Palestinian in their cataloging file.

It is necessary to clarify something, which is that the native Palestinian people have been since 1948 under a colonial yoke, but this colonialism has not only stolen the homeland soil but has also taken the history and culture of the native people. This particularity of usurping the history and its cultural heritage, for example, the embroidery, the culinary, and especially its history (Jewish Caucasians, not Semites who camouflage themselves as Hebrews), is because it is a colonialism that does not come from a nation, as is the case in the classic colonialism, but comes from a European colonial movement that cleverly disguises itself as a people.

Palestine became a forbidden people.

The lie of colonial racism synthesized in the formula of "a land without people for a people without land" is perfect. This false sentence, harmonious, almost musical, is typical of colonialism which is the bearer of a whole splendid aesthetic machinery that is not ethical at all.

The only history of the millenary Palestinian Semitic people is in this particular land of the Levant, but, after 1948, it became a wandering people.

The Palestinian Museum flourishes in the heart of this wandering Palestine: Palestine Museum US, exactly in Woodbridge, Connecticut, founded by the Palestinian Faisal Saleh. It is a colossal work, but the immense challenge is the moral and humanistic one, that is to say, the challenge of censorship since speaking of the Palestinian Cause is an obscene taboo in the United States. It is a challenge to the fraud laden with corrupt aesthetics, the challenge to fear, that putrid and dishonest accusation of anti-Semitism, the challenge to kick the table, the challenge to imperial and colonial atrophy, the challenge to Zionism, to that, the most powerful fascism of our time.  

Such a Palestinian museum may be a pantomime of the museological cloister, as a fetish façade of democracy, or it may be a Palestinian museum for justice. If it is the latter, the museum will be amputated.

It is a museum of the survival of a people that refuses to disappear, and when Zionist fascism accuses you of being anti-Semite, we must remember Pablo Picasso and answer: 'We are not anti-Semites, you are the anti-Semites.'

To a large extent, religion has become the opium of the people; let not art, academia, literature, pedagogy, and science become the opium of the people.

Let art, academia, literature, pedagogy, and science be for justice, let it be for honesty and generosity, that is what liberates!