The Cities We Cannot Reach: Palestinian Heritage, Urban Memory, and the 12 Cities Exhibition

By Ghadeer Najjar | Hana Sham Scent

The Shortest Path Between Two Points

I was always in love with mathematics. Not in the way some people describe loving a subject — tolerating it, managing it — but genuinely enchanted. Math classes were like poetry to me. There was music in the logic, beauty in the certainty, comfort in knowing that problems had solutions you could reach if you just held the right thread.

One sentence from those early classroom years has never left me:

"    أقصر مسافة بين نقطتين هي الخط المستقيم." The straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

I heard it and held it — not just as a geometric fact, but as a philosophy. A way of moving through life. Walk straight. Cut unnecessary distance. Find the most direct path to what you want.

It took years for me to understand how completely this principle fails in the landscape I grew up in.

When the Straight Line Becomes Impossible

The Levant is not a region that permits straight lines.

Not when your path is interrupted by checkpoints that appear and vanish without logic. Not when a wall cuts through the middle of a city, redirecting lives by forty kilometers to cover a distance of four. Not when topography conspires with politics and social division to turn a twenty-minute journey into a three-hour detour — or an impossibility.

I grew up reading diaries and listening to older generations speak with a casual intimacy about cities I had never been permitted to enter. My grandmother's generation moved freely across what is now a fractured map. They went to Beirut and Broummana for summer. To Damascus and Aleppo to buy cloth and household goods at the souk. To Jaffa and Cairo for honeymoons. To Ramallah for the cool summer air. To Haifa to board ships toward new beginnings. To Jerusalem for prayer. To Jericho for warm winters. To Amman to build new businesses and new lives.

These were not exotic journeys. They were ordinary movements — the kind that families make, the kind that connect a region, the kind that knit together an identity across cities.

I grew up dreaming about a version of the region where I could walk those same straight lines.

Drawing the Lines That Cannot Be Walked

In 2018, together with other designers, I launched an exhibition that had been forming in my imagination for years.

We called it 12 Cities | ١٢ مدينة.

The premise was simple in concept and layered in meaning: we would travel through twelve Palestinian and Levantine cities — Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Jericho, Gaza, Haifa, Nazareth, Acre, and cities beyond — and translate them into lines. Architectural skylines. Urban maps. Minimal drawings that captured each city's distinct character: its building patterns, its stones, its proportions, its memory.

The exhibition opened in Al Ma'mal, a former tile factory inside the Old City of Jerusalem — a setting that carried its own layers of time. Near the New Gate, in a space that is itself a form of material memory, we mapped cities that visitors could walk through in a single room.

Twelve cities in one afternoon. Something that the political reality of today makes impossible any other way.

What the Exhibition Became

I had expected people to come and look at the drawings. What I did not expect was what they brought with them.

Elderly visitors arrived with tears already in their eyes before they had read a single caption. They came carrying their own maps — not paper ones, but emotional ones, drawn over decades of longing. They spoke about first loves left in complicated situations in cities they could no longer reach. About market days in Nablus, and summer evenings in Haifa, and the smell of particular bakeries in Jaffa.

Young people came with their school geography books. They stood in front of the city maps and traced routes, asking questions their textbooks could not answer — questions about lived texture, about what these cities felt like as human places, not political problems.

On opening day, visitors had come from Haifa, Jaffa, Nazareth, Jenin, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem. The arrival of visitors from Bethlehem and Jenin — both on the West Bank, both subject to movement restrictions — was not a small thing. Getting to Jerusalem required permits. The fact that people made that effort to attend said something about what the exhibition was holding for people.

For those who couldn't come to Jerusalem, the exhibition travelled. To Bethlehem. To Nazareth at Christmas. And via Facebook, to the diaspora, where hundreds of people tagged their cities and shared their memories.

On the Architecture of Identity

The exhibition was built on one belief: that architecture is never just buildings.

Every stone placed by hand carries the strength of the person who set it. Every proportional system reflects a culture's sense of beauty, space, and family life. Every city skyline is a kind of autobiography — of the people who built it, the forces that shaped it, the losses it has absorbed.

In Palestinian cities, you can see all of this at once. Ancient places of worship. Cobbled streets worn smooth by centuries of feet. Ottoman arches beside newer facades. Each city has its own vocabulary — its own particular way of placing windows, of shaping doorways, of relating the private house to the public street.

What struck me most, working across the twelve cities, was how connected these vocabularies are to the rest of Bilad Al Sham. The same ornamental patterns that appear on a doorway in Nablus appear again in a courtyard in Damascus. The proportional language of an Ottoman merchant's house in Acre echoes in the architecture of old Beirut. These cities were not isolated islands — they were part of a living regional culture, connected by trade routes, pilgrimage paths, family networks, and shared aesthetic inheritance.

The straight line I had imagined as a child — the one connecting two points in the shortest possible way — had been there all along. It just ran through history rather than through geography.

The Study in Longing

The response to 12 Cities gave me something I had not initially sought: data.

Not statistical data, but the deeper kind — qualitative, emotional, ethnographic. I was collecting stories. I was watching how people of different generations oriented themselves differently to the same city names. I was seeing, in real time, what urban displacement does to a community's relationship with its own geography.

Older generations remembered with the body — smells, textures, the specific quality of light in a particular street. Younger people experienced a kind of inherited longing, a grief for places they had never been but felt they belonged to.

This became the foundation of a larger study: on Palestinian longing for cities and urban heritage. On what it means to be separated from the urban fabric that shaped your family's identity. On how communities maintain connection to places through material culture, storytelling, illustration, and food — through the everyday objects and practices that carry place-memory across generations.

This study, and the questions it opened, eventually became the conceptual bedrock of Hana Sham | هنا عبق الشام.

From Exhibition to Studio

Hana Sham is named for what I was looking for: the hana — the ease, the belonging, the gentle rightness of being somewhere — that carries the scent (عبق) of the Levant (الشام). The thing we have been slowly losing as political rupture accelerates cultural displacement.

To understand what I was documenting in the exhibition, I went back to study. I completed a Master's degree at SOAS University of London in Social Anthropology, focusing on migration and diaspora — to find frameworks that could hold the complexity of what I was witnessing. What does it mean to belong to a place you cannot reach? What forms does cultural memory take when the physical city is inaccessible? How do communities sustain identity through objects, food, architecture, and image?

The answers didn't resolve the questions — they deepened them. And they gave me the tools to work with them more rigorously, and more honestly.

Today, Hana Sham is the space where I continue this work: through illustration and visual documentation, through heritage consultancy, through food storytelling, through walking tours of Jerusalem's neighborhoods, and through ongoing projects that does the documentation of houses, combining hand-drawn illustration, oral history, archival photography, and maps.

What I Am Still Trying to Understand

I still believe in the straight line.

Not naively — I know the barriers are real. But I believe that even when direct movement is impossible, there are other ways of drawing the line. Through memory. Through illustration. Through the act of naming cities as if they are still connected, as if the distances between them are navigable, as if the region is still whole.

12 Cities was the first time I drew those lines publicly. Every project I have done since has been a continuation of the same act: insisting on connection across rupture, refusing to accept disconnection as the natural state of things.

This blog is part of that. A place where I will continue to document, reflect, and share the ongoing work of recovering what has been lost, and protecting what remains.هنا عبق الشام — the Levant is still here, in its stones, its cities, its tastes, and its people.

Ghadeer Najjar is a Jerusalem-based heritage consultant, illustrator, and cultural storyteller. She holds an MA in Social Anthropology (Migration and Diaspora) from SOAS University of London, and 17+ years of experience in heritage research, visual documentation, and cultural product development. She is the founder of Hana Sham Scent | هنا عبق الشام.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the 12 Cities exhibition?

12 Cities (١٢ مدينة) was a 2018 exhibition at Al Ma'mal Foundation in Jerusalem's Old City, presenting architectural skyline illustrations of twelve Palestinian and Levantine cities.

What cities were featured in 12 Cities?

The exhibition featured Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Jericho, Gaza, Haifa, Nazareth, and Acre — cities connected by shared architectural and cultural heritage across the Levant.

What is Hana Sham Scent?

Hana Sham Scent is a Jerusalem-based heritage stationery and consultancy studio founded by Ghadeer Najjar, celebrating Levant urban culture through illustration, heritage consultancy, and food storytelling.

What is Palestinian urban heritage?

Palestinian urban heritage refers to the architectural and cultural traditions embedded in Palestinian cities — their stone construction, ornamental details, and urban layout — sharing deep roots with Damascus, Beirut, and Amman.

Who is Ghadeer Najjar?

Ghadeer Najjar is a Jerusalem-based heritage consultant and illustrator. She holds an MA in Social Anthropology from SOAS University of London and has 17+ years of experience in heritage research and visual documentation.