A story of Arab loss comes to life in a kibbutz in Israel
For years, the kibbutz of Ein Harod thrived in the Jezreel Valley, a fertile plain in northern Israel still scarred by the convulsions that accompanied the establishment of the Jewish state 75 years ago.
On a hill above the kibbutz looms the ruins of a Palestinian village that, like other villages in the area, was destroyed when Israel was founded in 1948; further on is the hardscrabble town that has taken in many of the displaced.
Now Ein Harod, an emblem of early Zionism for Israelis, has become an unlikely place for the stories of Arab loss in the valley expressed by a family of Palestinian artists whose parents and grandparents were forced to leave their own village near the kibbutz.
An exhibit at a kibbutz art museum showing the work of five members of the Abu Shakra family has struck a chord with Israelis trying to understand the traumas suffered by Palestinians when the state was founded, as well as Arabs from surrounding areas.
The unusual exhibition – titled “Spirit of Man, Spirit of Place” – has attracted a record number of people to the small museum, nearly 100,000 people since it opened in November 2022. A program around the exhibition brings together Jewish and Arab children.
Works include paintings of the sabra, or prickly pear, shrubs that marked the boundaries of Palestinian villages and were adopted by early Zionists as a symbol of their own identity. A video installation flickers with a Palestinian matriarch in her final days sharing memories of trauma and loss. Intricate embroidered pieces are splattered with red, like blood, symbolizing the violence that has long gripped the region.
The project was first presented to the museum by Said Abu Shakra, 67, one of five artists whose work is on display, during a spasm of Arab-Jewish violent violence that rocked Israel two years ago. He said the goal was to create empathy between Arabs and Jews, while reaffirming Palestinian identity and pride.
“I refuse to be a victim in Israel. I am strong, I want to be excellent and lead, and speak about my culture,” he said. “I want a dialogue with the Jews in Israel, but a dialogue of equals.”
The exhibition comes at a tense time as generational, social and demographic changes have deepened divisions in Israel. It also coincided with the rise of the most right-wing government in Israeli history, including members with a history of anti-Arab racism.
“Each side has sharpened its narrative and become more extreme,” says Galia Bar Or, who curated the exhibition with Housni Alkhateeb Shehada, a Palestinian-Israeli art historian. The project “is based on respect for and acknowledgment of the other person’s pain,” she said.
“There’s no point in trying to erase history,” she added. “It never goes away.”
An eventful history
The history the exhibition highlights is the event that transformed the landscape around the kibbutz – the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel 75 years ago.
Palestinians mark that event as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” referring to the expulsion or flight of about 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and the depopulation of about 400 of their villages in the area that is now Israel.
Relations between the Jewish and Arab communities in the Jezreel Valley area are generally cordial today, and some of Ein Harod’s Palestinian neighbors work in the kibbutz industries. But the scars of 75 years ago are still visible.
The ghostly remains of Qumya, one of the cleared villages, hover over Ein Harod, one of about two dozen Jewish communities established in the area immediately after a major purchase of land there by Zionists in the early 20th century.
From Mr. Abu Shakra mother, Mariam, lived for several years in a village, Al Lajun, which was displaced by another kibbutz and now lies in ruins. She moved there in the early 1940s after being married off at age 12 to a man 15 years her senior, taking her rag dolls with her, according to family lore.
In 1946, at the age of 16, she gave birth to Walid, the elder brother of Mr. Abu Shakra. In 1948, as fighting raged between Arab armies, Palestinian irregulars and Zionist troops, Mariam and her family fled to a Palestinian farming village, Umm al-Fahem. Today, that village has become a working-class town that sprawls over the hills a few miles west of the Jizreel Valley.
Walid, the eldest of Mariam’s seven children, left school at 16 to work at a bakery in Tel Aviv, then as a tax clerk in the coastal city of Hadera. The Jewish family who rented him a room in Hadera saw one of his drawings and urged him to study art and enroll in a painting course. His teacher then recommended him to an established Israeli art school.
Encouraged by his mother and inspired by her traditions of Sufi mysticism, Walid eventually became a full-time artist, creating paintings and engravings of the evocative landscape around Umm al-Fahem. He died in 2019.
His art inspired other family members to follow in his footsteps. His younger brother Said embraced video art – his installation featuring his mother sharing fading memories is one of the highlights of the Ein Harod retrospective.
Another brother, Farid, created the intricate embroidered pieces on display in the museum, alongside photographs of wild cacti in plant pots, painted by a cousin, Asim, who died of cancer in 1990 at the age of 28. Asim’s cousin Karim contributed bold and colorful portraits, including sabras and other local plants.
Said Abu Shakra has his own gallery in Umm al-Fahem, a city known more for Islamist radicalism than art and for the rampant gun violence that now plagues Arab society in Israel.
In addition to the work of Arab and Jewish-Israeli artists, his gallery houses an image and audio archive he compiled about Palestinian life in the area before 1948.
Recently a group of Jewish artists from Rehovot, in central Israel, visited.
They gathered in a room in the gallery with a heap of brown earth in the center, the work of a prominent Israeli sculptor, Micha Ullman, with an empty coffee glass – a symbol of sympathy for Jews and Arabs alike – buried in it.
Mr. Ullman was looking for coffee-colored soil for the statue. Mr. Abu Shakra said that he himself found it in the ruins of Al Lajun and offered it to the sculptor.
While the sculpture was a poignant symbol of the ties to the land of both Arab and Jewish communities, Al Lajun, like other destroyed villages in the Jezreel Valley, remains a contested space.
An annual spring march commemorating the Nakba by Palestinian citizens of Israel ended this year where Al Lajun once stood and activists held Friday prayers there in June.
“We want to reclaim them,” Yousef Jabareen, a politician and academic living in Umm al-Fahem, said of the confiscated village lands.
Culture and conflict
When Said Abu Shakra proposed to hold the exhibition of his family’s art in the kibbutz when the violence peaked in May 2021, the museum accepted his offer without hesitation.
“The mission was crystal clear to me,” said Orit Lev-Segev, the museum’s director. “To create a better reality here.”
Located in a quiet part of the kibbutz, the museum has had a long history at the center of conflict.
Founded in 1921, Ein Harod was the first major kibbutz, or rural collective, to combine agriculture and industry. The pioneers who founded it, with the aim of creating a complete society, also valued culture. So in 1938, fighting malaria and facing a Palestinian nationalist uprising against British rule and Jewish immigration, members voted to establish a museum.
Initially housed in a barn, the museum’s original mission was to collect early Zionist art and rescue art and artifacts from Europe’s doomed Jewish communities. In the fall of 1948, while Israel was still fighting Arab armies in its war of independence, the first wing of the museum’s permanent building was inaugurated.
Anat Tzizling, the granddaughter of a founder of Israel who manages the kibbutz archives, recalled that the residents of Qumya, the Palestinian village, had fled during the hostilities.
“Palestinian leaders told them to leave and British trucks came for them,” Ms Tzizling said. Ein Harod took over some of Qumya’s land, she said, but a formal land deal was never finalized.
The kibbutz was soon torn apart by its own conflict. One side, Ein Harod Meuhad, remained more focused on Marxism and the Soviet Union, while a breakaway – Ein Harod Ihud – leaned toward the United States and the West. A line was drawn down the middle of the common dining room. Families were divided.
But the art museum, on the border of the communities, remained a shared space.
Like many kibbutzim, the two parts of Ein Harod have changed dramatically over the years, abandoning their collectivist roots. Meuhad was privatized in 2009 and has turned into a more bourgeois version of communal living similar to life in a gated community. Ihud recently voted to go in the same direction.
That has added to the contrast with devastated Palestinian villages like Qumya, covered in weeds and windswept on the hill above the kibbutz.
In Ein Harod, people prefer not to talk about Qumya – for fear, one resident claimed, that the Palestinians may reclaim it.
“I think the people who know the village of Qumya are all over 90,” said another resident, Moshe Frank, 88, who came from Minnesota 55 years ago to live in Ein Harod Ihud.
“I can understand the Palestinian vision,” he said. “It’s a very difficult situation. But I was on the side of the people who came here and not on the side of those who were here before.”
Still, he said, he was impressed with the Abu Shakra exhibit, echoing the generally positive response received within the kibbutz. “I think it is beautiful. We live so close,” he said.