For years, the kibbutz of Ein Harod thrived in the Jezreel Valley, a fertile plain in northern Israel still scarred by the convulsions associated with the creation of the Jewish state 75 years ago.
Overlooking the hill above the kibbutz are the ruins of a Palestinian village that, like many others in the region, was destroyed when Israel was established in 1948; Down the road is a hardscrabble town that took in many of the displaced.
Now, Ein Harod, the symbol of early Zionism for Israelis, is an unlikely home for stories of Arab loss in the Valley, expressed by a family of Palestinian artists whose parents and grandparents were forced to abandon their home village near a kibbutz.
An exhibition at the art museum in the kibbutz includes works by five members of the Abu Shakra family and Israelis trying to understand the traumas experienced by Palestinians and Arabs in the surrounding areas when the state was established.
The unusual exhibition – “Spirit of Man, Spirit of Place” – has attracted record crowds to the small museum, nearly 100,000 people since it opened in November 2022. A program built around the show brings Jewish and Arab children together.
Among the works are paintings of sabra, or prickly pear, bushes that marked the boundaries of Palestinian villages and were adopted by early Zionists as a symbol of their own identity. A video installation flashes through a Palestinian matriarch sharing memories of shock and loss in her dying days. Intricate pieces of embroidery are spattered with red, like blood, symbolizing the violence that has gripped the area for so long.
The project was first proposed to the museum by Said Abu Shakra, 67, one of the five artists whose work will be included, during a spasm of Arab-Jewish gang violence that rocked Israel two years ago. The goal, he said, was to create empathy between Arabs and Jews, asserting Palestinian identity and pride.
“I refuse to be a victim in Israel. I am strong, I want to be the best and lead and talk about my culture,” she said. “I want dialogue with Jews in Israel, but dialogue of equals.”
The demonstration comes at a tense time, as generational, social and demographic changes have deepened divisions across Israel. This coincided with the rise of the most right-wing government in Israeli history, which included members with a history of anti-Arab racism.
“Each side has sharpened its narrative and become more intense,” said Galia Bar Orr, who curated the show with Housni Alkhatib Shehda, a Palestinian-Israeli art historian. The project is “built on respect and recognition of the pain of another,” he said.
“There is no point in trying to erase history,” he said. “It will never go away.”
A Troubled History
The history the exhibition highlights is the creation of the Jewish state of Israel 75 years ago – an event that transformed the landscape surrounding the kibbutz.
Palestinians recognize that event as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” referring to the expulsion or flight of about 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and population of about 400 villages in what is now Israel.
Today relations between the Jewish and Arab communities in the Jezreel Valley region are generally cordial, and some of Ein Harod’s Palestinian neighbors work in kibbutz industries. But the scars from 75 years ago are still visible.
Atop Ein Harod are the ghostly ruins of Kumya, one of the cleared villages, one of about two dozen Jewish communities established in the area soon after the Zionists bought the land in the early 20th century.
By Mr. Abu Shakra The mother, Mariam, lived for several years in the village of Al Lazun, which was moved from another kibbutz and today lies in ruins. She moved there in the early 1940s after marrying a man 15 years her senior at age 12, taking her rag dolls with her, according to family lore.
In 1946, at the age of 16, she gave birth to Mr. Abu Shakra’s elder brother, Walid. In 1948, as fighting escalated between Arab armies, Palestinian irregulars, and Zionist forces, Maryam and her family fled to the Palestinian farming village of Umm al-Fahem. Today, that village is a working-class town spread across the hills a few miles west of the Jezreel Valley.
Walid, the eldest of Mariam’s seven children, left school at 16 and went to work in a bakery in Tel Aviv, then as a tax clerk in the coastal town of Hadera. A Jewish family who rented him a room in Hadera saw one of his drawings and urged him to pursue art and enroll in painting classes. His teachers later recommended him to an Israeli art school that he founded.
Encouraged by his mother, and inspired by her traditions of Sufi mysticism, Walid eventually became a full-time artist, creating evocative landscape paintings and sculptures around Umm al-Fahem. He passed away in 2019.
His art inspired other family members to follow in his footsteps. His younger brother Said embraced video art – sharing memories of his installation fading away with his mother is one of the focuses of the Ein Harod retrospective.
Farid created the intricate embroidery pieces displayed at the museum alongside images of wild cacti in plant pots painted by cousin Asim, who died of cancer in 1990 at the age of 28.
Abu Shakra said he owns his own gallery in Umm al-Fahem, which is better known for Islamist fundamentalism than art and the rampant gun violence now plaguing Arab society in Israel.
In addition to exhibiting the work of Arab and Jewish Israeli artists, his gallery houses a visual and audio archive, documenting Palestinian life in the region before 1948.
On a recent morning, a group of Jewish artists from Rehovot in central Israel were visiting.
They were crammed into a room in the center of the gallery that had a mound of brown earth in which the work of prominent Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman was buried, along with an empty coffee glass — a symbol of harmony for both Jews and Arabs.
Mr. Ullman was looking for coffee-colored earth for sculpture. Mr. Abu Shakra said that he himself found it in the ruins of Al Lajun and offered it to the sculptor.
While the sculpture provides a poignant symbol of the Arab and Jewish communities’ ties to the land, Al Lazun, like other destroyed villages in the Jezreel Valley, remains a disputed site.
An annual spring march by Palestinian citizens of Israel commemorating the Nakba ended this year, where Al Lazun once stood and activists held Friday prayers in June.
“We want to get them back,” Youssef Jabareen, a politician and educator living in Umm al-Fahem, says of the confiscated village lands.
Culture and conflict
When Abu Shakra proposed holding an exhibition of his family’s art at the kibbutz in May 2021 as the violence peaked, the museum accepted his offer without hesitation.
“The mission was as clear as day to me,” said Orit Lev-Segev, director of the museum. “Here to create a better reality.”
Located in a quiet part of a kibbutz, the museum has a long history at the center of conflict.
Ein Harod, founded in 1921, was the first large kibbutz or rural collective to combine agriculture and industry. The pioneers who founded it, aspired to create a complete society that also valued culture. So in 1938, as they battled malaria and faced a Palestinian nationalist uprising against British rule and Jewish immigration, members voted to create a museum.
Initially housed in a shed, the museum’s original purpose was to collect early Zionist art and collect art and artifacts from Europe’s declining Jewish communities. In the fall of 1948, while Israel was fighting the Arab army in its war of independence, the first section of the museum’s permanent building was inaugurated.
Anat Tzizling, granddaughter of Israel’s founder, who runs a kibbutz archive, recalled that residents of the Palestinian village of Kumya fled during the war.
“The Palestinian leadership told them to leave and British trucks came to take them away,” Ms. Tzizzling said. Ein Harod acquired some of Kumya’s land, but a formal land agreement was never finalized.
The kibbutz soon found itself confronted with its own conflict. On the one hand, Ein Harod Meuhad, remained more oriented towards Marxism and the Soviet Union while a splinter group – Ein Harod Ehud – leaned towards the United States and the West. A line was drawn down the middle of the communal dining room. Families were divided.
But the art museum at the border of the communities remained a shared space.
Like many kibbutzim, the two parts of Ein Harod have changed drastically over the years, drifting away from their collective roots. Meuhad was privatized in 2009 and morphed into a more bourgeois version of a communal lifestyle that resembles life in a gated community. Ihud recently voted to go the same way.
That contrast with ruined Palestinian villages like Kumya, overgrown with weeds and windswept on the hillside above the kibbutz, is even more stark.
In Ein Harod, people prefer not to talk about Kumya — out of fear, one resident argued, that Palestinians might hear it back.
“I think the people who know about the village of Kumya are over 90 years old,” said Moshe Frank, 88, who came to live in Ein Harod Ehud from Minnesota 55 years ago.
“I can understand the Palestinian point of view,” he said. “It’s a very difficult situation. But I’m on behalf of those who came here, not those who were there before.
Still, he said, he was impressed by the Abu Shakra performance, which echoed the generally positive response he received on the kibbutz. “I think it’s great. We live so close,” she said.
