"Umm al-Fahm!? Is it even safe to go there?"
Chapter 3: The ground from which the Abu Shakras sprung
(This is number 3 of a series of posts I’ll be publishing in the coming weeks about the background to an art exhibition opening at the museum at Kibbutz Ein Harod. The show is a retrospective of the works of five artists from one extraordinary family: the Abu Shakras of Umm al-Fahm.
Link to Chapter 1: What does an art show have to do with Israeli democracy
Link to Chapter 2: An artist in search of the sublime
I’m an American-born journalist on the staff of Haaretz English Edition who has been living in Israel since 1987. I’m Jewish, but I have long been interested in learning about the country’s Palestinian population. They have contended with countless challenges, which continue to this day, but this is their home, and they aren’t going anywhere, although that is something that some parts of the Jewish population still doesn’t understand.
To me, the Abu Shakras, their birthplace, and the art gallery in the city that’s associated with them, tell a story that goes beyond art. Call me naive, but I think that story can point a way forward to reconciliation among Israelis. Writing shortly after the November 1 election, I know how tempting it might be to think that “all is lost.” But this is our shared home, and we don’t have the option of losing faith. Maybe this newsletter will serve to provide readers with reason to be more hopeful. dbgiht@gmail.com)
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Palestinian citizens of Israel tend to stay put. I’m not so much referring here to their adherence to the concept of “sumud” – Arabic for “steadfastness” – which characterizes the determination of Palestinian Arabs to remain in the land and, when possible, on their families’ land, following the establishment of Israel, in 1948. Rather, I mean a more prosaic, though clearly related, tendency to live their lives in the same place they grew up. They may have a demanding high-tech job in Tel Aviv or Herzliya, they may be a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem or hold a senior civil-service position in the capital, but most evenings and certainly on weekends, they will return to their native town or village, even if that means driving several hours in each direction.
In this sense, it may not be surprising that all five of the artists in the Abu Shakra clan -- the subjects of the exhibition “Ruah Ha’adam, Ruah Hamakom” (“Spirit of Man, Spirit of Place: Artists of the Abu Shakra Family at Ein Harod”) -- have remained anchored in Umm al-Fahm, even if Tel Aviv is the undisputed center of Israel’s art world. The late Walid Abu Shakra was an exception, in that he relocated to the United Kingdom in the 1970s. But even in his case, there is little doubt that his heart remained in his hometown, whose landscapes were the principal subject of his art.
Understanding the Abu Shakras requires appreciating the place played by Umm al-Fahm in their lives. Even when Said (pronounced “Sa-eed”), today 66, worked as a senior officer in the Israel Police national headquarters, he made the two-hour drive back to the city in the evening, and it is in this most unlikely location that he and his brother Farid opened the first art gallery in an Arab town in Israel, in 1996. For his part, Farid, a nationally recognized painter, writer and teacher, gave up commuting to his studio in Tel Aviv five years ago so as to live and work fulltime in Umm al-Fahm. And three decades ago, when Farid’s cousin and soulmate, Asim Abu Shakra, finished art school in Tel Aviv and embarked on what looked to be a brilliant career before being felled by cancer, it was to Umm al-Fahm that he returned to die, in the embrace of his family, at age 28. Today, if you want to visit the studio of Asim’s nephew Karim -- who at age 40, is the youngest Abu Shakra represented in the Ein Harod exhibition, and whose work seems to be popping up every month at a museum or gallery in the “Jewish sector” -- you’ll have to come to Umm al-Fahm. There, Karim has turned the warehouse that until recently he used for the carpet-cleaning business that provided him with a livelihood, into a large exhibition space for his work. His home is a few doors away.
If Israeli Jews do have any impression of Umm al-Fahm – a place that for each of these artists has been a fount of unending spiritual nourishment and support -- it is most likely a negative one: It was the birthplace of the Northern Branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement, which the state considers enough of a threat to have outlawed it in 2015. It was the Northern Branch’s founding leader, Sheikh Raed Salah – who was also a three-time mayor of the city -- who was the guiding hand behind the “Al-Aqsa Is in Danger” campaign, which has tried to convince not only Israeli Arabs, but Muslims around the world, that Israel has a plan to defile if not destroy the Muslim shrines on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, and that Muslims must prevent this at all costs. That’s an accusation that until recently, Israelis could honestly say was a libel, but as Jewish attitudes vis-à-vis the Mount (known as Haram al-Sharif in Arabic) become increasingly aggressive, Sheikh Raed’s warnings raise the fear they could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Although nearly all of the Palestinian terror attacks on Israelis have for years been committed by people from the occupied territories, on the rare occasions when the militants, generally Islamic extremists, have been Israeli citizens, a disproportionate number have been from Umm al-Fahm. They included the two young Isis adherents who staged a shooting attack in Hadera last March, killing two Israeli Border Police members, and, in 2017, three Fahmawis who, leaving the Mount after a visit, pulled out homemade machine guns and killed two Border Police, before being shot dead by security forces. Later, when their bodies were released for burial in their hometown, thousands of mourners joined the funeral processions.
The city has also been struck hard by the crime wave that has swept over Israel’s Arab towns in recent years, with 11 murders there in 2021 alone[DG1] . And it invariably seems to be at the junction of Umm al-Fahm and Highway 65 that periodically, the police clash violently with demonstrators. The most notable example was in October 2000, when three residents of Umm al-Fahm were among the 12 Arab citizens (plus one Palestinian from Gaza) killed by police during the violent protests that took place following the start of the second intifada.
On the rare occasions when Israeli Jews or tourists do venture into Umm al-Fahm, it’s usually to visit the gallery directed by Said Abu Shakra, and founded by him together with his brother Farid. The gallery takes up the three floors of a squat building on Haifa St., a sharply steep road that runs up the side of Mt. Iskander, the 520-meter-high (1,700-foot) hill on which the city is precariously set. Parking is at a premium outside the gallery, and whether you find a spot further up or further down the hill, you will strain either your heart or your knees as you walk – in the street, as there are no sidewalks – to the entrance. But the exertion will pay off, as the gallery is a venue of constant creativity and stimulation. And a visit is a good way to get a slightly more nuanced view of Umm al-Fahm.
Actually, the word “gallery” doesn’t do it justice, as it is really a cultural community center. Open every day but Friday, it often has six different exhibitions running simultaneously, which are changed several times a year. Many take up only one or two rooms, but they are all conceptualized and curated with care and thought, and accompanied by wall texts (and sometimes professional catalogs) in Arabic, Hebrew and English, that don’t usually leave you feeling dumber than you already thought you were. The participating artists are not limited to Arabs, nor necessarily to Israelis: the gallery has a broad mission statement, the overriding goal of which seems to be multicultural exchange, with an emphasis on “encourag[ing] cultural dialogue between Arab and Jewish artists on a variety of themes, including ones related to critical current affairs.”
(The gallery is also a regular participant in the walking tours organized by the non-profit organization Marvad Yarok – Green Tapestry – in a number of towns, Arab and Jewish, in Wadi Ara. In 2020, for example, I participated in a tour in which local residents opened their homes to visitors as well to several artists, who displayed their work. The visitors were introduced to the work of maybe a dozen different Israeli artists, and also learned a bit about the lives of the families who hosted them.)
If exhibitions of contemporary art might be more likely to draw sophisticates from Israel’s coastal towns, the gallery also hosts events and a ceramics workshop for Umm al-Fahm’s elderly, and regular visits from school groups. It also hosts delegations of artists from abroad, sometimes to lead master classes for their local peers. Most notably, it has created an archive dedicated to the oral and photographic history of the city and of the larger Wadi Ara region. This includes a library of video interviews of more than 600 Umm al-Fahm elders (many now deceased), whose lives span the tumultuous period of Israel’s founding and early decades. On the political level, too, the gallery put Umm al-Fahm on the map, and has been leveraged by the city to draw national budgets for crucial infrastructure and social programs there. (The academic director of the archive is Prof. Mustafa Kabha, an expert on the history of Wadi Ara, among many other things, and the editor of a trilingual volume that will be published this fall containing oral histories of 40 Umm al-Fahm residents.)
Said Abu-Shakra has, almost since the opening of the gallery, been planning to make its collection the nucleus of a national museum of Arab art, also to be situated in Umm al-Fahm. It is a goal he has been working toward incrementally for more than two decades, and this autumn, it was looking closer to fruition than ever before, as the government had allocated funds to recognize and assist in establishing the country’s first Arab museum. The outgoing government, that is. Whether the new government currently being formed will make good on that promise remains to be seen. (I hope to deal with the subject in a future blog entry.)
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“Umm al-Fahm” means “mother of” – or more figuratively, “place of” – “charcoal” in Arabic, an allusion to the industry long associated with the city. This entire section of the country, stretching southwest to what is today Herzliya, on the Mediterranean coast, was once covered with forests, the source of the wood that was burned to create charcoal, the main source of fuel until recently. The first known written mention of the name appears in a document from 1265, where it is recorded that the Mamluk ruler Baybars bestowed the lands in this area to the sultan of Syria, Jamal Al-Din al Najibi, after the Mamluks defeated the Mongol army at the Battle of Ain Jalut five years earlier. (Ain Jalut -- Arabic for “Spring of Goliath -- coincidentally, is the location of the two modern-day kibbutzim called Ein Harod, whose art museum is hosting the Abu Shakra exhibition.
In the half-century prior to the United Nations decision on partition, in 1947, Umm al-Fahm became a prosperous producer of fruit, olives (and olive oil), and cattle, fields of commerce that benefited from the city’s transportation links with the rest of Palestine and the Arab world in general. Today, it remains the largest city along the stretch of the lower Galilee called Wadi Ara (in Hebrew, Nahal Iron). But, cut off from the Jenin district in the West Bank, and encompassed by development that prevented it from expanding, Umm al-Fahm has lost significance as a commercial crossroads. Until recently, Arab cities in Israel didn’t receive the kind of government incentives that Jewish towns in the area enjoy (such as the ability to open “industrial zones” that can offer tax benefits to companies that set up shop there). For Umm al-Fahm, this means that few businesses other than retail shops are based in Umm al-Fahm, and most of the working population has to look outside the town for employment.
Wadi Ara was not conquered by Israeli forces during the War of Independence, but rather was ceded by Jordan to Israel in the armistice agreement, signed in 1949 in Rhodes, that ended the war. In return for gaining control of what was then the strategically important road, Highway 65, that connects the coastal plain with the Jezreel Valley, Israel relinquished control of Hebron to Jordan.
The agreement left Umm al-Fahm within Israel, but cut off from the West Bank. If you make your way today to the summit of Mt. Iskander, you will come to the so-called Green Line, where the border ran prior to the 1967 Six-Day War. On the other side is the occupied West Bank. Although the two decades that followed that war allowed for nearly free movement between both sides of the Green Line, that hasn’t been the case since the first intifada (1987-1993), and during the second intifada, Israel actually built a physical barrier to keep West Bank residents from entering Israel at will. This separation barrier is in fact punctured with breaches, which Israel is in no hurry to seal hermetically (a porous border allows Palestinian laborers to enter unofficially, thereby relieving some of the economic distress on the other side, without Israel having to acknowledge it), but one consequence is that well-armed Border Police regularly patrol the residential neighborhoods on the lookout for potential terrorists.
Wajdi Jabarin, a historian and one of the city’s deputy mayors, whose portfolio includes responsibility for transportation, recalled earlier this year how an official from the Ministry of Transportation, during a recent working visit, complained to him about the city’s steep, narrow and crowded streets. No doubt, negotiating Umm al-Fahm in a car can often feel like riding a roller-coaster, including the sense that death awaits around the next turn: two-way streets with room for only one car at a time and hills so steep you fear that you may actually flip over. You can try using Waze to navigate to your destination, but you shouldn’t be surprised if you end up at the dead end of an alley unsure of how you are going to turn the car around.
Jabarin says he responded to the ministry official “jokingly,” saying to him: “You took all of our land, and then pushed us onto the hillside. So, how would you expect us not to have narrow alleyways?”
Jabarin explained to me how, prior to 1948, Umm al-Fahm and its satellite communities spread over some 145,000 dunams (about 35,000 acres), whereas today, it is squeezed into 26,000 dunams. The population, on the other hand, grew tenfold during that same period, from an estimated 5,500 to 56,000 residents, with plans for it to double in the coming decades. The construction that will facilitate that growth is only possible because the city’s current mayor, Dr. Samir Mahameed, came to an agreement with the state last year that will allow for drafting of a master plan for development. Many Arab cities lack such a plan, without which no new construction is legal. Beyond that, a master plan takes into account roads, electrical grids and sewerage systems, recreational areas, and other essential infrastructure that is de rigueur in the 1,000 new towns built for the Jewish population in the past 75 years. (The problem of the severe housing shortage and of a lack of master developments is one I covered in an article in Haaretz earlier this year.)
This last point is a good example of what can happen when rhetoric is confronted by reality. During the 12 years that Benjamin Netanyahu was last prime minister, from 2009 to 2021, the incitement against Israel’s Arab citizens, emanating both from his fellow ministers and from the premier himself, became increasingly harsh and nationalistic, if not racist. Yet those same governments allocated large chunks of the national budget to a variety of programs that were intended to improve conditions in the country’s Arab communities, in terms of infrastructure and planning, education and job training, improved access to mass transit, an added police presence – important, meat-and-potatoes areas of need.
Netanyahu didn’t brag about these achievements on the national stage – why risk being dubbed an “Arab lover”? -- but he did apparently understand the importance to the country of improving economic conditions in Arab society. What he and the majority of Israeli politicians seem unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge is that, crucial as smaller classes, local bus service, and new residential construction are, if they are accompanied by a steady stream of rhetoric reminding the Arabs that this is not really their country, and an atmosphere of suspicion that makes them feel they are on permanent “probation,” it will be difficult for them to feel or express the loyalty that they are suspected of lacking.
In the wake of the March 27 Hadera shooting attack, which was carried out by two cousins from Umm al-Fahm, Ibrahim Aghbaria and Ayman Aghbaria (both of whom were shot dead on the spot), representatives of the local media arrived in the city with the purpose, basically, of checking whether residents were willing to condemn the murders. Knowing a number of Fahmawis, some of them devout Muslims, I was more interested in knowing how they felt about being put on the spot regularly to prove their opposition to murder, and in a more general sense, their loyalty to the state.
When I spoke by phone with Aysha Agbarya, a 32-year-old journalist and social activist who recently finished a doctorate in communications at the Hebrew University, she expressed frustration: “Two guys who apparently underwent brainwashing did something terrible. A crime. But now, it’s as if the entire population is accused of that same crime.” Her feelings were echoed by Anas Mhana, a 31-year-old accountant who noted, with some irony, that his town is “not a place where people are always going around wanting to kill Jews.”
Although Umm al-Fahm’s mayor, Samir Mahamid, had within hours condemned, in unambiguous language, the attack carried out by two sons of Umm al-Fahm, two days later, the municipal website posted a note consoling the families of the two murderers on their deaths. The mayor ordered the removal of the condolence message, and explained that the outside firm maintaining the web site posted a similar message every time a city resident died, but the national condemnation of city hall came so fast and so furious (in particular from the interior minister, Ayelet Shaked), that Mahamid felt obligated to offer his resignation as mayor. A short time later, withdrew his resignation.
My point here is less that Israel’s Arab citizens are held to a different standard of collective responsibility than its Jews, and their loyalty treated as suspect – this is inarguable. Rather, it’s my sense that most Jews have so little contact with Arabs, and what they know of them comes from the media, when it’s reporting on acts of crime or terror, that they may very well assume that many Arabs really do “go around wanting to kill Jews.” The stereotypical thinking is reciprocal, but only to an extent, because Arab citizens all learn Hebrew in school if not at home, and by necessity have more knowledge and understanding of Jews than Jews have of them.