An opportunity to look into each other's eyes
Chapter 4: Said Abu Shakra: "Apparently, this used to be a Palestinian village"
(This is number 4 of a series of posts I’ll be publishing in the coming weeks about the background to an art exhibition that will be hanging at the museum at Kibbutz Ein Harod until May 2023. The show is a retrospective of the works of five artists from one extraordinary family: the Abu Shakras of Umm al-Fahm.
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.
Earlier chapters:
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
Link to Chapter 3: “Umm al-Fahm!? Is it even safe to go there?”
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 )
Several years ago, I asked Said Abu Shakra how and when his family had come to Umm al-Fahm. Today the name Abu Shakra is closely identified with theat city, if only because five members of the clan became highly regarded artists, and the three of them who survive continue to live there. Moreover, the city, Israel’s third-largest Arab town, is itself an integral element in all of their art. Beyond that, the art gallery that Said (pronounced “sa-eed”) and his brother Farid opened there in 1996, the first gallery to open in an Israeli-Arab town, has introduced thousands of visitors annually to Umm al-Fahm, helping in at least a small way to counter the negative reputation it has among many Israelis.
The name Umm al-Fahm (“mother of charcoal,” a reference to the industry historically associated with the town) first appears in a source from the 13th, but much of current population migrated to Umm al-Fahm from other parts of the country in the wake of the 1948-49 war. I wondered where the Abu Shakras fit into the picture.
Said answered with a story. He and his wife, Siham, an educator, are part of a group of friends who gather for brunch every few weekends, each time at a different home. Most of the others, he said, are affiliated with the Weizmann Institute of Science. On the weekend in question, the group was meeting at the home of a Jewish friend in Moshav Kerem Maharal, south of Haifa. The friend and his family had only recently bought the house and moved in, and were anxious to show it off.
“So my wife and I go to Kerem Maharal,” a 50-km drive from Umm al-Fahm, Said recalls. “And on our way in [to the moshav], I see a lot of sabras [prickly-pear cactuses], and also oak trees and olive trees. And I say to Siham, ‘Apparently, this used to be a Palestinian village.’”
As one is repeatedly reminded when viewing the retrospective exhibition of the Abu Shakras that opened last week at the Mishkan Museum at Kibbutz Ein Harod, the sight of sabras growing wild in Israel is an almost certain indication that a Palestinian village stood there before 1948. This stubborn vegetal survivor was often employed as a living fence to mark off the borders of a village, or of an individual family’s land. (As will be discussed in the chapter about Asim Abu Shakra, whose paintings often featured cactuses, both Zionists and Palestinians claim the prickly pear as their exclusive symbol, and there was a period when art critics allowed themselves to be dragged into what is essentially a political argument over just who is permitted to paint it.)
It seems that the Abu Shakras’ host, “who is really an excellent person,” according to Said, had also been thinking about Kerem Maharal’s, because when his guests came inside, he asked Said to “please excuse me for buying a house that was built on Palestinian land.” To which he added, “If I hadn’t bought it, someone else would have.” He then asked Said if he knew what Palestinian settlement had once stood on the land of Kerem Maharal. Said didn’t know offhand, but he took out his phone to see what he could learn.
The answer, he learned, was, Ijzim, which is quite a coincidence, because, as Said says he announced to the group, “to the best of my memory, the Abu Shakra family of Umm al-Fahm is from Ijzim.”
I recount this story here mainly for two reasons. First, it’s a reminder that most Israeli Jews know very little about Palestinian life in the Land of Israel prior to 1948. The state does not encourage them, to put it mildly, to learn that history, but there are many private initiatives, such as the organization Zochrot, dedicated to gathering as much information as possible about the 350 localities (that’s the low estimate) that were evacuated and destroyed as a result of the war.
Second, it should be clear from the almost wry tone employed by Said in relating this tale that he is not driven by rage or a need for vengeance. He obviously saw the irony involved in the interchange with his friend at Kerem Maharal, but he was not about to let it damage their relationship. At the same time, he has no intention of forgetting the past, or of agreeing to his Jewish fellow citizens doing the same. In fact, he has no doubt that Arab-Jewish reconciliation is dependent on both groups being able and willing to talk openly about their joint history.
Such conversations, as he puts it, are “an opportunity to place the narratives – yours and mine – in the center, and to speak about them, to look in each other’s eyes, and from there to move forward.”
•••
Said doesn’t know much about what brought the Abu Shakras to Ijzim, but it’s his understanding that two of his ancestors left that town to resettle in Umm al-Fahm. That was “in about 1850.” A vague family tradition says that the Abu Shakras were resented in Ijzim for their dominance over the community – “the village was angry that they controlled everything” -- and that the departure of the two forebears was precipitated by physical threats. Once they were settled in their new hometown, these two great-great grandfathers themselves had a falling-out, and one of them left Umm al-Fahm.
Today, he says, some 1,000 to 1,200 members of the Abu Shakra clan live in Umm al-Fahm, and all are descended from the lone great-great-grandfather who remained, and who, in the end, it seems, did get some respect. According to Said, “He was a generous person, who was very well regarded in the community, even before his arrival. He dug a well alongside the Wadi Ara road, and anyone who came along with his donkey could stop there and know he would receive help.”
Said’s role as chronicler extends beyond his family’s history, and also encompasses the modern history of Umm al-Fahm. It began, however, with his mother, when it dawned on Said that she had never spoken much about her own life to her children. That realization followed a conversation with Jewish friends, the children of Holocaust survivors, who explained that it was only late in life that the parents had begun to open up about their experiences, and that they had taken advantage of the opportunity to capture their accounts on tape. Said decided he would sit his mother, Maryam, down and interview her about her life, “for when she isn’t here to tell about it herself.” That was in 1992, when she was 61.
Married off at age 12 to a man 17 years her senior, to whom she bore seven children before he took a second wife, Maryam had, by any measure, a difficult life. She never learned to read or write, and she always lived at a subsistence level, but, according to Said, his mother knew how to take “the great difficulties she encountered and transform them into optimism, and she lifted us, this large family, up from the ground, and elevated us to the sky.”
Galia Bar Or, co-curator, with Housni Khatib Shehadeh, of the Ein Harod show, attributes Maryam’s positive approach to life, an attitude that infused her home, to her being the daughter of a Sufi sheikh (teacher). Additionally, even after Maryam had been abandoned by her husband, Abd al-Qader Abu Shakra, she who took in and cared for his mother -- her mother-in-law, Balkis Sheikh Zayed al-Kilani – when she was no longer independent. Balkis too was descended from a distinguished Sufi, although in her case it was the 12th-century Abdul Qadr Gilani (for whom she named her son), who in turn claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Apparently, Maryam and Balkis created an atmosphere of love and of mutual responsibility, and it left its impact on the children.
“Said is not exactly a Sufi, nor is Farid,” his younger brother, with whom he founded the gallery, Bar Or told me in an interview, “but they took that [Sufi spirit] in with their mother’s milk. And it’s also the behavior, the comportment of the mother. It’s possible that they didn’t even always understand her. The way she behaved in conflicts, for example: Her generosity, her ability to give, the way that she could embrace, in a place where there was hatred toward her, or dismissal. She would overcome it. And she conveyed this to her children.”
After Farid and Said opened the art gallery in Umm al-Fahm, in 1996, their mother recounted to them a dream she had had, writes Bar Or in the catalog, “in which her sons rose up amid the scenery of a wonderful lake on a clear crisp day…. Maryam’s description alludes to the Garden of Eden as Islam perceives it, a view that runs as a common thread throughout ancient Sufi literature. Although Maryam never read this literature, its images permeated her inner world.”
When Said began interviewing his mother, he borrowed a tape recorder from work – at the time he was working for the internal affairs division of the Israel Police. Later, he moved to video. In the end, he accumulated 25 hours of interviews with Maryam, conversations that served him in writing the joint memoir of himself and Maryam that is scheduled for publication early next year. Additionally, the Ein Harod show includes a short video work, made by Said Abu Shakra and Yaela Zalait and Bilal Sa’ed, composed of short clips filmed during Maryam’s final weeks, as members of the extended family arrived to take their leave of her and receive her blessing.
The second great influence in Said’s life was his older brother, Walid, the pioneer who left Umm al-Fahm to study art in Jewish Tel Aviv. From there, he forged a successful career in both the local and international art scenes. Born in 1956, Said is a decade younger than Walid, and to a large extent he followed in his brother’s footsteps. When he was still in junior high, he spent a summer in Tel Aviv working as dishwasher, in order to help support the family. All of the male children were encouraged to study and pursue their dreams, but they were also expected to work and turn most of their income over to the family.
Today, Said says, “I wouldn’t do that to my children, send them at age 15 to Tel Aviv, and have them come home once a week. I wouldn’t do that, because I saw terrible things there. I saw criminals, shall we say sex deviants, prostitutes, drug addicts, I encountered everything. And I was a kid.”
Interestingly, Said went on to work with street youth, first for the Tel Aviv municipality, and later for the police. After doing a year-long course at Beit Berl college that trained people to work as counselors with youth at risk, he took a job working with Arab youth in Jaffa, a job that he quit after two years, when he concluded that he wasn’t receiving the support necessary to succeed at the job. He went on to take a similar position with the Israel Police, where, in contrast, he says today, “I had authority, and I had contact with psychologists, and with social workers, and I could have an impact on kids before they committed their first crime.”
At the same time he was moving up the ranks in the police (he spent seven years in internal affairs, and then worked in the youth unit at the national headquarters), Said was also following the lead of his older brother in studying art. In 1980-83, Said attended the Avni Institute of Art, in Tel Aviv, the same school where Walid trained.
The first time I interviewed Said, back in 2000, he explained that one of the satisfactions he derived from art was that, as a civil servant (in the police), he was not permitted to speak publicly about politics, but that couldn’t stop him from saying “whatever I want on canvas.” In fact, when he retired from the force in 2004, in order to dedicate himself fully to the gallery, which he aspired to turn into Israel’s first Arab museum, he also put his paint brushes in storage.
•••
In 1987, shortly before he and fellow Umm al-Fahm native Siham, newly married, moved to Tel Aviv, where she was to begin her studies at the Lewinsky College of Education, Said organized an exhibition at their home in Umm al-Fahm of the work of 10 artists, Arabs and Jews. That got him thinking about organizing a permanent “meeting place for Jews and Arabs.”
It took nearly another decade, but in 1995, having returned to Umm al-Fahm, he began looking in earnest for a space. The death of his cousin Asim Abu Shakra, in 1990, gave him a push, in that it led him to consider the lack of exhibition spaces for Arab artists within their own communities.
“We didn’t have a single Arab gallery in Israel. Not one. I thought: If I want to exhibit, why do I need to be dependent on Jews?” At the same time, he recalls today, he realized that, “if I just continued to sit [passively], nothing would happen. And if I just blamed the State of Israel, nothing would change.”
Said felt that anything he did needed to be of a high standard: “If it’s going to reflect my culture, it needs to do that on a high and proper level. It would need to be of quality and excellence.”
Not that there was funding available for such a purpose. “There aren’t [public] budgets for things like this,” he says. “But then I thought about the way we grew up. We were raised in a small house -- many children in a small house. But there was the [maternal] embrace, and there was the attention, and love, and there was satisfaction. There was someone who directed things and took them forward.”
•••
The Umm al-Fahm Gallery of Art (which recently added the words “in memory of Walid Abu Shakra” to its name), has been operating non-stop since 1996, although during the initial Covid lockdowns, it was not open to the public. Farid left his position as co-director of the gallery after a few years, although he continued to curate shows there, and exhibit his own art. Today the gallery is widely known as a venue for artistic exchange, and a place where artists can address issues related to the Nakba. However, thanks to the serious and judicious approach of its staff, its shows are not gratuitously provocative, and don’t attempt to score cheap points for the sake of headlines, which may help explain why it has succeeded thus far not to stir up the kind of protests and boycotts that are common these days in Israel, and that promise to become more so in the near future.
As Galia Bar Or characterizes it in the catalog of the Ein Harod show, “The gallery conveys the memories of the ghosts of the past, commemorates the torment of the Nakba, and opens its gates to anyone who creates art: Jews, Palestinians, and others. Its mission statement is the creation of a venue of dialogue grounded in the realization that we are all created in the divine image. Said and Farid, it seems, not only grew up with this awareness but also undertook to disseminate it.
The first time I came to interview the brothers about their art gallery, 22 years ago, Said also took me to his home. There, he showed me the studio where, working late at night, the only free time he had, he did his own painting. Leaning against the walls were a number of finished works -- large, bold-stroked canvases, all of them focused on the theme of power, particularly power out of balance. I remember one painting, for example, of a muscular horse flailing on its back on the ground, while above it in the air flies a faceless and anonymous fighter jet. The violence is not overt, but the threat is overwhelming. Yet, although the horse is clearly defenseless, it retains a certain dignity.
At the time, Said spoke directly about what directed him to paint horses, and also bulls -- farm animals that represent power and pride, but that he was also matching up against modern weapons of war, for which they are no match. Attacking from the sky, the airplanes are oblivious to the majesty of what they can so easily destroy.
“I love them and identify with them,” he told me at the time, about the animals. “I see them as me, and so I put them in all kinds of situations that I myself have been in. Whenever I was on my back and exposed to the airplane,” by which I assumed he meant an overwhelming threat, “I was saved. How? Thanks to my sense of survival. Because of my balance.”
By this past spring, having returned to painting two years earlier, he was now depicting hyenas and bulls, although in a similar manner to the earlier works. And he still says that his paintings “talk about my own war of survival. That is, a war for existence of the strong and wild, the bull, who wants to live, and who sometimes wins and sometimes is vanquished.
“I don’t want to be a hyena -- wild and a predator -- I want to be a bull who fights for his very existence. And so, the symbolism of my being a bull fighting for existence, it will always be with me, whether it’s a bull or it’s a horse. The technique can change, maybe the way I do it will change, but I will always be within that bull or that horse.”
While a large portion of Said’s canvases and drawings portray large and powerful, even masculine, figures, whether animals or jets, another portion is devoted to paintings are of the women of his town – not only Maryam, but other family members and neighbors. Needless to say, these are not remotely risqué depictions of conventional beauty, but impressionistic images in blue, red and black of village elders, women who went through the trials of the Nakba, keeping their families and their society together, but whose impassive faces betray little sign of what they may have endured.
Beyond the paintings of Umm al-Fahm residents, there is also the library of video interviews. To date, the gallery’s archive, which is directed by Prof. Mustafa Kabha, has collected and digitized interviews with more than 600 people from the area, many of them no longer alive. Added to that are still photographs of than 800 residents, and thousands more that have been collected from Palestinians dispersed around the world. And when Walid Abu Shakra, the oldest of the brothers, died in 2019, he willed to the archive his own collection of some 10,000 photographs that he had shot during his regular visits to Umm al-Fahm after his move to London in 1974.
•••
As long as I have known him, Said has evinced a sense of responsibility for the preservation of Palestinian memory. On the one hand, this is the straightforward mission of the archive, but it is also reflected almost inevitably in his and his relatives’ creative work, which could only have been done by Palestinian artists. Yet because, like the gallery’s shows, almost none of the artwork is overtly political or preachy, it makes it easier for viewers of non-Palestinian background to identify emotionally with it, without coercing them into drawing political conclusions from it.
As Israeli Arabs become increasingly confident about their right to talk about the Nakba, large numbers of Jews have come around to accepting that acknowledgment of the Palestinian narrative does not constitute the first step toward national suicide. But at least an equally large portion of Israeli society sees an existential threat in such an open discussion. Among them, the determination to shut off any possibility of such a discussion – by law, if necessary – only grows stronger. The willingness of the “coalition of change” that governed the state during the past year to accept an Arab party as a legitimate member of that coalition, seen by so many as an important step toward greater integration of the Arab minority – and inevitably, of its narrative -- into Israeli society, was for many on the right catastrophic. For them, reconciliation and a shared society are not the prize to be sought; the best the Arabs can expect is being tolerated, if they remember their place.
For Said Abu Shakra, there is no alternative to reconciliation, and he is certain that can only be achieved on a level playing field, where both peoples begin from a position of equality.
“You’re here, and I’m here, this is my pain, and we both are permitted to mourn over our history” – that’s his aspiration. “Let me mourn, let me cry, over the loss of my house, for example. But that doesn’t mean that are competing in this, we will build a shared future… at the center of which is the idea that we are both human beings. And equal. You understand?”