Artists pursue coexistence in the shadow of Gaza

Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas’s brutal attack triggered Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza, some Jewish-Arab coexistence projects have come under severe strain, with participants dropping out, tensions simmering and a sense of irrelevance threatening their good intentions.

This was not the case at the Artists in Residence Program at Givat Haviva where five Jewish-Israeli and five Palestinian-Israeli artists lived together and created side by side for three months, culminating in an exhibit of their works that is stimulating and evocative. It runs until June 7.

The works touch with varying degrees of intensity on diverse themes and symbols, including censorship, individuation from family, memory, the deeper meaning of fishing and what would strike some Jews as an explosive verse by Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish.

To their credit, the curators enabled artistic freedom in an environment in which the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu is accused of stifling expression, especially among Palestinian-Israelis.

Residency Program Coordinator Orit Reingewertz said the participants had Arab and Jewish mentors and worked in a shared studio “so that they see each other and hear each other all the time.” Every week they met as a group to discuss what they had experienced. The Jewish artists studied Arabic.

One of the reasons the residency did not become fraught, despite the war, was that “the emphasis of the program wasn’t on ‘let’s talk about coexistence’, but rather on artistic practice itself - to learn about art in Israel and to experience working together,” said Darya Efrat, who returned to Israel following the start of the war after 12 years in the US, Portugal and Sweden. She saw the program both as a way to meet other artists and a chance to get more involved in Jewish-Palestinian coexistence.