Najib Nassar was born on the first day of the year 1865 in the village Ain Anoub, in a hilly area southeast of Beirut, the son of a Christian family. It was a difficult time for Christians in Lebanon. They were fighting for their rights under Ottoman rule and the hostile Muslim groups. The Christians found allies in the European powers who were trying to establish a foothold in the Middle East. Nassar went on to study pharmacology and found work at the Scottish Hospital in Tiberias. From there, he made his way to Haifa.
Like many residents of Lebanon and Syria, Nassar emigrated to what would later become Israel because of financial reasons, but that did not prevent him from becoming one of the founders of the Palestinian national movement. Feeding on the religious anti-Semitism that was rife in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Nassar flung himself into battling the Zionist movement and the idea of Jews returning to their homeland. In 1908 he founded the El-Carmel newspaper in Haifa, one of the first media outlets that were used to create a "Palestinian" national consciousness in response to the Jewish national movement. Like many of the "Palestinian people" at that time and later, Nassar wasn't even a native of Haifa or even of the country.
I thought about Nassar's story recently as I was visiting an exhibit titled "1948" at the Haifa Museum of Art. The exhibit has garnered criticism for one of the pieces it includes – "Evil," by Eliyahou Bokobza. The piece, which shows a soldier aiming his weapon at a woman shielding a child, is reminiscent of one of the most well-known images from the Holocaust. Bokobza claims that his work has nothing to do with the Arab-Jewish conflict and there is nothing that identifies the soldier as Israeli. Nevertheless, in a catalogue published a few years ago for one of Bokobza's solo shows, the same piece is described as "The artist placing himself in the arms of the Palestinian mother, as a victim of a militaristic system."
Art is open to interpretation, and everyone can see something different in a given piece. That is what the curators of the exhibit and the museum director explained.
Still, this is how I felt: Bokobza's work is not the main problem, the entire exhibit is. The message it sends is one of the misery and victimhood of the Arabs who were forced to leave their homes and property and flee from death, vs. the Jews, who are portrayed as a destructive, well-organized military force, even if here and there it includes references to the Holocaust. There is no mention of Arab violence, little mention of Haifa's unique story in 1948 and the efforts the Jews there made to keep their Arab neighbors in the city. It is only referenced as a footnote to news photographs hung outside the exhibit hall, on the museum's outside walls, like an unwanted child.
The exhibit fits in well with the Arabs' partial and false narrative about the events of 1948, which at its core presents them as victims of Jewish "evil." It holds no critical mirror up to reality; it just creates a perverted reality. It is part of the organized activity by extremist Arabs and Jews to turn Haifa, which is still home to fairly successful coexistence, into a hotbed of Palestinian art.
It's no coincidence: Haifa, they argue, is a symbol of the "true occupation" – the one that began in 1948. The art does not represent the entirety of the Arab population in Haifa, Christians and Muslims. But the decision by newly elected Mayor Einat Kalisch-Rotem to appoint extremist Arab activists to important roles on the city council does no service to the coexistence she claims to want to protect. Instead of caving to the extremists, it would be better to stop them before it's too late.
