SWD 23

Salaam Aleichem! Shalom Alekhem!

Salaam aleichem! Shalom alekhem! Remembrance and posthumous dignity to four teenage victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict slain 2014, 2015

Art: 2016
Media: Ink, gouache on paper mounted on board. The drawing includes a 2005 Segan-drawn panoramic drawing of the Old Walled city, Jerusalem w/ a rubber stamp, and metallic TSA luggage inspected stickers; American Airlines & El Al printed luggage stickers.
The panoramic drawing was cut into 2 pieces for the composition in the new artwork and the 2 sections were collaged onto the larger drawing paper (with the portraits) using conservation adhesive.
Size: 24 in. H x 29 W (unframed)

The portraits are of four teenage victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict slain 2014, 2015. Two were Jewish Israeli; two were Palestinian.

June 12, 2014, Three Jewish Israeli teenagers: Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16; Naftali Fraenkel,16, were kidnapped at a bus-hitchhiking site near the West Bank settlement where they lived. Their bodies were found June 30. Shaer and Yifrach are portrayed in the drawing. The portraits of Shaer, Yifrach were drawn from photos reproduced in numerous websites. A photo attribution in the Daily Mail (UK) newspaper website is to Reuters; the online seen photos are probably family photos.

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July 2, 2014, Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, was kidnapped by terrorists, then burned to death. Two of the terrorists were minors.

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July 31, 2015: Palestinian Laith al-Khalidi, 17, was shot by soldiers. He was at a demonstration protesting the murder of a toddler in the West Bank. The following day he died of his injuries.
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The plants seen in the center of the drawing were inspired by a drawing I did in Jerusalem in 2007, titled Jerusalem Plant.

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One thing happened that really distressed me after I did this drawing and the earlier drawing of the Sight-seeing with Dignity human rights art series, titled Shalom alekhem! Salaam Aleichem! I have been criticized by self-described “pro-Israel” people for my portraying Israeli Jewish and Palestinian victims of the conflict in the same drawing. And I have been criticized by self-described “pro-Palestinian” people for the same. As if the children and the teens who are victims of this conflict can’t be considered victims due to the politics of the “blame game.” The dehumanization-of-the-other continues on, sometimes far from Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. I find their respective anger that Jewish victims – and Palestinian victims – should not be depicted as the comparable to be obscene. Why? It is not children nor teens who drive the conflict and the never-ending wars, terror attacks and retaliatory missile strikes.  Adults drive and perpetuate the conflict.
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If both sides of the S. African conflict could sit down and break bread – keeping in mind that the ANC was considered a terrorist organization no less than how Israel and the U.S. view Hamas – and if the Catholic and Protestant extremists who drove the northern Ireland conflict could sit down and hammer out the peace, there is no reason under the sun why Israel, Hamas, and the P.A. cannot do the same.

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How many more deaths, funerals and physically wounded and emotionally scarred  kids, youth and adults must there be?

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The following is a notable quote from the very last column, by now deceased American Jewish writer, Leonard Fein, published in (The) Forward, then a Jewish weekly newspaper published in NY, about the conflict and the toll it takes on Gazans and on Israelis both:

“I was in Sderot, which for years was the prime target of rockets from Gaza. A friend who lives there explained to me that all the children of Sderot… suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. All of them. As it happens, I was in Gaza the very next day, chatting with a prominent psychiatrist who explained to me that all the children in Gaza suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sorry, they were both wrong. This is not a “post” anything. The trauma goes on, seething daily, now and not so rarely then boiling over, scalding tens, hundreds, thousands of people. What we have is ongoing traumatic stress disorder: OTSD.”

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A video of a multi-image drawing I did on walks around Jerusalem in 2007. At each site I sat outdoors, sometimes on benches, sometimes on the ground. The drawing, titled Jerusalem Mosaic,  depicts buildings and sites pertaining to Jewish, Christian and Islamic Jerusalem.

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Video of  a 2007 drawing I did titled Jerusalem Tree.