The Gush Katif Museum is devoted to works by those who opposed the Gaza pullout.
By DAVID STROMBERGgush katif museum 224 88(photo credit: Tovah Lazaroff)
The recently opened Gush Katif Museum on Rehov Sha'arei Tzedek, between Jaffa Road and Rehov Agrippas, has a grassroots, underground feel, with graffiti scattered along its entryway.
Nestled behind two apartment buildings, the six-room museum commemorates the 2005 disengagement from Gaza with historical background and documents, a small library, visual art, documentary photos and video, and a screening room.
The design is humble but professional, with a limited space in which to present its take on a complicated and unresolved period in the history of Israel.
"There's a [conceptual] path that people pass through," says museum director Yankele Klein, a former supplements editor of the newspaper Makor Rishon with a background in film production. "I want people to have a strong reaction to disengagement, to feel what people there felt."
The museum began after Klein was contacted by SOS Israel, a Chabad organization dedicated to fighting for Greater Israel, which was familiar with his work at Makor Rishon. The entire project started only four months before the planned opening date - Yud Be'av (the 10th of the month of Av), the disengagement's third anniversary.
Klein took on Miriam Gottlieb as an assistant, and together they began researching content - historical information, documents, films, artwork. He traveled all over the country, meeting people and artists in their homes and galleries, and collecting the pieces that would eventually make up the current exhibition.
"We want to give people the tools to see the disengagement in a different way so that next time we deal with such questions, we have better tools to think of different aspects," says Klein.
The museum opens with a large mural of a beachscape with light blue skies and pale sand. At its center, a time line shows the history of Jewish settlement in Gaza.
The narrative arc begins in 1200 BCE with Judah's conquest of Gaza. It passes through King Solomon's 40 years of Gaza rule beginning in 976 BCE and a series of resettlements, abandonments and expulsions, until it reaches the settlements of the last 30 years, describing the tourism and agriculture that had been developed there.
According to Klein, 90 percent of pesticide-free vegetables came from Gaza. "The generic term for any pesticide-free produce at the shuk was Gush Katif produce," explains Klein, "and some people still call it that way."
A wide, wooden bench fills the center of the first room, and on the walls are photos of an ideal beach, flourishing greenhouses, and scenes of prayer from a synagogue, as well as the first section of a three-part poem by Jerusalemite Daniel Mirski called "Yahrzeit," which describes life in Gush Katif as "a place so pleasing, the fateful fortress of scores."
From here visitors enter two gallery rooms, one slightly
larger than the other, where there are paintings, photographs, ceramics and mixed-media works that either deal with or relate to the evacuation.
Klein says that he "wanted the images in these rooms to speak for themselves. This forces people to think about what the artist meant when he or she made it."
He expects the art exhibits to change every three or four months.
A piece by Geula Ben-Arush Flesser, a student at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, shows a printed landscape on a ceramic background that has been broken into separate pieces. Jutting from under the image is braille.
Klein says the work is symbolic of the breaking up of Gush Katif, and the blindness of the people who planned disengagement.
On the wall across hangs a large, striking painting with a black background of a young religious settler couple with what is presumably their first baby hanging across the woman's torso.
The piece was painted by Solomon Porat in 2004 in Gush Etzion's Bat Ayin - before disengagement and in a different part of the country - but Klein included it in the exhibition because he believed that the work related to a deeper phenomenon in Israeli society.
"Their look somehow gets at what has torn the people of this country apart to reach such a situation," he says, adding that something in their appearance - from their slightly standoffish poses to their modern but religious clothing to their removed expressions - suggests a sense of separation.
Avi Sabah, a painter and one of the founders of the collective Barbur Gallery in Nahlaot, was glad to be able to see Porat's painting, but says that at the Gush Katif Museum, its potential context narrowed. "Art should be free and enigmatic," says Sabah. "It's the viewer who should take it somewhere, not the museum."
Before entering the next room in the museum, one is confronted by what Klein calls the Orange Wall, dedicated to the protest movement that used orange as its color of solidarity and was active before the pull-out.
Though many protests were held throughout the country, particularly in Jerusalem, Klein decided to focus on images from the human chain that connected tens of thousands of people from the Gaza Strip to the Western Wall before disengagement.
As with the rest of the art exhibits, photos on the Orange Wall may change to show other aspects of the protest movement, says Klein.
Next the visitor passes through a hanging plastic divider and enters the Black Room. "Everyone cries in this room," Klein says.
Its walls are covered with blown-up images from the evacuation itself: silhouettes of faceless policemen on horseback shining a red light into the night; a child in a red shirt and fisherman's hat offering cookies to lines of soldiers with black vests and bullhorns; a woman with her hair covered looking somberly out of a bus window, a toddler on her lap, and an orange Star of David stitched to her sleeve. That the bus was air-conditioned, that its destination was not a concentration or death camp, that the woman had donned the Star of David on her own initiative - none of this changes the fact that the evacuation was perceived in the community of settlers and protesters as the actions of a fascist state persecuting its Jewish citizens.
The second part of Mirski's poem, in white lettering on one of the black walls, describes the destruction caused by disengagement: "Katif is a wasteland now. A plot of splintered land./She's scorched by fire, she's wounded - oh how has she fallen prey?"
A video projection shows scenes of the forced removal of settlers and empathizers. "I purposefully edited into the film only images of soldiers taking people out of their homes and synagogues," explains Klein. "I wanted to show the big contrast between the soldiers who used force and the people who used no force but to hold onto the floor and each other."
In considering which images to include, Klein says he wanted the museum to offer an alternative to the pro-disengagement narrative that dominates the media. "The attitude of this museum is unique and has to stay so. I don't see any reason to give this small wall space to this [already prevalent] opinion."
Sabah believes that one is manipulated into a certain kind of response. "As a viewer, here you're going to feel pity, and maybe if you hold a certain political viewpoint, also anger."
After the emotional Black Room, visitors enter a small gallery that focuses on the aftermath of disengagement. There are images of the reburial of bodies exhumed from Gush Katif and brought to Jerusalem, as well as a list of all Jews who have died in the Gaza Strip since 1970.
Here visitors also see the last section of Mirski's poem, where he writes: "The redeemed shall return to Katif" and that until then "the cry of the woeful, those who were wronged and mistreated" will continue.
On another wall hangs a copy of then-prime minister Ariel Sharon's speech on the day of disengagement, where he warned "the harshest response ever" to any attacks by Palestinian extremists, and promised that, "Whatever disagreements there will be between us [evacuees], we will not abandon you after the evacuation."
Just below the speech is a graph showing the dramatic increase in the number of Kassam rockets that have fallen on Israel from Gaza before and after disengagement. And on another wall is data showing the cities into which the Katif communities dispersed.
"There's still a lot of work to do here [at the museum]," Klein admits. "We worked fast to open the museum on time, and now we can improve on what we did."
"To open this gallery in Jerusalem will make it popular," says Sabah. "If you want an audience, this is the place to do it."
On the other hand, he says that what's missing is humor. "I'm not talking about jokes, but without humor and self-critique, it's impossible to do art."
Many of the museum visitors on this particular Friday morning were religiously observant. Throughout the day, one visitor after another approached Klein and thanked him for creating the museum.
"I think this place is amazing," says Sarah, a resident of Gush Etzion. "I hope there will also be activities here for youth."
She also expressed a wish to see more art and poetry by those who were evacuated, and by their empathizers.
Asked whether he sees space in the museum for portraying those who supported disengagement, Klein says that he doesn't imagine including such exhibitions, but does hope to hold events or discussions with its advocates.
"We're the same people, we live in the same place. Different attitudes create different reactions, which can lead to separation and hate," he says. "With a better understanding between the populations, this couldn't have happened."
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