Last year, protests broke out in Iran against the regime. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” became the motivating voice behind a movement. Today in Israel, five recently-unveiled murals highlight that very message.
In Jerusalem on Thursday, Hooman Khalili, the producer of the Woman Life Freedom Murals Project, said he wants to show that Jews stand with the people of Iran. He spoke at The Jerusalem Post’s Celebrate the Faces of Israel conference at the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem.
In an interview with Tamar Uriel-Beeri, managing editor of Jpost.com, Khalili discussed the way he came to lead this unique project. He is a movie-maker who made the first feature film to be filmed on a smartphone and had a theatrical release. The film was called Olive, and Dolly Parton wrote the music for it. As a successful DJ, he also had a line in the film Cars.
The murals project began in San Francisco, he said. He told how he was approached by a muralist in California who wanted to win attention for the protesters in Iran. The first mural painted in California soon went viral, and was then noticed by Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, who invited him to Israel.
Khalili credits a number of people as key to the way this project has seen success and support, including Emily Schrader and former MK Ruth Wasserman Lande. She has helped him to find walls for the project and to speak to mayors of cities where the murals appear. He has now made five murals in Israel. He says these show that “Jews stand with the people of Iran.”
In an interview, he said, “I know I’m the only artist invited to Israel to create Murals supporting the Persian people and I had to take this opportunity.” Khalili was born Muslim and left Iran with his mother, eventually ending up in San Mateo, California. He became a Christian and was taken in by the Presbyterian Church. When he came to Israel his first mural made a major impact.
“I was in the Holy Land praying a lot and so when that first mural went up everyone was blown away and the mural was shown on Iranian television every hour on the hour for 36 hours straight. That was the first one that was in Jerusalem. Both the Iranian government and opposition media showed it,” he said.
“I prayed a lot and if God wanted it to keep going, I feel like the designs are downloaded from heaven and I’m looking at images downloaded from Iran; the whole idea is to unify the Israeli and Persian customs in one image. You’ll see the flag of Jerusalem because I want everything pointing to Jerusalem. In Netanya, one image had the nightingale, which is the national bird of Iran, and the one being unveiled on April 30 will have the hoopoe, which is the national bird of Israel,” he added.
3,000 years of friendship and counting
Khalili says that Persians have been friends of Jews for 3,000 years. “From the time of Cyrus, and they’ve only been enemies for less than 50 years. I feel like I’m called to at least start building that bridge [between Jews and Persians]. If Iran becomes stable, the whole Middle East becomes stable; I will pay for every one of these murals until I go broke or until a wealthy patron comes along,” he says. That is how important this project is to him, and he is hoping to make 18 murals in Israel.
”That was a divine number that was a given. Two different people prayed over me. One was a Jewish woman and one was a guy named Daniel Lim, who serves as the chief executive officer of the International House of Prayer of Kansas City, and they both said God was telling them the number 18,” he said.
He added that he hopes the next 13 murals turn out perfect. “All these are 95% there. In the world of art we have this phrase for film-making, which is ‘Great art is never finished, it’s abandoned,’ so I have to move on from one and keep going,” he said.
“My hope is to spread the love throughout Israel with these murals.” He says the murals are meant to inspire the Iranian people. “They are meant to show the Jewish people are standing with the Persian people.” He also praises Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for supporting the people of Iran. In addition, he thinks the recent visit by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi was important. Pahlavi visited the mural in Netanya.
The mural in Nazareth is particularly special, Khalili says. “The second mural is in Nazareth, and that wall is owned by a Muslim man. The artist Benzi Broffman said we should pick Nazareth to build a bridge between Arabs and Jews, so you have a wall owned by Muslim men painted by a Jew and organized by a Persian Christian.”