Pro-Settler Israelis Stake Out a Place in Art

The photograph of the front of a Jewish settler’s home, nearly life-size and mounted on a box-like frame, conveys the feeling that the rest of the house sits behind it.

But it is an illusion: The “interior” is missing, save for more photographs of the kitchen and dining room that have been cut into the shape of tents.

The artist, Avner Bar Hama, describes the piece as a critique of Israel’s plan to dismantle settlements in the Gaza Strip this summer. Bar Hama, 59, views the withdrawal as an act of surrender by Israel.

“The idea is to show that your house, which was your most secure place, is going to be temporary,” said Bar Hama, chairman of the art department at a college in Tel Aviv. “You can’t believe that whatever you built over the years is going down in one day.”

The exhibit, displayed at a municipal art gallery outside Tel Aviv, is part of a surge in artistic projects by Israelis on the political right who oppose the government’s Gaza plan.

Right-wing art, for years an oxymoron in a country where artistic expression has in effect been the domain of the left, still finds itself on the fringes, relegated mainly to obscure galleries and publications and scoffed at by Israeli cognoscenti as not particularly good.

But opposition to the planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and a slice of the West Bank has fueled pro-settler artists and poets with fresh energy and purpose, and their works are making their way into the public eye. They are turning to the arts -- painting, poetry, filmmaking, street theater -- to underscore their belief that all the land, including the occupied territories, is divinely endowed to Jews.

Bar Hama knows his construction is unlikely to stop or even slow the withdrawal, formally called a disengagement. The point, he said, is to use art to prod people to consider the pullout’s human dimensions. “Art can bring people to think,” he said. “I show people things that the newspapers are not showing.”

One poet who is involved in the budding movement, Eliaz Cohen, said the right had become Israel’s new avant-garde, protesting from outside the establishment just as leftists once did. “The map turned upside down,” he said.

Supporters say the still-evolving artistic drive reflects a realization by the political and religious right that it may have avoided Israel’s cultural mainstream for too long.

That camp “has really undergone a transformation over the last couple of years,” said Neta Ariel, director of the Maale School of Television, Film & the Arts in Jerusalem. “They have come to the conclusion that they must actively participate in Israeli culture, not only reading ‘their’ books and newspapers, but creating works of their own.

“People began to understand that the message can be conveyed not only by protest and demonstration but also by art,” she said.

One of the school’s graduates, Menora Hazani, has compiled 20 hours of videotape tracking daily life in the West Bank settlement of Homesh, where she and her husband have lived for 3 1/2 years. Homesh is one of four West Bank settlements that are to be evacuated, along with all 21 communities in Gaza. All told, about 9,000 settlers are to be removed.

Hazani’s effort to chronicle the uncertain months leading up to the withdrawal has for now fallen prey to financing problems and a camera that stopped working. The 28-year-old teacher is torn over whether persevere with the film or quit to devote her time to settler protests aimed at preventing the evacuation.

“If I don’t film it, it would be a shame,” she said during an interview at her hilltop home.

The withdrawal plan has roiled Israeli politics for months, breeding fear of a lasting rift between the politically potent settler movement and the wider Israeli public, which generally has been supportive of the plan.

An Israeli literary review made a splash this year when it devoted an issue to the theme of “disengaging.” The journal, Mashiv Haruach, included works by well-known leftists.

But most noteworthy were the contributions by anti-pullout writers who, in elegiac tones, sought to evoke the confusion and sense of loss felt by Jewish settlers. In “Invitation to Cry,” Cohen imagines a settler greeting the soldier who is sent to escort him out:

I will run toward you with

open arms, I will embrace

you and lead you

At the doorway, I will grasp your

collar, I will tear into you

Down to your heart

You will come in, you will join us

in sitting in mourning....

A second writer, Sarah Tzur, warned of a destructive alienation.

If we disengage

We will all disengage, not even

one will remain engaged

We will remain alone together.

Cohen, 33, who lives with his wife and four children in Gush Etzion, a Jerusalem-area settlement block not targeted for evacuation, insisted that although he was a settler, he was no hard-right ideologue. His poem, he said, seeks middle ground in its effort to not demonize the soldier, and reflects a wider anxiety among settlers that has been brought on by the withdrawal plan.

“There’s a lot of empathy for [Gaza settlers] and what is going to happen,” he said. “But in the end, I brought this anxiety to my own home in Gush Etzion.... Even there, there may be a cloud hovering over the place.”

That same sense of insecurity is evoked in the paintings of Mazalit Chezroni-Tabib, a West Bank artist whose works depict houses leaning toward collapse and include shredded maps of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Chezroni-Tabib has worked with similar themes for years but was at first reluctant to directly address the pullout for fear that doing so “might eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she said.

The smattering of pro-settler art projects has drawn respectful treatment from the Israeli media. And young religious writers, such as Cohen, have been praised for offering a more nuanced view of settlers by steering clear of traditional political rhetoric.

“It is not great poetry. But still there is a cultural change,” said Yochai Oppenheimer, who teaches literature at Tel Aviv University.

But art critics and others remain generally unimpressed with what they see as mainly amateurish works by a small and marginal group.

Typical was the reaction of one museum director who was called to offer an assessment of the trend. “Rightist art -- what’s that?” he snapped.

“Unfortunately, we are talking about a standard that is terribly far from the high standard of good Israeli art,” said art historian Gideon Ofrat, who calls himself a leftist.

Those on the right say they are snubbed in part for their political views, although they acknowledge that their art is less refined than the best of Israeli art. But they insist that it has matured since a few artists first tried their hand, with little notice, in the 1980s as an outgrowth of the settlement movement.

“It is a developing art. It is not yet as proficient with the language of art as mainstream Israeli art is,” said Tzipora Luria, a former art critic for a settlers publication who promotes works depicting the settlement enterprise in a positive light.

Luria rejects labeling pro-settler art as “right wing,” instead describing it as Zionist. She said she initially dismissed such works but became worried that future generations of Israelis would know only works by leftist artists, whose works tend to criticize Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Still, it seems a stretch to imagine a day when art from the Israeli right crosses into the mainstream.

But Luria says a quiet shift is already underway, a change seen in the availability of works such as Bar Hama’s new exhibit. “As far as what will be the mainstream, history decides,” Luria said. “Now it’s there. It was not there before.”

Times staff writer Shlomi Simhi in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.