These Palestinian artists exhibit a rare courage to look within
Visitors to the exhibition at the Rahat Art Gallery, July 2026
Avshalom Halutz reports in Haaretz on 28 July 2026:
“The Scream of Silence,” the title of the latest exhibition at the new Rahat Art Gallery, which opened just over a year ago, may convey the wrong impression. Could this art show in Israel’s largest Arab city, located in the country’s south, be confronting Israeli silence in the face of horrific atrocities – a silence that has become almost the default in this country?
The opening paragraph of the curatorial text, written by the gallery’s Jewish curator, Adi Yekutieli, seems to reinforce that impression: “At a time when violence around us is escalating, spilling into both the public and the private sphere, silence seems to have become the default response.”
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Yet this daring, powerful exhibition actually explores another bloody reality that has claimed far too many lives in this country: violence within Israel’s Arab society and its victims – many of them women.
At least 150 people from the Arab community have been killed so far in 2026, as violent crime and homicide rates have skyrocketed in recent years, spilling from feuds between criminal gangs into every level of public life. Community leaders have condemned the Israel Police and the government for failing to address this surge in violent crime.
“The subject is not an easy one,” says Yekutieli. “For the Palestinian artists, agreeing to participate in this exhibition was, in my view, an act of real courage. Even within Jewish society, we don’t necessarily discuss our moral dilemmas, examine them or reflect on them. But in the end, you can’t avoid confronting the moral and ethical consequences of your own actions.”
A black wall bearing the names of victims of violence from the past year serves as a second curatorial text of sorts. The wall has become a kind of memorial to the people who were killed, says Yekutieli. Most visitors, especially Rahat residents, stop in front of it, studying the dark lettering, which is legible only up close.
Work from Adi Yekutieli’s ‘The October 7 War’ art project, in which he paints over copies of the Haaretz Hebrew edition
Yekutieli managed to bring together many prominent and rising Palestinian artists from the north and south of Israel. Some of the most arresting works are by Rahat resident Khader Oshah. Born in a Gaza refugee camp in 1966, Oshah has long explored the Nakba in his work.
But his colorful pieces at the Rahat gallery turn to the violence Palestinian women face within their own families. Working with the traditional embroidered dresses that Palestinian women make and wear, Oshah unpicks them, draws over them and stitches in lines of contemporary Arab feminist poetry next to the ages of women who have been murdered, sewn in bright red.
An embroidered dress by Khader Oshah, on show at “The Scream of Silence” at Rahat Art Gallery. Credit: Yahel Gazit
On the walls of the gallery, A4 sheets printed with works by various Palestinian artists are hung from a rail using clothes pegs. The project, which addresses domestic violence, was originally displayed outside homes in the predominantly Muslim city of Shfaram in 2021. Alongside each work, the 14 artists selected a poem by the Jaffa poet Ayat Abou Shmeiss.
Several Jewish artists also took part in the exhibition. Among them was Zohar Yarom, who presented masks of women made from Bedouin pita bread, which gradually crumble over time.
Yekutieli has a long history of making art and curating exhibitions with Palestinian artists, including projects in the West Bank. But his position – a white Jewish man from Tel Aviv curating a show in Rahat about violence within Arab society – inevitably raises questions.
“My role is really to mentor people – to guide them in the process and help build something that will outlast me. I don’t say that apologetically. It’s simply the role I see myself playing, and I try to do it with as much humility as I can,” he says. “I listen carefully and try to make sure we’re doing things that are genuinely relevant to the community. That’s why I usually stay two or three years and then move on.
“I’m not trying to turn the Rahat gallery into a Tel Aviv art gallery. But at the same time, I do want it to be a gallery that shows works of a very high artistic standard. Sometimes I don’t quite belong to either world – and that has its advantages.”
Unlike his son – the well-known young Israeli artist Addam Yekutieli, better known as Know Hope – the elder Yekutieli doesn’t define himself as a political artist. Yet ever since October 7, he has produced a daily work of visual commentary using the pages of Haaretz, erasing whole paragraphs, drawing over photographs and adding images of the mass killing in Gaza that even this paper did not always report in detail.
The result is a remarkable body of work that turns pages destined for a dusty archive into a living testimony to how Israelis allow themselves to speak, report and see their own actions. The more than 300 works in “The October 7 War” are yet to be showcased in any gallery or museum.
“The Scream of Silence” is on show at Rahat Art Gallery until August 8.
Talking about our silence
Two years into the war in Gaza, historian Adam Raz and sociologist Assaf Bondy published “A Lexicon of Brutality,” examining the ways Israelis use language to control the narrative of the war and to protect their own peace of mind.
The cover of “Mute” by Amalia Sa’ar, The book examines what fuels Israeli denial of the country’s violent actions.
The Israeli silence in the face of our own violence is also the subject of “Mute: Why Israelis Fail to Recognize and Resist Their State’s Violence,” a new book by University of Haifa anthropology professor and feminist peace activist Amalia Sa’ar. In just 134 pages, Sa’ar closely examines what has enabled and fueled Israeli denial of the country’s actions, even as tens of thousands of people – including 20,000 children – have been killed in Gaza.
Sa’ar identifies many compelling factors. One appears at the very start of the book: “In Jewish Israeli public discourse, the attitude toward the state’s military violence swings between the opposing poles of denial and glorification. On the one hand, given the army’s profound centrality in the lives of civilians – both as a collective and as families – to acknowledge the military’s violence often means acknowledging the violence of the soldiers themselves: that is, our own violence, or that of those dear to us – which cuts sharply against our moral self-image.”
“And so,” Sa’ar adds, “discourse about the army tends to stress, in abstract and general terms, the soldiers’ contribution and sacrifice, while skipping over the concrete acts of violence that military service entails.”
A cinematic epic – at an Israeli supermarket
With the cease-fire in the war with Iran lasting longer than expected, Israelis are returning to movie theaters, and not only to buy IMAX tickets for “The Odyssey.” Israeli cinema has a summer blockbuster of its own: the film adaptation of the beloved mockumentary-style supermarket sitcom “Kupa Rashit” (“Checkout”) drew more than 250,000 moviegoers on its opening weekend, according to the film’s distributor.
The film is the latest adaptation of a popular Israeli television show. Since its release in June, the feel-good comedy has sold more than 700,000 tickets – a huge number relative to the size of Israel’s population. Haaretz film critic Oron Shamir was not impressed, though. “On the surface, what stands out is the ethnic humor – mainly accents and stereotypical behavior – in the tradition of Israeli popular comedy,” he wrote in his review. “Underneath is a featherweight satire with little bite. “It takes aim at the Israeli idea of customer service and at the absurd demands of customers convinced they’re always right, but above all at the sheer level of social derangement – in other words, at life in Israel itself, a country where people’s control over their own lives weakens year by year.”
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