2020 | Building Peace through Heritage
and the beginning of the exodus of the Palestinians from their homeland , an event in which most of their people were forcibly displaced ( Ibid ). Both the Israeli and the Palestinian society ignore the others ’ narrative because accepting it would undermine their own ; therefore , this creates a gap that makes the others ’ pain unrelatable .
The argument that I made about the major role of museums and arts in the construction of the memory of the state establishment cannot leave aside the analysis on how , practically , in the last decades museums ’ curators and artists took upon the task of creating an alternative narrative that will conciliate conflicting Palestinian and Israeli collective memories .
The exhibition “ 1948 ”, which took place in the museum of Haifa , curated by Majd Hamra and Inbal Dror Lax , showed works by both Israeli and Palestinian artists which describe their personal emotions about the events that took place either during the establishment period of the state of Israel , the 1948 war or the period that came right after the war . In all the works there is a clear current of pain . Both Israeli and Palestinian artists work with the same strong emotion , some for being forced to leave their homes , some for the loss of their loved ones , some because of a dream or a broken ideal ( Dror Lax 2018 ).
The iconography of pain has a long history , explains Susan Sontag ( 2003 ) in her book Regarding the Pain of Others , everywhere around us we keep on seeing images of pain , most of them represent a reality which is unreachable , of people far away from us towards which we feel we have no way of help ( Sontag 2003 ). These images are scrolling over our eyes every day until we became immune to them ; seeing a painful scene of a war far away on the newspaper , printed right next to an advertisement of a perfume , became ordinary to our eyes . Moreover , these images of pain do not represent the reality of any conflict . Every image , even if a photograph is a portion of the reality , not all of it . The way we perceive the image depends on our perception of the world , which in turn depends on the culture we are part of and the narrative we believe in . The way we would perceive the pain of others depends on our Cultural Identity and Collective Memory ( Ibid ).
According to the narrative by which we live , and in the attempt of having our pain recognized in the public sphere , we became sensitive to our pain only and in the same time immune to the pain of others . Different narratives compete in the effort of obtaining recognition , because often the other ’ s story is perceived as delegitimizing our own . This is especially relevant for the case of the Israeli and Palestinian competing narratives , the two memories are almost never exposed in the same public sphere and therefore a social barrier has been created which limits the possibility of perceiving the similarity between the emotion of pain ( Rothberg 2009 ; Sontag 2004 ).
The curatorial work of Hamra and Dror Lax wished to expose the public to the other ’ s pain in a way we cannot feel detached from . The similarities between the themes of the works is clear , the artworks communicate with one another in a way that permits the viewer to empathize with the other ’ s pain because it is similar to their own . The attempt of the curators in this exhibition is to encourage confrontation of the two different narratives in the museum space , an act which doesn ’ t often take place in Israeli and Palestinian society ( Dror Lax 2018 ).
The works displayed in the exhibition do not present an unrealistic reality , the artists did not wish to find a solution to the conflict or invent a means of coexistence . On the other hand , they should raise questions that can eventually lead to more productive dialogue without taking a side or preferring one narrative over another .
The recurring theme of the exhibition is Pain , an emotion that cannot be associated exclusively with either of the two narratives . In the work of Ruth Schloss , 1953 “ Mother and Child ” ( Figure 3 ) the iconography of this work is clear , and takes up the familiar images of the Pietà , the mother who mourned on the body of her child . Schloss , whose artistic activity is known as part of the Israeli So-
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