USD Magazine Spring 2006

AROUND THE PARK

hen the question of traveling to the Gaza Strip and West Bank to W BROAD STROKES OF HOPE Professor John Halaka’s trip to Gaza and the West Bank was a lesson in resilience by Julene Snyder [ a c t i v i s t ]

help paint murals last summer arose, John Halaka was intrigued, but hesitant. After all, he had other plans, and jetting off on short notice to visit the most dis- puted strip of land on the planet was not among them. Then he changed his mind. It all started last April, when the professor of visual arts went to San Francisco for the opening of a group exhibit, called “Made in Palestine,” which featured his artwork. A few months later, exhibit organizer Susan Greene — an artist, clinical psychologist and coordinator of the “Break the Silence” project — invited him to come to the war-torn region and help paint a series of murals. It turned out to be an offer Halaka couldn’t refuse. After two weeks of soul-searching, the self- described “informed activist” decided the opportunity was too rare to pass up. After a whirlwind of preparations, he found himself plunked down in the sticky heat of August in Palestine, where tensions were simmering even more than usual on the eve of the impending pullout of Israeli settlements from Gaza. Still, his group was ready to get to work. All they needed were official permits to move on to Gaza. Oh, and some paint. Although they’d been assured that art supplies were readily available at their first stop, the

Local artists joined in when word spread about the mural project (above). John Halaka balances on a makeshift ladder to reach the very upper parts of the once-bleak concrete wall (above right).

the Palestinian history of image- making and to reflect the peo- ple’s own stories. “The mural shows different scenes of life in Rafah: Their desires, their hopes, fears, resistance, plight.” Halaka explains that one of the main raisons d’etre for the murals was to honor the memory of International Solidarity Move- ment volunteer Rachel Corrie, who was killed by a bulldozer while protecting a Palestinian home from demolition in 2003, and to commemorate her rela- tionship with the people of Rafah. The project was truly collabo-

town of Rafah, on the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, they ended up making do with house paint. It was important to Halaka — who is of Palestinian descent and whose own artwork touches on the struggles of the dispossessed — not to impose Western ideas on the murals, a set of heavy can- vas banners that are now dis- played on the exterior of the city’s Health Center. “We didn’t have any specific images in mind,” he says. “We wanted to hear what the people wanted.” Paramount among their goals was to remain sensitive to

rative. “It was a remarkable situa- tion,” recalls Halaka, still moved by the response. “One person made a phone call, and an hour later, an artist showed up. Three hours later, 10 artists joined us. ” The whole experience went by in a blur, Halaka says, in part due to the extreme volatility of the region. Leaving Rafah for the town of Mas’ha on the West Bank, the group intended to finish a mural that Greene and others had begun the summer before. There they worked on a painting on the surface of a recently constructed 24-foot-high

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