I’ve written about Israeli artist Adam Yekuteli’s (aka Know Hope) art before, especially his street art, and how his work delves into the incredibly difficult areas of the relationships between Palestinians, Israelis, the land and each other. His compassion and humanity guides his work, and since October 7 2023, the crisis in his country has been torturous to face, knowing what his people have been inflicting on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Yekuteli wrote this recently and I wanted to post it, as he offers a unique perspective:
“Over the past two weeks, my feed has been full of videos of people returning to their homes in north Gaza. Rivers of people—families carrying belongings, children, the elderly, people on crutches and in wheelchairs—walking through a landscape of rubble after many months of survival and displacement. Most don’t have homes to return to, and many find the remains of dead relatives, whom they haven’t been able to bury and mourn, trapped under rubble.
For years, I’ve heard of a hilltop viewpoint in Sderot, a city in the Gaza Envelope overlooking the Gaza border, where people come to look at the bombardments. I found it hard to believe such a cynical place exists, so while working on a project in the south, I decided to see it for myself.
As I pulled up, I saw buses in the parking area and dozens of people making their way up the hill as if they were on a field trip. I, too, walked up to find multiple tour groups filling the space. One group was people around my parents’ age, and another was of teenage American yeshiva girls. Both had guides speaking about the events of Oct. 7th and past and present mythologies of Israeli military activity.
At the viewpoint were binoculars, through which one could see Jabalia, Beit Lahiya, and Beit Hanoun, for 5 NIS ($1.50). As guides spoke, people took turns looking through and moving on, largely disaffected.
As they peered at the chasm of human extermination, I wondered if, within this sea of destruction and erasure, they could see any of these people returning to their homes, even if only as small dots moving in the scenery. Lives existing. I wondered if they could see them as human beings, imagining themselves in their place, and perhaps reversing the situation by imagining someone peering through binoculars, watching them from a removed distance.
As we’ve all continued to live our lives alongside this for the past 16 months, I don’t think we fully grasp the depth of the reckoning our society will have to face for generations. Maybe someone who peered through saw, for the first time, what has long been an abstract entity to many—that this reality is real, and that real people are living, suffering, and surviving in it.”
