Hope for Middle East in Wadi Nisnas

This little neighbourhood in Haifa gave us hope. Perhaps conflict in the region could end. An edited version of the piece appeared in the Sunday section of the Financial Express on Jan. 10, 2010.


Chinki Sinha

Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, January 10, 2010

In Wadi Nisnas, hope screams silently from the walls, the terraces, and from the streets. In Haifa’s stronghold of coexistence, in Wadi Nisnas, artists saw what could have been if there had been no conflict, or wars, that have shaped Israel, its people, and their collective memory, or what could be if the people decided to move on and live together like they do in Wadi Nisnas.

In a country where the heroic Israeli narrative has not yet run its course, where forgetting their persecution over centuries is a sin and memorials built to remember the victims of the wars dot the landscape, where looking beyond the immediate has never been an alternative, in this small neighborhood where Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived together for years, stories of coexistence are everywhere painted, moulded and hung by the artists from all over the country on the walls ravaged by rockets.

From the blackened walls, from the balconies, they lead you to believe another way is out, that peace can be a possibility.

On such weary, grey walls, hope is the little white bird that some artist hung on a small balcony, peace is a graffiti on a crumbling building façade where an artist drew a safety pin in the shape of the Mediterranean Sea, bright blue, calm and beautiful. But the open ends of the safety pin speak of the Middle East’s dilemmas and tryst with elusive peace, the peace that exists in talks, in peoples’ dreams, in artists’ visions. It’s not closed, the region isn’t secure, and the loose ends need to be secured, that’s what the artist envisioned.

Sixteen years ago, the municipality of Haifa began the Holidays of Holidays celebration in December in the quaint neighbourhood of Wadi Nisnas, which in Arabic means Mongoose, an indigenous animal. Over the years, artists have created their pieces dictated by the different themes of the festival but much of the artwork revolves around personal stories of loss, and of hope like that of Haya Tuma, wife of Emil Tuma, a communist leader and one of the founders of Al-Ittihad, an Aradic newspaper, who also led the Haifa communist party with Emile Habibi. Emil was killed in the neighbourhood after he returned from Lebanon.

Haya’s marriage with Emil, an Arab Orthodox Christian, personified Jewish-Arab unity in a country torn apart by strife. Haya met Emil when she was 18 and married him a couple of years later. For the Jewish bride, her marriage also opened windows to the other side – the story of the Palestinian suffering - and she learned to mourn for the Palestinians, and hoped to leap over the chasm to the other side.

Haya, a ceramic artist, came to live in Wadi Nisnas with her husband. To the wife, her husband became her canvas, her story. In the narrow alleys, in cramped quarters, her artworks speak of her love, and her desperation, its deep sadness, too. They also speak of her hope that another way is possible, of peace that is not so elusive after all, and of countless lost opportunities for the Jewish and Arab people who could have buried the turmoil and the angst long ago.

So, on a wall in one of the alleys near the market, Haya Tuma nailed her vision, and her despair.

There’s a wooden door. Above the door, what seems like a framed wedding photograph of Haya Tuma and Emil Tuma, hangs. In its sepia shades, in its shredded edges, a smiling, coy Haya looks radiant. It’s the picture of their union, of an alternative.

Next to the wooden door, there’s a large key that hangs from the wall. But there’s no keyhole. In a way it symbolizes the Arab dilemma, of its refugee status, our guide explained.

“There’s space for all, for Arabs, too. But we have to find it. Just like how Haya saw it. There’s the key but there’s no keyhole. It’s a political artwork,” our guide said.

Haya made the artwork in 2001. She died in 2008. After her death, her son Michael Tuma, who is an artist in Germany, opened up her trunk and found the little pieces of ceramics she had made and stuck them on in the shape of a tree in the parking lot of the neighborhood across from where Haya’s artworks from the past hang in her memory and as a tribute to her vision.

This experiment in coexistence that started 16 years ago has now become one of the major celebrations in the city and many come to walk through the undulating lanes of the neighborhood including school children from nearby cities and tourists who want to see a different side of the conflict.

In this little space, in its alleys that lead nowhere in particular, people, it seems, have realized that life is too short for such a long conflict, it’s perhaps too short to even count the losses, too short to remain victims whichever side you belonged to. So, when they step out of their homes, and walk to the bus stop, or to their shops, they glance at the graffitis calling for change, for a solution to the division of people, of lovers, of humanity, depicting the horrors of the war like the graffiti next to the door that Haya put up that says “somebody live here in 1948” , and they feel emboldened, part of the courage in the artworks infecting them. For art, and love and peace, are contagious, and someday in future, they can look out across the sea, or the desert, across the grey security wall, and look at the warring countries where many of them have friends and families, and wave to them, or invite them for meals, or dinners.

But that hope for peace was once close to being buried under the debris of the building that the rockets from Lebanon struck killing at least two people.

At a shop, many locals sat drinking thick Turkish coffee and chatting in between the puffs of their cigarettes. Ever since, the municipality began the experiment, the neighborhood is full of people in December – tourists, school children, everyone. In December, at the culmination or the onset of three important festivals – Christmas, Hanukkah, and Muharram or Eid – of the three major faiths all of which lay claim on Jerusalem for it here that they were born and it is here that their prophets will descend, the festival begins.

Amir, a resident, said in Jerusalem the air is oppressive. It is heavy with history, religion, and conflict. Here, in Wadi Nisnas, breathing is much relaxed, he said.

“You can still feel the tension. But it is different from Jerusalem. We have lived together and we still do,” he said.

In 2006, this coexistence was threatened when rockets from Lebanon, the ones that Hezbollah fired from across the calm Mediterranean, struck the office of the newspaper that Tuma and Habibi edited. It killed at least two people. In those days, tension flared up again. Jews became suspicious of their Arab neighbours who didn’t criticize the Hezbollah leader and his organization, as one newspaper reported. It is then that Hassan Nasrallah managed to create a rift, it said.

But then, Wadi Nisnas managed to pick up the pieces from the doubt that raged in men’s minds and the festival once again showed them that there was a way out of this chaos and suspicion.

Artists got back to work, and the area was once again buzzing with tourists, and those seeking elusive peace. Wadi Nisnas to them became the oasis of peace. Similar projects were considered in other cities but never took off because tolerance is hard to find elsewhere, as one local put it.

“In Tel Aviv, there are mostly Jewish people. So, there’s no need. Jerusalem is the site of the conflict. Everyone wants a piece of it,” he said.

On the day we visited, school children from Hadera, a nearby city, filled the streets of the neighbourhood, chatting, and laughing.

It was a Wednesday, and the sun shone through the chinks in the parapets and on the huge graffiti infusing them with light, and energy. It was just before Christmas. Hanukkah had just concluded. An Arab Christian girl waited for customers at her house front. Her table was full of cookies and other Christmas sweets. In a shop window, Christmas decorations were displayed and red and green were the colors that stood out the most.

The festival today is the pride of Haifa.

“The experiment of Haifa was not repeated. This is a mixed city. The festival promotes coexistence of Arab and Jewish people,” our tour guide who belongs from Haifa said.

Built on the slope of Mount Carmel, and overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, Haifa, a mixed city, is the third largest city in Israel. Most of its Arab population is Christian and some of its Jewish people came from Russia. It also houses the Bahai Gardens, the pilgrimage site for the Bahais all over the world, and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The terraced gardens that’s maintained by the followers of the Bahai faith is one of the most visited sites in Haifa.

While tourists walk down the northern slope, through the garden, the pilgrims walk up the mountain, stopping by its fountains to meditate.

When Israel claimed its statehood in 1948, it was at the Haifa port that Jewish immigrants landed. The city became the gateway for a new life in the Promised Land to the Jews who under the Right to Return, came to Israel, the land promised to them by God, in thousands. Most were fleeing persecution and displacement after the holocaust.

Elsewhere in Israel, in Jerusalem, or Tel Aviv, the stories of loss and war and identity accompanied us everywhere. In Jerusalem, it shouted from the Wailing Wall, from the Dome of the Rock, from the streets of the Old City, and in Tel Aviv, we listened to the narratives of death in the Holocaust Museum, in its party clubs where men and women drank away through the night to create an illusory world where who knows what tomorrow might bring.

But in Wadi Nisnas such stories were touched with a tinge of hope and optimism. In its unique walls, we saw that people wanted peace, they yearned for it.

In this neighborhood, we too became hopeful.

If there was ever a way out of conflict, Wadi Nisnas would be its first turn.