Artist Seeking Mideast Togetherness

Jean Myking

Transcribed from the clipping

“Kamal Boullata is a political artist for the simple reason that he believes every human being is a political animal. He is a Christian Arab born in Jerusalem and after leaving in 1966 to exhibit his paintings at a one-man show in Beirut, Lebanon, he was denied his return after the six-day war of 1967. Boullata had been a refugee once before when his family fled to Bethlehem in 1948… But after the fall of Jerusalem in 1967, ‘I felt that my whole history as a person had been reduced to the size of a bag I was carrying from one country to another,’ said the 29-year old poet-artist in an interview this week… As a refugee from his home city, Boullata became a kind of ward of the Quakers who he said were aiding about 18,000 West Bank students, and about a million refugees in all… ‘It was during that year,’ he recalled, ‘that I was able to form my political views. All my life I was a-political. Ironically, it was among the Quakers that I discovered the differences between defensive violence and offensive violence, the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressors.’ The Arab-Israeli conflict, he believes, ‘might come from a specific religious group, but I am not against the Jews. Because today I feel more of a Jew than a Christian. When I read the Old Testament, it applies to the Palestinians who were born in Palestine and who have centuries of history there, and who today are being denied that.’… ‘They are the people I can hope in. These are the people I want to share the land with,’ he explained, citing the Israeli League for Human Rights and its leader, Israel Shahak. Shahak, he says, who lost his family in Germany during Nazi persecution, then fought the Arabs. ‘Now he stands up to Israel.’… ‘At heart I feel that anyone who supports the state of Israel is anti-Semitic,’ Boullata said… ‘But it is harmful to Palestinians. It is of our own interest that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist,’ Boullata said. ‘I believe in an ideology that doesn’t solve the question of Jews in the world. I feel that anti-Semitism is a Western concept. Arabs stood up for the Jews in the German holocaust. We are all Semites.’”

Context added by this archive

Boullata is 29 and three years into exile. The paper notes his appearance was “counterbalanced” four days later by Israel Kessar of the Histadrut speaking at the University of Virginia on “Minority Problems in Israel.” Photo caption: “KAMAL BOULLATA, PALESTINIAN ARTIST — His Paintings are on Display at Westminster Church.”

Cite this item

"Artist Seeking Mideast Togetherness," The Daily Progress, 3 May 1972. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1972-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1972-003

Elsewhere in the archive

Arab Militant Leader Dies In Car ExplosionJacksonville Journal · 8 July 1972 · the same year
Israel Accused in Assassination BlastThe Flint Journal · 9 July 1972 · the same year
Mideast guerrillas pledge to revenge chief’s bomb deathThe Sunday Oregonian · 9 July 1972 · the same year

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1972-003.

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