The New York Times · New York, New York · 21 February 2001

CP-2001-041

Bitter, Stark Souvenirs: Sneakers and Slingshots

By DEBORAH SONTAG

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Transcribed from the clipping

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Feb. 19 — In one translucent plastic box, there is a single sock, recovered by the widow of 25-year-old Bial Affaneh after he was shot dead by Israeli forces outside the Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem last September. It is tied up like a gift, with twine for a ribbon. In another box, another totem: pint-sized Fares Odeh’s rough-hewn slingshot.

It flung its last rock at an Israeli tank on Nov. 8, when the 15-year-old boy took a bullet in the neck. The Sakakini Cultural Center here has been converted into a spare, somber shrine to the first 100 Palestinians killed in the uprising that began in late September.

Each life is summed up by one or two objects, selected by the family and wrapped into a tidy bundle, boxed and mounted beneath a photograph of the deceased. The curator is a French-Palestinian artist, Samir Salameh. “I didn’t want to entomb the martyrs,” Mr. Salameh said in French, looking more Rive Gauche than West Bank. “The clear boxes are like windows into their souls.

The objects are banal but they are made precious by those who died. They are wrapped because the people gave their lives like a present to their country.” Encased on the gallery’s stone walls are book bags, soccer balls, boxing gloves, Gameboys, prayer shawls, teacups, wedding pictures and water pipes.

Seventeen-year-old Sami Balawneh is represented by his Israeli security clearance card, expiration date: May 19, 2001. He was killed last October. Israeli critics would say that the exhibit, “100 Martyrs — 100 Lives,” glorifies death and encourages the cult of the shaheed, or martyr.

But Adila Laidi, the cultural center’s director, said that she feared death was so routine that the dead were becoming “dismissable statistics.” Ms. Laidi said that she intentionally focused on the lives of those who were killed rather than on their deaths. In fact, she said, she declined to include the photograph of one young man because it was taken during his autopsy.

“Can you imagine that the only picture ever taken of this poor boy showed the entrance wound for the bullet that killed him?” she asked. […] Samir Maslamani of Jerusalem lent the exhibit a safari-style vest that his 15-year-old son, Madje, used to wear.

“If you ask me to close my eyes and describe him, he is wearing that vest and eating maybe chocolates or a biscuit,” Mr. Maslamani said in a telephone interview. “It’s not a painful thought. I feel proud. This was Madje’s destiny, and I couldn’t intervene.” Another youth, Nizar Eideh, is memorialized by an empty bird cage.

On the morning before Nizar was killed, he released his bird so that it could fly back to its mother, his family said. Then, ignoring his mother’s pleading, he headed toward the site of clashes with Israeli troops in Ramallah. “God will protect me,” he said. Putting last-minute touches on the exhibit, Mr.

Salameh worked to arrange the cage just so, and to position the boy’s picture beside it in an evocative manner. Inside this restored Palestinian villa, the cage was a long way from the boy’s refugee camp home — just as the elegantly mounted exhibit was far from the messy clashes that took the lives being memorialized.

Yazan Halayqa, a 14-year-old from Bethlehem who was killed on Nov. 2, used to ride that bike everywhere. “It was his best friend,” said his father, Muhammad Halayqa. Mr.

Halayqa, who owns several quarries and lives in a grand house, said that his son’s presence in the exhibit demonstrates that it is not only poor youths with nothing to lose who are willing to put their lives on the line. “What can I say?” he said. “It’s like I lost a part of my liver with this boy.

But everybody’s saying that only the sons of poor people die, and it’s good for them to know that also those of rich people do. The intifada is for all Palestinians.”

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