A colourful cry for freedom

The walls of Nisreen Al Azzeh’s house are covered with paintings. Vibrant shades of turquoise, pink, gold and green fill the canvasses. From a distance they look like happy, fairy-tale worlds. But closer up, you can see that they illustrate a violent conflict. Blood flows, guns shoot, children are dying. A dove of peace has a concrete wall for wings. Another perches on a ticking bomb.

Nisreen is an imaginative artist, but the scenes she paints are inspired by real life. She and her husband, Hashem, live with their three children below the Tel Rumeida settlement in Hebron. The walls outside their house are daubed with the graffiti of conflict: “Gas the Arabs,” “Free Palestine,” “Liberate Gaza”.

To sit with the family and drink tea, I had to pass through a checkpoint, show my passport to a soldier and climb across piles of rocks and garbage. Hashem does the same walk every morning and every evening. Nisreen sometimes walks here with her shopping bags. For the most part though, she stays at home and paints.

Nisreen was an art student in Jordan when she met Hashem. When she married him sixteen years ago, they moved to Hebron and she left her mother, father and sixteen siblings in Saudi Arabia. She has not seen her parents since.

“I was surprised and shocked when I got here,” she says. “The pictures from the television news did not match reality; it was worse, much worse.”

She smiles shyly and red lipstick glitters.

"It was a big change for me to move here. In Saudi Arabia, there were no soldiers, no checkpoints, no problems,” she says. “(But) we must stay here. It is our country and we must stay here.”

The Al Azzeh family never leave their house all together. They fear that the Israeli settlers who dominate Hebron would take it over. A family vacation is an impossible dream.

At the same time, the family receives few visitors. They live in the Israeli-controlled H2 area of Hebron, and all Palestinians who wish to visit need written permission. Few dare. To pass the time at home, Nisreen paints pictures.

“Artists reflect on their experiences and this is my reflection. This is my life,” she says.

I carefully look through the pictures. All are related to the conflict. One picture has a sign in the sky saying “Peace for Palestinians.” Underneath it is a beach full of corpses.

“In 2002 Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian family that were swimming at the beach in Gaza. I read about the incident and started painting right away,” she says. 

But the conflict is closer to home than Gaza. Israeli settlers constantly harass the family. The family’s closest neighbor is Baruch Marzel, an extreme right-wing Israeli-American settler and former politician who once called for the Israeli army to assassinate Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery.

The settlers throw stones, scream insults and cut electricity and telephone lines. Hashem has a red mark on his forehead; a settler threw a stone at him last week. Another settler threw a bag with a red substance the following day. Hashem thinks it was pig's blood.

Nisrin says she is afraid something will happen to her children. I ask how she explains the situation to them.

“I tell them that there are bad Israelis, settlers, and good Israelis, the peace activists,” she says.

Next month Nisreen´s paintings will be showed at an exhibition in Paris. Nisreen says she will remain here, continuing to paint her colorful cry for freedom.