‘Kibbutz Nahal Oz’
The Foundation Building, 7 E. 7th St.
March 2024

On October 7, Hamas terrorists swept across the border with Gaza and killed at least a dozen people at Kibbutz Nahal Oz. They held the kibbutz for 12 hours and took hostages back to Gaza. More than 60 soldiers were murdered at a nearby military base. 

A half-century earlier, Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan eulogized a Nahal Oz security officer, Ro’i Rothberg, who was killed by a Gazan infiltrator. The hero of 1967 reckoned that “beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path.”

That is not the day, though, that the young artist Darya Arad, an undergraduate at the Cooper Union,  imagines in her wonderful watercolors, on view at the school. Ms. Arad, who grew up at Nahal Oz, instead summons scenes of mere humanity — powerful because they are prosaic — from what she calls “a little village in the Negev desert.” 

As Ms. Arad puts it: “There’s an elephant in the room. There’s an Israeli in the building.” Not just any building, though. The same one, the Cooper Union one, where Jewish students were locked in the first-floor library for 20 minutes, for their own protection, while a pro-Palestinian crowd pounded on the windows and doors. One student who was there told CBS that “it was tense, people were nervous. They were specifically acting very aggressively in those spaces where outwardly Jewish students were sitting.”

The opening of Ms. Arad’s show, though, felt like a Zionist speakeasy. Hebrew could be heard in the halls and that quintessential Israeli snack, Bamba, was available. The Israeli novelist Ruby Namdar schmoozed with a professor at Columbia, Shai Davidai, who reports that the school is investigating his “advocacy for the Jewish and Israeli students, faculty, and staff at the university.”

Ms. Arad’s mother, Maya, is a noted novelist, and the younger Arad’s watercolors have a literary bent to them, as if they were chapters in a kibbutz tale told by, say, Amos Oz. She paints herself and her parents, an elegy for the past that is also an act of hope for the future — the return of the communities of the so-called Gaza envelope is one of Israel’s aims for its war in Gaza. More than 200,000 Israelis are internally displaced. 

In Ms. Arad’s paintings, though, the pleasures of home prevail. “Yossi and Tova’s Wedding, 1969” captures a moment between exaltation and relief, the nuptials conducted with Israel’s signature informality. “Family Portrait with Saba, Savta and Steve, 1980” dramatizes the contrast between the children, sabras born in Israel, and the older generation, carrying Europe with them to the Negev.

“Independence Day Celebration, 1975” is an arresting image, both blurred and precise, of young children celebrating the birthday of a young country. Here and elsewhere, Ms. Arad’s technique blends an almost photorealistic realism with swirls of grays that mute the viewer’s focus. “Seedless Watermelons, 1980” is an image of leisurely enjoyment of the sweet and frictionless fruit, a specialty of the kibbutz. A wall note, though, informs that the agronomist who pioneered that variety, Haim Livne, was murdered on October 7 with his daughter and her family.

Ms. Arad writes that “an exhibition is a ‘bringing together.’ An exhibition is a utopia, a kibbutz.” Dayan, in that speech in 1956, declared that “we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home.” Ms. Arad’s generation is, like Dayan’s, one acquainted with the logic that links home and the cannon’s maw.