An Art Installation of 5,000 Children’s Shoes
Maha El-Taji
Last week, after running errands in the Carmel Center in Haifa, Israel, I walked past the cinematheque. In front of the main entrance, and around the corner from where happy Jewish families sat to watch an outdoor movie only six weeks prior, there was an art installation of shoes: shoes of different styles, colors, and sizes, including children’s shoes. It took me a few seconds to grasp that the shoe installation represented the 240 hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October 2023. I did a double take when I saw that on the wall above the installation, there was a huge banner that said, “Thank You President Joe Biden,” flanked by the Israeli flag on one side and the American one on the other. I wondered if the banner thanking Joe Biden was part of the installation, and if so, what the families of the hostages could have been thanking him for. I concluded that the banner’s placement had to be an ironic coincidence, because six weeks had passed since the U.S. gave the green light for the war on Hamas, and yet the Israeli hostages were still that: hostages. “Thank You President Joe Biden?” For what?
Still, I thought that the underlying concept of the shoe installation was brilliant and very powerful. Shoes are an intimate personal property and also symbolic. The installation took me back to the power of personal items left behind during the Holocaust and their use in museums. The items remain, yet the people the personal items belonged to are gone; there is a story to be told. For a moment, I dared imagine an installation of 5,000 children’s shoes: the shoes of Gaza’s now-dead children, at least the ones whose bodies could even be found above the ground or extracted from the rubble. “That would be powerful,” I thought. I wondered if people who passed by such an installation in Haifa would be able to understand what it meant. Did Haifa’s Jewish residents follow the news in Gaza from some source other than the Israeli media? Were they aware of the number of innocent civilians who were dying? Did they know what was being done in Gaza in their name? Were they silent because they agreed with the war on Gaza? Or perhaps like me and other Arab residents, were they afraid to speak out and then end up in jail?
That evening, I attended an event in my neighborhood entitled “The Freedom of Speech and the Right to Grieve,” which was organized by a small Jewish and Arab grassroots group called “Haifa for Everyone.” About 130 Arabs and Jews attended, and the panel included a presentation by a human rights lawyer. She spoke about the police persecution of anyone, particularly Arabs, who showed any signs of identification with the people of Gaza or who dared advocate for a ceasefire. A person could be charged with incitement for, or identification with, terrorism. This leap from Gaza to Hamas is not a big leap for the Israeli media, which hosts analysts who clearly collapse the two: “Gaza is Hamas, and Hamas is Gaza,” one such analyst said the other day, without the host correcting him or even flinching.
“But what about an art installation with five thousand pairs of children’s shoes?” I asked the lawyer. “Would that be legal?”
“It all depends,” she said. “They would probably look at the intent, and if it is to criticize the government’s policy then you would get in trouble.”
“You can try,” she went on. “But I won’t be in Haifa on that day,” she added jokingly.
I gave up on the idea of the installation of 5,000 pairs of children’s shoes. Early on when the bombing of Gaza started and the number of children killed was starting to rise, I received an email from a dear American friend, and her tormented question haunted me: “Nearly 600 CHILDREN have been killed in Gaza since Sunday. How is this OK with the world?” As of yesterday, World Children’s Day, the number of children killed in Gaza had risen to 5,600, not counting those who remain under the rubble. The U.N. website shows that the theme for World Children’s Day 2023 is: “For Every Child, Every Right.” I can hear my tormented friend now haunting me with the question: “5,600 CHILDREN have been killed in Gaza since that Sunday. How is that RIGHT?”
Yes, I have given up on the idea of an art installation of 5,600 pairs of children’s shoes and counting. However, I am obsessed with the sheer magnitude of that number and with the symbolism of shoes. Shoes have a special status in Arab culture. For example, you do not sit with the bottom part of the shoe facing someone because you would be insulting them. In the Palestinian dialect, there is the word “kundara”, which is the regular use of the word shoe—such as “I put my ‘kundara’ on,” or “I bought a new ‘kundara.’” But there is another word for “kundara” which is used more as an insult, and that is the word “surmay.” “Ala surmayti” means “on my shoes”—as in “I don’t care” or “You are not worth my shoes.” One of the funnier recurring scenes in Arab Labor, the series written by Sayed Kashua for Israeli TV, is the scene where Amjad, the main protagonist of the series, regularly does something that disgraces his father and damages his status in the village. The father, played by Saleem Daw, takes off his shoes and runs after his adult son while cursing him with the phrase “Son of a sixty-six surmay.”
This use of shoes for insulting others came to international attention when, at a press conference in Iraq in December 2008, an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at then-President George Bush. President Bush dodged the two throws, and the journalist was immediately subdued and removed. What Bush said afterwards was surprisingly insightful: “Let me talk about the man throwing the shoes. It is one way to gain attention. It’s like going to a political rally and having people yell at you. [T]his is what happens in free societies, people try to draw attention to themselves.”
So, what can I do when I am exasperated and outraged about the killing of children and innocent civilians in Gaza—with no outlet to express my indignation, as a Palestinian-Israeli citizen subject to persecution by Israel’s government? I cannot yell at a political rally, and I am not about to assault the U.S. President with shoes. But on the occasion of this disgraceful Thanksgiving holiday, I will allow myself to say: “No Thanks to You President Joe Biden, son of a 5,840 surmay (and counting).”
Editor’s note: When the author began writing this essay at the start of 21 November 2023, Israel’s military had already killed 5,600 Palestinian children in Gaza. By the end of that day, the death count had further increased to 5,840 children, as reflected by the change in figures within the piece itself.
By the time this essay was last edited, on 3 February 2024, the number of children murdered by the Israeli regime had reached a total of 11,500. Sundog Lit is part of Publishers for Palestine, a collective of literary organizations across the world advocating for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. You can read the statement we have signed here.
Dr. Maha El-Taji is a Palestinian-Israeli citizen feeling extremely upset about the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians in Gaza. She is an Adjunct Lecturer in the International School at the University of Haifa and an independent researcher on academic topics affecting the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Since the October 7 attacks, any criticism of the state’s war policy or objection to the atrocities committed in Gaza could be cause for political persecution. In her writing, she gives voice to her distress and helplessness.