The Israel Museum in Jerusalem (IMJ) – home to impressive collections of ancient and modern art and some of the world’s rarest antiquities, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls – celebrated its 60th anniversary last year by launching eight new exhibitions. All focused exclusively on showing Israeli artists or works within the museum’s collection. The centrepiece exhibition, Israeli Art: Swing of the Pendulum, featured Reuven Rubin’s triptych from 1923, ‘First Fruits’, a work that embodies the harmony of Jewish immigrants and local Arabs in the early days of the British Mandate of Palestine. On the opposite wall hung Zoya Cherkassky’s diptych ‘Friday in the Projects / 1991 in Ukraine’, painted in 2015, depicting scenes of brutal street violence and war. Rubin’s idyllic harmony and Cherkassky’s horror conveys how life in Israel is like a swinging pendulum, constantly shifting between war and peace.

Artists and museum workers have had to adjust to the trauma and challenges of continuous multi-front wars, a depleted tourist industry, and the adversity of being shunned by a hostile, anti-Semitic international art community

Artists and museum workers have had to adjust to the trauma and challenges of continuous multi-front wars, a depleted tourist industry, and the adversity of being shunned by a hostile, anti-Semitic international art community

The pendulum took a major swing last month, when sirens rang out across Israel, alerting the nation that the air force had carried out the opening salvos of Operation Roaring Lion against Iran. It was Shabbat morning, the day of rest, but museum workers and curators were called in to begin taking down valuable artworks from gallery walls, packing up rare artefacts, and storing them underground. It was a familiar task, one rehearsed last June at the start of Operation Rising Lion, on the afternoon of 7 October 2023, and many times in between.

Since 7 October, the Israeli art scene should perhaps be described not as a pendulum, but a raging storm on the high seas. Artists and museum workers alike have had to........

© The Spectator