The pain felt on both sides

Umm al Fahm, Israel — THE green flags of the radical Islamic Movement flutter along the steep, narrow streets of Umm al Fahm, Israel's largest Arab Muslim town, located along the heavily fortified border with the West Bank. The impoverished municipality's former mayor and other prominent residents have been jailed on suspicion of promoting terrorism. Few of its women venture outside without a head scarf.

This hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism seems an unlikely locale for avant-garde art, but a rapidly expanding exhibition space here has become one of the most talked-about cultural institutions in the Jewish state. Attendance at Umm al Fahm Art Gallery exhibitions has turned into a kind of pilgrimage for artists, curators and collectors from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other Israeli cities.

The gallery, directed by a veteran of the Israeli police force who combined a career in law enforcement with the study of painting, first attracted attention within Israel in 1999, when Yoko Ono exhibited there in an effort to "balance" a show of her work at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. But with the second intifada in 2000, many Israelis grew reluctant to venture into Arab population centers, and Umm al Fahm acquired particular notoriety after police were stoned and three men were killed in anti-Israel riots there that same year.

Umm al Fahm means "Mother of Coal" in Arabic; the hilly area was once covered with trees that in earlier centuries were burned to produce charcoal. Some Jewish Israelis who nowadays visit the gallery nervously joke that they are going to Umm al Pahd, or "Mother of Fear."

"We are afraid of the unknown, the strangers, the Arabs," says Efi Gen, the Jewish curator of the current exhibition. "They are afraid of us, but the gallery is a bridge." To help overcome that fear, the gallery staged a show two years ago titled "In House." It featured Jewish and Arab artists and was displayed not only in the spacious two-floor exhibition space but in seven private houses as well. Minibuses ferried gallery-goers to these homes, where they viewed more art and talked with residents about difficulties faced by Israel's Arab population.