SumudA Dove for Palestine

Sumud is the Arabic word for steadfastness. For Palestinians it has become a value of its own: to stay, to remain on the land, to keep living with dignity. Its best-known symbol is the olive tree, rooted and slow to move.

The girl in the painting is not running and not afraid. She stands still, eyes closed, face lifted. That stillness is the subject.

The black-and-white keffiyeh is worn across the world as a sign of Palestine. In folk tradition its patterns are read as the fishnet of the sea and the fishermen of Jaffa and Haifa, as olive leaves for rootedness, and as bold lines for the old trade routes. No single meaning was ever fixed; they are passed on by word of mouth, like the scarf itself.

Here it is wrapped around a child's shoulders, the way it is wrapped around a family.

In Genesis the dove returns to Noah with a fresh olive leaf, the sign that the waters had gone down and life could begin again. In 1949 Picasso drew a dove for the Paris Peace Congress, and it became the world's sign of peace.

Hafsa's dove does not fly away. It has landed, on a child, and she does not look up at it. Her eyes are closed, as if peace were something felt before it is seen.

Mahmoud Darwish, regarded as the national poet of Palestine, was born in al-Birwa, a village in the Galilee that was destroyed in 1948. His best-known poem begins: "We have on this land what makes life worth living."

It goes on to name small things, like bread baking at dawn and grass growing on a stone. The painting names three more: a girl, her braid, and a bird that chose to stay.