The Main Green became a children's graveyard this week.
The exhibit, which began Tuesday and will end tonight, features around 800 mock graves, each with the name of an Israeli or Palestinian child killed between Sept. 29, 2001, when the current wave of violence, called the Intifada, began, and April 2005. The graves are arranged in chronological order, and are red if the child was Palestinian and blue if the child was Israeli.
"These children were all noncombatants. They weren't in the Israeli army, they weren't suicide bombers," said Ali Zarrabi '06, co-coordinator of Tikkun, the group that created the exhibit. Tikkun seeks to encourage balanced dialogue on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to its description on the Undergraduate Council of Students' Web site.
Zarrabi said Tikkun was trying to "start a dialogue" by impressing on students that children killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are "more than just statistics. This is to humanize them."
However, the exhibit was the sight of confrontation on Tuesday when several protestors from Anti-Racist Action, which has campaigned for Brown to divest from all companies that do business with Israeli, arrived.
According to Dara Bayer '08, a member of ARA, six or seven members came to the exhibit with signs reading "Brown is invested in these graves" to protest the University for "supporting the apartheid state of Israel, which is causing these deaths on both sides," she said.
"We had no problem with them protesting," Zarrabi said. But he added: "We had a problem with them standing directly in front of the piece. ... They made the impression that they were responsible for the work, which many people now believe."
After a brief confrontation, Zarrabi said, the ARA members moved several feet away from the exhibit.
"This is in memory of all the children and all the victims of the conflict," he said, adding that ARA was trying to impose one-sided political meaning on the exhibit.
But Bayer disagreed.
"Death is political," she said.
