I just got back from visiting Reykjavík. Iceland, for all its wintry weather, is a beautiful country, filled with warm, welcoming people. But strolling its streets downtown, I turned a corner and found something I never expected to see: a wall covered with political art.
More than that: a running death toll. The word genocide. A hashtag calling for the boycott of the world’s only Jewish state. And beneath it all, an Instagram handle, @juliamaiart, painted neatly and ready for its close-up.
I stood there and read every word. Here is what I found, and here is what I did not.
The wall says, “Since October 2023.” It never says what happened in October 2023. The month is there. The event is not.
Not the date. Not the fact. Not a trace of Oct. 7, 2023, the date of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Nearly 1,200 people were murdered in a single morning. Families were burned alive in their homes. Mothers and daughters were raped. Young people were hunted down at the Nova music festival, beaten, abused and shot, one by one. Another 251 people—women and children, grandparents, Holocaust survivors—were kidnapped by Hamas and Palestinian terrorists and literally dragged into the Gaza Strip.
October 2023 appears on that wall only as the beginning of Israel’s alleged crimes. The event that began that month has been painted out entirely. The mural presents a war with no beginning, grief with no cause and a villain with no provocation.
That omission is not incidental. It is the foundation upon which the entire installation rests.
I eventually found the word “Israel” painted in quotation marks. Stop and consider what those two small marks are doing. Quotation marks create distance. They suggest that an entire country—a nation of Jews, Arabs, Christians and so many others—is disputed or illegitimate. Whether that was the artist’s intention or not, the effect is unmistakable: The legitimacy of Israel itself is placed into question, not merely the actions of its government.
I did not find the word Hamas. Not once. Not Hamas that launched the Oct. 7 massacre and kidnappings in southern Israel. Not the U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Not the government that has ruled Gaza since 2007.
Not the group that openly embeds military infrastructure among civilians while fighting from within densely populated areas. Not the organization whose leaders have repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction. You painted the word genocide on a wall nearly 4,000 kilometers from the conflict while leaving unnamed the organization that started the war.
That absence is a choice.
I found a running tally of journalists, crossed out and rewritten as it climbs. And beside it I found this sentence: “Only those who want to hide the truth would target and murder journalists.”
Read that carefully. The wall does not say journalists have died during a war. It says they were murdered to conceal the truth. That is an assertion of intent, repeated hundreds of times over, across six countries.
Even the organizations that monitor press freedom do not make that claim categorically. They investigate individual cases. They distinguish between journalists killed while covering combat and those they believe may have been deliberately targeted. They publish their methodology. The wall does none of that. No source. No methodology. No distinction. No explanation. Just a number, repainted upward, presented as proof.
Numbers without sourcing are not evidence. They are visual persuasion.
I also found no acknowledgment of Reykjavík’s own history. In 2015, the city council voted to boycott Israeli goods. Within days, after widespread criticism and international backlash, the decision was reversed. Iceland’s own leaders concluded that the measure had been poorly conceived. Yet this wall urges Icelanders to embrace once again what their own city abandoned.
The part that troubles me most is not the politics. It is the certainty. Painting this wall in Reykjavík costs you nothing. No one you love was murdered at Nova, sons and daughters there to dance as a bit of relief in a tiny nation surrounded by enemies. No one you know was waiting for a hostage to come home. No one in your family is living under the daily threat of annihilation as war continues to rage to the north and south, east and west.
You paint. People stop. They nod. They take photographs. Some follow your Instagram account.
And the wall quietly shapes public opinion among people who may never investigate a single claim it makes. One detail captures that perfectly. A memorial does not need a social-media handle. But a brand does.
That is why I cannot see this simply as an expression of grief. It is also an act of advocacy, an act of persuasion. And if persuasion is the goal, then it deserves the same scrutiny as every other political argument.
So here is my invitation. Not to erase this wall, but to finish it.
Paint Oct. 7. Paint the Nova music festival. Paint the burned kibbutzim. Paint Hamas.
Paint all of it.
If your message survives the full story, it will be all the stronger for it. If it cannot, then perhaps the wall was never telling the truth to begin with.
Grief for Palestinian civilians is real, and it deserves compassion. Every innocent life lost in war is a tragedy. But grief that requires erasing murdered Jews to make its case is not reconciliation. It is selective memory.
History does not become more truthful when half of it is painted over. And peace is never built on half a story.
