An exhibit at Newton Free Library displaying photographs of people and landscapes in the West Bank has caught the concern of the city’s mayor and library director as they believe it could be “hurtful and divisive.”

The exhibit, which opened Thursday and will be on display for the next month, is titled “The Ongoing & Relentless Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 to Today.” It contains photographs taken by artist Skip Schiel in 2018 and 2019 in the West Bank, the larger of the two Palestinian territories.

“To create its new state, Israel forcibly removed some 750,000 Palestinians creating one of the longest lasting and painful refugee crises in modern history,” a flier for the display states. “From his own personal point of view, Schiel photographed and interviewed survivors, mostly living in West Bank refugee camps.  And their original homelands now in Israel which are usually unreachable by former residents. Some call the current violence over Gaza ‘The Second Nakba.’”

Mayor Ruthanne Fuller and Library Director Jill Mercurio, in respective statements, highlighted that the display, selected by an independent committee of art professors and professionals who live in Newton, doesn’t “imply an endorsement of the artist’s point of view.”

The committee selected Schiel’s exhibit last July, months before Hamas’ Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel in which the terrorist group killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. More than 34,000 Palestinians, around two-thirds of them children and women, have died in the war.

“When told of this exhibit by Library Director Jill Mercurio, I immediately had deep concerns,” Fuller wrote in a statement included in her weekly newsletter Wednesday. “I knew that the subject matter and title would be offensive to some residents, especially at this time with conflict in the Middle East and rising antisemitism at home.”

“The title … will be considered by some as not just one-sided and offensive, but wrong and reprehensible,” she added. “In addition, this exhibit is troubling in that it occurs during the month of May which is Jewish American Heritage Month, and a month that includes Yom Shoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day and Yom Ha’atzmaut — Israel Independence Day. I believe this exhibit will be quite hurtful and divisive.”

Included in the exhibit is a display of drawings by artist Zeev Engelmayer that he has created each day since October 7 from his home in Tel Aviv. The daily postcards offer a “different perspective” than Schiel’s work, Fuller said.

Fuller and Mercurio highlighted how the library is “guided by the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights and its principles.”

Principles include “resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas” and “not excluding materials because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.”

“With the continued goal of presenting access to varied points of view, we are compiling resource lists for readers,” Mercurio wrote. “We are inviting speakers from different perspectives to come together for conversations about the history and events that are shaping our world today. We are also actively working to prepare programing on the use of art to interpret events and express oneself, and ways to listen, talk, engage, and learn respectfully about divisive issues.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report