“I don’t want to be quoted as taking any political side or anything,” says Michelle Mayerson, repeatedly and often, while talking at great length about her latest commission, a monumental mural that has lorded over Wyckoff Avenue for all of the new year. For the cost of “a few thousand dollars,” she tells me, it had been commissioned, illustrated and then posted onto the walls, over New Year’s weekend.

It depicts a pair of children, walking side-by-side, arms held in embrace, splattered across forty feet of wall. One of them wears a bright white yarmulke and carries a large, forlorn teddy bear. The other is hatless, but around their neck hangs a Palestinian keffiyeh, apparently pulled down. They are both wearing soccer jerseys; sporting the last World Cup’s notoriously rivaling Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Coincidentally, because the kid in the yarmulke is wearing the jersey and colors of that year’s ultimately victorious Argentinian (both Ronaldo and the country of Palestine share a need for the largess of the Saudi government, perhaps), the numbers also spell out 10/7, the date being used by the Israeli government and others to mark the start of the latest war in Gaza. Above the pair, appears a line, splashed in white, that reads: “Love’s resilience can rebuild the bridges that war has burned.”

Tagged below is the instagram handle of Mayerson’s “street art” consulting outfit, called Brooklyn Street Art LLC. A complimentary write-up in New York Jewish Week describes the illustration as “Israeli and Palestinian boys act[ing] as symbols of a peaceful future.”