Posted on 05/06/2004 8:03:16 AM PDT by SJackson
Abusing the most emotive of Jewish symbols is deeply offensive, writes David Bernstein.
The decision to remove the offensive anti-Israel art display in Flinders Street has, inevitably, rekindled the freedom of speech and art debate that erupted over Andres Serrano's equally offensive Piss Christ a few years ago. There was never any doubt that the exhibit - which superimposed a series of outrageously distorted "facts" about Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians on a huge Star of David - was going to enrage the local Jewish community. For obvious and understandable reasons.
In the first place, the use of the Star of David in an indisputably hostile context was deliberately provocative. The Star of David is the most complexly emotive of all Jewish symbols: it has profound, ages-old religious significance as the most ubiquitous and recognisable of such symbols; it is the symbol of proud Jewish national renaissance, encapsulated in the flag of the state of Israel; and it is, when displayed in a hostile and/or derogatory context, the badge of shame, persecution and ultimately genocide, as in the yellow star that millions of Europe's Jews were forced to wear before their annihilation in the Nazi death camps. It is this nerve that the Flinders Street display has so brutally touched.
It is inconceivable that the creators of this exhibit would not have been aware of what they were doing when they used the Star of David in the way they did.
But why did they choose to superimpose on this highly emotive symbol a set of supposed "facts" about Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians over the past half-century that are so patently false that they border on caricature? Is this what the artists intended - that is, to deliberately outrage by exaggeration - or were the figures they presented intended to represent the "truth"?
If the latter, it is the easiest of tasks for any reasonably well-informed critic to debunk those figures as the grotesquely distorted fictions they are:
• "200,000 Palestinians have been killed" since the creation of Israel in 1948? Thousands, probably tens of thousands, of Palestinians as well as Israelis have been killed in the bloody conflict between the two peoples in the past 50 years. The exact figure is probably impossible to calculate with any degree of accuracy. But 200,000? As a bald assertion of "fact"? Why not 2 million - or even 6 million? (Indeed, is this the point the artists were obscenely trying to make: if it can be claimed that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust - a figure routinely disputed by Holocaust deniers and revisionists - why can't the Palestinians claim a similarly "unsubstantiated" figure?)
• "5,000,000 refugees have been created"? Well, yes, there are millions of people of Palestinian descent living outside Palestine - people who for one reason or another were forced to flee Palestine in 1948 and again in 1967, and their children and grandchildren. But by the same token, by this definition there are 5,000,000 Jewish "refugees" in Israel - people who for one reason or another were forced to flee a hostile, genocidal Europe before and after World War II and the increasingly hostile, if not genocidal in the European sense, countries of the Arab Middle East and North Africa after Israel's creation in 1948, and who, with their children and grandchildren, now live in the Jewish state.
All such "refugees", Israelis and Palestinians alike, are the tragic victims of a historical cataclysm that has engulfed both peoples. And no one is denying that the fairest possible solution must be found that answers the legitimate national, religious and security needs and aspirations of both peoples. A seemingly impossible task in the present climate of hatred, it is true - but one not aided by this kind of ignorant or malicious demonisation of just one side in the dispute.
• "385 towns and villages have been destroyed"? Yes, that is true - and that's only the Palestinian villages destroyed by the Israelis, not the thousands of Jewish towns and villages wiped out in the places where the families of most Israeli Jews had lived for centuries and, in some cases, millenniums.
True, two wrongs don't make a right - but the kind of one-sided demonisation of Israel in this artwork, using symbolism associated with the Holocaust in Europe, demands this kind of historical contextualisation.
• "200,000 settlements have been built"? Too absurd for serious comment - not even erstwhile settlement tsar Ariel Sharon, in his wildest dreams, would have been so ambitious. Try 350 or so.
As for the other charges: the "300 billion military dollars spent" - one would have to ask if this is just by Israel, or does it include the billions spent by its Arab neighbours in pursuit of Israel's annihilation, in which case the figure is probably a rather surprising understatement; the "100+ WMDs" Israel is purported to have manufactured - this is probably another rather surprising understatement, but one that most Jews would probably not quibble with; and the "65 UN resolutions" Israel has "ignored" over the past 50 years - most Jews would be somewhat surprised that there have been so few, given the inbuilt anti-Israeli bias that the United Nations has displayed for much of the past 50 years (manifested most notoriously in the cynical "Zionism is racism" resolution that the world body was forced to rescind in 1991).
On the most generous of all possible readings, the creators of this exhibit might just be credited with having been deliberately provocative in an attempt to highlight the complexity of the Israel-Palestine issue and the unreliability of the facts and figures that are thrown around by both sides to make their case. But I doubt it.
Whether the likelihood that its creators had baser motives merits the decision to ban the display is another matter, and does raise questions of freedom of speech and artistic licence. As a matter of principle, I have an aversion to censorship. But, somehow, I don't think I'll be losing too much sleep over this particular decision.
After all, too rigid and uncompromising a commitment to freedom of speech, like any other fundamentalism, has its drawbacks, too.
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