A wave of anti-Palestinian repression has swept the Western art world in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023. From Amsterdam to San Francisco, artists who have criticized Israel’s brutal war on Gaza have seen their exhibitions canceled, their work deinstalled, and other opportunities rescinded. Some of these incidents have been met with major backlash: After Vail, Colorado disinvited Native artist Danielle SeeWalker from a residency last May, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the town; months earlier, Indiana University’s cancellation of Palestinian American painter Samia Halaby’s retrospective made international headlines. In our extensive reporting at Hyperallergic on this phenomenon, we’ve seen that these high-profile cases are just the tip of the iceberg. In Miami Beach, for example, Oolite Arts removed an installation evoking the phrase “from the river to the sea” by Vietnamese artist Khánh Nguyên Hoàng Vũ, citing concerns from unspecified community members that the popular expression of support for Palestinian self-determination amounted to “a literal call for violence against them.” Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany canceled an exhibition section on Afrofuturism after guest curator Anaïs Duplan professed his support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in a social media post.
When you look at the examples they give of art or artists that they suggest are being unfairly attacked, you see that the art or artists that are being criticized aren't pro-Palestinian but anti-Israel.
Saying "from the river to the sea" is a call to dismantle the world's only Jewish state. BDS' explicit aim is the destruction of Israel. Other examples they give are of artists comparing the war in Gaza to the Holocaust - which is Holocaust inversion, a form of Holocaust denial - and calling Israel genocidal, which is a slander against Israel and not a "pro-Palestinian" position.
The article doesn't really have a lot of examples of this so called "repression" so it expands the definition of repression to include a museum moving a piece of artwork to another wall and adding signage about how its content can be seen as offensive. Beyond that it features anti-Israel artists' self-censorship - artwork that they refused to show when the galleries refused to adopt BDS - as examples of repression, when the only people who stopped their being exhibited were the artists themselves.
Nowadays, it is indeed difficult to distinguish between "pro-Palestinian" and "anti-Israel." That is because the proponents themselves make no such distinction between the two, causing otherwise intelligent people to be blind to the obvious: No one is calling to censor or repress any artwork that calls for a Palestinian state side by side with Israel, or that sympathizes with Palestinian suffering, or that celebrates Palestinian culture.
Calling to destroy Israel as a Jewish state when there is no call to demolish China or Iran, when there is no call to dismantle any state that defines itself as Muslim or Christian, is not "pro-Palestinian." Israel's entire purpose, and Zionism's entire purpose, is to create a small space on Earth that Jews can feel safe. Criticizing how Israel balances the rights of Jews and non-Jews under its control is perfectly acceptable. Opposing it altogether, and denying the Jews equal or any rights in the region, is antisemitism. Redefining Zionism, or framing that idea as "pro-Palestinian," does not change the bigotry behind the desire to destroy the Jewish state.
While these are all examples of "repression," it is richly ironic that Hyperallergic is not at all critical of BDS which itself calls for the censorship of anything - including art - of Israelis or Zionists.
The hypocrisy goes beyond that.
Hyperallergic properly discusses the work of the late artist Charles Krafft. Krafft was known in the Seattle arts scene as a deeply ironic artist who would explore Nazi and racist themes - but then he made it clear that he wasn't being ironic, and he was in fact a white supremacist and Holocaust denier. Obviously, once that became known his stock in the art world went down and galleries refused to show his art.
There is no criticism from Hyperallergic for the right of art spaces to choose who to highlight and who not to based on their politics when those politics are those that the magazine disagrees with. There is no complaint about "repression," even though the antisemitism represented by Krafft is just as odious than the antisemitism of the artists it celebrates.
Hyperallergic fully supports artists who deny Jewish national rights, who desire to ethically cleanse seven million Jews from their homes, who claim that Jews are not really Jews but Khazars, who say that Jews have no right to Jerusalem or other holy places, and many of whom question or deny the Holocaust if anyone would ask them. The magazine does not seem to understand that the Palestinian and Arab antisemitism that pervades their media and their art is indistinguishable from that of Krafft. Criticizing and marginalizing white supremacist artists is proper - and so is criticism and marginalization of antisemites from the Left and from the Muslima and Arab worlds.
Condoning their antisemitism is not at all being anti-Palestinian - unless you define antisemitism as an integral part of the Palestinian narrative. And that is a question that the Left should be taking seriously if it really hates racism.
The question of where to draw the line between free speech and hate speech is legitimate. The differences between censorship and criticism are important to define. It is proper for Hyperallergic to grapple with those issues. It is not proper for it to take an inconsistent position that conveniently aligns with its politics and ends up supporting some kinds of Jew hatred as a principled position.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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