What the removal of a Netanyahu Hitler painting can tell us about the art world - The Jewish Chronicle

A painting portraying Benjamin Netanyahu as Adolf Hitler has been removed from a London art fair amid outrage and the outrage was wholly justified. 80 years ago, the actual Nazis prohibited modernist art as “Jewish and degenerate”, replacing it with the obvious and the heroic. Today, in London, the obvious and heroic was back, and it was still antisemitic.

Modern antisemitism offers its caricature of Jews to help its audience understand who is responsible for all that is evil in the world. This is important for fantasies of global conspiracy because the all-powerful evil is necessarily not visible in such fantasies. Antisemitism gives them a human face.

Art has always been a medium by which this emotionally virulent message was rammed home. Medieval images of innocent, saintly children being bled dry by evil Jews resonated with depictions of the innocent Jesus on the cross, taking on all of the burdens of humankind and suffering with us at the hands of those amongst us who stubbornly refuse to work for the redemption of their souls.

Nationalist antisemites accused Jews of betraying the nation, Socialist antisemites accused them of betraying the working class, totalitarians accused them of betraying the people, feminist antisemites accuse them of betraying women and anti-imperialist antisemites accuse Zionists of playing a key role in imperialism. All of these forms have their associated genres of antisemitic art, which re-animate the seductive hatreds of the day with the plausible energy of half-remembered old tropes.

There were 20th-century efforts to make Israel symbolic of what is most evil and corrupt: that is racism and apartheid. But today, antizionism insists Israel is genocidal. Other countries may commit the crimes of crimes and be forgiven; but genocide is inherent to the very existence of Israel; it is original sin, not a terrible lapse.

Antisemitism often projects the actions and fantasies of antisemites onto Jews. Hamas is, according to its founding document, actually genocidal and antisemitic; it came into existence to sabotage the peace process.

On 7 October, even as the murder of a thousand Jews in a day was still going on, antizionism was already accusing Israel of genocide. Hamas ran away and hid amongst civilians, knowing that if Israel mounted an effective counter-attack to prevent them killing Jews again, then many innocents would die. They then accused Israel of genocide, of deliberately murdering children, because it did indeed counter-attack. A defensive war against a genocidal force is now portrayed as genocide. Democratic opinion formers around the world, news organisations and academics, have insisted that this contemporary blood libel is true, and if not true, it is any way a legitimate position.

Israel is assumed to be so powerful that if it wanted only to defeat Hamas, it could do so without hurting anybody; so, if civilians are hurt in this urban warfare, it follows that hurting civilians is the real intention.

The antisemitic Iranian regime, which bankrolls and arms Hamas, and which is murderously suppressing a feminist uprising, has long been a patron of Holocaust inversion art. There is a deliberate extra barb in accusing Jews of being Nazis, who indeed did murder millions of Jewish children, women and grandparents, with intent to destroy all Jews, everywhere.

Our London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism is hosting a global academic conference later this month. As part of the conference, we are exhibiting the work of three artists on the topic of the horrors of 7 October, and its aftermath. The mainstream art world will not show their haunting and emotionally taught work, but it does show vulgar antisemitic images, lacking in any originality or depth.

One of our artists was told by a senior academic that if she had done this kind of work ‘for the other side’, then she would have had people ‘knocking on her door with funding for post doctoral study’.

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Art