Beth Stuart’s Delibels, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, is an extremely concerning exhibition not for what it says but for what it is — artfully coded antisemitism. All the more reprehensible for its coyness.
The art pieces are enigmatic, engaging. In each, a black ledge of replicas tops a long black mesh. The objects — fabricated seeds, fruit, pizza crusts, nuts — suggest the relics of the once edible, the spectral word within the title — but now not-indelible. The nourishing solids have become transitory, passing, forgettable. Each piece poses a once-digestible solidity on a wavering base.
What’s problematic is the full-wall text — in spectral grey — that accompanies the sculptures. Stuart interweaves Luther Burbank, the history of some berries, nuts and phrases, with three cases of supposed genocide: the Armenian, the alleged Palestinian and finally our Residential Schools. As a whole, the work may contrast the self-renewal of nature’s produce with humans’ murderousness. The Palestinian focus, a friend suggests, adds a more accurate echo to the title: libels.
As it happens, this work precisely echoes the allegations of Jewish genocide, infanticide and illegal oppression of the Palestinians that an as yet unidentified vandal wrote on the outside wall of Congregation Emanu-el, the Victoria synagogue (the oldest operating in Canada). Police plan to charge the vandal with hate speech and incitement to violence. AGGV appears unperturbed by this entry’s blatant antisemitism.
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Of course the term “genocide” — here first used re: the Armenians — was coined in reference to the Holocaust. It means the deliberate attempt to annihilate a people. One example: the Gazans’ elected government, Hamas, is constitutionally pledged (Article 7) to eliminate WORLD Jewry. Here’s another: in 1948 Israel accepted the two-state solution but the Arabs instead launched their continuing war to eliminate the Jews. There have since been eight land-for-peace offers (six by Israel), all rejected by the Palestinians, without discussion. They demand a statehood that would replace not join Israel.
In short, genocide for the Palestinians is not a plight but their platform. This “big lie” must have Goebbels chortling in his grave.
The Palestinian claim is also an affront to the frame of two real victims of genocide. Incidentally, a large delegation of Canada’s indigenous leaders recently visited Israel to express their support. Knowing the Jews occupied these contested lands 2,000 years before the Koran launched Islam, the Jews are their model in across centuries surviving colonial oppressors, ultimately to reclaim their land and identity. Later Stuart parallels the Canadian government waste of a million dollars supervising a protest — against ending the Kamloops burial search — with Canada’s financial support of Israel’s self-defence.
Stuart first mentions the Jews as a threat on the Armenian border, then by implication responsible for their population drop from 27,000 to 1,000 in Old Jerusalem.
Then the Palestinians are Israel’s innocent victims: “I saw a social media post in November 2023 that showed someone opening an aid truck in the Gaza Strip and it was full of thousands of white shrouds. Not food or medicine.”
Though the professor does cite her scholarly (?) source she omits the obvious cause of that Palestinian inconvenience. Just weeks earlier — on October 7— their government Hamas invaded Israel, killed over 1,200 people, mainly civilians, including innocents at a music festival, abducted 251, and indulged in a fury of torture, rape and mutilation — that they and the Gazan citizenry celebrated. They made videos of their atrocities.
Hamas pledged to repeat that attack throughout Israel and the West Bank. Ignoring that detail, Stuart blames Israel for the aggressor Palestinians’ ensuing difficulties, like shortages of clean and desalinated water, medicine, food, etc. And their crop of shrouds.
Stuart then revives the centuries-old blood libel against the Jews: They want to kill your children! Even when they don’t need Christian blood for their matzo.
She cites a presumably Jewish “pundit” on Israeli TV Channel 14 in an “early 2024…. clip… saying every Palestinian over the age of four years is a potential terrorist and a necessary target of war.” So her sculptures’ mesh bags are the size of a four-year-old child. That quoted statement does seem monstrous — until you recall its context.
First, to represent Israel she has chosen the right wing news, politics and satire channel that even in Israel is considered extremist. Second, she again omits the October 7 context. A Hamas spokesman flatly stated “There are no civilians in Israel” — i.e., only targets in war. Among their many child victims was one infant whom Hamas reportedly microwaved to death in front of its parents. When Stuart attributes this monstrous “morality” to Israel, she not only blames the victim but charges him.
Third, Stuart’s allegation of extreme child abuse actually is true — but against the Palestinians. As Hamas has militarized their hospitals, schools, playgrounds, mosques — thus inviting their wartime attack — they have even more callously weaponized their own children. Their martyrdom culture encourages and rewards the very deaths of their children that they then bewail and blame upon Israel. Parents send their children to summer day camps to train as soldiers. Their schools — abetted by the UNRWA — continue to teach their children to hate and to kill the Jews.
Golda Meir’s sad prophecy still holds: “We won’t have peace until the Palestinians decide they love their own children more than they hate us.” The West’s reflex to blame Israel for the Gaza children’s deaths only encourages that vile abuse to continue. As does Stuart.
Indeed she blames Israel for all the Palestinians’ suffering, especially the self-inflicted. Palestinians not Israelis set those forest fires (with no loss of Green Party support). Since 1948 the deaths, expulsions/departures and losses all resulted from the Palestinians’ choice of war over peaceful coexistence with the Jews.
This widespread antisemitism has a clear cause. A world with 57 Moslem states, not one a democracy, cannot tolerate the existence of one slender sliver of a Jewish state. While the October 7 savagery initially appalled the civilized world, within days — before Israel even began its response — there was an eruption of aggressive support — for Palestine! The slogans — From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, Globalize the intifada — implicitly called for the elimination of the Jewish state, the latter for Jews here too.
Today we witness attacks upon Jews and Jewish institutions unseen since the Nazis. It’s as if the October 7 barbarity made antisemitism fashionable again. The recently unspeakable can now be yelled. And so we find the absurdity of Queers for Palestine, like Feminists, Christians, Artists, all campaigning against Israel — their sole defender in the region — and for an ethos that does persecute and would annihilate them. Regrettably the press, many governments and many arts organizations have bought into that folly. Now add AGGV.
Only at the end does Stuart finally acknowledge the October 7 barbarism. She celebrates it!
Early Stuart cited the invasive Himalayan blackberry which Burbank brought from Armenia. It’s thus an emblem of the victim of genocide. When she finally addresses the October 7 slaughter it’s planting a new generation, like her blackberries, a hardy new crop — planted to eliminate the Jews. “For the second spring since October 7, 2023, the blackberry hedges are blooming.”
Today’s cultural assault on the Jews is a clear revival of 1930s Germany. Here’s the compelling difference: We know what resulted then. Some then may have feared what might follow. We know what did. Yet we have willingly gone back there, on the street and in the art gallery. If Stuart does not know better the AGGV should. Their students and their supporters deserve better than to be nourished on poison.