Both institutionally and individually the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria seems to have forgotten October 7, 2023. Remember?
OK, that’s when the Gazans’ elected government, Hamas, invaded Israel, slaughtered over 1200 people, took 251 hostages, and murdered and raped civilians, including innocents attending a music festival. They recorded many of their atrocities to celebrate them.
The world was appalled — for a few days. Before Israel even began its response the UN warned her against excessive reaction. Immediately, widespread demonstrations supported — the Palestinians! They called for the elimination of the Jewish state — From the river to the sea, Bring the intifada, etc. They even charged Israel with genocide — trying to turn the Palestinians’ platform into their plight.
Article 7 of the Hamas constitution calls for the elimination of global Jewry! The Palestinians have rejected all offers of statehood that required peaceful coexistence with Israel. They rejected the 2-state solution in 1948 and eight land-for-peace offers (six from Israel) since, all without negotiation. They insist on replacing not joining the Jewish state. After all, why else be a separate state? They share all their Arab neighbours’ history, language, culture, values, religion and, of course, Dark Ages misogyny and antisemitism.
That’s the point. A world with 57 Arab states, not one a democracy, can’t bear the existence of one slender sliver of a Jewish state. It is a democracy — and indeed the West’s frontline of defence against the jihadist campaign for a global caliphate under Sharia law. So when you see those Queers for Palestine signs, or Feminists, Christians, Writers, Artists, Journalists, etc., you have to laugh. Those groups promote the destruction of the only state in the region that supports them! But antisemitism never did make anyone smarter.
And so to the AGGV’s current presentation of an antisemitic work. The exhibition is dedicated to celebrating and protecting our various cultures and communities. “Architectures of Protection” — they promise. That requires antisemitism?
In itself Beth Stuart’s Delibels are very beautiful, evocative works. In each, a black ledge of replicas tops a long wispy black mesh. In my reading, 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 embodies a once-digestible solidity, wavering below.
What renders the work problematic is the accompanying full-wall text. It interweaves the history of some berries, nuts and phrases with a few cases of genocide: the Armenian, “the Palestinian” and finally the Canadian residential schools. As a whole, the work contrasts the self-renewal of nature’s produce with humans’ murderousness. But repeating the lie of a Palestinian genocide debases the other two genuine cases — and reduces the entire exhibition to hypocrisy
Several works here celebrate indigenous community, with whom Ms Stuart identifies the Palestinians. But the Jews occupied those lands for 2,000 years before the Koran launched Islam. As it happens, a large delegation of Canada’s indigenous leaders recently visited Israel to express their support. The Jews are their model in across centuries surviving colonial oppressors, ultimately to reclaim their land and identity. Ms Stuart might not know that but AGGV should. Actually, Ms Stuart should too. Turns out she’s a prof at the University of Victoria. Guess that excuses her.
Here Ms Stuart introduces the Jews in passim, as dangerous neighbours to the Armenian survivors. She then presents the Palestinians as innocent victims of Jewish assault: “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 white shrouds. Not food or medicine.” Note the prof’s impressive “research” citation.
Is she really unaware that less than a month earlier Hamas had invaded Israel and slaughtered enough to prompt Israel’s existential defence? With their civilian help, planning and approval they’d tortured and killed Jewish civilians. But the professor’s only sympathy is for the Gazans who got shrouds instead of food. She ignores the excitement in the entire Palestinian community, in Gaza and the West Bank, at their successful atrocities. In the usual double standard against Israel’s self-defence she then blames Israel for the aggressor Palestinians’ ensuing difficulties, like loss of desalinated water, etc.
Ms Stuart then revives the centuries-old blood libel against the Jews. They want to kill your children, even beyond their legendary need for Christian blood for their matzo! She cites an “early 2024…. clip… saying every Palestinian over the age of four years is a potential terrorist and a necessary target of war.” That does seem monstrous — until you recall its context.
In Hamas’s recent total war against Israeli civilians, raping and killing, a spokesman flatly stated “There are no civilians in Israel” — i.e., only targets in war. Among the many children Hamas killed or took hostage was one infant whom they reportedly microwaved to death in front of its parents. But Ms Stuart has the gall to attribute infanticide to Israel, to the victim of that assault.
Moreover, that ostensibly monstrous statement contains a tragic truth — what the Palestinians regrettably have for decades done to their own children. As Hamas has militarized their schools, hospitals, playgrounds, mosques — thus disqualifying them from exemption from 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 — 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 do Ms Stuart and the AGGV.
When Ms Stuart complains about the ”massive wildfires near occupied Jerusalem…Ayalon Canada Park… located in occupied Palestine” she digs her hole deeper. The wildfires were set by Palestinian terrorists (with no loss of support among our Green Parties, we might note). In Israel the Jews plant; the terrorists burn.
So, too, when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 -- its last “occupation” — the Palestinians had the chance to prove themselves ready for responsible statehood. Instead they destroyed the massive greenhouse industry Israel had left them and proceeded to their campaign of attacking Israeli civilians. Hence the defensive embargo for which Israel continues to be vilified, even after that October 7. While Israel built underground bomb shelters for the necessary protection of all its citizens the Palestinians lavished huge funding on aggressive tunnels solely for military use against Israel. Of course Israel is condemned for destroying the Palestinians’ war-spaces.
Ms Stuart refers to the “30,000 Palestinians … killed or expelled” from that forest fire area in 1948 without recognizing the Arab initiation of the attack, the massive Israeli deaths and the 750,000 Jews who were expropriated and expelled from their homes in the Arab nations at that time. Nor that those same Arab nations created “the Palestinian refugee problem” by denying their Arab brethren security or citizenship, preferring instead to use them as living weapons against the new Jewish state.
Ms Stuart’s “occupied Jerusalem” denies the clear legitimacy of the Jewish state (UN, 1948). Though Israel won the 1948 war the aggressor Jordan illegally held on to East Jerusalem and the historic Jewish areas, Judea and Samaria. The world stood by as Jordan “cleansed” East Jerusalem of Jews and later annexed the other two areas, changing their name to West Bank to hide their obvious Jewish history. Jordan’s offensive grab was allowed but Israel’s defensive recovery in 1967 is illegal, “occupied.”
I am equally appalled by the AGGV providing a platform for this antisemitic work and by the fact I haven’t heard anyone else complain about it. The university’s surrender to antisemitism is one thing, But perhaps Victoria has become so used to it — the kaffyia-flaunting City Councilor, the obstructive pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the prevention of “dangerous” (i.e., not anti-Israel) presentations at the Belfry and Cinecentre. Or maybe this artist’s statement has a saving grace: It is so long, incoherent, turgid, that it is a labour to plod through it, leave alone to understand. (I should have guessed she was a prof.)
That does not let the AGGV off the hook. For an institution dedicated to preserving the best of our past and positively to relate it to the present this irresponsibility is inexcusable. Simply, the greatest threat to our civilization’s survival is this abandonment of the relevance of history and the blurring of our moral compass, exemplified by the ease with which we slide back into our oldest and costliest prejudice, antisemitism.
