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Swedish Snow White grimmer than a
fairytale
ANYONE who saw posters in the subway stations of Stockholm
in Sweden, advertising an exhibition at the Museum of National
Antiquities, would have responded instinctively to the image
of a young woman in a headscarf.
Her limpid gaze and grave expression spoke of a women who
was intelligent and dedicated.
Hanadi Jaradat was both of these things. She was also - and
this you would not have guessed, either from the poster or
from the exhibition it promoted - a mass murderer.
On 4 October last year, an unmarried Palestinian lawyer in
her late 20s walked through two Israeli army checkpoints on
the West Bank.
She was not searched, because male soldiers are prohibited
from searching women, and there were no female troops on duty.
The woman, Hanadi Jaradat, took a taxi to Maxim's restaurant
in Haifa, where a security guard waved her through. She was
well-spoken and clearly respectable.
The restaurant had been established for 40 years, jointly
owned and managed by Jews and Arabs, a testament to the will
of ordinary people to co-exist peacefully in Israel.
Jaradat bought a £3 lunch and took it out to the taxi
driver. Then she returned to the restaurant, positioned herself
as close as possible to several family groups, and detonated
the belt of explosives about her waist.
More than 20 people died, either instantly or over the following
days and weeks. They included Tomer Almog, who was eight and
who died with his father and grandparents. Five of the dead
were Arabs.
Among the dozens who were injured was the 90-year-old Arabic
father of Maxim's co-owner.
Tomer Almog's four-year-old sister was badly burned and his
10-year-old brother was blinded. Their photographs were not
displayed in Stockholm's subways.
When the Israeli ambassador to Sweden saw Jaradat's photograph,
pinned like a sail to a wooden boat that floated in a fountain
filled with red liquid, to symbolise blood, he reacted with
a fury that has been reported around the world.
Zvi Mazel ripped out light fittings and threw cables into
the fountain, reportedly short-circuiting the entire installation.
He was escorted from the building, and later said: "For
me it was intolerable and an insult to the families of the
victims. As ambassador to Israel I could not remain indifferent
to such an obscene misrepresentation of reality. This was
not a piece of art."
The director of the museum, Kristian Berg, retorted: "Violence
against art is never defensible." And Anna Larsson, a
spokeswoman for the Swedish foreign ministry, added: "We
feel it is unacceptable for him to destroy art in this way."
The ambassador is not the only Jewish iconoclast to make
the news with attacks on artworks recently.
Aaron Barschak, the self-styled comedy terrorist who gatecrashed
Prince William's 21st birthday party dressed as Osama bin
Laden in a ball gown, launched a paintball assault on Jake
and Dinos Chapman as the brothers displayed their installation,
The Rape Of Creativity.
The Chapmans' critically acclaimed work took Goya etchings
and pasted cartoon heads on to their bodies. Barschak's legally
condemned performance involved hurling red paint around while
shouting, "Viva Goya!"
Art is always a matter of personal opinions, and personally
my opinion is that, as an artist, Barschak is worth any number
of Chapman brothers, even septuplets.
But then my introduction to art was rather unorthodox: I
showed a book of my doodles and scribbles to Salvador Dali,
and he inspired me to attempt a series of surrealist paintings.
I used to meet Dali at the St Regis Hotel in New York during
the mid-70s - we were brought together by David Bowie's girlfriend,
Amanda Lear, who was the model on the cover of Roxy Music's
album For Your Pleasure... and who had been a man, so the
whispers went, until Dali paid for her sex change.
Dali gave me several sculptures and a stunning crystal, which
is now surrounded by bent cutlery on the bonnet of my Cadillac.
The car is an artwork itself, which I created with the sculptor
Avi Pines. I visited him at the Ritz in Barcelona, where he
was my artistic mentor for a time, though I think sometimes
I used to scare him, I once bent a gold fork in his hand,
and he locked himself in his room for the rest of the day.
The installation which the Israeli ambassador destroyed in
the Stockholm museum was called Snow White And The Madness
Of Truth. The only madness there is the labelling of a sick
killer as Snow White.
If the museum had really wanted to shock, its posters should
not have depicted Jaradat, but the faces of her 21 murdered
victims.
They are visible, fortunately, on an Israeli government website
- family snapshots of a score or more of lives cut brutally
short, for no reason but hatred.
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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