Article in top art magazine claims Israel ‘violently cleansing’ Palestinians
ArtForum magazine, a leading international contemporary art magazine, published an article in its Summer 2021 edition featuring an interview with strongly anti-Israel rhetoric and claims that Israel is ethnic cleansing Palestinians.
The article interviewed Hanan Toukan, an assistant professor in politics and Middle East studies at Bard College Berlin, and Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, the director-general of the Palestinian Museum, located north of Ramallah in Birzeit in the West Bank.
The interview broadly accuses Israel of illegally refusing to vaccinate Palestinians, engaging in “violent cleansing” of residents of Sheikh Jarrah, of arbitrary killings of Palestinians, and subjecting Palestinians to “obliteration from one of the most brutal militaries in the world.”
Toukan and Laïdi-Hanieh described how the museum is part of an “anti-colonial struggle” against Israel and is necessary to reclaim the Palestinian narrative and history.
In the opening of the interview, Toukan described when the museum opened that “writers considered what such a museum meant in the colonial context of Palestine, its relation to the land on which it exists, and how this relation reveals processes of dispossession and appeals for reclamation that define life under Israeli colonialism.”
The interview also described the unique role that the Palestinian Museum plays in opposition to a global context of “ivory-tower museum[s].” The article specifically denounces the Israel Museum in Jerusalem as a continuation of the British colonial legacy, because it displays items from Gaza, Nablus, and Jericho.
“Palestine is on its own, and the museum and concomitant cultural projects become a testament not only to survival in the face of eradication but to ingenuity in response to structural inequalities,” Toukan said.
Laïdi-Hanieh further described the importance of the museum in this context: “The colonial neoliberal dispensation under which we live – the reign of the consultant and the freelancer – leads to a generalized weakness and hollowing out of Palestinian institutions; it is killing the cultural sector.”
ArtForum has not responded to The
request for comment