A conference on genocide with an exhibit depicting a glamorized female suicide bomber provokes an angry Israeli ambassador to pull the plug on the piece. As a result, he is kicked out of the national museum of a friendly country. A diplomatic storm brews, the winds of which blow across Europe and the Middle East, making front-page news and filling the airwaves for days.
The exhibit in question featured a digitally aestheticized photo of a female suicide bomber of the Islamic Jihad, Hanadi Jaradat, a 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer who sent 19 Israelis to their deaths in the popular Haifa restaurant Maxim on October 4, 2003. Her photograph serves as the sail of a small boat bearing the word Snovid (“Snow White” in Swedish), floating serenely in a large basin of blood-red water. The work, entitled Snow White and the Madness of Truth, appeared at an exhibition that opened this past January 16 at Stockholm’s Museum of National Antiquities. The exhibition, part of a conference on genocide hosted by the government of Sweden, had been promoted by Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson himself. And there had been a prior guarantee from the Swedes that the conference on genocide would leave the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians out of things. Yet there she was, a digitally enhanced Hanadi Jaradat, sailing on a lake of blood.
Accompanying the display was a text that alternated between bold quotes from the Grimms’ telling of Snow White and the artists’ own italicized musings. It read as follows:
Snow White and the Madness of Truth
Once upon a time in the middle of winterFor the June 12 deaths of her brother, and her cousin
and three drops of blood fellShe was also a woman
as white as snow, as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebonySeemingly innocent with universal non-violent character, lesssuspicious of intentions
and the red looked beautiful upon the whiteThe murderer will yet pay the price and we will not be the onlyones who are crying
like a weed in her heart until she had no peace day and nightHanadi Jaradat was a 29-year-old lawyer
I will run away into the wild forest, and never come home againBefore the engagement took place, he was killed in anencounter with the Israeli security forcesand she ran over sharp stones and through thornsShe said: Your blood will not have been shed in vain
and was about to pierce Snow White’s innocent heartShe was hospitalized, prostrate with grief, after witnessing the shootings
The wild beasts will soon have devoured youAfter his death, she became the breadwinner and she devotedherself solely to that goal“Yes,” said Snow White, “with all my heart.”Weeping bitterly, she added: “If our nation cannot realize itsdream and the goals of the victims, and live in freedom anddignity, then let the whole world be erased”Run away, then, you poor childShe secretly crossed into Israel, charged into a Haifa restaurant,shot a security guard, blew herself up, and murdered 19 innocentciviliansas white as snow, as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebonyAnd many people are indeed crying: the Zer Aviv family, the Almogfamily, and all the relatives and friends of the dead and the woundedand the red looked beautiful upon the white1
In addition to the blood-red pool, the face of Hanadi on the floating boat, and the text mentioning the murders in Haifa, the exhibit was accompanied by a Bach cantata, entitled “My Heart Swims in Blood,” which features a soprano lamenting her wretched sinfulness and begging for salvation.
The work was said to have been made by an “Israeli artist.” But in truth it was the product of two artists: Dror Feiler, an Israeli living in Sweden as a Swedish citizen; and his Swedish wife, Gunilla Skold Feiler. More precisely, Mr. Feiler’s contribution was primarily the choice of music. In addition, he heads a Swedish organization called “Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace,” whose manifesto calls Israel’s elected prime minister Ariel Sharon “the biggest threat to the Israeli people and to Jews around the world.”
So what happened on January 16, 2004?
In an amazing performance captured on closed-circuit video, we see the Israeli ambassador, Tzvi Mazel, ripping out the electrical wires attached to the spotlights highlighting the exhibit, and hurling one of them into the pool, short-circuiting the display. In effect, he pulled the plug on Snow White. In his own words, “My wife and I stood there and began to tremble.... There was the terrorist, wearing perfect makeup and sailing placidly along the rivers of blood of my brothers and the families that were murdered.”2
At this point an irate Dror Feiler, who was present at the incident, began haranguing Mazel in Hebrew. “You’re doing exactly what you do in Nablus,” he shouted. “This is a free country and I can say what I want to say here. Not like in your apartheid country.”3
Mazel’s protest, it turns out, was sincere but not spontaneous. He told the press that he had planned the act after learning about the exhibition from the local papers. “We are in the 1930s now. That is the feeling of many of us who know history,” he said. “There is a feeling among many people, including me, of a tragedy that could be coming.”4