Art and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

התערוכה 'דיוקנאות קין: ייצוגים של "אחרים" באמנות העכשווית בישראל' עסקה בפעולת הסימון בחברה הישראלית, באחרות, דיכוי וחפצון, כשנקודת המוצא לדיון זה היה האירוע התנ"כי של רצח הבל על ידי אחיו, קין. המאמר "המצאת המוות" עוסק בראשוניות מעשה לקיחת החיים, כפי שהדבר מובא במקור התנ"כי, ובביטויו והשפעתו על עיצוב זהויות הקרבן והפוגע באמנות הישראלית.

The Occupied Territories are largely absent from the Israeli public sphere. Few movie directors even bother to tell their story anymore. Documentary maker Ra'anan Alexandrowicz has risen to the challenge in a powerful work that uses cinematic techniques to denounce the worldview responsible for the institutionalized miscarriage of justice by the Israeli military administration " in these parts. "

The art of today cannot be static, cannot seek permanence and must catch the eye or it will be dismissed quickly by the jaded modern viewer. The transient, striking nature of Street Art makes it a modern art for a contemporary audience. Yet the movement is more than simply a form of art, Street Art is very much a movement with profound social and political value. This is the facet of Street Art which I wish to explore in this essay.
Street Art has the capacity of being a very strong platform for socio-political activists, the most infamous and skilled of these Street Art activists I will be discussing in this paper- Banksy. He is more than simply a Street Artist however, rather a political activist operating through the medium of art. Famously encouraging other artists to 'Speak softly but carry a big can of paint', Banksy is something of a pioneer for incorporating his political messages into his artwork.  I wish to gain an insight into the mind of Banksy and to explain why he uses Street Art to project his principles and beliefs.
In this essay, I hope to examine Banksy as an activist, looking primarily at his Guantanamo project at Disneyland in 2006 and his work on the West Bank barrier between Israel and Palestine in 2005. I would like to view his work in Palestine looking at its wider context and at the impact his artwork has had on the Western World. By discussing Street Art by other Palestinian artists, I wish to highlight the significance and necessity of a strong political message in the art of the West Bank.

This book offers a much-needed focus on Palestine solidarity films, supplying a critical theoretical framework whose intellectual thrust is rooted in the challenges facing scholars censored for attempting to rectify and reverse the silencing of a subject matter about which much of the world would remain uninformed without cinematic and televisual mediation. Its innovative focus on Palestine solidarity films spans a selected array of works which began to emerge during the 1970s, made by directors located outside Palestine/Israel who professed support for Palestinian liberation. Visualizing the Palestinian Struggle analyzes Palestine solidarity films hailing from countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Iran, Palestine/Israel, Mexico, and the United States. Visualizing the Palestinian Struggle is an effort to insist, constructively, upon a rectification and reversal of the glaring and disproportionate minimization and distortion of discourse critical of Zionism and Israeli policy in the cinematic and televisual public sphere.

History is a Natural Selection" I discuss how municipal city museums in Israel, one among many agents, initiate the construction of collective memories of memorial sites and areas through "the politics of memory."  It illustrates the way memory becomes fluid in the hands of its designers, and how it is consciously and intelligently used for ideological, political and social purposes. The article discusses the thwarted attempt to establish an alternative model for museums in bi-national cities, a model that differs from the one sided and biased pattern, instrumental in shaping consciousness and erasing Palestinian history, currently used by Israeli museums to write the history of the powerful and the occupier

Sarah Chinski, the most prominent critical theorist of
Israeli art, wrote Kingdom of the Meek nearly a decade
ago, but she became ill in 2006 and died two years later,
before she could complete it. Edited by Yigal Nizri, the
book was published recently and is a continuation of
her important, controversial articles that rocked the
Israeli art world when they were published in the journal
Theory and Criticism in the 1990s and early 2000s.1
Chinski insisted that although art is often perceived as
dissenting from accepted beliefs and opinions (doxa),
in fact it contributes to the existing dominant discourse
and even replicates it. She demonstrated how the
hegemonic national-Zionist discourse is expressed in
the foundational theses of Israeli art.