Archive | 2023/06/18

Prawdziwe znaczenie “Od rzeki do morza Palestyna będzie wolna”

Jun18

(Zdjęcie: Andrew Ratto/Wikimedia Commons)


Prawdziwe znaczenie “Od rzeki do morza Palestyna będzie wolna”

Bassam Tawil
Tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

Antyizraelscy studenci na wielu kampusach uniwersyteckich w USA, Kanadzie, Australii i Europie często skandują hasło “Od rzeki do morza Palestyna będzie wolna”. To hasło, które zasadniczo oznacza, że Izrael nie ma prawa istnieć na ziemi między rzeką Jordan a Morzem Śródziemnym – innymi słowy na całej ziemi, która obecnie stanowi Izrael – od dawna jest popierane przez grupy islamistyczne, które otwarcie wzywają do wyeliminowania Izraela.

To samo wezwanie zostało powtórzono na:

  • Niedawnym spotkaniu Rady Studentów Uniwersytetu w Sydney, podczas którego członkowie rady uniemożliwili żydowskim studentom przemawianie lub wywieszanie izraelskich flag w Dniu Niepodległości Izraela.
  • Wiec 8 kwietnia pod nazwą “Ręce precz od [meczetu] Al-Aksa”, zorganizowany przez kilka pro-palestyńskich organizacji w Nowym Jorku. Na wiecu mówcy wychwalali palestyński “opór” i jego “męczenników” i powtarzali to samo hasło.
  • Wydarzenie zorganizowane na początku tego roku przez grupy żydowskie na University College London, gdzie dziesiątki antyizraelskich aktywistów skandowały: “Uwolnić Palestynę od rzeki do morza”.

“Powinniśmy wezwać arabskie i muzułmańskie armie do wyzwolenia Palestyny” – powiedział wyraźnie jeden z mówców na antyizraelskim zgromadzeniu.

Pod koniec zeszłego roku społeczność żydowska z Northwestern University w Chicago była zszokowana, widząc, że wydrukowane kopie artykułu o dumie żydowskiej zostały zamalowane słowami: “Od rzeki do morza Palestyna będzie wolna”.

Nie sposób wyobrazić sobie, że działacze antyizraelscy nie mają pojęcia, że to hasło jest powszechnym wezwaniem do broni dla tych, którzy chcą zniszczyć Izrael.

Hasło to odzwierciedla życzenia Iranu i jego terrorystycznych pełnomocników – zwłaszcza Hamasu, Palestyńskiego Islamskiego Dżihadu (PIJ) i Hezbollahu – zastąpienia Izraela pięćdziesiątym siódmym państwem islamskim – od rzeki Jordan po Morze Śródziemne.

Irańscy przywódcy i oficjele często powtarzają, że ich celem jest “wymazanie Izraela z mapy”. Niedawno Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych Iranu powtórzyło wezwanie, oznajmiając, Jerozolima jest “wieczną stolicą Palestyny, od rzeki do morza”.

W przeddzień swojej niedawnej wizyty w Syrii prezydent Iranu, Ebrahim Raisi, powtórzył życzenie swojego reżimu, aby Izrael został usunięty [z powierzchni ziemi].

Hamas, wspierana przez Iran grupa terrorystyczna kontrolująca Strefę Gazy, nigdy nie przegapił okazji, by zadeklarować swój zamiar przekazania tego samego przesłania. W grudniu 2022 r., w 35. rocznicę swojego powstania, Hamas ujawnił swoje hasło: “Palestyna od rzeki do morza”. Mapa towarzysząca sloganowi przedstawiała – bez Izraela – cały kraj od rzeki Jordan do Morza Śródziemnego.

Na początku tego roku przywódca Hamasu, Ismail Hanijja, ponownie powtórzył cel swojej grupy, jakim jest zniszczenie Izraela, mówiąc:

“Cała Palestyna, od rzeki do morza i od Ras al-Nakuora [na granicy izraelsko-libańskiej] do Umm al-Raszrasz [Ejlat, najbardziej wysunięte na południe miasto Izraela], jest jednym krajem, który jest niepodzielny i nie może być sprzedany ani przehandlowany”.

Rzecznik Hamasu, Husam Badran, również potwierdził poparcie swojej grupy dla wyeliminowania Izraela: “Palestyna, którą znamy, rozciąga się od rzeki do morza – nie pomijając ani centymetra” – powiedział.

Używając tego hasła, Iran i Hamas mówią bez ogródek, że na Bliskim Wschodzie nie ma miejsca dla państwa żydowskiego.

Mówią też, że ziemie rozciągające się od rzeki Jordan do Morza Śródziemnego są w całości własnością muzułmanów i nie mogą być oddane żadnym nie-muzułmanom.

Artykuł 11 Karty Hamasu nie pozostawia żadnych wątpliwości; jest po prostu ludobójczy:

“Ruch Islamskiej Republiki [Hamas] wierzy, że ziemia Palestyny jest islamskim Wakf poświęconym przyszłym pokoleniom muzułmanów aż do Dnia Sądu Ostatecznego. Ona ani żadna jej część nie powinna być trwoniona; z niej, ani z żadnej jej części nie można zrezygnować. Ani jeden kraj arabski, ani wszystkie kraje arabskie, żaden król ani prezydent, ani wszyscy królowie i prezydenci, ani żadna organizacja, ani wszyscy, czy to Palestyńczycy, czy Arabowie, nie mają prawa tego zrobić”.

Artykuł 13 Karty Hamasu otwarcie opowiada się za użyciem przemocy w celu zabicia Żydów i wyeliminowania Izraela:

“Nie ma rozwiązania kwestii palestyńskiej poza dżihadem [świętą wojną]”.

Artykuł 15 Karty Hamasu stanowi:

“Dżihad jest indywidualnym obowiązkiem każdego muzułmanina… Konieczne jest zaszczepienie ducha dżihadu w sercu narodu, aby stawił czoła wrogom i dołączył do szeregów bojowników”.

Podobnie Palestyński Islamski Dżihad, inna wspierana przez Iran grupa terrorystyczna z siedzibą w Strefie Gazy, również nalega, aby cały kraj od rzeki Jordan do Morza Śródziemnego znalazł się pod rządami islamu. Podobnie jak Hamas, PIJ był zaangażowany w niezliczone ataki terrorystyczne przeciwko Izraelowi i odrzuca prawo Izraela do istnienia.

Antyizraelscy aktywiści, którzy skandują “Od rzeki do morza Palestyna będzie wolna” – czy są tego świadomi, czy nie – popierają ideologię irańskich mułłów, Hamasu i innych grup terrorystycznych, które od dawna pracowały nad osiągnięciem swojego celu zniszczenia Izraela.

Ci aktywiści, którzy często określają siebie jako “pro-palestyńscy”, tak naprawdę nie troszczą się o Palestyńczyków ani o “wyzwolenie Palestyny”. Gdyby tak było, wzywaliby zamiast tego do stworzenia lepszych możliwości dla Palestyńczyków; do rządów palestyńskich, które byłyby mniej skorumpowane; do równego stosowania prawa pod palestyńskim przywództwem; do praw kobiet i dzieci oraz wolności słowa, zgromadzeń i prasy.

Obecni protestujący to wyłącznie izraelożercy – tak naprawdę antysemici – którzy sprzymierzyli się z muzułmańskimi ekstremistami i terrorystami.

Skandując “Od rzeki do morza Palestyna będzie wolna” na kampusie uniwersyteckim na Zachodzie lub na wiecu w Nowym Jorku, aktywiści ci służą jako rzecznicy muzułmańskich terrorystów, którzy codziennie mordują ludzi z zimną krwią w szkołach, kawiarniach i na drogach, tak jak zamordowali żydowską matkę i jej dwie córki w drodze na żydowskie święto. Hamas chwalił się nawet, że jego ludzie stali za zabójstwem brytyjskiej rodziny Dee ostrzeliwując ich samochód, a potem strzelając z bliska do bezbronnych kobiet w Dolinie Jordanu na początku kwietnia.

Następnym razem, gdy ktoś usłyszy hasło “od rzeki do morza” w Stanach Zjednoczonych, Kanadzie lub Europie, powinien zauważyć, że wyraża poparcie dla reżimu Iranu – trującego setki uczennic i wieszającego własnych obywateli za “przestępstwa”, takie jak “obraza religii” – jak również dla irańskich grup terrorystycznych za granicami Iranu: Hamasu, Palestyńskiego Islamskiego Dżihadu i Hezbollahu.

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Moscow Conceptualism Lives!

Jun18
Moscow Conceptualism Lives!

VLADISLAV DAVIDZON

The passing of Ilya Kabakov, 1933-2023, reminds us how the movement he pioneered under totalitarian rule paved the way for post-Soviet Russian art.

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Emilia and Ilya Kabakov in BremerhavenSUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY

Not many artists can claim to have totally embodied the countercultural spirit of their time. Even fewer can legitimately claim to have launched, led, and theorized a national conceptual art movement; to have had his name become a byword for aesthetic experimentation and the negation of repressive officious dogma; or to have been rewarded for his efforts by becoming a star of the international art market whose works are routinely auctioned off for tens of millions of dollars. Ilya Kabakov—the Ukrainian-born, Moscow and then New York Jew—can claim all these things. Along with his wife, Emilia, he became the leading figure of the Russian artistic underground of the 1970s and 1980s and a founder of the Moscow conceptualist movement. The innovator of the “Total Installation” assemblage and a practitioner of subversive and graceful opposition to the formal strictures of Soviet art, Kabakov died in May at the age of 89.

The Moscow conceptualists comprised a loose collection of underground and dissident artists who were united by their intent to create works of art that went against the grain of mainstream Soviet art. The movement was appropriative, multifaceted, and playful, both ironizing and subverting the official Soviet doctrine of socialist realism. Deploying many of the methods, tools, slogans and visual elements of the official iconography, the artists associated with the group effaced the traditional lines between different art media. They did so at the same time that parallel experiments were taking place all over the world and despite the fact that they were sealed off from information about these experiments by the Soviet government. In the 1970s and ’80s, Moscow conceptualism would become the dominant artistic style of the Moscow counterculture.

The Kabakovs’ aesthetic response to the repressive grimness of late-stage Soviet life was playful, rigorously philosophical, and deeply literate. The conceptualism they helped to pioneer was inherently a movement of outsiders for its first decades, and even since then, as it has been celebrated outside of Russia and thoroughly assimilated by international artists, it has remained an undigested impulse within Russian art. The artists who took part in the movement were notably thorough in their continuous, self-reflexive ruminations on its theoretical underpinnings—what was distinctive was that the Moscow conceptualists spawned a generation of artist-critics and theoreticians (Margarita Tupytsin, Boris Groys) who blended their theoretical output with the art.

The founding generation of Moscow conceptualists comprised a remarkable group of artists, many of whom lived around the Sretensky Boulevard in Moscow. The group included Eric Bulatov, Boris Groys, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Andrei Monastyrsky, Viktor Pivovarov, Dmitry Prigov (a poet), Edik Shternberg, and Lev Rubinshtein. Many of them ranged widely outside of the visual arts and also wrote theoretical texts, interesting conceptual poetry, or both. With a few exceptions, almost all of them were Soviet Jewish dissidents—archetypical outsiders in the post-Stalinist art world. Some emigrated and some did not; Kabakov himself did not leave for the West until 1989, when he was already in his mid-50s, and unlike his emigre peers, he was always honest about his ambivalence in leaving the “workers paradise,” whose absurdly long decomposition served as his prime subject and inspiration. He wrote what was likely the best book on the unofficial Soviet art movement of the ’60s and ’70s, and even as he worked across genres, it is through his room-sized assemblages and quirky art book that we most identity with him today.

The American poet and academic Barret Watten was one of the earliest American intellectuals to recognize Kabakov’s contributions to contemporary art and philosophy. In the early ’90s, he wrote about Kabakov and his cohort for academic journals with names such as Postmodern Currents. “Ilya Kabakov was a world-historical artist of a new type,” Watten told me last week. “His art, in multiple genres ranging from painting and drawing to assemblages, installations, and book art, charted the undoing of the Soviet Union and its everyday life during the “Era of Stagnation”—that is, at the moment of Soviet collapse. Kabakov redefined the “materialism” of the Marxist state and showed it to be a manifestation of sheer fantasy, while at the same time creating a precise record of its modes of unreason and pseudo-science with a mournful lyricism. All this was produced in the moment of epochal transition.

Kabakov was born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1933. Eight years later the Nazi war machine rolled through Ukraine. His mother, Berta, but not his father, Iosof, would be among the lucky cohort of Soviet Jews evacuated to Uzbekistan by the Soviet authorities—a cohort that also included my own ancestors. The Kabakovs landed in Samarkand, just as my own grandparents wound up in Fergana and Tashkent. Two years later, the budding artist began his studies at the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, which had likewise been evacuated from Leningrad to Taskhent. At the conclusion of the war, the promising young art student was transferred to a Moscow middle school specializing in art.

Kabakov enrolled in the prestigious Surikov State Art Institute in Moscow in order to study graphic design and book illustration. Upon concluding his education in 1957, he became an illustrator of children’s books. In that era, it was very common for some of the best and brightest Soviet artists and poets to be funneled into this playful and relatively apolitical craft, which offered a way to make an official living by day while engaging in more ideologically unwholesome activities in the evenings. Kabakov’s background as an illustrator and designer of children books would always be central to the phantasmagoric and attractively cartoonish aspect of his work. And unlike many of his peers in conceptual movements the world over, Kabakov really knew how to draw and paint.

Kabakov’s main conceptual innovation was the “total installation”—a Soviet version of the Gesamtkunstwerk born of his life as an ordinary Homo Soveticus. Kabakov fashioned his work from the raw material of ordinary Soviet reality. For Kabakov, as for his painter friend Oscar Rabine (as I wrote in my profile of the latter), the “grim and grimy realities of actual proletariat barrack life exposed the duplicity of socialist realism’s insistence on the routine heroism of the Soviet citizen, who in actuality was living a life of resigned desperation in communal housing in a Stalinist high-rise somewhere far outside the ring of the Moscow highway.”

In 1985, just as Perestroika began, Kabakov created his archetypical installation, “The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment,” in his Moscow apartment. The instillation was of a grimy apartment of an ordinary Soviet man whose walls were covered with Soviet propaganda space posters. A jagged hole in the ceiling can be seen over a primitive catapult device that the man had fashioned to launch himself into outer space. This Soviet worker had taken the propaganda of the Soviet Union literally and launched himself into the heavens to join Yuri Gagarin and the other cosmonauts. The accompanying text explained that the apartment had been covered up as a crime scene by the Soviet authorities who had arrived to investigate his takeoff. When the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery exhibited it in New York three years later, immediately after Kabakov had emigrated to America, the installation was a major revelation for most everyone. What else was going on in the Soviet art world that the rest of us did not know about?

‘The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment,’ originally created in 1985, here on display at a 2017 retrospective for the Kabakovs IGOR RUSSAK/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

Art world success on an unimaginable scale would soon follow. The New York Guggeheim’s seminal 2006 show “Russia!” was a glittering North American retrospective of the breadth of Russian art history. It was also the moment when Kabakov truly ascended to the heights of international prestige. After passing paintings by Ilya Repin and the other titans of Russian art history, which were arrayed in thematic order along the Guggenheim ramp, one finally arrived at “The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment”—the very last piece that viewers saw before reaching the roof, presented as the apotheosis of the modern Russian artistic tradition. Two years prior to that, Kabakov and his wife had also become the first living artists to have a solo exhibition at the Hermitage Museum in 2004. They soon also attained the record of having the most expensive work of art sold at an auction by a post-Soviet artist—for the first time in 2006, when the painting “Deluxe Room” was sold for $4.1 million, and once again two years later, when “The Beetle” was sold for $5.8 million.

Despite all of this, Kabakov, unlike many artists of his generational cohort, did not allow his legacy to be taken over by a post-Soviet Russian state keen to appropriate the glory and cultural cachet of the late Soviet dissidents. Many of the Russian obituaries that have appeared over the last week have underlined that Kabakov cannot be considered a truly “Russian” artist, as he never inhabited Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The last grand international exhibition for the Kabakovs was a 2017 retrospective at the Tate London called Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future. In the wake of the brutal Russian invasion of his native Ukraine, one of Kabakov’s works from the late 1980s, a geometric drawing of a ship overlaid with the words “Fuck off,” quickly became a symbol of Ukrainian opposition and resilience. A Ukrainian naval officer had told the Russian flagship Moskva to fuck off—a seminal early event in the war. It turned out that Kabakov had predicted the moment three decades before the flagship had been sent to the bottom of the Black Sea by the Ukrainians!

Ilya Kabakov understood very well that post-Soviet Russian society coveted the ironical and subversive objects that he and his wife and their cohort had created as mere assets and status symbols—that is, without understanding anything of their deeper philosophical implications or social critique. The Russian oligarchs who were strident supporters of the Putin regime were now purchasing the Kabakovs’ art works for tens of millions of dollars. I vividly recall the way that the Russian nickel czar Vladimir Potanin—a member of the Russian oligarchy under Putin who still remains unsanctioned—caused a media kerfuffle in France with his bequest of more than 250 works from the Russian underground and the Moscow conceptualists to the Pompidou Center in 2016.

Both Ilya and Emilia vividly understood that the mode of underground living that they and their artist friends had experienced for decades under Soviet rule was set to return. Russian art—that is, authentic and independent Russian art, rather than the ephemeral political kitsch created for the sake of the regime’s transient political needs—would have to return to its dissident tradition. In that way, the legacy of the Kabakovs and the Moscow conceptualists is now more important than ever. In an interview that Emilia Kabakov gave prior to the opening of the Tate retrospective, she admitted that “the biggest fear of any artist is that he will be left behind by history.” She had nothing to fear. We now need the Moscow conceptualists and their legacy as much as we did a half-century ago.

Vladislav Davidzon is Tablet’s European culture correspondent and a Russian American writer, translator, and critic. He is the Chief Editor of The Odessa Review and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and lives in Paris.

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Evidence suggests Russia blew Kakhovka dam in Ukraine – NYT report

Jun18
Evidence suggests Russia blew Kakhovka dam in Ukraine – NYT report

REUTERS

Evidence was found suggesting that Russia, which controlled the Ukrainian dam, planted an explosive charge in the passageway in the Kakhovka dam’s concrete base.
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A satellite image shows the Nova Kakhovka Dam and hydroelectric plant before its collapse, in Nova Kakhovka, Ukraine June 5, 2023 / (photo credit: MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS)

Evidence suggests this month’s destruction of the huge Kakhovka dam in a Russian-controlled area of Ukraine resulted from an inside explosion set off by Russia, The New York Times said.

Citing engineers and explosive experts, the newspaper said on Friday that its investigation found evidence suggesting an explosive charge in a passageway running through the dam’s concrete base detonated, destroying the structure on June 6.

“The evidence clearly suggests the dam was crippled by an explosion set off by the side that controls it: Russia,” the Times said.

Separately, a team of international legal experts assisting Ukraine’s prosecutors in their investigation said in preliminary findings on Friday it was “highly likely” the collapse in Ukraine’s Kherson region was caused by explosives planted by Russians.

Russia says Ukraine blew up the Kakhovka dam

The Kremlin accuses Kyiv of sabotaging the hydroelectric dam, which held a reservoir the size of the US Great Salt Lake, to cut off a key source of water for Crimea and distract attention from a “faltering” counteroffensive against Russian forces.

A view shows a flooded area after the Nova Kakhovka dam breached, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kherson, Ukraine June 8, 2023. (credit: REUTERS/Vladyslav Smilianets)

The Times cited engineers as saying only a full examination of the dam after the water drains from it can establish the sequence of events leading to the destruction.

“Erosion from water cascading through the gates could have led to a failure if the dam were poorly designed, or the concrete was substandard, but engineers called that unlikely,” the newspaper said.

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