There is currently a hate-filled anti-Israel exhibition in the library at SOAS. It has been up since October 25th and finishes on November 30th. During this time thousands of SOAS students will have been subjected to sick lies about Israel.
One exhibit is a cake filled with M16 bullets supposed to represent the time an Arab girl baked a cake for her sister in “Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron” in 1967.
The exhibition is called Memory Metamorphosis: An Exhibition of Palestine Remembered. The exhibits are based on interviews with Palestinians.
The exhibition will transfer to the Menier Gallery from 5th to 9th December when it will be sponsored by anti-Israel charity War On Want.
The introduction to the exhibition states:
“There are 6 million Palestinians living in the diaspora; most were displaced or expelled over the past 68 years by war and occupation. When a people’s history, culture and existence are being altered, erased or appropriated, holding onto their memories and creating their own historical record…is empowering and can be seen as an act of resistance.”
This 6 million figure is highly questionable and no proof is supplied. 6 million is, however, the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust so one has to ask whether the real aim here is to create a shameful Holocaust equivalence.
Another exhibit, by Father Khader N. El-Yateem, titled A Longing Heart is a picture of hearts pricked with thorns. The description contains the statement:
“Life in Palestine has a lot of unique characteristics…Unfortunately, this life has been marred by the Israeli occupation, its checkpoints and the racist separation wall, which upsets the mood of anyone coming back to visit after a long absence.”
Obviously absent is the narrative that Israel had to build the wall to stop Hamas blowing up Israeli teenagers outside nightclubs like the Dolphinarium where 21 Israeli younsters were murdered.
On Thurdsay night I went to a discussion at SOAS about this exhibition chaired by SOAS lecturer Rafeef Ziadah. On her panel were two of the artists; Jacqueline Reem Salloum and Suhel Nafar. Also on the panel was Hazem Jamjoum from New York University.
Jamjoun explained that someone they tried to interview for the exhibition had lived in Deir Yassin. Jamjoun told the audience what apparently happened there:
“There was a retributory attack on Deir Yassin. The bodies of the people who were killed and mutilated were then paraded around the Zionist neighbourhoods of western Jerusalem. It was a very intentional psychological warfare of getting stories of murder, rape and killing pregnant women to go far because it would scare and was extremely effective.”
A new book describes there being nothing of the sort having happened at Deir Yassin.
Jacqueline Reem Salloum told us how upset she was seeing Israelis cooking falafel which she described as being “our food”. She needs reminding that Jews have been living in Israel for over 2,000 years so it has been Israeli food also. She also told us that her cake exhibit was made of decommissioned bullets bought off the internet. So not even Israeli bullets, which kind of defeats her point.
She said they’d eventually expand the exhibition to include interviewees from Syria, Iraq and Yemen. I doubt that will come to fruition. Why would they want to dilute their anti-Israel propaganda?
Meanwhile it’s unsurprising War On Want are involved, again wasting resources that should be going to those in need on sick political agitprop instead. And the Menier Gallery is complicit in this by its hosting.
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