Writing that Culture Minister Miri Regev has asked Education Minister Naftali Bennett to stop funding the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design because of a poster by a first-year student is a dog bites man story. But in fact, this is what happened this week, when a poster showing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a rope swept the social networks. It’s hardly surprising that the culture minister, who is proud of never having read Chekhov, doesn’t understand the difference between a poster displayed in the stairwell of an arts school and incitement against asylum seekers in the town square (as she did in 2012, when she called African asylum seekers “a cancer”). And then again, maybe she does understand and even knows that the school assignment of an 18-year-old student, posted on the web by some anonymous hand, is hardly a security threat to the prime minister. But Regev, as always, never misses an opportunity to pick up a few more likes from her fans.
Many on the political right, and even on the left, did not like the poster’s depiction of Netanyahu next to a hangman’s noose. Others saw in it a legitimate form of criticism against Netanyahu, one of the prime instigators of the violent incitement that preceded the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. They read the substitution of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign poster image and the word “HOPE” with a picture of Netanyahu with the word “ROPE” as a portrayal of Netanyahu killing the hope for peace. In art, the interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. As Eli Petel, the head of the fine arts department at the academy, said, “An exercise by students at an academy is not a call for action. The aim of art education is providing an opportunity to ask questions about the personal, social and cultural — and inevitably the political — space in which we live.”
