Another signifier detaches from its signified and floats off past the horizon.
The mural at York University that has exercised mogul Paul Bronfman is shown above. In it, a bulldozer is starting its work to uproot an olive tree. This happens all the time on the West Bank. Again and again and again and again. Surely this everyday practice of the occupiers is denied by no one at this point?
The words “peace” and “justice” appear below, in several languages. The bulldozer is unmarked, but we can easily tell its provenance. In the foreground stands a Palestinian youth with a couple of stones in his hand.
David vs. Goliath.
But this mural, we are told, is “anti-Semitic.” With staggering irony, a Jewish student says it depicts violence against the nation of Israel. It makes her feel “unsafe.” (See how that “safe space” nonsense works?)
And it’s equally ironic, isn’t it, that Bronfman is so assiduously cultivating a hoary old anti-Semitic trope himself—the fabulously rich Jew exerting political control over our institutions? Except that York University isn’t playing: it’s resisting, as indeed it must. Even here, Bronfman fails.
UPDATE: To re-cap: a monster bulldozer trashes the livelihood of indigenous Palestinians to make way for a Jewish settlement on the West Bank. Both trees and Palestinians are being displaced. The youth in the mural faces this steel behemoth with a couple of stones. A moment in time, pregnant with possible actions and consequences. Beneath, ironically, ambiguously, are inscribed the words “peace” and “justice.”
The CEO of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies (FSWC), Avi Benlolo, shrieks that the mural is “a clear call to murder.” And Paul Bronfman enlarges: the mural is “pure hate.” A dogged refusal to acknowledge what they are seeing. But the picture doesn’t lie.