How we should reconcile free speech with hate

(OPINION) Last month, as news was unfolding about the ongoing campaign across the U.S. to remove Confederate statues and symbols, a friend gave me a copy of the controversial 2015 issue of the Parisian satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, with the unflattering cartoon of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad on its cover. For the uninitiated, the magazine is an equal opportunity offender with its irreverent assaults on politicians and sacred cows of all stripes. Muslim terrorists lacking a sense of humor attacked the weekly’s office, killing 12 people and wounding 11.

While admiring the cartoon as a historical artifact, my wife Randi looked at me aghast and demanded to know what I was going to do with the offending image. Frame it and hang it in a place of pride, I responded, ever ready to pick a fight over freedom of expression. My logic is that banning symbols is a slippery slope. If displaying swastikas is illegal in Germany, just like samurai swords in Japan, should some American symbols be criminalized? Should it be as serious a crime to fly Confederate flags as it is to falsely call "fire" in a crowded theater?

Hang on dear reader, as I propose a novel solution for dealing with hateful things that comes right out of the pages of Bible. It's a solution that offers people a means to demonstrate their disgust at offensive monuments and symbols—while at the same time building up a thick skin of tolerance.

Muslim fanatics do not have a monopoly on pigheadedness in this religion-obsessed Holy Land corner of the global village. In 2018, my colleague at the bi-weekly The Jerusalem Report, veteran caricaturist Avi Katz, was canned for lampooning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other politicians as a herd of pigs posing for a selfie. Evoking George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Katz had written: “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.”

Jews lacking an Orwellian sense of humor objected that portraying Israeli politicians as un-kosher swine was deeply offensive. One critic wrote: “Avi Katz: I hope that by now you understand the gravity of what you did. De-humanization of any Jew is rank anti-Semitism even if that de-humanization came from a fellow Jew. To do so while portraying Jews as swine? Brother, you proved yet again that we truly are our own worst enemies.”

A staffer at The Jerusalem Post taped the cartoon to the front door of our offices. It was torn down within 30 seconds.

In another example of history being re-written before our eyes, more than a decade ago thieves stole the plaque marking the site on Jerusalem’s Shivtei Israel Street where Palestine Police inspector Thomas James Wilkins of the Criminal Investigation Department’s notorious Jewish Section was assassinated by Irgun freedom fighters on September 29, 1944. The plaque has never been replaced.

As an Israeli, what do I make of today’s iconoclasts, for whom figures as diverse as France’s Louis IX, Christopher Columbus and President Thomas Jefferson have become persona non grata, even as freedom of expression is being eroded by the tyranny of political correctness?

While I can appreciate the affront of statues honoring those who, respectively, burned the Talmud; initiated the destruction of aboriginal civilization in the New World; and personified the slavery that subjugated Black people, I regret that a great educational opportunity is being missed.

Tearing down offending statues is only part of the solution. Society needs to reconsider how to remember horrific events like the Civil War without turning the commemoration into a treacle glorification à la Stone Mountain in Georgia[jk1] . There, the world's largest bas relief depicts Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee in a display that dwarfs Mount Rushmore. Impossible to dynamite, some protestors wish to hide the white supremacist symbolism by erecting a bell tower on top of the granite outcrop, featuring a copy of Philadelphia's Liberty bell to symbolize Martin Luther King's “Let Freedom Ring” speech. 

One of the world’s most moving monuments is Berlin’s Book-Burning Memorial, called “Empty Bookshelves.” It is located in the Bebelplatz (formerly Opernplatz), a square on the south side of the Unter den Linden boulevard, in the heart of the German capital. A glass plate, set into the cobblestones of the square, allows passers-by to peer into a sunken library. There are enough shelves in this underground library to hold 20,000 books, but the shelves are empty. 

Artist Micha Ullman’s “Empty Bookshelves” memorializes the mass burning on May 10, 1933 of 20,000 books which the Nazis had deemed un-German. The inscription quotes 19th century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine’s prophetic words from his 1820 play Almansor: Das war ein Vorspiel nur; dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.)

Blacklisted authors, many of them Jewish, included Berthold Brecht, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Helen Keller, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy and Kurt Tucholsky.

In a variation on the less is more impact of negative space, the concrete sign marking Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial represents the first word in the name as a cutaway. One needn’t be able to read the two missing Hebrew letters to understand the striking symbolism expressing the ghostly absence of 6 million Jews. 

Also worth mentioning are Stolpersteine—literally, stumbling blocks, in the form of brass plaques embedded in sidewalks across Germany indicating the houses of deported Jews. Typically they name the Jewish person who lived there and contain words such as verhoftet (arrested), deportiert (deported) and ermordet (murdered), along with the date and location for each named event. 

Alas, as an artist and writer in Jerusalem, I must acknowledge my city has failed miserably in its public art and memory policy. Rather than confront the city’s tortured history, the municipality’s policy is to avoid commissioning any statue that might be considered offensive. Instead, Jerusalem is decorated with scores of abstract sculptures, of which my favorite is Alexander Calder’s monumental Stabile. I learned of this policy after pitching a proposal for an ecumenical installation in Zion Square, creating a neon version of Times Square in tribute of world religions. I learned that City Hall eschews all representational art which evokes any religious symbolism whatsoever.

Nevertheless, a decade ago a Russian oligarch made the city a gift of a 13-foot statue of King David, inscribed with Czar David in Cyrillic, that was placed near King David's legendary (fake) tomb on Mount Zion. After being repeatedly vandalized, presumably by God-fearing haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) who smashed the king’s nose and plucked out the strings of his lyre, the offending statue was removed.

Similarly, an equestrian statue of a Crusader knight that once stood by the Tower of David Museum at the Old City of Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate was repeatedly vandalized and finally removed.

Then there was the infamous incident in 1995 when Florence, Italy wished to give Jerusalem a 4.5-meter-high copy of Michelangelo's statue of David with a slingshot over his shoulder, after killing Goliath. Ultra-Orthodox Jews were outraged since not only would David be depicted nude, he would also be uncircumcised. No fig leaf solution could be found, and the project was dropped.

A decade later, in 2006, another ambitious art caper that was conceptually 180 degrees in the opposite direction, was another fiasco. A $1 million gift from a donor in Waco, Texas to install an abstract sculpture by London-based artist and architect Ron Arad downtown was canceled because Jerusalem's then-mayor Uri Lupolianski—who is haredi—could not wrap his head around modern art. Arad said:

“Zion Square is probably the most difficult site in Jerusalem. It's a place that suffered some suicide bombings. It's a place crack dealers favor. And it's a place that was never lucky with its design or its public art. When I was approached, the last thing I wanted to do was a piece of sculpture on a pedestal. So I started playing with bundled cones pointing to the center of the Earth then I can get like a perforated canopy. But then it looked too biological, which was the last thing I wanted.”

“Later, struggling with it, I remembered that the British mandate left a law in Jerusalem that you're only allowed to build in stone and Israelis never bothered changing the law. So I thought I won't build it out of stone but I'll take stone patterns as the source. As the sun moves above it, it casts a shadow on the floor that looks like a moving shadow of a stone building pattern. And it's different in different seasons.”

With hizzoner unable to unable to appreciate conceptual art, the donor finally asked for his money back.

There is however a recently installed inukshuk near a building called Beit Canada. While traditionally inukshuk statues were erected in the treeless Arctic tundra to serve as signposts, sculptor Israel Hadany’s modern interpretation of the First Nations beacon serves as a marker symbolizing humankind's responsibility toward one another.

I personally prefer sculptor Ran Morin’s approach to memory. The artist turned a 1967 Six Day War battlefield in south Jerusalem into a monumental geometric array of olive trees, some of them perched unnaturally atop rusting columns. The effect is striking, and in its abstraction forces those who encounter the site to ponder multiple meanings.

While a battlefield preserving bunkers and trenches in their ugly beauty makes sense, righting history’s wrongs with art is tricky. In 2002, the Italian government acceded to Ethiopia's demand for the return of an ancient obelisk looted by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1937. The 24-meter granite column, looted from the holy city of Axum, was placed near Rome’s Circus Maximus, symbolizing Mussolini’s megalomaniac dream of establishing a new Roman empire.

But what about the nearby Arch of Titus, erected to celebrate Rome’s crushing of rebels in Judea and destroying Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE? Perhaps it too should be torn down, or moved to the port of Jaffa to symbolize the return of the Jewish people to the homeland the Romans drove us out from 2,000 years ago?

I humbly offer a cost-effective solution to deciding the fate of offending monuments. Instead of hauling them away, they should be turned into a focus for public scorn, surrounded by huge piles of shoes which passers-by may throw at them.

This proposal has its origins in the Hebrew Bible's account of King David’s rebellious son Absalom, who according to 2 Samuel 18:18 set up a pillar in the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem. Over the centuries there developed a custom for fathers to bring misbehaving children to Absalom’s monument to throw stones at the tomb of the boy who lifted his hand against his father. Evidently there were so many naughty kids in Jerusalem that by the early 20th century, the monument was almost completely buried under stones.

In the Middle East and in many other cultures, throwing a shoe at someone is a sign of great disrespect. Surely, the continuous throwing of shoes at racist symbols for generations to come will have a more cathartic impact than just removing the offending statues. 

Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.