Hasbara Feminism

Eugenic anxiety in Ruth Patir's video art.

In April 2024, the 60th Venice Art Biennale opened, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Amidst the zionists’ ongoing genocide in Gaza, many have wondered why the Biennale includes an “Israel” pavilion. Indeed, groups like the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) have gathered over 24,000 signatures (including over 1,000 current and former Biennale artists) demanding the removal of the “Israel” pavilion. In response to the petition, Gennaro Sangiuliano, the fascist Italian minister of culture said unironically that “Israel” has “the right to express her art.” (ANGA’s reply) The Biennale’s administration declared that the “decision to participate or not lies with the countries.” Unsurprisingly, Palestine has never been given its own pavilion at the biennial, as Italy does not recognize it as a sovereign state. The Palestine Museum US, which presented an auxiliary show of Palestinian artists at the 2022 Biennale, put forth an exhibition proposal for a pavilion for 2024 called Foreigners in their Homeland, but it was again relegated to a collateral show.

Pedrosa has titled this year’s exhibition Foreigners Everywhere, which he notes is inspired by several works made by the Italian-based art collective Claire Fontaine. While Claire Fontaine are an explicitly decolonial collective with ties to the militant marxist-anarchist collective Tiqqun, Pedrosa’s curatorial blurb reads like a DEI statement: “the backdrop for the work is a world rife with multifarious crises concerning the movement and existence of people across countries, nations, territories and borders, which reflect the perils and pitfalls of language, translation, nationality, expressing differences and disparities conditioned by identity, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, freedom, and wealth.” In 2008, Claire Fontaine exhibited a work at Dvir Gallery in occupied Palestine called Palestine Occupied in which the Hebrew words “Palestine Occupied” are lit on fire and burned.

Considering the Biennale’s function of artwashing eurocentric settler colonialism, the rest of Pedrosa’s statement is both eerily hypocritical and par for the course:

“the expression Foreigners Everywhere has several meanings. First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners—they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner…the Biennale Arte 2024’s primary focus is thus artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, or refugees—particularly those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Migration and decolonization are key themes here.”

And if you weren’t paying attention, Pedrosa continues to drive home the irony, explaining to us that “the indigenous artist [is] frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her own land.” The Palestine Museum US’ proposal title is drawn word-for-word from the curatorial statement.

The cognitive dissonance experienced by any lucid reader of Pedrosa’s statement quickly dissolves, as it is the same dissonance we encounter everywhere. In western art and academic worlds, decolonization actually is a metaphor, land acknowledgments means “sorry but it’s ours now,” and DEI processes are thinly cloaked human resources strategies for managing unruly students and employees.

ANGA writes, “While the Israeli pavilion presses ahead, the genocidal death toll in Gaza and the West Bank increases daily. While Israel’s curatorial team plans their ‘Fertility Pavilion’ reflecting on contemporary motherhood, Israel has murdered more than 12,000 children and destroyed access to reproductive care and medical facilities. As a result, Palestinian women have C-sections without anesthetic and give birth in the street.”

The “Israel” pavilion is curated by Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalit, and will exhibit US-born Ruth Patir’s video installation series entitled (M)otherland. Patir is a 40 year old white cis woman with dual citizenship in “Israel” and the US. Like many of the Biennale participants and despite Pedrosa’s poetic invocation of the outsider artist, Patir has a MFA from an elite western university, Columbia, which is itself implicated in Israel's genocide of Palestinians. Patir teaches at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, which sponsors IOF terrorism and is on the BDS list. Patir’s press materials describe (M)otherland as a “new video installation…bringing together ancient archeology and advanced image technologies.” In classic liberal zionist phrasing, the press release disavows the settler violence upheld by professionals like Patir and instead blames the murder of 200,000+ Palestinians on “the leadership of a hardline right-wing government.” Implied here is that were it not for Netanyahu, “Israel” would be a peaceful, pluralistic, equitable nation-state, built on an uninhabited wasteland and detached from a militarized apparatus that violently occupies and steals land. One of the key tenets of zionism is self-victimization, and Patir’s practice follows suit: “Amidst a period in which the nation, having endured the most brutal attack in its history…the work reflects on womanhood and the burdens of the female body, shifting between first-person storytelling and the shared experiences of so many throughout the globe and across time.” Patir becomes the victim, and her work a valiant attempt to connect with other victimized peoples.

It’s no coincidence that Patir’s exhibition is entitled (M)otherland. The videos serve to dehistoricize the hundred-year Nakba and mythologize “Israel” as the “Jewish homeland.” As scholars like Joseph Massad and Jasbir Puar have argued, the zionist settler colony wields gender and sexuality for conquest. Jews in the diaspora are berated from early childhood to return home to Mother. And as hasbara publications like the Israel Project’s Global Language Dictionary remind us, “Israel” is moral because “Israeli women have always voted, served in the military, and we’ve had a female Prime Minister.” Casting the zionist entity as the motherland also serves to further anti-arab tropes of brown terrorist men surrounding and threatening the innocent European, feminine “Israel.” On the contrary, the zionist entity is surrounded by allies. Jordan has stepped in to shoot down Iranian drones. The Egyptian government has close ties with the companies profiting from zionist displacement, and Cyprus has served as a staging ground for zionist allied forces like the US navy. Furthermore, motherland discourse references a scriptural matrilineal blood quantum for Jewishness, policing the borders around authentic Judaism.

Patir’s oeuvre is obsessed with cis femininity, gendering Patir and the nation state female and bad actors like Netanyahu and Moshe Dayan as male. In an interview with Sternthal Books, Patir misattributes the most violent forms of zionist settler colonialism to toxic masculinity. The video interview begins with Patir asking Alexa to play “Tomboy” by Princess Nokia, an artist who canceled her show in “Israel” under pressure from BDS organizers in 2017. This subtle promotional video editing is another layer of zionist gendering, this time describing Patir as spunky and masculine, but a proud female. The audience nods along, noting Patir’s deep voice and her butch Hebrew accent. As philosopher Daniel Boyarin has written, in traditional Jewish culture men were secluded in domestic spaces, swaying and studying Torah while “women of the same class were speaking, reading, and writing the vernacular, maintaining businesses large and small, and dealing with the wide world of tax collectors and irate customers. In short, they were engaging in what must have seemed to many in the larger culture as masculine activities, and if the men were read as sissies, the women were read often enough as phallic monsters.” Even in the 21st century, many of my American Jewish friends were raised in households where mom was the domineering breadwinner and dad was the lesbionic emotional vehicle. Perhaps this is why so many of us have embraced the ideology of transgenderism.

Beginning in 13th century Germany, Jewish men were thought by Christians to menstruate like Christian women, a punishment for their betrayal of Jesus, because their diet was strange, because they were circumcised (a sign of partial castration, effeminacy, transvestism), and because they were lazy, idle, effete. According to Christians, Jewish men’s domesticity made them melancholic and hysterical, causing a buildup of blood, giving them monthly menstrual periods and hemorrhoids. Jews, like witches, were so bloody that they were said to join in with witches and vampires to sacrifice Christian babies. This helped them replace all the blood they were losing out of their pussies and asses. As Boyarin reminds us, eastern Jews were feminine according to western European Christian standards. For Jews, this was always just the gendered tradition of Jewishness. For Christians, femininity itself was pathological, evil, and demonic, and so Jewish men became witches.

Jews, like witches, were exterminated by Christian witch-hunters and western European governments alike. Their charges were usually blood libel. In the Nuremberg area alone the Rindfleisch massacres of 1298 killed more than 20,000 Jews; the Nuremberg pogroms of 1349 killed thousands of Jews; hundreds of Jewish moneylenders were expelled in 1499; and the Wurzburg and Bamberg witch trials in the 1620s resulted in the beheading and immolation of thousands of Jews. During al Aqsa Flood, Mila Cohen, a ten month old Jewish baby, was killed by crossfire between the IOF and the Al Qassam Brigades. A few days later, a so-called reporter named Nicole Zedek published a false news story that Al Qassam had beheaded and burned forty Jewish babies, the old blood libel from the medieval pogroms. Mila Cohen was not beheaded and she was the only baby killed on October 7th.Every accusation is a confession.

In 1930, a Nazi government official claimed that homosexuality was a “Jewish pestilence.” Jews were said to be trying to spread the disease across Germany. In 1928, a Nazi newspaper described the “indissoluble joining of Marxism, pederasty, and systemic Jewish contamination.” Zionism was supposed to be the cure for all this, a sociocultural remasculation, led by the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie who were so ashamed to be Jewish that they collaborated with the Nazis in their antisemitism. Herzl once went to the Pope and offered to mass convert eastern Jewry to Catholicism.

Much of Patir’s video installation practice centers around a critique of zionist settler, IOF general, politician, and Haganah paramilitary fighter Moshe Dayan. Dayan is controversial among zionists for having been a bit too candid about his purpose as an IOF terrorist for many settlers’ liking. During the 1967 war when Dayan was IOF chief of staff, he reflected:

“let us not today fling accusations at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us. For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived…we should demand this blood not from the Arabs of Gaza but from ourselves…let us make our reckoning today. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house.”

Dayan was responsible for the displacement of southern Palestinians to the Gaza strip and the maintenance of the early militarized border. In 1950 he ethnically cleansed the town of al-Majdal (currently “ashkelon”), at one point forcing 120 Palestinians and Bedouins on a trail of tears in which dozens died of thirst. In 1953, Dayan was the architect of the Qibya massacre in which 70 Palestinian villagers were murdered by hundreds of IOF soldiers in one night. Rashid Khalidi describes that the zionists “blew up 45 homes with their inhabitants inside.” As IOF commander in 1970, Dayan coordinated the zionist bombing of the Bahr el-Baqar elementary school in Port Said, Egypt, killing 46 and wounding 50 children.

In her work, Patir focuses on Dayan’s plundering of Palestinian artifacts. However, it is not that the stolen items are Palestinian that bothers Patir. The artist actually claims the historical treasures are records of the early Jews in Gaza. For Patir, what is problematic about Dayan’s archaeology is the General’s misogyny. Indeed, Patir’s gripe becomes an individualized attack on Dayan as a singular bad sexist actor rather than a figurehead of the century of zionist occupation and genocide: “He’s using this collecting mechanism in order to project himself on 3000 years of being Jewish in Israel. If I look back and I try to picture myself as a woman in 600, 800 B.C…my life would be horrible.” Palestinian historian Salim Mobayed describes how the pilfering of artifacts began under British colonial rule of Palestine in the 1930s during which gold jewelry was robbed and traded: “After 1967, these robberies became a policy adopted by the occupation. The most prominent antiquities were stolen by Dayan, who took thousands of pieces, including four Pharaonic clay coffins from Deir al-Balah in the Gaza strip.” Mobayed writes that alongside Dayan, between 1967 and 1993, “Hebrew universities carried out excavations at the archeological sites and moved several Pharaonic, Canaanite and Byzantine items of jewelry and crockery to Israel, pictures of which were published in National Geographic.”

To wrestle power back from Dayan, Patir explains that she “started stealing archeological relics and making them my own.” 3D animated versions of the plundered artifacts are the signature flourish and unifying theme across Patir’s video work. One scene depicts a Hebrew history book of Pharaonic artifacts, reminiscent of the National Geographic issue that Mobayed describes. A 2D mummy is resurrected and given a millennial American affection, barking, “mummy…mummy” in a dopey tone. It’s unclear where Patir gets her “3000 years of Jewish history in Israel'' or her notion that Pharaonic ceremonial craft was ever practiced by Jews. While Judean, Samarian, and Babylonian spiritual and cultural traditions blended with each other in ancient times, Pharaonic iconography isn’t something usually associated with the early Jews. Patir’s ancestry on both sides of her family trace to Galicia in eastern Europe. Historians have placed Jews in this region of Eastern Europe as early as the 10th century.

In one video piece, Patir dunks on Moshe Dayan by force-feminizing him and reappropriates the artifacts he stole from Gaza because “being nostalgic about the past is a privilege that’s only relevant for some and not for all.” Patir often appears in press materials and photos wearing a shirt with the slogan: “Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise,” from a 1982 Jenny Holzer billboard series. In recent years, this slogan has been appropriated by imperial white feminists of the #nevertrump and #metoo movements, whose selective outrage extends solely to bourgeois survivors of patriarchal violence. (Holzer, too, has recently come out as a genocidal imperialist.) In 2016, Indecline, an art collective exhibited the Emperor Has No Balls, a series of statues of Donald Trump with a very small penis and no balls. Patir’s 3D renderings of Moshe Dayan depict an emasculated man with a tiny penis, alternatively in drag and naked. Patir explains that she is retaking power from Dayan who represents “the archetype of the Israeli man,” which we are supposed to understand as a violent misogynist.

Boyarin explains that the masculine Jewish man is a modern zionist invention, connected to the writings of Theodor Herzl, the founder of zionism. In 1897 Herzl published an essay, Mauschel, in his newspaper Die Welt. The first line reads: “Mauschel is an anti-Zionist.” Mauschel is a derogatory German word that comes from the yiddish diminutive for Moses - moyshele. According to Harry Zohn, the translator of Herzl’s essay, Mauschel came to describe a basic antisemitic stereotype of a Jewish man in 17th century central Europe, connoting an unassimilated working-class Jew who spoke German with a yiddish accent, or “a haggling Jewish trader.” Boyarin describes how Herzl, a Germanophile and big fan of Richard Wagner, ordered the Tannhauser music to be played at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898:

“at the fin de siecle, and especially in the Viennese milieu, many Jews were desperately seeking their own naches (peace, as well as satisfaction) in becoming just as male and just as Aryan as Tannhauser himself and his creator…although it is perhaps easy to ‘exonerate’ Jews who, in the early part of the [20th] century, considered these deformations of Jewish masculinity–the substitution of Muscle Jew for mensch–as an ideal, it is much harder to do so in the second half of that same century and particularly after such writers as Dijkstra and Klaus Theweleit have demonstrated the near direct connections between these masculinist ideologies and Nazi genocide.”

An orthodox white feminist, Patir relies on the emasculation of cis men to reground herself in her own gender identity. The conceit here–for both #metoo and Patir–is that feminism’s role is to “feminize” patriarchal men, literally make them into women. Of course, there is nothing especially gendered about the size or status of someone’s genitals, but for cisnormative feminists, the amount of phallus is directly proportional to the level of masculinity. It also seems peculiar to be a feminist who thinks that feminizing men would be degrading for them, as femininity is only inherently weak and abject in patriarchal value systems. Furthermore, all settler colonial ideologies like zionism rely specifically on these types of overdetermined genderism. Just as Herzl feminizes Jewish men who are anti-zionist, Patir feminizes men who are too zionist. In doing so she erodes one of the sacred cultural traditions of Jewish gender, that the mentsch is effeminate.

After Patir, Lapidot, and Margalit refused the ANGA call to withdraw from the Biennale, the trio staged a last minute stunt announced on Patir’s social media. The “Israel” pavilion would not open until there was a “release of hostages and ceasefire agreement.” The statement explicitly denounces cultural boycott but does not mention genocide or Gaza or Palestine. It’s safe to assume that Patir’s exhibit will open without a release of the thousands of Palestinian hostages held by “Israel.” The offending captivity is only Hamas’ righteous abductions. In response to a critical comment on the instagram post from another Israeli, Patir writes, “I feel that the Palestinians are asking me again and again not to speak their suffering on their behalf. I honor the request.” Another commenter, one of the only other critical respondents, explains that she caught wind of Patir opening the exhibit to give a tour to a zionist government official. Patir steps into her well-worn self-victimhood cloak, explaining that it was out of her control: “There were so much press people there, you can ask them if they went in. Very disappointing that not only am I not showing the work I did for the past four years out of solidarity and also constantly being questioned by haters.” In the context of the billion dollar hasbara machine, the “solidarity” in question is actually a desperate public relations calculation. It’s a wonder Patir’s team of handlers allowed her to write her own responses to “the haters”.

And it has all paid off for Patir and her zionist artworld associates. The New York Times Arts section published an immediate frontpage spread, profiling Patir and her work. In October, New York’s Jewish Museum director James Snyder hosted Patir for a public talk. And in December, the Jewish Museum acquired the five videos comprising Patir’s Biennale exhibition. The Jewish Museum, which exhibited Zoya Cherkassy’s atrocity propaganda paintings last year, is run by a cabal of zionist billionaires. The board chairman for example, Shari Aronson also makes major gifts through her family foundation to UJA, Birthright, and DMFI, a zionist political PAC. Aronson and her husband use the foundation to evade taxes on profit from his $32 billion private equity outfit Centerbridge Partners. Centerbridge owns BioLab, the chlorine plant that exploded several months ago outside Atlanta, causing the evacuation of 17,000 residents. Snyder was formerly the Israel Museum’s director, where he increased the endowment to $200 million by hobnobbing with donors like the Aronsons.

Patir’s (M)Otherland videos are 3D animations of Pharaonic fertility goddesses who stand in for the artist as she goes through the tangled process of extracting and freezing her eggs. In press materials Patir comments that, while she understands free fertility healthcare services as a luxury, she resents an undercurrent of misogyny that pressures her to become a mother. In the Stenthal interview, Patir explains that she works in 3D animation because it allows her “to have control over her body.” While I’m sure Patir, like most women in the world, have experienced sexual violence and patriarchal oppression, her imperial feminism launders a militarized function that confines, displaces, and murders Palestinians. Patir reflects that “Israel is a nation of technological fertility advances. If you’re a young Israeli woman there is an expectation for you to be a mother. We are expected to be fertile and productive.” But why is this the case?

By now, many of us are aware of the IOF’s sperm retrieval unit, which in true Muscle Jew fashion, takes advantage of the 48 hour post mortem semen lifespan to extract the contents of dead soldiers’ testicles. This tradition dates back over two decades, but has accelerated in recent months. Since al Aqsa Flood (Oct 7th 2023), over 150 dead terrorists have had their testes cut open and harvested so that their genocidal bloodline can continue. It’s often the parents of the baby killers who request the semen retrieval in a fascistic culture of mourning. In a Telegraph article about the ritual, Shaylee Atary, who sought the semen of her dead husband said, "I wanted to get life out of him… but I couldn’t.” The article adds Atary’s reflection that she “had only started to mourn the death of her husband once learning that his sperm did not survive.” The zionist ideology that primes Israeli society for “technological fertility advances,” as Patir calls it, is steeped in eugenics. Birthright, funded by Patir’s new benefactor Shari Aronson, is known to promote its trips as sex tourism.

The eugenics of it all, though, counter Patir’s imperial feminist oversimplification. As zionists themselves report, settler colonialism is a numbers game. For a century, zionist officials have attempted to shape an ethnocracy by cooking the books. Different fertility policies have been enforced at different times for different national groups. While Ethiopian Jewish immigrants to “Israel” were forcibly sterilized, so-called “Mizrahi” Jews have been encouraged to reproduce, “based on concerns that Israel confronted a demographic imbalance in which the birth rate of its Palestinian population had increased while its Jewish population demonstrated a clear decrease in reproductive rates.” Yinon Cohen and Neve Gordon write that:

“Liberal Zionists who currently support territorial compromise champion the creation of a Palestinian state primarily because they want to minimize the number of Palestinians within Israel’s territory. Even among this camp, Palestinian basic rights and UN resolutions are of secondary importance, since the logic overriding everything else is biospatial: guaranteeing a solid Jewish majority within a given space.”

Patir joins settler feminists as a bloc in misattributing the provenance of their oppression. The reproductive discomfort Patir experiences at the free IVF clinic in “Israel” is a particle of imperial blowback whose flip side is the mandate that surviving Palestinian mothers endure c-sections without anaesthesia. If Patir took seriously her own outrage at Dayanic violence of zionism, she might begin by looking at her own family. Her late father Avi was a former CEO of American Israeli Paper Mills and former General Manager of Bezeq, an Israeli telecommunications conglomerate that provides telecom services to the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Patir’s mother Ziva is the board chairman of the National Theatre of Israel and the former CEO of the Standards Institute of Israel, a state-owned corporation that has collaborated with the US Department of Homeland Security on binational “anti-terrorism” standards. Her sister Yael Patir is the former Israel Director at J Street, a liberal zionist PAC that threatened to cut off donations to any politicians who opposed Israel’s genocide. Yael is a former advisor to the EU delegation to “Israel” and the former chief of staff to Issawi Frej, a Knesset member who denies that “Israel” is an apartheid state. Last year, Yael landed a gig as the director of Communication Strategy and Fundraising for the “Israel” pavilion at the Biennale, where she helped raise $1 million to fund her sister’s work. Yael’s husband is Boaz Rakocz, a former senior military analyst for the IOF who recently took a new job at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a zionist think tank which is run by former head of the IOF Military Intelligence Directorate Tamir Hayman. Maya Wind explains that “to address what they call the ‘delegitimization’ of Israel, the INSS offers policy recommendations for disrupting BDS organizing, including through covert action by Israel’s intelligence community.”

Imperial feminism could care less about gender oppression. Like Patir’s gyrating CGI fertility goddesses, the hysterics are theatrical, their millennial mumblings are merely MFA-branded versions of the same hasbarese created by her brother in law. And so the Biennale’s “Israel” fertility pavilion births its own zionist think tank, functioning, in the words of INSS’ Memorandum 169, “to ‘launder’ classified intelligence products and allow them to reach the relevant organizations that are partners in the struggle against delegitimization.” And the Jewish Museum purchases and exhibits the propaganda to the applause of western feminists. It's just another day in the genocidal art world, as “Israel” burns another eighty Palestinians alive.