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June 19th, 2021 
Awake Goy Artists, tutors and co-activists at Piet Zwart Institute (PZI), a masters in fine art institution in Rotterdam, lately turned to the freedoms of artistic expression to fight on-campus censorship of Israeli actions.
Not knowing the extent of the fight yet to be had on their campus, a group of artist-activists at PZI mobilised after the May Israeli court rulings in favour of forced expulsions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah. They wished to exercise their right to free speech and protest on the grounds of an institution that has activated those rights when certain political winds could not be ignored: but not all. In 2015, PZI were vocal and visual in their criticism of the Hebdo attacks; they dressed their pillars with the slogans “Je Suis Charlie” and issued a solidarity statement. In 2020, they participated in the digital phenomenon, Blackout Tuesday, and captioned their post, “We stand against racism and support the black lives matter movement.”
Between March and May 2021, PZI permitted the hanging of a banner on the institutions’ building in response to the curfew riots that flared across Rotterdam and the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. The banner and its text was the creation of PZI students Diana Al-Halabi and Afrang Nordlof Malekian: “If a curfew violates freedom of speech, so does the visa regime”.
All these causes were appropriately supported by PZI, which is managed by the Willem de Kooning Academy under the umbrella of Hogeschool Rotterdam, and rightly so, but as will be evidenced throughout: Palestine remains the litmus test for double standards in solidarity.
The group set about creating a banner that read: “Stop ethnic cleansing, Free Palestine, Save Sheikh Jarrah” which they hung from their schools’ building, beginning on May 12, in the middle of the Gaza onslaught.
That evening they were told by PZI’s Dean, Jeroen Chabot, that the banner must be removed because “the building of the academy needs to signal to anyone that this is a safe pluriform educational space for everyone to learn in. That is why the building cannot be used for political, religious or commercial statements.”
After the banner was removed, a group of students spent an hour on Zoom with the dean and he said that the use of the term “ethnic cleansing” was a form of violence that made some feel unsafe, says Al-Halabi. The students responded that actual ethnic cleansing was a very violent action, and the term aptly describes the forced removal of one racial group in favour of another, in a colonial context. Rather amusingly, decoloniality features in PZI’s curricula, but as the Netherlands based British artist Hamja Ahsan points out, decoloniality is in fact a “trendy buzzword in the contemporary art world but you find that a lot of its infrastructure is complicit with actual coloniality.” Theory ought to engage with praxis.
The dean proceeded to further contradict the schools’ prior actions: “Also, we believe in true dialogue, rather than exchanging statements and Instagram posts.” Crucially, Chabot failed to comment when asked directly, on whether Muslim safety and opinion was explored through the ‘dialogue’ sacrosanct to his defence.
In the days that followed, students attempted to rehang the banner, post statements and attach flags to their studio windows, all of which were thwarted by on-campus security. The institution upped their policing “by multiplying the number of guards sent to our school on an hourly basis”, claiming that this was done in the interest of their safety, says Al-Halabi. Chabot reiterated the schools’ “neutrality” based on a ‘safety for everybody’ rhetoric, later saying that Israeli students may also feel unsafe. Diana Al-Halabi’s reassurance was satirically literal: “We harbour no weapons here nor are we against Israeli students. We are just demanding a stop to this colonial brutality.”
“As a Lebanese I am too close to the Palestinian cause” says Al-Halabi, an interdisciplinary artist who is completing her masters in Fine Art at PZI. Her native Lebanon is no stranger to struggle, which informs a great part of her oeuvre and practise. It is precisely because of this shared turmoil that she employs resilience in her campaign for Palestinian liberation.
“Campaigning can become overwhelming. But I cannot talk about mental limits in activism, even if I have them. The threshold for mental limits is abandoned in Lebanon” she says.
Co-artists and activists, Christian Ovesen and Emma Astner, turned to art proper to express their solidarity and painted a watermelon accompanied with the text: ‘“Ceci n’est pas une watermelon”. The watermelon banner went up on June 2. Aside from its popularity as a fruit and its culinary practises in the region, it became an alternative flag in response to the 1980 Israeli law which criminalised the use of four colours in artwork: red, green, black, white. Artwork that depicted the outlawed colours were confiscated, and in some cases their respective artists were arrested and imprisoned. The artists wrote:
“As a reference to both the Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani’s work ‘The Colours of the Palestinian Flag’ and French artist René Magritte’s ‘The Treachery of Images’, we wanted to call out the obvious hypocrisy carried out by Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. The watermelon already goes into a history of censorship and by combining this sign of Palestinian resistance with an artwork well-known to a white Western audience, we wanted to question on what parameters and by whom art is legitimized.”
The banner was removed and seized by security the same day, this time because “absolutely nothing was to be hung from the school’s building”.
The twofold censorship – of censoring the already censored – in the free scope of art is detestable. But there exists an even more damning bias: Why did PZI remove the watermelon painting when its subject matter of censorship, free speech and the right to image-making is identical to that of a campaign the school supported, Je Suis Charlie? Patronisingly, Chabot responded that ‘ [Je Suis Charlie] was not a religious or political issue but an issue of freedom to make pictures, something we train students to do’. The double standard is clear: when it suits, the right to art-making without fear of violence or silencing overrides religious incitement, and when it suits, Palestinian nationalism revokes the right to art-making without fear of violence or silencing.
Remarkably undeterred, Al-Halabi resorted to the art of physical bodies and initiated the group’s seven day performance, ‘Holding Palestine’, in which a pair of activists took turns in holding the banner an hour at a time, beginning 3rd June. Excerpts of works by Emile Habibi and Jeff Halper were read aloud. Activists arrived with watermelon wedges to share. Supporters camped in the gardens close to the performance. Curious passers-by stopped for information. Volunteer sign ups internal and external to PZI were mounting. Diana recalled her surprise at this new found community, “a community that was once invisible and has now realised its body.”
Artists like Diana, Christian and Emma have been forced to substitute works on paper for performance. They were part of the system of guarding something, of being present. Absence meant confiscation. The watermelon painting remains in custody and a 1980’s Palestinian déjà vu is very much the sentiment.
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