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STOCKHOLM (AFP) - Israel's ambassador to Sweden was kicked out of
Stockholm's Museum of National Antiquities after he destroyed an
artwork featuring a picture of a Palestinian suicide bomber, the
artists said.
The incident, widely reported in the Swedish media, occurred at the
opening on Friday of the "Making Differences" exhibit, part of an
upcoming international conference on genocide hosted by the Swedish
government and in which Israel is scheduled to participate.
Sweden's foreign ministry said Saturday it would summon ambassador
Zvi Mazel to a meeting to explain himself.
"We will contact him on Monday to arrange a meeting. We want to give
him a chance to explain himself. We feel that it is unacceptable for
him to destroy art in this way," ministry spokeswoman Anna Larsson
told AFP.
The art installation, called Snow White and located in the museum's
courtyard, featured a basin filled with red water, designed to look
like blood.
A sailboat with the name Snow White floated on the water, and placed
like a sail was a photo of a smiling Hanadi Jaradat, the female
lawyer who blew herself up in the Haifa suicide bombing attack in
October which killed 21 Israelis.
"For me it was intolerable and an insult to the families of the
victims. As ambassador to Israel I could not remain indifferent to
such an obscene misrepresentation of reality," the ambassador told
Swedish news agency TT.
According to museum director Kristian Berg, the ambassador went
berserk in front of the 400 specially-invited guests when he saw the
piece.
"He pulled out the plugs and threw one of the spotlights into the
fountain which caused the entire installation to short-circuit and
made it totally life-threatening," he told TT.
One of the two artists who created the work, Israeli-born Dror
Feiler, told AFP the ambassador was "totally unreasonable and
undiplomatic" and would not listen to his explanations.
"He said he was ashamed that I was a Jew," Feiler said. "We see this
as an offensive assault on our right to express our thoughts and
feelings."
The other artist, Feiler's Swedish wife Gunilla Skoeld Feiler, told
daily Expressen that the work was "not a glorification of the
suicide bomber."
"I wanted to show how incomprehensible it is that a mother-of-two,
who is a lawyer no less, can do such a thing," she said.
"When I saw her picture in the paper, I thought she looked like Snow
White, that's why I gave that name to the piece," she added.
Dror Feiler was to perform a piece of music but refused to do so as
long as the ambassador remained at the scene.
"Ultimately we had to escort the ambassador out of the museum,"
museum director Berg said, adding that he did not consider the
artwork to be a provocation.
"It is rather an invitation to think about why such things happen in
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," he said.
The museum's artistic director, Thomas Nordanstad, said he had given
the artists the go-ahead to create the piece, and had "hoped it
would lead to an artistic dialogue".
The artwork was repaired and was on Saturday on view to the public,
despite Israel's insistence that it be disassembled.
It was not immediately known whether the incident would affect
Israel's participation at the "Stockholm International Forum --
Preventing Genocide" conference, which is to take place January
26-28.
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