Haaretz | November 05

Dutch Politician Praises Kites Featuring Nazi Symbols in Solidarity Event for Gaza

Rens Reijnierse, a Dutch lawmaker, posted pictures of the kites last week on Twitter. It triggered sharp rebukes online and beyond, prompting Reijnierse to delete his post and issue an apology

A Dutch local politician praised artists who flew kites in his city featuring Nazi symbols and a picture of a rocket in solidarity with Gaza. Rens Reijnierse, a lawmaker from the southern city of Vlissingen, posted pictures of the kites last week on Twitter.

“Kites at Pool Beach. Beautiful autumn day in Vlissingen. No wind so the kites won’t fly but the project for Palestine still succeeded,” he wrote. The lawmaker’s tweet triggered sharp rebuke from critics online and beyond, prompting Reijnierse to delete the message and apologize, according to the Omroep Zeeland regional broadcaster. One of the kites created by the ruimteCAESUUR cooperative of artists featured a swastika in green, the official color of Hamas. [ see also next page ] Another showed Nazi Germany’s Imperial Eagle symbol carrying the copyright symbol, which the cooperative’s founder, Hans Overvliet, said is meant to protest the “extreme right’s appropriation of symbols.” >> The Netherlands’ surprise new best seller: Hitler's ‘Mein Kampf’

Other kites featured the Palestinian flag; one also had the image of a rocket resembling Hamas’ Qassam missile. Some 20 artists participated in creating the kites, including three from Gaza and one from Pakistan.

Beyond the imagery on some of the kites, some critics said that the premise of the project was problematic because of how Palestinians use kites to set fire to fields and forests in Israel. “The kite campaign is inappropriate in light of the terror campaign that various groups in Gaza have implemented for the past seven months,” the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, or CIDI, wrote in a statement Tuesday.

Overvliet said the kite initiative was not in support of fire starters but in solidarity with the use in previous years of kites in Gaza as peaceful means of protest. He nonetheless canceled a second kite event that was planned with the same artworks this week, explaining he “doesn’t have the energy” to explain the symbols they carry, the PZC news site reported.

The quote in the PZC: “Maar het heeft weinig zin dat ik op de boulevard ga roepen waar de vliegers voor staan als er alleen mensen op af komen, die vinden dat wij in onze benen moeten worden geschoten, zoals ik op sociale media las." Which translates into: “But it does not make much sense for me explaining on the boulevard what the kites stand for, if the only people who come to watch it, are those who think we should be shot in our legs, as I read on social media. "

From the POV

Open letter to Caesuur. Vlissingen, November 2, 2018.

Gentlemen [ sic! - HO],

In response to your letter of 25 October to the municipal council of Vlissingen, we will inform you as follows:

You state in your letter that the manifestation was meant to draw attention to the inequality that you observe in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. You refer here to reports indicating that there are many more casualties on the Palestinian side in this conflict than on the side of Israel. You also declare the signs and symbols used during the event. A statement and explanation that rattles as far as we are concerned, but in any case more than you had done so far for the transfer of your message.

It is clear that you have mixed art and politics here in a provocative way. As an organizer you can count on that combination attracting attention and provoking criticism. That can be an end in itself and is legitimate in itself. But if you know that Palestinians use kites to attack Israel in a terrorist way, then a kite demonstration with the theme of the Gaza Strip is not without obligation. Then you can count on resistance and disapproval, and of course on approval. Your action on the beach of Vlissingen used kites that were provided with images that can not be separated from Nazism and the persecution of the Jews in World War II. Of course you explain these images differently and you nuance the meaning of them. However, you are not naïve: it was a provocation where you gave a piece of art a political charge, or a political action under the flag of an art event, one of both. Your indignation about the reactions that triggered your action is therefore amazing and not to be taken seriously.

With regard to your statement that the damage to the image for Vlissingen is mainly caused by the POV, the following: because a representative of the Municipal Administration publicly qualified your action as good for the Palestinian cause, the municipality of Vlissingen became involved in the message of your manifestation. It is true that this is the cause, but the damage to the image comes from the position of the alderman involved. Not the letter that we sent on Tuesday, October 23, focused attention on Vlissingen, but his Tweet and the hundreds of reactions to the Social Media since Saturday, October 20 did so. The POV did not initiate a media campaign, but first and foremost wanted to keep the impact on the municipality as small as possible.

Alderman Reijnierse proposes to have been invited personally for your event on the beach. An alderman whose portfolio is prominent in Culture does not go to a cultural meeting in a personal capacity, as an alderman there. He has sent a tweet about this accompanied by images that were clearly visible as anti-Semitic symbols. He has in no way pointed out that he was there as a private person, something that obviously could not have been the case.

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