- "The ambassador caused diplomatic and political
damage to the state of Israel by being an intellectual dwarf and behaving
like a street peddler."
-
- JERUSALEM -- Ariel Sharon,
Israel's Prime Minister, has supported his ambassador to Sweden, who vandalised
an installation in a Stockholm exhibition that featured a Palestinian woman
suicide bomber.
-
- Mr Sharon said yesterday: "The entire government
stands behind him. Our ambassador did the right thing. The phenomenon which
we saw there is so grave that it was forbidden not to react to it."
-
- Zvi Mazel, a career diplomat, was attending the opening
of a government-sponsored show on Friday with his wife when he took offence
at an installation featuring a photograph of the bomber, Hanadi Jaradat,
a 29-year-old lawyer who killed 21 Israelis in a restaurant in Haifa last
year. The image "Snow White and the Madness of Truth" was floating
in a toy boat in a rectangular pool of red liquid. Mr Mazel angrily disconnected
the spotlights illuminating the display and flung them into the pool.
-
- Mr Mazel shouted at the artist Dror Feiler: "This
is praise of a suicide terrorist and the whole institution of suicide.
Shame on you! You are a clear hater of Israel and dedicate your time to
a terror attack and bad-mouthing Israel."
-
- He told Israeli reporters later: "I could not breathe
when I saw the photograph of the terrorist, who was represented as Snow
White with an angelic smile, sailing on the blood of our children, our
families that she murdered. I felt I had to do it because it is the continuation
of a succession of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli acts that are taking place
here almost every day. As far as I am concerned, Feiler is an extremist
and not an Israeli. He accepted the Palestinian side and deliberately ignored
the Israeli side."
-
- Mr Feiler, an Israeli who has lived in Sweden for 30
years, insisted that the sculpture was against violence. He said: "The
ambassador caused diplomatic and political damage to the state of Israel
by being an intellectual dwarf and behaving like a street peddler."
-
- Mr Mazel has been summoned to the Swedish Foreign Ministry
today and is expected to be reprimanded for undiplomatic conduct.
-
- But Robert Rydberg, the Swedish ambassador to Israel,
tried to downplay the incident yesterday. He said: "The piece is about
a Palestinian woman having murdered innocent civilians. It is not a justification
of suicide bombings. It is in my view an example of bad taste, but I think
the whole issue has been blown out of proportion."
-
- Mr Mazel's violent reaction, which he admitted was premeditated,
drew widespread support back home. Video footage of the incident was relayed
on Israeli television.
-
- Ben Caspit, a political commentator, wrote in the newspaper
Ma'ariv: "Mazel ought not to have done it, but it is hard to be angry
with him. His hand, which pulled out the plug, was the hand of all of us."
-
- Tova Bahat, whose husband was killed and three-year-old
son critically wounded in the explosion, said: "I'm sorry the artist
was not sitting in the restaurant and copped it."
-
- Mr Feiler responded: "Although I do not justify
the suicide attackers, I can definitely understand them. They have nothing
to live for, so they look for something to die for. That is twisted logic,
it is absolutely dreadful, but that is their reality, which we are also
guilty of creating. Israelis have also committed crimes against Palestinians."
The Israeli Government approved yesterday the controversial appointment
of another diplomat, Zvi Hefetz, a Russian-born tycoon, as ambassador to
London. Mr Hefetz, 47, represented the business interests of the fugitive
Russian media magnate, Vladimir Gussinsky, in Israel and is a friend of
the Prime Minister's son, Omri Sharon. Anglo-Jewish leaders, frustrated
by ambassadors who performed poorly on television, had questioned whether
his spoken English was up to it.
-
- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=482569
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