It often begins somewhere in Western Europe, with an exhibition that promises ‘exchange’ or ‘shared creativity.’ The posters are elegant, the words familiar: dialogue, peacebuilding, collaboration. The audience, usually consisting of academics, artists and students, gathers in a mood of moral ease. I’ve been to many of these events, where Israeli institutions are among the sponsors or participants, and the atmosphere feels rehearsed in its benevolence: the kind of event that critics would call art-washing1, this term refers to the use of art and cultural initiatives to distract from or legitimise unethical, oppressive, or politically controversial actions by individuals, corporations, or states. It parallels concepts such as green-washing or pink-washing, where aesthetic or moral appeal is used to obscure structural violence or complicity.
Though the term itself feels too blunt for what’s happening here. People speak about complexity, about nuance, about how art transcends politics, a claim that sounds profound but usually serves to keep things on the surface. To insist that art stands apart from politics is itself a political move, one that protects comfort more than it invites reflection. It’s the kind of language that makes disagreement feel impolite.
What is called art-washing often appears, at least to critics, under soft light: paintings, wine, small talk about coexistence. But the word itself feels violent to me. It flattens everything into accusation, leaving no room for those of us who live inside the contradiction: Jewish, critical of Israel, yet bound to it by something more than politics. The demand to separate completely, to say ‘this here is Judaism, that all the way over there is Israel’, feels like an intellectual ideal that collapses under the weight of history and emotion. I can’t make the cut cleanly, and I suspect few can.
In these, mostly European, institutions, the distance from Israel is both geographical and moral. There’s a kind of comfort in pointing to it, to say that is where the problem lies. But I cannot fully share that distance; my ties to Israel are historical, emotional, and religious, however uneasy they may be. What begins as a critique of power can quietly slip into a critique of presence. I’ve watched conversations about occupation turn into conversations about Jews as a problem, and it’s always done politely, with the vocabulary of liberalism.
So yes, art can serve power; it can soften the violence it is entangled with. But the critique of art-washing, when wielded without care, risks performing a similar erasure. Not necessarily of images, but of people. It can flatten the lives of those who live in contradiction, who are bound to Israel through memory, faith, or family, yet critical of its politics and policies. In the eagerness to expose complicity, it often leaves no space for complexity, for the discomfort of belonging to something compromised. The demand for purity, political or moral, can end up silencing the very complexities that art might have revealed.
The institutionalisation of neutrality
In Europe, institutions pride themselves on neutrality. They speak the language of even-handedness, as if ethics were a geometry problem that can be solved by balancing both sides. But neutrality is never neutral. It is a position maintained through distance, and that distance has a cost. When an exhibition on peace is funded by a state institution, neutrality becomes a gesture of hospitality that asks you to leave your discomfort at the door.2
For me, being Jewish within these spaces means never quite knowing how to stand. If I speak critically of Israel, I risk confirming someone’s quiet belief that Jews are divided, or disloyal to their own; a prejudice that lingers beneath the language of openness. I also risk alienation from the Jewish community I am part of and need in order to live my life; when I don’t speak, I risk alienation from the secular community that surrounds me. If I remain silent, I risk betraying my own convictions: the belief that power must always be questioned, especially when it speaks in my name. To question the Jewish state is not only my right but my responsibility, particularly when I see that state acting in ways that, in my view, do not adhere to Torah principles. Either way, my words are taken to represent something larger than myself, a weight that can’t be refused, only carried carefully. In a room that claims to host all voices equally, certain identities still carry the weight of proof.3
I have started to notice how quickly conversations turn to reassurance, how often people want to tell me that they ‘don’t mean all Jews, of course.’ I believe them, most of the time. But the need to clarify reveals something: the fear of saying the wrong thing has replaced the desire to say something true. Europe’s liberal spaces want to be innocent, and they use culture to perform that innocence, not out of malice, but because guilt has its own aesthetic.4
Perhaps this is why accusations of art-washing find such fertile ground here: they offer a way to feel clean. To say that culture serves propaganda is to locate corruption elsewhere, safely outside the frame. Yet for those of us bound to Israel by faith, memory, or family, the boundary doesn’t hold. The impurity is intimate.5
The spectacle of conscience
There’s a strange comfort in performance. Western Europe has mastered it. The performance of awareness, the performance of ethical vigilance. It’s not that people don’t care; they care visibly, sometimes beautifully. But visibility has become the measure of care itself. This is what Mark Fisher called the interpassivity of moral feeling: we outsource our ethical labour to symbols, panels, and artistic gestures that do the caring for us.6
I see this mechanism at work in every panel on coexistence, every gallery caption that assures visitors that art can heal. The institution’s conscience becomes our own. And yet, like all performances, it demands an audience willing to suspend disbelief. I think often of Walter Benjamin’s warning that mechanical reproduction risks stripping art of its aura, its capacity to invite participation rather than passive agreement.7 In these curated scenes of dialogue, the aura is replaced by consensus. Meaning is pre-packaged; the audience’s only task is to nod in recognition.
To be Jewish in this choreography is to occupy a double position, both object and participant in the spectacle of conscience. Our presence helps complete the image of plurality; our discomfort proves the event’s openness. And yet the conversation rarely touches what actually hurts. The occupation becomes abstract, the violence aestheticised. People leave the event feeling they’ve done something good. I leave wondering if participation itself isn’t a form of surrender.
Still, it’s not easy to refuse. The invitation feels like belonging, and belonging, for Jews in Europe, has always been precarious. To decline can seem ungrateful, to question can sound defensive. So I stay, and I watch, and I try to hold the contradiction without letting it hollow me out: that art can be both bridge and barrier, that culture can soothe conscience while silencing truth.
Holding the contradiction
What I am left with, after all these panels, exhibitions and discussions, is not certainty but weariness. The kind of weariness that comes from being both outside and inside the frame at the same time. I want art to mean something, to open the possibility of seeing differently. But I no longer trust the language of openness when it is used to protect comfort rather than challenge it.
Maybe this is what it means to be a Jew in Europe’s moral theatre: to clap politely at the end of the performance and still wonder if you were part of the show. The contradiction doesn’t resolve; it lingers, like the aftertaste of good wine served at a bad conversation. I tell myself that staying uneasy is a form of integrity, that refusal can be a kind of participation. It’s not redemption, but at least it’s honest. And honesty, here, is already an art form.
A possible solution
If there is a way forward, perhaps it lies not in purity or performance but in staying with the mess. I would like to see less urgency to simplify, less fear of contradiction. Complexity is not a failure of ethics but its condition. To live honestly within it, to allow tension, doubt, and discomfort to exist without forcing them into resolution, might be the most meaningful form of engagement we have. Art, at its best, can make this possible: not by offering clarity, but by holding what cannot be made clear. Perhaps that is where integrity begins; not in being right, but in being willing to remain in the uncertainty together.
- The term art-washing refers to the use of art and cultural initiatives to distract from or legitimise unethical, oppressive, or politically controversial actions by individuals, corporations, or states. It parallels concepts such as green-washing or pink-washing, where aesthetic or moral appeal is used to obscure structural violence or complicity. ↩︎
- Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004).
↩︎ - Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
↩︎ - Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). ↩︎
- Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile within Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the ‘Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture,” Theory and Criticism 31 (2007): 23–56.
↩︎ - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), 24–25 ↩︎
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 214-18.
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