Read the statement by Sara Nadal-Melsió—associate director of the Whitney Independent Study Program—regarding the Whitney’s cancellation of “No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance.” Link in bio and below. https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/nadal_melsio_sara_22_may_2025.php (fb)

In February 2004, French-Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan filed a libel suit in Paris against philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. The previous year, Sivan and Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi had released “Route 181: Extracts from a Palestinian-Israeli Journey”—a four-and-a-half-hour travel documentary tracing what remains, in the memories of the landscape and its inhabitants, of the violent expulsion in 1947–1948 of som­e three-quarters of a million Palestini­ans from the territory that would become the state of Israel. During a radio program, Finkielkraut had launched an aggressive critique of Sivan, arguing that he was representative of a “particularly painful, particul­arly frightening reality—Jewish anti-Semitism,” in that “Route 181” was premised on a false analogy between the events of 1947–1948 and the Nazi Holocaust. For Sivan, however, it is the very possibility of acknowledging the continuity between the Shoah and the Nakba that could establish the condition for sharing a single democratic state between Jews and Palestinians. “The problem is that we Israelis must take responsibility for the deeds of our parents, deeds for which they refused to take responsibility. In the eyes of Claude Lanzmann [director of Shoah] or Finkielkraut, if they acknowledge the crime of 1948, then Israel does not have the right to exist.” Sivan speaks instead as one who accepts that right, but differently—as a citizen. For the citizen, the experience of the partition and its remainders can only issue in a sense of the inevitability of sharing: “We share the history of the land, we share a memory of the Nakba/Independence, we share a destiny. This is a basis for thinking equality.” You can read the full translation of the Sivan vs. Finkielkraut trial as well as Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman’s introduction via the link in bio or below. https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/keenan_weizman.php (fb)