Jack Lang, president of the Institut du monde arabe (IMA) in Paris, on Sunday judged "derisory and saddening" the petition supported by Arab intellectuals about the exhibition "Jews of the East", which presents loans from Israeli institutions. This petition launched in early December by the controversial pro-Palestinian movement BDS which calls for a systematic boycott of Israel, rejecting all cultural cooperation and signed by some 250 intellectuals and personalities, is "completely disproportionate and beside the point," said Jack Lang, former French socialist Minister of Culture, on radio J.
The text, signed among others by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, the Palestinian director Elia Suleiman or the Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, affirms that the IMA "would betray its intellectual mission by adopting this normalizing approach - one of the worst forms of coercive use. and immoral of art as a political tool to legitimize colonialism and oppression ”.
The exhibition "made a splash"
"It's a reaction that seeks to divert this exhibition from its deep meaning, which has nothing to do with this or that political debate," said Jack Lang.
“Orient Jews”, open until March 13, is the third part of exhibitions devoted to the imprint of the three great monotheistic religions on the Arab world at the IMA.
It is "making a splash" and "we never talk about this debate," Lang said.
Out of 300 works collected all over the world, there are only “three or four from Jerusalem”.
“It's a bit derisory and saddening.
All the more so since I myself have contributed to highlighting Palestinian culture as a person, like no institution, ”continued the IMA president.
"It saddened me to note that people, some of quality, writers, philosophers, let themselves get carried away, a bit like sheep, in a text whose veracity they have not even verified", he said. he concluded.
