Ragnar Kjartansson is a widely exhibited Icelandic performance artist. In a 2002 work called Death and the Children, he dressed up in a dark suit and carried a scythe, leading young children through a cemetery, answering their questions. In a 2006 live performance titled Sorrow Conquers Happiness, he wore a tuxedo and played the role of a 1940s nightclub crooner with an orchestra, singing, “Sorrow conquers happiness” over and over as the music swelled. In 2011, Kjartansson won the inaugural Malcolm Award at Performa 11, the visual art performance biennial, for his 12-hour work Bliss, which was performed without a break at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with repeated performances of the finale of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro,” the moment when the count gets down on one knee and asks his wife for forgiveness, which she grants in an aria. Icelandic tenor Kristjan Johannson played the count.

For his exhibition titled Architecture and Morality, at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv this season, Kjartansson, according to a press release, was going to “create a new, ambitious body of paintings within the specific context of Israel. He will spend two weeks painting the urban landscapes in the West Bank ‘En plein air’ (a fancy French term the press release misspelled and which means ‘outdoors’) akin to his performative painting practice over the past few years.”

Ragnar Kjartansson settlements exhibition / Source: CCA Facebook

So Ragnar Kjartansson took his canvas and stand and paints and brushes and went en plein air to various Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, and what he brought back was, well, not so bad. He painted what he saw (a paraphrase on the New Yorker’s surrealist Gahan Wilson’s book of horror cartoons), and apparently he saw none of the blood curdling evil normally associated with the term “settlements” on the corner of south Tel Aviv’s Tsadok Hacohen and Kalisher Streets, which is where the CCA is located.

Ragnar Kjartansson settlements exhibition / Source: CCA Facebook

Or, as Galia Yahav put it in Ha’aretz this weekend, “The houses are rendered separately, one per painting. All of them are drawn from the front and fill the canvas in the same way and from the same distance. The style is blatantly amateurish and naïve, as though from a hobby group, deliberately bland, with obedient brushstrokes and a filling of blank spaces, turgid coloration and pedantically mimetic attention to detail.”

But, most upsetting, from Yahav’s point of view, “the result is a small, suburban neighborhood of villas, completely artificial, in which little Israeli flags attached to parked cars wave in the breeze and larger ones flop from the windows of houses. Without addresses or names of specific settlements, this artistic tactic poses with feigned innocence in the likeness of a 19th-century pilgrimage, in which the Holy Land is portrayed through misty eyes.”

Ragnar Kjartansson settlements exhibition / Source: CCA Facebook

In other words, this cutting-edge performance artist, who was going to do to the settlements what Edvard Munch did the screaming, came away from those colonialist, apartheid-dispensing satanic neighborhoods with a fairly bland set of impressions, which is what one could expect from suburban bedroom communities anywhere.

“Perhaps the idea was to depict a generic quality of life rife with sated insensitivity – architecture as amorality,” Yahav tried to dig up some evil from under those middle class shaggy rugs. “Or perhaps it’s the realization of violent fantasy through painting: the occupied territories without Palestinians, a heaven on earth.”

Ragnar Kjartansson settlements exhibition / Source: CCA Facebook

Curator Chen Tamir wrote that Kjartansson’s settlements paintings “tell a story about the banality of everyday life amid complex political turmoil.” Maybe. But it ain’t in those paintings. Indeed, Tamir conceded that the entire Kjartansson exhibition “is a bold statement on art’s futility in the face of social and political strife.”

Or maybe, just maybe, the Icelandic artist discovered and then made a point leftwing art critics can’t afford to admit: that things in those Jewish settlements and in all of Judea and Samaria, just aren’t nearly as bad as they are in many other, more troubled places, such as London, Paris, Brussels, Nice and Istanbul.

The Swiss Air Force scrambled fighter planes to escort an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv around their borders following a bomb threat against the flight.

The Swiss F-18 planes escorted the El Al flight along the French-Swiss border, according to Swiss media.

Israel radio said that German fighter planes were scrambled too.

It is unclear what the fighter planes would actually do if there was a bomb on board.

The flight is continuing on to Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport without a problem. It’s expected to land between 12:32 PM to 12:40 PM Israel time. Update: The plane has landed safely at around 12:43 PM.

El Al released a statement that an anonymous threat was received, and the plane is continuing to Ben-Gurion airport as planned.

According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry after conferring with El Al, US airport authorities received an anonymous threat of a bomb in the kitchen of the El Al plane. The American authorities informed the Swiss authorities as the plane was then over their airspace. The Swiss then scrambled their fighters.

The El Al crew checked and did not find any bombs on board in the kitchen or elsewhere.

Update: The plane has landed safely at Ben-Gurion Airport at around 12:43 PM.

An El Al flight to Paris from Tel Aviv was forced to return to the terminal after it began making its way to the runway, according to a Channel 2 report.

According to the report, the flight’s security guards never got onto the airplane. When the staff realized the undercover guards weren’t there, the plane returned to the terminal to pick them

The plane took off an hour late, which is nothing too serious compared to the other delays El Al flights have been suffering over the past week.

At least they didn’t forget the pilot.

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First, on Spiritual Cafe, Rabbi Mike Feuer and Yishai discuss the Death that was let into the world with the rejection of the Land of Israel, and the heroic alliance between Caleb and Joshua that saved the Jewish people. Then, Yishai brings you to the funeral of Dr. Irving Moskowitz, a great Jews who was the patron of Jewish re-settlement in the whole Land of Israel. Finally, Alan Weinkrantz was a tech PR guru who was tragically killed last week in a Tel Aviv car accident. Hear Yishai’s interview with Alan from only a year ago.

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The third annual Israel Genesis Prize was awarded Thursday evening to native Israeli virtuoso violinist Itzhak Perlman.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sarah hosted the 2016 Genesis Prize laureate violinist on Thursday (June 23) at the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem.

The Netanyahus congratulated the internationally-renown musician on winning the prize and expressed their appreciation of his unique contribution to the Jewish People as an artist and teacher — and for his work on behalf of special needs children.

A long-time advocate for the disabled, Perlman had also participated with 170 athletes with disabilities earlier in the week in the Etgarim (Israel Association for the Disabled) Marathon in Jerusalem.

This year’s award ceremony was held Thursday evening at the Jerusalem Theater under the direction of Oscar-winning actress Helen Mirren.

Netanyahu first announced the Genesis Prize in 2012. The award is presented under the auspices of the Government of Israel, the Jewish Agency and the Genesis Philanthropy Group. The goal of the prize is to emphasize the contribution of Jews to world history and bring the younger generation of the Jewish world closer to the State of Israel and Jewish identity.

In awarding the 2016 Genesis Prize, Netanyahu told Perlman, “You are an advocate for those whose bodies are disabled but whose spirits never can be. Winning the Prize is not end of the journey but rather, just its beginning.”

Perlman knows first-hand the challenges faced by those with special needs; at the age of four he contracted polio, a deadly disease that left him in a wheelchair for life, without the use of his legs. “The Genesis Prize is especially meaningful to me, to receive this award here in Israel in the country of my birth,” Perlman said. The violinist left Israel at age 13, after completing his initial training at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv. He went on to study at the Julliard School, where he is currently an instructor.

But it was Itzhak Perlman’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show soon after his arrival in the U.S. that alerted the international arena that a new world-class violinist was about to step on the stage.

Perlman has performed as a conductor with major orchestras across the world — including with the New York Philharmonic, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic.

In addition, he has been awarded 16 Grammy Awards and four Emmy Awards, most recently for the PBS documentary, ‘Fiddling for the Future.’ The film is about the Perlman Music program founded by him and his wife Toby for young musicians who need support to enable their music talent to flourish.

The virtuoso has also been involved with major movie music scores, collaborating on American films such as Schindler’s List and Memoirs of a Geisha as well as the 2002 Chinese film, Hero.

Perlman, a father of five, will mark his 70th birthday with three album releases and a worldwide concert tour.

TPS / Tazpit Press Service contributed to this report.

A well orchestrated ambush by Arabs on Rt. 443, the alternative highway connecting the Tel Aviv metro area with Jerusalem via Modi’in, resulted in three Israelis injured from stones and broken glass and damage to a dozen vehicles.

According to motorists who spoke to News 0404, late Monday night masked Arab terrorists poured oil on the highway about two miles east of the Maccabim check post, then stood by the side of the road and as each Israeli car arrived and started swerving on the oil, they smashed it with very large stones. At least 12 vehicles were seriously damaged, as windows and windshields were cracked and broken, as well as the sides and roofs.

Security forces were alerted and arrived on the scene shooting at the terrorists.

Arab media sources reported that four attackers were wounded in addition to the one Arab who was killed.

Update: The IDF is investigating if the IDF troops accidentally shot and killed an Arab bystander and wounded a second Arab who were not involved in the attack.
Please see this story for more information.

Also on Monday night, at 11:52 PM, Arabs set fire to an IDF post near Al Arub using a Molotov cocktail. At 11:34 Arabs threw stones at an Israeli vehicle in Huwara, Samaria, causing heavy damage. At 11:04 Arabs set fire to the Gva’ot forest in Gush Etzion. At 10 PM Arabs threw stones to vehicles in Huwara, Samaria. At 8:03 PM Arabs rioted near Zeita Jamma’in in Samaria.

In other words, a normal evening.

An Otniel mother of six did not go down quietly earlier this year when 16-year-old Arab terrorist Morad Bader Abdullah Adais stabbed her to death in front of three of her six children.

Daphna Meir, a neurosurgical nurse at Soroka Hospital, fought her attacker for possession of the knife as he stabbed her over and over again in the kitchen of her home.

That and other details of Meir’s struggle for life on January 17, 2016 came to light in a transcript of the killer’s interrogation by Shin Bet intelligence personnel published by Walla News.

Because the killer had to work so hard to end Meir’s life, the final time he stabbed her, the knife got stuck and he was unable to remove it – saving the lives of others in the community.

“She started screaming, the children saw me and also started screaming, then I stabbed her in her upper body another three or four times. She tried to fight me and tried to take the knife from me. The two children who were there were still screaming, but she continued to resist, so I pushed her, and overpowered her.”

He didn’t stab the children, he said, because “it’s forbidden.”

Her oldest daughter, Ra’anana, 17, provided the security forces with a description of the murderer. As a result, he was tracked down and caught within hours.

“She struggled against me… I stabbed her until I couldn’t remove the knife from her body… and [then] I saw another woman coming [so] I fled and went home and watched a Saudi Arabian movie.”

The killer told his interrogators that he committed the murder in order to help “liberate Palestine” – including cities such as Haifa, Akko, Tel Aviv and Jaffa (Yafo), Nazareth and Tiberias.

“The liberation of Palestine is in the hands of prisoners and heroic martyrs,” he declared. “We will return to Akko, to Haifa, to Tiberias, to Yafo and to Nazareth.”

He asked the interrogators why he was blocked from going to the Temple Mount. “I would go to the Al Aqsa Mosque, even if I would be killed,” he said. “And on the way, I would murder as many Zionist Jews as possible.”

He added that he himself intended to die – as a martyr, in order to attain the terrorist’s alleged promise of a bevy of beauties.

“I would have kept stabbing her and if I had seen another Jew I would have stabbed him to death too. If I had manage to withdraw the knife from her body I would have kept murdering Jews until I died a martyr’s death.

“Every Muslim hopes to die a martyr’s death,” the young terrorist explained. “I want to enter heaven and have 70 virgins.”

The Adais family home in nearby Yatta was demolished earlier this month in accordance with Israeli security protocol.