Regarding Rising
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Melbourne’s Rising Festival opens today. Arts and freelance writer Lily Beamish has been covering recent withdrawals from the famously blue-and-white-lit event. She reached out this week to ask some questions about the arts in Melbourne. Here are my answers in full:
26 May 2024
Lily Beamish: Matt, you co-wrote ‘Have you comprehensively rejected the Besen Family Foundation?’ in December last year, in which you highlighted the role that the foundation plays in supporting Melbourne’s art industry. What inspired you to write that story?
Matt Chun: Just to reframe your question slightly, I highlighted the role that the Besen Family Foundation plays in supporting the ongoing colonisation and genocide of Palestine. The Besen Family Foundation is one of several zionist organisations that have strategically cornered the Australian arts industry for decades, through which they exercise power and influence. You’ll also be familiar with the Gandel Foundation, Schwartz Media, the Lieblers and others. These wealthy propagandists are toxic and ubiquitous, intimately entwined with each other, and deeply connected to the zionist occupation entity and its leadership.
It's important to note that Australian zionist organisations are not merely ideologically genocidal, which would be bad enough, but that they directly fund the ongoing violence of colonial expansion on stolen Palestinian land.
That particular post on the Besen Family Foundation was part of broader research into zionist influence and institutional complicity I’ve been undertaking for a number of years, always in close collaboration with Palestinian comrades. However, since the anti-colonial resistance operation of 7 October, and during this most recent and horrifying escalation of the zionist entity’s decades-long project of genocide in Palestine, there has been a much wider interest in exposing and expunging the deep rot of zionism within arts institutions, as well as newsrooms, publishing houses, healthcare providers and many other industries. For that reason, I’ve been reposting and expanding some previous work on the subject.
LB: Why do you think attention needs to be called to funders with connections to Israel and zionism?
MC: Zionists have always understood that the arts and media are where cultural narratives can be effectively captured and manipulated. Through their infiltration and exploitation of cultural spaces, zionists act to suffocate any criticism of their repulsive ethnostate, while leveraging their money and power to amplify Israeli myth-making at every turn.
Zionists also know that we all, as artists, crave the funding, the opportunities, the galleries and performance spaces, the media reviews and the audience. Unfortunately, many of us will capitulate or self-censor in order to gain these platforms, benefits and resources. Add to this a fear of bogus antisemitism accusations, alongside the accumulated decades of racist propaganda, and we begin to comprehend the overwhelming silence of the Australian art world on the colonisation and occupation of Palestine.
LB: Are you seeing any positive growth in Melbourne?
MC: Through eight months of live-streamed genocide, western consumers of the arts and media have learnt a lot about the function of imperialist propaganda, including its prevalence within organisations that many had never previously thought to interrogate.
There has also been a mass of rapid learning about Palestinian history and liberation struggle. A larger number of people now understand that zionism is a white supremacist ideology with land theft and mass murder at its core, and that Israel itself is nothing more than the temporary manifestation of that ideology; an illegitimate and utterly irredeemable settler-colonial project that must be destroyed in its entirety.
Many people are also starting to see through the progressive veneer of Australian arts and media. Despite hand-wringing land acknowledgments and an obsession with liberal identity politics, most are deeply violent colonial institutions that happily capitalise on the aesthetics of decolonialism — just so long as the grip of imperialism is never actually, materially challenged. Thanks to Palestinians' struggle for liberation, this flimsy masquerade is being exposed.
Artists have discovered, many for the first time, that the overwhelming majority of their industry is rotten to the core, and that many of our ‘progressive’ heroes are in fact cowardly or compromised, if not literal genocidaires.
These realisations are the first small steps towards extracting ourselves from the moral wasteland of the Australian arts economy, whether as consumers or producers of art, and towards building genuinely anti-imperialist alternatives.
Meanwhile zionists, and the network of institutions through which they have for so long leveraged power and influence, are in crisis. They have lost control of their multi-billion-dollar propaganda machine. The global south have always understood Israel to be an illegitimate imperialist outpost, but this revelation is now occurring on a significant scale throughout the west.
That said, the zionist program of genocide continues, as does the complicity of Australian institutions. Since October, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reports that more than 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza are now dead or missing under the rubble. We know that these numbers will increase exponentially as the full scale of this genocide is unearthed. Israel has targeted no less than ten refugee camps within the last 24 hours, where tens of thousands of displaced people are sheltering from previous zionist bombardments. I’ve just seen the footage of the most recent tent massacre at Tel al-Sultan, Rafah, scattered with the charred, dismembered bodies of entire families.
I do see ‘positive growth’ in the imperialist core and amongst its colonial vassals, but I don’t think it's happening quickly enough, and I don’t think that complicit institutions, in any case, can ever redeem themselves.
Palestinian resistance will ultimately liberate Palestine — that can never be doubted. And once that inevitability occurs, all these western arts and media institutions will assure us that they were always on the right side of history.
We have seen this cynical pivot from western institutions with regard to every historic liberation struggle, from the Frontier Wars to Vietnam. We must keep the receipts and we must never allow them to rewrite the fact of their direct participation in genocide.
LB: Now that it has come out that the Besen family Foundation has withdrawn from this year’s RISING due to backlash, how are you feeling about the Melbourne Arts scene?
MC: Rising isn’t a particular focus of mine, and its machinations don’t change my feelings about the Melbourne art scene broadly.
To the best of my knowledge, the backlash against Rising occurred organically and was not a centralised campaign. Some principled people on instagram utilised my research, reached out to programmed artists with this information and pressured the festival to divest from zionism.
My role is simply to conduct research, and to communicate that research through text or drawing. It's not my role to call for a boycott, except where, as in the case of Schwartz Media1, a clear picket line has been established by Palestinians, in which case I will always amplify that call. To be clear: there has been no such call to boycott Rising.
That said, let’s also be clear about Rising’s zionist connections, so that we can each make our own moral assessment around participation:
Following a number of artist withdrawals, Rising went into a frenzy of damage control: editing and reordering its website multiple times over the course of a fortnight in order to hide, de-emphasise and finally to remove information about the central role of the Besen Family Foundation as both major funder and originator of the blue-and-white-lit festival.
Having deleted receipts, the festival then attempted to dismiss artists’ concerns as ‘speculation about our sources of funding’.
Their eventual ‘Message on the Middle East’ was exactly the kind of cowardly, equivocal nonsense we’ve come to expect from arts organisations throughout the imperialist anglosphere.
I’ve watched Rising’s public melt-down, and I also attended a private zoom meeting with the co-artistic directors and CEOs Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek2 at their request. Presumably their goal was to hose down any opposition to the festival resulting from my research, but they never made their agenda explicit. I was left to ask repeatedly and politely what it was they wanted from me, but they remained condescending and incomprehensibly opaque.
While it appears that Rising has now been forced to part ways with the Besen Foundation, I would not characterise this as divestment, but as disingenuous and contradictory PR.
I would also point to existing Rising partnerships with such institutions as the zionist-funded ACMI3, and to existing pro-occupation board members, including Martin Foley, who visited the zionist entity in 2017 to ‘strengthen the Victoria-Israel bilateral relationship’. In 2014, Foley was also praised by zioist rag J-Wire for supporting ‘Israel’s justified but costly operation in Gaza’.
We must each make our own decisions around our engagement with ethically compromised institutions. Personally, I wouldn’t attend Rising.
LB: What further steps would you like institutions to take?
MC: I think we first need to let go of the idea that these institutions are permanent, necessary or irreplaceable. I’d like to see most of them burnt to the ground.
However, if an institution is to somehow outgrow its direct complicity in a world-historic horror — and undergo the enormous change required to ensure that it remains relevant in a post-imperialist world — I think, at the barest of bare minimums, this would surely begin with some genuine accountability (rather than sneaky wordplay), genuine reparations (rather than gaslighting) and a comprehensive, ground-up overhaul of its entire management and partnership structure (rather than a vague aesthetic shuffling for the purpose of damage control and liberal optics).
I haven’t seen any examples of complicit institutions engaging in anything approaching meaningful change, much less apologising for that complicity. Even if they were to do so this very instant, I wouldn’t applaud these cowards. We’re now eight months into this current stage of the zionist entity’s long campaign of genocide against Palestine. It's too late for a redemption arc.
photograph: Angelita Biscotti
Obarzanek spoke to zionist ‘journalist’ Jessica Abelsohn for AJN about his ‘cultural background’ growing up on an Israeli settlement and doing ‘quite a lot of Israeli dancing’ (not a thing that exists).
In October, the Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI) lit itself up in blue and white as a display of support for the zionist occupation entity. ACMI lists the Gandel Foundation, Naomi Milgrom Foundation and 6A Foundation as its ‘major philanthropic partners’. Naomi Milgrom is a Besen Family billionaire. 6A foundation is operated by Romy Katz, previously an employee of zionist private school Mount Scopus and a board member of zionist organisation AJF. ACMI also lists the Besen Family Foundation under its ‘trusts and foundations’.
ACMI is, beyond a doubt, a zionist institution.