How Bezalel turned from a school of Jewish art into a post-Zionist breeding ground

This week, the police opened an investigation against Issa Grayeb, a Bezalel graduate and lecturer at the academy, following an exposé by Ornit Poran-Swissa on Channel 14. Grayeb refers to the IDF as "the Israeli occupation forces" and presents places in Israel as part of "Palestine." In leaked screenshots, an account bearing his name is seen liking extremist content, including a post welcoming the Iranian missile attack on Israel in October 2024, a post stating that "there is no solution but armed revolution until victory," and a post describing Kiryat Shmona as a "Zionist settlement" in "occupied Palestine" following rocket fire by the "Lebanese resistance."

Grayeb is not the first case in the history of Bezalel. Over the last decade, there have been political scandals at the institution. In 2016, a work was displayed at the academy showing Benjamin Netanyahu next to a hangman's noose. In 2018, a call was published on the academy's website describing the Zionist enterprise as one that caused a "catastrophe (Nakba)" for the Palestinians. In 2022, students established a cell aimed at "bringing Zionism back to the art academy." The absurdity is complete: bringing Zionism back to an institution whose establishment was approved by the Zionist Congress.

And it is not just about students. In recent years, the presence of Bezalel graduates and faculty has been evident in the visual language of the anarchy against the government, in posters, exhibits, and actions in the public space. Students and senior lecturers took part in extreme actions of the "Kaplan riots," in the vandalism of central traffic arteries in Jerusalem, and in "protest workshops" within the walls of the institution itself. Illustrators and cartoonists teaching at the academy published cartoons saturated with hatred, sometimes with misogynistic imagery bordering on antisemitism. Bezalel's people and graduates were partners in shaping the visual language of the anarchy.

To understand the reversal, one must return to the first Bezalel. Bezalel ben Uri, after whom the institution is named, was chosen to build the Tabernacle. The Almighty filled him with "the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship" (Exodus 31:3). He is not the modern artist, narcissistic and sovereign, to whom creation is subject and self-expression, but an artist in the ancient sense, a craftsman who was given wisdom and talent to build something greater than himself. Bezalel was not asked to express himself; he was asked to build a Tabernacle.

It is no coincidence that Boris Schatz chose the name of the builder of the Tabernacle when he founded "Bezalel, School of Arts and Crafts" in Jerusalem in 1906. Schatz sought to create a new Jewish material culture, art and craft that connected Jewish tradition, biblical imagery, the landscapes of the land, and Jerusalem with national revival. Bezalel was one of the cultural enterprises of the return to Zion.

After the establishment of the state, Israeli art increasingly moved away from the Jewish and national world of the old Bezalel. "New Horizons" sought abstract and universal art; in the sixties and seventies, the winds of the avant-garde and political art from the world arrived here, followed by postmodernism. In recent decades, the progressive, post-Zionist, and post-colonial discourse joined them. The names changed, but the direction was clear: less and less from the Jewish root from which Bezalel grew, and more and more from the ideologies dictated in every generation by the international art world.

I know Bezalel from the inside. I studied in the architecture department and taught there for years. I saw up close how a certain political position becomes the language of an institution, in what is considered advanced and critical and what is marked as outdated, nationalist, or provincial. This is not the position of one lecturer or another; it is an institutional culture.

Issa Grayeb is not the story, but the result. An institution named after the builder of the Tabernacle and founded to build a Jewish culture in the Land of Israel has become one of the breeding grounds for the culture of dismantling and protest. The Israeli left did not establish Bezalel; it inherited it, changed its language, and turned a founding institution of Jewish revival into a power center of post-Zionist culture. The path from Bezalel ben Uri to the Bezalel of Issa Grayeb is a complete reversal: from building to dismantling, from craft to ideology, from Zionism to post-Zionism. Bezalel still bears the name of the builder of the Tabernacle. The question is what kind of Tabernacle it is building today.