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Since 1976, David Tartakover has been a senior lecturer in the Visual Communication Department of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. His art specializes in various aspects of visual communications, with a particular empahsis on culture and politics. He is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). He has been a president of the Graphic Designers Association of Israel (GDAI), and is a laureate of the Israel Prize (2002) (Sadly, an awful lot of Israel Prizes keep going to those who work against the Jewish people and Israel as a Jewish state). Tartakover’s art has won numerous awards and prizes and is included in the collections of museums in Europe, U.S. and Japan. In Japan, he exhibited a poster with his self-portrait over a map of Palestine Occupied Territories.

Tartakover was the designer of the name and logo for the Israeli peace group Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) to which he belongs. He and his organization push a land for peace ideology for Israel, a consistent ideology that fellow Jews must be deported from their communities in the disputed territories. As a member and leader within Shalom Achshav, Tartakover voices continual umbrage at the Jews of Yesha and blames them for the conflict with the Arabs.

In fact, Tartakover is obsessed with those Jewish communities, his fellow Israelis

There is a fundamental lack of rationality in Tartakover’s position on Jewish deportation, especially since the Disengagement from Gaza. Jews were indeed deported once again from Gaza (the last time was by Nazi Germany), yet this only increased attacks against other Jews and Israelis in the Negev, notably at Sderot and Ashkelon. Perhaps it is the fate of someone like Tartakover, with a centralized frame of reference (he always makes provocative art) that he cannot see the entire picture (Tartakover thinks it's the "occupation" following the 1967 Six Day defensive war against three Arab states that is the sole cause for the current Israeli-Palestinian dispute with the Arabs, not an Arab culture of Jew-hatred.) But he seems incapable of asking what made the Arabs start that war when all those territories were still firmly under the control of the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria? Raids by the Fedayeen to kill Israelis occurred long before 1967 and before Israel controlled any land to swap at all for peace.

Tartakover, in cooperation with his fellow far leftists in Israel, known as the Peace Bloc, or Gush Shalom, played a role in promoting a campaign urging his fellow Israelis to boycott goods produced in Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip (while under Israeli control). This program was also promoted in American supermarkets to sully Israel s image abroad.

The Nazis in 1933 started their campaign against the Jews culminating with the Holocaust through boycotts and divestment such as the likes of David Tartakover that he has been promoting. One would think that Tartakover knows this, yet if the results of the Disengagement won t persuade him that the Arabs want all of Israel, not just land in Yesha, what will? Meanwhile, deportation of Jews is still in his formula for peace. Tartakover is so impassioned about deporting his fellow Jews, he even wants them removed from the Golan Heights that is already part of Israel today because the Syrians claim it is theirs.

What next? Tel Aviv?

Tartakover has also like many of the anti-Israel academic crowd been promoting desertion in the Israeli army by encouraging his students to serve in the IDF and become refuseniks. Even thought the Security Fence has been built under withering terrorist attacks against his fellow Israelis, Tartakover has marched with the International Solidarity Movement and others who try to portray the Fence as an apartheid wall.

It is ironic that Tartakover’s art academy should be named after after the Biblical figure Bezalel, son of Uri, who was appointed by Moses to oversee the design and construction of the Tabernacle (Exodus 35:30), especially since Tartakover has a personal dislike of religious Jews and considers them the cause of the conflict with the Arabs, not the victims of Arab religious passion for killing Jews as part of Holy Jihad. Other faculty in Bezalel have supported boycotting Israel as another part of the Arab master plan to starve the Jewish state into capitulation, enough to even merit posting on the Arabs key UK boycott Israel website.

As mentioned, Tartakover has enormous contempt for religious Jews, something that also colors his hatred for Jews who reside in Yesha. He expressed this artistically when he defaced the memorial of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with the words, Killed by a Kippa wearing Jew! thus lumping all religious Jews (no doubt to him, all those in Yesha are religious too, when many are not) into the same group.

He has also shown his artistic abilities in other ways. He produced an artistic work with the writing “Arik eats children” on it, in reference to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for taking defensive actions against terrorism (the theme was not original to Tartakover, but was taken from an anti-Semitic news cartoon whose image was stolen from a painting by Goya; so much for originality in art - see below). That conjuring up such an image as art is also promoting the old Jewish blood libels that are still marketed by the Arab world seems to have made no difference to David Tartakover.

The fact is, art is only one of the venues being used by the Arab world and its allies to attack Israel and de-legitimize the Jewish state. David Tartakover, as a lecturer at Bezalel Academy, could use his artistic talents to promote the beauty of Israel and the survivability of the Jewish people after centuries, not attack his fellow religious Jews as being the cause for murderous attacks by irredentist Arab nationalists and Muslim extremists against the people of Israel.

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