November 2023 – Page 3 – The Koboi Project

At the dawn of the humanist epoch, the great pioneer of spatial, physical, and psychological realism, Giotto di Bondone, painted a fresco cycle at the Arena Chapel, in Padua, which which presents the story of Christ. Arguably, the perspectival acuity, the modeling of masses, and the emotional expressionism that would come to characterize the Italian Renaissance found its first consolidated realization in this celebrated cycle. Descending from the anagogical abstractions of Medieval art, to engage in an empathetic somatic and psychic sensibility of Humanism, the panels of Giotto’s cycle must have given contemporary viewers an unprecedented impression of the Biblical narrative as being couched in the moral and ethical realities of earthly life.

One striking image here is ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ (detail) which represents King Herod’s men slaughtering all male children, 2 years old and below, in Bethlehem. As the slaughter ensues, a collection of lifeless children builds into a central heap, as if Giotto were presenting both the physical evidence and the statistical data of the event, all in one visualization. Although the representation of the mothers in this image is thought to have received contemporaneous criticism for being impassive, subdued, numb, and expressionless, I find the stunned stillness of this image more profound and moving than the later more expressive version in Lower Church, Assisi, also believed to be from the artist’s hand.

Not unlike Herod, whose indiscriminate slaughter was based on the uncertainty about the identity of the infant King of the Jews, whom he feared would usurp him one day; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to justify his collateral slaughter of innocents based on their geolocational inseparability from the constituents of his own dreaded nemesis – Hamas. UPDATE: The number of Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza stands at 8,663 (this figure is an estimate as of December 19).

Image: https://gallerix.org/storeroom/146947004/N/2469/

Image: https://betweentwocities.com/2017/03/19/giottos-two-views-of-the-massacre-of-the-innocents/

https://www.thehistoryofart.org/giotto/massacre-of-the-innocents/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-trackerI

The national motto of Canada, “A Mari Usque Ad Mare,” which translates to “From sea to sea,” marks the occupation of a land which the prior occupants still call Turtle Island. While this proprietary geographical imagery derives from the Biblical Psalm 72:8, “He shall have dominion from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth,” its eschatological sense of “dominion” has been repeatedly transposed into an imperial one throughout the Common Era. The territorial imagery of “A mari Usque Ad Mare,” is evoked again in ‘America the Beautiful’, a popular patriotic song often confused with the American National anthem,

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

This proprietary boundary symbolism seems to be an identifiable feature of European settler colonial imagery and lore. Indeed, European settler colonialism can be said to have been inaugurated in 1452, when Roman Catholic Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, authorizing King Afonso V of Portugal to subjugate the lands and the lives of non-Christians. While Zionism does not derive from this Christian ‘doctrine of discovery’, the founding of Israel in the violent displacement of native Palestinians by non-native European Jews, can be seen as the last significant instantiation of such an ethnopolitical ‘dominion’.

Given both the history of settlement and erasure of Palestinians from their lands and the fact that in the past month, 10,733 Palestinians have been killed (10,569 in Gaza and 164 in the West Bank, November 8, 10:50 GMT Update) with the complicity of the collective West, I wonder if it is a guilty self-projection that underpins the interpretation that the freedom slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as a call for genocide (mass killing or other form of eradication with intent)? In fact, as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has recently explained, this is not a call for the destruction of the state of Israel, but “a call for freedom ‘from the river to the sea’ for everybody.