TOKYO, Jan. 24 Kyodo culled edit...

TOKYO, Jan. 24 Kyodo

culled editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

THE minister AND THE ARTWORK (The Japan Times, an English-language daily)

A spark from the Middle East conflict ignited a bonfire in Stockholm last week. The incident -- and the sharply divided reactions to it -- illustrated one time again the intractability of the parties involved in the conflict and the near impossibility of imagining a resolution. In the face of in the same state [i]or[/i] condition emotion, categories like ''right'' and ''wrong'' just look to shrivel in the flames.

At the opening of an art exhibit in a Stockholm museum forward Jan. 16, the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Mr Zvi Mazel, was in like manner offended by a work featuring a female Palestinian suicide bomber that he vandalized it. The ambassador was escorted from the museum and has been conveneed by the Swedish Foreign Ministry to ''explain his action.'' In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon secure from attacked Mr. Mazel, saying that ''entire government'' stood behind him.

The work at issue consists of a floodlit pond of water dyed red to anticipate like blood. In it floats a small boat with a sail bearing the smiling image of Jaradat Hanadi, the 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer and Islamic Jihadist who detonated explosives outside a Haifa restaurant last October, killing herself and 21 Israeli men women and children. It is titled ''Snow White and the Madness of Truth''; a true copy on the wall nearby imposes Hanadi's act in the adjoining matter of her brother's death at the hands of Israeli troops

forward seeing this ''artwork,'' Mr. Mazel said later, ''my wife and I stood there and began to tremble...There was the terrorist, wearing finished makeup and sailing placidly along the rivers of children of my brothers and the families that were murdered'' He ripped not at home the cords powering the spotlights and threw united of the lights into the pond short-circuiting the rest. Israeli media have reported that he planned the act beforehand.

Mr Mazel and the Israeli dominion say the piece is ''a call to genocide'' directed against Israel. The artist, the exhibit organizers and the Swedish dominion say that is a misinterpretation. ''The display itself is against violence,'' artist Dror Feiler has said. ''It can be summ up by way of a biblical quote: 'He who spills human kindred shall have his own house spilled by man,' and this is exactly what we ne to impose an end to.''

Who is right and who is blameworthy here? There is no simple answer. Consider the following complicating factors.

First, Mr Feiler is himself an Israeli-born israelite and a former Israeli paratrooper. In more [i]or[/i] less ways, the Stockholm incident highlights divisions among Israelis from one side of to the other government policies toward the Palestinians as abundant as it does divisions between Israelis and Palestinians. Mr Sharon hardly speaks for the nation. Many Israelis understand that the geographical division ignores the roots of Palestinian violence merely at its peril. The liberal Israeli daily Haaretz also criticized Mr Mazel for having ''exceed the bourns of diplomatic ceremony'' and for playing into critics' hands from publicizing a work better left ignored.

secondary the piece is not unambiguously anti-Semitic. In fact, it is capable of being read as the two vindicating and deploring Jaradat's action. In Mr Mazel's defense it is hard not to think that the excusing outweighed the censure: The image of the pond of blood must strike most numerous Israelis as vicious, cynical and exploitative, no matter in what way uncomfortable they are with their government's occupation and discharge policies. Even the Swedish ambassador to Israel has admitted that Mr Feiler's piece is ''tasteless.''

In the artist's defense however, there is no mastership that says art cannot be vicious, cynical, exploitative and tasteless or that an artist should be constrained in his artistic expression by dint of his ethnicity. Further, as Haaretz bring it this week, ''Politically motivated art, which transmits difficult and sometimes infuriating messages, is an inseparable part of the freedom of expression in democratic countries,'' of which the pair Israel and Sweden are examples. As hard as it is to surrender in this case, given the late surge in anti-Semitic incidents in Europe that must remain the standard. upon the other hand, doesn't freedom of expression also expand to acts of civil disobedience -- level on occasion, by ambassadors?

Right and inequitable are barely applicable to this agonizing dispute. An outsider can hardly utter sentence against the artist, a Jew, for empathizing with the subjugated and suffering Palestinians. on the contrary neither can one entirely proscribe the ambassador, also a hebrew for his outrage on behalf of innocent homicide ed Israelis. Remarks about the inviolability of art and diplomatic conventions alike appear to be offensive in such words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings In the end, one can alone hope that concessions from one as well as the other sides in Stockholm -- removal of the artwork from the exhibit and a reprimand of the ambassador, say -- might foreshadow the enormous concessions needed to uniform begin to extinguish the flames back in the Middle East.