Berlin-based Italian artist Costantino Ciervo is no stranger to controversy. Over the past four decades, the self-proclaimed political artist and socialist has created artworks that address the plight of some of the most exploited sections of the working class—undocumented workers in Italy, migrants who have died crossing the Mediterranean and the persecution of the Palestinian people. In the course of his work he has often encountered the indifference or even the hostility of cultural institutions.

However, the reaction to his latest exhibition, “COMUNE—The Paradox of Similarity in the Middle East Conflict,” came from an unexpected source. In his introductory speech to the audience attending the exhibition’s opening at the Fluxus Museum in Potsdam (on the southwest border of Berlin) on November 15, the curator of the museum, Tamás Blénessy, expressed his vehement opposition to the content of the exhibition, which seeks to encourage debate and shed light on the background to the persecution of the Palestinian people by Israel and the imperialist powers led by the United States. The WSWS has dealt with the content of the exhibition in a previous article.

After the opening of the exhibition, I spoke to Costantino Ciervo to ask him to explain his differences with the curator’s introductory speech.

Costantino Ciervo: I only received the text from the curator, Tamás Blénessy, three hours before the exhibition began, so I couldn’t really prepare myself properly. But it was enough time to understand that the positions put forward by the curator in his text expressed the most extreme form of Zionist propaganda. I hastily drew up nine points arguing against the main positions put forward in the text and presented them to the audience in my reply to the curator.

I began by stating that I disagreed with the opening statement and said it put forward arguments which could have come from the mouth of Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who is a criminal and a terrorist and who heads a terrorist state. Netanyahu, the same man who has been charged by the International Criminal Court in The Hague with the crime of genocide and is the subject of an international arrest warrant. Tamás’s statement at the opening of the exhibition represented the most right-wing positions held by the Zionists.

In his introductory comments, the curator acknowledged that he based his remarks on an essay authored by the virulent Zionist blogger, Ilya Bezruchko. Taking up Bezruchko’s theme, the curator scandalously claimed that there were in fact no Palestinians and that the term “Palestinian” was a construct. It is also very important that from that point on in his speech, he never used the word “Palestinians.” Instead he spoke of “Arabs” or people other than Israelis. In his opinion, the Arabs were the aggressors in the Middle East. He went so far as to say that no occupation of Palestinian lands had taken place and that Arabs were attracted into the territory where Palestinians had lived for thousands of years by the envy of the much more advanced Israeli civilization. This is all vicious nonsense, of course.

In my counter to Tamás, I made the point that the concept of nation first arose along with the development of capitalism. Peoples with traditions other than the Jewish tradition had been living in the territory of the Middle East for thousands of years. It was only later, with the founding of Islam in 630, that Islamic traditions gradually took hold, and so the historic identity of these peoples cannot be defined in terms of a nation state. The term Palestine did not come out of nowhere; it was already used 2,000 years ago by the Romans, by the British when they had the mandate to administer the territory, and it is also used by the United Nations. I also gave other examples, such as the indigenous peoples of Australia or North America. They had had an identity for thousands of years, and the concept of nationhood arose much later, ultimately under capitalism.

In the case of the Palestinians the first assault on their land took place in 1948 with the founding of Israel—a completely unequal offensive by migrant settlers armed with modern weaponry against shepherds and farmers, driving 700,000 Palestinians from their land. This Israeli offensive was then deepened and advanced with the Six-Day War in 1967. Against this background of aggression by successive Israeli regimes backed to the hilt by the US and other imperialist countries the armed struggle by Palestinians to defend themselves and their land was entirely justified.

That was, in summary, my argument, which was followed closely by the audience.

Stefan Steinberg: The aim of your exhibition is to highlight the common interests and roots of the peoples of the Middle East. In my own place of work I work alongside Arab colleagues, who have relatives in Gaza and are appalled by the actions of the fascistic Israeli government. At the same time, they reject the accusation that their opposition to the regime in Israel is tantamount to antisemitism, pointing out that the historical definition of Semitism applies to all Arab and Hebrew peoples in the region. On this basis, the only solution to the conflict is a single state for Arab and Jewish workers based on the principle of social equality. Donald Trump’s recently announced “peace plan,” which denies Palestinians any real sovereignty, was approved by the United Nations last week. Could you comment on this in relation to your exhibition?

Costantino Ciervo: The aim of the exhibition is to highlight the common interests and roots of the peoples of the Middle East. I suggest that the Jewish and Arab peoples, who have been in conflict with one another for nearly a 100 years, ultimately have much more in common culturally and historically than they have differences. I have illustrated this by using figures created with the help of artificial intelligence—to show similarities via the juxtaposition of Jews and Israelis, thereby evoking an affiliation of individuals, an association of brothers/sisters. It’s about siblings (mostly twins in the portraits), and this starting point is very important to me because I think that the solution in this territory called Palestine can only be a one-state solution.

If two states are built side by side, then one state, i.e., Israel, would be much more powerful, would receive more support, have more money, while the second state would remain underdeveloped and receive less or no support. This would mean that this latter rump state would invariable serve as a cheap labor platform for Israel. And this inequality in turn would, of course, provoke violence. Inequality in economic performance will sooner or later cause violence to escalate again.

In my opinion, the only answer is a one-state solution, a federation of two populations living together in one state giving full freedom to two different historical and cultural traditions, based on social equality. I have sought to express this concept in the exhibition in the form of a sewing machine that sews the outline of Palestine from 1917, and in the middle, the territory occupied by Israel. The steady diminution of Palestine at the hands of Israeli expansionism during the past 75 years to the tiny rump state of Gaza and some villages in the West Bank is shown in the background to the portraits on show in the exhibition.

Stefan Steinberg: In 1948 the Trotskyists in the Fourth International warned of the utopian and reactionary nature of a “Zionist solution” of the Jewish question and declared that Jewish and Arab workers could only unite on the basis of a complete renunciation of Zionism. In the same year leading Jewish intellectuals in the US, such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, also warned of the dangers of a religiously based Jewish state in the Middle East.

Costantino Ciervo: I know about the letter undersigned by Einstein and Arendt to the New York Times. At that time Menachem Begin headed the Irgun terrorist group. Begin was visiting New York to drum up support and money for his terror activities, but Einstein and Arendt wanted nothing to do with him, likening his ideology to that of the fascist state in Germany. Begin went on to form the Likud Party, which is headed by Netanyahu today, and is continuing in the fascistic tradition represented by Begin.

Stefan Steinberg: Your activities to expose the oppression of the Palestinian people go back at least two decades, and in the course of your work you have combined complex mechanical constructions with visual art. The portraits for your current exhibition are meticulously hand-painted portraits based on patterns generated by artificial intelligence. Under capitalist conditions, AI clearly poses great dangers to artistic production, but your own work shows how this new technology can be used in a positive way. Could you say something about this?

Costantino Ciervo: Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that can be used for negative and destructive purposes but also for constructive purposes. Now, specifically with regard to Israel, one must understand that AI is used every day to achieve Netanyahu’s plan for a Greater Israel extending from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. The well-known Unit 8200, a division of the Israel Defense Forces, is responsible for clandestine operations. Unit 8200 employs some of the best minds in the field of AI to use facial recognition techniques in order to identify, control and eliminate opponents, for example, with remotely controlled drones. According to members of the Israeli government, its opponents extend to the entire population of Palestine population. This makes clear that this technology is being used to oppress and potentially eliminate an entire people.

My approach is metaphorical. I took an existing person from the internet, a photo of a Palestinian, and told the AI to make a copy of this person as a twin, but the characteristics in terms of clothing and symbols should not be so Palestinian but rather Jewish. I want to show that while they differ in their clothing, with regard to their physical and facial features, they are siblings, that in essence, as fellow humans beings living in societies under the same stress and pressure, they have more in common than in mere appearance. The source of their differences is external, in particular, the priorities of the major imperialist powers which seek to divide in order to maintain their rule.

Stefan Steinberg: You attended a recent meeting here in Berlin. At the meeting the chairman of the WSWS Editorial Board David North addressed the issue of AI and announced the plan to make available a chatbot, Socialism AI, as a resource for the study of socialist and Marxist analysis.

Costantino Ciervo: I think highly of the idea. The problem with AI is private ownership. As long as AI exists and is developed in private hands—I’m talking about people like Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and worst of all, Peter Thiel, a billionaire who owns platforms like Palantir, a powerful company that provides its services to the secret services in the US, for example. AI must be taken out of private ownership and put into the hands of the working class and the exploited. It must be transparent, it must be open source, so that knowledge remains transparent and is used for progressive purposes. And this includes building a new platform, for example, to specifically disseminate Marxist ideas, which are often misused or misrepresented.

I think it’s very good that Socialism AI is happening. There are all sorts of technical, political and other related questions that arise when you do something like this, but basically, I am very, very excited that AI is being developed in such a way for a world without private ownership and capitalist exploitation.