The Israeli Ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel strained diplomatic relations between Israel and Sweden when at the opening to an exhibition at Stockholm's National Antiquities Museum held as part of a conference on genocide, he attacked an artwork he felt to be sympathetic to terrorism against Israelis. The artwork "My Heart Swims With Blood" by the Israeli born musician and artist Dror Feiler and his wife Gunilla Sköld Feiler features a boat floating in a pool of red liquid with a photo of the Palestinian suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat attached to the mast as if "forming the sail of a little toy boat on a pool of blood." ^[1]. The work gets its title from Bach's Cantata 199, Mein Herze Schwimmt im Blut (My Heart Swims in Blood) which plays along in the museum courtyard where the work is situated. The suicide bomber Jaradat, a 29 year old lawyer - shocked the world when on October 4, 2004, grieving over the death of her brother at the hands of the Israeli army she murdered 21 people and injured 51 others at the Maxim restaurant in the northern Israel beachside town of Haifa by detonating explosives strapped to her body.

According to some reports Mazel, unplugged the lights and threw one of them in the pool, though the artist describing the situation said that the lights short circuited only after Mazel threw one of the lights into the water ^[2] causing the installation to become what gallery director Kristian Berg called "life threatening". Mazel said "For me it was intolerable and an insult to the families of the victims. As ambassador to Israel I could not remain indifferent to such an obscene misrepresentation of reality. This was not a piece of art. This was a monstrosity.'^[3]. Perhaps unsurprisingly Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed, but viewed Mazel's actions as defending and reacting against a rising tide of anti Semitism in Europe and saying "I think Ambassador Mazel behaved in an appropriate way ... I think the phenomenon is so serious it would have been forbidden not to have acted on the spot." ^[4].

In a radio interview with artist and the ambassador, Mazel defended himself against accusations that he was an iconoclast and in turn advocated a sort of extreme form of art criticism, saying that "This is not a work of art. The viewers determine what art is. I decide what art is. This is not art. This is perverse art at the most and in my opinion, it is not art at all. It is a political cry to glorify the concept of the suicide bomber." Mazel would have found a sympathetic ear with Roger Kimball, who in the Wall street Journal stated that "In the normal course of things, you would never have heard of "Snow White." It's just another bit of dreary left-wing "statement art": morally rebarbative, aesthetically nugatory, interesting only as a symptom of cultural decay. You can see yards of the stuff every day at any of the 23,872 places where challenging, border-testing, antibourgeois, avant-garde, cutting-edge art is shown." [5].

Israel called for Sweden to take the work out of the exhibition though Sweden didn't capitulate and supported the gallery director Kristian Berg's view that "Difficult and controversial works of art should be shown in public institutions like ours," ^[6]. Describing the event, Sweden's ambassador to Israel said that there had been "a misinterpretation of a piece of art which may very well be in bad taste, very bad taste, but which is not a justification of suicide bombers.."^[7]. Far from being a work encouraging "a call to genocide" as felt by Mazel, it was as Feiler described to Israeli army radio "against violence... It can be summed up by a biblical quote, 'He who spills human blood shall have his own blood spilled by man,' and this is exactly what we need to put an end to."^[8].

Feiler, a president of the organization Jews for Israeli Palestinian Peace felt that his prominence as a peace activist actually prompted Mazel to attack the work. Feiler once served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Army, and according to some reports refused to serve in the Gaza deployment becoming one of the first Refuseniks and though he has since renigged his Israeli citizenship, his family still resides there: "My family lives in Israel - why should I like suicide bombers? The fact that we try to explain terrorism doesn't mean that we forgive. It feels ridiculous to have to say it, but we condemn suicidal bombings."^[9] he said.

In a further incident following the Mazel intervention, Jewish activist Dmitri Vasserman placed a picture of Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh's murderer afloat in the same pool causing Dror Feiler to be outraged once again at the misinterpretation of their work, crumpling the picture and accusing Vasserman of acting dictatorially.

In one of his writings, Feiler says "Music, poetry & art that doesn't function like the matador's red rag upsets me."^[10] and so it seems that in keeping with this philosophy, Feiler got to have a bull fight of his very own.