Israel Matzav

Waiting for a happy ending

You could hear it right away. The grumbles about how the Jews run Hollywood, how the Israelis tell them what how to think, what to exalt, what to censor.

How if someone dares depart from the party line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the Holocaust, or the Jewish leadership in the time of Jesus, the forces of retribution will visit ruin upon them and upon their distributors domestic and foreign.

In remarks published two days before the ceremony, Hany Abu-Assad, the director of Paradise Now, a film centering on two Palestinians preparing to carry out a suicide bombing, said he believed pro-Israel lobbying would in the end cost him the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

"I can write off an Oscar win right now," Abu-Assad said.

"The Oscars are a complex matter, and I believe that in the end, if there is a close call, what will work against me will be two or three conservatives, even if the majority votes with its heart."

For his part, Steven Spielberg faced an unaccustomed storm of Jewish protest when he released Munich, which raises questions about Israel's assassination policy in the fight against terrorism.

"So many fundamentalists in my own community, the Jewish community, have grown very angry at me for allowing the Palestinians simply to have dialogue and for allowing Tony Kushner to be the author of that dialogue," Spielberg told Newsweek last month.

According to Spielberg, "'Munich' never once attacks Israel, and barely criticizes Israel's policy of counterviolence against violence. It simply asks a plethora of questions. It's the most questioning story I've ever had the honor to tell. For that, we were accused of the sin of moral equivocation. Which, of course, we didn't intend - and we're not guilty of."

It was only natural, then, that when Steven Spielberg's Munich failed to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and when Paradise Now lost out as Best Foreign Language film, the predictions of battalions of anti-Semites and radical Muslims were borne out.

So what?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:48 PM