Israel Matzav

Israel finances its own demonization

Shavua tov and a good week to everyone.

This past week, I reported on an anti-Israel film being shown at a Jewish-federation sponsored film festival in San Francisco. Perhaps I spoke too soon when I said that showing the film illustrated "the unfortunate state of relations between Israel and the American Left today." Here in Israel, we also show anti-Israel films. In fact, the government even pays to have them made.

David Horovitz reports on his trip to the Israel film festival which is taking place in Jerusalem this week. He reports on one evening which was a series of seven sequenced short films called Jerusalem Moments. The films were made by Israeli, 'Palestinian,' and in one case, both an Israeli and a 'Palestinian' filmmaker. In each case, the films presented the 'Palestinian' view of life in Jerusalem.

It began with a eulogy to the late PLO representative Faisal Husseini - who happened to be cited by Likud Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor this week as being the one Palestinian leader to have acknowledged that there could be no "right of return" - and headed mainly downhill from there.

We got to meet a Shuafat refugee camp rap pack, one of whose members made a casual lyrical reference to Israel's unexplained purported killing of a mother and father. We saw footage of the complexities of travel into and across Jerusalem, with a soundtrack that included the voice of a pregnant Palestinian woman discussing how Israeli security forces allegedly threatened to kill her if she would not get undressed for a security check at a roadblock, and the voice of a man discussing how he had been unable to save a dying Palestinian woman blocked en route to the hospital by hard-hearted Israeli security personnel at another roadblock.

We heard about the alleged intolerance of the Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance being sited at a city center Muslim cemetery. This came complete with outrageous declarations by the Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem and others that Israel routinely builds parking lots and shopping malls over Muslim sites in a systematic effort to erase Islamic history.

And in the most powerful of this succession of mini-features, we followed a group of Palestinian laborers as they sought to make their way into the city to earn the money to feed their families. The camera tracked the hapless young men risking life and limb to scale walls, crawl through barbed wire and dash across highways pre-dawn - all in the hope of finding honest work, and all in a desperate cat-and-mouse game with the Israeli security forces.

The final images were of uniformed Israeli troops chasing down a trailing member of the group and catching him. There he stood in all his cornered misfortune, his face a study in despair, his hands ripped and bloodied by Israel's barbed wire.

The films are completely without context. The audience isn't told that IDF troops don't go around randomly shooting people. It isn't told that three years were expended trying to reach a compromise about the Wiesenthal Center construction - nor that the court implemented the compromise proposed by the Wiesenthal Center at great additional expense to the Center and its museum. It isn't told why 'Palestinians' can't just come into Jerusalem to look for work anymore without passing through checkpoints and searches. It's all without context. And the leftist Jewish audience that attends these things - the yfei ha'nefesh as one of my Israel office mates used to call them - applauded and ate it up.

All of which would be well and good - people are free to say whatever they want and make whatever films they want in this country (unlike in any of our neighbors) - except that my tax shekels and those of everyone else who pays taxes in Israel paid for these films to be made.

My only question is, do we actually have to participate in the more extreme demonization? Do we ourselves have to directly contribute to the kind of dismally skewed, toxic, decontextualized attack that prompts official complaint and widespread frustration when practiced by others? Do we have to finance it ourselves?

For Ir Amim's Jerusalem Moments was made, in part, with NIS 200,000 of funding from the Cinema Project of the Tel Aviv-based Rabinovitch Foundation for the Arts, which gets its funding, in turn, via the Israeli Film Council, from the Ministry of Culture and Sport.

Jerusalem Moments was relentless Palestinian Israel-bashing, interspersed with near-relentless Israeli Israel-bashing. And we paid for it.

I don't know whether the current government can force change at the Israeli Film Council - and cut off its funding if such change is not made. But I certainly hope so. It's outrageous for us to be financing films that demonize us on the world stage (and make no mistake about it - these films will be seen abroad) in the name of 'culture.'

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:20 PM