Israel Matzav

Israelis pleased no 'Israeli film' won an Oscar

Many Israelis are pleased that no 'Israeli film' won an Oscar.

5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers' loss at the Academy Awards was no loss for Israel, Bayit Yehudi MKs said on Monday morning.

"The Israeli film, the anti-Israel 5 Broken Cameras did not win the Oscar. I did not shed a tear," Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett wrote on Facebook.

MK Uri Orbach (Bayit Yehudi) took to the social network to write a sarcastic message: "Make a face like you're disappointed that the two documentary films that 'represent Israel' didn't win the Oscar for Best Documentary. Oy, so unfortunate."

...

MK Ayelet Shaked (Bayit Yehudi) expressed support for a campaign by reservists who are considering suing the creators of 5 Broken Cameras for libel.

After appearing on a Channel 10 talk show together with a reservist who served in Bil'in, Shaked called the soldier a hero.

"The whole studio was full of pride when he spoke," she stated. "The truth will win over those trying to twist it."

A group called Consensus: Guardians of the IDF Spirit, an NGO meant to counter anti-IDF attacks in the media has posted a video to YouTube that spoofs 5 Broken Cameras, as well as Waltz with Bashir and Beaufort, Israeli films that were nominated in 2008 and 2007, respectively.

Let's go to the videotape (sorry, Hebrew only).



Meanwhile, The Gatekeepers, which features interviews with the last six directors general of the General Security Service, is panned for being dishonest.

However, the film repeatedly ignores history and context. It blames Israel for the Palestinian hostility and violence that occurred after 1967, when Israel began administering the West Bank.

The viewer never learns from the film that terrorism against Jews and Israelis was not a result of Israel’s administration but rather has been a regular feature of life since pre-state days.

Palestinian Arabs murdered over 1,000 Jews between 1920 and 1967, and they ethnically cleansed all Jewish communities from the areas they captured during the 1948 war, including the West Bank, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem. The pattern of terrorism simply continued after Israel’s victory in its 1967 defensive war. Yasser Arafat organized 61 Fatah military operations from the West Bank in the few months after the war, and 162 Israelis were killed by terrorists between 1968 and 1970.

Visually and verbally, the film portrays Israel as a heartless occupier. Audiences get no information about how harsh life was for Palestinians under Egyptian and Jordanian rule between 1948 and 1967, with rampant childhood diseases, economic stagnation and restricted civil and political rights. In addition, the documentary completely overlooks the big picture of positive Israeli-Palestinian relations after 1967.

Even as Israel sought to stop terrorists, it also instituted Palestinian municipal self-government and administration, introduced freedom of speech and association, and vastly modernized the Palestinian economy as well as Palestinian health, welfare and education, turning the West Bank and Gaza into the world’s fourth fastest growing economy in the 1970s and 1980s.

In line with his political agenda, Moreh tries to paint all religious Israelis, settlers and right-of-center parties as extremist and intransigent.

That article, however, goes on to give a very simplistic view of the so-called Jewish Underground. The Jewish Underground was not just a 'group of extremists from Hebron' as the article would have you believe, and most of the people who were eventually arrested and imprisoned for being part of the 'Underground' had nothing to do with a plot to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount. Anyone whose name came up in the interrogation of the 'Jewish Underground' (which used many of the same methods that are used with 'Palestinian terrorists') was charged with being a member of a terrorist organization.

While the critique of the movie is correct, the critique of the 'Jewish Underground' has been colored too much by what the General Security Service heads said about it in the very same movie. We don't believe what the movie says about the 'Palestinians.' Why believe what it says about the Jews?

Read the whole thing.

Labels: General Security Service, Jewish Underground, movies, Oscars

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:49 PM