by Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief

September 9, 2009

For the past few years I have been asked to lead discussions following screenings at the New Jersey Jewish Film Festival. My specialty seems to be “difficult” films about Israel by Israelis. I have introduced Lemon Tree (about a Palestinian woman whose lemon grove is threatened by Israeli bulldozers), For My Father (a sympathetic portrait of a Palestinian suicide bomber), and Knowledge Is the Beginning (a documentary about the Israeli-born conductor and peace activist Daniel Barenboim, a frequent critic of his homeland).

I’m always proud that the festival chooses these films, which tend to challenge the preconceptions of many in its target audience and belie the frequent charge that American Jews are interested in sharing only the good news about Israel. Not everybody welcomes these warts-and-all portraits, but the discussions are always lively, and you don’t have to be a bleeding heart to appreciate the seriousness with which Israeli filmmakers treat their national dilemmas. I also felt these controversial movies are a message to Israel’s critics: Listen, Israelis know they aren’t perfect. But unlike their enemies, at least they have the courage and honesty to examine their flaws.

Lately I’ve come to a different conclusion: Nobody’s listening, and those who are couldn’t give a flying lemon whether Jews have a conscience or not.

I’m thinking of the actors and artists who signed a letter last week complaining about a series of films about Tel Aviv at the Toronto International Film Festival. Among the signers were Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, novelist Alice Walker, musician David Byrne, playwright Eve Ensler, and actor and writer Wallace Shawn.

The protest (henceforth known as the Fonda Letter) was prompted by a Canadian filmmaker, John Greyson, who withdrew his short film from the festival to “protest TIFF’s complicity with the Israeli propaganda machine.” That was a reference to “Brand Israel,” a pro-Israel PR campaign being partly underwritten by a couple of Canadian media moguls. The Fonda Letter provides no smoking guns but implies that the film festival was somehow manipulated or bribed by “Brand Israel” to provide a showcase of 10 films dealing with Tel Aviv, as part of the festival’s “City to City” component.

Cameron Bailey, the festival’s programmer, denies this, saying the only motive was artistic. The festival was “attracted to Tel Aviv as our inaugural city because the films being made there explore and critique the city from many different perspectives.”

Indeed, the films present Tel Aviv in all its messy, modern glory and ignominy. The films’ subjects include gay life in the city, the sex trade, schizophrenia, and “pessimism in the wake of a full decade of the South Lebanon conflict.” The latter is a description of Life According to Agfa, a 1992 film known for, according to the festival website, its “harsh depiction of the Israeli Defense Forces.”

There’s also a documentary, A History of Israeli Cinema, which demonstrates the increasing willingness of Israelis to deflate their own myths, and Jaffa, a Romeo-and-Juliet story about a Jewish woman and an Arab man.

I would say this: If this is the best the “Israeli propaganda machine” can do, those moguls ought to ask for their money back.

But read the Fonda Letter and it’s clear that the content of the films is beside the point. The letter pays lip service to the inclusion of “Palestinian filmmakers” (in fact, the festival also features two films by Palestinians and others from Lebanon and Egypt). What really bothers the signatories (assuming they read the letter) is the very idea of depicting Israel as normal in any way — even normal in its pathologies and neuroses.

“Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and…the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population,” according to the letter. “This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada. Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid….”

Remember, we’re not talking about a West Bank settlement, or East Jerusalem, or even the Golan Heights. According to Fonda et al, all of Israel is a question mark. For these thought police, it’s no longer enough to question the occupation. You must challenge the very existence of the city that represents Israel’s secular, leftist, modern, forward-thinking, and, yes, bleeding heart.

You see what’s happened here. The signatories aren’t looking for “balance,” or diversity. The subject of the Toronto protest is not diversity, but legitimacy. Their fear is not that the Palestinians are being overlooked, but that Israel’s reality will somehow be acknowledged, and thus legitimized.

I feel for the Israeli filmmakers, who, perhaps like me, thought an honest cinema would add to the world’s understanding of the Mideast conflict and perhaps open hearts and minds to a possible solution.

The Fonda Letter mocks their artistry, and the Jewish dream of normalcy.

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