There is a lacuna of knowledge and understanding about Israel, which took me a long time to gauge after first arriving in Britain in 1972.
Haim Bresheeth-Zabner
Professor Haim Bresheeth is a filmmaker, photographer and a film studies scholar, retired from the University of East London, where he worked since early 2002. He now is a Professorial Researcher Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
His books include the best-selling Introduction to the Holocaust (with Stuart Hood, two reprints since 1997); the first version was titled Holocaust for Beginners (1993) and was also reprinted a number of times. This title was also published in Turkish, Croatian and Japanese translations, and is being translated into other languages. His edited volumes include The Gulf War and the New World Order, (with Nira Yuval-Davis) published in 1992 by Zed Books, Cinema and Memory: Dangerous Liaisons, co-edited with Sand, S and Zimmerman, M (Zalman Shazar Centre, Jerusalem (Hebrew) 2004), and a co-edited volume with Haifa Hammami: The Conflict and Contemporary Visual Culture in Palestine & Israel, a special double-issue of Third Text on Palestinian and Israeli Art, Literature, Architecture and Cinema.
Bresheeth has been on the Editorial Board of the Journal Khamsin for many years until its demise in 1991, and has published widely in Hebrew and English on Palestinian and Israeli film; he is currently working on the representation of the other and stranger in European film. His films include the widely-shown State of Danger (1989, BBC2), a documentary on the first Palestinian Intifada. He has also written many newspaper articles in Hebrew, mainly published in the Israeli Ha’aretz broadsheet, as well as English language articles, largely published by the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Weekly.
Since 2001, he served as Professor of Film Studies and Chair of Cultural and Media Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of East London. In 2001 was the Chair and writer of the special Report on Public Broadcasting in Israel, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Sport, and published in 2001—with the government accepting all its recommendations, only to avoid putting them into practice.
In 2012, completed the film London is Burning, on the August 2011 London Riots. His recent films include Convivencia in the Turnpike (2015) and The Last Honeymoon in Europe (2018). His latest monograph is An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defence Forces Made A Nation, Verso, London 2020.