Israeli International Festivals: Occasions for Whitewashing Oppression or Resisting it?

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Oct 10, 2011 Israel
[PACBI logo from pacbi.org] [PACBI logo from pacbi.org]

Israeli International Festivals: Occasions for Whitewashing Oppression or Resisting it?

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following is the latest from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).]

Israeli International Festivals: Occasions for Whitewashing Oppression or Resisting it?

While cultural talks go on] in the nice cinematheques of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, it is hell on earth in Gaza and I would not want to be there basically. [1]--Mike Leigh

Once again, the Israeli cultural establishment is attempting to put itself on the global cultural map by mounting another extravaganza, this time the 27th Haifa International Film Festival to be held between 13-22 October 2011. The Festival is sponsored by Israel’s political establishment, from the Minister of Culture and Sport to the Mayor of the city of Haifa. The Israeli Haifa elite celebrates Haifa as “a city that has become a symbol of co-existence, tolerance and peace,” in flagrant contradiction to the realities of segregation, discrimination, and racism suffered by the native Palestinian residents of Haifa, and in denial of Israel’s violent history of ethnic cleansing in that city [2].

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) appeals to all international artists of conscience to withdraw their participation from the festival, whether through direct attendance or by showcasing their films, and thus, to deny the festival the international legitimacy it seeks through such participation. PACBI calls on these international artists to refrain from showing their films or accepting awards at the festival. Doing otherwise would inadvertently lend a stamp of approval to Israeli policies of colonialism, apartheid and occupation, especially given the festival’s ties to the Haifa city government and the larger Israeli establishment, both of which use this as an opportunity to rebrand Israel as a normal country by showing its “prettier face”--its vibrant cultural and artistic community.[3] Israel, however, is not a normal country and should not be admitted into the global cultural arena until it respects international law and recognizes the Palestinian people’s right to freedom, equality and justice.

A former deputy director general of the Israeli foreign ministry, Nissim Ben-Sheetrit, explained upon launching the Brand Israel campaign in 2005: "We are seeing culture as a hasbara [propaganda] tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between hasbara and culture."[4]

We urge filmmakers and other artists scheduled to appear at the festival or to showcase their films to follow the example of the renowned filmmaker Ken Loach, who declared in 2006 that he would decline any invitation to the Haifa International Film Festival, or other such occasions, as an acknowledgment of the Palestinian call for boycott, which Palestinians have been driven to pursue "after forty years of the occupation of their land, destruction of their homes and the kidnapping and murder of their civilians." [5] Loach was responding to the 2006 call by Palestinian filmmakers, artists and others to boycott state sponsored Israeli cultural institutions and urged others to join this campaign [6]. The Palestinian cultural workers were heeding the Palestinian call for the cultural and academic boycott of Israel, launched in 2004 [7], supported by an overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society movements and organizations.

We are particularly concerned that this festival has the active support and enthusiastic promotion of the British Council, an organization that PACBI has previously taken to task for promoting cultural cooperation with Israel through the BI Arts scheme [8]. Thanking the British Council’s “partners at the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who co-fund the BI ARTS programme,” the director of the British Council Israel, Dr. Simon Kay, enthuses about the highlight of the Festival: the launch of the UK-Israel Co-production Film Treaty.

While the British Council is part of the same UK officialdom that has regularly granted immunity to Israel and has refrained from imposing sanctions of any kind upon this rogue state, we certainly expect more from British filmmakers and artists, many of whom have been at the forefront of the academic and cultural boycott of Israel and the solidarity movement with Palestinians. We particularly appeal to John Madden, who will be given the Award for Cinematic Excellence at the Festival. We hope that Madden will not follow in the footsteps of the British writer Ian McEwan, who accepted the Jerusalem Prize last February during the Jerusalem Book Fair. Festivals and similar events, put on by state-supported cultural institutions in Israel, are occasions par excellence for the Israeli rebranding campaign [9], and are used by officials to discredit the growing international support for Palestinian civil society’s call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), as well as to show off Israel as a cultural and artistic haven.

We also appeal to the international members of the jury for the “Golden Anchor Competition for Mediterranean Cinema,” Raisa Fomina (Russia), Gareth Unwin (UK), Azize Tan (Turkey), Yael Fogiel (France), and Daniel Mulloy (UK) not to allow the Festival to exploit their international standing in an event that only serves to whitewash Israel’s crimes.

Likewise, we urge all participants in the international competitions to withdraw their films immediately, as a gesture of solidarity with Palestinians and in respect of their call for BDS. We particularly appeal to the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose film, "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia," has been entered in the international competition for Mediterranean cinema. We remind Mr. Ceylan that Israel has certainly not behaved as a good Mediterranean citizen, as attested to by the state violence it unleashed against fellow Turkish “Mediterraneans” on the Mavi Marmara last year.

In heeding the Palestinian call for boycott, these artists and filmmakers will be joining the increasing number of international artists, including Mike Leigh, the Yes Men, Jean Luc-Godard, among others, who have in recent years refused to entertain apartheid Israel and who have chosen not to cross the Palestinian picket line [10].

PACBI would like to point out that there are honorable precedents concerning the Haifa International Film Festival. In 2006, the administrative council of the Greek Cinematography Center (GCC) decided to withdraw all the Greek films from the Festival, arguing that "under the current circumstances the specific cultural event has lost its meaning" [11]. Earlier, in 2002, Gaslight, the producers of the British documentary “Sunday” withdrew their film form HIFF. In their withdrawal letter to the festival, they wrote:

... of the many lessons that flow from the story of Bloody Sunday, key among them is the ethical political and long-term military folly of governments attempting to impose military solutions on civil and human rights problems. We take this action in support of the Palestinian people and in solidarity with Palestinian artists and filmmakers. It is also done in solidarity with those within Israel (both Israelis and Arabs) who are speaking out and acting (e.g. refuseniks) against the government`s murderous policies against the Palestinian people [12].

PACBI contends that funding by Israeli state institutions of international film festivals is a key aspect of the rebranding effort to cover up for an escalating agenda of apartheid, occupation, and colonialism against the Palestinian people, as well as a blatant whitewash of the deadly assault on the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009, and the lethal attack on humanitarian aid workers aboard the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla in May 2010, which resulted in the murder of nine Turkish relief workers and human rights activists. When international filmmakers and artists shun film festivals by refusing to participate and thus withdrawing their implicit approval, it deprives Israel of the chance to use art and culture as a tool in beautifying its apartheid reality.

With Israel`s continued disregard for international law and the basic rights of the Palestinian people, the kind of solidarity we expect from people of conscience around the world is to heed the Palestinian civil society call for BDS against Israel and its complicit institutions, as international artists did in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Finally, we would like to call on international solidarity groups to put pressure on international participants of the Haifa International Film Festival to cancel all forms of participation, and to explain to them the political meaning of their participation.

 


[1] http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/40043/zionism-to-hell-all-says-%EF%AC%81lm-director

[2] See http://www.pmes.org/articleArchive/Haifa and http://www.palestineremembered.com/Haifa/Haifa/

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/world/middleeast/19israel.html

[4] http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/about-face-1.170267

[5] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=340

[6] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=315

[7] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=869

[8] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1177

[9] http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/13/truth_and_advertising

[10] For a partial list of those who have adhered to the Palestinian call for BDS and the degrees to which one can support the call see: http://pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1291

[11] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=309

[12] http://electronicintifada.net/content/gaslight-boycotts-israeli-film-festival/117
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412