The Other Israel Film Festival: Hammered by Israel’s Friends, Shunned by Palestinians

The Palestinian film 200 Meters has come under fierce attack in the Arab media, its makers accused of normalisation with Israel for taking part in the Other Israel Film Festival, which closed in New York last week. Its director, Ameen Nayfeh, stayed away from the festival. Its producer, May Odeh, told me the organisers had assured them that the festival was neither Israeli nor funded by Israel.

So I called the festival to check. When I told its director, Isaac Zablocki, what had happened, he was stunned. He had heard nothing about the attacks on the film and had no idea why its director never turned up to talk about it. He wished Nayfeh had told them about these obstacles, he said. Nayfeh was expected, they never heard from him, so they screened the film without him and the Palestinian actor Mohammad Bakri took the audience’s questions.

The festival was founded in 2007 by liberal American Jews who wanted to show Israel from an angle at odds with the official Israeli narrative that dominates the United States. Its films rarely catch the attention of the American media, and they seldom reach American cinemas because Israel’s supporters campaign against them. Zablocki insists the festival is Israeli-Palestinian, and it has refused any support from the Israeli government and its institutions. Even so, Palestinian filmmakers often turn it down because of its name.

Why the name says Israel

The name was a strategic decision, Zablocki explained. The organisers had no wish to preach to the converted. They wanted to lure Israel’s supporters into the cinema, where these films would show them the facts hidden from them. Those supporters are the audience the festival is made for. Without the word Israel in its name they would never have come, and the project would have failed. The festival is also under fire from the political right, which condemns the name and insists there is only one Israel and no “other” one.

This year’s programme included Ahed’s Knee by the Israeli director Nadav Lapid, which portrays Israel as a morally, culturally and artistically corrupt state through the story of a filmmaker preparing a film about the Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi. Avi Mograbi’s The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation lays bare the ugliness of the occupation through the testimony of the soldiers who enforced it. The festival had also programmed Karnit Mandel’s A Reel War: Shalaal, which follows a lost Palestinian film archive seized by the Israeli army.

These films often shock the festival’s audience, raised on an Israel painted in lofty moral colours and surrounded by hostile neighbours cast as child killers devoid of humanity. That does not mean they turn against Israel overnight, Zablocki said. He is regularly threatened and insulted over what the festival shows. He answers by offering free tickets and urging his critics to come back, watch a film and see the truth from another side. Some come, change their view of Israel and the Palestinians, and end up thanking him for opening their eyes. Others carry on with the insults and the threats.

From “America is our Zion” to David and Goliath

History has a sense of irony. In 1898 the Union of American Hebrew Congregations rejected the Zionist movement’s call for a Jewish state in Palestine and declared that “America is our Zion”. After the Holocaust, and the creation of Israel in 1948 in the middle of a hostile Arab world, many American Jews came to embrace Zionism.

When Israel defeated the Arab armies in 1967, American Jews felt it had restored their glory. Israel became David slaying Goliath, holier in their eyes than the Torah itself. They backed it on every front, with money, media, moral and military support, crushed anyone who criticised it, and sent their children to volunteer on its kibbutzim and serve in its army.

Zablocki was one of those enchanted by Israel’s might and the valour of its soldiers, he told me, and his Zionist schooling left its mark on him. The Israeli army had become a legend in American eyes and a source of pride for every Jew. American Jews travelled there and saw everything through the eyes of Israeli soldiers, blind to the Palestinian side.

Those same trips showed some liberal Jews Israel’s darker face: the discrimination against its Palestinian citizens and the military occupation of the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. They began to doubt the moral perfection Israel marketed in the United States, came to see its army as an occupier oppressing another people, and called on Washington to stop the military aid it hands Israel every year, now $3.8 billion.

Until recently, criticising Israel was taboo in the United States, and the formidable pro-Israel lobby managed to silence liberal voices. Its argument is that Israel needs a strong army to protect Israelis and Jews, to prevent another Holocaust, and that Israel is the fortress of the Jewish people. None of that justifies oppressing another people, Zablocki said, and the Israeli army’s abuse of Palestinians is unacceptable.

When he and his liberal colleagues founded the festival in 2007, Israel’s supporters waged a ferocious campaign against them and threatened them, even though they screened only films about the Palestinian minority inside Israel and the discrimination it faces, and never touched the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

They could not even call them Palestinians, Zablocki recalled. The word provoked too many American Jews, so the festival spoke of “Arab citizens of Israel” to avoid upsetting its Jewish audience. Today it puts the word Palestinian in its publicity with pride, he said, because American Jews know more of the facts, sympathise more with the Palestinians and criticise Israel more.

The mainstream moves left

In recent years prominent American Jews have indeed begun to criticise Israel in public. Bernie Sanders became the first leading presidential candidate to put the suffering of Palestinians under occupation on the campaign stage, condemning Israel’s violations of their rights and calling its government racist. Natalie Portman told me in an interview that the Jewish nation-state law, passed by Israel in 2018, was racist, and promised to campaign for its repeal. Seth Rogen mocked his Zionist schooling. “I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life,” he said on Marc Maron’s podcast. “They never tell you that, oh, by the way, there were people there.”

In May, during the latest Gaza war, nearly 90 American rabbinical students signed an open letter condemning Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and calling on American Jewish communities to hold it to account. They asked how many Palestinians must lose their homes, their schools and their lives before American Jews would understand.

That discontent among American Jews has been around for a long time, Zablocki said. They only dared to voice it in public once Donald Trump arrived.

The Israeli government’s embrace of Trump, and his close friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu, then prime minister, opened a rift with most American Jews, who tend to vote Democrat, loathed the Republican president and back anti-racist movements such as Black Lives Matter. Liberal Jews seized the moment to attack Israel’s policies openly, and they won over a new generation.

These days the festival is the mainstream, Zablocki said with a laugh, because the mainstream has moved to its left.

So the Other Israel Film Festival is caught between the hammer and the anvil. Israel’s supporters accuse it of smearing Israel, and Palestinians see it as Israeli. Whatever its identity, it remains a small platform beside the giants, Hollywood and the American media, which still tell the story from the official Israeli point of view.

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Sources: Other Israel Film Festival, 2021 programme; The Jewish Chronicle; Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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