Last week I went to see a screening of
the movie Between Two Worlds at UC Berkeley. I had missed the film
when it was shown at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last year, and I
was curious to see it (after all, not only was I briefly in the film, I had
played a role in the event that the filmmakers, Alan Snitow and Deborah
Kaufman, acknowledge as the motivation
).
I was also curious as to what the
tenor of the discussion would be afterwards, given that another key event in
the film was the rancorous debate before the Cal Student Senate over the divestment
bill several years ago.
The movie itself starts with the
controversy that arose at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in 2009, and
immediately portrays the situation inaccurately. The cause of the widespread
community furor was not simply the choice of the film “Rachel”, a film about
the death of Rachel Corrie, the idealistic young woman recruited by the
International Solidarity Movement to go to Gaza and serve as human shields for
weapons smuggling. It was the additional
invitation to Rachel’s mother Cindy to speak at the showing, and the choice by
the SFJFF to partner with two organizations (Jewish Voice for Peace and
American Friends Service Committee) that support the BDS movement. The SFJFF has a history of showing films
that portray Israel negatively; none had created the reaction that this program
engendered. Claiming that the outcry was
simply on the basis of the film allowed Peter Stein, then the executive
director of the SFJFF, to proclaim his surprise at the reaction—when in fact it
was immediately obvious on publication of the SFJFF program that this was a
very unusual event.
The portion of the film that dealt
with the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation funding guidelines, which
the filmmakers themselves outspokenly oppose, was far from even handed. While interviewing Peter Stein, Jewish Voice
for Peace spokesperson Cecilie Surasky, and others opposed to the guidelines,
there was no interview of JCRC Executive Director Doug Kahn or JCF CEO Jennifer
Gorovitz. John Rothmann, formerly of
KGO Radio and a prominent local author, speaker and activist, was interviewed
but only one sentence of his was included in that segment. The fact that even this film did
not generate a lot of controversy when shown at the SFJFF is proof that the
guidelines are NOT precluding discussion; they just provide that the Federation
isn’t going to use its funds to provide legitimacy for anti-Israel groups.
The film then meandered through the
Berkeley divestment debate, the filmmakers’ own family histories and made its
way to Jerusalem and the controversy over the proposed Museum of Tolerance to
be built over the site of an abandoned Muslim cemetery. While Rabbi Hier from the SWC was at least
given an opportunity to state his case, the film failed to include a key point
that Rabbi Hier could not have failed to mention: that in 1945 the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem had planned a six story building on the site to house, among other offices, their own! The museum itself was to be built on the site of a municipal parking lot that
had existed there for decades without any complaints from the religious
authorities, and which prior to that had been the site of a hotel proposed by
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
Though I had not seen the film prior
to that night, none of this was really surprising. Alan Snitow had defended the SFJFF and claimed
that I provoked the audience’s response to the film that day at the Castro
Theater; you can view my speech yourself and judge whether an audience at a Jewish Film Festival should have been
provoked by my words. (At least in the discussion section afterwards, Snitow
did allow me to point out a few of the flaws I noted in the film—and nobody
jeered. )
After the film, I approached one of
the other members of the audience, Tom Pessah, a perpetual UC Berkeley student
who is one of the leaders of Students for Justice in Palestine and a proponent
of the so-called "one state solution" that would turn Israel into the 24th Arab nation. (Not only would this turn the Jews into a minority in an area
noteworthy for its treatment of those who are different , it would-- if recent
trends are any indication-- lead to Islamist rule extended from Gaza to the
entire land of Israel). I wanted to ask Pessah why he wrote an article
in 972 Magazine appropriately condemning the anti-Semitism displayed by Greta Berlin, leader of the Free Gaza Movement, but tolerated the same Holocaust
revisionism, blood libels and other anti-Semitic ideology from Hamas and the PA—backed with
missiles in the case of Hamas. His answer—that he wasn’t
responsible for Hamas, but only for his own “civil society movement”—doesn’t
really wash given that he supports the flotillas which provide PR benefits to
Hamas and which Hamas is involved in organizing. And
given that his own group, SJP, still adheres to the “Zionism is racism” libel
that even the UN abandoned years ago. He
even had the temerity to later post this on an anti-Israel listserve: “Stand With Us guy comes up to me in an event this
week to tell me my article against antisemitism was a "good start". A
bit patronizing, but I'm glad he and his kind read it - especially the parts
aligning this anti-racism to the support of BDS and the Right of Return”.
News flash, Tom.
The fact that you can at least recognize Nazi-level Jew hatred when it
slaps you in the face doesn’t make you the arbiter of “anti-racism”. BDS is racist at its core: it has at its core the anti-Semitic concept that
among all the nations, ONLY THE JEWS do not have the right to national
self-determination. That of all nations,
ONLY ISRAEL does not have the right to define who can enter its country and
become a citizen. And that anti-Israel
activists can create their own “international law” – the fictional “right of
return”--that applies only to Palestinians.
And if you think that Greta Berlin was an exception and that the
anti-Israel movement isn’t rife with anti-Semitism, we’ve already
seen plenty of evidence that she’s just the tip of the iceberg. I think the next few months will show how the
Israel-hating Jews will find themselves caught between a Jewish community that
rejects them politically and their fellow Israel haters who use anti-Zionism as
a front for anti-Semitism—essentially, between two worlds.