At the end of 2022, Israel swore in an administration which The New York Times and The Economist describe as the country’s most right-wing government ever. While Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch already condemn Israeli policy as apartheid, Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu threatens to accelerate arguably genocidal processes of annexation, expulsion, and massacre. As I write on Feb. 13, some 48 Palestinians, including 10 children, have already been killed in the West Bank by settlers and soldiers since the year’s start. Also today, an estimated 100,000 Israelis took to the streets to protest judicial moves which further shatter the facade of Israeli democracy. Even the Israeli military’s former chief of staff describes the government as “fascist.” One would not know of this grim reality by visiting the website for Wesleyan’s Israeli Film Festival.
The Israeli Film Festival website doesn’t once mention Palestine or Palestinians. This tone-deaf presentation normalizes a reality that is nightmarish for the land’s Indigenous and migrant populations, and increasingly for Mizrahi and working-class Jews. I personally love much about Israeli culture, and I occasionally try to converse with Israeli friends (some of them anti-Zionist) in the little bit I know of modern Hebrew. I would be genuinely interested in learning more about Israeli (and Palestinian) cinema. Indeed, when I enrolled at Wesleyan in 2008, as a liberal Zionist, I would have had no qualms about attending this festival. Yet the more I honed my reading, thinking, and writing skills through Wesleyan’s liberal arts education, and particularly the College of Social Studies, the less believable I found the Zionist claims I’d been taught during my Conservative Jewish upbringing’s history classes. Reading books like Saree Makdisi’s “Palestine Inside Out” and Joel Kovel’s “Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine,” I came to realize that supporting an ethnocratic state went against core Jewish values and international human rights. I hope that anti-Zionist Wesleyan students are leafleting the film festival and encouraging attendees to look into other perspectives. In particular, the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement offers one peaceful route toward a fairly shared land of Palestine/Israel without oppression or dispossession. And North America’s Land Back movement, intersecting with struggles for Black Lives and climate and migrant justice, provides another entry point for those interested in decolonial and ecological struggle.
Dan Fischer ’12 can be reached at Dfischer@riseup.net.
3 Comments
Beer Baron
We can all agree that Israel is a shining star of freedom in a region, sadly, largely devoid of it.
In truth, Israel is a veritable social justice Shangri-La compared to the rest of the Arab Middle East.
Yisrael Medad
The editors do not feel any embarrassment publishing such drivel, such unsupported wild propaganda claims, assisting to inflame hatred and even, perhaps, danger to students at the university from this screed?
Perpetual Student
It’s encouraging to see such a thoughtful and positive advocacy for equal rights in a country whose government so thoroughly fails the calling expressed by Rabbi Hillel so long ago. Hillel’s summary of Torah was the socalled “while standing on one foot” description of the Jewish faith: “Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to you… think about it.” Israel isn’t the first or last settler colonial country with such betrayal of basic principles, but it’s tragic, and our own government is betraying basic principles by lavishing billions in military “aid ” on it. Many thanks to Dan Fischer for reminding us of a path out of such squalid conditions.