By Adina Wollner
SAN DIEGO — I attended on Thursday, February 2, an Alternate Focus, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee screening of the film Israel vs. Israel a documentary directed by Terje Carlsson. The film highlights four Jewish Israelis who are working to bring an end to the “40 year occupation of the West Bank”.
There were approximately thirty people in attendance including ten who StandWithUs recruited, a few other pro-Israel attendees, and many who came to honestly learn something about the situation in Israel and a few people that I recognized from an anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions event I monitored a couple of weeks ago.
The film focused on Yehuda Shaul, Ronny Perlman, Jonathan Pollack, and Arik Ascherman. The film began with a brief “history” of the west bank and borders relaying facts in a way that either misrepresented the truth or were completely false. Yehuda Shaul is a religious Israeli working with Breaking the Silence, an organization that has been condemned for fabricating stories in order to demonize the IDF. Yehuda’s extremism was obvious when he said that “every soldier of my generation should be lined up and marched off to jail.”
Ronny Perlman volunteers for the organization Machsom (Checkpoint Watch) and argues that the checkpoints are dehumanizing. All of the footage shows lines of Palestinians pushing their way through turnstiles and metal detectors. It was mentioned that this was shot during Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic calendar, where thousands of Muslims travel to Jerusalem to pray. It would then be logical that the checkpoints are seeing the highest number of people traveling though, especially this particular checkpoint going into Jerusalem from Ramallah, however it was made to seems like this was year-round.
Jonathan Pollack is a young Israeli who works with Anarchists Against the Wall to organize demonstrations where he either confronted soldiers guarding in the West Bank by slinging rocks at them or tore down partially built areas of the security fence.
Lastly Arik Ascherman is an American Reform rabbi from Pennsylvania who founded the organization Rabbis for Human Rights. He was shown in valleys and fields in the west bank translating for Palestinian farmers and mediating between IDF soldiers who are portrayed as kicking them out of their groves for no apparent reason. The context of the situation was never given.
In conclusion the movie only portrays Israelis as majority soldiers and extremist settlers with a few pro-Palestinian advocates who are constantly and aggressively attacked by the rest of the Israeli population. Palestinians are portrayed as the constant victims of abuse and dehumanizing checkpoints except for the few demonstrating against Israel Defense Forces soldiers. This question of why Israelis and Palestinians were portrayed as such was later brought up but never really answered. Also everything was shown without any historical context about the first and second intifadas and terrorist threats as reasons to why Israel decided to build the security fence and checkpoints.
After the movie the director invited questions about the movie and discussion. StandWithUs had passed out a list of questions and facts about the movie to our advocates in the audience and they began to ask the director why he had chosen to include false information. The discussion got heated at one point between Nasser Barghouti, a San Diegan who is a pro-Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, and a pro-Israel supporter. The director said that there have been times that his film discussions have resulted in fist fights.
The tone changed when an upset audience member asked for direct questions to the director. When one of our supporters did just that with the aforementioned question about the portrayal of Israelis and Palestinians, it was met simply with avoidance. The director’s only answer to many questions about peace prospects and peace initiatives was that “if Israelis wanted peace so much why are they still building settlements.”
After the discussion StandWithUs volunteers stood at the exit and passed out the attached fact sheet to everyone as they walked out the door and I hope that those uninformed will read it and not take the movie’s false information for face value.
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Adina Wollner is a research intern with StandWithUs San Diego