[Peace-discuss] "Rachel" in San Francisco: Who Needs a Guardian Council?

Tue Jul 28 14:18:35 CDT 2009

When is this film coming to Champaign-Urbana...?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jewish Peace News <jpn at jewishpeacenews.net>
Date: Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 3:10 PM
Subject: "Rachel" in San Francisco: Who Needs a Guardian Council?
To: naiman at justforeignpolicy.org

On Saturday, July 25, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival screened
Simone Bitton's new film, "Rachel," about the killing of pacifist ISM
volunteer Rachel Corrie while she protested the demolition of a
Palestinian family's home in Gaza. See below for links describing what
happened during the screening. First, some background and commentary.

When the SF Jewish Film Festival decided to include Bitton's film in
its program this year, it chose Bay Area-based Jewish Voice for Peace
and the local chapter of the American Friends Service Committee to
serve as the screening's sponsors. JVP has sponsored a number of films
at the Festival in years past. (I organized one of these sponsorships
for JVP in 2000, when noted journalists Amira Hass and Hamdi Farraj
were invited as guests.) The Festival also invited Rachel's mother,
Cindy Corrie, to speak in conversation with Festival director Peter
Stein after the film's screening. These decisions unexpectedly
provoked a furious reaction from some of the Festival's biggest
funders, including the Koret Foundation, the Taube Foundation, and the
Consulate General of Israel in San Francisco, as well as from
organizations like the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations
Council (JCRC), which claims to represent the city's "organized"
Jewish community (certain local groups, however, like
Jewish Voice for Peace, are not welcome under the JCRC's tent).

These organizations' reactions against the film were so severe -- the
Festival board's president, Shana Penn, who is also the executive
director of the Taube Foundation, resigned, citing her disagreement
over the Festival's handling of the film -- that the Festival agreed
to invite local "pro-Israel" activist Dr. Michael Harris to give a
"balancing" perspective in an introductory statement before the film's
screening. Harris represents San Francisco Voice for Israel/Stand With
US, an organization whose stated mission is to "take to the streets to
respond to enemies of Israel in the San Francisco Bay Area." In other
words, this is a purely reactionary organization without any positive
agenda.

>From the outset, it was clear that those objecting to Bitton's film
regarded it as a nothing more than an attack on Israel, though these
critics hadn't actually seen the film <http://bit.ly/UBQG2>. Moreover,
the Koret and Taube foundations reverted to an ugly adversarial script
in which, without a shred of credible evidence, they tarred Jewish
Voice for Peace and AFSC as "virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic
groups." Koret and Taube jointly issued a flamboyantly hysterical
statement likening the Festival's screening of the film and inviting
Cindy Corrie to sending Israel to its destruction
<http://bit.ly/1W8dXs>.

What is most surprising about this episode is the degree to which
Jewish community and charitable institutions in San Francisco --
historically one of the most progressive Jewish communities in the US
-- see themselves as being on the defensive in the Obama era. These
institutions have done a tremendous amount of needed charitable work
in San Francisco, both within and outside the Jewish community. Yet
they also historically have acted to set highly restrictive limits on
the breadth of the Jewish community's political debate, and they
display all the rigidity and corrosive defensiveness that the felt
need for such discursive restrictions would imply.

But why were these organizations so provoked over the screening of a
single critical film? Has President Obama's insistence that Israel
halt all settlement construction so rattled Jewish leaders and
institutions that a cultural event as apparently innocuous as this
could set off all the alarm bells? This is hard to fathom, given that
the President has repeatedly affirmed his intention to make Israel
more secure, not less. The White House's stated objections, in recent
days, not only to illegal settlement outposts but also to new Jewish
construction in East Jerusalem that would harm prospects for a shared
Jerusalem and an equitable resolution of the conflict seem expressly
designed to curtail only the most egregious settlement activity --
activity which, in turn, is often paid for by American Jewish
extremists like Irving Moskowitz and Ira Rennert
<http://bit.ly/xjWUl>. What seems to be happening here is what
progressive organizations like J-Street PAC have diagnosed as the
disconnect
between an established, often older, Jewish leadership and a younger
generation of often unaffiliated Jews who hope for an equitable and
principled resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
<http://bit.ly/nv4wN>.

It is worth remembering that the film which has generated so much
acrimony and sniping was directed by Simone Bitton, a Jewish filmmaker
born in Morocco and raised in Israel. (You can read an interview in
which she discusses her motives for making the film, and her view of
the question of guilt for Rachel Corrie's death, here:
<http://bit.ly/cPzZV>.) The SF Jewish Film Festival is presenting 37
films made in or about Israel, as Joel Frangquist points out,
including two about Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah and Hamas.
Do Israel's self-declared supporters believe their cause is so fragile
that a single film in this line-up, or a single critical speaker,
could unfairly and irreversibly tilt the proverbial scales? More
importantly, do they really believe that festival-goers need to be
protected from ideas with which some do not agree? This is a
profoundly un-Jewish attitude toward contention and dissent.

Here's a link to two personal accounts of what happended at Saturday's
screening in San Francisco:
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2009/07/27/san-francisco-jewish-film-festival-what-happened-on-saturday/

And here is a YouTube video of Michael Harris's much-heckled speech
assailing the film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k66uGD5nuk

--Lincoln Shlensky

Joel Beinin adds:

Neither [account of Saturday's screening, on the Muzzelwatch.com site]
fully captures the super-charged atmosphere and the emotional impact
of the film.

Among the highlights, Jonathan Pollack saying, "I couldn’t live in
this place if I didn't resist, not just words (mas sfatayim), but
actual resistance."

Rela Mazali adds:

In autumn 2006 I was one of three speakers touring New England -- a
Palestinian woman from Khan Yunis, a Palestinian woman from Bet Jallah
and myself, an Israeli-born Jewish woman from Herzlia. Of the several
dozen venues and organizers that hosted us over three weeks, only a
tiny minority were Jewish. And yet, at least two of these were
contacted by the Israeli consulate before our arrival and "strongly
advised" to cancel our talks because we were allegedly anti-Israel and
dubitable. At one of these venues, whose organizers nevertheless went
ahead and held the planned events, someone in the audience commented,
"Just imagine the scandal if it had been the consulate of some Arab
country that was contacting Muslim or Arab organizations and
'recommending' what and whom they should or shouldn't host... yet the
Israelis do it all the time and it's treated as standard fare."

................................................................
--------
Jewish Peace News editors:
Joel Beinin
Racheli Gai
Rela Mazali
Sarah Anne Minkin
Judith Norman
Lincoln Z. Shlensky
Rebecca Vilkomerson
Alistair Welchman
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-- 
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org