And the Winner in the Category of Most Dishonest Film goes to…

From the President’s Desk
The Anti-Semite Corner of the Week

And the Winner in the Category of
the Most Dishonest Film goes to…

An anti-Israeli propaganda film won an Oscar. And thus, the false anti-Semitic narrative finds its way into the living room of Western culture.

By: Anat Vidor, WIZO President

What does the anti-Semite essentially say? That Jews are guilty. Of what? Everything. Diseases, wars, poverty, high interest rates, low interest rates, interest rates in general. Jews supposedly control the world, and if it’s not perfect – it’s their fault. And now comes a documentary with the clever title “No Other Land” to illustrate this claim. If not for the cynical wink at political correctness, this propaganda film, freely available on the internet, would have been called by the more accurate name: “Look What Else Jews Are Guilty Of.” But then it would have just been another BBC article, without the Oscar.

I watched the film after it won, but I must admit – only partially. The agenda is exhaustingly familiar, worn out to the extreme. The “plot” focuses on an illegal Palestinian settlement in the Hebron hills, where suffering and miserable residents = a human story. Why are they miserable? Because of the Jews who are cruel to them. The Jews = enemies of humanity.

“We must stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians!” declared the filmmakers as they came to collect the golden statuette in front of an enthusiastic audience of peace-loving people dressed in elegant tuxedos and strapless gowns. For a moment it seemed that the creators represented the freedom-loving human spirit, and not a terrorism-supporting people who have thrown away every opportunity for peace in the last hundred years.

Now, let’s take a moment and go back a hundred years, to a small Jewish town in Israel, established amidst sand dunes by destitute immigrants who fled threatening Europe. Without being armed, without a country standing behind them, and against authorities who were cruel to them, they established a small urban settlement. Eight years after its establishment, war broke out and the authorities expelled the Jewish residents, scattering them everywhere as they suffered from poverty, diseases, extreme hunger, and cold. At the end of the war, they were allowed to return to their homes, but three years later, an Arab wave of riots erupted, and Arabs from the neighboring city raided the town, murdering, looting, and raping the defenseless Jews.

But they wanted to live! Without a state, without allowances from the world, without UN agencies handling their affairs, they collected money and established a library. And a theater. And an exhibition center, and a port, and an opera house, and a kiosk, and a high school, and a fountain. They built themselves a city called “Tel Aviv,” they built themselves a country.

What’s stopping Palestinians from doing as the Jews did? After all, Gaza was handed over to them unilaterally, as were the cities of the West Bank, and the key to developing the region is in their hands. A hand was extended to them for peace and they were offered almost everything, much more than what the Jews received in that same UN resolution of 1947. But they refused, because they couldn’t give up on the dream of throwing the Jews into the sea.

The film “No Other Land” is the Palestinian story. A story about addiction to victimhood, to being victims, to comfortable despair that absolves one from responsibility. Self-destruction of any chance for revival, preferring missiles over education and industry, preferring terror tunnels over parks and tourist sites. But the film was essentially meant to generate anti-Semitism and blame Jews for what they cannot prevent. The filmmakers talk about “the destruction of Gaza” as an Israeli crime and not as a result of the Gazans’ own choice of terrorist rule and a culture of hatred. They talk about “ethnic cleansing,” and it’s laughable, because some of them are Israeli Arabs – living proof that the only ethnic cleansing that actually happened was that of Jews from Arab countries.

It’s hard not to suspect that it was the agenda and not the film itself that won the prize, and that in its very selection, the Academy of Motion Pictures aligned itself with the entire academic establishment in the US, which has become, under the sponsorship of Qatari and Saudi money, an official importer of anti-Semitism. For them it was a complete victory: a glamorous, glittering audience, devoid of information but well-connected to Hollywood clichés about the perpetual and absolute righteousness of the victim – applauding creators who tell about Jewish injustices against Palestinians. On this, we say in Hebrew: ‘חיים בסרט’ (‘living in a movie’) – meaning they’re completely detached from reality.