The Canary Mission is not a shadowy group. It is funded by Israel and is
part of their propaganda effort. Although it is a foreign propaganda group,
it has not for profit status in the US.
Miriam
Censoring This Documentary Only Plays Into AIPAC's Hands
A scene still from "1948: Creation and Catastrophe." (screengrab)
On Wednesday, in keeping with its image as a progressive leader in social
policy, the City of West Hollywood, Calif., was scheduled to host a film
screening and panel discussion on the painful birth of Israel and the
Palestinian refugee crisis. Instead, the city is playing censor,
"postponing" the event until further notice.
The screening of the new documentary, "1948: Creation and Catastrophe," and
panel, which I was invited to join, are part of West Hollywood's Human
Rights Speaker Series, co-sponsored by PBS SoCal. But after spurious
allegations of anti-Semitism by local rabbi Denise Eger, the city pulled the
plug. City Council member Lindsey Horvath said she didn't want West
Hollywood to become a "refuge for hate."
The real issue here, as it is increasingly in public forums and media across
America, is who gets to tell the story. West Hollywood is taking the word of
a constituent with a keenly vested interest-Rabbi Eger of West Hollywood's
Congregation Kol Ami is, after all, a staunch supporter of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its efforts to lobby Congress
and silence critics of Israel, often by accusing them of anti-Semitism.
Rabbi Eger appears to have cut and pasted accusations against one of the
film's producers, Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb, communications professor at Cal
State-San Bernardino, directly from Canary Mission, a shadowy blacklist that
targets critics of Israel. As the Forward reported in August, the
anonymously funded Canary Mission "is now being used as an intelligence
source on thousands of students and academics by Israeli officials with
immense power over people's lives."
The West Hollywood City Council appears to be playing directly into an
AIPAC-driven political agenda that conflates legitimate criticism of Israel
with anti-Semitism. In many cases, calling someone an anti-Semite is an
effective means to shut down open discussion. It is, however, a direct
threat to free speech, which is why it's long past time to stand up to this
anti-democratic agenda.
The disingenuous claim that "1948" is anti-Semitic or promotes hatred is
part of a broader effort to narrow the boundaries of "acceptable" discussion
regarding Israel and Palestine. Recently, the commentator Marc Lamont Hill
was fired by CNN for delivering a speech at the U.N. in which he suggested
that the Holy Land would eventually become a single state from the Jordan
River to the Mediterranean. Hill's words were certainly provocative, but
decades of Israeli settler colonization of the West Bank have undermined a
"two-state solution," and a single, democratic state of Israelis and
Palestinians is hardly an idea to be muzzled by the thought police.
Even more troubling are the broad efforts to slap the anti-Semitic label on
nonviolent, constitutionally protected calls to boycott Israeli
institutions. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which has
gained momentum in recent years, has prompted dozens of state laws and bills
in Congress to impose civil and even criminal sanctions against groups that
boycott Israeli products or institutions.
Some say the fears provoked by the recent wave of anti-Semitism, including
the murder of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue, is reason
enough to curtail criticism of Israel. As someone who has spent years
working in Israel, and many hours interviewing Holocaust survivors for an
oral history project of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, I have long
known those fears to be legitimate. But exploiting that fear can be cynical.
It is not legitimate to label critics as anti-Semites when they advocate a
boycott of, say, Caterpillar, whose Israeli military D-9 bulldozers have
helped to reduce almost 48,000 Palestinian homes and other buildings to
rubble since 1967.
As for "1948," it is not clear whether those involved in West Hollywood's
"indefinite delay," as one organizer calls it, have even have seen the film.
I have. It is fair and even-handed in its telling of a wrenching, difficult
history that features the perspectives of Israelis who saw the 1948 war as
their War of Independence, and Palestinians who experienced it as their
nakba, or catastrophe. The film includes stories of expulsions of
Palestinians, which have been well-documented by Israeli historians. (I did
much the same in my 2006 book, "The Lemon Tree.") What the "1948" film does
not do is simply repeat the triumphal narrative conveyed in Leon Uris's
"Exodus," which a generation of Americans grew up reading. Uris's account
describes the birth of Israel in exclusively heroic terms, with the plight
of "the Arabs" (i.e., Palestinians) conspicuously missing from the story.
For those exposed to this blinkered history, a deeper, more inclusive
narrative can be challenging to accept. Yet isn't the role of a democracy to
promote difficult debate, and to help us face our collective history? The
Dec. 12 forum was an opportunity for West Hollywood, which takes pride in
its "impact on the national progressive public policy agenda," to do just
that. Instead, the city has placed itself, unwittingly or not, on one side
of the debate, and chosen to stifle free speech and open discussion.
Sandy Tolan
Contributor
Sandy Tolan is the author of "Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a
Hard Land," a finalist for a 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the
international best seller, "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew,.