As a filmmaker and Toronto Film Festival veteran, I was among the 1,500 signatories of a letter addressed to festival organizers protesting their focus on Israel’s capital city of Tel Aviv in the festival’s inaugural City to City film program.
The City to City program’s choice to highlight Tel Aviv obscures war crimes committed by the soldiers of the IDF against the people of Gaza as well as the suffocating consequences of the ongoing siege.
Protest against the program has continued to grow. John Greyson pulled his own film from the Festival in August, and a Sept.14 press conference and protest was attended by over 250 people.
The protest letter, entitled “No Celebration of Occupation,” denounces the celebratory “spotlight on Tel Aviv.” The letter was drafted by Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni, Canadian filmmakers Elle Flanders, Kathy Wazana and John Greyson, video artist Richard Fung and writer-activist Naomi Klein.
Numerous Canadian filmmakers and video artists also signed it, along with celebrities including Danny Glover, filmmakers Ken Loach, Paul Laverty and Sophie Fiennes, playwright Wallace Shawn, journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, author Alice Walker, musician David Byrne, writer and art critic John Berger and progressive academics Howard Zinn, Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek. Jane Fonda, in a cowardly act, signed and then withdrew her name as the controversy intensified.
The letter states that, “As members of the Canadian and international film, culture and media arts communities, we are deeply disturbed by the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv. We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.”
It goes on to state, “The emphasis on ‘diversity’ in City to City is empty given the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program. Furthermore, what this description does not say is that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population.”
The letter takes pains to make clear that “We do not protest the individual Israeli filmmakers included in City to City, nor do we in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF. However, especially in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of… an apartheid regime.”
The carefully moderated wording of the letter hasn’t stopped desperate Zionist apologists from debasing the discourse into political cuss words. These apologists include a host of Hollywood celebrities including the actress Minnie Driver, and directors David Cronenberg, and Ivan Reitman, who lent facile quotes to a statement issued by the Jewish Federation with the aim of silencing the growing protests.
Filmmaker Robert Lantos asserted “The attack on TIFF is a vile attempt by a gang of fashionable bigots to use coercive tactics to stifle voices they don’t like. These are not crusaders for justice.”
Simcha Jacobovici added that, “The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has been hijacked by a group of so-called activists bent on furthering their agenda to demonize Jews and to marginalize Israel, in order to bring about the destruction of the Jewish State.”
The Gaza massacre was an atrocity in which over 1,400 Palestinians were killed with high-tech weapons paid for by the U.S. government in retaliation for four Israeli deaths in the previous year due to homemade bottle rocket fire. Claims of bigotry or racism on the part of signatories to the protest letter collapse like a house of cards under the weight of a grotesquely disproportionate equation in which Israeli lives are hundreds of times more precious than Palestinian lives.
Meanwhile, the hijacking claim is laughable on its face. The Israeli consulate provided funding for the Festival program as the centerpiece of ‘Brand Israel,’ a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel. Which is to say the program was explicitly propaganda. The campaign spent over $500,000 on the festival program alone. The protesters meanwhile signed a letter.
The Film Festival program was announced while the scent of cordite still hung in the air over Gaza. And this is no coincidence. The Gaza massacre was an abject political disaster for defenders of Zionism. Based on a paper-thin pretext of self-defense, the IDF murdered hundreds of women and children using openly criminal weapons and tactics. The massacre sparked worldwide protests and condemnation.
For all these reasons and others, the protest letter did not go nearly far enough. It could have made clear that racist propaganda must never be welcome at the festival, and that it was despicable and deeply corrupt for the festival to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars to help rehabilitate the image of a criminal state, especially in the immediate aftermath of what was objectively a massacre. Moreover, it could have insisted that the film festivals join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Regardless, the controversy at the Toronto Film Festival makes one matter clear: the Israeli atrocities in Gaza were of such a brazen scale, that the winds of world opinion have finally shifted unequivocally. An opening has been created for revolutionaries to intensify the struggle to liberate Palestine from the murderous blight of colonialism as embodied in the state of Israel, fully supported by U.S. imperialism.
