The following is a press release from the US Campaign the End the Israeli Occupation:
As NBC’s new action series ‘Dig’ premieres tonight on USA Network, human rights activists are again protesting the network for its complicity in whitewashing Israel’s military occupation and illegal colonization of East Jerusalem.
Protests against the show began in November 2013 when it was announced that ‘Dig’ would be set and shot in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem. More than 20 Palestinian civil society organizations and national institutions immediately called on NBC to terminate the project. In February 2014, it was revealed that the Israeli government and Jerusalem municipality were providing NBC a $6.2 million grant for the series, part of an effort to brand Israel and its occupation of Jerusalem in a “positive light.”
“It is without irony that this show, which disregards stated U.S. policy on the status of Jerusalem and opposition to settlements, premieres just two days after Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered an insulting speech to a joint session of Congress,” said Andrew Kadi, co-chair of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. “Israel’s attempts at cultural branding are clearly designed to detract from its aggressive and illegal apartheid policies and actions. NBC and other companies should not be complicit in their efforts.”
In May 2014, human rights activists delivered a petition to NBC that was signed by more than 5,000 people, echoing the Palestinian call to end its involvement in the show. In April, Palestinian artists sent a letter to the show’s star, Jason Isaacs, asking him to pull out. While NBC claimed that there were no plans to do any filming in Silwan, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem where Palestinians have been evicted from their homes in order to make room for extremist Jewish settlers, DIG production trailers were spotted there in June. That same month, a protest against the show took place outside of NBC’s ‘Today Show’ and Israeli activists disrupted filming in Jaffa.
At the time, the Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, Sarah Leah Whitson, warned: “Israel has misused archaeology projects in occupied East Jerusalem to strengthen settlements, evict Palestinians, and damage their homes.”
The campaign to hold ‘Dig’ accountable for its human rights violations is being organized by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, Adalah NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Palestinian BDS National Committee.
Bring it on! An honest archaeological reconstruction will confirm that there is no four thousand year history of the Jews. The tales of Noah, Abraham, Moses and other key figures are simply tribal myths, totally uncorroborated by archaeology, and brimful of anachronisms (in Abraham’s case a much later spice trade, domesticated camels, and the presence of Philistines). The Hebrews were never enslaved in Egypt, never wandered in Sinai for forty years, never acquired a monotheistic religion, tablets of stone or an Ark of the Covenant under a leader who supposedly wrote the first five books of the Bible. There was no violent conquest of Canaan; there were no walls of Jericho to come tumbling down. There was no United monarchy under David, and Jerusalem was a desperately poor country village when it supposedly became a national capital. There was no huge state from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates, and Judea only survived as a state as a client of Assyria or Egypt or Babylon or the Persians. There was no enforced Exile in the first or second century AD, since Jewish migrants had long before colonized large areas of the Mediterranean, and Jewish peasant farmers remained in Palestine to be converted to Christianity and later Islam, just as large numbers of pagans were converted to Judaism in Europe and North Africa during the later years of the Roman Empire.
Honest archaeology largely contradicts not only the Bible but also the national myths that primarily secular Zionists have so assiduously cultivated. (See the work of William Dever, Ze’ev Herzog, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman.)
I am sure the Mondoweiss editors are familiar with the discussion on Twitter between BDS supporters and Reza Aslan, who is a “cultural consultant” to the Dig program. Aslan, of course, is a well known supporter of Palestinian rights and opponent of Islamophobes. From the twitter account it appears that Aslan was unaware that NBC was insincere about its plans to film in Silwa. And his role as a cultural consultant is minor, so I am inclined to overlook his participation.
Perhaps more interesting is Aslan’s newest hollywood venture, a biblical drama called Of Kings and Prophets on ABC. The actor Ray Winstone has just been announced to play the role of Saul in this David-era story. Aslan is an executive producer for the show. It’s filmed in South Africa. not occupied Palestine, so BDS should not be an issue. But I wonder how the subject of Saul and David can be handled without offending either the evangelical Christians and conservative Jews, who will certainly be the show’s primary audience, or those who think the genocide of the Amalekites, if it happened at all, should be abhorent to modern viewers.