While Richard Gere was in Israel and the occupied West Bank promoting his film “Norman,” he was recorded in an unguarded moment wandering the desolate streets of Hebron’s Old City. A dumbfounded Gere is near at a loss for words in the clip, which aired on Israel’s Channel 2 network.
Not a Palestinian in sight. Soldiers and settlers roam comparatively carefree. The roads are too quiet. All of the shops are shuttered. Gere is stunned:
“This is the thing that’s flipping me out right now,” Gere stammers to his Hebron guides, activists with the Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence, former soldiers that now advocate against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory, “Of everything we’ve seen for two days, the people we’ve talked to, it’s…I mean…I’m…I’m touched by that, I know that story. But this is really bizarre.”
“This is genuinely strange,” Gere adds, before telling his guides, Hebron is like the Jim Crow South:
“It’s the dead city, but who owns the city? And their [the settlers] feeling of ‘I’m protected, I can do whatever I want,’ and that sense of where the boundaries are. I mean it’s like…it’s exactly like what the what the Old South was in America. Blacks knew where they could go, they could drink from that fountain, they couldn’t go over there, they couldn’t eat in that place. It was well understood. You didn’t cross it or you’d get your head beat in or lynched,” Gere said.
At one point soldiers stopped Gere and asked for his passport. He didn’t have it on him. But he’s from New York, he told them. Once the soldiers realized he is the Richard Gere–“Richard Gere, wow,” one said–the mood softens. But Gere is still visibly unsettled.
A car driven by a settler zooms by. Gere catches on, “These guys driving through. It’s a really dark energy. Wow,” he says, “it was kind of Mad Max.”
The scene that Gere had entered for the first time includes Palestinians who are made to use alleyways as the main roads are for settlers only. Palestinians cannot drive in the Old City, settlers can. There is one notorious sidewalk with a rope to segregate Palestinian and Israeli pedestrian traffic. It’s a scene many are horrified by the first time they enter. (Philip Weiss had a similar response back in 2006.)
Before Gere went to Hebron, he spoke with Haaretz in Jerusalem:
“Obviously this occupation is destroying everyone,” he says. “There’s no defense of this occupation. Settlements are such an absurd provocation and, certainly in the international sense, completely illegal – and they are certainly not part of the program of someone who wants a genuine peace process.” He pauses before adding, “Just to be clear about this: I denounce violence on all sides of this. And, of course, Israelis should feel secure. But Palestinians should not feel desperate.”
Later that same trip Gere met with Palestinian former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Following the meeting Gere was asked if he would ever act in a production by a Palestinian filmmaker (“Norman” writer and director, Joseph Cedar, is Israeli). “Why not,” Gere told the Arab News, continuing:
“My only criteria are the quality of the script and the production. Naturally I’d have to be emotionally connected, but that isn’t enough. It has to be a quality film. I won’t discriminate if it’s a Palestinian film. In fact, I’d look closer if it was a Palestinian director.”
Gere added, “I have a special place in my heart for Palestinians, and I have a special empathy for their suffering.”
The Old South is a good comparison.
So is Nationalist South Africa.
Both those states were “democratic,” but with the democratic rights limited to one class of people.
Just so, Israel.
It is not, and can never be, a democracy in its present form.
RE – Actor Richard Gere in Hebron: ‘it’s exactly like what the what the Old South was in America’
MY COMMENT: If an Israeli Arab posted something like that on Facebook, the Israelis might very possibly arrest him/her for “incitement”. Fortunately for Gere, the Israelis are not yet quite crazy enough* to do something like that to him because they are not quite yet so far gone that they can’t appreciate the damage that would result from all the bad publicity.
* At the rate things are going, five or so years from now the Israeli authorities might well be crazy enough to arrest someone like Gere for the nebulous offense of “incitement”.
As if this privileged white man knew what it was like to be black in the ‘deep south’ .
There are no comparisons to the situation in the I/p because the conflict is not racial, religious or cultural. Is it nationalistic? Yes. But only Jewish nationalism Is condemned. Palestinian nationalism Is championed. Is it tribal? Oh yes. It’s tribal. And is it a war of ideas or a war to the death? Ask yourselves that. It seems like the Palestinians (or maybe both Israeli and Palestinian have opted for the latter)
So many on the far left (and here) have such pseudo intellectual disdain for tribalism and nationalism but only condemn it when it’s Jewish. They act as if the movement for ethnic identity and cultural prominence in the US is anything different then a way of preserving the institutions of one’s tribe. Tribalism is akin to Neanderthal. Ok. Come live in the ME anywhere but Israel and start preaching that line. And if I read that argument that all off the above is ok except that it is all taking place on ‘stolen’ land I’ll just be reminded that MW changed their tagline’ war of ideas ‘ because it’s really a war to the death that the far left advocates for. In a twisted and roundabout way, but absolutely to the death of Israel and Zionism. All of us from the center left to the far right understand this. However, I am not saying that incremental changes at a snail’s pace (irritating as this may be) won’t edge the conflict more towards a resolution, temporary or based on milestones. I would say at this point it’s still 50-50
Palestinian supporters of the far left love to make analogies to support their delusions. Palestinians have suffered like:
American first nations people.
BLM
Armenians
Worse then Jews under Nazis (that may have been also said by both erdogan and Abbas)
The Jews of Europe during ww2
Syrians during their present state of constant war.
And etc.
Gere and Roger should hook up if they already havn’t
To a hammer everything is a nail. Movies, “Mad Max”, “Cabaret”…
Dick Gere to Israelis – “you have to act fast!”
Zionist’s creation of a “Jewish state” in historical Palestine, which was accomplished by the dispossession and expulsion of well over one million of its indigenous defenseless Arab inhabitants between late 1947 and the summer of 1967 through armed might, several massacres, mass rape and intimidation, remains the number one geopolitical blunder of the post WWII era.
To state the obvious: Foreign Jews had the same right to Palestine as Irish Catholics and Mexican atheists, i.e., none whatsoever! Therein lies the root of the conflict.