Another sign of the great change afoot in our political culture. The New York Times has a great piece by Robert Mackey on the legendary director Marcel Ophuls’s new film project about Israel, “Unpleasant Truths,” for which he is raising money. Mackey says Ophuls is skeptical of Zionism.
Unlike some of his contemporaries, that wartime experience [fleeing the Nazis in 1933 and 1941] left Mr. Ophuls wary of embracing the Zionist dream of a homeland for the Jews in the Middle East.
Actually it’s better than that. In the delicious 12-minute trailer the Times has posted to its site, Ophuls says of his father: “He thought the Jews’ destiny in the 20th century was to be cosmopolites. Against nationalism.” And asked if he is a Zionist, Ophuls winces. “Not at all.”
Then he interviews Michel Warschawski saying that the Israel lobby in France is “importing” a religious conflict from Israel to France (what Scott McConnell said about the special relationship as the “transmission belt” of bad ideas to the U.S.), and Ophuls points out the poisonous fruits of Zionism. Palestinians live in a “prison” in the West Bank, he says, “it’s apartheid.” Then we see rightwing demonstrators opposing marriage of Jews and Arabs and shouting “Death to Arabs!” In the New York Times! Ophuls is showing up Jodi Rudoren.
And notice how shocked and offended the great old man is by the Islamophobia expressed by a Frenchman at 3:40 of the trailer. The man says that French women are sleeping with Muslims, making their wombs a weapon for Arabs. Ophuls sighs afterward: “Racist, fascist, the worst there is, he rattled racist bullshit for 5 minutes.”
Mackey gets it right: “The question the filmmakers want to explore, Mr. Sivan added, is whether ‘Islamophobia is the new anti-Semitism.’”…
Then the director interviews an Israeli rabbi who states that one out of three Muslims is a murderer.
Former speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg tells Ophuls that the idea of partition is over. “We have to move into shared society, shared territory, shared sovereignty, shared resources.” Call it post-Zionism or anti-Zionism; but notice that it’s Jews who get to say this stuff.
The most beautiful interview in the film is at 10:40. Look at it. Ophuls asks a lovely Palestinian woman how her son, lately arrested, became a militant. She explains that during the first intifada the Israelis demolished their home, and at 10 the boy couldn’t go to school.
“If he had studied and lived in dignity everything would be different…. He saw his brother killed. What else could he have done?”
Unbelievable. When you watch that interview, you understand that what an exercise in ethnic supremacy it is to talk to Israeli Jews and American Jews about this problem when there are articulate Palestinians who have deep experience of Zionism. Ophuls suffers from it. The New Yorker suffers from it. We have to break out of this structural racism.
“So another of your sons was killed?” Ophuls asks.
“Yes. His brother is a martyr.”
“Thank you,” Ophuls says, smiling in evident sympathy.
So terrorism is explained, on the New York Times site. Ophuls’s last statement, apropos of Gaza, that the “suffering is on the other side” is a beautiful moral conclusion.
More on the Jewish supremacy question. Last summer the Rev. Bruce Shipman lost his chaplain job at Yale because of his three-sentence letter to the New York Times suggesting that the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe can be laid partly at the feet of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. The idea that Israel is somehow to blame for Jewish hatred — anathema! The Yale president leapt into action on the case. Shipman stumbled up the turnpike to Groton, and was forced to publicly examine his heart over and over for a scintilla of bigotry.
But in the Times today Ophuls and Sivan ask the same question.
[Last summer Ophuls] called Mr. Sivan, suggesting that together they direct a documentary looking at both the war in Gaza and the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Europe. A central focus of the film, Mr. Sivan said in a telephone interview, is to ask if the two situations are linked. To put it bluntly, Mr. Sivan said, the two directors hoped to answer the question: “Is Israel provoking anti-Semitism?” Mackey writes, “Mr. Sivan said, the two directors hoped to answer the question: ‘Is Israel provoking anti-Semitism?’
Their careers will not be damaged by that exploration, though, because they are Jewish. That is unfair.
” what an exercise in ethnic supremacy it is to talk to Israeli Jews and American Jews about this problem when there are articulate Palestinians who have deep experience of Zionism. ”
Well, the American and Israeli Jews are uniquely qualified to discuss Zionism considered as an (unacknowledged) dream, a pie-in-the-sky, and make all the usual propaganda, whereas Palestinians are uniquely (except perhaps for Lebanese) qualified to speak of Zionism-in-practice from the perspective of its victims.
Both are supremely qualified!
Then he interviews Michel Warschawski saying that the Israel lobby in France is “importing” a religious conflict from Israel to France
ok, now i really have to go listen. i was in conversation w/mcohen the other day. he said something about “it’s all good”or something wrt all the french jews moving to israel because of anti semitism. there are ways to make that happen of course. it’s been done intentionally in the past (baghdad). anti semitism is milked to kingdom kome, if it wasn’t there maybe they would have to invent it. sad.
“what an exercise in ethnic supremacy it is to talk to Israeli Jews and American Jews about this problem when there are articulate Palestinians who have deep experience of Zionism. – See more at: https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2014/12/bullshit-exposes-islamophobia#sthash.eF0TR7vc.dpuf”
And what a exercise it is in privilege and supremacy for a coterie of Western leftists to opine on Israeli policy when the people living in that country have a deep experience in the region, and a deep experience of Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian terrorism.
The Ophuls documentary looks amazing!
Two very telling moments of the trailer are the two segments with the French-Israeli Jews: both of them compare Israel to French Algeria, the other Western settler-colonial project in the Arab world. And the rabbi outs himself as an admirer of Salan and the OAS, the French colonial terrorist group that killed Algerian civilians and French officials alike in the waning months of the war.
They share the stereotypical mentality of the pieds-noirs, the French ex-colonials that returned to France after the Algerian War: “the Arabs booted us out of Algeria, and now they’re coming for us here, too. Never!” That’s why the pieds-noirs are one of the electoral bases of the FN (the far-right party) in France. And I live in area where there’s a ton of them, woe is me
This mentality also exacerbates the Zionism of much of the French Jewish community today: since the end of the war, the majority of French Jews are Sephardic Jews–Jews from North Africa. They were actually natives of Algeria, like Algerian Muslims, but were assimilated into the colonial population, starting with the Crémieux Decree of 1870 that granted them French citizenship. The tragic irony being that, while this turned them into colonial foreigners in the eyes of the Muslim population, the local Europeans were for their part very opposed to the process (which was being pushed by the métropole) and were probably the most antisemitic demographic in France, filling the ranks of the French fascist parties in the 1930s, and later massively supporting the Vichy regime (further proving that colonialism produces the worst societies and the worst people, outside of maybe slavery-based societies).
So these French-Israelis come from a community that already saw Arabs as hostile, and yet also faced antisemitism from the European colonials. And they took their issues with them to Israel, and now the Palestinians, who already serve as Nazi stand-ins for the Ashkenazim, can also play the part of FLN fighter for the Sephardim (the latter being much more accurate, since the Palestinians’ struggle, like the Algerians’, is an anticolonial one). This makes the Sephardic Jews in Israel two-time colonials, which explains the hardcore racism of the two in the trailer.
PS: this also explains why the French President, François Hollande, pandered to the CRIF (the umbrella group of organized French Jewry) during a speech he gave at their yearly dinner by cracking a joke at Algeria’s expense, declaring that the French Minister of the Interior (now PM, and a pro-Israeli, Islamophobic dogwhistling a**hole to boot) had returned “safe and sound” from Algeria, and that that was “already a lot” (“c’est déjà beaucoup”). His audience loved it.
I’m thoroughly stunned!
The trailer leaves me hungry for more. Three cheers for Mr. Ophuls and Mr. Sivan! This film could be a serious turning point for millions.
Huge props to Robert Mackey. Many thanks, Phil. You are completely correct when you write:
“When you watch that interview, you understand that what an exercise in ethnic supremacy it is to talk to Israeli Jews and American Jews about this problem when there are articulate Palestinians who have deep experience of Zionism. Ophuls suffers from it. The New Yorker suffers from it. We have to break out of this structural racism.”