Truth in advertising

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.”

“How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.”

“We can forgive [the Arabs] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [the Arabs] when they love their children more than they hate us…”

I wonder whether we will hear these words spoken by Golda Meir—Israel’s first female prime minister—when Guy Nattiv’s new film, Golda, opens in the United States on August 25th. Nattiv insists that his film “is not glorifying anything about the Israeli narrative,” but how could a film starring the incomparable Helen Mirren be anything but an encomium to the character she portrays. And the film’s release—coming as it does in the wake of Netanyahu’s ongoing effort to emasculate the Israeli Supreme Court—makes it difficult to imagine that it will be viewed as anything other than an attempt to glorify the Israeli narrative.

But yet, regardless of how the film attempts to dramatize the Israel of yore, the narrative that Israel and its international supporters have been telling the world and themselves these past decades has never been more discredited.

Some have labeled the attack on the Supreme Court—the only check on an authoritarian government in a country without a constitution—as an attack on democracy, but what is the meaning of “democracy” in a state where Palestinian citizens of Israel have always been treated as second-class citizens and who lived under martial law for many years? What is the meaning of “democracy” when a decision was taken, in violation of international law, to keep the territories captured by Israel in the Six-Day War, and to maintain total control for more than half a century over the lives of more than five million Palestinians who have no vote? And the stated determination of Netanyahu’s extremist cabinet to pass legislation privileging Jewish citizens of Israel over non-Jewish (read: Muslim, Christian) citizens of Israel—which would make de jure what has always been the case de facto—will be the final nail in the coffin of so-called Israeli “democracy.”

Many American friends of Israel have been cheered by the massive demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem against the Knesset vote, and by the threat of Israeli Air Force reserve pilots to refuse to report for duty. But have there been massive demonstrations against murderous rampages by West Bank settlers against innocent Palestinian villagers? Or against the demolition of Palestinian houses and other forms of collective punishment? Or against the fact that there is virtually no punishment for killing a Palestinian? Have those military pilots refused to bomb Gaza or Jenin? No, the demonstrations against the Knesset vote are about the danger to Israeli Jews, not about the evils of the occupation.

When we pay attention not to the profile of rhetoric but to the profile of action, it becomes clear that the unspoken program of the powers in Israel—with the witting or unwitting financial and political support of the “friends of Israel” in the United States—has been from the beginning occupation, colonization, annexation, expulsion. Not terribly different from what the U.S. government did and continues to do to the Native American population.

Any Jew should be haunted by the question Leonard Fein asked years ago, “Was there truth in Jewish advertising?” when for almost two thousand years, we Jews have been telling ourselves that, were we in power, we would never mistreat others as we have often been mistreated. After all that suffering, all those prayers, all that hope, all the goodwill of the family of nations for the newborn state—the reality that the most promising Jewish experiment in eighteen centuries has come to this is heartbreaking. The occupation is a violation of every Jewish value since the Deuteronomist’s resounding, “Justice, justice shall you pursue!” (16:20), or Hillel’s dictum (Talmud Shabbat 31a), “What is hateful to you, do not do to anyone else; that is the entire Torah.”