There was a damp handful of Israeli flag-wavers standing in the rain outside the Stade Hall last night, when I arrived to see Gillian Mosely’s film Planet Israel. I ignored them. It’s more or less standard these days, that if you arrive at an event that matters at all, there will be some people outside who think it’ll help to tell you that you’re stupid and wrong, and that if you attend the event, you’re hateful. They generally prompt conversations in the foyer asking how our politics got so ‘contentious’ or ‘polarised’.
To a great extent, that is the issue Planet Israel addresses. If you’ve used social media to keep track of what’s happening to Palestine over the last few years, it’s easy to think you know quite enough about Israel already, thank you so much – but Gillian is investigating a truly central point – the vital one, if you want to have any hope: how do you fix this situation? How does a country grow a population in which the vast majority seem fixated on maintaining a vicious, world-threatening conflict?
And what do you do about it?
The film follows Gillian through her investigations on a visit to Israel, talking to ex-soldiers, rabbis, people in the street, and to trauma management experts, psychologists and academics, asking ‘how did we get here’, and ‘how do we get out of it?’
If you’ve been trying to follow this story, I’m sure you have a headful of examples of the jaw-dropping behaviour of Israeli military, officials and politicians, and you’re probably already aware that it’s going to take more than an election to stop it – but to put the problem front and centre, consider those administrating the siege at the gates of Gaza: in the Q and A after the film, someone asked where we were at with aid getting into Gaza.
Gillian described a situation that, if you were being really diplomatic, you could only call fickle: as has been the case for years, Israel controls every entry into and exit from Gaza. The plethora of ever-changing rules about what’s allowed in throw up appalling situations. She said that often, all proper food is turned away, but crisps and chocolate are waved through. One man, we were told, an amputee, had managed to get out to Egypt where he’d had a prosthetic leg made. On his return, he’d been told he could take his wheel chair or his new leg home with him. Just think about the dust-plagued, rubble-strewn remains of Gaza’s streets, and the consequences of the choice that one man had to make, and multiply that by the number of Palestinian amputees Israel has created.
As far as we can see, there is no reason in it. No reason whatsoever, nothing but a seemingly unquenchable desire to punish, humiliate and control — and to maintain the state of fury and frustration in the populations of Israel and Palestine.
And we’re seeing the same phenomenon in our own country, as our government oversees the harassment and arrest of thousands of our own elders for their resistance to the genocide; and across Europe, as police forces become more and more obviously thuggish in their response to an unhappy citizenship, whilst politicians and the media stoke the belligerence of the up-and-coming generation with endless talk of conscription and war, fed into heads that have been brought up on violently competitive computer games and war films.
But Israel is years ahead of us in bringing up kids primed for conflict. Seek out the works of Nurit Peled if you’d like to know more…
There are some signs that people in the UK are making progress on understanding what the government and media have done to our heads on this particular topic, with their eternal conflation of ‘Jewish’ with ‘Zionist’, forever blurring the boundaries of race, religion and politics to make anti-Zionism look like a form of race-hate, rather than a perfectly rational political stance.
But it’s failing – I can’t be the only one who found myself laughing helplessly when a BBC presenter took it too far, and expressed her utter shock and incomprehension at a politician who had the temerity to calmly say she was wrong…
Riding the wave of the global #FreePalestine movement, the Green Party are making a far better job of responding to accusations of ‘anti-semitism’ (which is what the war-mongers call anti-Zionism) than Corbyn’s Labour ever did. Here’s a very good one…
But we’re not out of the woods yet.
There are worrying signs across Europe that as Israel and its allies give up on the ‘anti-Zionism = anti-semitism’ trick, they are moving increasingly to stoking general belligerence, militarism and Islamophobia instead, so, for the sake of all our futures, please go see Planet Israel, and join Gillian Mosely in some informed thinking about how we break the cycle of the conflict mentality.
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