89% of Palestinian films showcased by Netflix directed by BDS supporters
Nearly 90% of films in Netflix's recently launched "Palestinian Stories" collection of films are directed by supporters of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, according to findings from right-wing watchdog group Im Tirzu.How Media Reviews Enable Cinema to be Used as Vehicle for Palestinian Propaganda
On Friday, Israel Hayom reported the online streaming service had announced the launch of the collection of 32 films, which it said would be expanded in the future. Sixteen of the 19 directors whose films are currently available for streaming in the Palestinian category are BDS supporters, while 12 had called for a boycott of the Jewish state when they signed a letter blasting Israel as recently as May.
In the letter titled "A Letter Against Apartheid," the directors alleged "Palestinians are being attacked and killed with impunity by Israeli soldiers and armed Israeli civilians who have been roaming the streets of Jerusalem, Lydda, Haifa, Jaffa, and other cities chanting, 'Death to Arabs.'" The letter further accused Israel's government of carrying out a "massacre" in the Gaza Strip and fomenting "murder, intimidation, and violent dispossession."
"We call for an end to the support provided by global powers to Israel and its military … Israeli apartheid is sustained by international complicity, it is our collective responsibility to redress this harm," the letter's signatories said.
The films offer a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and include scenes depicting interrogation by Israeli security officials and life in a refugee camp.
Critics of the new Netflix collection argue that the films portray a biased depiction of the conflict while glorifying terrorism and omitting the thousands of terror attacks perpetrated against Israeli civilians.
"It is unforgivable that Netflix has become an outlet for the spread of material written by propagandists who seek to boycott Israel and remove it from the map. This at a time of rising global antisemitism, much of it disguised as anti-Israel activity," investigative journalist David Collier said.
When Linda Sarsour recently tweeted about Palestinian films and documentaries arriving on Netflix, her choice of words was telling: “Educate yourself,” she told her followers. “Learn about the Palestinian experience.”UKLFI warns Amazon and Google that “workers'” BDS campaign orchestrated by anti-Israel NGOs
Not a word about Palestinian culture, cuisine, architecture, music or family drama. Sarsour summarised the function of Palestinian cinema as showing viewers about “the Palestinian experience,” a codeword for the story of what Sarsour and others term “life under occupation.”
In truth, the burgeoning Palestinian cinema scene has been developing for some years now, and is a key tool in Palestinian ‘soft power’ through which to influence the hearts and minds of people around the world. The relentless drab scenery and stories of alleged injustice meted out by an uncaring, unforgiving Israeli military machine are staples of Palestinian films and serve to influence the way people perceive the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians specifically, as well as the Arab-Israeli conflict in general.
Compare this to Israeli television. Many of the films and television series made in Israel have very little to do with the Palestinians or indeed the Arab world at all. Shtisel, aired by Netflix and subject of positive reviews around the world, focuses on an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem and barely mentions any non-Jewish characters.
While Israeli films and television series often do relate to the conflicts Israel deals with, their scope is far more extensive than the simple victimhood narrative that is the hallmark of Palestinian film. Instead, Israeli television wrestles with the ethical dilemmas facing Israeli soldiers and the Israeli public, and attempts to humanize the people on both sides, most notably in Our Boys (2019), based on the kidnapping and murders of young Israeli teenagers in the summer of 2014 that led to a serious escalation between Israel and Hamas.
To a lesser extent, this is also true of Netflix’s global hit show Fauda, which shows numerous Palestinian characters at home engaged in day-to-day life, as well as a romance between a Palestinian woman and an Israeli man. In some cases, Israeli television and film productions are highly critical of the Israeli government and military, and sympathetic to the Palestinians.
For example, the recent Israeli film Let There Be Morning (2021), featuring a Palestinian cast, depicts a Palestinian accountant whose path home is blocked by an Israeli checkpoint.
Overwhelmingly, Palestinian film and television, however, simply do not display anywhere near such compassion for the people on the ‘other side’ of the conflict.
Taken in comparison with the type of jingoistic fare often seen on Palestinian television, which depicts Palestinians as crushing scared Jews, and often features military parades and Islamic preaching, a stark contradistinction emerges. These themes are entirely absent from the films made for Western consumption.
Anonymous Amazon and Google workers’ supposedly wrote a letter to the Guardian claiming 300 Amazon workers and 90 from Google had signed a letter calling on Amazon and Google to drop the cloud contract, which is known as Nimbus.Pro-Israel Advocacy Groups Send Letter to Unilever Asserting It Can Overturn Ben & Jerry’s Israel Boycott
UKLFI has now written to Amazon and Google with information that undermines the claim that this campaign that was started by workers at Amazon and Google.
The time line indicates that the campaign was co-ordinated by anti-Israel NGOs.
On 12 October at 11.45 BST NBC News published an op-ed by two Amazon and Google workers, which attacked the Nimbus contract. One of the co-authors was Bathool Syed, a content strategist at Amazon, whose Instagram page links directly to a website called notechforapartheid.com.
A letter in the Guardian was published on Tuesday 12 October at 17.15 BST, by “anonymous Google and Amazon workers”, which stated that “So far, more than 90 workers at Google and more than 300 at Amazon have signed this letter internally “. Since the signatories were anonymous there was of course no proof of who or how many people actually signed the letter.
The “No Tech for Apartheid” website was launched on 13 October at https://www.notechforapartheid.com/, and it appeared to be in response to the Guardian article. The website urges people to add their names to an automatically generated email to these Amazon and Google executives, demanding that they should pull out of the Nimbus contract.
The Wayback Machine web archive shows that the activity on the website began on Wednesday 13 October 2021 at 14.43 BST. (screenshot at A4). The “No Tech for Apartheid” website is professionally designed and contains a great deal of content, including long articles from five different Palestinians describing “life under apartheid”. On 13 October it contained endorsements from 40 anti-Israel organisations.
Two major pro-Israel advocacy groups have sent a letter to Unilever, the parent company of the ice cream giant Ben & Jerry’s, arguing that, contrary to its claims otherwise, Unilever could overturn the latter’s decision to boycott the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
Ben & Jerry’s stated in July that it will not sell its products in what it called the “the Occupied Palestinian Territory” because it was “inconsistent with our [company] values.” The ensuing backlash has seen a number of US states seek to divest from the company and its multinational parent company Unilever, on the basis of anti-BDS legislation.
In July, Unilever released a statement saying that “as part of the acquisition agreement, we have always recognized the right of the brand and its independent Board to take decisions about its social mission.”
In a letter dated Oct. 15, 2021 addressed to Unilever CEO Alan Jope and the company’s Board of Directors, StandWithUs and the Israeli-American Coalition for Action argued that the “right” referred to by Unilever is not absolute, and the company has the power to overturn Ben & Jerry’s decision.
Unilever’s contract with Ben and Jerry’s, the letter stated, “gives Unilever the power to make ‘financial and operational’ decisions for Ben & Jerry’s; the Board can make ‘social’ decisions only insofar as they are ‘commercially reasonable.’”
“Boycotting an entire country is, in fact, commercially unreasonable,” asserted the letter, “especially when it triggers counter-boycotts by states and consumer groups and divestment of state pension funds” — referring to legal and financial actions taken by various entities in reaction to boycotts of Israel in general and Ben & Jerry’s in particular.
“Ben and Jerry’s must explain — to you and to the investing public — how its social mission requires such a boycott when it signed a contract showing that doing business in Israel was consistent with its social mission,” the letter said. “Clearly, it is Ben and Jerry’s that is in breach, and it is within Unilever’s rights to reverse the Board.”