The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has inaugurated its new City to City program with a focus on Tel Aviv. Cameron Bailey, Festival co-director and City to City programmer wrote, “The ten films in this year’s City to City programme will showcase the complex currents running through today’s Tel Aviv. Celebrating its 100th birthday in 2009, Tel Aviv is a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.”
In protest of this decision, some members of the film community have written a letter to TIFF entitled “The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of the Occupation.” Among the signers are Jane Fonda, Danny Glover and filmmakers, producers, and artists from various countries.
The endorsers of the letter don’t want the TIFF to be a party to “Israeli propaganda,” which is what they consider a marketing campaign by Israel to promote the country for its achievements in medicine, science and culture.
When filmmakers promote their films, is that propaganda?
It is not really surprising that quite a few of the 50 or so signers of this letter are Israeli and/or Jewish. In fact, many Israeli films are very critical of Israeli society. Unfortunately there is a notable absence of criticism of wrongdoing by the Palestinians, among many critics of Israel. For example, I haven’t seen leftist protests of rocket attacks on Israel; or calls for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit to be freed or even condemnation of suicide bombing. When Israel receives all the condemnation, and the Palestinians receive none, no matter what they do, progress towards peace is impeded. This is what these one-sided critics who supposedly want peace, fail to realize.
As Emmy-award winning Canadian-Israeli filmmaker Simcha Jacobovichi stated in an article in the Washington Times about the TIFF protest, “It seems that nothing the Jews do is right, and nothing the enemies of the Jews do is wrong.”
To learn more about the Tel Aviv Centennial click here.
To view the text of the “The Toronto Declaration” and the signers click here.
For the full Washington Times article on this story, click here.
Comments
What is wrong with these people? I'm scratching them off my list. These Jewish signers must not have EVER been to Israel...it's so sad.
I think that the boycott is 100 percent justified, even when one sets aside the horrific massacre perpetrated over the New Year period by Israel in Gaza.
The ``diversity'' being celebrated in the festival regarding Tel Aviv is so phony that not one Arab film or cultural event is being organized by it. Just what a diverse multicultural city like Toronto has in common with a city founded on the mass ethnic cleansing of people whose only crime it was to be Arab is something none of Israeli apartheid's apologists seem to explain.
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