All Eyes on Palestine!

Frann Michel

The Palestine Exception (2024), dir. Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth, prod. Marlene Eid; The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza (2024), dir. & prod. Kavitha Chekuru; Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines,Where Olive Trees Weep (2024), dir. Maurizio Benazzo and Zaya Benazzo, prod. Science and NonDuality; Israelism (2023), dir. Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, prod. Daniel J. Chalfen, Nadia Saah, Erin Axelman; Tantura (2022), dir. Alon Schwartz, dist. Journeyman Pictures; Occupation of the American Mind (2016; 2023), dir. Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp, prod. Media Education Foundation; Roadmap to Apartheid (2012), dir. and prod. Eron Davidson and Ana Nogueira.

“PEOPLE SEE PALESTINIAN violence but they don’t see Israeli violence,” says Israeli journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors Amira Hass in Where Olive Trees Weep, one of the many documentaries seeking to change that pattern.

But that pattern is changing, too, as Israeli violence has become more visible with the genocidal assault on Gaza since October 2023. As Palestinian-American scholar Saree Makdisi says in The Palestine Exception, the knowledge is out there, the genie is out of the bottle, the bottle is broken, and the question now is whether people can be “pummeled into silence.”

The pattern of silencing and suppression, in turn, has long been carefully cultivated both within and beyond Israel by government officials, advocacy organizations, public relations firms and think tanks seeking to suppress awareness and criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Such suppression has also itself been the subject of recent documentary films. Of the many films about Palestine and the conflicts over Palestinian advocacy, I comment here chiefly on the political import of some of the more accessible, recent, and compelling feature-length documentaries.

We see Israeli violence and the suffering of Palestinians in the occupied territories in Where Olive Trees Weep, Roadmap to Apartheid, and, with particular attention to events of the past year, The Night Won’t End.

Israel’s repressive self-mythologizing is addressed in Tantura, while Occupation of the American Mind and Israelism also explore the maintenance and enforcement of those myths by Israel’s advocates in the USA.

Free Speech Abolished?

The Palestine Exception focuses on the suppression of the movement for justice in Palestine on U.S. campuses. (Disclosure: I have worked with Jan Haaken on past projects and am listed as a supporter of The Palestine Exception.)

The “Palestine exception to free speech” (or “the Palestine exception to academic freedom”) refers to the failure of free speech protections to accommodate criticism of Israel in various Western countries (or on academic campuses).

The phrase gained currency with the 2015 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal, “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack in the US,” documenting the “widespread and growing suppression of Palestinian human rights advocacy in the United States.”

At this writing the U.S. Senate has not passed the proposed federal legislation that would codify criticism of the state of Israel as a form of antisemitism. But as Alan Wald has discussed (“The Antisemitism Scare: Guide for the Perplexed,” ATC 234), legislators and university administrators are already interpreting Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as though anti-Zionism were the same as antisemitism.

In brief, we can say that anti-Zionism means political objections to the policies of the settler colonial ethnostate of Israel, while antisemitism refers to the hatred, fear, harassment, or persecution of people because they are Jewish.

Wald’s essay, along with films including Israelism and The Palestine Exception, points out that disproportionately many of those involved in these U.S. movements — for Palestine and against genocide — are themselves Jewish. The failure of university administrators to defend anti-Zionist Jews highlights that, contrary to administrator claims, cracking down on these movements is not about protecting Jews but about protecting Israel’s reputation.

Moreover, as noted by Wald, as well as in The Palestine Exception and Occupation of the American Mind, many of the most vocal Zionists in the U.S. are Christian. Insofar as Christian Zionism looks toward the second coming and the conversion of the Jews, it is arguably an antisemitic Zionism.

Indeed, Zionist groups have at times allied with right-wing groups that have also been explicitly antisemitic. There were Proud Boys, for instance, in Charlottesville in 2017 chanting “Jews will not replace us” and, as Makdisi relates, at UCLA in 2024 attacking pro-Palestinian activists.

Campus activists have faced violence, administrative sanctions, job loss, and legal persecution including threats of deportation, now magnified by Trump. As The Palestine Exception reminds us, that toll pales in comparison to the experience in Gaza, where all 12 universities have been destroyed and hundreds of faculty, staff and students have been killed.

Struggles Over Visibility

Media have long been a part of this political struggle over the visibility of violence. Tantura includes footage excised from 1948 newsreels, for instance. (The village of Tantura was the site of an Israeli massacre of civilians in 1948. The documentation by an Israeli researcher, Teddy Katz, of this mass murder and the coverup by Israeli government and academic censorship is detailed in Ilan Pappe’s memoir Out of the Frame —ed.)

Occupation of the American Mind explores propaganda playbooks published by the Israeli government and related advocacy groups. The Palestine Exception considers attempts to stop Israelism from screening on campuses, and includes clips from the 1960 movie Exodus, the celebrated liberal Hollywood mythologizing of the founding of Israel.

Indeed, the power of some of these documentaries is recognized in attempts to counter them: the Israel Emergency Alliance, which does business as Stand With Us, has prepared an array of “Reviews and Rebuttals” attempting to refute the messages of films including Israelism, Occupation of the American Mind, and Roadmap to Apartheid.

If it comes to be as widely seen as it deserves, Haaken and Ruth’s The Palestine Exception is likely to be added to that list. The film addresses key misreadings and distortions of the discourse and draws on interviews with thoughtful activists and recognized experts from diverse Jewish, Palestinian-American, and South African backgrounds.

The documentary emphasizes the ways that charges of antisemitism are used to undermine universities, and argues that higher education is under attack because of its potential as a space for people to draw connections among various histories of oppression and resistance and to develop critical views and practice in opposition to current power relations.

Historian Ellen Schrecker comments on parallels with McCarthyism and the ways university administrators capitulated to pressures from trustees and government to crack down on campus movements.

Philosopher Judith Butler, a longtime supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, deconstructs several Zionist claims. For instance, the claim that the call for Palestinian freedom, “from the river to the sea,” is a call for genocide looks like a matter of projection once we know that Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies use the phrase to call for Israel’s absolute control over the territory.

The Palestine Exception also makes striking use of archival clips: we see Harry Truman discussing the difficulties of moving five million people out of a territory and five million different people into it. (It was not, as the Zionist slogan claimed, “a land without people.”) There’s a young Joe Biden insisting that if there were no Israel the United States would have had to invent it to protect U.S. interests in the region.

We also see more recent clips, including from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case brought by South Africa against Israel.

As Butler explains, the definition of genocide is not simply a matter of numbers killed, but includes the targeted destruction of the infrastructure of life. The Palestine Exception includes footage sent by an academic from Jenin, showing the destruction of water, power, and roads there.

The ICJ has already ruled, we are reminded, that Israel should end its illegal occupations, leave its settlements in the occupied territories, and provide reparations to Palestinians. The ICJ has also ruled that all states and institutions are obliged not to recognize the occupations as legal nor to render aid or assistance toward maintaining the illegal occupations — points of international law that, obviously, the United States as well as Israel has continued to violate.

Repression and Resistance

Recent clips also include some of the more outrageous moments of the congressional grilling of university presidents, including interrogators repeatedly citing the Bible as though it were an American governing document. We see Elise Stefanik later gloating about having put university presidents out of their jobs.

There’s Mike Johnson suggesting calling out the National Guard to end campus protests, juxtaposed with footage of Kent State officials in May 1970 discussing what the National Guard might do (that month was when the Guard killed four nonviolent student protesters at Kent State and police killed two at Jackson State).

In this and other ways, the film highlights connections between the movement for justice in Palestine and past movements, including campus antiwar and anti-apartheid campaigns; the use of sit-ins during the civil rights movement and the sit-down strikes of the 1930s; and parallels with violent campus repression in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

Several interviewees stress that ordinary people can bring about change, and that change can happen surprisingly. The gains of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements would once have looked unlikely. Student organizers comment on the profound experience of connecting with fellow activists across the country and across the ocean, learning from each other, and creating in their protests liberated zones that were spaces of caring, and not about profit.

Many of the speakers in this, as in other films under review here, including Israelism and Roadmap to Apartheid, emphasize that a peaceful and safe resolution to these conflicts will require an egalitarian state in which Palestinians have the same rights as Israeli Jews.

The Fault Lines Series

Haaken and Ruth’s feature documentary should not be confused with the short film of similar title from Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines documentary series.

The Palestine Exception: The crackdown on Israel criticism at Columbia and other US campuses, at 25 minutes long, examines some of the same issues more briefly. Chiefly profiling the attacks on activists with Students for Justice in Palestine at Columbia, it also touches on the Congressional testimony of university presidents at the hearings on purported antisemitism, and universities’ concern with the wishes of donors.

It considers how Stand With Us weaponized Title VI to attack psychologist Lara Sheehi, and it mentions that pro-Israel talking points are part of a plan for shutting down Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, and more broadly controlling what can be taught.

A fuller entry from Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines series is The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza, focusing as the title suggests on U.S. support for the Israeli assault on Gaza since October 2023.

It centers three families suffering the effects of the Israeli attacks, including the story of Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl trapped with her dead family members after Israeli forces attacked their car, and for whom Columbia University protesters renamed a building.

We hear from the Red Crescent workers who stayed on the phone with Hind for hours while seeking Israeli permission to send an ambulance, and after an Israeli tank destroyed the ambulance, despite the granted permission.

We also hear from forensic analysts and monitors tracking the details of attacks on children and other civilians, and from legal and humanitarian experts decrying the USA’s repeated vetoing of UN ceasefire resolutions, the violation of the U.S.’s Leahy law that forbids the funding of war crimes, and the consequent undermining of international law more generally.

The Trees Weep

Filmed in 2022 in the West Bank, Where Olive Trees Weep also addresses the traumatic experiences of life under occupation, stressing that, as one of the humanitarian workers in the film notes, people in Palestine are not dealing with PTSD, since the trauma is not post and not a disorder, but an ongoing traumatic situation.

A project of the Science and Non-Duality (SAND) nonprofit with Dr. Gabor Mate, the film emphasizes the emotional as well as physical impact of occupation, and the “indomitability of the human spirit” rather than analysis of the political situation or strategies for resistance.

Journalist and therapist Ashira Darwish calls on the viewer to stop funding weapons used to kill Palestinian children, but the film is not about how we might go about making that happen. It does, however, have an extensive resource page on its website, with links to information about BDS campaigns, solidarity organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, humanitarian aid organizations, and books, movies and other resources for learning, as well as poems, prayers and intergenerational trauma healing resources.

Roadmap to Apartheid presents some of the structures generating that trauma: it explores the parallels between South African apartheid and Israel’s policy toward Palestinians, opening with a split-screen sequence of parallel scenes: children throwing stones at tanks, mothers weeping over wounded children, massive protest marches and funerals, soldiers checking papers, beating civilians, holding up a hand to block the camera lens.

The film makes an irrefutable case that Israel is practicing apartheid, the legal and physical separation of a population for the control of land and resources. In both the South African and Israeli cases, the ruling minority understood itself to have been oppressed victims in the past, and believed itself to have a divinely-given right to the land.

Both have used pass laws or permits to control movement of the subjugated populations; both have used house demolitions to confiscate land; both have denied the oppressed peoples due process, with Israel’s “administrative detention” or apartheid South Africa’s “detention without trial.”

We see texts of explicit comments from leaders of both states calling attention to the similarities of their situations, and we learn that Israel violated UN sanctions to provide military support to the apartheid regime.

Both Israelis and South Africans interviewed suggest that the Israeli system is harsher. South Africa did not have separate “sterile” roads reserved for the ruling group, as Israel does. Bantustans were provided resources, infrastructure, and education. They were not surrounded by militarized walls nor subjected to aerial bombardment.

South Africa’s apartheid system, which depended on black labor, ended after international boycotts and pressure combined with internal resistance, and the film ends with the hope of a similar possibility of freeing both Palestinians and Israelis, as white South Africans discuss feeling freed by the end of apartheid.

The Public Relations Playbook

The Media Education Foundation’s Occupation of the American Mind illuminates the need for such explanations of Israeli policy, giving a clear overview of the development of Israel’s public relations playbook and its dominance in U.S. media.

The film juxtaposes U.S. media with more critical European reporting, touches on key moments and documents like the 1984 Hasbara conference and the 2009 Luntz report that provided public relations playbooks for Israeli media policy, and considers the millions of dollars Israeli lobbying groups funnel to U.S. politicians.

The film ends with attention to the shifting of perspective among younger Americans, a shift attributed to the rise of social media, the availability of more diverse news sources, and documentaries by both Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers — films like The Gatekeepers (2012, interviewing former heads of the Shin Bet security agency), The Law In These Parts (2011, interviewing the architects of the legal system that Israel put in place to control Palestinians in the occupied territories), and Five Broken Cameras (2011, documenting attempts to film the construction of a separation barrier on Palestinian land, and the violence of Israeli repression).

Occupation of the American Mind also notes the rise of the BDS movement on campus and the explicit connections between Ferguson, Missouri and Palestine made by those in the Black Lives Matter movement.

While these films all offer some background on the founding of Israel, Tantura focuses most on that history and its retellings. This Israeli documentary investigates one Israeli historian’s discovery of evidence of war crimes in the destruction of a Palestinian village in 1948, and the subsequent attacks on him and suppression of his research.

Tantura illustrates the lengths to which Israeli institutions will go to hide and deny information that challenges what another Israeli historian in the film calls “the founding myth of Israeliness” as distinctively moral.

The film stops short of calling for the return of Palestinian land, and does not make explicit connections with contemporary events. But its tale of Jewish Israeli scholars vilified, harassed, physically threatened and legally persecuted for exposing difficult truths confirms the extent to which ideological policing of information about Israel/Palestine occurs within as well as beyond Israeli borders.

Attention to that cross-border ideological policing comes in Israelism, focusing on the experience of young Jewish Americans. The film recounts its subjects learning — and then unlearning — narratives about Israel meant to cement the false equivalence between Judaism and Zionism.

Through Jewish day schools, camps, youth groups, clubs and other institutions, young Jewish Americans are recruited to the Israeli military and to advocacy for Israeli policy. The Birthright movement makes trips to Israel available to any Jewish young person; the yearly AIPAC conference is a community event welcoming young people; Hillel has a presence on almost every college campus.

(It’s worth noting that this state-worship of Israeli power became prevalent in American Jewish institutions after the 1967 war. Before that, Jewish community sympathy for Israel never implied that the Israeli state should be seen as the center of Jewish life. —ed.)

Israelism profiles the journey of Simone Zimmerman, cofounder of the IfNotNow movement of American Jews to end U.S. support for Israeli apartheid, and stresses the potential power of the American Jewish community to shift U.S. policy on the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Zimmerman describes her initial dissatisfaction with the answers she was fed about Palestinian criticism of Israel, her curiosity about life in the Palestinian territories, and the criticism she faced — as a “self-hating Jew,” for instance — for becoming an activist opponent of U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system.

The film highlights the irony of the rise in actual antisemitism — we see scenes of the aftermath of a synagogue shooting, chants of “Jews will not replace us,” burning swastikas — even as the focus on “antisemitism” has shifted to protecting Israel even when that means attacking Jews.

The visceral impact of visual evidence means that documentary films can be a powerful educational tool, and shared screenings or post-film discussions can make them also a tool for organizing. In the face of attempts at control and manipulation of political narrative, engaged documentaries are part of the work of movements fighting to change the story.

March-April 2025, ATC 235