Evidently, you don’t need to be Jewish or Israeli any longer to get your film attacked by Jew haters. If you dare make Israel look good, that’s enough to get you cancelled.
For this latest outrage in the global march to single out the Jewish state, we can thank the international film festival in Belgium. The festival, which has been held in Brussels for 30 years and shows films from Mediterranean, European, African, and Middle Eastern countries, announced last week that it was cancelling the screening of the documentary film, “The Belle from Gaza.”
The French documentary follows a young Palestinian transgender woman who flees Gaza on foot after her life was threatened because of her gender identity and arrives in Tel Aviv to live freely and formulate her identity.
So, why would the festival cancel such a human-centered film?
Why else? Because it came under pressure from pro-Palestinian groups who protested that the film “contributes to the pinkwashing and colonialist narrative of genocide,” a perspective the festival said it did not share. Sure, but that didn’t stop them from canceling the screening.
The film, which is not Israeli and was only partly filmed in Israel, committed the unforgivable sin of portraying Palestinian society as anti-LBGTQ and Israeli society as the very opposite. In other words, it showed the truth. Even the film’s French director, Yolande Zauberman, conceded in an interview with Haaretz, “I didn’t make this film to show that Israel treats trans people better, but that is a fact.”
Another fact is that the decision to cancel was made only a few hours before the scheduled screening. Because activists threatened to boycott the event and disrupt the proceedings, festival leaders decided to cancel the screening “in order to ensure the smooth running of the festival.”
That is not protest—it’s intimidation.
Hysterical Jew haters and Zionophobes across the world will continue to bully and intimidate authorities until those authorities have the courage to say no more. It’s bad enough when the haters single out Jewish and Israeli authors, academics and artists for boycotting. But when they start going after a French director because she dared show a truth they don’t like, you know we’ve entered new territory.
This kind of radical intolerance becomes a war not just against the Jews but against artistic expression. Let’s hope “The Belle” from Gaza who found refuge in Tel Aviv will speak up for creative freedom– even if it makes Israel look good.
