Following an outcry, far-left activists in Haifa on Monday postponed plans to raise money for Gaza at a benefit screening of a movie that critics call defamatory of Israeli troops.
Director Mohammad Bakri, best known for his controversial 2002 film “Jenin, Jenin” about the Battle of Jenin during the Second Intifada, was scheduled on Monday to attend the screening in Haifa of his sequel, titled “Janin, Jenin” (2024). Proceeds were earmarked for the Think Gaza donation drive.
The film is about Israel’s recent actions in Judea and Samaria but features some footage from the 2002 film, which the High Court of Justice in a rare move in 2022 banned for screening in Israel, citing its mendacious defamation of troops who fought in the Second Intifada fro the year 2000 to 2005. The film had been the subject of legal action for years.
Bakri said the postponement was due to personal reasons but activists against anti-Israeli defamation said it was the result of their mobilization to bring hundreds of protesters to Haifa if the screening goes forward. The outcry reflects diminishing tolerance in Israeli society for Bakri’s trademark packaging of anti-Israel propaganda in the documentary film format.
Shai Glick, CEO of the B’Tsalmo human-rights group that headed the pushback in Haifa, told JNS that the cancellation was the result of pressure from the office of Mayor Yona Yahav on local representatives of the far-left Hadash Party, whose activists had organized the screening. Hadash is part of Yahav’s governing coalition in the city council.
“The city realized that screening during wartime a collection of defamatory lies to raise money for Gaza would not look good, and attract protests by hundreds of opponents. So they shut it down,” Glick said.
Hadash and the Communist Party of Israel had planned to hold the screening last month but police prevented the event from happening, citing the need to avoid public disorder. Police did not, however, ban the screening outright, issuing a 10-hour shutdown order for the venue at the time designated for the screening, leading to its cancellation.
Police in Haifa questioned Rim Hazan, the Communist Party’s secretary in Haifa, twice last month. In Tel Aviv-Jaffa, police issued an order prohibiting the film screening at Jaffa’s Al Saraya Theater.
Nirit Anderman, the film critic of the Haaretz daily, said the actions taken regarding Bakri’s film mean that “we have to delete that part of our brain that’s still convinced we live in a democracy.”
Glick, however, said that the police’s intervention, and the indignation of ordinary Israelis, is in line with the court’s 2022 ruling, in which it determined that Bakri had intentionally lied in the 2002 film, defaming Israeli troops. The court banned all screenings of the film and ordered copies of it to be destroyed.
The ruling, which reaffirmed a district court verdict, ended multiple lawsuits and appeals over the previous 20 years in connection with Bakri’s film, which initially was screened widely in Israel, including at the cinematheques or at art film houses in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.
‘What passed in 2002 will not pass today’
The 2024 film is not subject to the rulings on the 2002 film, Glick acknowledged. “But it’s an obvious attempt to recycle the defamation. The new film also contains whole segments of the older one, calling into question its legality. Regardless, there’s now a consensus that didn’t exist 20 years ago that we as Israelis will not stand for this blatant libel and defamation, which serves to incite murder of Israelis and Jews. The whole episode shows that what passed in 2002 will not pass today.”
Bakri’s 2024 film focuses on an Israel Defense Forces raid on terrorists in Jenin in July 2023, in which 12 Palestinians were killed, including at least nine terrorists, according to the IDF. One Israeli soldier also died in the operation.
One part of the film deals with what Palestinians call the “right of return” to Israel by people who left during the 1948 war, in addition to their descendants.
Bakri also looks back in the 2024 film at how the 2002 one was received, incorporating several parts of the earlier work into the new one, he said in interviews promoting the sequel.
