The movie NAZA recently caught the media’s attention both in Israel and abroad; perhaps more attention than such a movie deserves.
The film features testimonies from unidentified individuals who claim to have been soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces during the Swords of Iron War. According to them, the IDF disproportionately risked and indeed killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people in order to assassinate Hamas terrorists.
Since the movie is not currently available to the public, I have not seen it, so I will not address the movie itself. I will, however, address what NAZA represents. This movie and the media attention and recognition it received represent international audiences’ desire for someone to show them that Israel is in the wrong.
This is not about humanitarianism, as no movie about the famine in Yemen or the tsunami in Japan received a 20-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. Several social media users reminded us that such long ovations had been given to communist leaders and their speeches at Soviet-era conferences. Everyone, it seems, was too scared to be the first to stop clapping.
Clearly, certain people today, media and entertainment leaders among them, are more like brainwashed Soviet communists than they would like to think.
Both groups, Soviet communists and progressive entertainers, believe in a core narrative (communism and anti-Israelism, respectively), understand that almost all their peers think the same or are silent and still try to frame their position as groundbreaking and edgy. Moreover, they portray themselves as a vanguard that pays a personal cost for its advocacy.
In reality, these anti-Zionist entertainers are rewarded for rejecting Israel, snubbed if they do not and canceled if they support Israel. As in the Soviet Union, the humanitarian, just position is not what the majority wants you to believe.
In my new book Intifada Globalized, I try to explain how we arrived at this situation, which is the worst in several decades. At the risk of sounding superficial, I make the case that supporting Israel is not “cool” anymore.
Shallow as it sounds, this is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Younger generations who care about supporting whatever is trendy have the most influence in today’s public debate. The young generation not only consumes information but creates it via social media. When their elected officials try to gauge voter sentiment on Israel, they are more likely to come across those who post on social media than older generations that are more supportive of Israel.
Certain media and entertainment leaders are more like brainwashed Soviet communists than they think.
To address this problem, we must first understand it. It is not enough to say that these youths do not know which river and which sea they are talking about when chanting “from the river to the sea.” Even if true—and it is true in fewer cases than we would like to think—it accomplishes nothing but to give us an excuse to avoid confronting the problem, which is only going to get worse.
We need to work within the existing world, and in the world we live in, even those who do not know all the facts are entitled to an opinion. Moreover, some of them are extremely effective in influencing others. We must talk to them. Their lack of knowledge should serve not as a reason to mock them, but as an opening to informed conversation that can change how they feel about Israel.
We should not wait until there is already a crisis, as happened with NAZA. Film production is a long process, and Israeli officials have admitted to being aware of the movie before it was released. This is unfortunate, because commenting on the film will never have the same impact as running a campaign to discredit the movie before it comes out. This is also true of the International Court of Justice case, the “Gaza famine” campaign and many other examples.
There is obviously no point in trying to influence the leaders of anti-Zionist campaigns, so we should focus our time and resources on those people who have yet to form a solid opinion on Israel or have turned against Israel during the Swords of Iron War but are open to listening to other narratives.
Moreover, I think we have reached a moment when we should also preach to the choir. Our choir, mostly composed of Diaspora Jews, is facing an extreme situation in which they are attacked daily due to their support for Israel.
Over the last three years, they have asked Israel for help; not for themselves, but for their activism. Unfortunately, they were told or made to understand that they had to wait until the war was over, as Israel was too busy at the time.
That was and still is a grave mistake. Diaspora Jews need us. If they don’t hear from us about what is happening on the ground, they cannot be expected to carry our narrative to the places where they live and work.
On a deeper level, Diaspora Jews will struggle if they do not feel like Israel and Israelis view them as a part of the bigger story of the people and the State of Israel. Diaspora Jews are not just PR firms, ATMs or future olim. They are our brothers and sisters, and we should empower them to speak on our behalf and treat them as what they are: family.
