By: Petra Chase, Arts & Culture Editor
Content warning: mentions of genocide and police brutality, descriptions of racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism.
On January 7, people packed SFU’s David Mowafaghian Cinema to watch a crucial film. Israelism documents how two American Jews raised to “unconditionally love Israel” flipped its façade to lay bare the horrors of the occupation. This was one of five sold-out Vancouver screenings in a premiere and panel series across 40 cities. The interest was undeniable — there was an additional live audience in a nearly full overspill room at Harbour Centre — evidence of rising waves of Jews critical of Israel.
Simone Zimmerman, who became a vocal critic of Israel and organizer for Palestinian liberation, says the story she shared on screen isn’t special, but reflects what “hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world” have gone through. On the panel, she was joined by two leading Jewish speakers who underwent the unlearning process ahead of the curve: award-winning journalist and bestselling author Naomi Klein, and physician, bestselling author, and SFU honorary alum Dr. Gabor Maté.
Klein began her remarks with gratitude for the “unshaking moral leadership” of everyone involved. This included Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) and SFU’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, who collaborated on hosting the event. The night was a testament to the value of institution building, and the legacy of Jewish, Palestinian, and Arab intellectuals throughout history.
After 109 days into Israel’s escalated genocide of Palestine, watching the opening sequence of the film was disturbing. Footage from a gala in Jerusalem showed tens of thousands on birthright, a free trip to Israel guaranteed to Jews worldwide. This zealous celebration, occurring 70 kilometres away from where the state military confines Palestinians to the world’s largest open-air prison, is almost as disturbing as the fact that things have gotten even more horrific since.
For Zimmerman and Eitan, who narrate their experiences on screen, birthright was a culmination of years of vigorous indoctrination beginning in childhood, from Israel-centred preschool activities in Jewish day school to youth camps led by Israeli soldiers.
In the documentary, Eitan shares he joined the military after high school — Israel felt like a place where he belonged. Contrary to the heroic image he’d been fed of Israeli soldiers defending citizens against “threatening” Palestinians, his duties were to limit Palestinian movement at checkpoints, patrol villages, and enter housing to “make their presence felt.” We see heartbreaking footage of how children are routinely terrorized when walking outside, and even in their own homes.
Maté spoke on how Palestinian dehumanization is a tool to justify their suffering. He brought up how Palestinian boys between 12–17 years old are systemically incarcerated for things like painting anti-occupation graffiti or throwing stones at tanks. The global community’s reaction to the October 7 Hamas attacks revealed how thousands of innocent Palestinians “tortured in Israeli jails” wouldn’t spark the same scale of outrage and condemnation as an attack on Israel. Israel’s sadistic war crimes like bombing hospitals and preventing life-sustaining aid from entering Gaza reveal the sheer level of destruction that continues to be treated as permissible when inflicted by a western-backed entity. “Palestinian children are having to have amputations without anesthetic on kitchen tables,” Maté said. “That’s the reality!”
Scenes and testimonies of the horrors of the occupation are juxtaposed with interviews with a Hillel group, a university organization dedicated to Israeli advocacy, which they describe as a core tenet of being a Jew. As a member at the time, Zimmerman was encouraged to defend Israel from so-called attacks at her university, when a motion to divest from Israel’s military was brought forth. After exhausting the talking points she was given, like calling the motion antisemitic — an attack on her Jewish identity — she found herself questioning why her limited script only led her to dead-ends, none of them addressing the suffering of Palestinians.
“[So-called leaders] do not represent us. We refuse to be led through mechanisms of terror.” — Naomi Klein, Author of Doppelganger
We follow Zimmerman to the West Bank where she sees the reality for herself: Palestinians just trying to live their lives under a terrifying apartheid and occupation. Like many in her community, the history she was taught erased the fact that Palestinians had lived there peacefully for generations, and the unfathomable violence, ethnic cleansing, and displacement Israel has inflicted on them since it besieged the land in 1948.
In the documentary, Sami Awad shared his experiences growing up under occupation, including early memories of American soldiers invading their homes. “Palestinians don’t have a day of freedom under the occupation,” he said. While walking the streets with Zimmerman, he acknowledged how Jews have inherited unspeakable trauma from the Holocaust, and how they created this “suppressive security mechanism” as if it’s the way to prevent such an unfathomable atrocity from occurring again. Maté, a trauma expert and Holocaust survivor, described this as “re-traumatization, not remembering, there’s a difference.” He explained, “We’ve never healed the trauma.”
According to Awad, recognizing and denouncing the injustice of the occupation is “where the healing work begins to happen.”
The beauty of the film, according to Klein, is that it models what it’s like to “change your mind” and the process of “learning, unlearning, and uncertainty.”
“A lot of people are looking for a good offramp from this ideology that is so treacherous and violent.”
“The same media that brought us the Vietnam war and lied about it for years [ . . . ] now bring us Israel’s right to defend itself.” —Gabor Maté, author of The myth of normal
Claims of antisemitism are increasingly misused by powerful institutions like the government, media, and academia, to shut down conversations that demand accountability for their complicity in Israel’s crimes. At SFU, students and faculty continue to demand divestment from Israeli weapon suppliers.
According to Maté, criticism of Israel should not be mistaken with hatred toward Jews — conflating Israel with all Jews is antisemitism. Leaders are “supporting [Israel] in the name of the Jewish people. How does that look to non-Jews of goodwill?” Maté asked. His question shows how harmful it is to attribute a group of people to a fascist force.
The unfortunate irony the film points out is that antisemitism has been on the rise with the proliferation of neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups, like those who participated in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. However, pro-Israel leaders who claim to be concerned about antisemitism sweep these dangers under the rug.
“[So-called leaders] do not represent us,” Klein affirmed. “We refuse to be led through mechanisms of terror.”
Maté quoted the thesis of Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger, to describe how there is an “open warfare against objective reality.” He related this to the role the media plays in dangerously misrepresenting and justifying violence against oppressed groups, saying, “The same media that brought us the Vietnam war and lied about it for years [ . . . ] now bring us Israel’s right to defend itself.”
While Canada accepts an unlimited number of Ukrainian refugees fleeing, the number of Palestinian refugees were capped at 1,000. The bias is blatant.
The good news is people are waking up to it. “A lot of people are so uncomfortable with the heaviness in peoples’ hearts, and from the narrative they’ve been fed,” Maté said, to which Klein added, “There are examples of tremendous horror producing change” — as discussed in her book, The Shock Doctrine.
The evening concluded in no-time, and while there was almost an hour of well-articulated insight, the most salient were the calls to action:
Zimmerman: “Allow yourself to be transformed by heartbreak and by grief at witnessing such unspeakable oppression and violence.”
Maté: “We’re up against a system that is much larger than this particular issue. So in challenging this narrative, we also have to challenge the narrative and colonization of our own minds.”
Klein: “This is deadly serious, we need to liberate ourselves from this death machine. It’s time.”
Rent Israelism through Kinema for $5 to stream at home by visiting their website, israelismfilm.com.
