A TIFF over Tel Aviv

Editorial

What, really, can come next in the chronicles of anti-Israel preposterousness? Was it not just last month that a few nutbars claimed that the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are as Jewish as Moses, are in fact stolen Palestinian property? Now, a mob of cultural workers who should know better are urging a boycott of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) because of a thematic focus on films featuring the urban vibrancy of Tel Aviv.

The comical thing is that these boycotts almost invariably have the opposite of the intended outcome. Attendance at the Scrolls exhibit skyrocketed after rational people caught wind of the boycott attempt. Efforts to boycott Israeli wines at B.C. liquor stores have resulted in stores being sold out of their stocks and many a happy evening for Zionist oenophiles. The childish shot at destroying the reputation and viability of a great local cooperative success story, Mountain Equipment Coop, by forcing it to delist some of its finest products because they are Israeli-made failed spectacularly last spring. Frankly, in these times of economic distress, it seems a business could hardly wish for anything better than to have the anti-Israel crazies attempt a boycott. But these incessant acts of ideological and racist harassment are like mosquitoes, endlessly irritating and only very rarely fatal.

John Greyson, the Canadian fronting this latest jihad, withdrew his own film from the festival to register his dislike for the only country in the Middle East where he would be free to produce the kind of politically and sexually explicit material for which he is sort of well known. In support of Greyson's inanity, a contagion of like-minded cultural revolutionaries joined his celebration of ignorance, signing a statement they self-importantly titled the Toronto Declaration, accusing TIFF of being "complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine."

As if unconsciously aware of the stupidity of accusing Israeli filmmakers of participation in a propaganda exercise, Greyson said he was not criticizing individual films, but the support of the festival by the Israeli government. How despicable is the artistic worker who declares he's not criticizing the specific content of the books he's burning, but is burning them on principle nonetheless? God forbid theatre-goers should get a nuanced appreciation of Israeli life or any conception at all that conflicts with the crude, easily chantable sloganeering upon which the anti-Zionist movement has been built. For all they (or we) know, the specific films would have reinforced their bigotry.

Greyson, whose most memorable creation may have been the film Zero Patience, has become a burlesque of his own creation. One can make a lot of legitimate claims and complaints against Israel, but Greyson's contention that Tel Aviv is built on stolen Arab land is as utterly uninformed or as deliberately malevolent as the idea that the Dead Sea Scrolls do not belong to the Jewish people.

Tel Aviv was the first Hebrew metropolis, begun a century ago on nothing but sand dunes and a dream. Could the signatories of the Toronto Declaration truly be so ignorant that they do not know this? Probably. Ignorance is almost a precondition for full membership in the anti-Israel movement, where knowledge of history is usually unpolluted by context or veracity.

Signing on to this ideological atrocity are a bunch of the usual suspects, including the inevitable Noam Chomsky and the precious John Pilger, a coterie of career protesters including Jane Fonda, a list of professional petition-signers headed by Judy Rebbick, erstwhile respectable figures like the musician David Byrne, the actor Danny Glover, the writer Alice Walker and a long list of notable nobodies.

Eve Ensler, whose Vagina Monologues would get her head scythed off in most of Israel's neighboring countries, seems more concerned with blotting out representation in film of the most liberal city on its continent than she is with the fate of women outside of Israel whose vaginas are routinely excised of their clitorises and labia. Thomas Waugh, whose academic work on gay porn would invite death probably anywhere in the Mideast except in Israel, must not understand that Tel Aviv is to most gay people in the Middle East what San Francisco was to desperate gay men in the 1950s and '60s.

What is wrong with these people? The intellectual equivalent of soccer hooligans, they are bullies who seem to relish the fight for no logical reason other than that they get to throw a few recreational punches. Tel Aviv is the epitome of personal and artistic freedom, human creativity and respect for free expression and the arts. It is an oasis of creative ferment in a region where creativity is often punishable by death.

If Canadians do not stand up to the thuggery of anti-intellectuals like the signatories of the Toronto Declaration, this country's cultural life may soon more closely resemble that of Riyadh than that of Tel Aviv, which seems to be the self-defeating intent of these moronic proponents of censorship.

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