On the website of the “Other Film Festival,” Carol Zabar, founder and member of the boards of the JCC and its co-sponsor, the New Israel Fund, states: “It is not about the conflict — it is not about taking sides — this festival is about people … paving the way to co-existence and a new, more inclusive culture in the Middle East.”
Yet Zabar’s Letter (Nov. 11) to The Jewish Week does take sides and reveals the festival’s Israel-bashing agenda, accusing Israelis of a “growing level of racism” — even as it is the Israeli Arabs who have radicalized and Islamized and now openly identify as Palestinians, many supporting Hamas and Hezbollah — while increasingly propagandizing against their own country. The day-to-day reality is that too many Israeli Arab members of the Knesset — as “Palestinians” — refuse to participate in the “Zionist” government. Such actions self destructively guarantee that their community does not get its fair share of the communal pie, even as their constituents enjoy full rights as Israeli citizens.
The Jewish state is under genocidal threat from a nuclearizing Iran, and its Hamas/ Hezbollah clients are pointing tens of thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians. Jews are prohibited from living in many to most Middle East countries, including a future Palestinian State, and unable to even enter many Arab towns in Israel.
At such a time, Zabar and the JCC are taking our community precisely in the opposite direction of “Middle East coexistence.”
