Integration is Not a One-Way Street

"Beyond Them and Us: Films about Israeli Arabs"
C3, Wednesday 10/29/08
By Robin Pogrebin

This article details the upcoming "Other Israeli Film Festival" in Manhattan which focuses on the experience of Israeli-Arabs. The festival is a "pet project and consuming passion" of Carole Zabar, wife of Zabar owner Saul Zabar. In an admiring tone, the authors devotes a considerable amount of space to describing her unique lifestyle and philanthropic work.

The crux of the article is not only her passionate work, but the Jewish community's attitude toward Mrs. Zabar's Israeli-Arab program. The author writes that the festival's focus "specifically on the experience of Israeli Arabs, which makes it somewhat less mainstream and certainly more of a hard sell to its core audience, New York Jews." This skeptical, if not hostile Jewish attitude is corroborated Mrs. Zabar's interaction with a Holocaust survivor, who berates her: "What are you doing this for? Why do you care about Arabs? You should care about Jews."

I take offense to the author's framing of the article in such a manner. New York City is the center of liberal American Jewry, one of the most staunchly liberal groups in the United States to begin with. To say such a program is a "hard sell" within the New York Jewish community, as evidenced by the cherry-picked quote from the Holocaust survivor, does not only belie the truth, but creates the impression that this community is unreasonably discriminatory.

As a follow-up, Mrs. Zabar is quoted as saying: “I want people to see Israeli Arabs as human beings,” she said. “Not just as human beings — as citizens that contribute to the vibrancy, the cultural life of Israel.” Wait a second. There is real discrimation against Israeli Arabs that needs to be addressed in Israel, but to say that Israel Arabs need to be seen as "human beings" is an insult to the plurality of Israelis and American-Jews who yearn for Israeli-Arab integration into Israeli society rather than ethnic division.

In reality however, integration takes both the willingness of the majority to incorporate the minority as well as the willingness of the minority to integrate into the greater society. It is somewhat surprising then that "to form the festival Ms. Zabar collaborated with Mohammad Bakri, an Israeli Arab movie actor and director..." In 2002, Bakri directed the film "Jenin, Jenin," which disseminated and perpetuated the libel that Israeli perpetrated a massacre in the West Bank city of Jenin during "Operation Defensive Shield." In a July 2008 article posted on the staunchly anti-Israel website, "Electronic Intifada," Bakri denies any wrongdoing and defends his film. Then, exploiting anti-Semitic motifs, Bakri goes on to criticize the "Zionist media empire."

While Bakri may not be openly agitating for a binational solution or the elimination of the Jewish character of Israel (He is quoted in another article: "I don’t want to live in an Arab country and prefer to live in Israel; at least there is a space of fake democracy I can play with, in Arab countries even this space does not exist."), victomology and demonization of the greater society will not lead to integration.

In that light, it is difficult to accept the article's closing statements in which Ms. Zabar says that she mainly wants "to change the attitude among many Jews that Arabs are 'the enemy, that they want to push the Jews into the sea.'" Firstly, to paint the general Jewish representation of Israeli-Arabs in such a manner is untruthful. Secondly, majority-minority relations is not a one-way street. Some Israeli Jews, as well as some in the American Jewish community, can do much more to lessen discrimination against Israeli-Arabs. At the same time though, if the Israeli-Arab community is going to dwell in victimization that leads to demonization of Israel if not rejection and violence against the state, communal harmony will never be achieved.