Loneliness of the Long Distance Propagandist

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A remarkable discussion has taken place on Meccsa, an academic mailing list for media, communications and cultural studies, sparked off by my previous blog, Behind the News from Gaza. With more than 150 messages in three days, very little of it had anything to do with what I actually wrote, and I’ve no complaint about that—it’s just one of the dynamics at work on the internet, and that’s what made it so interesting. The discussion was kicked off almost immediately by a doubting response from a list member in Israel, which gave me the feeling that she hadn’t read the full blog on Putney Debater but reacted impulsively to the snippet which appeared on the list. Thirty-six messages later, a correspondent posted the information that Elina Bardach-Yalov is listed on Linked In as a former Political Communications advisor for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Read more

Behind the News from Gaza

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When the issues become too sharp and the contradictions too blatant, the news media are severely challenged to contain them within normal bounds. They generally try to keep stories apart in order not to have them contaminate each other, but just recently this became impossible. The events in Gaza and Ukraine are not directly connected, yet in the mediasphere they became coupled by their coincidence in time and their jostling day by day for the top story slot. As a result, it was impossible not to see, for example, the shameless hypocrisy of the British Prime Minister berating France for selling warships to Russia while everyone’s military support for Israel continues unabated. In Britain’s case, it has emerged that the value of all British military exports to Israel currently being processed stands at £7.9 billion, including a single deal last year worth more than £7.7 billion for cryptographic technology. Read more

Avi Mograbi: A fly in the soup

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 Here’s a piece I’ve written on the Israeli documentarist for Sight & Sound:

Variety calls him a “gadfly documaker” and Cineaste quotes his own self-evaluation: “If some [filmmakers] see themselves as a fly on the wall, I see myself as a fly in the soup”. In short, he is a performative documentarist, like Nick Broomfield, Michael Moore or Nanni Moretti, who acts himself up on screen: a playful and self-deprecating video diarist with attitude — and split-screen personality disorder. Part of this attitude is a rejection of Zionist orthodoxies and solidarity with the Palestinians; part is a deep distrust of the orthodox idea of objectivity. Reality isn’t punctual. As Mograbi puts it, it is never there in itself and it’s always already being interpreted for us all the time. Besides, there is no such thing as a transparent camera; no way, for example, you can introduce a camera at a checkpoint without the soldiers noticing. The camera has a certain power: ”You can almost blackmail everyone into behaving better.” Whatever the situation, people respond to the camera, whether explicitly or not.But the intervention of the camera also has a tendency to backfire on you.

Read the full article: Chanan on Mograbi

Avi Mograbi

Avi Mograbi is a special guest at Open City Docs Fest in London (17-22 June). See opencitydocsfest.com for details.

Academic boycott exercises Israeli TV

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A current affairs programme on Israeli television is planning a report on reactions towards Israel’s policy in Gaza ‘taking place outside Israel, mainly in the UK’, and in particular, the call for an academic boycott. How I know is that I’m one of the people they’ve got in touch with to ask for my opinion. The email from the producer says ‘We’re trying to understand the intensity of this, the meaning of this, are there any concrete levels for that or [if] it’s a “silence boycott”, are there a group of academics organized acting together for this goal, or each one is protesting alone?’

This is my reply: Read more

Activists return; Osama tells his story

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Report on return of British members of Gaza aid flotilla attacked in international waters by Israeli commandos on 31 May 2010. Osama Qashoo recounts his experience.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqHz-Twu8hs]

A message from Osama

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June 3rd
Dear All
Your love and energy kept us strong all the way through to face the ugly face of hate, death and injustice

I am back again and tonight I saw the story for the first time on TV. I was not aware that you could see us as we did not know that people were watching us live and we are sooooooooo glad that our media strategy worked to reveal the true ugly face of Israel Read more

Release Osama Qashoo & the Gaza Flotilla activists

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The figure in this grab from C4 news on Monday evening of the scene aboard the Mavi Marmara at the moment of the Israeli attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, is Osama Qashoo, an award-winning documentary film-maker, a Palestinian peace activist from the West Bank, and a member of the Free Gaza Movement. He arrived in England in 2003 as a political refugee, gained a place at the National Film School, and now holds British nationality. Read more

Musical Protest

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A few days ago, a concert at the Wigmore Hall by the Jerusalem Quartet was interrupted by what the radio announcer (I happened to be listening to the live broadcast) called a disturbance. Turned out it was a protest by a group of anti-Zionist activists, one of whom, Tony Greenstein, subsequently explained on his blog that

we wanted to make a clear statement that those who aid and abet the murderous activities of the Israeli Occupation Forces cannot then claim some form of musical diplomatic immunity

— because the Quartet are not only ‘cultural ambassadors’ for Israel but they regularly perform for the troops of the Israeli army. [*]

Well, I’m all in favour of such protests, even once participated in one myself, and if I’d been there I would have applauded them. But I find that I now have to disagree strongly with Greenstein’s subsequent blog on the subject, which purports to give us the lowdown on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Read more