Song of Songs director Josh Appignanesi responds to Ken Loach's recent statement in favour of a cultural boycott of Israel:

The suffering that Israel has in one way or another inflicted on the Palestinian people is completely unacceptable and the current situation in the territories is a political and humanitarian scandal that must be brought to an end. The disgusting recent war with Hizbollah has taken a shocking and entirely unnecessary human toll. But it is precisely at such times that we need to remain cool-headed and clear in our response. And so it was with some disappointment but no great surprise that I heard that Ken Loach, a filmmaking institution in himself, has added his voice to calls to boycott state-sponsored Israeli cultural institutions. In his recent open letter, he added that he “would decline any invitation to the Haifa Film Festival or other such occasions.” His letter is far from clear about what the boycott hopes to achieve, and why he is asking us to sign up to it, apart from the fact that it is “impossible to ignore the appeals from Palestinian comrades.”

Let’s leave aside Mr Loach’s ill-advised attempt to cast these matters in the language of the barricades sure to rouse his red-diaper peers, and take him at face value. The comradely appeals he refers to presumably include the recent petition signed by the cream of Palestinian filmmakers. Cannes winner Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention), Golden Globe winner Dutch-Palestinian Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now) – important, fascinating films – and many other interesting filmmakers put their names to it. It’s worth quoting at length.

We, the undersigned Palestinian filmmakers and artists, appeal to all artists and filmmakers of good conscience around the world to cancel all exhibitions and other cultural events that are scheduled to occur in Israel, to mobilize immediately and not allow the continuation of the Israeli offensive to breed complacency. Like the boycott of South African art institutions during apartheid, cultural workers must speak out against the current Israeli war crimes and atrocities.

We call upon the International community to join us in the boycott of Israeli film festivals, Israeli public venues, and Israeli institutions supported by the government, and to end all cooperation with these cultural and artistic institutions that to date have refused to take a stand against the Occupation, the root cause for this colonial conflict.

The letter should be seen in its wider context of recent academic and cultural boycotts, supported by a range of organisations including PACBI, and including threats to picket film festivals such as Edinburgh, which were successful in getting said festivals to publicly turn down the Israeli state funding they had previously accepted in order to bring Israeli filmmakers to the festivals to show their films. Many of the statements of these other organisations make the problems and contradictions raised by the language of the letter look incredibly subtle by comparison. But let’s look at this letter first.

If the letter were simply a call to end the occupation, or a call to filmmakers to speak out for the end of the occupation, or an appeal for the condemnation of violence, that would be one thing. But of course it is much more than that. It’s a classic rhetorical ploy to hide a contentious statement inside a less contentious one. Is the occupation really the ‘root cause of the conflict’? And is the conflict ‘colonial’?

I don’t want to get bogged down in these questions, merely to point out that they are part of complex, ongoing debates. The raison d’etre of a given cultural institution is not, in the majority of cases, to have to deal with such debates or declare a ‘position’ on them. The Israel Film Council is not a think tank designed to sort out the problems of Israel-Palestine. It exists to fund, guide and promote filmmaking in Israel, like Film Councils in any other country.

There certainly are nuanced, on-the-ground arguments to be made about, for example, whether the bodies of the Israel Film Council fund enough Palestinian films. Or one can talk about the difficulty of funding Palestinian films if filmmakers prefer to fund them without being made into a ‘joint Israeli-Palestinian’ artistic project, because they value self-determination, fear encroachments onto their freedom of speech, and so on. But sweeping boycotts aren’t about this kind of committed, detailed political activism.

It is important to ask, who is this boycott really going to affect? Let me quote Goel Pinto, someone much more qualified to speak about the detail than I am, in Ha’aretz recently:

“[is it] against Alon Garboz, the director of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, the man who with his own body blocked demonstrators who protested the screening of Mohammed Bakri's "Jenin, Jenin," despite its distortions of fact? Against Pnina Bleyer, director of the Haifa International Film Festival, who has for years presented films, even insignificant ones, because they were made in Algeria, Morocco or Palestine? Or perhaps it is against filmmakers in Israel, many of whom have proved over the last decade, even during the most difficult days of the intifada, that cultural dialogue is possible even in at a time of violent confrontation?

The point is that the boycott does only not affect Israeli film people, many of whom have for years been among the opponents of the occupation of the territories, but also the Palestinians themselves, as the example of Ibtisam Mara'ana shows. Does the call for a ban mean that "Paradise Now" should not be screened just because one of its producers, Amir Harel, is Israeli? And what about Palestinian filmmaker George Khleifi? Is his signature on the petition also aimed at the film "Route 181," directed by his brother Michel Khleifi, together with Eyal Sivan? Or perhaps his call for a boycott also extends to the book "Landscape in Mist: Space and Memory in Palestinian Cinema," which his brother wrote together with Nurit Gertz, because it was put out by the Am Oved publishing house?

It’s an obvious but essential point: these actions affect the very people who we cannot afford to boycott, sometimes to the point of de facto censorship. The boycott ends up attacking crucial spaces for dissent, dialogue, free speech, and complex analysis, in the very places we need them most. In the case of artistic institutions, it’s also a boycott of visions of the world that are not inherently political, which refuse the totalising political vision of so many who involve themselves in these matters.

Even if one subscribes to a politically puritanical ideal of ‘untainted’ funding only, it’s unclear exactly how to run cultural or academic institutions of any kind without some involvement of the State in a country like Israel. I personally attended the Jerusalem film festival this year with a film of mine. I found it to be a very diverse event, in parts quite radicalised, in any case with many of the organisers and participants seeing their support of pro-Palestinian voices as a proud part of their Israeli identity. Many of the films in question, including anti-occupation or pro-Palestinian ones, wouldn’t have got made at all without some form of Israeli involvement, be that in the form of committed individual producers or of Israeli state involvement at some level. Nor would a festival like Jerusalem and its year round Cinematheque exist at all without the State’s support. We need filmmakers from all over the world to attend these cultural events, to talk to each other, and to bring them into a more not less public field. To draw attention to what they’re doing, not silence it. I can also tell you that I and most filmmakers I know, particularly working in the more ‘committed’ end of the fiction business and in documentary, would not be able to afford to attend festivals at all if either the festival itself or one’s national ministry or council didn’t pay for them.

The proposed and actual boycotts are likely to have, overall, a detrimental effect in the struggle for peace and for dialogue. The lingering effect of these actions will be the damaging alienation of the Israeli left, key agents for change in the area, from the global left, feeling as they do that their projects are misunderstood and delegitimised by outsiders who know very little of the detailed situation and who sometimes appear to be engaged in self-satisfied political theme-park-ism.

More profoundly concerning are the often un-voiced assumptions at the heart of the pro-boycott discourse. What is implicitly or explicitly being commanded is that state institutions must declare the state is illegitimate. This is something made even clearer in the various calls for an academic boycott. Leave aside that this is tautologous to the point of absurdity – a state institution successfully upholding the illegitimacy of its existence is clearly no longer a state institution. What the people behind the boycott are trying to enforce is the creeping delegitimization of the state of Israel itself.

One can only wonder why the world is being asked to rally to boycott Israel in lieu of say, Turkey, Iran, Zimbabwe and China. Perhaps those nations have been around long enough to be able to trample human rights constantly without their existence being drawn into question? Strange that the concerned Western Left, in which I would like to include myself, can trust itself to distinguish between creator, creation, specific institution, and regime in these other cases, but not in that of Israel. Or is there something else at play?

The letter’s comparison to South Africa is telling. One would think the fact that state-funded Israeli cultural and academic institutions support a decent range of dissenting voices would be taken as a sign of a relatively free state, rather than the ‘apartheid’ so many claim. No doubt, individuals and institutions alike could certainly do more in Israel for dialogue and for peace. But it’s hard to imagine the old South African regime even tolerating let alone supporting black filmmakers of any kind, let alone anti-state ones. Nor do the current Iranian or Chinese regimes exactly have a great track record in supporting diverse artistic statements or political points of view. Whereas, generally speaking, Israeli film festivals can claim to be foremost in the world in supporting Palestinian voices, pro-Palestinian voices, and in many case varied middle-Eastern voices of all descriptions.

It has become dangerously comforting and easy to sign up to such a boycott or petition in the name of ‘justice’ without reading the time-consuming small print where, in fact, the justice of accurate argumentation is so often replaced by rhetorical language disguising deeply confused and problematic political positions. In any case, it’s doubtful the boycotts work, and they may just make it worse. The wrong people are affected, the debate is oversimplified, and the blame game rolls on. Speaking as an artist, my contribution hopes to assert the sanctity of the individual voice, and to complicate and call into question mass action, rather than to straightforwardly write its hagiography.

There is an onus on the famous to put their names to the teams they side with, even if they don’t agree with everything the team does or says. That can’t be easy. All the same, it would be nice if Mr. Loach, whose filmmaking I happen to find both inspiring and admirable, would reconsider what kind of actions might heretofore be considered revolutionary in this mixed-up world of greys on greys. Perhaps simply making a more detailed statement than he did would be a kind of bloodless revolution, in the name of nuance, tact, consideration of complexity. Without these qualities, those of us more suspicious of barricades might wonder whether some people’s well-intentioned support of the disenfranchised allows itself to be reduced to a mere aspect of their cultural production, a piece of marketing so clever that it is disguised as such not only from the market, but from the producers themselves.

Viva la revolucion!

Josh Appignanesi, 28 August 2006