The ignorance and idiocy of Hollywood’s Israel boycott

In Israel, there is a thriving television and film industry, which in recent years has become admired around the world. If you are one of the few people who have not watched the thriller, Fauda, a global sensation in Hebrew and Arabic that is particularly popular in the Arab world, binge it immediately; a new season is due for release in the coming months.

Shtisel is another example of Israeli creativity, though in a very different way; it is a profound and reflective series about life in ultra-orthodox Jerusalem. And the brilliant Hatufim, or Prisoners of War, which was the model for American smash hit Homeland, is harder to track down but well worth the effort.

For those with arthouse tastes, I’d recommend The Band’s Visit, a lovely little film about the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra travelling from Egypt to perform in Israel and getting lost in a small town in the Negev desert.

Good stuff. It’s no surprise, really. As the only democracy in the Middle East, which faces enemies on every border and holds a remarkable history of anguish and triumph, the Jewish State has much material on which to draw.

The fact that it has a vibrant gay scene – Tel Aviv hosts one of the best Pride parades on Earth, I’m told – is testament to its liberal heart, despite the far-right thugs temporarily in its governing coalition. And where you find an open society, you find a vibrant arts scene.

Palestine, not so much. Whether on the West Bank or in Gaza, this is a place where it can be fatal to be homosexual. This was appallingly demonstrated by the 2022 murder of Ahmad Abu Marhia, a gay Palestinian who was kidnapped from Israel where he was seeking refuge, dragged back to Hebron and beheaded.

Television programmes and films are produced by Palestinians, of course, but suffice to say that none of them has appealed to Western tastes. Our enthusiasm for their culture seems limited to that which we can appropriate, like the keffiyeh. Anything that requires a deeper engagement with the autocratic society that has laboured so long under corrupt and brutal leaders is rather more tricky.

What I’m getting at is this. If an alien descended and was asked whether actors in the West would tend to boycott the democracy or the extremist state, it surely would plump for the latter. The values of toleration, individual rights and free association that we hold most dear must surely be promoted.

You know where I’m going with this. This week, 1,300 actors and filmmakers including Olivia Colman, Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton signed a pledge to boycott Israeli film companies (which, tending to be rather left-wing, oppose Benjamin Netanyahu and the war in Gaza with greater venom than anybody else).

In a depressing coda, when Sky News reported on the story it saw fit to mention that ‘the world’s leading association of genocide scholars, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, declared Israel is committing genocide in Gaza last week’.

Now, to anybody with half a brain, such a statement sounds a bit rum. For one thing, how many people could mention the runner-up in the title for ‘world’s leading associations of genocide scholars’? Is there some kind of pageant? Or had the group been put together to bash Israel?

Lo and behold, it turned out that you could join this ‘association’ for a few quid without any qualifications; its membership soared after 7 October; a great deal of its members are unknown persons from Iraq; and one person joined under the name ‘Adolf Hitler’. Either Sky News knows this and ignores it, or it doesn’t know it and can’t do journalism.

Any true intellectual investigation of the spurious ‘genocide’ claims – as a statement by more than a thousand true experts confirmed in response to the ‘association’, but was not covered in the media – will find that it collapses very quickly indeed.

But what use are true intellectual investigations when there’s a country to hate? As Saul Bellow once remarked, ‘a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep’.

Or perhaps that is dignifying these actors and filmmakers with too much hinterland. It isn’t even about anything as grand as ideology, is it? It’s simply about their self-image.

As ever, Israel and Gaza have become little more than political ciphers, culturally appropriated by the very people who scream most loudly about cultural appropriation. They are badges, symbols, postures. They are the asymmetrical haircut of our age, and they are turning us against ourselves.

Now that’s what I call culture wars.

Jake Wallis Simons is a journalist and the author of Never Again: How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself.