Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Hollywood seems to have retained a liberal image despite the deeply reactionary content of the majority of its output. With an extraordinarily early start to the presidential race, Democratic presidential hopefuls are already seeking alliances, and the crucial financial backing, among the ranks of Hollywood’s rich and famous. Clinton, Obama, Edwards; they all seem to be vying for the same dollars, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, come in sums no serious candidate could ignore.

The entertainment industry gave federal candidates $22 million in 2006 donations, according to the Web site opensecrets.org. That’s more than either drug companies or the oil and gas industry.

The liberal veneer of Hollywood could be quite deceiving, as John Edwards discovered to his chagrin; Hollywood may hold liberal views on many things but one issue it blithely dispenses with such pretences: Israel. Vareity magazines reports on one recent reception honouring John Edwards:

The aggressively photogenic John Edwards was cruising along, detailing his litany of liberal causes last week until, during question time, he invoked the “I” word — Israel. Perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace, Edwards remarked, was the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. As a chill descended on the gathering, the Edwards event was brought to a polite close.

The Dreamworks trio of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen are all backing Obama, whose views have undergone a transformation from fairly critical to obsequiously supportive on the question of Israel. Spielberg, of course, is the director of famous Zionist propaganda, like Munich (While Spielberg sold his sophisticated propaganda as a “balanced” view of the conflict, the extent of his dissent is evident in the fact that during Israel’s brutal assault on Lebanon, he signed a statement along with other Tinseltown heavies, pledging his unequivocal support for the campaign of mass murder). David Geffen’s “philanthropic” ventures include funding Jewish immigrants from former Soviet Union and Ethiopia to help them settle on illegally occupied Palestinian lands.

Hillary Clinton on the other hand is courting Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media mogul who is the highest donor in the Democratic Party’s history. Besides his massive media empire, and pro-Israel think-tanks, Saban is known for statements such as “I am a one issue guy and my issue is Israel”. In the year 2,000 alone he donated $12.3 million to the Democratic party.

Obama also has the support of Ari Emanuel (Michael Moore’s agent for the deeply flawed Fahrenheit 9/11, a putative critique of American role in the Middle East which didn’t mention Israel once), brother of Rahm Emanuel, the pro-War Democratic hawk who served in the Israel military. Ari is also a signatory to the aforementioned letter in support of Israel’s destruction of Lebanon.

Reel Bad Arabs

But this, of course, is merely one aspect of Hollywood’s pro-Israel activism. It is the role that it plays in historical engineering, shaping public perceptions and reinforcing anti-Arab/Muslim stereotypes that it does real damage. Jack Shaheen did an excellent study of more than 250 films to show the persistence of cultural stereotypes, reductive interpretation of current affairs and essentialization of people from the East in his book Reel Bad Arabs (Some of the typical Hollywood representations of Arabs have been compiled in this amusing video collage).

The role played by just a single film, Exodus, in shaping Western perceptions of the Israeli state have been instrumental in erasing Palestinian history and the manner of their dispossession.  In a two part analysis of Zionism in cinema, Larry Portis writes:

How can the “Western democracies” continue to participate in the genocidal punishment of a population while proclaiming the purest of intentions? One of the reasons is the power of Zionist propaganda over those who lack alternative information and the political fear and hypocrisy that it can inspire in those who understand what is happening. Of the modern means of communication and the formation of consciousness, the cinema is pre-eminent and, in the case of the Zionist state of Israel, one film in particular has been remarkably influential.

In the first chapter of his brilliant book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, Norman Finkelstein dissects the racist stereotypes of Arabs that litter Leon Uris’s novel on which the film was based. This book, according to Kathleen Christison, “had an immense influence on an entire generation of Americans”.Could it be that these racist assumptions are less an evidence of the author’s malice than of his ignorance? Larry Portis continues:

It was Dore Schary, a top executive at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) who suggested the idea for the book to Leon Uris. As Kathleen Christison explains, [in her book Perceptions of Palestine] the whole project “began with a prominent public-relations consultant who in the early 1950s decided that the United States was too apathetic about Israel’s struggle for survival and recognition.” Thanks to Schary, Uris received a contract from Doubleday and went to Israel and Cyprus where he carried out extensive research. The book was published in September, 1958. It was first re-printed in October the following year. By 1964, it had gone through 30 printings. This success was undoubtedly helped by the film’s release in 1960, but not entirely, as Uris’s novel was a book-of-the-month club selection in September 1959 (which perhaps explains the first re-printing).

The film was to be made by MGM. But when the time came, the studio hesitated. The project was perhaps too political for the big producers. It was then that Otto Preminger bought the screen rights from MGM. He produced and directed the film, featuring an all-star cast including Paul Newman, Eva Marie-Saint, Lee J. Cobb, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford and other box-office draws of the moment. The film also benefited from a lavish production in “superpanavision 70” after having been filmed on location. The music was composed by Ernest Gold, for which he received an Academy Award for the best music score of 1960. The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo. In spite of its length—three and a half hours—the film was a tremendous popular and critical success.

It is noteworthy that the release of Exodus the film in 1960 indicates that its production began upon Exodus the book’s publication. It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose a degree of coordination, in keeping with the origins of the project.

The film was a major success, both politically and financially: the book sold about 20 million copies whereas the film has been seen by hundreds of millions (a Venezuelan friend was telling me recently that it would play on their national TV every christmas). Not only did it shape Western perceptions of the Israel-Palestine conflict, it also embedded the myth of the Zionists prevailing in the face of overwhelming odds to establish a Jewish state (In fact, the Haganah [Jewish milita] far outnumbered the combine military forces of all the Arab states in ’48). The Holocaust is milked in the film for maximum propaganda value, even though in Israel itself, holocaust survivors were referred to disaparagingly as “soap” at the time (only last year, Ha’aretz was reporting that 40% of the holocaust survivors in Israel still live below the poverty line). The choice of the names for the protagonists suggests the writers wanted to leave nothing to the imagination.

Commenting on the ”routine bestialisation of Arabs and Muslims” in cinema, Robert Fisk wrote:

Yes, the film O Jerusalem … has reached Europe (mercifully, not yet Britain) and it is everything we have come to expect of the Hollywoodisation of Europe. It is dramatic; it stars the French singer Patrick Bruel as an Israeli commander; there is a flamboyant David Ben-Gurion – all white hair defying gravity – and Saïd Taghmaoui and JJ Feild as that essential duo of all such movies, the honourable, moderate, kind-hearted Arab (Saïd Chahine) and Jew (Bobby Goldman) whose friendship outlives the war between them.

We are used to this pair, of course. Exodus, based on Leon Uris’s novel of the same 1948 events, contained a “good” Arab who befriends Paul Newman’s Jewish hero, just as Ben Hur introduced us to a “good” Arab who lends Charlton Heston’s Jehuda Ben Hur his horses to compete in the chariot race against the nastiest centurion in the history of the Roman Empire. Once we have established that there are “good” Arabs with hearts of gold, we are, of course, free to concentrate on the rotten kind. They murder a young woman in Exodus and they also kill a brave young woman during the battle for Latroun in O Jerusalem…

You only have to watch the Arab slave-trader film Ashanti, again filmed in Israel and starring Roger Moore and (of all people) Omar Sharif, to see Arabs portrayed, Nazi-style, as murderers, thieves and child molesters. Anti-Semitism against Arabs – who are, of course, also Semites – is par for the course in movies…

No, what I object to is the deliberate distortion of history, the twisting of the narrative of events to present Jews as the victims of the Israeli war of independence (6,000 dead) when in fact they were the victors, and the Arabs of Palestine – or at least that part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 – as the cause of this war and the apparent victors (because the Jews of East Jerusalem were forced from their homes after the ceasefire) rather than the principal victims. Take, for example, the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, where the Stern gang murdered the Arab villagers of what is now the Jerusalem suburb of Givat Shaul, disembowelled women and threw grenades into rooms full of civilians. In O Jerusalem, the Stern gang is represented as a gang of wicked men, a kind of Jewish al-Qa’ida, hopelessly out of touch with the mainstream Israeli army of young, high-minded guerrilla fighters.

In the movie, you see the bodies of the dead Arabs – and a wounded woman later being treated by an Israeli – but at no point is it made clear that Deir Yassin was just one among many villages in which the inhabitants were butchered – this was particularly the case in Galilee – and the women raped by Jewish fighters. Israel’s “new” historians have already bravely disclosed these facts, along with the irrefutable evidence that they served Israel’s purpose of dispossessing 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes in what was to become Israel. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has courageously referred to this period as one of “ethnic cleansing”. But no such suggestion sullies the scene of slaughter at Deir Yassin in O Jerusalem.

Reality has to be separated from us. Thus a massacre that became part of a policy has been turned in the movie into an aberration by a few armed extremists. Indeed, after the film ends, a series of paragraphs on the screen bleakly record the dispossession of the Palestinians as a result of “Arab propaganda”. This itself is a myth. Yet again, Israeli historians have already disproved the lie that the Arab regimes told Palestinian Arabs over the radio that they should leave their homes “until the Jews have been thrown into the sea”. No such broadcasts were made. Most Palestinians fled because they were frightened of ending up like the people of Deir Yassin. The propaganda about radio broadcasts was Israeli, not Arab.

It’s as if a blanket, a curtain, a veil has been thrown over history – so that the shadow of real events is just visible, but their meaning so distorted as to be incomprehensible. “So this is why you wanted guns,” Bobby Goldman shouts at the Stern leader amid the dead of Deir Yassin. And he’s wrong. The guns enabled the Stern gang to murder the Arabs of Deir Yassin to produce the panic that sent three quarters of a million Palestinians on the road to permanent exile

Speaking of the influence of these representations of the Arabs and Muslims, Kathleen Christison had written:

The basic set of assumptions that has governed policymaking on this issue is an enveloping blanket of tightly knit impressions, perceptions, and fixed ideas that’s virtually impossible to unravel. It did not all just start in 1948; it is not a matter only of a very strong pro-Israel lobby; it’s not only the influence of a very manipulative media. These are all part of it, but the frame of reference through which policymakers have always shaped policy began to develop well before 1948, and it’s a much broader phenomenon than just skillful lobbying or media misinformation.

With aspiring politicans required to genuflect to this powerful lobby and its approved narrative, can the West ever be trusted to play the role of an honest broker in the Middle East?