Hillel Schenker
On Thursday evening I went to the opening of the 10th annual Solidarity Human Rights film festival at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. The opening film was “The New Greatness Case”, an extraordinary documentary about repression in Russia by Anna Shishova, who fled with her family to Israel and was present at the screening.
The festival is the result of a wonderful initiative by my neighbor/friend Danny Vilensky, who lives around the corner on a street named after writer Zalman Schneur, all the streets in my neighborhood are named after writers – mine is Moses Hess, author of “Rome and Jerusalem”, and a good friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Opening night was an opportunity for people to get together in one space for the first time since the elections. I assume there wasn’t a single person among the few hundred people in the audience who voted for Netanyahu and his racist right-wing and ultra-Orthodox allies.
Pini Shatz, artistic director of the Cinematheque said “there may be some bigger film festivals in Israel, but this is the most important one, the only one dedicated to the defense and preservation of human rights.”
When the results of the Israeli elections came in, Tom Friedman wrote “The Israel We Knew Is Gone”. Well, we are clearly not giving up, though the immediate future looks very gloomy. My friend Harriet said “did you hear what Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai said on the radio? He won’t let this extreme right-wing government limit any of the freedoms that we have in Tel Aviv.” Zehava Galon, leader of the left Zionist Meretz party, which got 151,000 votes but lacked just 4,000 votes to pass the threshold to enable 4 members to get into the Knesset, was one of the speakers at the opening. The moderator was courageous actress Einat Weizmann who was number 6 on the Arab nationalist Balad party list which believes Israel should be “A state for all its citizens”, got 138,000 votes, also just missing the threshold. If the two parties had made it, liberal centrist journalist Yair Lapid would still be prime minister. The fact is that the anti-Netanyahu bloc actually got 30,000 more votes than Netanyahu’s bloc, shades of Hillary and Trump!
Kibbutz-born Haaretz columnist Uri Misgav says – “they won, so let’s see how they deal with the country’s genuine problems”. While former Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkott, a member of Benny Gantz’s opposition “National Unity Party” said in an interview this weekend “if they dare try to undermine our democracy, and try to politicize the army, a million people should take to the streets, and I’ll be one of them.”
At the Palestine-Israel Journal (www.pij.org), the only joint Israeli-Palestinian publication that I co-edit with my Palestinian colleague Ziad AbuZayyad, the new issue that will come out next week, “What Do We Do Now? Meeting Challenges, Defeating Despair”, is filled with ideas for initiatives for how to move forward. Many are still in a state of shock over the results of the elections, which could easily have been different. All is not lost. The struggle continues.