“Zionism is a form of white supremacism,” stated the anti-Israel activist Emily Siegel at Arlington, Virginia’s Central Library for a July 15 screening of an online filmed version of It’s What We Do: A Play about the Occupation. Her slanderous condemnation of Zionism exemplified the rabid Israel-hatred of this play and its post-screening discussion audience of about 40 people filling a conference room.
The screening’s woman moderator from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) set the tone at the outset by thanking the event’s various like-minded radical, anti-Israel sponsors. These included local representatives of JVP, Code Pink, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), as well as the annual Washington, DC-area anti-Israel Voices from the Holy Land (VFHL) film series. Play director Pamela Nice, a typically non-Jewish member of JVP and regular VFHL participant who attends the nearby St. George’s Episcopal Church, introduced the film as a “docudrama.”
As Nice indicated at the screening and has previously explained, her play, which has won praise at Washington, DC’s Capital Fringe art festival in 2015 and 2017, “is drawn directly from the testimonies” of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers. She relied namely upon the book Our Harsh Logic by a founder and current co-director of Breaking the Silence (BtS), a radical Israeli organization that has fraudulently made unsubstantiated accusations of Israeli war crimes. A BtS spokesman himself fabricated stories about beating a Palestinian during the spokesman’s military service, an incident that casts considerable doubt upon BtS’ anonymous reports from IDF soldiers.
As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has noted, the play is “repackaging Breaking the Silence’s anonymous, unverifiable accusations” for an “anti-Israel hit-job.” While the Palestinian-American political activist Jamal Najjab at the library screening spoke falsely about a “brutal, brutal occupation,” the play ignores the fact that Israeli authorities in recent decades have ceded self-rule to most of the Palestinian population. Military experts have also testified to the IDF’s high ethics, while Nice has, in contrast, ludicrously asserted that Hamas rocket attacks on Israel are an “organic, deadly outgrowth of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
The play’s BtS soldier testimonies portray in a one-sided evil manner IDF operations amidst Palestinians in the disputed territories won by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. The soldier characters read lines such as “every time there is some kind of breach, ethical breach, someone closes their eyes” and claim that to “disrupt and harass people’s lives” is the IDF mission. Statements such as “I was such a racist there” and “I have to flip a switch in my brain so that I can keep hating the Arabs” brand IDF soldiers as mere bigots. Another IDF character line absurdly states that Hamas terror-tunneling from the Gaza Strip into Israel “is actually an act of despair. Wherever tunnels are dug, people are desperate.”
The play’s IDF characters equally vilify Jews who settle in these disputed territories comprising the ancestral Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria as “criminals,” for “it’s illegal for you to even be here.” Holocaust inversion makes ugly appearances, as one soldier says that the “settlers are the biggest Jewish Nazis I have ever met” while discussing alleged Jewish arson attacks on mosques, and that settler parents teach their children to “hate the Arabs.” Without any concerns for cultural appropriation, one of Najjab’s character roles in the play includes a settler in Orthodox Jewish clothing holding an M-16 assault rifle who cries “Arabs to crematoria.” One IDF character, meanwhile, repeats the canard of “Jewish-only roads all over the West Bank.”
The post-screening discussion at the Arlington Central Library made no critical improvement upon the play. One man wearing a “Veterans for Peace” shirt praised the deranged Israel-hater Max Blumenthal and his book Goliath: Fear and Loathing in Greater Israel. “Israel is one of the most racist states,” something that “goes back to what the concept was, a Jewish state,” the man stated.
Other inflammatory statements from the audience included the claim that the “Jews are acting for the Palestinians just like the Nazis acted toward them” and that “Israel is inciting the anger and the violence that is threatened against them all the time.” Another audience member supposedly claimed what are the two “foundational principles of this racist colonial Zionism that we are experiencing today that is dying of cancer.” These are namely that Jews “are God’s chosen people, we are better than anyone else” and that “the other is demonized, dehumanized, as the enemy.”
As one of the screening presenters, Siegel responded negatively to the audience question of “is there any form of Zionism that can accommodate Palestinian human rights?” “The Zionist movement was a European, white, Jewish movement, colonial movement,” she stated, while racist Zionists merely haphazardly “sort of zoned into the area of Palestine” among possible settlement areas globally. “There is no form of Zionism that can accommodate another people,” the JVP moderator concurred. Najjab likewise distorted the classically liberal Zionist founding father Vladimir Jabotinsky’s thinking on the Arabs’ relationship to a Jewish state as simply “these people are going to be forced out.”
The panelists, including Siegel, who noted that Israeli authorities have denied her entry into Israel due to her support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, presented Israeli Jews as simple fear-mongers. “In Israel they are always looking for some enemy; it’s Palestinians; it’s Iran, now it’s the BDS movement,” she stated, as if Israel faced no jihadist threats in its neighborhood. The JVP moderator shockingly added that the unparalleled Nazi genocide of the
Holocaust is exploited terribly in Israel as a way of brainwashing people and getting people to live in fear of another Holocaust so that they will accept any policy no matter how undemocratic, no matter how awful rather than have another Holocaust.
The panelists naively recommended that Jews abandon any group solidarity such as Zionism’s Jewish national liberation movement and seek protection by assimilating into a wider humanism. Siegel spun myths about a pre-Zionist Jerusalem under the Ottoman Empire’s Muslim domination in which “Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared the city in a very harmonious way.” The JVP moderator approvingly paraphrased the arguments of the anti-Israel Brant Rosen from JVP’s Rabbinical Council that
solidarity with other peoples is the only way that one persecuted Jew can protect itself, by identifying with and being in solidarity with other persecuted groups and fighting for equality for everyone, that’s the only way, and unfortunately, it’s the exact opposite of Zionism.
With screenings of It’s What We Do, haters such as the JVP have put their demonization of Israel on center stage under the glare of spotlights. Israel’s defenders in local communities in Washington, DC, and beyond should not fail to notice. JVP and assorted jihad-enabling radicals deserved to be panned.