3 min read
ByDavid Aaronovitch, David Aaronovitch
'This appears to be a series that conveys a terrible truth, which is that when people hit the streets yelling “Death to the Arabs!”, one day someone will say, “So, let’s kill an Arab”.'
September 5, 2019 14:55I want to start this piece with two familiar propositions, which at first sight bear only passing relationship to each other. Number one is the often repeated statement— subject of a million tweets and Facebook posts, and now even of a book — that accusations of antisemitism have been cynically “weaponised” as ways of damaging legitimate critics of Israel or otherwise unimpeachable anti-racists such as Jeremy Corbyn. Number two is the familiar assertion that Israel is not just a democracy, but a liberal democracy in which artistic expression and internal criticism — even when uncomfortable — are positively valued.
Hold these in your mind while we consider the new drama series called Our Boys, made by Keshet, Israel’s Channel 12, showing at the moment in Israel, and now bought by HBO Europe and therefore coming to a British screen very near your living room.
The subject is the circumstances leading up to and following the real-life murder of a 16 year old boy, abducted from a Jerusalem street in July 2014, whose partly burned body was found within hours in a wooded area near the city. The boy was an Arab, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, and his killers turned out to be three Jewish settlers, two of whom were minors. The murder had been motivated out of a desire for revenge for the terrible murders a few weeks earlier of three Israeli teenagers, Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach and Naftali Frankel.
I have not seen any of the episodes in this series, but one American critic describes it as “a study in cognitive dissonance. Story-wise, it questions the hypocrisies of racism, tribalism, blood libel and religious extremism.” A writer for Ha’aretz wrote that “I’d call it the most painful but strangely rewarding show of the year, one that is not afraid to go to some very dark places in the country’s psyche.”
But last week the Israeli Prime Minister called upon Israelis to boycott the show altogether. Writing on his Facebook page, Mr Netanyahu said he had been approached by families of the victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks who had objected to the programme, which he went on to describe as “antisemitic”. Since the series began, he wrote, “many of you have contacted me and asked what could be done. I have made my recommendation clear: Do not watch Keshet or its shows. This is the real answer in democracy, freedom of choice to watch and freedom of choice not to watch.”
In most democracies senior politicians do not recommend boycotting TV programmes. The more usual stance is to advise viewers to make up their own minds. Indeed Mr Netanyahu could have made something of the second proposition that I began this piece with — that it is precisely the fact that Israel can produce works like this, that elevates it to the top rank of countries worth defending. Instead Netanyahu, already embroiled with Channel 12 in a row about its coverage of his legal travails, and fresh from failing in an attempt to stop its journalists from reporting on damaging leaks about charges that might lead to his criminal indictment, decided to drop the A-S bomb.
As I said, I haven’t seen the series, but what can possibly be in it to justify the claim of antisemitism? Does it repeat those infamous tropes about Jewish financial power, back-room manipulation and love of money? Does it seek to depict Jews as akin to Nazis?
Not from any of the reviews I’ve seen. What it does seem to be is very uncomfortable, depicting what can happen when people are fired up by group hatred.
In this case the people were Jews. So this appears to be a series that conveys a terrible truth, which is that when people hit the streets yelling “Death to the Arabs!”, one day someone will say, “So, let’s kill an Arab”.
It is a unique quality of late-period Bibi-ism that it should manage simultaneously to damage a claim that redounds to his country’s credit — artistic fearlessness —while seeming to vindicate one of the most damaging accusations aimed at Jews in the diaspora, that they deflect fair criticism with unjustified accusations of antisemitism.
To me it signifies yet again what I think I have long known — which is that the Israeli populist Right does not give a bent dredl for the situation of Jews around the world who actually have to confront and deal with manifestations (some of them wonderfully subtle) of Jew-hatred.
But you know, what after all would Bibi and the antisemites do without each other?
David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times