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Last year, I wrote in these pages about the wonderful array of talent bursting through the Israeli film industry, and the appalling lack of wider attention being paid to any of that country's cinematic offerings that did not focus on the situation with the Palestinians.
That still goes. But I've recently returned from the Sundance Film Festival where two (out of three) Israeli films presented the situation from the Palestinian viewpoint.
One, a documentary called The Law In These Parts, won a coveted Grand Jury prize. I didn't see it. I didn't have time but, also, in some ways I couldn't bring myself to. According to the blurb, it documents the way that Israeli law is skewed against the Palestinians in the "occupied territories".
I will see it, and I'm sure as a piece of film-making it has much to recommend it. But here's my general point. I didn't see it because I'm fed up. I'm fed up with every film we've heard of about Israel and the Palestinians, or the Arabs, being from the Palestinian, Arab or the generally Israel-bashing viewpoint - from Waltz With Bashir on.
It's not just films. After Caryl Churchill's anti-Israel (some say antisemitic) play Seven Jewish Children, what was the pro-Israel camp's response? The replies - Deb Margolin's Seven Palestinian Children, Richard Stirling's Seven Other Children - were not, like Churchill's play, on at the Royal Court but at less prestigious venues. It needed a writer of similar fame - Ronald Harwood, say, or David Mamet - for attention to be paid.
The Israeli side doesn't sit well with decent people
I go to my local Waterstones and Joe Sacco's graphic novel Palestine yells out at me, as do shelves of books critical of Israel by the likes of Robert Fisk or Noam Chomsky. Yet the commentaries from the opposing camp are few and far between. Very occasionally, an Alan Dershowitz book is allowed on to the shelves, or one by Melanie Phillips, or perhaps Robin Shepherd's A State Beyond the Pale. But their presence is nothing compared to that of their opponents.
Let's look further afield. In opera, several productions of the classics have equated various historical transgressions with Israel's behaviour. Most recently there was Rossini's Moses in Egypt, re-imagined by the director Graham Vick, depicting Moses as a militant fundamentalist. It was premiered in Pesaro, and then promptly, and unsurprisingly, its scheduled New Israeli Opera staging was pulled.
There are simple but deep-rooted reasons why anti-Israel narratives are so predominant in the arts. The Israeli side doesn't sit comfortably with concerned, decent-minded people these days, telling what, on the face of it, is the story of the victors.
Bearing in mind the undoubted suffering of many Palestinians today, would I really be inclined to write, say, a television play about Israel's success in the Six-Day War? Yes, it could get across the fact that (in contrast to various revisionist accounts) the Israeli first strike was undoubtedly pre-emptive. And it could even point out that the capture of further lands in 1967 was entirely justified and the responsibility of those who attacked and in some cases continue to attack Israel. But how would it feel, telling that story? Like rubbing the noses of the defeated further in their own catastrophe? That's not cricket.
Then there's the visceral dimension. A drama depicting a people whose lands have been stolen by imperialist forces, complete with brave resistance fighters and martyred heroes? That's dramatic, that's an easy sell.
But how do you make drama out of the fact that the Palestinians have been offered almost everything they have demanded from Israel at least twice and turned these offers down? Is that inherently the stuff of a great stage or screen epic? And good luck conveying that message in a restaging of Verdi's Nabucco.
So the odds are stacked against any narrative cultural effort to redress the balance. But be redressed it must. There is nothing wrong, and much right, with criticisms of Israeli society (as any society) being brought to light through the arts. But unless there are voices on both sides, we're not talking about the market-place of ideas.
We're talking about one group shouting everybody else down. And that helps nobody.
