“Israelism” a dishonest, simplistic one-sided hack job

by Ellen Ginsberg Simon

Several months ago, I wrote about the disinformation campaign being peddled by the film “Israelism.” Well, I invested the $5 to watch it so you do not have to waste your money, time, or energy trying not to hurl a glass at your TV screen in disgust.

A brainchild of some the most virulently anti-Zionist activists on the scene today (think Noam Chomsky, Cornell West, Peter Beinart and Jeremy Ben Ami, each of whom get a cameo), the film purports to tell the story of how American Jews are indoctrinated from childhood to believe in Israel’s centrality to their Jewish identity, its necessity for the security of the Jewish people, and its utter perfection and flawlessness.

It fictionalizes a monolithic Jewish community, as if Jewish people across America all grow up under one form of education, one set of beliefs, one political and religious perspective, and one set of opinions. Naturally, those opinions and beliefs are simplistically and mindlessly accepting of everything Israel does and stands for, blindly loyal to a country across the world. It contends American children are so blindly loyal to Israel that they grow to feel such an irrational connection that they are willing to enlist in the IDF and die for this foreign land and foreign people.

It then portrays the so-called moral awakening of a handful of Jewish 20-somethings who reached college and had their minds blown by learning the words apartheid, colonialism, and occupation “for the first time in their lives.”

You read that correctly. They quite literally found the most ignorant, self-satisfied Jewish kids they could find, and put them on display to speak for all Jewish youth worldwide.

As a Jewish woman who once was a Jewish child educated in the same country, I can say this film does not speak for me. I’d wager it does not speak for 90 percent of American Jews. One of its most dangerous aspects is the fact that it portrays a teeny, inconsequential group of woke, poorly educated Jews as a significant movement.

I would like to take five minutes of your time to shred this movie on every level. Humor my ire.

The fallacies are never ending, the reduction of millions of people to the opinions of two is laughable, the inclusion of every woke, liberal slogan is just irritating, and the childish gloss over history so monumentally flawed that one wonders if the filmmakers insultingly think everyone who watches it is an uneducated dolt. In light of the current scene on college campuses, I suppose I can appreciate their low estimation of their target audiences.

The greatest irony of all, however, is that a movie claiming to pierce the veil of generations of “propagandizing” to American Jewish youth itself is quite possibly one of the most blatant works of anti-Zionist propaganda I’ve seen since the Ayatollah’s latest rant on X.

In their attempt to depict American Jewish education as a monolithic curriculum of youth movements, camps, and nefarious Jewish crafting projects, the film makers seem blind to the fact that they employ the stories of merely two American Jews and two Palestinian activists to represent the experiences of millions upon millions of people, as if entire cultures can be reduced in such an absurdly simplistic manner to the anecdotal experiences of two — did I mention it was two? — random Jewish kids.

I do not accuse work of being propaganda lightly. Having been educated at Oxford’s Middle East Center, however, I am rather adept at recognizing propaganda related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when I see it. I was forced to live and breathe it for two years.

So let’s start at the very beginning. I’ve been told by Julie Andrews that it’s a very good place to start.

What is the definition of propaganda?

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines propaganda as: information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people’s opinions.

No sentence better describes the content of “Israelism.” It does not offer a balanced review of a highly complex conflict. Rather, it cherry-picks stories, quotes, and bits of history to repaint reality into a grotesque, Picasso-esque patchwork mosaic of misrepresentation, bedtime fairy tale, and insulting demonization.

The disingenuous nature of the film shines through in its editing of statements by the purported purveyors of the evil, Zionist narrative — respected individuals like Abe Foxman, retired CEO of the ADL, and Rabbi Bennett Miller. The filmmakers actually hoodwinked respected Jewish community members into participating and then did a transparent hatchet job editing their comments to make them seem like purveyors of a despicable plot to mind-control Jewish youth with the ever-wicked Birthright trips.

Even their very best efforts to cut and paste sound bites to makes Israeli students, Hillel directors and community leaders look reprehensible fall surprisingly flat, however, because they are so laughably obvious. An Israeli young adult employed by Hillel at the University of Connecticut jokes that he is trying to help the “P.R.” image of Israel — cue the dystopian, somber music. One of the film’s protagonists — a girl named Simone Zimmerman who co-founded the anti-Zionist group If Not Now (but whose family’s name literally adorns a synagogue in Jerusalem) shows a blue crayon drawing she made in Jewish day school of a map of Israel as proof that she was never taught that Jews did not own all of the land.

It is slightly hard to believe, however, that someone who was admitted to UC Berkeley never once learned that Israel was any more complicated territorially than in the crayon drawing she made in third grade that she proudly displays as proof of her indoctrination. Apparently, she never learned anything about the Occupied Territories until she went to college, a college noted for its anti-Israel activism and currently under Department of Education investigation for Title VI violations related to its antisemitic hostile environment.

The audience is left to wonder whether she is simply obscenely ignorant and uneducated (believe me, in light of what we have seen in the past two months on college campuses, I do not discount the possibility) or simply lying to make her point.

Not only does the film generalize regarding how millions of American Jews are raised and come by their knowledge of Israel, but its conclusion that a whole new generation of Jewish youth are awakening to rebel against those lies grossly overstates the significance and size of this movement of self-loathers. Cornell West applauds the “new day” when young Jews are undergoing a “moral and spiritual awakening” to realize they do not want to perpetuate the hate Jews have faced. Noam Chomsky comments that Israel knows there is a sea change in the air in the younger generation, implying fear.

Let us be clear about one aspect of the current crisis facing Jews. These children may be loud on campuses right now, but make no mistake. They do not represent anything more than a fraction of the weakest minds who fell prey not to fairy tales told by their Hebrew School teachers, but rather to the reams of anti-Zionist propaganda peddled on U.S. college campuses by Students for Justice in Palestine and other Hamas and Qatari-funded quasi-terrorist organizations.

They are obnoxiously loud because their voices are augmented and magnified by those who take advantage of their naivety and pliant minds.

These kids swallowed propaganda, alright. Unfortunately, the propaganda that hooked them was the one that erases the legitimacy of Israel and sides wholesale with a Palestinian narrative that is not even honest about the history of the region’s wars. They are so weak-minded, they do not even grasp which propaganda has brainwashed them and the extent to which they are being used to harm their own people.

In a stellar moment demonstrating a complete dearth of self-awareness, Simone Zimmerman states, “How is it that I am, like, the best the Jewish community has to offer, I’ve been through all the trainings and the programs, and I don’t know what the occupation is, I don’t know what the settlements are.”

Oh honey. You are FAR from the best the community has to offer.

Simone reeducates herself by taking a tour of the West Bank with an anti-Zionist organization, as if replacing one form of purported indoctrination with another is a sound form of rounding out one’s education. The film shows a local Palestinian describing how Jews poison their water wells with chemicals and dead animals, and everyone on the tour shakes their head in disgust.

If you’re going to trounce out time-worn blood libels from medieval Europe, I’d like a refund of my $5 now please.

The two protagonists of the film — Simone and Eitan — are juxtaposed with two Palestinian activists, Beha and Sami. The latter two ostensibly represent the Palestinian perspective and people en masse. Soft-spoken with stylish scarves and stories of having visited Auschwitz, they play the role of the sole historians in the documentary.

History is told from one perspective alone — the Palestinian. While it is important to recognize that there are multiple historical narratives that very likely exist as utter truths in various peoples’ minds, this movie is not here to present them. It is here to peddle one perspective, and one perspective alone. The one where, in 1948, Holocaust survivors came out of nowhere and violently, intentionally displaced and dispossessed 750,000 innocent Palestinians with malice aforethought.

They show a map of Jewish settlements and the Palestinian population at the time. Jewish settlements are marked as scattered dots, and the entire rest of the land is shaded dark green as if it was teeming with an organized, Palestinian state. It is a total fiction. They say that, as a result of the war in 1948, Israel took control of 78 percent of the land and 750,000 Palestinians “were expelled or fled their homes.”

They say NOTHING about how what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, started and was prosecuted. Not a word regarding the UN Partition Plan that created both a Jewish and Palestinian State. Nothing about how five Arab neighboring lands immediately declared war on the nascent State of Israel and their intention to wipe it and its people — many of whom had just survived Nazi genocide — from the map. No mention of how those Arab leaders encouraged the residents of their villages to leave their homes for a few weeks until they had taken care of killing off the Jews and it was safe to return home.

The two self-appointed Palestinian spokesmen declare that their ancestors magically were ethnically cleansed for no reason. A war just happened one day, and they were persecuted. In their remarkably minimalist narrative, they describe the Nakba as “the biggest mass exodus percentage wise of a people from their land in modern history.”

I mean, don’t tell that to the 6.7 million Syrian refugees. We all know they do not count when it comes to persecution, because they weren’t allegedly persecuted by Jews.

They then skip straight to 1967 when another war mysteriously occurred without explanation or context. Beha states, “In 1967, the state of Israel managed to complete its control over Palestine by taking over the territory of the West Bank and the territory of Gaza.”

If you were hoping for more of an explanation than that, you are out of luck. That is all you will get. It portrays the Six Day War as intentionally waged aggressively to take territory away from Egypt and Jordan, as if Nasser is not universally recognized as responsible for the saber-rattling that started the war, the Soviets did not promote Syrian aggression, and Israel was not again fighting a five-front war that it managed to win, gaining territorial and strategic advantages.

If you pick every fight and you lose every fight, it is the height of chutzpah to play the perennial victim card.

That should be the motto of every Israeli-Arab conflict, most especially the current war.

Beha is the vehicle through which they plant every cliché in the woke handbook. “The intention of Israeli control over the land of Palestine is complete colonization of the territory.”

Avowed anti-Zionist journalist Peter Beinart pops up to declare in a vacuum, “you see in some ways what non-democracy looks like up close” when you look at Israel.

Rutgers’ anti-Zionist Professor Noura Erekat appears to state that “anyone who sees these facts on the ground or speaks to Palestinians would understand that this is a process of settler colonization of an apartheid regime.”

In short, a rogue’s gallery of activists and partisan figures flash on screen to bore you with woke word salad. Trust me when I tell you they have nothing to say that is worth $5 to hear.

Some of the ahistorical presentation is enraging. At one point, the film-makers interview Avner Gvaryahu, executive director of Breaking the Silence, an organization critical of the Israeli army and government. As Gvaryahu described his three generations of familial presence in Jerusalem, the film played newsreels to support its discussion of violence by the apartheid, colonial regime to which it reduces Israel. You hear a reporter’s voice narrate a scene — “in the battle for Jerusalem, at least 26 people are reported dead.”

And then you see the remnants of the gutted Sbarro’s on the corner of Jaffa and King George St. from August 2001. They do not say what they are showing. They leave the impression that this is random violence that could have been perpetrated by Israelis upon Palestinians. Because they never once mention that Palestinians engage in violence. All violence in the movie is perpetrated by Israelis. The assumption is clear.

But anyone who lived in Jerusalem at the time of the Second Intifada, however, knows exactly what they are viewing. I was there. I know. I remember frantically calling my friends who regularly ate lunch there on Fridays, terrified they had been killed. I recall my friend Dave telling me the blast knocked his 6’4” frame to the ground halfway down King George Street.

They do not explain that this was part of the Second Intifada in which Israeli civilians were bombed in night clubs and pizzerias, stabbed on the streets, blown up in buses, and mortared daily. I went to bed to sound of mortars hitting Gilo, and gunfire nightly. For me, the disingenuous nature of the film is encapsulated in this one moment when a grotesque suicide bombing by a terrorist is unidentified and presented for the viewer to assume to be violence perpetrated by Israelis against Palestinians. The trick felt even dirtier than erasing the history of Israel’s many wars.

I had to walk away for a few minutes.

Another shameless and insulting moment occurs when Sami explains to Simone that he went to Auschwitz to better understand the Israeli mindset. His concludes that Jewish inherited trauma is the cause of the conflict. Jews have so often been attacked, they assume they will be attacked again and are now acting pre-emptively. He uses the Holocaust as an explanation for Jewish aggression and violent nature toward Palestinians.

Jewish paranoia based on millennia of very real persecution and attempted genocides is the root cause of the conflict. Not a Hamas charter that calls for the death of Jews worldwide. Not the war declared by five Arab countries the day of the U.N. Partition vote. Not the failed Palestinian leadership that has siphoned billions of dollars from their own people, preventing them from building a state of their own. Not Yasser Arafat and Abu Mazen’s refusal to accept multiple two-state solution plans. Not the terrorists who two months ago burned whole families alive in their homes, cooked a baby in an oven, drove nails into the groins of 19-year-olds while raping them, and shot young Israeli soldiers in the vagina after raping them. Not the people who are holding over a hundred Israeli hostages right this very minute under the earth in their terror tunnels while they allow the Palestinian civilians to die on the surface.

Zero agency. Zero accountability. Jewish paranoia.

The only good aspect of the film is the timing of its release. I think it is quite apropos that it is being screened right now on college campuses across the country while those campuses flagrantly display the dire results of 20 years of the anti-Zionist propaganda machine. One can so easily discern that the two protagonists of the film, Simone and Eitan, are products of the self-same education system currently in antisemitic free fall.

Jewish paranoia, indeed.

This idea extends to the treatment of American Jews who choose to serve in the IDF. Sami cannot fathom why anyone would risk life and limb for a country half a world away and a foreign people. He believes they come to claim foreigners’ land as their own with no logical connection. He understands nothing of why they come, yet he speaks for them.

Imagine if a Jew tried to speak on behalf of the experience of an Arab or an African-American in the way Sami and Cornell West do, coopting their identity and voice? They would be eviscerated, and rightfully so.

Let me give a Jewish voice to why those young Americans feel a connection to Israel and wish to defend her with their lives. Israelis are not a foreign people to Diaspora Jews. They are our family. If the world learns anything from these two months, it will be that a crisis in the Jewish community is felt, viscerally, by Jews the world over. Differences are forgotten and cast aside instantly, and we are a singular family unit. It is as simple as that. We have never been more unified.

And the idea that we do not need Israel to prevent another Holocaust? That we are paranoid and do not really need a safe haven as was drummed into us as children purportedly to make us blindly love Israel? If the world learns a second lesson from these two months, it is how very real and true is the Jewish need for a home in our ancestral lands. In every corner of this earth, shouts of “gas the Jews,” “out with the trash,” “intifada revolution,” and “from the river to the sea” threaten us every single day. Us. The entire Jewish people. Defending Israel means defending ourselves. Serving on behalf of Israel means serving on behalf of our family, not some distant foreigners. There is nothing more logical than self preservation.

So yes. We were taught that we need Israel to be a safe haven. And we are learning right now just how accurate those lessons were.

These lessons were not propaganda or brainwashing, nor did they present Israel as a place of perfection. It is as if the world has never met Jews or noticed how often with disagree with one another and criticize everything. Has the world forgotten how Israel almost tore itself apart in the year leading up to October 7 with protests against the government?

Anyone who forgot these lessons or thought they would be welcome in woke circles when they checked their identity at the door now knows just how ephemeral was that dream. Jews are shifting away from leftist, woke groups because of their exclusion and shameless discrimination.

In a way, we should thank these shoddy filmmakers for peddling a laughingly simplistic, one-sided hack job at a time when it has become exceptionally clear why the world needs Israel as a haven for Jews and as a bulwark against Islamist designs on western civilization. At a time when it has become abundantly evident that the real indoctrination has been occurring at the hands of those same Islamists in our greatest halls of learning.

Consider “Israelism” just another symptom of the madness that has gripped our universities, and consign it to the garbage bin, along with my Harvard Law diploma.

Ellen Ginsberg Simon is self-described as a “highly opinionated Jewish lawyer, mother and writer.” Her Substack, where this was first published, is here. Reprinted with permission.