“¡No pasarán!” — they shall not pass. It was meant quite literally, but we also understand it in a more figurative way. On September 7th, we, five activists held a disruption during the Seret Film Festival in Berlin. The action took place during a Q&A session with director Dan Shadur, following the German premiere screening of his film “King Bibi”. A week earlier, another protest took place outside the opening event of the festival, which was attended by the guest of honor, Israeli ambassador Jeremy Issacharoff.
The Seret Film Festival is sponsored by the Israeli embassy and the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah, the ministry for exclusive ethnic-based immigration.
We will not give Israel a platform for whitewashing Israeli crimes where it uses arts for the sake of state propaganda — diverting the attention from being built on seven decades of colonization, while upholding a system of apartheid, a crime against humanity under international law, and while subjugating millions of people under a brutal occupation.
Just as the movie completely erases the existence of Palestinians, so does the whole festival — whose motto is “Films through Israel’s eyes” — actively silencing 60% of the population living under Israeli apartheid. While Palestinians make up the majority of the population [over 1.5M as subjugated second class citizens; 4.5M under military occupation; 6M in forced exile], there is only one Palestinian name in the entire list of directors, producers, writers and actors in any of the films that have been screened in the Seret Film Festival 2019 in Germany.
This shall not pass.
In addition to being silenced by the Seret Film Festival, whenever Palestinian filmmakers try to screen their films in Germany they are often blocked from doing so — as has recently happened to filmmaker Mohammed Alatar with his film “Broken” and filmmaker Wisam Zureik with “Heimat am Rande”.
Seret, in its slanderous statement against our action, had outrageously invoked the name of director Nadav Lapid and his film “Synonyms”. Lapid, however, as a conscientious filmmaker, issued a statement in which he is distancing himself from the festival, saying the following:
“…My film and the fact it was created in Israel does not balance that out in any way, nor does it shed a different light on the injustices being carried out in Israel, and I of course do not wish it to be used as a political tool for improving its image.” (Nadav Lapid)
Our protest, which started after the five of us sat through this film, awaiting the discussion, was quickly met with violence. When two young Israeli activists held a banner reading “No Kultur in Whitewashing Apartheid”, they were violently removed from the cinema. Another activist proceeded to show a list of the Palestinians who were murdered by Israel over the course of 2019. This act was met with deep disdain from the audience, which mirrors the general disregard for Palestinian life by the Israeli system of apartheid.
Even in Berlin, in a non-violent protest that was almost exclusively Jewish/Israeli, the Israeli understanding of “self-defense” became blatantly obvious — brutally crushing anything that shows the blood stains on Israel’s face.
We will not let this pass.
Even in the face of violence, we proceeded to read the list of the killed, because as Judith Butler said: “Even the utterance of the name can come as the most extraordinary form of recognition, especially when one has become nameless.”
This was clearly proven to us as the names of the dead were mocked by members of the audience and our list was ripped apart.
We will not let this pass.
We will prevent the normalization of crimes against humanity until freedom, justice and equality will prevail. Where you find violence, we will find creativity to stand in your way.
