Tamara Nassar – The Electronic Intifada Jan 21, 2021
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Every act of censorship inadvertently achieves its opposite by drawing attention to its subject.
Last week, an Israeli court ordered the 2002 film Jenin, Jenin to be banned in Israel and all copies of it confiscated.
The film – which was directed by Mohammed Bakri, a Palestinian citizen of Israel – has been the subject of censorship attempts since its release around 18 years ago.
Nissim Magnaji, a soldier who appears on archival footage in the film for just a few seconds, sued Bakri for defamation in 2016. His suit was supported by former Military Advocate General Avichai Mandelblit.
An Israeli judge ruled in Magnaji’s favor last week, ordering Bakri to pay more than $50,000 to the soldier and another $15,000 in court fees. Israeli government and military officials welcomed the court’s ruling.
Bakri is now planning to appeal the ruling in Israel’s highest court.
Following the court’s ruling, social media users shared links to the video and Bakri gave a number of interviews.
The Palestine Film Institute, a body that preserves and promotes Palestinian cinema, decided to make the film available to everyone. You can watch it for free at the top of this page.
Bearing witness
The film is a collection of interviews with residents of Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank following an Israeli military invasion in April 2002 that lasted almost two weeks.
The Israeli military killed at least 52 Palestinians and injured scores of others, according to a report compiled by the United Nations secretary-general at the time.
Israeli forces also shelled 150 buildings, leaving 450 families homeless. According to the report, 23 Israeli soldiers were dead by the end of the operation.
“It was not just the numbers involved that shocked the world at the time, but the brutal nature of an Israeli assault that was unprecedented even in the harsh history of the occupation,” Israeli historian Ilan Pappé wrote in The Electronic Intifada in 2017.
Bakri said he snuck into the camp on foot through the mountains about 10 days after the invasion to witness what Israel had done and speak to camp residents.
“I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe,” Bakri told his son Adam Bakri in an interview on Sunday about his emotional reaction after he first arrived in the camp.
“I couldn’t hold my body, I mean, when I saw these things around me and I smelled that smell of death.”
Little in the camp was left unscathed.
“Their bombs came down on us like water,” a young Palestinian girl tells Bakri in the film.
“I saw dead bodies, houses in ruins and undescribable atrocities. After all I’ve been through, what will become of my life?”
The girl, who Bakri identified as Najwa in later interviews, gained notoriety for her remarkable courage and became an iconic face of the film.
The documentary-style film combines rapid-fire shots in between interviews with dramatic sound transitions for aesthetic effect. It is genre-bending. It has no voice over and it doesn’t identify anyone. Bakri, who is often shown walking away from the camera, is sometimes heard, but he never turns around.
The film does not pretend to do more than bear witness.
A technicality
The filmmaker isn’t new to dealing with censorship and lawsuits pertaining to his film.
Five soldiers sued Bakri following the film’s release accusing him of defamation. Their cases were later dismissed, because, as Bakri wrote in The Electronic Intifada in 2008, “I do not know them and neither are they mentioned or shown in the film.”
Magnaji tried to get the film censored on relatively similar grounds.
Magnaji appears briefly in the film with two other soldiers as a camp resident recounts how during a raid on his home, an Israeli military officer robbed him of his life’s savings that he had set aside in the hope of having a child one day.
The elderly man recounted asking the military officer about his money. “He said, ‘shut up or I will kill you,’” the man recalls, as a clip is shown of three Israeli soldiers walking near a military vehicle, including Magnaji, according to Israeli media.
Getting the film censored may provide Magnaji and his supporters in Israel’s government with some temporary satisfaction.
But no amount of censorship will change the indisputable fact that the Israeli military committed atrocities in that camp and in others during the second intifada, nor that these soldiers were members of the military that has reinforced occupation and committed countless crimes against Palestinians.
No amount of intimidation will shake the legendary courage and resilience of each camp resident who witnessed Israel’s crimes that month.
And no amount of lawsuits will make them forget.
That’s just a truth Israel and its soldiers will have to live with.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that a United Nations report concluded it was “probable” that a massacre had taken place in Jenin. It was, in fact, a submission to, rather than the final United Nations report, that suggested it was “probable” that an Israeli massacre had taken place in Jenin.
“We Jews, the destroyers……….”
It seems to me that the Jews WANT to be hated – and feared – and it has been going on for five thousand years, since they destroyed Babylon in spite of Hammurabi’s great efforts to stop them.
The book “……and forgive them their debts.” by Michael Hudson is fascinating and very illuminating.
I wonder if he has read David Astle’s “The Babylonian Woe.”
Message to Kamala Harris. If you want equality for all, start here.
Jews, throughout their history, have suppressed or tried to suppress the Truth, where ever they were responsible for War, Conflict or Destruction of a Country and turned the blame on their Victim. They are experts in the dialectical reasoning.
What’s new? Just read about the Hebrew Semites behavior towards the gentile nations, like the Canaanites, as they killed the women/children of their enemies in the Torah/Old Testament, instructed by their ‘god’ (Jehovah). Which is the same ‘god’ the Christians worship. Nothing changes, because they’re still the same Semites.
The unnatural mongrel origins of the Semites (Hebrews-Israelites-Jews-Arabs):
“Brothers of the Arabs, the Hebrews, like all Semites, were the offspring of an ancient mixture of the white & black races.” –Edouard Schure
as baby i was made a christ without wanting. so, i dont believe in this
jewish jesus, created from gnosticism, dionysus cult,jhvhism,paganism.
if there is a god its certainly not JHVH not ALLAH !
Astraea
Excuse my ignorance but didn’t the Medo-Persians invade and topple Babylon?
The religious Jews or Tora Jews only follow the first four books of the Old Testament.
The Old Testament of the Bible talks of vengeance, but the New Testament of the Bible talks about love, forgiveness, righteousness and honour.
The New Testament replaced the old covenant with the new covenant of Christ. That is why the Jews hate Jesus Christ with a vengeance.
So REAL Christians worship the God of Christianity. Not the Judaeo Christianity of the main stream churches. Judaeo Christianity is in fact an oxymoron.
The Children of the Devil
43Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you are unable to accept my message. 44You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out his desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, refusing to uphold the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, because he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 But because I speak the truth, you do not believe me.
Acts 13:10
You who are full of all deceit and fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all “righteousness, will you not cease to make crooked the straight ways of the Lord?
Matthew 13:38
The field is the world; and as for the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil one.
John 6:70
Jesus answered them, “Did I Myself not choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?”
1 John 3:10
By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother.
Source: https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Children-Of-The-Devil
It is the same today. There are many passages in the New Testament that carry on in the same vain. And the so-called Jews have written many books about the New Testament being Anti-Semitic.
What does that tell you?
Why the Bible is not A “Jewish” Book
https://christiansfortruth.com/why-the-bible-is-not-a-jewish-book/
One day Isrsel will face a wrath it will have No idea how to stop.
The Jewish Imposters are Vermin.
Actually the New Testament proclaims that the god of Jesus is the same Hebrew god of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob.
Nico, who wrote this in the NT ??
@Mr Reynard….I’m sure there are multiple verses substantiating this in the NT, but here’s a couple: Matthew 22:29-32; Acts 3:13.