A Tale of Massacre & Theft

If the following extracts from Stephanie Bunbury's interview with Israeli-American actress and director, Natalie Portman, are anything to go by, it looks like Australian moviegoers are in for a massive dose of Zionist propaganda:

"A Tale of Love & Darkness [2015] is adapted from a childhood memoir by Amos Oz*, the Israeli writer whose prominence on the world literary stage has him regularly tipped to win a Nobel prize." ('You need a great deal of ignorance to take on a a great challenge', Sydney Morning Herald, 24/10/15)

Question: Is there any Israeli writer out there not strutting around on "the world literary stage," or on the cusp of winning a Nobel prize?

Grumble: I do wish journalists would put quotation marks around the hype they lift from press releases.

"A Tale of Love & Darkness recalls the 5 years between 1945 and 1950. A Jewish state was re-established in what had been the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948."

Re-established?

Now that's straight out of the Zionist catechism! I refuse to believe that that word came unaided from Bunbury's pen. From a Portman press release, yes, but not from Bunbury herself. Be that as it may, Bunbury's responsible for its recycling.

I mean, does she seriously believe that a bunch of Russo-Polish nutters, such as Benjamin Miliekowsky, Ariel Scheinerman, David Grun and Chaim Weizmann (or Amos Klausner for that matter), to name but the top dogs, and their ugly little apartheid project in Palestine, are seriously connected to some fabled Palestinian kingdom, so lost in the mists of time that, try as they might, no archaeologist of repute can find any compelling evidence for it? If so, you've got to ask, does she also believe in the tooth fairy?

"As young Amos remembers that time, cocooned in a right-wing Zionist family,..."

OMG, Give me Guantanamo Bay any day!

"... the mood of elation and hope was only faintly shadowed by the angry despair of the Arab Palestinians outside that circle of nationhood."

Now WTF does that mean? Let me guess: Amos's Mum and Dad, their minds cocooned in a right-wing Zionist ideology, drank a toast to Menachem Begin and the boyz on hearing about their deeds of derring-do at Deir Yassin.

"[Portman] certainly understood the wide European antipathy to Israel, particularly over West Bank settlements; she has not held back on her own condemnation of Benjamin Netanyahu... With Oz, however, she clearly thought she was on safe moral ground; his central role in the peace movement and sustained opposition to the settlements have made him a hero of the Israeli left."

Oh did she now? So Portman has a problem with post-1967 Zionist settlers, but not with pre-1967 Zionist settlers? If so, could she please explain the subtle difference between, say, the Hebron massacre of 1994 and the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948? The simple fact is that, as far as indigenous populations are concerned, all European settlers, Zionist or otherwise, have only ever talked to the natives through the barrel of a gun.

"In Portman's film, the spirit of Zionism is intermittently represented in visions of a fit young man. He is simultaneously shown to be the kind of man Fania failed to marry - strong, determined, practical, cheerful - and a symbol of the nation's future."

Shouldn't that be a fit young man... carrying a gun?

"... the Zionists in this film are idealists, the good guys..."

Say no more. Is this the new Exodus? Is Portman the new Otto Preminger? God help us!

[*On Oz, see my 28/8/08 post Amos Oz, Oz, Oz, Oi! Oi! Oi!.]