California: Pro-Israel group muzzles film festival

By Vakkas Dogantekin

ANKARA (AA) - Under pressure from a Jewish group, San Francisco's Jewish Film Festival is being forced to exclude a Jewish civil society organization that champions Palestinian rights from the invitee list, reported a local weekly.

Festival organizers invited Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a civil society group, to co-present the film Advocate, which shows the Palestinian struggle for justice, but had to cancel the invitation for fear of losing funding from the San Francisco Jewish Federation, the East Bay Express reported.

The JVP advocates Palestinian rights and shows human rights violations by the state of Israel.

In 2009 the Jewish federation also meddled in the festival in a row over a documentary about Rachel Corrie, a young America activist who was bulldozed to death in 2003 by Israeli forces while she was defending a Palestinian family’s home from demolition, it said.

Discomfort with the screening of the documentary, co-presented by the JVP, led pro-Israel extremists to pressure the federation to impose a pro-Israel films-only policy on the festival committee, or lose funding, said the article.

In 2010, the federation adopted a controversial policy categorically banning any film or documentary that "undermines the legitimacy" of the state of Israel and dictated that grantees may not partner with anyone supportive of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which criticizes the decades-long Israeli occupation and mistreatment of Palestinians.

Boycotting, according to American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is a "quintessentially American" right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The federation blacklisted the JVP and several other Palestinian-friendly civil society groups that support the BDS movement.

The JVP has around a million online supporters, with over 70 chapters across the U.S., and an advisory board including prominent intellectuals and artists such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Tony Kushner.