A five-year-old Gazan girl has become a martyred symbol of Israeli brutality in one of three pro-Palestinian films short-listed for an Academy Award next month. Preface: The New York Times published a feature, “Decades of Palestinian History, Told By 3 Films With Award Hopes” (Feb. 11), interviewing the directors of the three films cited here. Their comments, and the reporting of Sara Aridi, a Times editor and writer, ignored the origins, context and complexity of the conflict and portray the Palestinians as victims rather than aggressors.

Israel, through blood, guts and tears, has achieved a military victory over Hamas terrorists. But in terms of public perception here and around the world, the Jewish state has suffered a stinging defeat – in part, and increasingly, through well-produced, deeply biased “historical dramas” that cast Palestinians as noble victims at the hands of violent, inhumane Jews.

Three of the five entries short-listed for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards on March 15 deal with Palestinian history through a one-sided lens. Given the current political climate, with Israel widely seen as a pariah state, and Hollywood’s reputation as a bastion of progressive views, it seems certain these films will receive a great deal of laudatory attention on Oscar night, in front of a global audience, and going forward.

As Rachel O’Donoghue of HonestReporting observes in a thoroughly researched analysis, “a new genre is taking shape with lasting consequences: by framing Gaza through the moral language of historical atrocity, these films risk cementing distortions that will outlive the war itself.”

Each of the films is emotionally charged, fully sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle, presents Israel in villainous terms and makes little effort to back moral claims with sufficient facts and historical context. In large part, film critics have been so impressed with the emotional impact of these films that they pay little attention to the bias of the narratives – or they simply share the sentiment.

For example, in reviewing “All That’s Left of You,” the Jordanian entry that scored 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Daniels, a Chicago-based film critic writing on RogerEbert.com, said the film was “immaculately rendered” in offering a fictional multi-generational drama of the suffering of one Palestinian family from 1948 to current times. Produced by Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo, the film depicts the family enduring violent displacement, trauma and humiliation from inhumane Israeli soldiers. There is no effort to provide context for the war that began on May 15, 1948, when five Arab armies attacked and sought to destroy the state of Israel, which had declared independence the day before. But Daniels wrote that the film “smartly interweaves … instances of degradation with varieties of violence inflicted at every level of Israel’s occupying apparatus. Some of it is physical – like arrests, imprisonment and death – some psychological, and others bureaucratic.”

The Palestinian entry for an Oscar, “Palestine 36,” stars Jeremy Irons and focuses on the 1936-1939 Arab revolt against British rule in Palestine, casting the Jews in a harsh light. It received a 20-minute standing ovation after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, and rave reviews from numerous film critics. This, despite the fact that some historians noted the film avoids mention of Arab violence against Jews that set off the revolt, and the role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who supported and collaborated with Hitler in opposing a Jewish presence in Palestine.

Writing in The Free Press, author and journalist Oren Kessler concludes in “The Bad History of ‘Palestine 36” that the film is “a morality play of colonial cruelty” that portrays Jews as “voiceless pantomime figures” or wretches.

Perhaps best-known and most heart-wrenching of these Oscar nominees is Tunisia’s entry, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” based on the true story of the death of a five-year-old Gazan girl trapped in a car in the midst of the war. Responding to an IDF evacuation of an area, she and six relatives fled from the fighting on January 29, 2024. Their car was fired on and everyone else in the car was killed. Hind managed to speak by phone to her mother and Palestinian rescue dispatchers, who sought to save her but were unable to. She was found dead in the car 12 days later.

To add weight to the tragedy, Hind’s frantic conversations from the car were recorded. They became the emotional core of this highly praised “docudrama” and of a foundation launched in Hind’s name. Its core mission, it says, is to use “offensive litigation” and take legal action for “war crimes” and “atrocities” against the state of Israel.

In effect, the story of Hind’s death has become a powerful political and cultural cause with major implications. And while the details surrounding the events of that tragic incident two years ago are under dispute – Israeli officials have said IDF forces were not in the area of the car that fateful day – The Hind Rajab Foundation doggedly pursues Israeli soldiers for war crimes, and the film advances the narrative of Israel as an evil force, heartless in its efforts to destroy the people of Gaza, including a helpless child.

There is no mention of Hamas or its brutal attack that launched the war by slaughtering 1,200 Israeli men, women and children, and taking 251 hostages on October 7, 2023.

A disclaimer at the outset of the film says it is “based on real events,” and filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania asserts, “this is not a story. This is history.” But HonestReporting’s O’Donoghue notes, “emotional power does not absolve factual responsibility. If anything, it heightens it. That obligation is precisely where ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ fails.” She charges that vital, disputed aspects of the incident “have been systematically flattened into certainty by activists, NGOs, and – now – cinema.”

In this case, O’Donoghue cites the efforts of Mark Zlochin, an independent researcher and data analyst whose detailed report on Substack raises a number of inconsistencies about the incident, involving low visibility and fog-of-war battlefield conditions, unexplained timeline gaps, shifting accounts and omitted communications. Zlochin writes that soon after the tragedy took place, major media outlets like Al Jazeera, the BBC, The Washington Post and Sky News “published reconstructions that turned a chaotic battlefield episode into a tale of deliberate execution … meticulously engineered for maximum outrage.”

The combination of a film that “flattens war into myth,” as O’Donoghue writes, and journalists who repeat and expand on unproven allegations, has a powerful effect. It creates and advances a false narrative that soon becomes accepted as fact, as history.

The tragic Hind Rajab episode, and how it has been reinterpreted and deployed as a propaganda tool, brings to mind the death of another innocent Gazan child more than 25 years ago. On September 30, 2000, the day after the Second Intifada broke out, Muhammad al-Durrah, age 12, reportedly was killed while huddling with his father to avoid Israeli and Palestinian cross-fire near the Gaza border. The Arab world claimed the shooting was deliberate, and made a symbol and martyr out of Muhammad, memorializing him on postage stamps. Israel conducted its own investigation and found that the fatal shots most likely came from Palestinians. Thirteen years later, another Israeli report said the “shooting” was staged and the boy was not harmed. All these years after the incident, the debate – and search for the truth – continues.

The Hind Rajab tragedy may well suffer the same fate. Rachel O’Donoghue told me the reason she continues to report on the Mideast conflict, separating fact from fiction, is because she is an optimist, hopeful that in the end the facts will prevail. But she and others believe there will be more films like these three because much of the world population and mainstream media are open to the images of Israelis as oppressors and Palestinians as victims. “Not only Gaza, but Israel’s entire past, will be re-imagined through this lens,” O’Donoghue wrote – “a process that does not merely criticize a state but delegitimizes its very existence.

“And once committed to the big screen,” she concluded, “those myths will be far harder to dismantle.”

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)