NOTES FROM TIFF 2015

Notes from a couple of films from TIFF 2015. 3000 Nights shows a young Palestinian bride arrested for giving a youth a ride in her car, jailed for 8 years, giving birth in an Israeli prison for women with her hands and feet cuffed, amidst other scenes of torture and abuse. That was a Palestinian film. Rabin, The Last Day, made by Israeli (and Jewish) Amos Gitai, shows the mentality of the far right within Israel, which resulted in the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yithzak Rabin, for the crime of negotiating a peace accord (Oslo) with the Palestinians. It is standard fare in the West, to depict Muslims as 'crazy' or 'terrorists' to the point where US Presidential candidate Trump answered questions about what the US would do to deal with the (Muslim) problem. Not too many people ask about the root of the problem, for example, whether ISIS would exist today without the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the refugee crisis without Western interventions in Syria. Mr. Gitai, in the post-screening Q&A, said he made this film to open people's eyes about the fanaticism and hate within the right in Israel. Claiming it is based entirely on documentary records, he shows Israeli mobs chanting 'Death to Rabin', (mobs often including a much younger Netanyahu), an Israeli psychiatrist raving about the 'schizophrenia' and 'schizoid personality' of Rabin, similar to that of Hitler. Rabin is also described as a Satanic figure, and right-wing rabbis chant curses at him, which without subtitles might appear as prayers.. The youth who kills him shows no remorse, citing the Torah as authorizing the assassination, on the basis that if someone attacks you, you can kill him. The attack? Rabin's attempt to make peace with the Palestinians which would have stopped the advancement of settlements into Palestinian lands. Stopping the theft is therefore an attack on the settlers' ambitions, justifying murder. One of the questions post-screening was whether the director thought the right-wing in Israel would never allow peace to happen in Palestine.. the director's reply was 'you may be right'.