The Belgian town of Nivelles, near Brussels, hosted a “Solidarity Film Festival” earlier this month.
One of the films screened is a 2014 documentary called “This Is My Land” by French-Israeli Tamara Erde where Jewish and Arab schools are shown to emphasize each own’s narratives in the classroom and to ignore the other. Erde’s incentive to create the film:
During my army service, which took place during the second Intifada in 2002, I began to see up close the Israeli army’s operational methods in the operations held against the Palestinians. This was, for me, the first blinking of a red light, an alarm of sorts. But more time needed to pass before I discovered just how ‘blind and ignorant’ I was in terms of my knowledge about the “other side,” and the history of my country and area. Several years later, I found myself wondering, “How could I have never doubted before what I was taught?”
The “expert” chosen to discuss this film at Nivelles was Marianne Blume, an anti-Israel professor who lived in Gaza for ten years and worked at Al Azhar University there.
She said at the screening that it is an “open secret” that almost all Israeli students in Belgian universities are Mossad agents. “Everything that comes from Israel should be boycotted”, she said.
She called Israel a “foreign body” in the Middle-East.
Blume also complained about Belgium cooperation with Israel in the fight against terrorism, saying that such cooperation is a “threat to Belgian democracy”.
No one challenged her, of course. Her words fit right in with many of the types of people who go to “solidarity film festivals” to begin with.
The drinks and snacks at the screening were sponsored by…Oxfam.
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