The Voice of Hind Rajab, a devastating dramatised retelling of Israel’s slow-motion murder of a five-year-old in Gaza, arrives in UK cinemas next week. Please take the opportunity to see it. The vast majority of Americans were denied such an opportunity when it was released there last month.
Here’s what happened to the film in the US, via New York Times columnist M Gessen:
The Voice of Hind Rajab had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September and took the Grand Jury Prize, the second-highest honor. A few days later, it was screened to great acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival.
High-profile US distribution companies came calling. But then, the producers Odessa Rae and Elizabeth Woodward told me, one by one the companies peeled off.
In the end, Woodward, who has a small distribution company, put together something akin to self-distribution. The movie opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday. Elsewhere in the world this film, shortlisted for the Oscar for best foreign movie, has major distributors—but not in the United States or Israel. That’s a kind of coordination, too.
That may be the nearest you will hear the New York Times admitting to an Israel lobby and its extraordinary power to shape the West’s cultural and information landscape.
It is almost impossible to get serious criticism of the Israeli state, which (falsely) claims to represent the Jewish people, anywhere near mainstream US culture, even when it takes the form of a critically acclaimed movie, backed by Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix, that received a record 23-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.
For decades, pro-Israel lobby groups have dedicated their efforts to telling us that antisemitism is rampant across the West and takes the form of opposition of Israel—a message endlessly amplified by the western media.
Note this: the “antisemitism” threat just so happens to have grown precisely in line with the realisation among an ever-widening section of western publics that Israel is operating a system of apartheid rule over Palestinians and is now committing genocide in Gaza.
The role of the lobby, so readily given a platform by the establishment media, is to conflate any resulting increase in criticism of Israel with an increase in antisemitism. The solution, it hardly needs pointing out, is to shut down criticism of Israel to reduce antisemitism.
With this logic dominant among the professional class in the West—in fact, with it serving as the price of admission to that class—it is presumably easy to warn off film distribution executives from allowing into US cinemas a film that bears witness to Israel’s killing of a five-year-old.
Hind Rajab’s murder, of course, was nothing exceptional. Tens of thousands of other children in Gaza have suffered similar fates at the hands of the Israeli army over the past 27 months, though their horrifying experiences have not been turned into a movie.
Like anyone trying to get more real information about Israel into the mainstream, I have direct experience of these difficulties myself. As a journalist at The Guardian 30 years ago, I found that my new-found interest in the Israel-Palestine issue after I had completed a masters in Middle East studies propelled me headlong into conflict with senior editors. It was an experience I had never had before, and one I was totally unprepared for.
What disorientated me at the time was that my editors were barely concerned whether a story about Israel was true or not, or whether it was interesting or not. Or whether I could make a good case based on reliable sources. It soon became clear to me that the yardstick they were employing was whether my proposed piece would undermine Israel’s moral case for being considered a self-declared “Jewish and democratic state.”
Note that The Guardian was and is exceptional compared to the rest of the British media in permitting trenchant criticism of Israel. But that criticism was, nonetheless, highly circumscribed. The paper made a clear distinction between Israel’s occupation, which it regarded largely as an unwarranted, criminal enterprise, and Israel’s status as a self-professed Jewish state.
Israel’s “Jewishness” was treated as a moral, unquestionable necessity and a safeguard against antisemitism.
In practice, this meant I could submit articles exposing the crimes Israel was committing in Palestinian areas under occupation, but only in so far as those related to the inevitable problems Israel had enforcing its “security” in the inherently insecure environment produced by its army illegally occupying another people.
Such articles were allowed on condition they did not conflict with the paper’s core editorial premise that, were Israel to leave the occupied territories and return to its internationally recognised borders, all would be well.
No articles were allowed—whether reports from the occupied territories or from inside Israel—that indicated there were inherent problems with the notion of Israel as a Jewish state, or questioned the assumption that a state defining itself in ethno-religious terms could also be a democracy.
This was the unspoken editorial formula:
Articles suggesting that the occupied territories were a gangrenous limb that needed amputating—ok.
Articles suggesting that the illegal occupation was a natural outgrowth of a highly militarised state, driven by an expansionist ideology of Jewish supremacy that necessarily dehumanises Palestinians—not ok.
That is the reason The Guardian, like so many others, has struggled to come to terms with Israel’s genocide in Gaza over the past two years.Genocide, and the overwhelming support for it among Israeli Jews, hints at a sickness within the Israeli state itself and the ideology of Zionism. That dark underbelly of ethnic nationalism cannot simply be amputated, like a gangrenous toe. The whole body politic is infected. A holistic, root-and-branch solution is needed, as it was with apartheid South Africa. A process of decolonisation must be instituted, a programme of truth and reconciliation is required.
There are similar reasons why the Voice of Hind Rajab did not made it into US cinemas. Because the Israeli army’s attack on the car containing Hind and her family, the Israeli army’s long delaying tactics before allowing an ambulance to tend to Hind, and the Israeli strike on the ambulance after its route had been approved cannot be explained by a mistake, or even a series of mistakes.
Just as Israel’s murder of tens of thousands of children like Hind, and the starvation of the rest, cannot be explained by a mistake.
These aren’t mistakes. Genocide isn’t a mistake. It is evidence of a deeply sick society, driven into the darkest of places by a racist ideology that says Jewish lives count and Palestinian lives don’t.
 | A guest post by
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Zionism is antisemitism. Why else would Israel offer sanctuary to nazi war criminals after the second world war?. You are only ok being jewish, if you are the right kind of jew. Just like in the Labour Party here, they got rid of the left wing jews that weren't zionists but who did have a moral compass and did believe in ethics and diplomacy. If that is the kind of jew you are then you are wrong and unwanted.
It is fascism and has been from its inception.
They knew about the break out of Gaza on Oct 7th. They allowed it to happen and participated in the killing of Israeli citizens and let the troops have a lie in and get murdered in their beds. There were men in balaclavas with guns, on motorbikes that could have been anyone. Hamas did not set out to kill any citizens and did not know there was a party going on. Killing troops is fair play but civilians is not. So it might have been done by some splinter groups from Jenin but they were probably joined by Israelis. Whatever the case, no civilians should have ever have been killed. It has haunted Gaza ever since. Israel used tanks on the surrounding houses that day and we know, because there were survivors from those assaults. They shot and killed people that were being kidnapped and on their way back to Gaza with their captors.
As one IDF soldier said "it would never ever happen" in response to the question of why they were not guarding the wall? So it is an engineered genocide. All carefully planned down to the last evil detail. Im quite sure the UK will have known in advance. They are very much in hoc with the Israeli top brass. They train them over here, in one of the most prestigious schools in the UK for training officers. The training has gone on throughout the genocide.
We won't have been the only country that was collaborating with Israel.
We are up to our necks in it in both the UK and the US. Everyone can now see how well this has been planned.
It is an ongoing Nakba that started in the 1940's and has not finished yet.
This part of their sick plan is called 'The Final Solution'
The speed with which the network of soft power, that it has taken over seventy years to build up, parroted the first lie 'Israel has the right to self defence' is staggering and revealing. It very obviously does not have that right, as they are occupying somebody else's country. But it was parroted quickly and widely. Unlike Your Party, who do not understand that first impressions are by far the most important thing. Israel gets that fact and exploited it.
Your Party will likely crash and burn and has damaged the left's chances before we even get started.
Israelis are very sick and radicalised sociopaths. Their government is criminally sociopathic and narcissistic and cruel to a degree I didn't expect to see in my lifetime. They have turned killing, maiming and demolishing and traumatising, into an art.
They dedicate their lives to making things to spy on and kill people, even better than previously.
Imagine if that was our government running the UK's economy, on the back of death and destruction and torture.
Zionism is fascism or white supremacy.
The Israelites came out of the forbidden Old Testament. It was forbidden to teach it and at my church of england primary school and on leaving, we were only gifted the new testament. People should try reading it and then maybe more people would understand why these fascists are as criminally calculated as they are.
It really is a vile book and I personally would probably burn it, if I did have a copy. I don't!
Brilliant expose of how censorship of reporting on Israel works even at the Guardian (one of the better papers in the UK, sadly). As an US journalist who went independent back in 1980 because of the censorship of many topics in the US Media -- from reporting hondstly on the imperialist genocidal slaughter in the US War on Indochina to the war crimes of the Iraq wars and the war on Afghanistan, jouirnal;ism is censored in the US through firins og journalists, or driving journalists to quit the mainstream media and trhy as I snd many others have tried to get the truth out in alternative media.,Mostr recently my book "Spy for No Country: The story of Ted Hall, the teenage atomic spy who may have saved the world" (Prometheus Books, 2024) was totally shut out of any review in a main stream news organization, primarily because it shows how a US spy courageously preventede the nightmare of a US with a monopoly on nuclear weapons at the end ot WWII by providing all the informtion and even schematics of the US P=pluonium bomb to the Soviets, but also because it also documentedd how that adt caused the US to drop plans for a 400-bomb nuclear blitz on the Communist world (even including on the captive Warsaw Pact countries set for the r\early '50s because the Soviets managed to get their own bomb--a carbon copy of the Nagasaki bomb in August, 1949. Dave Lindorff, ThisCantBeHappening,substack.com