ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
NOMINEES
ANNETTE BENING
LILY GLADSTONE
SANDRA HÜLLER
CAREY MULLIGAN
EMMA STONE
I want Annette to win.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Cold, almost naked and surrounded by Israeli soldiers with M16 assault rifles, Ayman Lubbad knelt among dozens of Palestinian men and boys who had just been forced from their homes in northern Gaza.
It was early December and photographs and videos taken at the time showed him and other detainees in the street, wearing only underwear and lined up in rows, surrounded by Israeli forces. In one video, a soldier yelled at them over a megaphone: “We’re occupying all of Gaza. Is that what you wanted? You want Hamas with you? Don’t tell me you’re not Hamas.”
The detainees, some barefoot with their hands on their heads, shouted objections. “I’m a day laborer,” one man shouted.
“Shut up,” the soldier yelled back.
Palestinian detainees from Gaza have been stripped, beaten, interrogated and held incommunicado over the past three months, according to accounts by nearly a dozen of the detainees or their relatives interviewed by The New York Times. Organizations representing Palestinian prisoners and detainees gave similar accounts in a report, accusing Israel of both indiscriminate detention of civilians and demeaning treatment of detainees.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Six students have sued Harvard University, accusing it of becoming “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment” and tolerating intensifying harassment of Jewish students since October 7th. This comes as reports of antisemitism and Islamophobia have soared nationwide, but there’s been a broader effort to restrict pro-Palestinian speech on college and university campuses and to conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israel’s occupation and demands for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The former Harvard President Claudine Gay was forced to resign earlier this month, just weeks after the University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down in the wake of a congressional hearing on antisemitism where they were grilled by lawmakers, including the far-right New York Congressmember Elise Stefanik.
The lawsuit against Harvard was filed by two law firms, including the New York-based Kasowitz Benson Torres, which filed similar lawsuits against New York University and the University of Pennsylvania. The firm also has ties to the Trump administration.
The lawsuit refers to student-led marches on Harvard’s campus in support of Palestinian rights as “mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty” and singles out a screening at Harvard Divinity School in September of the new documentary Israelism, which examines the relationship between Jews in the United States and the state of Israel, and the disillusionment as they begin to question Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
In a minute, we’ll speak with one of the film’s directors and one of the main subjects. This is the film’s trailer.
UNIDENTIFIED: Some American Jews who come here say, “We came to Israel, and we left from Palestine.”
ABE FOXMAN: The non-Jewish community does not understand our obsession with Israel.
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: I went to a Jewish day school.
EITAN: Summer camp, organized trips to Israel.
TEACHER: Do you want to go to Israel, too?
STUDENTS: Yeah! We want to go! We want to go!
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: Israeli soldiers, they are hot. They’re awesome. They’re strong.
JACQUI SCHULEFAND: We actually have had quite a few of our former students join the IDF. These are kids. These are 18-, 19-year-olds. Amazing.
EITAN: I told my parents, “I don’t even need to apply to college. I am going to just join the Israeli military.”
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: Ten percent of my graduating class joined the Israeli army.
EITAN: We were deployed to the West Bank.
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: I don’t think I realized the extent to which what I would come to see on the ground would really shock me and horrify me.
LARA FRIEDMAN: When people look at the West Bank today and say this is an apartheid system, it’s not just throwing out a word.
UNIDENTIFIED: Palestinians living, day in, day out, without experiencing a day of freedom.
PETER BEINART: And you see what non-democracy looks like.
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: What we’ve been told is that the only way that Jews can be safe is if Palestinians are not safe. The more I learned about that, the more I came to see that as a lie.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Within the Jewish community, there’s been a striking change.
JEREMY BEN-AMI: They’re really angry at the way they were indoctrinated, justifiably so.
ABE FOXMAN: When we talk about we’re losing the kids, we not — we lost them. I think they’re a little super naive.
CORNEL WEST: Any time you cut against the grain, you’re going to catch hell.
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: “You are a self-loathing Jew. Go kill yourself. You’re an antisemitic Jew.”
SARAH ANNE MINKIN: The way that we talk about antisemitism isn’t about protecting Jews. It’s about protecting Israel. How dangerous is that?
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: They will do anything to preserve unconditional support for Israel.
LARA FRIEDMAN: The great irony is that there actually is a resurgent antisemitism.
WHITE SUPREMACISTS: Jews will not replace us!
LARA FRIEDMAN: History is not going to judge us kindly.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the documentary Israelism.
For more, we’re joined in Toronto by Erin Axelman, co-director of Israelism. The film is now on a 40-city screening tour in Canada and the United States. Here in New York, we’re joined by Simone Zimmerman, Jewish American activist, co-founder of IfNotNow, one of the main protagonists of Israelism.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Erin, let’s begin with you. Why did you make this film?
ERIN AXELMAN: Yeah, this film is really based off my story. It’s based off a story of young American Jews learning a idealized and sanitized version of Israeli history, and really falling in love with that history, but, upon coming into contact with Palestinians and Palestinian narratives, having quite the rude awakening upon learning about the horrific oppression of the Palestinian people.
So, upon learning about the Nakba and the occupation as a young person, I wanted to do all I could in whatever way, big or small, to help change my own Jewish community, as well as to end the horrific oppression of the Palestinian people. And I began trying to come into contact with more and more people who had similar experiences,, and I began to realize that my own story was part of a much larger generational change, as hundreds of thousands of young American Jews begin to realize that to live out our Jewish values to the best of our ability, we must fight for the freedom and equality of Palestinians while also fighting against antisemitism.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the organizations that you chronicle, that you sort of depict in this film, those that are challenging the state of Israel and those that are supporting it, that the other groups are taking on.
ERIN AXELMAN: Definitely. We really — Simone is the main character and protagonist in the film. And we really try to tell a generational story, and I’m telling my own story through Simone, in many ways. We really chronicle a variety of progressive Jewish groups, including IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, J Street and many others.
And then we also, on the right, document a lot of pro-Israel groups. We had Abe Foxman as one of the main characters in the film, the director emeritus and former head of the Anti-Defamation League. We talk extensively about Birthright and AIPAC and other groups that have tried to keep the status quo of unconditional support for Israel alive and well.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s bring Simone Zimmerman into this conversation. Why don’t you tell us about your upbringing, Simone? Talk about your allegiance to the state of Israel, how it was instilled with you, and then talk about your transformation.
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: Absolutely. I grew up in a Jewish community where, you know, the Holocaust was a formative part of my upbringing, and I saw defending the state of Israel as a core part of what it meant to keep the Jewish people safe. It was a core Jewish commitment for me, so much so that when I actually met anti-Zionist Jews, anti-Zionist Israelis, people who were fighting occupation and apartheid when I was a college student at UC Berkeley, I couldn’t even believe that those people existed. They were an anomaly to me.
And the more I met those students and, more importantly, met Palestinian students, learned about their lives, about, you know, what it means, from the moment that you’re born, to live under a system that deems you lesser, less worthy, that you have to live under occupation and oppression and dispossession just because of who you are and where you were born, I very quickly ran out of answers that felt moral and logical to me to answer the hard questions that I was hearing from these students about how I could justify the oppression that they lived under.
AMY GOODMAN: Simone, I wanted to go to that moment at UC Berkeley — you’re a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley — a clip from Israelism, which features you in 2010 there, when the student Senate failed to override a veto of a bill calling on campus officials to divest from companies that supply weapons that Israel uses in the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: I just knew it was this bad thing that I had to fight.
BILL OPPONENT 1: It is antisemitism. It is.
BILL OPPONENT 2: You are trying to make me feel marginalized on my own campus.
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: And I remember all of us going, “Well, you shouldn’t boycott Israel, because it’s applying a double standard. And you shouldn’t boycott Israel, because it’s unfair to single out Israel.”
BILL OPPONENT 3: Please, I beg of you. I beg you, please, to have compassion and to remember that we are alienating students. And I am devastated by this bill. I am a human being.
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: I still remember you have these Palestinian students who get up and said, you know, “Jewish students, you are crying about feeling silenced and marginalized. You know, my aunts and cousins didn’t sleep for weeks while bombs were falling overhead in Gaza. What do you have to say to that?”
BILL SUPPORTER: If divestment is hostile, then where do we begin to describe the hostility of a military occupation?
AMY GOODMAN: Simone Zimmerman, if you can talk about that moment at UC Berkeley, what exactly was happening, and how you decided to explore further the kind of questioning that actually also came out of your Jewish education?
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: Absolutely. Well, you know, first, I want to say it’s striking to have this conversation right now as the Israeli military has destroyed all the universities in Gaza right now. And for me, I remember when I was in that campus debate, the way that this narrative about Jewish students being unsafe on campus is actually, I think, a deep conflation between being unsafe and being uncomfortable. I was deeply uncomfortable. I did not know about the realities that Palestinians lived under. I was systematically denied an education about that reality. And to this day, we see pro-Israel organizations working to do everything they can to change the topic away from Palestinian suffering onto Jewish discomfort.
You know what? Occupation and apartheid are deeply uncomfortable. We should all be uncomfortable and outraged by what’s happening in Gaza right now. And again, as I already said, the more I listened to Palestinian students testify about their realities, the more it was undeniable to me that I was missing a huge part of the story, and I had to go find out more.
AMY GOODMAN: Erin Axelman, I wanted you to introduce us to Eitan, an American who decides not to go to college first, but to serve in the IDF. We’re about to play a clip of him.
EITAN: From our hands and threw him to the ground while he’s still blindfolded and hands tied behind his back, and they started kicking him for a good few minutes. I was responsible for this man’s well-being. I was responsible to bring him from the checkpoint to the detention center. That was my job. And right outside the fence of the detention center, they grabbed him from me, and they started beating him. I felt responsible, but my commander wasn’t saying anything, so how could I say anything? The entire time that this was happening, a military police officer was standing just inside the fence watching and smoking a cigarette. As soon as these guys were done kicking this Palestinian man, the military police officer tossed his cigarette, he came, brought him inside the detention center. And I didn’t even speak up. I didn’t speak up. And that’s just one of many stories that I have from my time in the West Bank.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Eitan. It reminds me of our previous guest, Mosab Abu Toha, describing being beaten by the IDF. Well, he, Eitan, came to serve in Israel in the IDF. Tell us more about him and his transformation.
ERIN AXELMAN: Yeah, many American Jews are told that to defend the Jewish people and to be a good Jewish person, one of the best things you can do is to join the Israeli military or support the Israeli military. In the film, we extensively interview Hillel educators and an Israel fellow at the University of Connecticut, and they openly brag about how many kids they’ve gotten to serve in the Israeli military. And that is deeply tragic.
And I have had friends, American Jewish friends, who have also served. And they join as young people, as 18-year-olds, thinking that they’re doing a great thing by defending the Jewish people. And then many of them are sent to the occupied West Bank, and they quickly realize that they are actually a cog in a system of apartheid, a system that places you in a different legal system based upon the race you are born into. And so many American Jews, and some Israelis, as well, when they actually realize that this is what they’re doing — they’re not defending the Jewish people; they’re actually defending a settlement expansionist program in the West Bank, that is very literally a system of apartheid — it is devastating, and it is heartbreaking.
Obviously, they’re not the greatest victims. The greatest victims, of course, are the Palestinians who have to face that apartheid. But it’s inspiring to see members of Breaking the Silence, both Israelis and Americans, speak out and say, “We thought we were joining to do something, and we found out that we were actually, again, a part of this apartheid system,” and they are going to do everything they can to end this system of occupation and apartheid. And so, we really wanted to include someone like him, because it’s a common story, and it’s also the story of many of my friends, who were — served in the Israeli military, realized that they were part of a system of apartheid, and are now doing all they can to end that system.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Simone Zimmerman, you didn’t serve in the IDF, but you did go to Israel and the Occupied Territories. You also, for a moment — what was it? For two days? — became the outreach coordinator for the Bernie Sanders campaign, before a campaign was waged against you. Talk about your trajectory, going to the Occupied Territories, coming back, founding IfNotNow.
SIMONE ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, I went. You know, I had grown up spending time in Israel. I felt deeply connected to the place. I thought I knew — I thought I knew Israel. But the way that the apartheid system is actually built is such that Israeli Jews don’t actually have to see the reality that Palestinians live under. They can drive on roads. You know, they can drive on the side of the wall where they don’t have to see what is on the other side, the daily horrors and brutality and deep denial of dignity and freedom that Palestinians live under.
And once I saw those realities with my own eyes, once I met people who had been evicted from their homes, who were denied basic freedom of movement, people just like me who want to live in freedom and safety, whose every piece of their lives have been destroyed and constricted by a system of Jewish supremacy, I couldn’t unsee those things. And again, as Erin has already spoke about, this is a story that thousands of Jewish people around the world have encountered. And we know that it’s so deeply contrary to our values as Jewish people to support this disgusting oppression and denial of freedom from another people. And I’ve been part of this generation that includes IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace and many other groups that are taking on an outdated establishment that wants to enforce a pro-Israel orthodoxy and will do everything they can to attack and marginalize and silence anybody who dissents from that viewpoint.
You mentioned at the beginning of this segment the lawsuit going on at Harvard University. I can’t help but bring up right now the attacks that we’ve seen over the weekend on Derek Penslar, the director of a Jewish studies center at Harvard University, a world-renowned Jewish studies scholar. And he has been attacked for being named to an antisemitism task force at Harvard just because he criticizes the Israeli government.
So we’re seeing how far this establishment is willing to go to attack and marginalize anybody who doesn’t toe that very strict and narrow orthodoxy, and increasingly anybody who doesn’t defend this government’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip. And it’s absurd, but it’s also deeply dangerous and offensive to those of us who are acting out of a deep place of intellectual integrity, of Jewish values, of a commitment to justice, who want to build a world of genuine safety and freedom and dignity for Jewish people and for Palestinians. And that old guard is more and more desperate to keep any of us out of public life and political life, and certainly not to be legitimized as a legitimate Jewish voice.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Erin Axelman, you’re in Canada. Simone is here in New York. You’re starting yet another tour of the film. As Simone mentioned, Israelism is mentioned in the Harvard lawsuit, equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism or criticism of the Israeli state. Your final thoughts as the two of you travel both countries?
ERIN AXELMAN: Totally. You know, it’s ironic. You know, there was four attempted cancellations of screenings that we had in the fall. And at all of those screenings, it was actually Jewish groups, Jewish student groups or Jewish faculty, who were bringing this to the venue or university. So it’s very ironic that under the guise of protecting Jewish students or fighting antisemitism, administrations or venues are trying to cancel a film brought by Jewish people, made by Jewish people, about Jewish people. And it just shows how confused this moment is, and how all criticism of Israel, even if it’s being made by Jews, is often considered antisemitic, and which is totally absurd and really makes it much more difficult to fight real antisemitism.
And as we’re about to do this screening tour, we’re sure there’s going to be quite a few attempted cancellations. We just found out that Barnard’s president is attempting to unilaterally cancel a screening of Israelism in February. We’re working with the faculty, and we will make this screening happen. And we will fight all attempts to cancel our screenings. And we’ll also be part of the movement to fight back against attempted censorship of any pro-Palestinian or progressive Jewish voices.
AMY GOODMAN: Erin Axelman, co-director of Israelism, and Simone Zimmerman, Jewish American activist, co-founder of IfNotNow.
When we come back, Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the presidential race. Stay with us.
The White House has called on Israel to protect innocent people as Palestinian officials said the Israeli military had stormed one hospital in Gaza and placed another under siege.
National security council spokesperson John Kirby said on Monday Israel had a right to defend itself but added: “We expect them to do so in accordance with international law and to protect innocent people in hospitals, medical staff and patients as well, as much as possible.”
Israeli troops advanced for the first time into Gaza’s al-Mawasi district near the Mediterranean coast, west of Khan Younis, the main city in the territory’s south, in what some Palestinians said was the bloodiest assault so far in January.
The widespread damage caused by Israeli attacks since October 7, following Hamas’s surprise attacks on Israel, has led to a shortage of medical staff and supplies and an urgent need for fuel, electricity and water.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), only 15 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are partially functional - nine in the south and six in the north.
From October 7 to November 24, there were 74 Israeli assaults on health facilities with 30 hospitals attacked in Gaza, according to Insecurity Insight, a humanitarian association that collates data on threats facing people in dangerous environments.
Northern Gaza, including Gaza City, has borne the brunt of attacks on the healthcare sector, but as the war has progressed, previously designated safe areas south of Wadi Gaza have come under Israeli fire.
Fundamentally, educators are really only in this profession because we care so deeply about young people and the promise they hold — not in our communities, but across the globe.
Watching what is happening in Gaza has been soul-shattering too. Some 10,000 children have been killed since October 7; many are now without parents; some have been held hostage. Every one of them is someone’s child, someone’s loved one, someone’s student.
I’ve been told directly that teachers need to stick to teaching, that international matters aren’t something we should talk about, and that educators don’t have any clue or right to comment on issues that may seem so far away.
But we know what it is like to lose students, to see young
people suffer. Whether that child is in Chicago, Israel, Palestine or
anywhere in the world, we don’t want anyone else to experience this
pain. My partner encouraged me to finally start therapy because I lost
so many students that I was no longer able to cope with seeing the empty
desks, the social media eulogies, the funerals.
That’s why, for the first time in the history of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), we approved a resolution on November 1 to improve how we support students during world conflicts. That’s why we also approved another resolution, to add our name to a letter with other unions calling for an immediate cease-fire in Israel and Palestine. This decision wasn’t impulsive; our members met and thoroughly considered and discussed the various angles and issues. Our hundreds of delegates, all educators, further discussed and voted democratically. The support was nearly unanimous.
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) called for an “immediate” ceasefire in Gaza on Monday, adding to a growing chorus of voices who are calling for a ceasefire as Israel’s genocidal assault has killed over 25,000 Palestinians so far, with thousands missing under the rubble.
In a statement, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry cited Israel’s systematic dismantling of the infrastructure for basic needs in Gaza — with bombings, starvation and disease threatening the lives of everyone in the region — as reasoning behind the call.
“We call for an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and the delivery of life-saving food, water, medicine and other resources to the people of Gaza,” Henry said.
hat will it take for the International Olympic Committee to suspend Israel from the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics? Would the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian Olympic coaches be enough for such a sanction? That is the question posed after an Israeli air strike on Gaza City killed Hani al-Masdar, the 42-year-old coach of the Palestinian Olympic soccer team. Al-Masdar, known in Palestine as Abu al-Abed, was a midfielder for the Al-Maghazi Club and then the Gaza Sports Club before retiring in 2018. The Palestinian Football Association announced his death on Facebook with the following statement posted by The Palestine Chronicle:
The President of the Palestinian Football Association, the family of the Palestinian Football Association, and the entire Palestinian sports family, extend their sincere feelings of sadness and pain at the martyrdom of former Palestinian football star, the general coach of the Olympic national team, Hani Al-Masdar (Abu al-Abed). Abu al-Abed rose [to martyrdom] due to the occupation aggression on the Gaza Strip for the third month, joining the constellation of football martyrs and martyrs of the Palestinian sports movement.
This is just part of a horror that has been inflicted upon the Palestinian athletic community since the start of the Israeli bombing campaign. The Palestinian Football Association says Israel has killed 88 top-tier athletes since the Hamas raid of October 7, 67 of whom played soccer. In addition, the group counts 24 administrators and technical staff who have been killed. Israeli forces killed one prominent soccer player, Ahmed Daraghmeh, 23, not in Gaza but the West Bank.
In previous decades there have been calls to ban Israel from international athletic competition in response to its jailing and targeting of Palestinian athletes as well as keeping competitors in Gaza from leaving in order to join their West Bank teammates to play overseas. When these complaints have been raised, the Israeli response is invariably that they are being held to a “higher standard” than other countries also engaged in awful acts against civilians, and this higher standard is rank antisemitism. But how could anyone short of a zealot or the Biden administration not see that the genocide settling over Gaza and the killing of Olympic coaches cannot be tolerated?
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