Planet Israel review – valuable personal documentary about Israel/Palestine conflict

Gillian Mosely’s film argues that Israelis are asked to accept a ‘forever war’ in part motivated by Netanyahu’s desire to defer investigation into corruption allegations

Gillian Mosely has produced a follow-up film to her earlier documentary The Tinderbox, about the Israel/Palestine conflict and about how, as a Jewish person, she came to sympathise with the Palestinians. This film returns to the same subject, reiterating her argument that, since the grotesque antisemitic pogrom of 7 October, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has normalised a cruel, callous and paranoid political culture within an administration that needs far-right elements to stay in power and defer indefinitely any legal pursuit of Netanyahu’s own alleged corruption and cronyism, and that the civilian deaths in Gaza are an international scandal. Further, she says that all Israeli citizens, hawks and doves, are being asked to accept a “forever war” as a mark of patriotic loyalty; an eternal state of bloodshed.

It is a perfectly admissible point, complicated by the fact that Israel does indeed have neighbours that deny its right to exist at all; fundamental, existential statehood enmities not faced by Putin, Xi, Trump and other strongmen with whom Netanyahu is often bracketed. Mosely at a later stage in the film damages her own argument, in my view, with a glib and naive statement to the effect that all this “fuels antisemitism”; an equation that comes close to inviting Jews all over the world to blame themselves for anti-Jewish bigotry. (Somehow it is not permissible in the same way to shrug and say that Hamas “fuels Islamophobia” or that Xi “fuels anti-Chinese racism”.) But, as before, Mosely has relevant things to say about a horrendous situation which Netanyahu’s ban on foreign journalists in Gaza is designed to mask.
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