Massively successful Canadian journalist Naomi Klein has issued an alert about the official Israeli anti-anti-propaganda campaign currently in full swing. She cites the Toronto International Film Festival accepting a pro-Israel lobbyists' proposal to "highlight" Tel Aviv during the event. The concept is to divert international attention away from unpleasant facts about the Israeli occupation and destruction of Arab land and people. They will not succeed.
In her excellent piece titled "We Don't Feel Like Celebrating with Israel This Year", Klein tells us
For more than a year, Israeli diplomats have been talking openly about their new strategy to counter growing global anger at Israel's defiance of international law. It's no longer enough, they argue, just to invoke Sderot every time someone raises Gaza.
Famous Israeli artists and writers will evangelize to the gentiles about the "pretty face" of Israel, promoting Tel Aviv as a city tolerant of liberalism and gays. See, Israel is just like Paris, New York, and Toronto, so diverse and Western. No need to listen to those annoying Palestinians.
Klein noted the irony of attention being diverted to pleasant Tel Aviv, whilst obscuring what is behind the 600 km apartheid wall, barbed wire and checkpoints. Yes indeed, what is behind those 10 meter concrete walls and towers? About 2,000,000 inconvenient Arabs, under the control of Israel (but not given true democratic rights).
She is not calling for a boycott of the festival or Israel. Instead, Klein calls for people of conscience to sign a petition called Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation. For Klein, its sorry, we don't feel like partying with Israel this year.
She would rather stand in solidarity with her Arab friend, Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women's-rights activist, who told about what happened when Israel used American-made bombs to kill 1,400 Arabs last December.
Naomi Klein is my kind of woman: attractive and anti-imperialist. Her recent book The Shock Doctrine: ... Disaster Capitalism chronicles the workings of modern imperialism. Naomi Klein writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian that is syndicated internationally by The New York Times Syndicate. In 2004, her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s Magazine won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Also in 2004, she co-produced The Take with director Avi Lewis, a feature documentary about Argentina’s occupied factories. The film was an Official Selection of the Venice Biennale and won the Best Documentary Jury Prize at the American Film Institute’s Film Festival in Los Angeles. Klein is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia.