The Palestine Exception: Film as a Form of Cultural Work that Facilitates Movement Building - CounterPunch.org
Home | Palestine Exception The Palestine Exception | Official Trailer The exceptional new documentary The Palestine Exception, co-directed by Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth, focuses on the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that swept across U.S. college campuses in 2024 and the repressive backlash students, faculty and activists encountered, which is called onscreen “the New McCarthyism.” In only 71 minutes the nonfiction film covers lots of ground, including the thorny double standards applied to the Israel/Palestine divide. For instance, when Palestinian pupils are told to remove their flags, they ask why Hillel is allowed to fly the Israeli flag. And while pro-Palestinian supporters are chastised for chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea,” Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu displays a map that conspicuously omits the occupied territories, as if Gaza and the West Bank don’t exist. The Palestine Exception intercuts contemporary, original interviews with activists and academics, archival footage of the founding of Israel and expulsion of Palestinians and news clips, including of the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice proceedings regarding allegations of Israeli genocide. In addition to discussing the film’s subject matter, co-director/producer Jan Haaken, who is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University and a clinical psychologist, also spoke about the way psychoanalysis influences her filmmaking style and how cinema can be a tool of and medium for social change. Haaken was interviewed in Portland via Zoom. What is the central thesis of The Palestine Exception? Jan Haaken: College campuses for a very long time have been sites of rebellion and resistance, experimentation with new ideas and modes of analysis. But also, sites of tremendous repression, around military research, militarism and the production of knowledge. This last year we see the campus as a site of a return of the repressed around the disavowal or denial of the Palestinian struggle for justice and the history of Israel’s repression, including more recently, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and expansion of its territories over the occupied territories. There’s a long history but it’s been most manifested, the resistance to this past year of a genocidal campaign in Gaza but also tremendous suffering and death in the occupied territories on the West Bank. We wanted to bring out that story of why so many young people, young activists, are identifying with the justice in Palestine movement. It’s Palestinian, Arab-American, but also lots of Jewish students and students who are not identified ethnically with this issue. Typically, news crews arrive when something dramatic or violent happens or an action like the encampments on campuses, but then it’s gone. It’s a fleeting moment. The medium of a long form documentary is a form of social memory holding more of this history in context of this struggle into a form people can reflect on. And the movement itself can expand its reach. Your documentary starts with an inter-title stating: “After years of right-wing assaults on higher education, attacks took a new form in 2023 and 2024 that has been described as the New McCarthyism.” What were those pre-2023 “right-wing assaults”? The co-director, Jennifer Ruth – she’s on the faculty of film studies at Portland State University and has published several books on campus politics and academic freedom, the distinction between academic freedom and free speech – and I had talked about doing a film on the crackdown on campuses in recent years by the rightwing. Attacks on DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion] programs, critical race theory, queer studies, gender studies. These are the same programs and activists often that are the target of the campaign over the last year under the pretense of protecting Jewish students from anti-Semitism. There have been many news reports in places like Florida, Texas, where campuses – one university in Florida fired most of its faculty and set it up as a new rightwing school. We had trouble getting traction around that project. The Palestine Exception sees similarities between the crackdown today on pro-Palestinian protesters and the repression during the Red Scare period. You have black and white archival footage of Dalton Trumbo testifying in 1947 before the House Un-American Activities Committee. What do you think are the main parallels between the HUAC Hollywood hearings and Sen. Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn’s hearings in the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations? Ellen Schrecker is a scholar in the film [American professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University], among others, who comment on the parallels. She drew on the Red Scare and academia, professors who lost their jobs, or were blacklisted and suffered during the McCarthy period of the 1950s. HUAC and then Sen. Joe McCarthy, it’s a complex history, how you distill that history into a film where it’s a touchstone; it’s not the main thesis. I always draw on touchstones. Early on there were these signs about McCarthyism and students and faculty talking about McCarthyism… The testifying and the sight of seeing presidents of these prestigious universities hauled before these congressional hearings really resonated as a parallel. Those students saw it as a mode of intimidation that’s taking hold, frankly, on campuses. Presidents, like at our own [PSU], a more working class university, the presidents are very afraid, the pressures coming down on them. A “New McCarthyism”? Yeah. I initially thought of a title like “McCarthyism Redux,” then I thought that’s too narrow a frame. I moved to The Palestine Exception, which keeps at the center the stories and history that’s been most marginalized and repressed. You show part of the trailer of Otto Preminger’s 1960 epic Exodus. Do you know who wrote its screenplay? Was it Leon Uris? He wrote the novel. The screenplay was by Dalton Trumbo… Discuss other historical parallels your film makes between the anti-Vietnam War era protesters in the 1960s/70s and the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, compared with today’s pro-Palestine demonstrators? I’m a psychologist… I’m always interested in how a current dilemma stirs memory… There’s always a problem that leads to the revisiting of memory. History, whether personal or collective, is always open to interpretation and different lessons to be drawn… that helps orient and sustain them and the enormous pressure pro-Palestinian protesters are facing…. The biggest parallel that comes to mind is the anti-[Vietnam] war movement because this is an antiwar movement. The critique of militarism – the U.S. role as a military power in maintaining its empire is central to this problem. The university as a site of military research and resistance to it was very much part of that back history… There were issues that are still with us, about the U.S. as an empire and militarism. I was listening for how activists are using history… During the anti-[Vietnam] war movement there was also lots of crackdowns on students. Often violent. Yeah, violent repression. One point your documentary makes has to do with BDSM, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, which came out of both the anti-Vietnam and the anti-apartheid in South Africa causes? Discuss the movement to divest on campus during the Vietnam era at Columbia and elsewhere and why? Premilla Nadasen, who recently resigned as a history professor at Barnard, came from South Africa to study in the U.S., was very involved in the anti-apartheid movement. That history inspired her current activism. The side of history that you’re on, and whether it was the right side, isn’t always apparent in the moment. There’s a nostalgic position of virtue from a distance. They tried to get an honorary degree for Nelson Mandela at Columbia, and they refused that, defining him as a terrorist. [The film] is asking the audience to take the longer view of history… The BDS Movement has come under fierce attack in this country. Many states have passed laws making it illegal to boycott Israel, which is shocking and shows the severity of the repression and desperation around defending Israel… You see the parallels with the encampments now and the creativity that’s always been a part of radical movements. We have to figure out ways of surviving police assaults, and making sure the medium carries the message. One of the big controversies in recent years has been the call to boycott Israeli universities and whether that’s counterproductive. Are Palestinian activists in occupied territories calling for them? That’s always an important criterion. To put economic pressure on Israel, to isolate them? There’s a moral hazard attached to boycotts. It’s like rulings from the International Court of Justice [and the International Criminal Court], a storyline we wanted to carry through the film. It gives authority and legitimacy to what the students are calling for, but doesn’t have lots of teeth to it in terms of enforcement. But nonetheless, these actions carry a moral authority, with Israel persisting in carrying out its lethal campaign in Gaza and elsewhere in the region, there’s even more urgency to calls to isolate Israel. How are today’s BDSM pro-Palestinian students being treated now? Were they successful on any college campus? There were a few campuses, like Rutgers and Brown, where student demands for university disinvestment from companies that do business with Israel [the administrations] agreed to negotiate with students, to look at their portfolios. That can be a delaying tactic, but many saw it as a better outcome than calling police, arresting students and penalizing them by withholding their transcripts, not allowing them on campus. There have been some very severe consequences for students and faculty, particularly adjunct or contingent faculty. The BDS Movement has been around for over 20 years against Israel, but it really has gained momentum over the last year… The Palestine Exception states that 3,100 pro-Palestinian students on 60 campuses were arrested. Tell us other ways that pro-Palestine activists have been punished? Palestine Legal [https://palestinelegal.org/] has summations of faculty not having contracts renewed, those without the security or protection of tenure and due process particularly. Students having their transcripts withheld; having job offers withdrawn because of their known posting and support for Palestine on social media. Students who are suspended for a year and then having to submit papers on what is “good protesting,” like third graders, and have them reviewed before their status as active students is renewed. At NYU, a number of faculty are persona non grata, a category that apparently has been used from time to time with mentally ill people who come in and shout in the library or do something very disruptive. There’s lots of ongoing consequences, many take the form of more elaborate bureaucratic rules. Even the scheduling of this film – we’ve only had six screenings so far since mid-November… The students themselves are very worried, particularly worried with the potential for the federal government to withhold funds under a civil rights law, which had protected oppressed groups around racism and sexism, and can withhold federal funds to universities that violate that part of this civil rights act. Now, Zionist organizations are trying to use that to protect Zionism as a part of their religious and ethnic identity, so students and groups, that are especially anti-Zionists, [from] allowing them on campus. Like Jewish Voice for Peace would be in violation of civil rights law, which is absurd in terms of the intent of that law; defining Zionism as a protected category of Jewish identity. There’s lots of worries about what’s ahead. Did police and counter-protesters use violence against pro-Palestinian demonstrators and occupiers? Yes, there’s examples in the film… at Columbia and UCLA, because that was part of the picture. UCLA calling in the police [after] the failure to protect students from a mob that came in [to the pro-Palestine encampment] and attacked students violently. And then using the police to suppress the students was for some the most outrageous example of the repressive use of police. But we didn’t want to replicate in the film what the media does: Just featuring the most dramatic and riveting moments of drama and violence. To also capture the range of this movement, of effective movements, there’s lots of grief, a tone of lamentation we were striving for, as well as rage and horror and the angry outrage. As a psychologist I’ve done projects before in war or conflict zones that involve violence and you can be too captured by that. People can become inured to it after a brief fascination. For us, the modes of analysis, how you can understand what’s happening, is as important as what’s happening. It’s important to have a range of scholars explaining the history invoked and informs this movement, as well as some of the repressive use of violence. What do you think of the fact that people supporting peace and stopping the mass killing of children are met with violence in response? The perverse irony and just blatant hypocrisy of that is commented on in the film several times. There’s a kind of splitting that happens, where people who are otherwise decent people can turn away or rationalize what, if they really had to look closely, to take a sustained look, would find horrifying. There is, of course, racism that’s part of it. Whose suffering do you identify with? Who you’re apt to care about and who not? So that’s part of The Palestine Exception too, is whose stories are pushed aside and don’t arouse the same empathy or concern or demand protection. That’s part of where the film started, in 1948, with the refugee crisis of Jews coming to find sanctuary in that land, Palestine, and at the same time making claims and at the same time creating a whole class of refugees. For Judith Butler, a scholar on refugee displacement storytelling, that was an important part of that story. And to hold onto at the same time the horrors of the Holocaust and the problem of anti-Semitism. As Butler says, we have to remember that story and hold it, but also understand how people who have suffered tremendous persecution and oppression can also be the agent of tremendous oppression. And of course, the Palestinians weren’t the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Yeah. Edward Said speaks to that. What happened when Tami Gold of Hunter College’s Department of Film & Media Studies Department – which I graduated from – planned to screen Israelism at Hunter? That was a story that unfolded. We strive throughout the film to find incidents that register and represent something larger. Hunter was one of the first schools to have that film cancelled. And it was scheduled before the events of October 7. Right, it had been scheduled about a month before to be screened in late October, then it was cancelled. The concerns the administration raised have been raised by other controversial films in the past, but to cancel a film that had been scheduled by an academic department with the support of other academic departments, and then that began to happen all over the place. So, that was something that had not happened before. It clearly registered, it was a shot over the bow for the administration. What was important in that story for us, as filmmakers, was they pushed back. They had meetings, they enlisted the union to push back on the administration, it was important for Tami Gold to have her name on the screen, recorded by Tami Gold, she took responsibly for that recording so nobody else could be targeted for that recording [of a hearing regarding the Israelism imbroglio with] the student body president confronting the interim president. It was not just about the repressive action of the administration; they’re testing the waters on that – but it’s important to show the pushback… Israelism did screen, months later, when the departments did prevail… Hunter is a working class school. Lots of the media attention has been on Columbia, Harvard, MIT, these elite schools. We also wanted to show Portland State, which [like] Hunter is a working class school, part of CUNY. To feature the important work and vibrant activism and critical thinking at working class schools. As I recall, when I majored in cinema at Hunter in the seventies we screened 1935’s The Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, which wasn’t banned. Why didn’t the 2024 wave of student protests that swept college campuses resume when the Fall semester began? There are a number of dynamics at play with upsurges in movements. Some are common, like Black Lives Matter. Earlier I did two environmental films, Necessity, about climate activism, the use of civil disobedience and there were massive protests. Reproductive rights movement has had waves. Movements tend to have insurgent waves. And then the impact doesn’t stop there. That’s why it’s important to have films and other mediums that holds the memory of these more dramatic insurgent moments. But this year there are still lots of activists organizing on campuses, having discussions; that’s part of what we’ve been doing with the film, is talking about how it’s harder to have encampments. It’s also a mistake to fetishize one tactic. You can’t recreate the encampments. But there are ways of using parody or other forms of symbolic protest or interrupting activity around all of the checking of ID cards [to be allowed onto campuses]. Movements have often had street theater, various ways of working around the censors. There’s a huge amount of censorship now. We’re working nationally with Jewish Voice for Peace. There are about 50 chapters on campuses around the country; about 25 of them have been either suspended or sanctioned in some way. Are you and your co-director Jennifer Ruth Jewish? No. Describe the way language is being used? The conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? The Holocaust International Remembrance has a definition that places criticism of Israel and Zionism at the center of the definition of anti-Semitism. There’s a Jerusalem Declaration that makes that distinction [between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israeli/Zionist policies]. HIRA’s more conservative definition that many politicians are using now claim that criticism of Israel and Zionism are inherently anti-Semitic. The absurdity of that though – it’s burst its bounds. I used to argue with my other feminist comrades, back in the day, if we use rape or sexual abuse too broadly, it loses its specificity… There’s so much now, that young people realize anti-Semitism is being so used to silence criticism of a genocide. I mean, that’s absurd. Particularly by people who are very rightwing in this country and have been trafficking and traveling with real anti-Semites. People who have organized anti-Semitic politics and neo-Nazi sympathies. It’s falling under its own weight. That may be a parallel with McCarthyism. When the charge of subversion or communism became so broad that you’re even going after the Army. It’s not carrying much weight with young people anymore, even though there’s lots of money behind that accusation. Why are there clips of Joe Biden as president and as senator expressing very pro-Zionist sentiments? That was important to show in the film. There are different histories of Zionism. Now, it’s pretty common for liberal Zionists in the Democratic Party and elsewhere to narrow their critique of Israel to Netanyahu and the far right. Over the course of this [film], I’ve become more critical about Israel as a project, as a state. It’s not just the rightwing of Israel. Biden embodies… a critical analysis, saying, “If Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent her.” That hit something important. A documentary film is not like writing a book – you have to get to the point fast. That was some of the central political motive of this very costly support of Israel. If you look at the military defense of Israel compared to other countries, it’s astonishing. You have to ask: “Why is that?” Biden has been the biggest recipient of AIPAC funding at $4,229,598. Yes. Just one part on AIPAC in the film…. There has been a very effective documentary on AIPAC funding [2007’s AIPAC – The Israeli Lobby]. But Christian Zionism has been a very animating political force. There are a lot more Christian Zionists than Jewish Zionists in this country now. How much that’s been a driving force in the rightwing attacks on higher education in general, as well as around the defense of Israel. Your documentary uses lots of archival footage and news clips. How much of The Palestine Exception is original material shot specifically by your crew for your film? If you just listen to the audio and interviews, I’d say 75%… You don’t want to just watch [talking heads], so what you do as a documentary filmmaker is bring in archival footage to cover or illustrate what the interviewee is saying. We couldn’t be everywhere all the time, so you rely on footage shot by people elsewhere. Jewish Voice for Peace gave us permission to use footage of their actions in New York. That’s part of the collaborative nature of movement documentaries, that you’re sharing footage. They’re all original interviews, the only one who’s not is Edward Said, because he’s dead… Seven or eight scholars, it was also important for us to have some personal stories, so Sophie Smith, who has a PhD in cultural studies and teaches, but is also a Jewish Voice for Peace activist, she tells a personal story of “escape to Israel night” at a B’Nai B’rith Camp… We found a way to animate it, and create an animation effect… We had an illustrator for that and an animator. And for [Palestinian-American academic] Ted Khoury’s family story that’s passed on, of escaping the Nakba, we had a different illustrator and an animator. Animation is very, very expensive and we had a small budget. How to use the creative tools we had to create movement. There was lots of creative use of graphics, we had a great graphic design person on the team… How was your film funded? We got a small grant from the AAUP [American Association of University Professors] Foundation. A few people early on provided some initial funding… Then we had a seed and spark campaign for $25,000. We had lots of people who offered to help us with below market rates for their labor. It cost about $76,000. It’s a combination of a few small grants a crowdfunding campaign and a few individual donors. Frantz Fanon, author Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth was a psychiatrist. As a clinical psychologist, what unique insights do you bring to this documentary and subject matter? …I went to graduate school with lots of psychoanalytic Marxist faculty who came out of those traditions and critical theory… My work is psychoanalytically informed. What I try to bring to my films is a way of thinking about this medium as a living form of memory. Somewhat as people are struggling with something and then they’re motivated to recall, to reflect… I bring both that aesthetic and heuristic to the film. I tend as a psychologist to how people will attend to something, then push it out of mind. I like to include spaces of quiet and reflection and to help people not only recover repressed histories or memories in this medium, but how do you hold onto what you initially reject or what’s anxiety provoking? So, I wanted the film to not be inspirational in that shallow way or a manic claim of ultimate victory but have a sober aspect to it. But to say there’s something here worth fighting for. And to move away from the individual hero narrative where you have the individual challenged, then the vulnerability is exposed, and there’s a triumph or a tragic fall at the end. I’m interested in groups doing things together and the relational side of groups… doing things together, not only out of ethical and political commitments, but out of a commitment to one another. I always hope that my films centered on activism make students or adults of any age think it’s a more interesting life to be a radical. [Laughs.] And to push for and imagine a different world – even one that can’t be realized. I find movements so interesting to follow in my work and to draw out the joys, as well as the disappointments of activists. In terms of film history, The Palestine Exception is to some extent in the tradition of the campus revolt movies made around 1970 such as The Strawberry Statement, Zabriskie Point, R.P.M., Getting Straight, Drive, He Said. Except yours is a nonfiction film. Do you see any similarities between your documentary and those features? There’s the question of documentary and fiction films. There are always aesthetics, subjective choices, selections that are part of taking a massive amount of footage and archival material and creating a film, so there’s a creative process in a documentary. There’s also an agreement with the audience that this film is, as close as you can, represents real events. I take that seriously, my documentaries came out of my field research, and participatory action methods of research, where I did many, many interviews in settings where groups are struggling with something difficult, a crisis zone of some kind. I’d always pick not just the most dramatic story, or riveting, most heroic element of the scene, but what seemed to capture a range of group experiences. For me there’s an empirical fidelity I strive for to the lived experience of people. Lots of fiction films don’t have – even when they’re capturing history or narrative films of the left – they’re still interested in the most dramatic character. Often men. [Laughs.] That’s one difference. There’s a tendency to be nostalgic about earlier campus radicalism. Bringing history into the present here was important. Many of the campuses, including my own, Portland State University, have plaques celebrating the antiwar activists during the Vietnam War era who occupied buildings. The same leaders who applaud those earlier activist radical students are appalled by what students are doing today. We’ve covered lots of ground. Would you like to add anything? …I think it’s important to remember that repression and the defenses that hold some kind of repressive operation can become quite brittle and rigid. As much as we’re seeing an intensified crackdown and repression on students on campuses, there’s also an element of desperation around this. It’s important, especially with the Trump era now before us, lots of students, faculty are very scared… Repressive actions and forces have their vulnerabilities, they can become rigid and overstretched and lots of young people aren’t buying that story any more. We hope the film will open-up paths for movement building around this and how young people are seeing the connections between settler colonialism, our own history as a settler colonial project. How capitalism and militarism have such intimate ties. And that the film will be a form of cultural work that will facilitate movement building. What’s next for Jan Haaken? [Laughs.] I’m not a spiritual person, I’m very secular. I always feel like these film projects come to me. Sometimes literally. Like Atomic Bamboozle, some of the tribal people I work with said I want you to make this film… I’d like to continue to follow this movement as it continues to unfold. How do the climate, the racial justice, the justice for Palestine movements, how are they going to converge and challenge in some way the system we live under? Whatever comes next, I think it will be in that area, social movements and the lessons to draw from them. The Palestine Exception will be screened January 26, 2025, 4:00PM – Cinema 21, Portland, OR and January 28, 2025, 5:30 PM, Claremont McKenna College, California. For more screenings and info see: www.palestineexceptionfilm.com. Ed Rampell was named after legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow because of his TV exposes of Senator Joe McCarthy. Rampell majored in Cinema at Manhattan’s Hunter College and is an L.A.-based film historian/critic who co-organized the 2017 70th anniversary Blacklist remembrance at the Writers Guild theater in Beverly Hills and was a moderator at 2019’s “Blacklist Exiles in Mexico” filmfest and conference at the San Francisco Art Institute. Rampell co-presented “The Hollywood Ten at 75” film series at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and is the author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and co-author of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34887): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34887 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110851174/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
