On Sept. 2, 2009, a group of Canadian and international cultural producers in the film, culture and media arts communities issued a statement called the Toronto Declaration.
In opposition to the Toronto International Film Festival's (TIFF) celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv this year, artists from around the world sent a strong message that occupation anywhere will never be celebrated.
Despite a week of attacks on the signatories of this letter, the Toronto Declaration is unstoppable. Since its initial release, the letter has continued to gather signatures. Now more than 1,000 people from around the world -- including many Israelis -- have signed on in protest of TIFF's City-to-City Spotlight on Tel Aviv.
New signatories include music and cinematic legends Harry Belafonte and Julie Christie. Actor Viggo Mortensen, who will be attending this year's festival, just added his name. Leading intellectual figures Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler and Anne McClintock have also recently endorsed the declaration, along with prominent Canadian writers Rawi Hage, Joy Kogawa, Dionne Brand and Kerri Sakamoto. Celebrated local filmmakers Velcrow Ripper, Min Sook Lee and Lynne Fernie have also signed the letter.
International support for the declaration continues to grow despite denunciations, unfounded personal attacks on earlier signatories Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, and Naomi Klein, and despite an aggressive campaign of misinformation regarding the letter’s content.
On Monday, Sept. 14 at 7 p.m. some of the names behind the Toronto Declaration will gather in Toronto to share messages of solidarity and responses to their critics. Watch it live on rabbletv!
For more information, and to read the Toronto Declaration and the full list of signatories, visit The Toronto Declaration blog.
Let's see....the Palestinians were first occupied because they attacked Israel, and they have continued to state that they don't recognized the right of Israel to exist.
Since the middle of the last century, the surrounding Middle Eastern countries began deporting all their Jews, many whose families had lived in these Middle Eastern countries for centuries. Many Jews had all their property confiscated, and they arrived in Israel with almost nothing but the clothes on their backs. Israel accepted them, and also accepted pour uneducated Africans of Jewish decent, and accepted Russians and Eastern Europeans, many who arrived with nothing. None of these people were put into refuge camps. They were all integrated into Israel, even though this was an imperfect and difficult process.
The Palestinian refugees have been stranded in refugee camps for 3 generations now. No surrounding Middle Eastern country has granted any of them citizenship or tried to resettle them. The Palestinian refugees have been governed by a succession of thugs who have taken the billions of dollars that outside countries have pumped into the refugee camps and spent the money on maintaining a secret police and a thuggish militia, and on enriching themselves and their band of thieves, and doling out enough scraps to their followers to keep them onside.
The Palestinians have been teaching their children to hate, and even their equivalent of Sesame Street teaches hatred of Jews. The Palestinian elites live in fortified palaces, or abroad, and direct attacks on Israel to be launched from unprotected civilian areas in order to create Palestinian casualties. The Palestinian elites live in luxury on the money that was intended to help the whole population. Arafat awarded members of his family exclusive control of and all the profits from most of the necessities in the refugee camps, and they made millions off the backs of poor Palestinians.
If the Palestinians had spent their money on schools and hospitals, infrastructure and supporting small businesses, they could be a thriving, educated society today. Instead they are a backward, oppressed (by their own thuggish, totalitarian leaders) and impoverished people.
If the Palestinians had offered a firm commitment to peace, they most likely would have gotten back much of the land they lost in 1967, just as Egypt did.
The Palestinians live in a land that has changed hands many times over the past centuries, and who's to say they have more claim to it than the Ottomans, or the British, or the Israelis? Muslims are the latecomers to this territory, by any account, and many of their mosques and homes are built over the foundations or ruins of the Jews and Romans and Canaanites and so on and so on.
If the Palestinians would declare an end to the fighting, the fighting would be over. The Palestinians are now in the clutches of groups who thrive on their misery, and enrich themselves at their expense. The Palestinians have been brainwashed to think that all their problems could be eliminated if they could just wipe out Israel. If they could just get rid of the 'others' then their lives would be perfect. They imagine that by displacing or killing millions they could make the world a better place.
What I want to know is, why don't the Palestinians try peace? Put down their guns and stop preaching hate? Use their energies and moneys for schools and hospitals and roads and sewers?
Everyone in the region knows, more or less, where the final boundaries will be drawn. Everybody knows what the peace could look like. All that's left to be decided is how many more people are going to die, and this is something that the Palestinian leadership is completely responsible for.
It makes no sense to me to boycott Israel, where people have freedom of speech and a democratic system of government, and it makes no sense to me to act as though the Palestinians are pure and faultless in their own situation, when they have been guilty all along of aggression and terror. Maybe in la la land somewhere people get a 'mulligan' on their history, but the real world isn't a golf game, and when the Palestinians attacked Israel they didn't get a 'do over' just because their plan didn't work.
And I particularly loved the banner showing gays supporting the Palestinians. Why don't they try that march in Gaza, huh? You know, Gaza, the place where homosexuality is considered to be an illegal perversion? Oh there are openly gay Palestinians, but they're living in places like Tel Aviv and London and New York and Toronto, and if they want to stay alive, they'd better not go back to their homeland and declare their sexuality.