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Film Festival Backtracks on Condemnation of Anti-Israel ‘From the River to the Sea’ Slogan After Directors Withdraw From Event

Anti-Israel protesters hold a banner that says, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” standing in front of the president’s palace in Warsaw, Poland, on Nov. 5, 2023. Photo: IMAGO/Marek Antoni Iwanczuk via Reuters Connect

Organizers of the 2023 International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) currently taking place in Amsterdam have walked back their criticism of a rallying cry widely known as a call for the destruction of Israel after a number of pro-Palestinian directors withdrew their participation in the film festival.

The IDFA’s Artistic Director Orwa Nyrabia told The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday that “around 10” directors have pulled their films from the festival’s lineup. The Palestine Film Institute (PFI) announced on Sunday that it too has withdrawn from all activities at the IDFA film market. The PFI additionally organized a protest outside the main IDFA headquarters on Monday to demand an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, and to criticize the IDFA.

In response, Nyrabia said, “We respect the choices and the decisions of all filmmakers, whether that is to speak their minds on stage or online or to withdraw their films. All forms of peaceful protest, including criticism of our work, we honor and respect.”

The IDFA is the world’s largest documentary film festival. At its opening night on Nov. 8, pro-Palestinian protesters rushed on stage and held a banner that read, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The slogan has been widely interpreted as a call for Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, to be eradicated and replaced by “Palestine.” It has also been used to defend the deadly Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel that took place on Oct. 7.

Last week, the US House of Representatives voted to censure Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for her use of the slogan. A resolution passed by 22 Democrats and most Republicans called the slogan “a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel and its people to replace it with a Palestinian state.”

A day after the incident at the film festival’s opening night, 16 prominent members of the Israeli film community — including the chair of the Israeli Film Academy, chairwoman of the Israeli Documentary Forum, and chairman of the Israeli Producers Union — wrote a letter to the IDFA. They asked the festival and its director to “clearly and resoundingly distance themselves, reject and denounce these calls for violence and withdraw any platform from those who knowingly incite for the annihilation of Israel, instigating violence and giving rise to antisemitic sentiments against Jews everywhere.”

IDFA organizers afterwards condemned the slogan in a statement released on Nov. 10.

“That slogan does not represent us, and we do not endorse it in any way. We are truly sorry that it was hurtful to many,” the statement read in part. “We understand that the slogan was hurtful, and sincerely apologize for how this happened. There are many ways that people use or read this slogan, and that various sides use it in opposing ways, all of which we do not agree with, and we believe that this slogan should not be used in any way and by anybody anymore.”

Nyrabia added that the slogan is “a triggering statement and an offensive declaration for many, regardless of who carries it. It does not represent IDFA, and was and will not be endorsed.” The Syrian-born filmmaker also denied allegations that he was applauding the banner that featured the slogan on opening night, saying that he did not see the words on the sign until afterwards and “clapped to welcome freedom of speech, and not to welcome the slogan.”

In a separate statement released on Nov. 10, the film festival called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

After the release of the statement slamming the “river to the sea” slogan, a number of pro-Palestinian producers and the PFI announced their withdrawal from the film festival. PFI additionally accused the IDFA of engaging in “institutional violence and censorship.” It said that by condemning the actions of the anti-Israel protesters at the festival’s opening night, the IDFA was responsible for the “vilification of Palestinian voices.”

The IDFA responded to the backlash in its most recent statement published on Nov. 12, when it repeated its call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, accused Israel of “occupation,” and clarified its stance regarding the slogan, appearing to somewhat justify its usage.

“Many filmmakers, Palestinians, Israelis, and others, whose work featured at IDFA over the years, showed the world how occupation is the core of this tragedy, and that ending the occupation and respecting all human lives as equal and sacred, are the essential steps,” the statement read.

The festival then said it recognizes that the controversial slogan “is at the heart of the on-going discussion is used by various parties in different ways and is perceived by various people in various manners.”

“We are not ignoring, undermining, nor criminalizing any of these positions, and we fully respect and acknowledge the pain that is going around and the extreme urgency of these discussions while war is still on, and innocent civilians are still dying,” the statement added. “Our aim is to make sure everybody feels welcome and safe to express themselves and to listen openly to others, even when in disagreement. Our hope is that everybody feels entitled to use this platform, seriously and responsibly, lovingly and sincerely.”

Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory is among the directors to withdraw from the IDFA after it criticized the anti-Israel slogan. She pulled her film Mast-del from the film festival’s lineup and said in an Instagram post that she is “heartbroken, betrayed, and outraged by the damaging slander” of the “from the river to the sea” phrase. In the same social media post, she accused Israel of being an “apartheid state,” of “ethnic cleansing,” and of committing an “ongoing genocide” agains Palestinians.

The International Documentary Film Festival is taking place Nov. 8-19. On Wednesday, it awarded top prizes to a film about a “stateless Palestinian child” living in a refugee camp in Beirut, titled Son of the Streets, and another film titled Coexistence, My Ass! about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but with a comedic twist.

In a statement about awarding Son of the Streets at the IDFA Forum Awards, jurors Zdeněk Blaha and Nada Riyadh explained “with our decision, we would like to support not only a specific aspiring talent but also a cause,” in a clear reference to supporting the Palestinians. “If there was one project that needs support at this moment the most, it is this one. We would like to recognize the struggle of a nation forced to live as ghosts caught between the walls. Without home, without identity, without land.”

The post Film Festival Backtracks on Condemnation of Anti-Israel ‘From the River to the Sea’ Slogan After Directors Withdraw From Event first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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The Dreaded Moment Is Finally Here

A drone view shows Palestinians and terrorists gathering around Red Cross vehicles on the day Hamas hands over the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, seized during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

JNS.orgThe moment we had all been dreading came to pass on Feb. 20, as four coffins draped with Israeli flags traveled from the Gaza Strip to Israel in a convoy led by the Israel Defense Forces. Two of the caskets were markedly smaller, in a heartbreaking confirmation that Ariel and Kfir Bibas, the two little boys abducted to Gaza with their mother, Shiri Bibas, during the Hamas-led pogrom on Oct. 7, 2013, did not survive their ordeal.

As I was writing these words, I received a video from my youngest son, who is studying in Israel, of two rainbows etched high in the sky above Tel Aviv’s Florentin district. As I choked back tears, I wanted to believe that this spectacle—God’s tribute to these two complete innocents—was a sign of hope for the rest of us.

But then I remembered that once again, Jews are on the defensive even as we grieve for these children, whose smiling faces became emblematic of the plight of the Israeli and foreign hostages seized on that terrible day. For it is impossible to grieve peacefully without remembering the sight of posters bearing the photos of Ariel and Kfir, as well as Shiri and their father, Yarden Bibas, being violently ripped from walls and lampposts by the antisemitic Hamas cheerleaders who have poisoned our lives. It is impossible to grieve peacefully without recalling the cruel barbs about the “weaponization” of the hostages issued by insidious pundits like Mehdi Hasan, the British-born Islamist antisemite who, shockingly and inexplicably, was granted US citizenship in 2020.

Most of all, it is impossible to grieve peacefully with the memory of the grotesque ceremony staged by Hamas before the coffins carrying the four bodies set off still fresh in our minds. Jaunty Arabic music blared through loudspeakers, and children posed with the guns carried by Hamas terrorists as their parents grinned and leered for the cameras.

Many hours later, an even more shocking development was reported. Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike, as falsely claimed by Hamas, but were brutally murdered in November 2023, as was the fourth hostage, 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz, according to the autopsies on the bodies undertaken in Israel. Forensic analysis also revealed that Hamas lied about Shiri being returned since the body in the coffin was not hers. The agony persists, and we continue to cry out, “Where is Shiri Bibas?”

The giant screen at the ceremony mocked Shiri and her children even in death—their images dwarfed by a vile, crude caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire, his fangs dripping with blood. Don’t be fooled by the apologists who will tell you that this representation of Netanyahu is merely trenchant criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza—a war that only erupted because of the monstrous atrocities of Oct. 7. It is better understood as a symbol of the sickness enveloping Palestinian society, which regards Jews as subhuman, and which liberally borrows from 2,000 years of anti-Jewish iconography to make that point.

The depiction of Netanyahu as a vampire is no accident, just as images of him dressed in a Nazi uniform are no accident. The Palestinians and their admirers are expert at selecting images that recycle the worst canards about Jews: that they have eagerly adopted the methods and ideology of their worst persecutors and that their collective goal is to suck out the lifeblood of non-Jews without mercy—to the point of sacrificing their own people should that turn out to be necessary, with the Bibas family on display as Exhibit “A.”

The association of Jews with blood dates back at least to the Roman era, spawning anti-Jewish “Blood Libel” riots from Norwich in England (one of the earliest examples) to Damascus in Syria (one of the more recent.) It has been embraced by both Christian and Islamic theologians, as well as by the more secular antisemites who asserted their hatred of Jews in the language of science rather than religion. In the literature and journals of the 19th and 20th centuries, the fictitious figure of the vampire emerged with unmistakable Jewish associations.

“It’s impossible to have this discussion without bringing up the blood libel, the unsubstantiated claim that Jews murdered gentile children to use their blood in rituals,” wrote Isabella Reish in a recent essay on the 1922 film Nosferatu. “Thus, European vampires of old are intrinsically linked to Jewishness.” In my view, that linkage is as true of Hamas now as it is of a Berlin salon in the dark years that ushered in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

We cannot live with this hatred, which has seeped from the Palestinians into the wider world, especially among Muslim communities in North America, Europe and Australia—nor should we be expected to. Combating it effectively means that we must be honest about the sources of the problem.

The main source is the Palestinians themselves. All the current discussions about the reconstruction of Gaza and the possible relocation of its civilian population miss the bigger issue. If Palestinians are to live successful, productive lives, then their society must be thoroughly deradicalized, foremost by challenging the antisemitic hatred that has consumed them. The United States, in particular, must prioritize the complete transformation of the Palestinian school system, installing and supervising a curriculum that will educate Palestinian children about Jewish history and religion, about the abiding, uninterrupted Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, and about the cynical manner their own plight has been exploited by Arab leaders happy to project internal unrest onto an external, “colonialist” enemy.

The second source is harder to pin down and cannot be dealt with in a school environment. I’m talking about the fans of the Scottish soccer club Glasgow Celtic, who waved banners urging “Show Zionism the Red Card” at a match in, of all places, the German city of Munich; about the Muslim and far-left vigilantes who last week descended on one of America’s most Jewish neighborhood, Borough Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were gratifyingly confronted by local resistance; about the cowardly arsonists burning down synagogues and Jewish day-care centers in Canada and Australia. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to do more than just respond to each outrage. What’s required is a comprehensive global strategy aimed at rooting out these organizations, their communications networks and their propaganda outlets. No measures, including deportation and loss of naturalized citizenship, should be off the table, and no country—looking at you two, Qatar and Iran—should escape scrutiny for fueling these fires.

For decades, our elected leaders have cynically used Holocaust commemoration and education as evidence of their commitment to fighting post-Hitler antisemitism. That hasn’t worked very well, and as the black-and-white images of the Holocaust fade into history’s depths, replaced by decontextualized social-media video bursts of Gazans fleeing Israeli bombing, it’ll work even less so. If the soul-crushing pictures of the coffins bearing the Bibas children don’t result in a fundamental strategic pivot, then perhaps nothing will.

The post The Dreaded Moment Is Finally Here first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Is Religion Rational?

Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.orgWhen it comes to religion, how much is belief, and how much is rational? Is Judaism a rational religion? Does being religious require a leap of faith?

Perhaps other faiths do. I mean, I respect everyone’s right to choose the religion they subscribe to and want to practice, but some religions do require extraordinary leaps of faith from their followers.

Judaism, on the other hand, is based not on any incredulous leaps of faith, but on the shared firsthand experience of an entire nation.

With other faiths, the starting point is a supposed revelation reported to have been experienced by the founder of that faith. You either believe it or you don’t believe it. Your choice.

But Judaism was founded at Mount Sinai where millions of Israelites, fresh out of Egypt, experienced the Revelation at Sinai. Each and every Israelite, personally, heard the Ten Commandments from the voice of God, not Moses! And it wasn’t virtual, it was personal. They were all there, and it was an in-body experience.

That’s not faith. That is fact. Not only Moses and his disciples but the entire nation of men, women and children—a few million in all—were eyewitnesses to that revelation. And this was handed down by father to son, mother to daughter, throughout the generations wherever Jews lived. European Jews and Yemenite Jews have the very same tradition, the very same Torah. Yes, there are differences in custom and variations on a theme, but the basic traditions are identical.

How? Because they all came from the very same source—Almighty God at Mount Sinai!

This week, we read Mishpatim, a Torah portion that deals with civil and social laws that are very logical. Everyone understands and accepts that society needs a code of law and justice to be able to function.

So, if your ox gores your friend’s ox, you will be liable for damages. If you’re making a barbecue and your negligence causes the fire to spread to your neighbor’s property and it burns down his house, you will be liable. And if you’re going on vacation and deposit your pet poodle at the Lords & Ladies Poodle Parlor for safe keeping and when you come back, they tell you they lost your poodle, then they will be responsible for paying you for your poodle. And so on.

But even the logical mitzvot have much more to them than meets the eye. There are layers and layers of depth, meaning, symbolism and profound spirituality behind every single mitzvah, rational or not.

There are only a handful of chukim, statutory decrees that we were not given an explanation of and for which we must take on faith, like kashrut or shatnez, the law of not mixing wool and linen garments together.

But the truth is that every mitzvah needs faith.

Why? Because without faith, we do something only humans are capable of. Do you know what that is? Rationalization.

Everyone understands that you’re not supposed to steal. And yet, studies have shown that no less than 59% of hotel guests steal from their hotel rooms. Now, I don’t think the hotel really minds if you take the shampoo. I imagine if you asked them, they would say it’s fine.

But no hotel will let you take the towels or the robes. And no hotel will let you take the TV. I was shocked to read that some guests even took home a mattress! (Apparently, in the middle of the night, they snuck it into the elevator, went down to the basement garage and stuffed it into the trunk of their car.)

If you ask these people, they will likely give you all kinds of reasons why their actions are justified. The hotel overcharged me. It calculates shrinkage into their price, so I actually paid for it. If I wear the hotel’s towel on the beach, I am advertising for them, so they should pay me.

This is classic rationalization.

So we do need faith after all, even for logical commandments like not stealing. Otherwise, we fail. Badly.

Interestingly, the very same Torah reading of Mishpatim, with its logical, civil laws also has the famous phrase, Na’aseh V’Nishma. These were the words of the Jewish people when asked if they would accept God’s Torah. They replied Na’aseh, “we will do” and only thereafter Nishmah, “we will listen” and understand. It is the core of simple, pure, absolute faith, beyond any logic or understanding.

And this explains why the Ten Commandments, which we read last week, begin with Anochi, “I am God,” the lofty, abstract mitzvah to believe in God. To have faith.

And then the other commandments go on to tell us the most basic laws that every low life knows he should keep. Not to murder, commit adultery, steal, lie or be jealous.

How did we get from the highest, metaphysical commandment of belief to the grossest of the gross in a few short sentences?

Because without faith, a human being is capable of justifying anything.

The accursed Nazis justified the Holocaust. REAL genocide, not make-believe South African genocide. How did they justify it? By saying Jews are scum, sub-human. We are doing the world a service by eliminating them. The world will be a better place for it. Rationalization.

Without the first commandment of faith in God, there can be no adherence to any of the other commandments.

Logic gets you pretty far but not far enough. As logical as Judaism may be, we still need the foundation of faith to do what we must do and avoid that which is tempting but wrong.

May we all embrace Judaism with knowledge and reason and by understanding its philosophy, without losing that pure and simple faith that every one of us possesses.

The post Is Religion Rational? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israeli Security Control of Gaza Is an Existential Necessity

Orthodox Jewish men stand near a tank, ahead of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, as seen from the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, Jan. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

JNS.orgThursday was a national day of mourning, as the bodies of hostage Shiri Bibas’s children Ariel and Kfir, along with that of Oded Lipshitz, returned to Israel. Hamas also handed over a fourth coffin, falsely saying it held Shiri Bibas‘s remains, but it was subsequently determined that it contained the corpse of an unidentified non-Israeli woman.

Their dire fate, along with that of some 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, stand as an unbearable reminder of the consequences of allowing a genocidal, jihadist army to entrench itself on Israel’s border.

The sorrow that grips all Israelis, reinforced by months of war, adds up to a clear national imperative: Israel can never again allow Gaza to be a staging ground for an Iranian-backed terrorist army. Once Israel has exhausted all efforts to secure the release of its hostages, Hamas must be eliminated from the face of the Earth as a terror army. No one on Israel’s borders can be allowed to build an ability to send death squads and invasion brigades over the border in an organized manner.

Ensuring Israeli security control over Gaza is the only way to achieve this. This work cannot be outsourced to anyone; the idea that a foreign force or paid mercenaries would have the ability to deal with Hamas is absurd. Israeli security control of Gaza is not just a military necessity to prevent future Hamas barbarity, it is an existential imperative.

The ongoing professional inquiries by the IDF into the events of Oct. 7 aim to provide answers to the public, the bereaved families and affected communities about the multiple system failures of that darkest of days.

But these investigations are not just about accountability—they are about learning from history in real time. As one IDF official put it this week, Israel must “carry out the lessons learned during the war, not afterward, and prepare for future conflicts.”

The scope of the IDF’s inquiries is broad, covering four main areas: Israel’s long-term strategy regarding Gaza, intelligence failures leading up to the war, the decision-making process between Oct. 6 and 7, and the first 72 hours of defensive operations.

But even before their conclusions are published, likely in the coming days, it is possible to draw some key conclusions.

Not deterred, not a rational actor, not seeking prosperity

Before the attack, every day that Israel did not act to prevent Hamas from building its capabilities, and every day that Israel gave up on the idea of achieving security control over Gaza, was an opportunity for Hamas to develop further its murderous plans and prepare for the massacre.

The Western-oriented idea that Israel could afford to refrain from continuous security operations in Gaza, and that the IDF could stay back behind the border, was fueled by deluded concepts of Hamas being deterred, that it was a rational actor, and that it sought economic prosperity.

These delusions stem from a catastrophic inability to grasp the jihadist mindset of a fundamentalist Islamic death cult, and from the tendency that was rampant in the defense establishment and the political echelon before Oct. 7 to project Western thinking onto our enemies. This allowed Hamas the space and the time to prepare its attack. Those who wish to indefinitely delay Israeli operations to prevent Hamas from rebuilding these capabilities have returned to the pre-Oct. 7 misconceptions. The “day after” is today.

During the Oct. 7 attacks, Hamas behaved like an army intent on genocide. It seized land, executing civilians in the most brutal manner imaginable, and taking hostages to act as insurance policies for the survival of its leadership. It was only able to do these things because it controlled its own territory, giving it the ability to develop an arms industry, smuggle in weapons and develop its intentions with minimal interference.

Meanwhile, the chief of the IDF General Staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, who is due to step down on March 6, has spent recent days in the United States discussing strategic and operational issues with top American military officials.

Halevi visited the Pentagon to meet with Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with staff officers, and with Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the commander of CENTCOM (responsible for the Middle East), to discuss Lebanon and Iran, and ways to strengthen U.S.-Israeli cooperation.

But Gaza trumped the other arenas. Halevi expedited his return to Israel due to the agreement to return the bodies of the hostages.

No international diplomacy or security guarantees can obviate the necessity of full Israeli freedom of operation in Gaza for the foreseeable future. Failure to recognize this would invite, once again, catastrophe, and Israel cannot afford to repeat its mistakes.

The post Israeli Security Control of Gaza Is an Existential Necessity first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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