Small toy figures are seen in front of displayed Netflix logo in this illustration taken March 19, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

An association of British lawyers who support Israel sent roughly 6o of the biggest film industry companies and agencies in the United Kingdom a legal warning about a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions that has already garnered support from thousands in the film business.

“This boycott breaches the law in this country which protects people of all religions, races, and nationalities from discrimination,” Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), said in a statement to The Algemeiner on Monday. “If we allow celebrities to discriminate in this way, then it erodes the protection for everyone.”

Javier Bardem, Olivia Colman, Mark Ruffalo, and Emma Stone are among the more than 4,000 film industry professionals who signed the “Film Workers Pledge to End Complicity” last month, vowing not to work with Israeli film institutions – including festivals, cinemas, broadcasters, and production companies – which they claim are “implicated” in “genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” The pledge defines “implicated” as “whitewashing or justifying genocide and apartheid, and/or partnering with the government committing them.” The boycott was spearheaded by the group “Filmworkers for Palestine.”

In a recent letter sent to major film companies — including the UK divisions of Netflix, Warner Bros, Disney, Amazon Studios, Apple, and Discovery — UKLFI argued that the boycott of Israeli film institutions is a breach of the UK’s Equality Act 2010 (EA). The law prohibits direct or indirect discrimination against persons because of “protected characteristics,” which include race, religion, and philosophical belief. “Race” includes nationality and ethnicity, and “philosophical belief” includes belief in the right of Jews to self-determination, according to UKLFI.

“[EA] is the key legislation in the UK protecting against racism and discriminatory treatment,” stated the letter, which was obtained by The Algemeiner. “If the UK television and film industry colludes with acts contrary to this legislation, organizations are themselves likely to be in breach. It also creates a dangerous precedent: one that condones the exclusion of individuals and/or organizations based solely on their nationality, ethnicity, and/or religion.”

“The boycott actively encourages its signatories to undertake discriminatory conduct contrary to the EA,” UKLFI further stated in its letter.

Domestic companies in the UK – such as the BBC, Film4, and ITV – also received the letter from UKLFI, as well as the film organizations BFI and Pact, the talent agencies Curtis Brown and United Agents, and unions such as  Bectu and Equity.

UKLFI also said in its letter that any discrimination that breaches the EA can result in “potential legal, insurance, and funding issues” for the companies. They noted that efforts to breach the UK’s Equality Act are “highly likely to be a litigation risk,” and a deliberate breach of discrimination legislation could even invalidate insurance policies. Participating in the anti-Israel boycott may negatively affect funding for the company since financiers “typically require compliance” with anti-discriminatory laws, according to the group of lawyers. This means that any breach of the EA because of the boycott could result in a film being ineligible for government funding, or withdrawal of financing already granted, UKLFI claimed.

“It follows that a breach of the [EA] through the boycott, would render a film ineligible for government funding, or trigger clawback of finance already granted,” the letter noted.

UKLFI further stated that these companies could potentially be liable for any breaches of the Equality Act by their “staff and agents.” Actors, agents, managers, production companies, producers, and “anyone else who instructs, causes, induces, or helps to implement the boycott – for example, encouraging a distributor not to deal with Israeli outlets, or advising a colleague to insist on a boycott clause,” could also be liable for a breach of law.

“Producers and other contracting parties should also be aware that knowingly enabling or acquiescing to discriminatory demands – for example, by agreeing to exclude Israeli distributors or institutions from financing or distribution arrangements – may itself give rise to liability under the Equality Act,” UKLFI added.

The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law recently sent a letter to major American film industry companies stating that the boycott infringes US federal and state civil rights laws. The letter was sent to major film studios, distributors, platforms, talent agencies, and film festivals. UKLFI noted in the letter it sent out this week to major film industry companies in the UK that if any of the organizations also operate in the US and participate in the boycott, they may be in breach of US laws as well.

Illustrative: Kyiv’s Chief Rabbi Yonatan Markovitch holds a fragment of a Russian drone that damaged the Chabad-run Perlina school in Kyiv, Ukraine, Oct. 30, 2024. Photo: Jewish community JCC in Kyiv, Kyiv municipality, and Yan Dobronosov

A group of young men attacked a Jewish man outside of a synagogue in Kyiv on Saturday, hitting him with pepper spray.

The Obolon Synagogue, located in the Obolon district of Ukraine’s capital, was targeted shortly after noon as congregants marked Shabbat, the weekly Jewish day of rest. Witnesses said a group of several young men approached the building, jeered at worshipers, and made Nazi gestures while yelling “Sieg Heil.”

When one congregant stepped outside, the assailants sprayed him in the face with what police later described as an “irritant gas” before fleeing the scene. The victim, who was wearing a kippah and tzitzit (fringes on Jewish religious garments worn underneath a shirt), suffered burns and severe irritation to his eyes and skin, according to statements from the Chabad Kyiv Jewish Community and the United Jewish Community of Ukraine.

Chabad Kyiv condemned the assault as a “brutal antisemitic attack” that desecrated the sanctity of the Sabbath. “This was a deliberate, cruel, and premeditated antisemitic act,” the community said in a statement. It added that the attack “overshadowed Shabbat at the Obolon Synagogue” and left local Jews shaken.

The incident followed an earlier episode the previous day in which a similar group of youths appeared near the synagogue, shouting antisemitic insults at the rabbi and mocking worshipers. Community leaders said they believe the same individuals returned on Saturday to escalate their harassment into physical violence.

The Kyiv Jewish Community in Obolon described the sequence of events in a social media post: “Around 3:00 pm, the men inside the synagogue saw youths approach our building and begin demonstratively gesturing. One of our community members stepped out to them. Seeing a man wearing a kippah and tzitzit, the boys drenched him with tear gas from two spray cans and fled.”

Community representatives said police were informed of the assault only after the post began circulating online. In response, the Kyiv Police Department issued a statement confirming that it had opened an investigation into “provocative actions against a member of the religious community.”

The statement read that “police determine the circumstances of the attack on members of the religious community in the Obolonsky district of the capital. The event became known by the law enforcement officers from social networks. According to the published post, a group of unidentified youngsters, outside a synagogue building, began shouting antisemitic slogans, showing Nazi greetings and then using gas in provocative actions against a member of the community. Currently, the fact is under investigation, the police establish all the circumstances of the event, as well as its participants. The issue of legal qualification is being resolved.””

As of Monday, authorities had not announced any arrests or identified suspects.

Now that the war in Gaza appears to have come to an end and Hamas has returned the remaining 20 living hostages to their families, we can fully expect Israel’s enemies and other critics across the globe to turn their attention to the declared intention of some of the extremist members of the Israeli government to formally make the West Bank part of a greater Israel that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

Except, of course, that President Donald Trump seems to have preemptively put the kibosh on any such scenario. “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Trump told reporters two weeks ago. “It’s not going to happen.”

Trump realizes and has said out loud the simple truth that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his acolytes stubbornly ignore: Israel cannot endure in the long run by permanently subjugating the Palestinian population of the territories it has held since the June 1967 Six-Day War. More importantly, as Trump told Netanyahu in a telephone conversation this past week, “Israel can’t fight the world.” Or as he told Netanyahu during his speech to the Knesset on Monday, “Be a little bit nicer, Bibi, because you’re not at war anymore. … You don’t want to have to go through this again.”

An Israeli – or Jewish – hegemony over what was once the biblical land of Judea and in due course morphed into pre-1948 British Mandatory Palestine is not and has never been the goal of mainstream Zionism as conceived and understood by the likes of Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Louis D. Brandeis. But with the concept and essence of Zionism widely misunderstood or deliberately mischaracterized, it is more critical than ever to place the broad and multifaceted nature of this ethnocultural ideology in its accurate historical context. 

We know whereof we speak. We are both unabashed Zionists who unequivocally identify with the State of Israel even though we radically disagree with the extremist ideology and many of the policies of its present government. One of us is a former national president of the Labor Zionist Alliance and past member of the Zionist General Council which oversees the work and activities of the World Zionist Organization. The other has been a visiting professor at both the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, and maintains ongoing relations with both. We are long-time supporters of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. One of us met with Yasser Arafat and senior leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization together with four other American Jews in Stockholm in December 1988, resulting in the PLO’s first public acceptance of Israel as a state in the Middle East. The other is presently writing a book on the early socialist founders of modern Israel.

Trump’s above-quoted comments regarding the West Bank came against the backdrop of an earlier pronouncement by Netanyahu in which he resurrected the old meme of Israel as latter-day Sparta. Acknowledging Israel’s ever-increasing political and economic isolation in consequence of what then still seemed as his government’s seemingly interminable war in Gaza, Netanyahu declared that his country “will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics” and become a “super-Sparta.” 

Had Netanyahu’s reference been to Plutarch’s account of the ancient Greek polity — a society highly unified, disciplined, and militarily formidable when existentially threatened – then perhaps, fair enough. The problem with his analogy, however, is what it leaves out: First, that Sparta’s hegemonic dominance was decisively and permanently ended by its catastrophic defeat at the hands of a far superior Theban army at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE. And, more importantly, second, that Israel was meant by its socialist founders to emulate Athens more than Sparta, and that most of its population longs to return to this “Athenian normal” even as its current leaders try to force it into a Sparta-only straight-jacket.

There are, in short, two conflicting contemporary visions of Israel that can, when taken in “absolutist” fashion, distort understandings of both the Athenian and the Spartan aspects of today’s Israel. Peace, progress and prosperity await both refinement and synthesis of both visions. 

The first vision, part of which was at the core of the Labor-Zionist-guided establishment of Israel under U.N. auspices in 1948, is of a democratic polity rooted in not only the quintessentially Jewish values of justice and social solidarity but also, equally important, a Jeffersonian-republican model of social democracy pursuant to which religiously and ethnically diverse groups coexist and co-govern as a matter of course. 

This vision requires updating in one subtle respect to stay true to the Israel-as-Athens picture: namely, by supplementing the largely pastoral-agricultural imaginary of Israel’s primarily kibbutznik Labor-Zionist founders (not to mention of Jefferson himself) with a now-fuller and more productively-diversified picture of the Israel now widely called, among tech visionaries and others, the “Startup Nation.” This we must do if we are to understand both the motivations and, indeed, the promise of the Abraham Accords with their vision of a vibrantly revived Mediterranean-Levantine civilization the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the days of the ancient Phoenicians.    

The second, borderline-apocalyptic vision of Israel now dominant in today’s Netanyahu-led Israel government is that of a fundamentalist Jewish hegemony over the entire biblical territory that encompasses not only Israel but the West Bank as well – “From the River to the Sea for Jews and Jews Only,” as it were. This is the pseudo-messianic model that Netanyahu and the shots-calling extremist far right members of his government are working feverishly and openly to bring about at the expense of Israel’s Jewish and non-Jewish citizens alike — not to mention its neighbors, its standing in the international community, and even the interests of Jews across the globe.  

This vision requires far more radical revision to do justice to a plausible — and indeed desirable — Spartan comparison than does the original Labor-Zionist vision to do justice to a plausible Athenian comparison. Indeed, an accurate Spartan vision would have to be as Jeffersonian as the Athenian model: It would be that of a republic of citizen-soldiers able to mobilize on short notice, “Minute Man” style, when threatened, but otherwise going about the business of producing, inventing, arguing (these are Israelis, after all), and governing under the rule of law just as the ancient Israelite leaders were anointed only on condition that they rule under then-Hebrew law.      

Happily, there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who not only reject the Netanyahu government and its (distorted) “Super-Sparta” policies, but also have consistently taken to the streets against it since long before Hamas’ terrorist savagery on Oct. 7, 2023. These Israelis have sought to block Netanyahu’s attempt to eviscerate their country’s independent judicial system. They are the ones who called consistently for the ceasefire in Gaza that has now been reached and that will hopefully result in a pathway to a viable Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. And they are among those whom, alas, the likes of Hollywood actors Javier Bardem, Emma Stone,and Hannah Einbinder seek to boycott.  

Israel’s aforesaid enemies, for whom a putative “anti-Zionism” they do not begin to comprehend or deliberately distort is an article of blind and blinded faith, seem either cognitively unable or perversely unwilling to distinguish between anything-but-Athenian neo-fascists like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who want to destroy Israel’s democracy on the one hand, and the likes of Israeli President Isaac Herzog and opposition leader (and former prime minister) Yair Lapid, among others — who work to preserve that democracy — on the other hand. And in his heart of hearts, we fear, Netanyahu desperately wants the world to see only the former and never the latter.   

Nahum Goldmann, then president of both the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress, pointedly observed, in the wake of Israel’s June 1967 “Six-Day War,” that Israel cannot prevail exclusively as “the Sparta of the Middle East.” He was right. Israel must be both Athens and Sparta — and it must be the actual, not the children’s book, version of both. Netanyahu does not seem to “get” this. Nor, sadly, do some of those who support New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who in endorsing a “global intifada” are, wittingly or otherwise, effectively calling for the elimination of Israel altogether and thereby perpetuating Netanyahu’s comic-book Sparta government with all the apocalyptic horrors that this entails.  

The road ahead will not be easy even after the Gaza war is in the rearview mirror and it will not be short, but if there is to be any hope for the future, the leaders of both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must embark on it by recognizing each other’s humanity and seeking to emulate Athens more and Sparta less. 

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