The Tel Aviv Question

In the debate over the Tel Aviv showcase at TIFF, free expression should be a two-way street.

Howls of protest against the boycott of the Toronto International Film Festival can already be heard across Canada and beyond.

Ten films that spotlight Tel Aviv are to be shown at TIFF, and a lot of people, including world-class artists like Alice Walker, aren't happy about it. They see this as a "Brand Israel" propaganda exercise, and have proposed a boycott of the festival.

The response to said boycott?

Censorship! Intimidation! Anti-Semitism!

Free expression, we are told in a kneejerk Globe and Mail editorial, is being threatened. Yet it is unclear to me why those boycotting the festival should not be permitted their own freedom of expression. The Globe slams the boycotters' "one-sided world view," but the editorial takes a pretty one-sided world-view of its own: free expression is reserved, it seems, for those with pro-Israel views.

But of course it's more complicated than that. Are the ten films "pro-Israel" in some narrow, polemical sense? Clearly not, although, as John Greyson (who has withdrawn his own short film from the festival in protest) points out, the films are all "big-budget Israeli state-funded features." In any case, it is the showcasing of Tel Aviv, not the content of the films, that is really at issue here.

I think the boycotters' have a valid point – how would we have felt about running a series of films centred on Johannesburg at the height of apartheid? Or on Moscow after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia? Context is everything. Even if the films are non-political (a proposition that I can't accept), the circumstances of their showing are anything but. There is an entire herd of elephants in the theatre.

There is also no end of hypocrisy here. A few months ago, when Caryl Churchill's play "Seven Jewish Children," was performed in Toronto, B'nai Brith called for its suppression. In 2006, the play "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" was actually shut down because it might offend Jewish sensibilities.

Where were the loud voices for free expression then? Where were the thundering Globe and Mail editorials? In the case of Churchill's play, there was only a vicious polemic by Rex Murphy, offering a grotesque misreading of a deeply humane work.

One might argue that the two examples just offered were themselves intensely political, whereas the films to be shown at TIFF are not. But I have always found such distinctions specious. I have not seen “My Name is Rachel Corrie," but I've read and seen “Seven Jewish Children.” Churchill reaches deep into the souls of people in crisis. Her work is not, despite some motivated claims, a mere piece of propaganda. It calls aloud for engagement, as all art must, and that engagement is not solely aesthetic. No work of art exists in a bubble.

And that is all to the good. Art is a form of social conversation. Works of art become political as soon as they are observed. The films set in Tel Aviv, by the very fact that they look away from the excruciating larger issues (Gaza, the security wall, Palestinian dispossession, a continuing brutal occupation, and so on) are unavoidably making a statement about those issues. That palpable absence inevitably finds its own voice. And the act of showing these films is, in the same way, a political act.

Art is never neutral and we should not pretend that it is. The films, the boycott, the festival defenders, the polemicists, the editorialists and the legion of commenters are all part of one vast dynamic. That art, in its manifold complex ways, can be such an active site of struggle doesn't alarm me – on the contrary, the wide conversations sparked by artistic production are positive and engaging.

Situating myself in this current conversation, I am obviously sympathetic to the boycotters' cause, if a little uneasy about a boycott as a tactic in this case. I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but I wonder if there might be other, more productive approaches to the TIFF decision: a counter-festival, perhaps, or a public debate about the value, function, social character, and politics of art.

Oh, wait – we're having that now. And if we can avoid the clichéd responses that falsify it, we might actually get somewhere.