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It’s 2025. There’s an Internet. Who can now pretend they have no idea what Israel has done, is doing, aims to do?
It’s obvious to the entire world that the Biden and Trump administrations have run cover for Israel while enabling the horrors before us.
But for those seeking a deeper understanding, or perhaps sources to encourage others to understand what is taking place, many important documentaries stand ready to enlighten.
One, Who Killed Shireen?, was recently viewed at the National Press Club. In 2022 Shireen Abu Akleh, a renowned Palestinian-American journalist for Al Jazerra, was clearly marked as press in blue body armor yet fatally shot in the back of the head by an Israeli sniper, and her producer wounded.
Israel made fanciful claims such as Abu Akleh being killed by fire from Palestinian militants. After Israeli explanations eventually turned to wet tissue, Israel refused to identify even the unit responsible, denying the Biden administration access, while refusing changes to rules of engagement that might protect innocents in the future. The desire to know the perpetrators was widely shared by Abu Akleh’s family and colleagues and by many in the Middle East who respected the journalist as a trusted and valued source interpreting what was happening around them.
The press club ballroom was at capacity, mostly with members of the general public who bought tickets to view the 40-minute investigative film and a panel discussion afterwards. The documentary was backed by Zeteo, a news outlet owned by Mehdi Hassan. The investigation, akin to a detective story, was headed by Dion Nissenbaum, an American journalist with experience in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
The investigative team established that Israel knew at the outset its soldiers were culpable. Initial American assessments determined the shooting intentional, and that the shooter could be convicted of murder in an American courtroom. The Biden administration then flipped, concluding there was no reason to believe the killing was intentional, laying the cause on “tragic circumstances.”
Nissenbaum’s crew believes they have pinpointed the shooter, including from comments from an unidentified Israeli official and IDF soldiers who spoke anonymously. There were no consequences for anyone. The alleged shooter, 20-year-old Alon Scagio, was made a captain in another unit and died in combat. Soldiers angry at Scagio being identified used pictures of Abu Akleh for target practice. The cost of the Biden Administration’s failure to dent Israel’s impunity over the Abu Akleh murder have been high. It sent a signal that Israel had no worries about declaring open season on the press to damp down coverage of Israel’s actions. Over two hundred media workers have been killed, many with their family members.
The Biden administration’s softballing the matter, even running cover for Israel’s crime, is a major takeaway from the film. Hassan hopes that Biden is haunted by his lack of action in the case. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) sent a video stating that the impunity Israel has enjoyed since the Abu Akleh killing likely paved the way for killing at least a half dozen Americans and other civilians.
An Israeli colonel tweeted “Wearing a vest that says ‘press’ doesn’t turn a terrorist into a journalist.” This writer has been shocked to hear similar sentiments from US journalists asked to stand up for Palestinian journalists.
CLICK HERE. for a preview of Who Killed Shireen?
A massive database of documentaries on Palestinians and their plight can be found at Palestinecinema. com, many of them brief yet poignant, most within the past two decades. Brief is sometimes a welcome alternative. Although longer films are well-done and effective, the sheer injustice over decades can overwhelm one’s sensibilities. Four minutes worth every moment are in a Brief Animated History of the Question of Palestine, put out by the UN Palestinian Rights Committee, accessible on You- Tube. This is a quick shot to fire at those nonsensically denying Palestinians are a real people, or that there’s an occupation.
One coming to mind is US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a pastor whose enterprises include decades of taking Christian evangelical tourists to Israeli settlements. Of late Huckabee is bewildered by reports of harassment of Christians, and by arson attacks on an ancient church near Jerusalem.
He says he’s troubled by the recent brutal beating death of a US citizen at the hands of West Bank Israeli settlers. Who knows, perhaps one day he’ll end up getting religion.
Naw. Huckabee recently infuriated the Irish by telling them to “sober up” and asking if they’d “fallen into a vat of Guinness” after Ireland explored legislation banning goods from settlements in occupied territories.
Among other animated films Huckabee would benefit from is one done in 2022 by a West Bank human rights organization, viewable at AlHaq.org and on YouTube. The nine minute Israel’s Settler Colonial Apartheid Regime: Segregating the Palestinian People, succinctly explains the history of Israeli apartheid.
A great exposé of the threat Israeli spyware poses to privacy, including in America and dozens of other countries, arrived via Surveilled, a 2024 HBO documentary by Ronan Farrow. It carefully examines an NSO Group product called Pegasus which can turn a cell phone into “a spy in your pocket.” It’s also another instance of Palestine as a proving ground for such technology.
Not just for Israeli companies. According to the Business and Human Rights Resource Center, American companies are exploring AI and other technical abilities in synch with Israel, including Google, Meta and Microsoft, which quickly penalize or fire employees who protest their employers’ involvement.
Intelligence expert James Bamford has written in The Nation on Palantir Technologies supplying powerful targeting capabilities. He says US tech companies have provided AI that targets thousands of Palestinians, often slaying their families with them. Many targets are not even alleged militants. Some are also cultural pillars. Even poets.
This is how culture is erased. The Farrow film delving deep into Pegasus is an excellent start on understanding how tech companies put the Orwell in Orwellian. If you’re not on HBO, DemocracyNow.org has excellent segments on Surveilled.
For those tired of hearing the de rigueur preface that the slaughter before us began on October 7th, 2023, the 2019 documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom, by Abby Martin, provides excellent ammo.
Available on YouTube, it uses archival footage to examine what happened during peaceful demonstrations in Gaza during the Great March of Return, in which 200 unarmed civilians were killed and many maimed. Doctors Without Borders puts the number of demonstrators injured in the weekly protests by the fence that pens Palestinians into Gaza, held over a 636- day period starting in March of 2018, at over 35,600.
Often they were hit by bone-shattering gunshots in the quest to inflict the worst and longest-lasting injuries possible.
The gleeful depravity of the Israeli euphemism “mowing the lawn” – code for terrorizing Palestinians – was on clear display. Israeli snipers’ targeting of medics who responded, as well as of journalists and children, was a warmup for what everyone not in a self-induced coma sees they have now wrought.
If one slides about the Internet, one will soon come across the film being attacked as biased and supporting terrorism. Such claims nicely illustrate Israel’s public relations machine as they try to tear down critics of Israel’s occupation and subjugation of Palestinians.
But the footage in the film is bulletproof.
Related is a 14-minute film The Waiting Room, about three of the patients who were injured in those demonstrations and how their lives changed. It’s available at msf.org, the site of Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), which works in over seventy countries to save lives and ease the suffering of those in crisis.
There is a more recent film exploring attacks on medical workers. Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, is a BBC project that the BBC later cancelled the showing of, to wide condemnation. It’s not for nothing that last year over 230 members of the British media industry, including 100 BBC staff members, signed a letter accusing the BBC of favoring Israel in its news broadcasts and lacking fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza.
The five and a half minute trailer for the film, which can be seen at zeteo.com, begins with the murder of fifteen medics on a rescue mission. IDF soldiers subsequently buried them in a mass grave with their vehicles.
After the grave was found, the discovered cell phone of a slain medic who was recording the operation put the lie to Israel’s explanations of the deaths. The film contrasts the brutality to medical workers, in violation of international law, with their perseverance trying to maintain a semblance of care in impossible situations as medical centers are bombed and Israel methodically robs Gaza of irreplaceable medical expertise and training.
The media firm Zeteo acquired the film. Alas, it is only available to subscribers as an incentive to sign up.
Given the power of this film, and the dire timing as malnutrition and starvation take hold in Gaza and medical workers pass out from hunger and exhaustion, it would be a public service for Zeteo to make it freely available to the public.
Viewers could then widely distribute it via the Internet throughout the world, including to members of Congress. The film might change even hardened minds. The need for that is immediate.
The subject of methodical assaults on medical workers and facilities can be pursued at DemocracyNow.org, which has multiple filmed interviews with doctors in Gaza and with volunteer medical workers from abroad who’ve provided services. Their morality and courage are stunning. Their undeniable testimony proving IDF solders deliberately and frequently target children and infants in the head is a stain Israel’s enablers can never erase.
What is one to make of the mentality of encroaching settlers in illegal settlements who don’t just claim but believe they have divine real estate deeds, solid as the tablets handed Moses? British-American Louis Theroux has done scores of documentaries, many for the BBC, winning multiple awards.
He spent a great deal of time getting to know these religious-nationalist settlers, including Daniella Weiss, the movement’s “Godmother.” Theroux also spends time with Palestinians, learning how their lives have been impacted by the settlers entering their communities.
His new film, The Settlers, can be viewed at the Films for Action site, FilmsforAction.org, as can his 2011 film The Ultra Zionists.
One is struck by how these settlers surround themselves in a religious echo chamber that reinforces justification of the indefensible. The dehumanization of those whose land they covet is a required building block for this chamber.
Another exploration is done in the 2016 film The Settlers (inside the Jewish settlements), by Israeli film director Shimon Dotan, who looked at both religious and secular settlers. It is also accessible at Films for Action, as are scores of other films showing diverse aspects of the lives of those in the region and also people impacted back in America.
An example of the latter is Inside Meta’s Palestine Censorship, on the internal censorship of pro-Palestine content and intimidation of Meta employees, owing to the massive media company’s ties to Israel.
Such ties by many companies profiting from the destruction of Palestinians are explored in Exposing a Global Economy of Genocide, an interview with UN special rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, who was sanctioned by Trump after releasing her recent report on the economic machinery that helps drive the oppression.
Inside Occupied Palestine offers the combined perspectives of Veterans for Peace, US activists and a former Israeli Air Force Blackhawk pilot. They convey the impossible circumstances for Palestinians living under Israel’s occupation, also at FilmsforAction.org. The flip side of what Israel is doing is not just the horror the US government enables on its path to pariah status, but the harm it inflicts on American society.
The Chris Hedges Report, available on several sites including Scheerpost.com, often fleshes out related themes in front of a camera. Recently Hedges discusses The End of Academic Freedom with Dr. Maura Finkelstein, an academic fired for speaking out in defense of Palestinians, detractors awarding her the slur “self-hating jew.”
Such filmed reports are critical to include alongside discussion of documentaries on Palestinians. Even though that level of brutality inflicted by Israel is not widely apparent here, our rights and academic freedoms are being brutalized and careers damaged. This is inseparable from what America enables Israel to do, as it is motivated by Israel’s desire to crush public scrutiny of what it does and to destroy critics.
And, of course, there’s 2024’s No Other Land, a joint Palestinian-Israeli documentary showing the forced displacement of Palestinians in Masafer Yaata in the West Bank after it was declared an Israeli “firing zone.”
It won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film. It has yet to find a distributor for North America.
On March 24th, Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian co-director of the film, was severely beaten by Israeli West Bank settlers. No consequences. On July 28th, Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian consultant on the film, was shot dead by Yinon Levi, an Israeli settler who’d been under US sanctions for violent attacks on Palestinians until Trump removed them. No consequences.
Delving into these filmed offerings will provide insight into what a diminishing American morality means not just for America but for lowering the bar for morality around the world. If Americans fail to understand and stop what we’re enabling in Israel, the reverberations will come to haunt them like banshees.
Don’t look away.
Netanyahu’s Cone of Shame
by Nancy Ohanian
“…there is no starvation in Gaza…”
