Update

Racist Rabinovich Foundation will reportedly end loyalty oaths

BREAKING: Racist Israeli film fund, the Rabinovich Foundation, will reportedly end its insistence that filmmakers seeking its support must sign a loyalty oath to deny in their films the reality of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing against Indigenous Palestinians.

Following PACBI’s August 2022 call to boycott all films supported by the Rabinovich Foundation, apartheid Israel’s largest film fund, over its racist political conditions and loyalty oaths, dozens of mainstream Israeli filmmakers also announced a boycott of the fund.

Our call, covered in the Hollywood Reporter and other leading film industry media, exposed that Israeli filmmakers accepting Rabinovich funding must “omit in their films any mention of Israel's system of apartheid and the ethnic cleansing inherent to its foundation”.

The Israeli filmmakers' boycott of Rabinovich over its loyalty oath was largely motivated by concerns that the BDS call would lead to the increased isolation of the Israeli film industry, including their work, with ever more international film festivals joining the boycott.

A much smaller group of principled Israeli filmmakers had earlier called on Locarno Film Festival to drop a Rabinovich-funded film, a call widely publicised in international film press. These filmmakers explicitly cited the BDS call:-

“This regime of oppression was founded through the violent displacement and dispossession of Indigenous Palestinians … storytellers accepting such censorial and unethical conditions for their film projects is an undeniable form of complicity in covering up this ongoing Nakba that Palestinians face.”

We thank the international filmmakers, festivals and film institutions that have supported the Palestinian call to boycott Rabinovich films. It remains to be seen if the far-right Israeli government, with its influential fascist component, will yet reverse this decision.

It’s high time to intensify the cultural boycott of apartheid Israel, given the escalating violence of the most openly racist, far-right, fundamentalist, sexist and homophobic Israeli government ever. We call for ever more impactful, creative cultural boycott campaigns.


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