Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal
National Film Board of Canada
2004
68 minutes
Discordia is a documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada that records the strife at Concordia University over the issue of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The events depicted in the film begin with a 2002 visit to the campus by (then) former and also future Israeli Prime Minister Bejnamin Netanyahu at which protests gave way to rioting. This event was followed by an attenuated struggle for student space between members of the progressive Student Union and members of the Concordia chapter of Hillel (an international organization for Jewish university students).
Directed by Ben Addleman and Samir Mallal, Discordia captures the events of this struggle as they unfold. At the centre of the struggle was a challenge to the right for Hillel to use campus as recruiting grounds for the Israeli Defense Force. The students of Hillel saw their recruitment efforts necessary to protect Israel, a Jewish island in an ocean of Arab hostility, while Arab students took the actions of Hillel as a provocation against them, and as a means of evoking the actual violence suffered by Palestinians at the hands of the people who actually do the fighting for that organization. The film thus captures numerous interviews with the students involved as well as moments of direct conflict between the groups, as well as moments of friendship and solidarity among the members of either side. Finally, the documentary also captures reactions by a number of students who are not interested in the strife these issues have caused and are simply frustrated by it having temporarily taken over campus life.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this kind of subject matter is the question of where bigotry and politically conscious activism overlap. Consistently, the argument is made against pro-Palestinian activists that their work is basically anti-semitic. There’s no question that in the broader spectrum of pro-Palestinian expressions a strong anti-semitism can be found that pushes the immediate socio-political realities of the central issues to the side (often to indulge in age-old conspiracy theories of Jewish manipulations). In this particular documentary, the weight of dealing with the present issues as bigotry falls mostly upon the shoulders of Hillel members, both in accusations they make of their adversaries, and in their attitude towards the other. The pro-Palestine Concordia Student Union is headed by Aaron Mate, a young Jewish activist who currently works as a producer for Democracy Now!, a daily social justice radio program carried by the Pacifica Radio network, and Samir Elatrash, a Canadian-Palestinian student with family in the occupied territories. Hillel is primarily represented by Noah Sarna, a leader of the Concordia chapter and a sincere and passionate fighter for Israel. There are some instances of unadulterated Anti-Semitism expressed, but more common are the Islamophobic statements of the Hillel students. Furthermore, Aaron Mate is characterized as a self-hating Jew during the documentary and also off screen by his opponents. This charge against Mate suggests that in some circles Jewishness demands unlimited support for Israel and all of its policies.
This film was released after the release of another documentary about the Netanyahu riots called Confrontation at Concordia, directed by Martin Himel. I haven’t seen Himel’s film (I’ve now added it to my watchlist) but according to wikipedia it heavily emphasizes the anti-Israel sentiments expressed and the anti-free speech dimension of the riots which ultimately succeeded in preventing Netanyahu from speaking. In interviews, Himel also was someone who regarded Discordia as flawed for its heavy presence of Aaron Mate, the “self-hating jew” who sided with Palestinians. During a talk given by Himel about the two documentaries, he said, “In my Concordia, we did interview the Arab student leader Samir Elatrash, as well as the Jewish student leader Patrick Amar. But Discordia, besides interviewing Elatrash, interviewed a self-hating Jew who agreed with the Arabs. There was no interview with Amar or any other self-respecting Jewish spokesperson.” This kind of statement indicates a point of view where race and ethnicity determines political disposition. Discordia challenges that notion however, showing that Anti-Israel doesn’t have to mean Anti-Semetic, and in fact, opposition to oppression of Palestinians doesn’t have to mean death-to-Israel. The struggle over this issue is far more nuanced in its actual manifestations than a simple clash of ethnic hatreds.
Discordia is essentially a film about the subaltern struggle for Palestinian sovereignty from Israel, and an example of how this conflict carried out by diasporic communities far from the centre of the fight. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has its epicentre in Jerusalem’s West bank and the Gaza Strip - the ‘Occupied Territories’ - but it has its peripheral battlegrounds on university campuses and public spaces and events such as, for example, the Toronto Pride Parade, where the presence of the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is an annual source of controversy. At these peripheral sites of conflict, ideologies, flows of influence, rhetorics, symbols, and attitudes are the means of attack and the ground upon which the battle is waged, and they are relevant to the overall conflict.
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