#BoycottGoldaMovie - One Democratic Palestine

HELP PICKET EVERY SCREENING OF THIS FILM WHEN IT COMES OUT IN THE UK FROM 27TH SEPTEMBER

Where the film is on and how to get flyers

What the protestors at the UK premiere experienced

UPDATE- GOLDA FILM PULLED FROM MOST UK CINEMAS

Golda movie pulled from most UK cinemas– Press Release 14.10.23

The Golda movie, starring Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, celebrating Israe’s 1967 Yom Kippur war, has been pulled from most UK cinemas, barely a week after it was released.

In the 51 cinemas that the Golda movie has been screened to date, it has been pulled from 30; in those where it is being screened it has been relegated to a single matinee screening.

All Picturehouse cinemas, bar Edinburgh, have removed it from their schedules. The film went on general release on 6^th Oct, the evening before the surprise Hamas attack. Barely a week later, Londoners would struggle to find a cinema were it was being shown.

At the Picturehouse Piccadilly Cinema yesterday, staff admitted they had heard of the boycott campaign, but could not say if that was the reason it had been pulled from movie screens.

The film stars Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, Israel’s only female prime minister, and focuses on the 1973 Yom Kippur war against Egypt and Syria. This war (like the present one) was initially largely successful, leading Meir to call in her US supporters, who rushed to Israel’s aid with massive shipments of planes and tanks. Egypt and Syria were trying to reclaim the land Israel had stolen in 1967, in the Six-day war it had initiated, when it had attacked Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian soldiers- in order to occupy the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem (where it has been ever since)- expelling 300,000 Palestinians in the process.

However, the movie does not mention the Palestinians. Meir famously declared “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people. It is not as though we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.”

Campaigner Pete Gregson described the film as a “jingoistic morale booster, designed to boost Israel’s flagging reputation as it lurches ever further to the right”. The organisation he chairs, One Democratic Palestine, has been working with Palestine Online, a Gaza-based news agency, to campaign for a boycott of the movie since mid-September; they organised a protest at the premiere at the London Jewish Film Festival on the 27^th September, where protestors waved the Palestinian flag and handed out 100 flyers to cinema-goers.

However, he feels the removal of the film from Britain’s screens has more to do with the Hamas attack- in a reprise of the Yom Kippur attack of 1973 and its impact on Israel- which Israelis have described as the worst day in their history. 50 years ago, Israel was similarly unprepared for war; although the objectives of Egypt and Syria were to retake land in the West Bank and Gaza that Israel had invaded 6 years prior, Golda Meir presented the war to the US as an attempt to wipe out Israel.

Howie Movshovitz said in the KUNC film review: “When Golda Meir was prime minister, Israel had more friends in the world than it does now. It was still viewed as a tiny, somewhat romantic and courageous little country. But now, there’s more controversy and opposition around the world over the issue of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. So why a film about this Israeli heroine with no mention of the Palestinian question? Movies about the past are always also about their own present.”

Helen Mirren visited Israel in 1967, after the Six-Day War and had herself volunteered on a kibbutz. She shares Meir’s messianic view, declaring when the film was released “I believe in Israel, in the existence of Israel, and I believe Israel has to go forward into the future, for the rest of eternity.” Unfortunately for her, it seems her movie has done the opposite.

See Pete Gregson at the Piccadilly Picturehouse – https://youtube.com/shorts/LAUZqYEr60k?feature=share

The film is distributed by Metfilm; to see the list of 51 cinemas and those who have cancelled – go to www.onepalestine.land/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Golda-Screenings-cancellation.pdf

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Palestine Online began their campaign against the Golda movie in August

Rabbi Haim Sofer and others calls for a boycott of the Golda movie

Let’s encourage a boycott!

One Democratic Palestine are working with Palestine Online (see Activists Launch Online Campaign Urging to #BoycottGoldaMovie For ‘Whitewashing a Genocidal Maniac’ – Palestine Online) to encourage a boycott of the new film “Golda” to be on general release from the 6th October, which stars Helen Mirren as Golda Meir and celebrates her leadership as Israel’s prime minister during the 1973 Yom Kippur war. We are asking people to protest at cinemas where the film is being shown and hand out leaflets.

(download them as pdf flyer by clicking here or email us at info@onepalestine.land to get some posted to you)

Apart from the war, Meir’s other claim to fame is that she played a vital role in advocating for funding from US Jews, for the would-be Zionist state of Israel, raising enormous amounts of cash in 1948. This funded the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 into the refugee camps that they languish in, up to the present day. [source: Alan Hart’s book “Zionism; the real enemy of the Jews“]

Born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1898, Meir moved to the US as a child and then to Palestine in 1921, working in a new kibbutz; she held a Palestinian passport. She declared “I’m a Palestinian”. That did not stop her later declaring “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people. It is not as though we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.”

American Muslims for Palestine observed “Meir was intent on ethnically cleansing the indigenous population from Palestine to make room for Jewish immigrants. She had no problem with forcibly removing people from their homes and kicking them out of their country in order that Israel may exist.”

During her tenure, Meir worked to violently colonise and ethnically cleanse Palestine. In the early 70s, Meir’s government poisoned the lands of Aqraba in the West Bank to force out its Palestinian inhabitants and clear the way for an illegal Jewish settlement

New report outlines how Golda Meir’s Israel poisoned Palestinian land in ethnic cleansing operation

But whilst denying the very existence of Palestinians, she lived in a grand Palestinian house looted in 1948 from Hanna Bisharat, who had built the house twenty years earlier for his large family.

The film focuses on the 1973 Yom Kippur war against Egypt and Syria- who were trying to reclaim the land Israel had stolen in 1967, in the Six-day war it had initiated, when it had attacked Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian soldiers in order to occupy the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem (where it has been ever since)- expelling 300,000 Palestinians in the process.

To reiterate- the 1973 war was initiated by Egypt and Syria and aimed to recover land stolen from the Palestinians six years previously; Meir had ignored previous peace overtures from Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. But Meir and the movie exaggerate the threat of the 1973 war, declaring to the USA that the Arabs were seeking to wipe it from the Earth- the Americans then, of course, supplied Israel with the tanks and planes it needed to secure the land it had stolen.

Meir absolutely believed that she, a Ukrainian, had a God-given right to take Palestine. Palestinian Rabbi Haim Sofer (see his video above) observes “She rejected the teachings of the Torah and the Talmud, which declared that only when the Messiah came and brought peace to the world, might Jews return; until that time, Jews must live peacefully in exile and must not steal or kill.”

Furthermore, unlike the Palestinians, Meir had few genetic links to the ancient Hebrews; her sense of entitlement was based around evangelical readings of the Christian Bible. She was even hostile, as an Ashkenazi (or European) Jew, to the darker Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews from the South and East.

Known as Israel’s “Iron Lady”, she is known for her attempts to project responsibility for Israeli violence onto Palestinians. She said “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

Meir continued “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us”. She completely ignored the fact that Muslims and Jews had previously lived together in close harmony for 1400 years, a peace that was only broken when Zionists arrived in 1917 to take Palestinian land, after Britain had given Palestine to the Zionist Federation.

In response, Pete Gregson of One Democratic Palestine says “Mirren has led the cast in a racist movie, intended to propagandise the Israeli project and its war criminal founders, whitewashing their crimes against humanity. The film glamourises ethnic cleansing; it attempts to romanticise the occupation and to portray the perpetrators as the victims. People like Meir should be remembered as war criminals and illegal settlers, rather than being portrayed as heroes in silly Hollywood movies.”

Palestinians and Israelis “clash” on the streets of Hebron on the day of the signing of an accord granting the city self-rule. One of the oldest cities in the world and a center of Islam, Hebron has been a frequent source of controversy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Photo by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

Jonathan Ofir, an Israeli musician based in Denmark, wrote of her: “In the end, her attitude towards Palestinians was basically a macho, chauvinist, denialist attitude which is intrinsically inherent in Zionism.”

See what Gideon Levy had to say of Meir on TikTok here

“If anyone thinks Ben-Gvir is worse than Golda Meir, they are mistaken. She was an arrogant, ignorant, racist war criminal!” American rights activist, Miko Peled, said.

Taghrid Al-Mawed runs the Palestine Refugee Project; she had this to say:

“Golda Meir had no problem killing Palestinians, saying, “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to?” Helen Mirren is more than happy to play this evil woman in her latest film. Well, Helen, we Palestinians do exist, and we will never forget your words and acts of support for the Zionists and your eagerness to play Meir, who has done us so much harm. She (and you) may have wanted to wipe us out, but she failed; we are still here, and we still have a very loud voice that more and more people are starting to hear and pick up. You have made a mistake Mirren; history will judge you.”

Where the film is on and how to get flyers

Golda is being shown in various locations, starting with the Jewish Film Festival on Wed 27^th September, that’s in London at the Phoenix Cinema, 52 High Road, London N2 9PJ at 7pm- then it’s on in more London Cinemas from 28^th Sept, then from 6^th Oct, in Ambleside, Barton Nedwood, Boreham Wood, Derby, Leeds, Brighton, Poole, Shrewsbury, Woodall Spa, then from 13^th in Coventry, Keswick, Nottingham, Ilkley, Wetherby, then from 20^th in Birmingham, Lerwick, Leicester, Melton Mowbray, Portsmouth, St Albans, Northampton, then from 27^th in Chichester, Tavistock, Berkhamstead, then from 3^rd Nov in Monmouth, Wellington, Malvern; more details of the actual cinemas at https://metfilmdistribution.co.uk/golda (There will be other cinemas too, in due course)

Get the #BoycottGolda flyer to picket cinemas with- download it as pdf by clicking here or email us at info@onepalestine.land to get some posted to you, just give your address and say how many you want.

Please also sign the petition promoted by Palestine Online at www.change.org/p/make-difference-and-boycott-golda-movie

What the Protestors At the UK Premiere Experienced

See the Palestine Chronicle coverage before the protest here

Many were called to lobby the premiere- around 500 people- but in the event, just two people responded to the One Democratic Palestine (ODP) chairman’s request for help on TikTok. The activists who offered to confront the Zionist hordes were Libyan volunteers Naser Al-Sherif and Osama Al-Jerrari. (Osama is a veteran of the Libyan revolution which toppled Gadaffi- he was part of the Libyan National Guard who were charged with maintaining order, after the revolt 12 years ago). First they went to Café Palestina in Kentish Town to stock up on flags and scarves:

The premiere took place at the Phoenix Cinema, 52 High Road, London N2 9PJ at 7pm, as part of the Jewish Film Festival, on Wed 27th September 2023; the film was sold out.

At the cinema, Naser and Osama (and a third friend, who came late) began picketing at 6:30pm and gave out 85 of these flyers to educate both those attending and passers-by as to the real nature of Golda Meir’s rule of the land she had taken by force.

Osama said “It was great- when passing cars and pedestrians saw our Palestinian flag- they were tooting their horns, waving and filming us on their phones. Those walking past were English and Jewish people- that’s the area. But they were curious and already mostly aware of the Zionist agenda.

“On the other hand, many of the Zionists going into the cinema were so frightened, they could barely look at us. It was just when they were leaving, as they got into their cars, that they gave us a hate-filled look- or cursed us- some gave us the finger. But we had absolutely no trouble from them.

“Of those who were going into the movie, around 10 took flyers – they said they were ready to study them and listen to what we had to stay. One Jewish woman who was going in even came out again with two cappuccinos for us! It was such an incredible experience, One guy stood and spoke to Naser for 30 minutes. We really educated a lot of people tonight.

“There was nothing to be afraid of; those who took the flyers said they wanted to learn more. This film is on every day here and at other cinemas across England. It’s a great opportunity to educate Zionists. Get some flyers and get out there.”

To see this report on You-Tube, go to https://youtu.be/YC8zF1BBnOw