Before Israel-based documentarian Shimon Dotan ever screened his film, The Settlers, at Syracuse University, he received an email telling him that it was a bad idea.
“The BDS faction on campus will make matters very unpleasant for you and for me if you come,” the email read, referring to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Weeks earlier, reports the Atlantic, a University of Nebraska professor reached out to Dotan to ask if his film—which documents religious settlers in the West Bank—could be screened at an international Syracuse-based conference titled “The Place of Religion in Film.” That invitation was soon intercepted with a disheartening response: The film will not be shown for fear of a student uprising.
“Obviously, my decision here has nothing to do with you or your work, and nothing to do with Bill [the Nebraska professor], who contacted you in good faith,” Gail Hamner, a Syracuse professor who organized the conference, wrote to Dotan. Hamner added that she might “lose credibility with a number of film and Women/Gender studies colleagues” if she was not able to vouch for the film. She said she had not seen it, and so could “only vouch for it through my friend and through published reviews.”
“I feel caught in an ideological matrix and by my own egoic needs to sustain certain institutional affiliations,” she wrote.
Here’s the irony: If Hamner or her colleagues had viewed the film, they would have seen that The Settlers would likely affirm, rather than inflame, BDS activists.
The documentary focuses on a fraction of West Bank settlers devoted to ideological causes, with nary a mention of the majority of settlers who move for economic reasons—a criticism the Times of Israel made of the film upon its release. “By failing to provide much context about mainstream settlers, the film conveys the message that the Jews of the West Bank are exclusively racist, murderous zealots and the sole impediment to Israeli-Palestinian harmony,” the paper wrote.
While the film “forces [viewers] to reckon with the ugliness in the settler movement” and contains “a fascinating look at how the [religious] settlements came into being,” it continues, the documentary offers many half-truths.
“Palestinian violence against Israelis goes almost unmentioned, except for a few oblique references,” the review says. “In Dotan’s film, the only Palestinians we see are victims.”
This is the point that political correctness on college campuses has reached: A film that confirms anti-settlement narratives was batted down by a university out of fear that it would enrage anti-settlement students and spark persecution from colleagues.
