Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1998, Pages 103-105

Pro-Israel McCarthyism

U.S. Filmmaker Details Efforts to Suppress Film on Occupied Palestine in Current Link Issue

By Richard H. Curtiss

Several years ago Tom Hayes, a young independent filmmaker from Columbus, OH, visited my Washington office. In the late 1970s he had made a film, "Refugee Road," centered on Vietnamese in a refugee camp in Thailand and during their first year as immigrants in the U.S.

The film had been shown nationally on Public Broadcasting System stations and again by the New York City PBS affiliate, WNET, as one of a series of films on immigrants. Now, Hayes proposed to do the same thing with Palestinian refugees in the camps in Lebanon.

As I described the huge difference between getting films about Middle Eastern subjects and films on any other subjects funded and shown in the U.S., I tried to size him up. How would he react when he first saw himself described in the Jewish weekly newspapers as an "anti-Semite"? Would he quit or would he become so angry at his defamers that he actually would begin to distrust all Jews? His attackers wouldn't care. In either case, they would have won. Only if he fought back fairly against the inevitable unfair accusations and innuendo would he accomplish his purpose.

It's now more than a decade and two films later, and obviously Hayes won his first battles. He has funded and shot two films about Palestinians, while remaining honest, objective and fair. The first film, "Native Sons," is the one he'd planned to do from the beginning about Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.

The second film, "People and the Land," is about the Palestinian intifada. It was even harder to fund than the first, and infinitely more dangerous to make for Hayes, his Palestinian-American co-producer, Riad Bahhur, their crew, and the dozens of Palestinians who helped them make it. Many of the Palestinians were arrested and beaten, at least 18 were imprisoned without trial for periods of up to a year, and four of them were shot and wounded by Israeli soldiers.

Hayes has painstakingly documented how one of his part-time assistants, Palestinian journalist Zacharia Talamas, was shot in the stomach at point-blank range in Gaza by a uniformed Israeli soldier. The soldier had hunted him down for ignoring an order the previous day by an Israeli officer who, after Zacharia had been beaten in Israeli police headquarters, warned him, "You'd better quit this journalism bullshit."

In a 21-page article in The Link,* a bi-monthly publication of Americans for Middle East Understanding in New York City, Hayes relates the whole story of making the films. Reading his account will make you furious, sad and immensely proud to be a member of the same species as Tom Hayes and the many people who extended a helping hand whenever he needed it most. Among them are Israeli peace activists and, in going out of his way to give them credit, clearly Toms Hayes has passed the most difficult test of all.

The dangerous business of filming the purposeful torment of the Palestinians by the Israeli government, its U.S.-armed soldiers, and its U.S.-subsidized Jewish settlers, however, is only part of the story Hayes tells. The rest comprises his struggles for funding—Catch 22 battles he finally won—and for access to PBS audiences, a battle in which he presently is engaged. Below are some excerpts from Hayes' American story within his Palestinian story as published by The Link:

I remember quite clearly the morning I stepped into that black hole marked Palestine...I reach for the (Columbus) Dispatch (and read), "Israel launches air strike against Rashidiyya, a Palestinian guerrilla stronghold in southern Lebanon." And I look up. Just across the dining room table I've tacked up a map...And I'm looking right at the word Rashidiyya with a little symbol that says it's a refugee camp...Israel— the Israel I was so smugly sure of—would never bomb a refugee camp...The shining city on the hill simply wouldn't do that...So I read everything I could get my hands on...The more I...read, the weirder the world seemed to have gotten. Strange stuff about displaced people not being allowed to return to their homes, two-tier legal systems, international law being used as toilet paper...

While I was working on "Refugee Road" I had a long look at how selfless Americans could be when they knew the truth. Three-quarters of a million people were resettled, in a volunteer effort, from those terrible camps to America...And why? Because Americans met those folks through their televisions, and they heard their stories and saw their living conditions.

That was the context that brought me to consider producing a documentary about the situation of Palestinian refugees. It was really two decisions. I wasn't just setting out to clue up Americans who I had faith would respond when they had information on the human side of these issues. I was also setting out to test the hypothesis that there was some kind of too-tight tourniquet on information about the Palestinian experience...I was still incredibly naive in 1981 about the power I was poking at.

During the fund-raising period of that project (released as "Native Sons: Palestinians in Exile") I had my first encounter with what I have come to think of as The Information Blockade—yes capitalized, definitely...

To PBS, the more "controversial" the content of a program, the more inadmissible funding from "sources with a direct interest in the topic"...A program on Indochinese refugees was not "controversial..." I intended to approach a program on the Palestinian refugee experience in the same way I had approached "Refugee Road"—portraits of individuals' lives. But this was seen as controversial. Same filmmaker, same human issues. Different ethnic group, different definition...

PBS let me know that funding for "Native Sons" from any organization with even a peripheral "interest" in the topic would "taint" such a "controversial" program...The problem is that information on some issues, like Palestinian human rights, has been so systematically distorted that virtually no funder without a direct interest is going to touch it.

Jo Franklin-Trout was publicly crucified for allegedly accepting "tainted funding" when she brought her program on the intifada, "Days of Rage," to PBS. Fortunately she had a prior commitment to air from PBS, which felt compelled to begin the program with a graphic detailing the allegations against her.

It took two years to generate enough "clean" funding (spell that n-o-n-A-r-a-b) to go into production on "Native Sons." Most of the grants were from the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts...UNRWA was providing some logistical support and I had borrowed heavily against our home to make up the balance of the budget...

On "People and the Land" Riad and I were fortunate to get the nod from the Independent Television Service (ITVS). Congress mandated the creation of ITVS through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to serve underserved minorities and increase programming diversity on PBS.

The total annual budget for ITVS is equivalent to six hours of aid to Israel, or three 30-second Super Bowl commercials. ITVS provides full funding for productions precisely to accommodate PBS funding "concerns."

That makes the process sound so simple: one grant, full funding, out the door. It's anything but simple. It took two years to raise enough money to go into production on "Native Sons." Five years on "People and the Land"...

It was July 1991 when ITVS called. They had just completed their first grant panel meeting...I was told that our project had been selected. The next sentence that came scratching out of the phone dropped a sinker in my stomach: "We have some questions." When you have spent a few years doing information work on Palestine, the sound of a qualifying remark from a grant administrator is an icicle to the heart.

"Some questions" from ITVS staff, mostly in the person of John Schott, then executive director, turned into 18 months of battling to keep the grant. Multi-page lists of questions streamed in from their offices in Minneapolis. The paper interrogation boiled down to "where did you get every penny that went into shooting the sample work submitted for this grant?" ITVS burrowed through the project records, mining for a justification to kill the funding...

There was plenty of time for soul searching. For me, work on Palestine was a test of the relevance of independent filmmaking. If you couldn't get funding and dissemination for work about super-power culpability in cultural genocide, then what exactly was the point of independent filmmaking?...What John Schott described as "administrative diligence" appeared to me like a monster cop-out, an attempt to protect ITVS funding by not having to defend a Palestine project before Congress...

Schott's "administrative diligence" with the project was the source of ongoing discussion and division on the ITVS board. At one point, Jackie Shearer, a member of the founding ITVS board, threatened to resign over the affair. She had herself come under the Zionist swatter when she produced a human interest story for a Boston station about Palestinians in America. Jackie knew precisely what was going on.

In December 1992 she became president of the ITVS board. Four months later the pre-production payment for "People and the Land" arrived from ITVS. Jackie Shearer died of a chronic illness some months later. Without her dedication to the principles of diversity and artistic freedom, "People and the Land" would not exist...

The Information Blockade

Getting footage "in the can" and easing it and a living crew back to the States is all very nice, but there shouldn't be any sense of accomplishment in it. You're no closer to getting it into the nation's living rooms than when you started. The Information Blockade is cocked and waiting like a bear trap. The first time I got my leg hung in that thing was in the early '80s. I was editing "Native Sons" but had zero finishing funds...until the George Gund Foundation out of Cleveland awarded us a grant adequate to complete the work, the first time they had funded an independent film project. There was much naive rejoicing.

About a week later there was a tiny squib of a story in...The Columbus Dispatch: "The Community Film Association has received a $25,000 grant from the George Gund Foundation for Tom Hayes's project, 'Native Sons,' that examines the lives of three Palestinian refugee families in Lebanon." That's all it said, but it changed my world.

My funders and potential funders, and the Community Film Association that administered my grants, received letters from the Columbus Jewish Federation painting me as a PLO stooge (and) making perverse allegations about the Gund Foundation...At the same time free-lance enthusiasts—Jewish Defense League types—began harassing my family. Phone calls into all hours, obscene threats against my then-pregnant wife, threats on her life and mine. I put wire mesh on all the windows except the living room, a simple way to avoid a firebombing. It didn't help; someone came into the yard and busted that window out. At one point our phone line was cut as I prepared to take a business trip. I stayed home.

We talked to the police several times, even providing them a tape of one set of calls. But whenever we got to the question "why would you be having this problem?" and I explained what I was working on, they'd sort of wander away asking quietly over their shoulders if I owned a firearm. This was in Columbus, Ohio, not Jenin or Hebron. Nevertheless we had begun to feel like we lived in occupied territory.

The whole thing was so dumb. Like I'd forget about the film if enough people hassled me. I had already put my butt on the line precisely because I suspected there were structures preventing a broad base of information on issues Palestinian. These info-terrorists did nothing but affirm the reasons I started this work in the first place. We got scared, sure, and we got busy.

One of the grants the Community Film Association (CFA) was administering came from the Ohio Arts Council. This was a matter of public record. The Columbus Jewish Federation secured that information, and a copy of the Gund Foundation proposal, which was not public record. Under the signature of Eric Rozenman, director of community relations, a second barrage of correspondence went to my funders trashing the film and me and urging CFA to disassociate itself from the project.

A CFA board member told me that he and other board members had received intimidating phone calls from people at Federation. "You are responsible for Tom Hayes engaging in propaganda with public funds. There's going to be an injunction against this film and your whole board is going to be sued for their personal assets."

This board was basically a bunch of folks who liked to watch movies and thought it exciting to help an independent filmmaker occasionally. This "Native Sons" thing was giving them a lot of unexpected grief. They called me in to announce that one of their number would screen the rough cut. They sent Dennis Aig, who was at the time active with (I'm sure you can guess) the Columbus Jewish Federation.

Dennis ended his private screening standing on a chair in my cutting room yelling, "You can't say that! You can't say that!" His visit was followed a week later by a letter from CFA informing me that the board had found that I was engaging in propaganda and would therefore forfeit a $20,000 reimbursement grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

I had borrowed once again on the house (counting on reimbursement from the grant for repayment) and spent the loan on lab charges. I contacted OAC howling for help. Chris Nygren, who coordinated the media arts program, informed CFA that it had the right to forfeit the grant. BUT if it followed this course, with its implicit effect on an artist, then CFA could not expect to see another OAC grant. It was some ice-cold line like "if you forfeit then you must not want our funding" that did the trick.

Two days later I received a letter from CFA stating that it would complete its commitments on existing grant contracts. The financial heat was off, but the freelancers kept at my family with threats and harassment. The Ohio State University School of Fine Arts had booked the premiere for a series called Personal Independents and would be using a local theater for screenings. I got a call from the curator, Nancy Robinson, telling me that "Native Sons" was going to have to be shown elsewhere; the theater owner was refusing to show it. I suggested that she might respond to this censorship by telling the owner she planned to pull the whole series out of his theater. That served as an inducement to him to straighten up and act like a supporter of artistic freedom. Personal interest conquered politics.

A week before the premiere of the film, Alex Odeh, a regional director in California for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was blown in half by a bomb wired to his office door...Suddenly the threats felt less like threats and more like impending doom...

If American Zionists had left the project and my family alone, I doubt that I would have continued work on the topic. They made it personal...I'm old enough to remember the same tactics of intimidation were used to keep Black Americans from registering to vote in the South. There's no way I could walk away and allow intimidation to succeed. I was weaned on Cry the Beloved Country.

I got curious about AIPAC. As I dug around, the rest of the equation of oppression began to lay itself out before me: the U.S. tax dollars that prop up the Zionist enterprise.

Some years later, when we entered into the agreement with ITVS, we stipulated in the contract that no public information about "People and the Land" would be released without our express permission. Important advice to anyone working on a project about this topic: keep quiet until you're done. Talking to the papers is like taping a "kick me" sign on your behind.

One interesting aspect of the contract with ITVS is that their projects are at no charge to the PBS system for a period of three years. And only PBS. As producers, Riad and I have no rights to license broadcast or cablecast of the program anywhere in America until the year 2000. This would not have become a problem if the PBS system had picked up the program, or if ITVS had handled itself more carefully.

ITVS submitted "People and the Land" to PBS for national release in February 1997. Gayle Loeber, director of broadcast marketing for ITVS, called some time afterward to inform me that PBS had "declined the program...They are not required to provide a reason."

She went on to describe the next steps in the distribution plan: submit for PBS's "Point of View" series and, if that failed, up-link. ITVS would prepare press materials and arrange a satellite feed to all 283 PBS affiliate stations...Stations, at the discretion of the individual program directors, can air any of the dozens of (such) "soft feeds" they receive each week.

The relationship with ITVS, never warm on account of the first 18 months they had me swinging in the wind, deteriorated further over the first press release. I had worked by phone and fax with ITVS in preparing it. Their first draft omitted mention of the foreign aid issues that the program starts and ends with—the essence of the program. I wrote a brief paragraph to remedy this defect, they said "fine," and (I thought) we put the project to bed.

When I got my press copy in the mail (my addition) had been deleted from our final draft...In May ITVS called to say that some of the stations requested additional information about the program...What I was not told was that ITVS had requested Mark Rosenblum, founder of Americans for Peace Now, to review the film. ITVS didn't ask anyone else to review the film. No Palestinian view was solicited, no American historian, just Mark Rosenblum. ITVS sent this review to every programming director in the PBS. [Washington Report editor's note: For information on this misleading "review," see accompanying box.]...

When the Anti-Defamation League sent out its press release expressing outrage that CPB had funded "People and the Land," ITVS sent a very thoughtful letter to Abraham Foxman at ADL, and sent copies of ADL's condemnation of the program to every station in the system.

Now check me on this: is sending out an utterly negative review of a program a '90s promotion technique that I'm not sharp enough to appreciate? Orwellian promotion: war is peace, promotion is sabotage.

I asked Jim Yee and Suzanne Stenson of ITVS why ITVS had become a mailbox for the ADL. Public agitation by the ADL would have raised the profile of the program and widened the debate, raising censorship and free-speech issues. When ITVS delivered the message, ADL's hands were clean and the desired results were achieved without public discourse.

These ITVS/ADL/Rosenblum tactics have scored hits. At least one station that we can document, WTIU in Bloomington, Indiana, removed "People and the Land" from its schedule following the communiquès from ITVS. Other stations...rejected member requests to air the free program by referring to the ITVS material...

However, there have been some victories for information and the "marketplace of ideas." Twenty-three stations have broadcast so far. Many of those screenings were the result of grassroots organizing....

*Washington Report readers may obtain the 21-page text of the Tom Hayes article by sending $35 for a one-year subscription to The Link, AMEU, Room 245, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10115-0241 or telephoning (212) 870-2053.

Getting "People and the Land" On the PBS Station Near You

(Excerpt from article by Tom Hayes in The Link, November-December, 1997)

The decision to air or not to air "People and the Land" in any of the 283 communities served by PBS rests in the hands of two people, three at the most: the program director, the station manager, and the general manager. It's not a "System"—it's two or three people with phone numbers and offices. ITVS provides the tape free of charge, so the "broke station blues" is not a valid excuse.

Program directors who express ignorance about where to obtain the program can be reminded that ITVS can be reached at (415) 356-8383 or by e-mail at <itv@itvs.org>. Lois Vossen, manager of marketing and promotion, is the contact person for stations.

The production crew, our colleagues, and friends in Palestine have gone to some lengths to create this information resource. Are there any enterprising and energetic people out there who will run the blockade at the 260 PBS affiliate stations that are still sitting on the program?

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

(Excerpt from article by Tom Hayes in The Link, November-December, 1997)

...What I was not told was that ITVS had requested Mark Rosenblum, founder of Americans for Peace Now, to review the film ("People and the Land")...ITVS sent this review to every programming director in the PBS system. An introduction signed by Gayle Loeber states that "Mark is uniquely qualified to comment on the program..."

The review...proceeds to firebomb the film with Zionist mythology: "approximately 20 percent accurate," "97 percent of Palestinians are ruled by Palestinian authorities," and—in a true flight of imagination—"Actually Jews [in Palestine] represented the demographic majority since 1870." The document bears a striking resemblance to the ooze that rolls out of the Government Baloney Factory in Jerusalem. A sort of Joan Peters pocket novella.

(Link editor's note: The Link contacted Mr. Rosenblum on Nov. 12 to confirm his connection with Americans for Peace Now. He emphatically denied having written a "review" or having put any comments in writing for ITVS, although he said he had expressed certain opinions orally to someone at ITVS whose name he did not recall. He was aware that ITVS had cited him as the authority for the "review" on "People and the Land" that it distributed in May to all PBS stations. Told that he was quoted as saying the documentary was "20 percent accurate," Mr. Rosenblum said he had not stated any percentage of accuracy. He specifically denied saying that 97 percent of Palestinians are ruled by Palestinian authorities (explaining that he might have said that such would be the case if the Oslo accords were fulfilled). He also repudiated the statement regarding the majority status of Jews in Palestine in 1870. (He said that he might have remarked that Jews had attained majority status in Jerusalem by the turn of the century.) On Nov. 13, The Link reached Suzanne Stenson, formerly of the ITVS staff, who said she had transcribed Mr. Rosenblum's comments on a laptop computer during an hour-long phone conversation. Ms. Stenson told The Link that prior to its dissemination to PBS stations, the text of the communiquè quoting Mr. Rosenblum was e-mailed to him for review at his personal and business e-mail addresses. No response to these e-mails was received, she said.)