PHOTO: ATARA BECK
Rochelle Wilner, senior vice president of the Canadian Coalition for Democracy, chaired the Jabotinsky Memorial event last week at the Leah Posluns Theatre.
“How long will it take before Qassam (rockets) reach Ashkelon, Ashdod, and even Tel Aviv?” should Israel pull out of Gaza, said former B’nai Brith Canada president, and now Canadian Coalition for Democracies Senior Vice President Rochelle Wilner.
She was introducing the Canadian premiere of Igal Hecht’s searing documentary film Qassam at the Leah Posluns Theatre on Aug. 4, as the keynote event of the Ze’ev Jabotinsky Memorial, commemorating the 65th anniversary of the great Zionist pioneer’s death.
This memorial service was sponsored by Betar-Tagar of Toronto, whose shaliah, Itay Gadot, was praised by emcee Wilner for an outstanding production.
Nothing could have been more timely than to have screened this film, just 11 days before the planned disengagement. While, in the best journalistic tradition, this film is supposed to take a neutral stance regarding disengagement, the overall impression, created by numerous interviews with the residents of Sderot, just east of the Gaza strip, is that the daily terror inflicted upon its 20,000 residents by the firing of 800 Qassam rockets from the Palestinian Arab terrorists based in Gaza, will happen in many other Israeli cities after the Israeli pullout from Gaza.
The film documents the grief suffered by several Sderot families after their small children were killed by the Qassam rockets fired from Gaza: a young boy on his way to kindergarten (Hecht states as narrator: “The Palestinian terrorists prefer to launch their rockets in the early morning, hoping to murder children on their way to school”), and a young Ethiopian girl who was killed when a Qassam hit their succah as the family was about to enjoy a festive dinner. Her large family is shown weeping at her funeral as her coffin is laid to rest. “Sometimes I am afraid to go to kindergarten,” says one of her young classmates. A 19-year old young man is shown traumatized by the attacks, and the mother of one of the victims is shown describing her constant fear. “This is an impossible, very bad situation,” she says.
Long-time residents of Sderot, such as the merchant Sasson, express anger at the Gaza pullout, calling it “dangerous.” His anger is also directed at the Sharon government for not caring about Jews in Sderot – because it is a low-income town – until two children were murdered. Then, when Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu came to vow to wipe out the terrorists, they were greeted with angry outbursts of too little, too late. IDF retaliatory actions are seen by Sasson and his friends as being sporadic and ineffective in the long term.
Sasson is cynical about politicians in general: “Today nobody cares about the state. They only care about their careers.” But his greatest anger is reserved for Peace Now activists who followed the politicians into Sderot. “You never lived in Sderot. How can you tell us what to do?”
Before the film, Hecht, who hails from Ashkelon but who has spent much time in Toronto where he studied film and communications at Seneca College, expressed to the Jewish Tribune his deep personal reservations regarding the disengagement.
“There are no guarantees that the pullout will mean the end of Qassams. The Palestinian Authority has not stopped terrorists. What if, after the pullout, they build a tunnel from Gaza to a kindergarten just north of the new Gaza-Israel border?”
Qassam will be showcased on Canada’s I Channel on Aug. 15 at 8 p.m., and will be showcased on CTS later in the fall.
The contentious disengagement issue overshadowed Jabotinsky commemoration ceremonies throughout Israel as well as in Toronto. At the Jabotinsky Memorial service at Mount Herzl, four youths from the leadership course in Betar took off their shirts, revealing undershirts with the slogan, ‘Jews Don’t Expel Jews,’ in the presence of President Moshe Katzav and his wife, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, MK Reuven Rivlin, army veterans and young members of the Betar Movement. The four were violently arrested and taken into custody for questioning.
The great-grandchildren of Jabotinsky also made a political statement when, upon laying the family wreath, they appeared in orange shirts with one girl placing an orange ribbon in her hair. MKs Uzi Landau and Rivlin were applauded for their anti-disengagement stance.
Before the Toronto memorial, one of the speakers who preceded the film, Amos Hermon, chair of the education committee of the official Jewish Agency for Israel, told the Jewish Tribune that the Mount Herzl arrests “were not right.”
As long as protests against the Gaza pullout are peaceful, “these are legal demonstrations. Wearing orange shirts as a sign of protest is OK. If we do want to keep a democracy, we have to give the maximum opportunities to a very large percentage of Israelis.”
Israel Consul-General Ya’acov Brosh stated that Jews i the Diaspora must support Israel “without a but....” adding that only those who have made aliyah have a right to participate in the debate. The mood of the audience, however, was overwhelmingly anti-disengagement. Anti-disengagement proponents distributed both a myths-and-facts pamphlet entitled Deconstructing the Disengagement, and an orange flyer entitled Disengagement Betrays Jabotinsky’s Memory. Except for one or two anti-pullout brief outbursts from one individual in the audience, there were no disruptions of the long program. The general feeling was that disruptions were not necessary: the film had made a convincing argument against the Gaza pullout.
On a note of solidarity, before the film, Betar-Tagar and Likud-Canada President Rose Lax presented the Ze’ev Jabotinsky National Award for Campus Activism to six Ontario Jewish student leaders who have bravely combatted Arab antisemitism on the campuses of McMaster, U of T, Guelph and Osgoode Hall Law School: Avi ben-Tzvi, Esther Mendelsohn, Brandon Catriel da Silva, Jonathan Jaffit (grand-nephew of Eliyahu Lankin, captain of the Altalena), Michael Twayman, and Marilyn Fenton, who created the glossy pamphlet United Colours of Israel, which was distributed to the audience.
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