Speaking up for Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he wants to strip citizenship from two Israeli directors who made an acclaimed documentary detailing atrocities in Gaza. Also, Macklemore is back. What, what, what? What do these things have in common? Well, boycotts and protests of pro-Israel, Israeli artists, Israel-critical Israeli artists, non-Israeli artists who are pro- or anti-Israel, artists who don't want to say anything about Israel at all, and artists who just wanted to say. Free Palestine. are leading to cycles of cancellation, retribution, and resignation. So, is any of this helping people in Gaza? Is that even the point? We're going to ask, coming up on Today Explained from Vox. Support for Today Explained comes from Anthropic, the team behind Clawed. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation founded on a hard question. That question is, how do we make sure AI goes well for people? They're working on it, publishing what they find, even when it's uncomfortable. There's hope in hard questions. Ask your hard question at clawed.ai slash today explained. That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot A-I slash today explained. Yeah. You know that feeling. Too many updates, too many meetings, too many things falling through the cracks. Monday.com was built for that gap. The AI work platform designed from the ground up for people and agents to work side by side and deliver more together. Drafting the brief, flagging risks, running a competitive scan. Your agent can do it all. And the best part? Anyone can build one. Even you. Try it. Create your first Monday agent today at Monday.com. This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Most people haven't had a chance yet to see the documentary Naza, but Bilge Ebiri did at the Venice Film Festival, where the filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Jor got a 25-minute standing ovation. Naza is a very grim documentary in which one of the directors, Yuval Abraham, sits on various rooftops in Tel Aviv and interviews 24 different Israeli intelligence agents and soldiers about some of the things they did. during the Gaza War. And most of what they talk about are the different systems they used to effectively destroy homes and buildings in Gaza. The term Naza refers to collateral damage. It's a collateral damage figure. And so, for example, when they say something has four Naza, that means there are four other people killed besides the main target. That means there are four other people killed besides the main target. and IDF soldiers. Inside Israeli society, the film becomes an internal voice, telling Israelis the war they are fighting isn't just. They have internalized Jew hate and in turn use their Jewishness to kosher anti-Jewish ideas by assuming the role of the good Jew. It will not protect them, but in the process it can do untold damage to the Jewish people. Israelis from all sides are afraid of the way the world is seeing us at the moment. It's something that is really important. Is anybody in Israel saying, hey, we're glad that they did it. We're glad that they made this movie. Yes, there are people who are supporting Yuval and Rachel, the filmmakers, supporting their right to criticize, to investigate. As a liberal country, we should be able to investigate ourselves, to criticize ourselves. And this is a very important thing. something that they are doing. They are doing their work as journalists. There has also been a reaction from the Israeli government at a more official level. What has the Israeli government said about this film? So the first person to react was the minister of culture. I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state. He said that Israel should, that the nationality of Yuval and Rachel, the filmmakers, should be revoked, that we should take their nationality. They should not be Israeli citizens anymore. And it was, there's a really, a really long history of films that were criticized by, especially by different culture ministers. But the way, I mean. I mean, I haven't seen anything like this, like what is happening now before. This is really frightening. I mean, I'm, I don't know, I'm completely, I'm horrified by this. I already saw some clips on social media. By people who were, you know, filming themselves where you can see, like in the background, you could see a house and someone was saying, you can all come here. This is the house of Rachel Scholl's parents. They live here and you can come and do whatever you want. I invite you all to come here and take revenge. And there were several clips. The same message, I guess, I'm guessing they're not coming back to Israel at the moment. I think it became, it has become really dangerous for them to be here. And it's a new level, you know, I've never, even I published an article about this. I'm not, I didn't do the movie. I just published an article supporting them at Haaretz, in Haaretz. And my mother is afraid that they, that someone will attack me. I mean, this is also, yeah. The echoes of this event are, they're going very far now. Shani Litman of Haaretz, you also heard from Bilga Abiri of New York Magazine. Thanks to them. When we come back, the boycotts. Every big AI headline is a lot of important questions, like what does this mean for my job? Should I even be using it? Anthropic is a public benefit corporation founded on asking those kinds of questions. More specifically, they say, how do we make sure AI goes well for people? So Anthropic sat down with some people. They did more than 120,000 interviews. They asked those people for their hopes and fears. And they don't gloss over what they heard. Anthropic publishes that data even when it's uncomfortable. What came back, they say, wasn't just fear. It was curiosity with questions like, could this cure diseases? Or could my kids have a better future? Perhaps there is hope in asking hard questions. Ask yours at clawed.ai slash today explained and keep thinking. Support for the show today comes from Framer. And if you're hoping to get those cute pictures, all taken care of, this isn't the place. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist. Or get started building for free today at framer.com. Slash explained for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash explained. Rules and restrictions may apply. With Framer, agents and humans work in tandem. Agents bring speed and scale. People bring taste, judgment, and control. Support for the show today comes from Framer.com. fractured thing that we're seeing. Similarly with Nasa, I wouldn't characterize it, the main response as being a critical or calling for a boycott of the film. It's just elements within the movement, but it's a real, you know, line of division. A similar incident, Israeli authors, there's been a lot of, you know, Israeli authors talking about difficulty being published or getting their books into translation. There have been, you know, Israeli musical acts who have faced protests or interruptions at their concert. So yeah, that's been going on for a long time. It's just interesting now that it's also spilling over into the Israelis who are being critical of the government, and that's still not viewed as good enough by some people. Historically, there has been a difference between people complaining online, even if we're talking about like hundreds of thousands of people complaining online, and a formal boycott. What form are these critiques taking? Are these formal boycotts? Are they informal boycotts? Like, what is behind them? So the BDS movement, which stands for Boycott, Divest, and Sanction, is this sort of global, you know, nonviolent campaign to pressure Israel to, it depends who you talk to, but to change its policies to the Palestinians in one way or another. And so the idea is, you know, one tranche of that is boycotts that kind of anyone can participate in, and those are intended to be strategic boycott targets. So, you know, we're going to boycott SodaStream, to pressure them to, you know, move their manufacturing facilities. Honestly, boycott SodaStream. Free Palestine. Literally, like, all of their mixes, made in Israel. Made in Israel. Boycott SodaStream. And if you want to be a good little watermelon and help out any way you can, I'm going to show you an alternative to the CO2 cylinders if you still want to keep your bubbles. We're going to pressure Caterpillar to not sell, you know, bulldozers to the Israeli military. Caterpillar is very much still providing the Israeli government with the tools they need to displace and dispossess the Palestinian people. To keep the apartheid going. Zionist and Israeli products have no business in Costco. We don't want to be buying their products. So, boycott Kat and free Palestine. And so I think the boycotts look like different things depending on the context. When it came to Israeli restaurants in the U.S. or restaurants with Israeli chefs, you know, there was sort of a sense of you shouldn't go patronize them. Some have since closed and blamed those boycotts for their closure. It's really hard to measure the impact. And a lot of it is more about online vitriol than it is. I mean, I haven't seen calls on like the New York, you know, the Film Festival of New York that's hosting NAZA to like not host it. So in the case of NAZA, it's not even clear that it's like a boycott of the film itself. It's more just like this outrage toward the filmmakers. The response to these boycotts has been interesting in a lot of ways. Some people see them as justified. I mean, you know, there's a lot of isolation of artists and institutions that support Israel or that get support from Israel. And some say, look, you are pushing Israeli artists out of public life. So there is nuance here. There's nuanced disagreement, even. How do you make sense of the nuanced disagreement? Well, you know, I think that part of the argument is I'm not even sure that there is actually disagreement that these things are intended to push Israeli artists and public figures out of public life outside of Israel. I think that's just the way it is. You know, both sides sort of agree that that is the goal. The disagreement is whether that is justified. And I think that, you know, the refrain from people who think this is unacceptable or anti-Semitic is that we don't do this to other countries, which is by and large true. You know, if you're a filmmaker from China or Syria or elsewhere, you know, you are not expected to answer for your government's actions. And I think the retort is that the Jewish Israeli public is much more supportive. Of the things that people are mad at the Israeli government for. So there was widespread Israeli Jewish support for Israel's campaign in Gaza. The flip side of that is that, of course, many of the Israeli artists and professors and other public figures who are traveling and speaking and doing events abroad, especially those who are not doing those things to defend Israel, are critics of the government or are more likely to be more liberal and more sympathetic to the protesters. But I think that, you know, the. Discourse became so polarized that the request was not just for you to express concern about Palestinian civilians, for example, it was really for you to completely disown, you know, Israeli identity, condemn the Israeli government, fully embrace sort of anti-Zionism. And that was something that like is really a non-starter, even for many very liberal Israeli Jews. And so that's where kind of the tensions came to the fore. We would assume that the point of a boycott is to change the conditions that people are. So appalled by right. Put pressure on the Israeli government to stop what is happening in Gaza. And I wonder, you know, whether in this case we see any of that actually happening, whether there is any evidence that the Israeli government in in the face of boycotts and protests and people talking online, people canceling each other and canceling other people, whether whether there is any evidence that the Israeli government is is changing tact here. I think the short answer is no. But I think that it's a little bit misguided to view the boycotts and the other pressure as an attempt to like specifically change Netanyahu's like personal policies of the Israeli government's personal policies or even to like directly appeal to the Israeli public. I think there's an understanding that they are not receptive to protests in, you know, New York or London or Antwerp or what have you, but that the governments might be right. And so that all of this public pressure may have. But I think the short answer is no. The boycott movement in the West Bank is not worth the cost of these sanctions. So it's hard to draw one to one. I don't think the boycott movement has always been extremely strategic, but I think that's the chain that they see it following. Arno Rosenfeld, Washington correspondent for Haaretz. Today's team, Ariana Espudu, Jolie Myers, Bridger Dunnigan, Kelly Wessinger and me, Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Today's team, Ariana Espudu, Jolie Myers, Bridger Dunnigan, Kelly Wessinger and me, Noelle King.