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This event starts at 12:00 Noon US EDT; 7:00 PM Palestine time
The screening will be followed by Q&A discussions with Rami and Yoav Tzabar, Shimon’s sons, and Judit Druks, his longtime partner.
Shimon Tzabar
About the Film
27 Minutes, English
A short film about the late, celebrated Israeli journalist, poet, artist and satirist SHIMON TZABAR, and his last public protest against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, made shortly before his death in 2007 after forty years of self-imposed exile in London.
Shimon was a trailblazer in the struggle against the occupation and Zionist colonisation of the Palestinian territories after the June 1967 war. He was viciously attacked not only by the Israeli-Zionist establishment, but also by others who would later follow in his footsteps, albeit at some distance.
On September 22 1967 he published a prominent advertisement in Ha'aretz, signed by him and 11 others: "Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation entails foreign rule. Foreign rule entails resistance. Resistance entails repression. Repression entails terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. Let us get out of the occupied territories immediately."
This was the first widely publicised protest in Hebrew against the occupation after the 1967 war and met with universal howls of anger. Now it seems prophetic. In December 1967 Shimon left Israel for London. In his (yet unpublished) autobiography, he says that his aim was to "try to mobilise world opinion against the occupation".
Shortly after his arrival he and some like-minded comrades published a satirical magazine, Israel Imperial News, which got favourable reviews in the British press but a stormy reception in Israel. Shimon relished these attacks; his aim was to provoke public opinion and get people thinking.
He made numerous, varied and highly original contributions to modern Hebrew literature. His satirical anti-war book, The White Flag Principle: How to Lose a War and Why (1972), has been translated into nine languages. In 2004 he published the bitingly satirical booklet: (Much Better Than) the Official Michelin Guide to Israeli Prisons, Jails, Concentration Camps and Torture Chambers. Michelin started legal proceedings against him for using their distinctive format but - to his great disappointment - later withdrew the charge.
Christopher Sykes
About the Filmmaker
Christopher Sykes is a TV documentary producer based in London. In 1970 he joined the BBC as a television researcher. He has made about seventy documentaries for BBC TV and Channel 4, some of which have been shown on PBS/Nova — notably the programs he made with and about Richard Feynman (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Last Journey of a Genius and The Best Mind Since Einstein). He is also a consultant and contributor to Web of Stories, an online video collection of in-depth interviews with many of the great minds of our time.