<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Valley of the&nbsp;Anti-Semites?]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<table border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1" width="100%" align="center">
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<td class="normal_text" style="padding-left:15px;" align="right">14:49 01/29/2011</td>
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<td height="15px" valign="top"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/palestinechronicle.com/images/separator.jpg" alt="" width="510px" height="1px" /></td>
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<td align="center"><img class="border" src="https://i2.wp.com/palestinechronicle.com/uploads/1296330583vally_wolves_image.jpg" alt="" vspace="2" width="400px" height="300px" /></td>
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<td class="caption_text" align="center">Israel is perhaps not used to being the bad guy in movies.</td>
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<td class="normal_text" style="padding-top:10px;"><strong>By Belén Fernández</strong></p>
<p>The  Turkish film &#8216;Kurtlar Vadisi: Filistin&#8217;—&#8217;Valley of the  Wolves—Palestine&#8217;— opened yesterday in Turkey. Based on the immensely  popular television series &#8216;Valley of the Wolves&#8217;, the film is a response  to the May 2010 Israeli attack on the Turkish-led humanitarian aid  flotilla en route to Gaza, which resulted in the murder of nine Turkish  activists.</p>
<p>The New York Times points out that the TV series “has  portrayed Israelis as baby-killers and human organ thieves. Israel has  criticized the series as viciously anti-Semitic fiction”. Perhaps Israel  should direct similar criticism at the Times for publishing articles  with titles like “Gazan Mother and 4 Children Killed” and “Israeli  Shells Kill 40 at Gaza U.N. School”, and for describing Israel as a  “nexus” of global organ trafficking.</p>
<p>I watched “Valley of the  Wolves—Palestine” at a crowded cinema in a town in southwest Turkey last  night. It is an action film and the plot is straightforward: three  Turkish agents, led by Polat Alemdar, travel to Israel to pursue the  demise of Moshe Ben Eliezer, the fictional Israeli commander who  masterminded the flotilla raid.</p>
<p>During the first scene in  Jerusalem, Alemdar is asked by an Israeli soldier why he came to Israel  and is told “I didn’t come to Israel; I came to Palestine”. A battle  ensues and the Turks down an array of soldiers, escaping afterward to  the home of a Palestinian named Abdullah with a shell-shocked Jewish  American tour guide named Simone in tow. (She happens to speak fluent  Turkish, as do all of the Israeli and Palestinian characters in the  film.)</p>
<p>Until now ignorant of the Palestinian reality, Simone is a  caricature of discomfort and fear in her new surroundings, and refuses  to eat or to wear the Palestinian dress offered her by her female hosts.  Reality starts to sink in when Abdullah’s wheelchair-bound son warns  her not to go outside because “they will beat you”. She asks why such a  thing would happen and learns that the disabled child had functioned as  an Israeli target on the way home from school.</p>
<p>The Turkish agents  resume their mission along with Abdullah, causing numerous headaches for  Israeli security forces in between chasing Ben Eliezer. Simone is left  at the house, where she swiftly and in the most clichéd manner comes to  realize Palestinian humanity and dons the outfit she had previously  rejected. Ben Eliezer and his gang subsequently descend upon the  neighborhood, remove Simone and the other women and children from the  house, and bulldoze it on top of the young boy, whom the Israelis have  deliberately left on the floor of the living room.</p>
<p>Simone’s  capture provides her with the opportunity to inform Ben Eliezer that he  is not a true Jew and that he is an embarrassment to the Jewish  religion. Israel’s insistence on the film’s anti-Semitism might  meanwhile have more traction if Israel was not in fact known for  bulldozing houses atop disabled Palestinians.</p>
<p>Ben Eliezer is  killed by Alemdar in the film’s final scene in Gaza, where the Turks and  Abdullah have succeeded in distributing to the Palestinians weapons  raided from an Israeli stockpile. An Israeli tank is vanquished, and  soldiers are shot as they descend on ropes from helicopters—the  opposite, of course, of what happened in the flotilla raid. The  symbolism is transparent and the film lacks substance. But it’s not  anti-Semitic.</p>
<p>The New York Times proclaims its concern that  “Anti-Israel Film Disturbs Turkey’s Holocaust Day”. Translation: “Valley  of the Wolves” premiered the day after Turkey’s first officially  sanctioned participation in International Holocaust Remembrance Day. No  matter that the film release also very nearly coincided with the release  of the first part of the Israeli Turkel Commission’s report on the  flotilla attack, according to which Israeli commandos who murder  humanitarian activists are merely acting in self-defense, or that the  Jewish community and Chief Rabbinate of Turkey joined the rest of the  country in condemning the attack last year.</p>
<p>Israel is perhaps not  used to being the bad guy in movies. One way of deterring Turkish  scenarists in the future might be to ensure that the Israeli response to  the next Turkish-led flotilla—which according to the humanitarian  organization IHH will sail on the one-year anniversary of the attack—is  not blockbuster-worthy.</p>
<p><em>&#8211; Belén Fernández is an editor at  PULSE Media and the author of Coffee with Hezbollah, a satirical  political travelogue about hitchhiking through Lebanon in the aftermath  of the July War. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.  Contact her at: </em><a href="mailto:belengarciabernal@gmail.com"><em>belengarciabernal@gmail.com</em></a><em>.</em></td>
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<p><a href="http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=16596">Valley of the Anti-Semites?</a>.</p>
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