On Feb. 15, about 70 people gathered at the Montpelier Senior Center for an event cosponsored by Montpelier Indivisible and the Vermont ACLU: a screening of the documentary “Boycott.” It was followed by a discussion facilitated by Daniel Nerenberg, an education and communications specialist from the nonprofit Just Vision, which produced the film.
Just Vision, which states that it has no religious affiliation, seeks “to fill a media gap on Israel Palestine through independent storytelling and strategic audience engagement,” according to its website.
In an email to The Bridge, Nerenberg writes about that alleged gap. “For decades we’ve seen how the mainstream media often tells an incomplete, misleading, and sometimes inaccurate narrative on Israel Palestine. Many outlets miss crucial content … focus solely on major power players while overlooking those working at the grass roots … willfully or in advertently creating a narrative that rationalizes and sanitizes a harsh military occupation, growing apartheid, and, most recently, the war of Gaza that most experts including Israeli and international human rights organizations deem a genocide.”
In the Feb. 29, 2024 issue of The Conversation, that news organization reported that bias often shows up in word choice. In one study media scholar Mohamed Elmasry said that the U.S. media may frame Israeli violence as “retaliatory and legitimate” while depicting Palestinian aggression as “barbaric and senseless.”
In the same article, however, readers are reminded that accusations of bias come from both sides and are not solely aimed at American media. In it, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League accuses the U.S. media of biases that “dehumanize Israelis while sanitizing Hamas” and the BBC has been accused of bias by both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups.
Just Vision addresses bias with documentary films, journalism, and “strategic audience engagement,” according to Nerenberg. He says, “We know that media interventions are only as powerful as the reach they have. We hold regular events with faith communities, students, educators, activists, and more. The event we held last month with Montpelier Indivisible and the ACLU organized by Miriam Hansen was part of those efforts.”
“Boycott” tells the story of a pushback against laws passed to penalize American citizens for exercising their right to choose nonviolent political action. Like “Boycott,” films from Just Vision often showcase ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
“My Neighbourhood,” winner of a Peabody award, documents a young Palestinian boy and his family forced out of part of their home. When the family starts a nonviolent protest against the evictions, they are joined by scores of Israeli supporters.
The films are real but hopeful. The organizers of the meeting on Feb. 15 wanted to strike the same tone and opened the event by encouraging the group to join four Jewish members of the audience in singing the liturgy from Yom Kippur before viewing a film about their constitutional right to protest against the actions of the Israeli government.
