UK: Film about ethnic cleansing of Jews met with calls to ethnically cleanse Jews

Lyn Julius @ Times of Israel:

My organisation Harif — a UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa — was invited to the Shalom Festival to present the film, the Forgotten Refugees.

As we entered the Shalom Festival venue, we ran the gamut of Palestinian flags and verbal threats. More political, you could not get. This was obviously a well-funded and well-run campaign. The presence of familiar faces suggested that some demonstrators had been flown in from London.
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The noisy protesters chanted hateful and defamatory slogans and libels about Israel. The air was bristling with hatred and intimidation.

We presented our film, which deals with the plight of 850,000 Jews driven from Arab lands. These Jews and their descendants now comprise over 50 percent of Israel’s Jews.

As we strained to be heard over the racket on the street below, the slogan rang out over the megaphone: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

In no uncertain terms, the protesters had revealed their true intentions: Free Palestine of Jews. Irony of ironies: here we were — describing the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the region, and the protesters were advocating finishing the job — by ethnically cleansing the Jews of Israel.

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