In January, the English-language website of the prominent Israel Hayom newspaper reported with satisfaction that Netflix had suddenly added an “unusually high number of Israeli-made films”. The paper speculated that this “special gesture” was perhaps an attempt to “lure back customers”, after a high number of Israelis had dramatically cancelled their Netflix subscriptions in response to an “anti-Israel film” that “portrays Israeli soldiers as murderers”.
The offending film in question is, of course, Farha – which Netflix released in December and which depicts the horrors of the Nakba in 1948, when Israel achieved so-called “independence” on Palestinian land by killing more than 10,000 Palestinians and destroying more than 500 villages. Fast forward 75 years and Israeli soldiers still do not need much help looking like murderers; just ask the family of 61-year-old grandmother Majida Obaid, who was fatally shot in the neck during the Israeli military’s January 26 rampage in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
And yet Netflix’s decision to feature the likes of Farha as well as the 2022 series Mo constitutes a deviation from business as usual at the California-based streaming giant, by offering a glimpse of Palestinian reality and legitimate history that contests the dominant Israeli-fabricated narrative. To be sure, the company’s seemingly special relationship with the state of Israel has often rendered it indistinguishable from a Zionist public relations service. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.