On Sunday, 30 August 2026, the lights will dim at Silverbird Cinema in the Accra Mall. Popcorn will be served. Two Israeli feature films will be screened alongside Ghanaian student productions. There will be talk of culture, creativity and friendship.
There is another screen Ghanaians must refuse to look away from — the one on which we have watched Gaza reduced to rubble, families displaced again and again, hospitals and schools destroyed, and children carried from the wreckage of a war that, despite the ceasefire announced in October 2025, has not stopped killing them.
On 6 August, UNICEF reported that at least 300 children had been killed in Gaza in the 300 days since that ceasefire — an average of one a day. On 18 and 19 August, the UN reported at least 17 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks. On 24 August, six days before the Accra screening, it warned that civilians in Gaza “continue to pay the price.”
And yet we are invited to the cinema. We should decline.
Not because cinema is evil. Not because Israeli artists have no right to make films. And not because Jewish people bear responsibility for the conduct of the Israeli state — they do not.
We should decline because this is not artists meeting freely across borders. It is an Israeli Embassy-backed cultural initiative, staged while Palestinian civilians continue to pay with their lives.
We have heard this language before
The 30 August programme pairs the Israeli films The Milky Way and Matchmaking with Unfinished Ride and Smokes and Mirrors, student productions from the University of Media, Arts and Communication.
It is billed as a cultural exchange. Last year, the Embassy’s multi-day Israeli Film Festival at the same cinema was to “foster dialogue and mutual understanding.” The Embassy later declared it a success that had strengthened ties.
There is another account of September 2025.
Nearly 400 Ghanaian individuals and organisations joined calls for the festival’s cancellation — academics, artists, trade unionists, filmmakers, faith communities and civil-society groups.
Protesters gathered outside Silverbird. Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City publicly denied being a sponsor after its logo appeared on promotional material without authorisation, and demanded its removal. openDemocracy described a festival marred by protest, with a sponsor pulling out.
Dignitaries did attend — among them then Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin, alongside Israeli Ambassador Roey Gilad. But dignitaries do not manufacture popular legitimacy. A policymaker in a cinema seat is no substitute for a public that has made a different moral calculation.
The Insight reported this week that last year’s festival was poorly attended and marked by empty seats, and that the participation of Ghanaian film students drew controversy. That account should be distinguished from the Embassy’s own — but the contrast is the point: official diplomacy proclaims success; the public can tell another story. Perhaps that is why the project has returned in a markedly smaller form—not several days of screenings, but a “mini festival” of two films on a single day.
If the empty seats spoke last year, somebody was listening. Ghanaians should make them speak again.
The record stated precisely
On 16 September 2025 — the very day last year’s festival opened — the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed and were continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
It found reasonable grounds that four of the five underlying acts listed in the Genocide Convention had been committed: killing members of the protected group; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction; and imposing measures intended to prevent births.
Israel categorically rejected those findings, called the Commission biased, and maintained that its objective was defeating Hamas after the attacks of 7 October 2023 while minimisingcivilian harm. That position should be recorded accurately. So should this: the International Court of Justice has not issued a final merits judgment declaring Israel responsible for genocide in the case brought by South Africa; it has issued binding provisional measures while proceedings continue.
These distinctions matter, because the case against normalisation needs no exaggeration. The documented reality is grave enough.
“But these are only films” Art builds bridges, we will be told. Young Ghanaian filmmakers need exposure. Dialogue beats isolation. In ordinary circumstances, these are respectable propositions.
But an embassy-organised cultural event is not neutral by definition. Governments fund festivals, exhibitions and exchanges precisely because culture shapes how a country is seen abroad. The Israeli Embassy in Accra itself states that its work includes strengthening government-to-government, business-to-business and people-to-people relations. There is no mystery here. It is called soft power.
If governments may use culture to build goodwill, citizens may equally say: not with our participation, and not while Palestinian children are still dying. The cinema became political the moment state diplomacy entered the theatre. The only question left is whether Ghanaian audiences will respond.
Why an empty seat matters
Everyone who walks into that auditorium becomes more than a viewer. They become part of the attendance figure, part of the photograph, part of the evidence later presented as successful Ghana–Israel cultural engagement — another body in a chair, another line in a diplomatic report saying the controversy of 2025 has been overcome.
An empty seat cannot be photographed smiling. It cannot applaud. It cannot be counted as public enthusiasm. It can only say: we have not forgotten Gaza.
Silverbird should hear this too. A commercial venue may consider itself neutral, but neutrality in business is not the absence of ethical choice — companies decide every day whom to associate with. Audiences have a choice of their own: not to buy the ticket, not to accept the free invitation, not to lend their presence.
Ghanaian film students, meanwhile, should face no abuse. Young filmmakers want exposure and training, and they deserve them. But Ghanaian talent should never serve as local decoration for another state’s diplomatic reputation.
Our universities and government should be creating far more international opportunities that do not place students in the middle of a controversy over occupation and war.
What Africa already knows
This is the country from which KwameNkrumah declared that our independence was meaningless unless linked with the total liberation of Africa — because freedom cannot be defended only when the oppressed resemble us or live beside us.
And Africa knows what normalisation means. Colonialism did not arrive only with rifles; apartheid did not survive only through police stations. Systems of domination seek respectability — the reception, the investment forum, the cultural exchange — until oppression becomes a disagreement to be discussed politely while business continues.
That is why cultural isolation mattered so much against apartheid South Africa, and why Palestine now asks the African conscience a painfully familiar question: when injustice is normalised, which side will you stand on?
Peacefully
Rejecting this festival is not rejecting Jewish people. Antisemitism is hatred and must be rejected. Harassing ordinary Israelis is wrong. Threatening filmmakers is wrong. Violence against festival-goers is wrong. Our disagreement is with the policies and actions of a state, its military institutions, and the diplomatic machinery working to improve its image abroad while accountability remains unresolved. That distinction must be defended fiercely.
So: no stones. No threats. No intimidation. No hatred. Just conscience.
Sometimes resistance means marching through the streets. Sometimes it means speaking when silence is more convenient. And sometimes it is as simple as refusing to occupy the seat prepared for you. Nobody is asking Ghanaians for heroism on 30 August — only to decide whether our leisure should become somebody else’s legitimacy.
Ghana welcomes art, dialogue and genuine friendship between peoples. But friendship cannot require silence about the suffering of another people. There may come a day when Israeli and Palestinian artists and Ghanaian filmmakers gather in a cinema under a banner of just peace, equality and accountability. That day will be worth celebrating. Normalisation is not a substitute for justice.
So the question on 30 August is not whether The Milky Way or Matchmaking is worth watching. It is whether Ghana will help create the impression that everything is normal. For the people of Gaza, it is not.
Ghanaians knew what to do in 2025. We should know what to do again.
Do not attend. Let the empty seats speak — for the Palestinian child who will never again enter a classroom, for the families still living among ruins, and for the proposition that human life is worth more than diplomatic image-building.
By Abdulhaq Ibrahim