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The creator of the movie about Arthur Finkelstein made him a discount but solved the great mystery surrounding him

The rare materials presented in the docu "The Consultant", which interprets the life story, methods and secrets of the strategic consultant Arthur Finkelstein, give the film an extraordinary plot richness.

The film's approach to its friends also dispels its mystery.

However, there is a feeling that the director did not delve into the negative consequences of his actions

His dew

12/09/2022

Monday, September 12, 2022, 08:14 Updated: 08:39

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In the video: Lieberman accuses Netanyahu that his methods are exactly like the methods of Goebbels and Stalin (Photo: Roni Knafo)

Arthur with Netanyahu and Sarah (Photo: Amos Ben Gershom, PM)

A few hours before the broadcast of the film "The Counselor" about the life of Arthur Finkelstein last night on HOT8, Israeli politics did a free promo for him, and gave a purposeful presentation of his legacy and how topical it is.

Avigdor Lieberman caused the daily campaign storm with an unprecedented attack on Benjamin Netanyahu, whose propaganda methods he compared to those of Stalin and Goebbels.

"To make the harshest and most absurd accusations and repeat it a million times until people get used to the same absurdity," Lieberman said, referring to the plots of the former policeman, Yossi Kamisa, who claims that 20 years ago he ordered the assassination of a police superintendent from him.

Lieberman accurately described the working methods of Finkelstein, who is considered one of the most influential strategic consultants in contemporary politics.

In all corners of the world, from the USA to Israel to Eastern Europe, his name became known due to personal and negative campaigns based on blackening and slandering the opponent in front of him. While he laments the methods used against him, Lieberman's attack on Netanyahu also draws directly from Finkelstein's instructions. The entire political existence of Lieberman is based on his political vice, which holds that every campaign needs an enemy to defeat and arouse the feelings of the defeated: they met for the first time in 1996, in the election campaign that brought Netanyahu to power, and later cooperated in Israel, our home, with the slogan "without loyalty, there is no citizenship" that brought him to the peak of his political power and 15 mandates in the 2009 elections. Lieberman started with hatred of Arabs, then focused on the ultra-Orthodox, and in recent years he has carried on hatred of Netanyahu. Last week, he called him "the scum of the human race", yesterday he sailed to the realms of Nazism,

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The king of campaigns.

Finkelstein (photo: private archive)

All of them were the sons of Finkelstein, whose life story, methods and secrets are now documented in Ado Zuckerman's docu which is currently being screened on HOT8.

He is considered the king of modern campaigns and a master of public opinion, and Israeli and American politics are full of politicians and advisers who were his students and claim to be his successors, some of whom are interviewed about him and in the film.

Finkelstein, as his colleague Amit Segal eulogized him upon his death in 2017, "turned the science of campaigns in Israel from an art to a science": he was the first to use sophisticated demographic analyzes and segmentations and went down to tribal and ethnic resolutions to identify potential groups and motivate voters, and to shape and ignite emotions that decide voting at the ballot box, He focused them on fear and hatred.

This is how he won over dozens of Republican campaigns in the US, headed by Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and was the most senior American campaigner to land in our tiny country in the mid-1990s, when he was one of the decisive players in Netanyahu's first victory. Then he also first conceived the identity and tribal distinction between Jews and Israeli, which forms the basis of Netanyahu's strategy to this day. Watching the film provides a guide to contemporary Israeli politics and even the first and second Israel of today; what began with "Pers will divide Jerusalem" and "Netanyahu is good for the Jews" developed over the years into "Us or Them" " and "The Arabs are flocking", and today connects Yair Lapid with Ayman Odeh and Ahmed Tibi "Supporters of Terror". Finkelstein was the first to connect the external enemy with an internal political opponent and memorize it in short political videos.

great master

Finkelstein (photo: private archive)

Unlike the strategic consultants of our time, who wash the morning shows and the commentators' chairs, Finkelstein was old school who hated cameras and hated being interviewed.

It grew and flourished in the period before the iPhone and the Story, so for years it remained hidden from view and enjoyed an aura shrouded in mystery.

"I'm the screenwriter or the director, not the actor. I think it's absurd that consultants become as important and revered as the candidates they run," he said in a rare interview he gave in 1996.

The filmmaker, Ado Zuckerman, worked with him in those years as a producer and director of commercials, and after his death, his heirs and family members gave him the right and access to his private archive.

A treasure trove of thousands of documents and records and above all thousands of rare home videos allowed him to reveal and commemorate the real Finkelstein, and what he tried to hide for years.

The film brings to light the contradictions in the life of Finkelstein, who led a 51-year relationship with Donald Kirilli, which began at a time when homosexual relationships were outside the norm and prohibited in the United States by law. While he was promoting dozens of Christian and conservative Republican candidates in Washington, some of them even downright homophobic, Wag 'Nada who opposes and fights for LGBT rights, they lived underground in a mansion in Massachusetts, where they started a family with the head of the household and her daughter, and were one of the first couples to give birth to a child with a surrogate mother.

Finkelstein managed to keep the work out until politics shattered his double life in 1996, when an investigative reporter brought him out of the closet and pointed out the hypocrisy between his work and lifestyle.

He blamed the strategists of the Democratic Party and Clinton until his last day.

Yair Lapid's contemporary American reviewer, Mark Melman, is marked in the film as the one who took care of the first paparazzi photo that exposed him.

Promo.

Lieberman (Photo: Roni Knafo)

Zuckerman's rare materials, some of which Finkelstein shot himself, give the film an extraordinary narrative and visual richness, and his approach to friends and associates dispels the mystery he built all his life.

The love story between him and Kiraili and the special family life they established warms the heart, and the film manages to deal with the conflict and irony that separated his professional work and lifestyles.

At the beginning of the film, the tension between those who see Finkelstein as "the genius of political propaganda in the modern era and those who called him a poison dealer and fascist" is presented as a mystery, but at the end, there is no doubt which side Zuckerman himself is on, and one wonders if he also paid a certain price for the close approach.

He celebrates the genius and complexity of his former colleague, but does not deal with the same seriousness with the negative consequences of the legacy he shaped, of constantly searching for internal enemies to energize the base with.

"The Counselor" includes an impressive gallery of interviewees from Israel and abroad, family members, politicians, friends and colleagues, but not a single one voices the side that was harmed or destroyed as a result of his demonization. Only Tzipi Livni briefly refers to the fact that political polarization has led to the proliferation of hatred The film reviews Finkelstein's professional work in Israel and the USA, and only at the end refers to his work in Eastern Europe, and especially in Hungary.

Finkelstein and his partner George Birnbaum, one of the main interviewees in the film, were among the architects of the victory of Viktor Orban, the man of the extreme right.

Two Jews were the thinkers of the strategy to preserve his rule, which was based on a worldwide anti-Semitic conspiracy against George Soros, which one of them, Yair Netanyahu, also likes.

Soros' name is not mentioned in the film at all.

Finkelstein himself admitted late in life that he may have changed the world for the worse, but Zuckerman chose not to include this archival footage in the film.

In an interview with Zion Nanos on News 12 he said that he "

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