A rumble is brewing between Hollywood’s top liberals. A few weeks back, a petition did the rounds objecting to the Toronto Film Festival’s decision to include a season highlighting movies from Tel Aviv.

Distinguished figures such as Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Klein, David Byrne and, crucially, Jane Fonda got out their Biros and registered their support for a boycott. Then Samuel Maoz’s

Lebanon

, an Israeli film concerning the 1982 invasion of that country, won the top prize at Venice and the coalition began to unravel.

“The point of a film like mine is to open a dialogue, to get people talking to each other about important issues,” Maoz said. “Maybe I wouldn’t have won if Jane Fonda was on the jury, but she wasn’t.”

Fonda swallowed hard, apologised and declared that she had signed the document “without reading it carefully enough, without asking myself if some of the wording wouldn’t exacerbate the situation rather than bring about constructive dialogue.” Interesting stuff.

dclarke@irishtimes.com