The Idea of Israel (34 page)

The Israeli film industry travelled in a somewhat similar trajectory to that of the theatre. But when it took a critical stance, it went further than any other medium in presenting fundamental challenges to the Zionist historical narrative and discourse. Moreover, any change in approach to reality carried far more significance in cinema than in other forms of media. Film was one of the most popular pastimes in Israel, especially when one considers that the country already had an important and expanding cable system that broadcast commercial films on television about a year after they were shown in movie houses.

The pioneering works of this kind were produced in a highly unlikely place: the studios of Israeli national television. It is possible that this took place because directors who worked for the national television service in the 1970s, unlike their colleagues in the commercial or private film industry, tended to be given funding and not be constrained by ratings (there was only one channel) or commercial consideration. As a result, if they had a radical idea, they could at least make an attempt to translate it into a film – unless they were stopped by politicians, which did happen every now and then. Moreover, as long as there was only one state-owned television
channel, considerable effort was invested in creating local drama, much of which was highly politicised.

Levy’s
Hirbet Hiza
was screened in 1976 on the national television channel, Channel 1, and not in the movie houses. In those days, television programming was supervised by a council of politicians, and when the film was prescreened, they banned it. In an unprecedented reaction, technicians and journalists in support of freedom of speech managed to darken the TV screen at the time that had originally been scheduled for the screening of the now-banned film. A public and legal campaign enabled its brief reappearance.

Subsequently, still using the national television channel, Ram Levy became one of the more prolific contributors to a genre of docudrama that heralded a wave of post-Zionist productions in the 1990s. It began with
Ani Ahmad
(I Am Ahmad), produced in 1966 before television existed which criticised the state’s treatment of Israeli Palestinians, and continued with
Bread
(1986), a powerful exposure of Mizrachi life in Israel’s development towns.

Outside the television channels, the film industry followed the nationalist agenda until the early 1970s more closely than any other cultural form except for children’s books. Arabs were depicted on the screen as stereotypical figures – evil, cruel, stupid, pathetic – who end up yielding to the superior Israeli hero. As mentioned above, a not uncommon plot involved Israeli schoolchildren single-handedly capturing armed Arab terrorists or invaders. In what I have been calling the post-Zionist cinema, that approach was radically transformed into a more complicated and humane representation of the Palestinians, in particular those who resisted Israeli aggression and occupation.

The First Lebanon War of 1982 catalysed local cinema’s move in this new direction. Israeli film-makers began to give voice to underprivileged individuals and groups within Israel, though the transformation was of the ‘diet-Zionist’ variety. None of the films deviated from the Zionist metanarrative or from the major chapters in the mythical historiography taught in the schools; rather, they limited themselves to Israel’s post-1967 Palestinian dilemma. Even so, and despite the fact that the film-makers preferred to tell the story
of the conflict through romance, this was an impressive development if compared with the 1960s. On screen, the Palestinians became real human beings and, at times, even heroes.

Diet Zionism was replaced for a while during the 1990s with a bolder cinematic effort to engage directly with the essence of Zionism. In fact, film became the vanguard in the local Jewish attempt to reassess Zionism. The relative political openness of the early years after the signing of the Oslo Accords meant that critique and the representation of voices of the deprived could also sell well. Selling is the key factor for cinema, as it is for culture in general, and for a short while it transpired that a film with a radical message could be relatively profitable.

Compared with the academics, the film-makers appeared to be more open about their own ethnic, national, or gender agendas, which they discussed in interviews and seminars that followed film screenings as well as in dialogue written into the scripts. Films for the first time represented the world of Israel’s Arab Jews, whose socio-economic status had only slightly improved since 1948. The films portrayed their growing frustration with the prospering Ashkenazi upper classes, their geographical and social marginality in the development towns and peripheral slums, their limited access to financial resources, and their distorted image in the national narrative. Some of the film-makers who portrayed Mizrachi life also dealt with the Palestinians. Ram Levy, for example, whose above-mentioned films
Hirbet Hiza
and
Ani Ahmad
addressed the Palestinians’ situation, dealt with the development towns in
Lehem
(Bread), a tale of the helplessness and hopelessness of a North African Jewish family pushed to the geographical and social margins of Israeli Jewish society with very little chance of extracting themselves from the dismal reality.

Jad (Yehuda) Ne’eman, a film-maker and scholar who was a powerful voice in the 1990s, commented that those new films conveyed through their texts and subtexts a radical criticism of Zionism.
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Thus far, both fictional and documentary exposure of the abuses of Zionism or the problematic involved in the idea of Israel had had only limited impact on the society. The main reason had to do with the socio-economic background of the film-makers. For all its
radicalism, there was still an Ashkenazi predominance in this new wave cinema: most of the films that could be classified as having a non- or even anti-Zionist stance depict the Arab–Jewish relationship in Israel from the perspective of yuppies in Tel Aviv. In the 1980s, Ashkenazi film-makers still dominated the film industry, and they were more interested in the conflict with the Palestinians than in the plight of the
Mizrachim
. A radical, leftist agenda was defined by one’s position on the Arab–Israeli conflict; not on social issues. Thus, because their agenda was political rather than social, these films could appeal to people living in relative comfort, who could afford to identify with the Other. They were, of course, accepted warmly by Israel’s Palesinians, and in that sense strengthened Arab–Jewish cooperation, but mass audiences in the more deprived areas may have received them differently.

Nonetheless, the fact that some of the films that depicted the Israeli as occupier and coloniser and the Palestinian as victim were shown for several weeks was an indication that they were intriguing enough to create empathy, or at least interest. Indeed, it does seem that the critique genre, whether hidden or fairly overt, was quite popular for a while. This popularity was the result of the curious fusion of an aggressively free-market political economy with the rise of multiculturalism in Israeli society. The continued capitalisation of the Israeli economy also explains the success of, and even the drive for, a more critical response to the local cultural market, not just as a fulfilment of an ideological agenda. As Pierre Bourdieu commented so aptly, both academic and cultural products represent not only political and social transformations but also economic products that need to be marketed.
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This is clearer in the case of the cinema than in that of academia.

In some instances, however, commercial considerations were secondary. What such film-makers wished to do was to connect, or reconnect, to the world they came from – and this was particularly true of Mizrachi and Palestinian film-makers. The Mizrachi film-makers were producing their more critical work at a time when the Mizrachi Jews’ overall economic, judicial and political conditions had improved. But improvement was not enough, at least in the eyes
of these artists. They, like other members of their community, were in fact frustrated at the persistent social and economic polarisation within Jewish society in Israel and in particular with the marginal position of their own community in the national myth and narrative.

Yet despite these impressive forays into other perspectives, the treatment of the Other in films and plays was inhibited by the projection of an Israeli image onto the Palestinian. It was as if the other side could be understood only if its heroes acted like Israelis or subscribed to an Israeli concept of reality. For instance, in the 1986 film
Avanti Popolo
, an Egyptian soldier, speaking in a Palestinian dialect (which Israeli Jewish viewers would not notice), conveys the message of human values common to both sides by quoting Shakespeare’s Shylock. An Anglophile Egyptian common soldier must have been a very rare sight on the Sinai battlefield and yet he was invented to provoke sympathy from the Israeli audience.
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Some of the bravest attempts to show the world through the eyes of Zionism’s victims, as suggested by the late Edward Said, were woven into fictional or real tales of impossible love.
¹³
Romance and sex sell, and romance was the main sweetener for the new views offered to Israeli filmgoers. Most of these films were modelled on a Romeo-and-Juliet sort of plot: a Jewish woman falls in love with a Palestinian man against the wishes of their respective families and societies. In reality, this was and is an extremely rare occurrence – and one which indicates how exclusionary the project of Zionism was. More than a century of settlement did not produce any significant romantic, let alone familial, ties between the settlers and the native population. No other settler society has been that ‘pure’, apart from the whites in South Africa.

The eroticisation of the conflict generates a sensual identification with the heroes. As with Hollywood films about African Americans, so in the ‘enlightened’ Israeli film industry the ‘Arabs’ were exceptionally handsome or beautiful. The focus on sex and beauty permits what psychologists call displacement: instead of identifying with the cause of the general suffering inflicted on the other side, the viewer identifies with the broken heart of an attractive hero. Also worth considering with regard to cooperation, friendship, and even
romance across the divide is the interesting difference between the attitude of historians, especially in the new age of relativism and even postmodernism, and that of film-makers. While the historians may deduce an optimistic conclusion from such incidents in history, the cinema usually presents them through the lens of tragedy, as an indication of the unbridgeable abyss that separates the two sides and cannot be overcome. Thus, fiction is far more realistic in its depiction of relationships on the ground than the typical academic illusions about humanity and human beings.

Still, the films in which Jews apppeared as villains and Palestinians as heroes did seem to have an effect at the time. Switching conventional roles challenged the image of the Arab in the Zionist metanarrative. No academic work could reach such a broad audience or produce such a clear message. The best of this kind was the 1989 film
Esh Tzolevet
(Crossfire), which went beyond the subject of romance and presented, in a way never before seen in an Israeli feature film, a Palestinian perspective on the 1948 war. It warrants extensive mention here.
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Humanising the Nakba:
Esh Tzolevet
(Crossfire)

However progressive some of the films appearing in the post-Zionist decade were with respect to the occupation and the conflict, almost all of them lacked empathy towards Palestinian positions on the Nakba, in particular the sense of catastrophe and the right of return. What the more critical films did was to challenge the 1967 occupation, although it is true that the Arab, in a timeless sense, does become more humanised and appears, on several occasions, as the hero.

Most of these films lacked a historical dimension; they were located outside any well-charted chronological or geographical framework. The viewer never knew whether the locus was inside or outside the Green Line, or what time or year the events took place. Even so, they did present a Jewish occupier/colonialist and a native Arab/Other.

Crossfire
is one of the few post-Zionist feature films that, like the classic Zionist films, dealt directly with the 1948 war. Very few people in Israel have seen the film, either when it first appeared or afterwards, and its maker, Gidon Ganani, does not belong to the ranks of Israel’s hegemonic culture producers. Therefore it is not a good example of any salient trend or development. Yet it clearly shows the potential for an alternative representation of the idea of Israel.

The film is based on a true story: an impossible love affair between George Khouri, a Palestinian, and Miriam Seidman, a Jew. They meet accidently at a British checkpoint circa 1947. While searching Miriam’s belongings, the soldiers toss her basket on the ground, spilling its contents. George helps her collect her things and thus they become acquainted with each other. Miriam works in her mother’s restaurant in northern Tel Aviv, and George makes his way there on the pretext that he had to stop nearby because his car’s engine got overheated and he needed water. On his second visit, he is thrown out by Miriam’s brother, a member of the Hagana, and his mates. Miriam’s apology gives rise to another meeting and then another, always due to Miriam’s insistence and initiative. Although the meetings take place at intimate sites, such as the Andromeda Rock in Jaffa where they go for a night-time swim, they do not lead to a more intimate relationship between the two, because George does not take advantage of the many opportunities falling his way. As the overall situation deteriorates and tensions between the Palestinians and Jews increase, the meetings move to a British club. During one of those meetings, two Stern Gang terrorists enter and murder a British officer. Stern Gang members follow the couple on the suspicion that Miriam may be working with the enemy.