The Idea of Israel (9 page)

Nevertheless, the narrative became an intricate sequence of interdependent elements. Thus, while the
Yishuv
(the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine) faced annihilation from a barbaric Arab world, as a hostile British Empire and an indifferent international community looked on, it had no time to bother with the indigenous population. According to this narrative, these native people became refugees because their own leaders, and those of the Arab League, told them to leave, paving the way for an all-Arab invasion. Only then could they return to the liberated Palestine. Into this collective remembrance were interwoven the individual recollections of Jewish leaders and city dwellers who urged their fellow inhabitants – their Arab neighbours – not to leave and who, alas, failed in convincing them not to do so.
¹⁴

The story culminates in the image of a moral war, one that produced the most famous Israeli oxymoron: the ‘purity of arms’. This was a war against all odds, fought against the worst of enemies, and won while the army adhered to the highest precepts of moral conduct on and off the battlefield. The ‘pure arms’ can only be Jewish, are fired only in defence, and do not permanently scar the warrior; on the contrary, they make the warrior a far better human being. Films, such as those produced in Israel until the 1980s, are adept at conveying these sensations in a highly explicit way.

A Children’s Horror Film: 1948 in the Cinema

The Cinema Album
, edited by David Greenberg in the late 1960s, was an early attempt to summarise the history of Israeli cinema. Greenberg declared that until 1967, all the feature films on the 1948 war were produced by foreigners who failed

to comprehend the full meaning of this glorious period, but nonetheless helped to publicise it globally. This topic still awaits an Israeli director who will illuminate it from a novel vantage point; one which caters to the aspirations of the Israeli filmgoer.
¹⁵

Although, according to Greenberg, the average Israeli filmgoer sought more realistic films and was not content with the beautification of the war, it is hard to find evidence for this. The local film industry continued to depict the war, whether in feature or documentary films, in heroic, idealistic terms, much the same way as did the foreign producers.

More to the point is the work of Nurith Gertz on this period. In various articles and in the only book of hers that appeared in English,
Hirbet Hiza’a and the Morning After
, she proposed that in the 1960s, the Israeli cinema was still a nationalist, Zionist and heroic medium, which located the troops and their adventures at the centre of cinematic production.
¹⁶
Cinema was treated as a means for national propaganda; in fact, the officials appointed by the state to supervise
and encourage local cinematic production stipulated that their offices would assist ‘educational and constructive films which would reflect the Israeli mentality’.
¹⁷

Films of that period, as Ella Shohat has commented, focused on mythical Israeli heroes, all of them Sabras (Jews born in Palestine), kibbutzniks and soldiers. Many of these films used the Arab–Israeli conflict as the background for a story of one Israeli, or a group of Israelis, fighting a large number of Arabs, epitomising the struggle of Israel against the Arab world. Among such films were
Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer
(1955),
What a Gang
(1963), and
Five Days in Sinai
(1969), all of which related a personal story of heroism in the face of Arab barbarism and aggression. Quite often the Zionist warriors in these films ended up dead, and quite a few of the films end with a famous Israeli mantra from 1948 that was integrated into every speech given ever since by politicians on Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance for fallen soldiers: ‘In their death they gave us our life’.

Until the 1980s, nearly every film conformed to Zionist ideological guidance. The cinema reconstructed and maintained the mythology of the war and in particular left untouched the stereotypically negative image of the Arab. Because of the visual dimension of cinema, on the one hand, and the commercial demands of the industry on the other, the engagement with the Arab was more pointed and extensive than in any other medium (perhaps apart from children’s literature).

Actual Arabs rarely appear in these films; when they do, we know nothing about them – they are anonymous. Thus, although the hit film
He Walked Through the Fields
(1967) deals with the 1948 war, not one battle scene appears in it. In
Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer
, the Arabs are unseen but continually appear in the film’s narrative as the hidden threat. The Druze, Israel’s allies in that war, are fully visible (played by Jewish actors), as are the Jews themselves.

One of the leading myths was that the Jewish community faced an existential danger on the eve of the 1948 war. This is the theme of
Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer
. The film’s opening scene shows a strategic map of Israel, accompanied by a narration explaining the movement of the forces during the conflict. The arrows charted on the map present an alarming picture of an all-Arab assault on the Jewish
community, and depict the entire country as a besieged bastion.
¹⁸
The film was a pseudo-documentary, fully staged – a docudrama. This same depiction would later appear in the popular Israeli Carta atlases and in the current edition of Martin Gilbert’s
Atlas of the Arab–Israeli Conflict
.
¹⁹

Cinema added its own dimension to the myth of annihilation and associated the Nazi ideology of human extermination with Arab intentions in 1948, as can be seen in films such as
Hill 24
,
They Were Ten
(1960), and of course
Exodus
(1960). An especially blunt version is to be found in the feature film
Amud Ha’Esh
(Pillar of Fire, 1959); not to be confused with a television series discussed later on with a similar name. It is the story of a small southern kibbutz locked in a desperate fight against Egyptian tanks.
²⁰
The American Jewish director Larry Frisch staged the film as a classical western, where the cowboys have to fight the savage Indians, who do not appear in the film but are implicitly present as targets whenever the brave Zionist soldiers shoot someone in the dark. In one scene, there are obscure images in the distance that seem to be dangerous Arabs.
²¹

Some of the films directly associated the Palestinian or Arab threat with that of the Nazis. In a joint Italian–Israeli co-production,
Judith
(1966), Sophia Loren plays the wife of an ex-SS officer who was smuggled to Israel by the Hagana so that she could identify her husband, who was now helping the Arabs in the 1948 war. The same association appears in the film
Exodus
, adapted from Leon Uris’s famous novel, in which a sadistic Nazi expert orchestrates murderous Arab assaults on the Jewish community. Finally, in
Hill 24
, a humane Israeli soldier helps a badly wounded Egyptian soldier who turns out to be a German-speaking Nazi who tries to kill him at the first opportunity – although the Israeli soldier does not then kill the Nazi but merely defends himself.

Amud Ha’Esh
, a TV documentary series directed by Yigal Lusin for the first, and that time the only, Israeli TV channel in 1981, gives the viewer a good sense of why the Israelis call the 1948 war the War of Independence. That year is described as the culmination of an anti-colonialist struggle against the evil British Empire. The British were defeated and so, according to this narration, left
Palestine because they could not withstand the Jewish resistance against them. Meanwhile, the professional historiography indicated that the British decision to withdraw from Palestine arose from the overall and inevitable global collapse of the British Empire. This wider context informed the financial and regional strategic decisions that led to the end of British rule in Palestine.
²²

The lengthiest feature film on 1948 during those years was
He Walked Through the Fields
, based on a novel by Moshe Shamir. It presents the 1948 war almost exclusively as a war against the British; the Arabs are hardly there.
²³
The film tells the story of Uri (played by Moshe Dayan’s son, Asaf Dayan) – a fighter in the Palmach, the storm-troopers of the Hagana – and his love for an immigrant girl. He is a kibbutznik, the first child born in Palestine in the fictional kibbutz. Uri deserts his girlfriend in order to receive training under the nose of, and for the purpose of attacking, the British troops in Palestine. During training, Uri dies. This film is a good example of cinema being able to convey marginalisation and exclusion in a far more powerful way than is offered by the cool heads of historiography; primarily because of cinema’s potent visuality.

Dan and Sa’adia:
The Ultimate Mythology

Intertwined with the myth of annihilation was the myth of the ‘few against many’, which the popular film
Dan and Sa’adia
illustrates better than any other. The full name of the film was
Dan Quihote V’Sa’adia Pansa
the obvious inferences of which have been aptly analysed by Ella Shohat. Here I am concerned with treating it as a cinematic representation of the classical historical version of the 1948 war.
²⁴

The film engages with all the foundational mythologies of the war and represents them through a fictional tale of individual Jewish heroism on the day of Israel’s independence. The film was produced in 1956 and was directed by Nathan Axelrod, one of Israel’s leading cinematic figures in the early years of statehood. His later documentary films were highly regarded, the best known of which was
Etz o Palestine
(
The True Story of Palestine
, 1962), named after the images found on the two sides of a Mandatory Palestine coin. Before the invention of modern cinematic appetisers, that film, which was the basis for the newsreel
The Carmel Dairies
, preceded every feature film.
²⁵

Israeli academics generally refer to
Dan and Sa’adia
, Axelrod’s first feature film, as a pioneering movie that broke away from Zionist pathos, and they characterise it as a fairly realistic and even cynical film about the ideology and mythology of the state. But viewed from a critical perspective, it seems deeply entrenched within the Zionist historical narrative.

The same can be said of the feature film
Waltz with Bashir
(2008) and the documentary
The Gatekeepers
(2012, nominated for an Oscar in 2013). Israeli Zionist critics would hail both as bold and courageous cinematic revisitings of the 1982 war on Lebanon, in the case of the former, and the evil of the occupation of Palestinian areas in the latter. In fact, it is possible to see these works as attempts to have one’s cake (support and participate in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon or the occupation) and eat it too (display public remorse and regret until the next invasion or while the occupation continues).
²⁶

Dan and Sa’adia
tells the story of Dan, an Ashkenazi boy who is an avid reader of detective stories and lives in an imagined world of adventure and excitement, and Sa’adia, a Yemeni boy who shines shoes and is Dan’s friend and partner in his detective games. Dan is considered a troublemaker and is therefore sent to boarding school, where most of the film’s scenes take place. Sa’adia sneaks into the car that takes Dan away, and stays with him. All this happens just a few days after the State of Israel was declared on 15 May 1948 and war broke out. The head boys in the boarding school are busy collecting weapons, hiding them from watchful British eyes, and training for the real fighting. Dan and Sa’adia continue their detective games, steal a crate full of hand grenades (not knowing the its contents), and hide the crate as pirates’ treasure.

Fear of an Arab attack leads to the children being evicted from the boarding school, leaving behind the two young companions, the teachers, and the military troops. The teachers worry that the
ammunition they have accumulated before the war will not be enough to repel the attack. To their rescue come Dan and Saadia, who avoided the eviction and now understand that the treasure they hid could save the
Yishuv
. When they go to the orchard where they hid the crate, they happen to eavesdrop on a meeting among Arabs who are contemplating a night attack on the Jews (they are able to follow the conversation, because Sa’adia the Yemeni knows Arabic). Using the hand grenades, the children prepare a deadly trap that saves their boarding school from destruction.

Fear of annihilation and the almost miraculous acts that avoid it are recurring motifs in this film. Fear and pride are conveyed through a microhistorical focus on the conflict as a reflection of the macrohistorical picture. The boarding school is ‘surrounded by Arabs’ and is saved by the valour of the two boys – one Ashkenazi and the other Mizrachi – signifying another foundational myth, the unity of Jewish exiles from all over the world.

These two new Jewish heroes face Arab danger without for a moment losing their humanity. Although the peril of extinction would normally raise suspicions against anybody who is an Arab, the two schoolboys, unlike all other teenagers in the world, resist this tendency. The viewers see this when, in Dan’s imagination, an innocent Arab woman momentarily turns into an Arab wearing a keffiyeh and holding a gun. Arab violence is responsible for the demonisation in young Dan’s mind, which in turn can explain the collateral damage sometimes meted out to the Arabs by the Zionists. But the woman soon transforms back into the innocent person she is. Apart from this scene, however, the Arabs are shown as an incited mob, complete with keffiyehs and guns – in other words, the potential terrorists portrayed in scholarly works up to the 1980s.