The outcome of Shamir’s investigation is complex, defying any easy ideological categorizations. Indeed, the director, who is responsible for the cinematography and has also provided the English narration (albeit with a clearly Israeli accent), does not conceal his political convictions. Shamir does not hesitate to comment directly on what his subjects say, and does so not only in the form of asides to the audience, but as direct challenges to their views and opinions. Shamir repeatedly gives up any pretense towards objectivity, and becomes an active participant in the debate created by his seemingly naïve questions. At the same time, Shamir avoids a summary judgment of his interviewees—a common pitfall of political filmmaking—a judgment that would have alienated his audience. On the contrary, he ultimately seems empathetic to those he interviews, irrespective of their opinions.

Shamir’s journey is, in fact, several separate journeys. The film begins with a visit to the editorial staff of Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s biggest daily. There, Noah Klieger, the journalist in charge of covering global anti-Semitism, and a Holocaust survivor himself, assures the director that every country—including western liberal democracies such as the US, Germany, France, the UK—is anti-Semitic to the core. Later in the movie, Shamir finds out from one of Klieger’s apprentices that whereas a rise in anti-Semitism is considered newsworthy, this is not the case for a decline; hence the paper throws into relief news items that would reinforce one’s impression that the former is the case, and suppresses items that would contravene it. Be that as it may, Shamir finds out that in its coverage of anti-Semitism, the paper relies not on its own reporters, but on data provided by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Next, Shamir travels to the New York offices of the ADL, where Abe Foxman has granted him unprecedented access to its operation, and even allowed him to join himself and members of the League in a tour of Europe and Israel. Shamir looks for an anti-Semitic incident that he could follow and explore in full as a centerpiece for his film. Notwithstanding the officers’ alarm in the face of what they portray as a significant increase in anti-Jewish incidents, they are unable to provide Shamir with a single incident to explore. Because, as the Israeli director quickly finds out, the vast majority of incidents registered come down to overhearing racial slurs, or complaints about being denied days off on Jewish holidays.

Finally, Shamir discovers a noteworthy incident, in which African-Americans have stoned a Jewish school bus. A local Jewish journalist assures him that Jews in the neighborhood do suffer from the anti-Semitism of their African-American neighbors. A street interview with three African-American residents who readily quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion appears to confirm this. But to Shamir’s great surprise, he also encounters Rabi Hecht, one of Abe Foxman’s critics. Hecht warns of viewing every incident in which Jews and African-Americans are involved as racially motivated and moves to harshly denounce the work of the ADL as counter-productive. One shouldn’t trust, he says, someone who makes a living out of anti-Semitism to provide an impartial account of the phenomenon.

Indeed, as though in agreement with Hecht, Shamir becomes ill at ease when members of Foxman’s coterie tell him that they became active in the organization  as a way to consolidate their own Jewish identity. The director finds even more troubling their affirmation that they look at Israel as their insurance policy, in case Jews become unwelcome in the US. Are they acting in Israel’s best interests, Shamir asks, or in their own? Yet, as he follows Abe Foxman in his meetings with politicians and heads of states around the world, it becomes clear that notwithstanding their difference of opinions, Yoav Shamir cannot stop himself from believing in Foxman’s sincerity, and admiring his inexhaustible energy in pursuing what he believes to be best for world Jewry.
Shamir’s Foxman seems quite sympathetic in comparison with the filmmaker’s troubled  portrait of one of Foxman’s nemeses, Norman Finkelstein. Shamir travels to Minnesota and interviews him both prior to and following his dismissal from DePaul University. One would have assumed that Finkelstein’s claims that the State of Israel and its American stand ins, such as the ADL, make cynical use of the Holocaust to justify their immoral politics vis-à-vis Palestinians would meet with approval. Yet, notwithstanding the merits of Finkelstein’s claims (Shamir does not assess their merit) he emerges as a troubled figure, obsessed and haunted in ways upon which, at least in the film, he refuses to acknowledge. As Finkelstein takes leave of Shamir, he states "Heil Hitler." The director is baffled. Wouldn’t such a provocation undermine Finkelstein’s credibility? Finkelstein insists it is his absolute right to do so, particularly given the immorality of those he criticizes.

Yet, the most troubling journey Shamir takes in this film is not to the US, but to Auschwitz, with a group of Israeli high school students. 30,000 students take this trip each yearm. Shamir follows their preparations for the trip, and their tours of the camp. Two things become manifest through Shamir’s interviews with the students, and as his camera captures their interaction with their teachers and guides. First, the trip is not designed to yield a historical understanding of the Holocaust but, rather, to elicit an emotional reaction that would reinforce the students’ identification with the State of Israel. Such an emotional reaction is deemed the basis for their realizing that Israel is the only place where a Jew can live free of the fear of persecution. Second, in order to elicit such a reaction, the students are repeatedly forewarned that the local Poles are still anti-Semites. They are thus forbidden to interact with the locals, irrespective of circumstances.

The fear instilled in the young students reaches its climax in a very brief, yet disturbing scene. Three elderly Polish men address two Israeli female students. Whereas the students speak Hebrew and some English, the men only speak Polish. They proceed to ask the students where are they from, and whether they are indeed Israelis. Not understanding Polish, the two students infer that the men are speaking ill of Israel, and say that the two are bitches. The girls quickly step away. Later, they repeatedly recount the story of their encounter with this example of local anti-Semitism.

The reaction of the students, Shamir suggests, is not simply the product of adolescent silliness. Notwithstanding the best intentions of their trip’s organizers and the worthiness of their educational purposes, the incident is a welcome one. Logically, none of the accompanying adults bothers to dispel the students’ misperceptions. What, then, is the outcome of our obsession with the Holocaust, Shamir ultimately asks. Even if we do not accept Uri Avnery’s assertion in Defamation that anti-Semitism does not exist, this does not exempt us from questioning how it effects  our view of the world, and, most importantly, the way we raise our children. For this reason, we should endeavor to emulate Yoav Shamir’s example, by asking these very same questions.

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The best example is  Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor’s brand new A Matter of Size. The success of Tadmor’s previous film, 2007’s Strangers (which he co-directed with Guy Nattiv) created tremendous expectations for his next project. Such hopes were boosted by the fact that A Matter of Size was selected, among others, for the Tribeca Film Festival and as the opener of this year’s Jerusalem Film Festival. Unfortunately, such high profile festival endorsements have done the film a disservice.

Maymon and Tadmor’s film weaves two familiar comedic genres that are increasingly brought together in American films: martial arts, and cultural encounters between East and West. Set in contemporary blue collar Israel, the film centers around Herzl, a 340-pound 35-year-old chef who still lives with his mother. At the beginning of A Matter of Size, Herzl is dismissed from the local health club for gaining weight. At the same time, the cook quits his job at a fancy restaurant after being told he is not “representative enough” to serve at the bar, and placed in the kitchen. Herzl finds new employment as a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant, where his coworkers convince him that he would be a perfect sumo fighter, explaining that the owner of the restaurant was an important sumo referee back in Japan. Herzl now has a double mission: to convince his overweight friends to quit the health club and jointly establish a sumo club to celebrate their obesity, and to convince his boss to train the staff in the art of sumo combat.

The most successful aspect of A Matter of Size is its use of visual gags that build on the excessive weight of the film’s protagonists. Dressed in bright red loincloths, it is impossible to avoid noticing them on the main street of their working class town. Between their obesity, and the alien character of their clothing, they are, quite literally, exposed. The question is to what end, apart from the sheer spectacle of encountering corpulent Israelis in Japanese wrestling drag.
A Matter of Size does not ask what it means to be (physically) set apart and discriminated against by a society that places such a premium on weight. Nor does it adequately bring to the surface how this sense of apartness is related to the desire to shock, to celebrate one’s difference and frame it in such a deliberately exotic manner. Likewise, the film does not ask what is at stake in having Israelis stage such an encounter between the Orient and the Occident, and how this might say something about their self-perception, as aliens. If that doesn’t strike you as problematic, you’ll find Reshef Levi’s Lost Islands even more troubling. A box office hit in Israel in 2008, Lost Islands presents a stellar cast of some of the country’s best actors, including Oshri Cohen and Michael Moshonov (who won the Israeli Film Academy Award for his performance) in the lead roles, and Orly Silbersatz Banai and Shmil Ben Ari (who also won the Israeli Academy Award for his performance) as supporting cast. The film tells the story of the Levi family, residents of the upper middle class town of Kfar Sava in the early 1980s. The Levi family is anything but happy. The father is a case study in hipocrisy, advising the his five children of the importance of pursuing their dreams, all the while forcing his own upon them. The mother, equally dysfunctional, rules the Levy household with an iron fist, openly favoring one of their twin sons, Ofer, over his brother, Erez. High school seniors about to enter the army, the boys compete with and support each other simultaneously, as they pursue their first sexual encounters, paying an obligatory visit to a hooker, falling in love with the same girl at school. When the father has an accident and loses the use of his legs and, consequently, his job, the family’s troubled dynamics rise to the surface, threatening its very existence.

Ofer and Erez now have to consider their roles within the family as well as within society as a whole. Coupled with the political and military turmoil that Israeli underwent in the wake of the first Lebanon War, (which breaks out shortly after the twins enlist in the army), their adolescent bubble completely explodes. The course of the plot suggests that the film was intended to explore the uneasy, even tragic dimensions hidden beneath the glistering surface of a typical coming of age narrative, much along the lines of classic Hollywood films such as American Graffiti. Herein lies the film’s failure. For one thing, the repeated references to the social and political events in Israel during these years seem completely superficial. Indeed, this is not a film about how politics and world affairs intrude on private lives, irretrievably changing them, as so many Vietnam films narrate. Similarly, this is not a film about how individuals resist the intrusion of the outside world in an endeavor to protect  their private lives. Indeed, despite constant references, the role that politics plays in shaping the characters’ lives remains completely unexplained. Even the Lebanon War, which ostensibly plays a central role in the plot, is ultimately redundant. The impact it has on the characters could have been equally produced by any number of events.

More damning, however, is the fact that Lost Islands refuses to take seriously the guilt that haunts Erez throughout the second part of the film, in his relationship with both his father and his twin brother. In fact, it ultimately suggests that this could be easily alleviated. The resolution that the film ultimately provides – and which I will withhold for those who have not seen it yet – is completely unconvincing within the psychological and social-political contexts that Lost Islands sets for itself.  

Eran Merav’s film Zion and His Brother is arguably the most successful of all of these features, even though it is the least polished. Like Lost Islands, it follows a loaded relationship between two brothers. Yet, this time, the story takes place in a working–class suburb of Haifa, which recent Israeli films, most notoriously Nir Bergman’s 2002 Broken Wings, have turned into a privileged locus of class dramas in Israel.

Zion is a 14 year-old high school student who relies on his older brother Meir for physical and emotional support and protection in their rough neighborhood. However, Zion also constantly competes with him. Both Zion and Meir experience emotional turmoil when their divorced mother’s relationship with her current suitor seems to get ever more serious, and the suitor invites the mother and the children to move with him. Meir—an angry young man who cannot hold down a job—turns ever more violent. When that aggression is turned unchecked against one of Zion’s classmates, at Zion’s instigation, a tragedy ensues. Zion, haunted by guilt feelings, is now prompted to reevaluate the role his brother plays in his life.
The director makes the most of the economically depressed setting of his story and of the exposed, ugly concrete structures in which they live. Indeed, this urban setting becomes the fifth character in Merav’s chamber drama. Zion and His Brother likewise enjoys strong performances from Reuven Badalov as Zion and Ofer Hayun as Meir. Surprisingly, the film’s more experienced actors, Ronit Elkabetz (playing Zion’s mother) and Tzahi Grad, her suitor, are less convincing. Elkabetz in particular seems to rely on stock gestures she developed in previous roles as a suffering, emotionally volatile, poverty-stricken woman (To Take a Wife [2004] and Shiva [2008]) and brings little new to the character.
Merav’s film is far from perfect. It fails to fully explore the nature of the guilt feelings that are so crucial in shaping Zion’s relationship with his brother and, indeed, ultimately disappear from the plot. Be that as it may, Merav does not fall into the trap of easy resolution of the conflicts he so painfully portrays. In doing so, he remains true to his characters’ psychology. This is more than can be said about A Matter of Size and Lost Islands.

Click here to read the first installment of Shai Ginsburg’s coverage of the 2009 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

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Desert Brides

Ada Ushpiz’ 2008 documentary Desert Brides explores the life of Bedouins in Israel. Until a decade or so ago, Bedouins were present only on the margins of Israeli cinema, mostly as an emblem of the exotic, primitive Orient in which Jews sought to establish a modern European polity. The present interest of Israeli filmmakers in topics and communities that were traditionally marginalized brought attention to Bedouin communities. Among the films that deal with Bedouins in Israel one should count Dan Verete’s 2001 Yellow Asphalt and such documentaries as Uri Rosenwaks’ 2006 The Film Class, Oded Adomi Leshem’s 2007 Voices from El-Sayed, and Ebtisam Mara’ana’s 2007 Three Times Divorced.

Israeli films commonly explore Bedouin life from a double perspective. On the one hand, they point at the discrimination which Israeli Bedouins experience, not only in their interaction with State and local officials, but also in their interaction with private individuals. On the other, they draw attention to the oppressive character of Bedouin society. Conversely, these films throw into relief the endeavors of the state to uproot the Bedouin from their traditional grounds and settle them in permanent towns. The Israeli government further refused to recognize and provide services to 36 Bedouin villages, in which some 50% of the Bedouin’s in the south of Israel reside; this refusal translates into the abject poverty that dominates Bedouin life, whether in recognized or unrecognized villages. These films also explore the ways that Bedouin society deny what one would consider basic rights to some of its members, particularly to women.

Desert Brides largely focuses on three Bedouin women who are all part of polygamous marriages. While the annulment of a marriage is not prohibited among Bedouins, divorces are unusual and polygamy is still a common practice. About 30% of Bedouin women in the Negev desert live in polygamous marriages. Indeed, the film argues, if not already within such polygamous household, all Bedouin wives live in fear that their husband would “marry over them.” Ushpiz studies the ensuing anxiety and melancholy of her female protagonists. Be they first wives, second wives or the only wives, anxiety and melancholy becomes the core of their experience as Bedouin women.

Ushpiz begins the film with a wedding scene. A woman takes photos and directs a video camerawoman. The sound of music, laughter, screams of delight and the sight of the wedded couple and their joyful guests contrast with the listless, not to say dull expression on that woman’s face. Miriam El Kwader, a professional wedding photographer, supports her family and unemployed husband. Now her husband’s family pressures the reluctant husband to take a second wife.

The director returns to Miriam’s wedding photos and videos throughout the film. The magnificence and display of luxury of these weddings does not merely contrasts with the angst of the film’s protagonists, but also to the poverty in which some of them live. More than that, these weddings appear less like traditional Bedouin celebrations than wedding parties common elsewhere, in Europe, the US and Israel. Yet these similarities are misleading. A completely different fate awaits this newly wedded woman.

The film then returns to these photos and videos to introduce his two other protagonists.
Miriam Al-Nimer, recently divorced, is a successful young woman who runs the local Center for the Elderly. She had promised herself never to enter a polygamous marriage. At first, her marriage indeed seems happy, albeit filled with romance.  But as Desert Brides progresses, we discover that she is a second wife. Notwithstanding what assurances her husband gives her of his love, she constantly feels she has to compete with the first wife and her children for the time and attention of her husband. Ushpiz does not fail to interview the first wife as well, who feels betrayed after having welcomed Miriam into the family. Both women mirror each other.

Desert Brides’last protagonist is Aalya El-Abd. At twenty-seven, she feels she has to marry or be doomed to remain a spinster. As her partner courts her, he promises to divorce his second wife, but refuses to provide a time limit for that. On the day leading to the wedding, Aalya’s sisters warn her not to trust his promises. He will never divorce his first wife, they tell her. She must get used to the idea of being a second wife.

Most disturbing about the portraits of the these three women is the fact that they all believe themselves to be trapped. Despite their intelligence, education and familiarity with Israeli-Jewish society, in which polygamy is unacceptable as well as illegal, they are unable to imagine better lives for themselves. No thought of resistance or of change crosses their lips. In the end, they submit to what they perceive is their fate as Bedouin women.

While watching the film, though, I had one reservation, As capturing and nuanced a study of the life of women in a non-Western society as Desert Brides is, its introduction does it disservice. Preceding the first scene, frames of text dialogue link polygamous marriages in Bedouin communities to Israel’s handling of Bedouins. Each begats the other, or so it seems Yet, nothing in Ushpiz’ film actually explores that link. Nowhere does the director examine the ties between the experience of being uprooted and resettled, or of life in an unrecognized village, to the experience of her subjects. It is all too easy—even if not unjustified—to blame the Israeli state and its treatment of its non-Jewish citizens and residents for the social faults the latter suffer. It is much more difficult to expose and analyze the links between state policy and communities like the Bedouin in concrete, narrative terms. Simply invoking such idée reçue, without subjecting these same beliefs to critique, doesn’t explain such causal relations between the Israeli state and its Arab subjects. It is a pity that the otherwise intelligent and probing Desert Brides falls into this trap.

Lady Kul El-Arab

Ibtisam Mara’ana is one of growing number of, yet still all-too-few Israeli-Palestinian filmmakers who seek to transcend the ethnic-national boundaries of their “home” communities and appeal to the Israeli public in general. Her documentaries regularly explore the complex realities not only of the people she captures on film, but also of herself, as a someone with three identities: Israeli, Palestinian and female. As Mara’ana’s films suggest, in present-day Israel, reconciling the three proves to be not only difficult but unlikely.

Mara’ana’s films turn on the travails of women in one of Israel’s minority groups: Palestinian, Druze or Bedouin. Paradise Lost (2003), Badal (2005) and Three Times Divorced (2007) put into relief the endeavor of her female subjects to seize hold of the rights and opportunities offered (or at least nominally proclaimed) by the Israeli “liberal” state while, at the same time, fighting a double oppression: their legal and political oppression as members of a national minority by the very same “liberal” state, and their social oppression as women within traditionally patriarchal communities.

What allows the director to study this double oppression is her own position as an outsider to both Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian societies. As a member of the Palestinian minority, Mara’ana finds herself—despite her best efforts—outside the Jewish culture of the Israeli state. And as a feminist who decided to leave her Palestinian hometown for the big cultural center of Tel Aviv, she consciously places herself outside the Palestinian-Muslim patriarchal culture into which she was born. In her films, Mara’ana translates this “outside” position into narratives that aim to give voice to the distress of Palestinian (as well as Druze and Bedouin) communities within Israel, all the while criticizing the traditional patriarchal customs that still predominate in these communities. The center of gravity of Mara’ana’s latest film, Lady Kul El-Arab (2008) is somewhat different, as Mara’ana focuses more on a critique of traditional Arab patriarchy. The film follows Duah Fares, native of the largely Druze town of Sajur in the northern part of Israel. After Duah reaches the final stage of the Lady Kul El-Arab beauty pageant, she decides to withdraw and register, instead, as a contestant in the Israeli beauty pageant. The Arab pageant, she tells the director, would offer her only limited, brief opportunities within the Arab sector, while she dreams of an international career as a model. Yet, what seems at first to be a simple story of a young woman’s aspirations to move beyond her community into the “big world,” turns into an account of the ensuing conflict between traditional and liberal values, between the patriarchal tradition in which Duah was raised and the free, progressive state to which she would like to move.

Whereas the Arab pageant adheres to the customs of modesty prevailing in Duah’s community, the Israeli pageant, like other such pageants in Europe and the US, dresses its contestant in revealing clothes. The prospect of Duah’s appearance in a swimsuit spurs condemnation in her hometown and shakes not only her parents, but also her Druze community as a whole. The elders of the community all enlist to pressure her Duah and her parents to yield and withdraw from the Israeli pageant, warning them that they risk being ostracized. But the pressure does not stop there. Duah and her parents receive threats, and she has to go into hiding and remain under constant police protection for the duration of the pageant. Duah now has to weigh her dream against its consequences—for herself as well as to her family. A career as a model, it now becomes clear, would come at a very dear price. Yet, Lady Kul El-Arab displays a dimension of Mara’ana’s oeuvre as a whole, a dimension that was subdued in her earlier films, but that in this film takes center stage. The director skillfully turns Duah’s story into a compelling tale about the struggle of a young woman to pursue her dream, a tale about the hurdles she has to overcome in order to realize herself and about the ways a patriarchal society mobilizes all of its powers to curb that woman’s free spirit. Yet Mara’ana’s film stops short of considering the most interesting question her subject raises: What is the relationship between Duah’s endeavors to transcend the limits set by her community, and the status of women in a so-called liberal state, of which she aspires to become a member?

The film sets Duah’s story within the coordinates of a simple opposition between oppression and emancipation, failing to question the nature of the emancipation offered by the liberal state. Nowhere does the director stop to question the nature of the “liberal” values her characters—and the director herself, it seems—set so high. Are they indeed as liberating and emancipating as they seem? Would taking part in a beauty pageant truly place Duah’s beyond the yoke of patriarchy? Or would it, perhaps, simply replace one such yoke with another one, as the common feminist critique of these pageants would suggest? The most troubling aspect of Lady Kul El-Arab, then, is that the director seems to sincerely believe that an Israeli beauty pageant is a place of feminist liberation beyond reproach.

A History of Israeli Cinema

Raphaël Nadjari’s film, A History of Israeli Cinema, is in fact, groundbreaking. It is the first attempt ever to survey the history of Israeli cinema in the same medium, that is, in film. The outcome is captivating. The documentary will serve as an excellent introduction to those unfamiliar with Israeli film and will certainly become the bread and butter of all college classes on the subject. It is also simply fascinating.

Nadjari does not introduce a new history of Israeli cinema. Rather, he portrays it the way it has been described and taught over the past two decades. He thus divides his film into two parts. The first, which focuses on the years 1933-1978, presents a rather homogeneous film scene, shaped and formed by a single idea at a time. At the center of stage is Zionist ideology, the establishment of a new state, and of a new Jewish society and culture. Israeli movies moved from portraying the glory of the Zionist endeavor in Palestine and, in particular, of the New Hebrew Man, through a paean to Jewish might , to ethnic comedies (the Bourekas films) that brought to the surface inter-Jewish ethnic tensions, and finally to personal cinema that explored the confusion of the hegemonic Ashkenazi middle class in general, and of the Ashkenazi male in particular. The first part of Nadjari’s survey is easier to follow than the second one, which deals with the period falling between 1978-2005, and which presents a much more convoluted film scene that pulls in divergent directions. During this era’s first decade, the homogeneity that characterized Israeli filmmaking is still somewhat present, at least in terms of subject matter. However, this work is by no means quiescent. The late 1970s through the 1980s were dominated by films that, for the first time, turned on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the fate of Palestinians under Israeli of paramount concern. Yet, the early 1990s saw the emergence of new films that are much harder to group together under any specific rubric. Israeli cinema no longer followed a single theme or style, but multiple ones.

The sense of disorder is also enhanced by the way Nadjari introduces selections from different Israeli movies. One of the most successful decisions of the director was not to make do with short clips from as many films as possible but, rather, to present longer sequences, selected from fewer films, to allow viewers to get a deeper sense of these productions. Yet, whereas in the first part, each sequence is properly introduced and contextualized, (and its relationship to the present stage of Israeli cinema is made clear), the sequences in the second part lack such context. This is another indication of the disappearance of the homogeneous frame of reference that shaped Israeli cinema for the first few decades of its history.

Nadjari’s second formative decision was to cut between film sequences and interview sequences. These include interviews with directors, actors, producers, film scholars and critics. The director does not see his interviewees as subservient to the film sequences. On the contrary, he turns them into subjects in their own right, of equal importance to the films that they discuss and analyze. A History of Israeli Cinema thus does not merely accentuate the central role scholars and critics played in shaping and forming Israeli films. After all, many filmmakers make their living teaching in the different departments of cinema studies and communication alongside many of the film critics and scholars. History is as much about the relationship between his interviewees and Israeli films as it is about the history of Israeli cinema. The director thus opens his film with the 1935 Avodah  (Labor),  which fetishizes the figure of the Jewish-Zionist settler in Palestine, and cuts to the figure of Nachman Ingber, one of Israel’s most influential film critics, who ironically looks much more like the "Old Jew" Zionism tried to overcome than the young, muscular and Aryan looking man that it set as a masculine ideal.

That said, Nadjari’s film primarily focuses on the history of feature filmmaking in Israel. The one documentary he discusses,  David Perlov’s Yoman (Diary, 1973-1983), accentuates the absence of other documentaries, and begs the question what the relationship is between documentary and feature filmmaking in general and the boom in both that we have witnessed over the past decade in Israel. Likewise, the director fails to discuss the relationship between television and cinematic productions. Once again, the one television drama noted, Ram Loevy’s 1978 Khirbet Khizah, poses the same question that was asked about documentaries, especially television series and their role in the recent boom in Israeli filmmaking. In a similar manner, History includes just one short feature film, Avi Mograbi’s 1989 Gerush (Expulsion). The choice is particularly interesting given that Nadjari does not note that this is a short, and that Mograbi’s reputation is in documentary, not  feature filmmaking. Nadjari’s choice of Mograbi’s film also raises questions about what the relationship is between Israeli shorts and the “larger” cinematic works.

Be that as it may, Nadjari’s A History of Israeli Cinema is a worthy introduction to Israeli cinema.

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State Broadcasting

When I was growing up in Israel during the 1980s,  Israeli Army Radio, commonly known by its acronym Galatz, was the radio station to listen to. Notwithstanding its designation as a military radio station (and, therefore as a mouthpiece of the Israeli military establishment,) the station presented editorial independence rarely matched by other radio channels, which were all operated by Kol Yisrael,Israel Public Radio.The suspicion Galatz’s producers and announcers had of the formal high-rhetoric that ruled Kol Yisrael was translated into an irreverent hosting style and satirical programs as well as non-traditional (by Israeli standards) musical choices to one would hear nowhere else, neither on the Israeli radio nor, at the time, on the country’s state-run, single television channel.

The approach Galatz took was by no means beyond reproach. In fact, it was regularly censured for its elitism, and for reflecting exclusively the Ashkenazi, secular culture of its Tel Aviv setting (and of the vast majority of its civilian and recruited announcers). Indeed, wide sectors of the Israeli population—namely Mizrahi and religious Israelis—were not represented in the contents the station broadcast. Army Radio was similarly censured for putting into relief a leftist agenda. Right wing politicians were incensed by the liberty announcers took, in particular in the wake of the 1982 war in Lebanon and the first Palestinian Intifada, to criticize military operations and IDF policies and to play songs that articulated the same spirit. Such criticism is still voiced today.

Given its reputation, the changes Galatz underwent in recent years could serve as a parable of a sort to the changes underwent by the so-called “liberal-secular-Ashkenazi” Israel. Music-wise and politics-wise, the station holds now to a much more conservative appearance. In 1993, Galatz started operating a subsidiary station, Galgalatz, which broadcasts non-stop pop music and traffic reports. The greatest contribution of the new broadcaster seems to have been the introduction of the “playlist”: a list of a limited number of mainstream songs, selected by the chief musical producers of the station, to be played over and over again. Songs not included are condemned to public amnesia. Notwithstanding its conservative musical choices, or perhaps precisely because of it, the station has become extremely popular.

Politically, Galatz has undergone what is arguably an analogous change. Two recent examples, both in the wake of Obama’s Cairo speech, should suffice to exemplify the nature of that change. The host of a music magazine interviews an Israeli jazz musician who enjoys international success, mainly in the US. After the musician is introduced, the conversation goes something like this:

Host: were you ever invited to the White House?

Musician: Nope, but we really would love it if we were invited.

Host: If you play for Obama, would you hit him on the head with your instrument? He’s getting on my nerves. I despise Republicans, I truly do, with their conservative agenda, and I am usually for Democrats, but Obama, oh, he’s too much with his anti-Israeli sentiments.

Musician (a bit bewildered): don’t believe in violence …

Host: Sometimes this is the only answer.

At which point I reached for the dial to search for a new station.

This exchange points not only to Obama’s diving approval rating among Israelis (6% according to a recent poll), but even more so to the ever-growing presence of a language of intolerance, violence and even bigotry, a language that has swept what is still considered by wide sectors of the Israeli population to be a bastion of elitist liberalism. Another example further brings to light the implications of such a language. It is from Hamila Ha’achrona, (The Latest Word), a daily magazine that examines the news from a supposedly humorous perspective and that is hosted by teams of two announcers, one supposedly a spokesperson for the secular-liberal-left, the other for the religious right. While the positions articulated by the “conservative” members of each team are often predictable, those expressed by the “liberal” ones are less so. This is what one such “liberal host” had to say about Obama’s speech:

What disturbs me the most about this speech was that it was full of lies: the way he sucked  up to the Muslims. After all, we all know that they contributed nothing to world culture: they plagiarized everything; everything of value in their culture they took from the Greeks and Romans and the Jews and the Christians …

The fact that the co-host had no comment on this exhibition of racist ignorance is, perhaps, not surprising. The fact that no disciplinary measures were taken against the host is more disturbing. Most surprising is the fact that these comments elicited no public outcry. The silence with which the Israeli public responds to such comments merely shows the bon ton of “liberal” Israel these days. In light of such liberal comments, one can only wonder about the chances of success the Obama administration has in convincing the Israeli political establishment to reengage with Palestinians in an attempt to restart the peace process.

Israeli Music

The latest trend in Israeli music this year seems to be musical renditions of the medieval Jewish poetry of Spain.  Some of Israel’s leading musicians came up with new albums whose lyrics are all taken from the great poets of the period. Etti Ankri, a leading Israeli vocalist, issued a CD of Judah Halevilyrics. Rea Mochiach, a former member of the Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordellojoined Berry Sakharof, a founding member of the post-punk Minimal Compact, to issue an album with the lyrics of Solomon ibn Gabirol. And Micha Shitrit, a member of Hachaverim shel Natasha, one of the most influential Israeli rock ensembles of the 1980s and 1990s, collaborated with the liturgical poet Lior Elmalich and the music arranger Haim Laroz to set poems by Halevi and Gabirol, as well as by the 16th-17th century liturgical poet Israel ben Moses Najara .

The Iberian peninsula, which was under partial Muslim rule between the 9thand 13th centuries, offered Jews social, economic and political opportunities not available to them elsewhere. Indeed, Muslim Spain was much more tolerant towards Jews than Christian Europe, and as a result, a steady flow of immigrants made its way from the Christian north to the Muslim south. Under Muslim rule, Jewish culture in general and Jewish poetry in particular, enjoyed unprecedented freedom, designating the era a “Golden Age,” by which it is commonly known today.

The period marks extraordinarily close contacts between Muslim and Jewish cultures. Jewish literati were highly influenced by Arab philosophy and literature, which reached new heights during the same era. This had a double impact: on the one hand, as Jews became ever more integrated into the local society, they produced works not only in Hebrew but also in Arabic. On the other hand, under the impact of Arabic culture, they introduced themes and forms popular in Arabic cultural production into their Hebrew works, and produced religious alongside secular poetry.

What is curious about the latest wave of popular interest in medieval Jewish poetry is that these intense Muslim-Jewish exchanges are elided. Thus, in the same program of The Latest Word, just a few minutes after the Obama comment, the two hosts discuss the new Mochiach and Sakharof CD, and note that this is a prime example of authentic Israeli music, which relies on Jewish sources, and shies away from foreign influences such as Madonna, Depeche Mode, Suzan Vega, and other international musicians who had plans to give concerts in Israel this summer. No mention is made of the debt both Mochiach and Sakharof (and, indeed, Israeli popular music in general) owe to the international music scene, and the way their extended stay in Europe and the US has shaped their music.

Another radio magazine presented an interview with Chetrit and Ankri, coupled with an academic whose field of research is medieval Jewish poetry. The efforts of the academic to underscore the Jewish-Muslim cultural exchanges that shaped that poetry, and the debt Hebrew poetry owes to Muslim poetry encountered fierce resistance by Chetrit and particularly by Ankri, who protested that this poetry is the pure articulation of Jewish sentiments and spirituality, that were shaped exclusively by Jewish history and religion. This poetry, she exclaimed, is directly linked to the sentiments of modern Israeli Jews and had nothing to do with the Muslim milieu in which Jews were residing at the time.

Notwithstanding, thus, the divergent approaches taken in each of these projects and their critical evaluation, their reception seems to follow a similar pattern: the interest in medieval Jewish poetry is seen as a long-overdue return to a place of pure Jewish articulation, informed almost exclusively by religious sentiments. It fits, it seems, a growing desire to conceive of Jewish culture (and, as a result, of Israeli-Jewish culture and society in particular) in exclusive and purist terms.

By necessity, such terms deny that there is more than one Jewish culture, and that these cultures (like all other cultures) were produced through an exchange with other cultures. It ultimately denies Christian, Muslim and other cultures have anything to teach and to contribute to Israeli culture. Culture produced in Israel is by no means parochial, but its reception (as well as, at times, production), at least among some circles, seems to becoming increasingly so. Such trends are sadly familiar to students of twentieth century European political culture. It is greatly disturbing to see signs that Israeli culture is beginning to see itself in such terms.

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The term “unrecognized villages” refers to settlements that the Israeli government refuses to recognize as ‘legal.’ Accordingly, they are not marked on any commercially available maps, and are denied state and municipal services, such as connections to the electrical grid, water mains, and telephone network. These communities are excluded them from health, education and transportation planning as well (scores of unrecognized Bedouin and Palestinian villages do not receive any such services). It should be further noted that none of these villages are new. Some predate the state of Israel, while others are decades old, established as a result of government attempts to resettle Bedouins in these same areas.

Leshem does not take the all too-obvious and well-trodden route of recounting the history of these communities, tracing the predicament of their residents to the discriminatory policies of successive Israeli governments. All of them, Labor and Likud without exception, from the establishment of the State in 1948 to the present day have continuously refused to acknowledge the rights of Palestinian and Bedouin residents to the very land on which they reside. Yet, neither do the director nor his interviewees point fingers either. Rather, Leshem explores what life in such a village entails for its residents. He seeks to show the friction between the lives Bedouins in such unrecognized villages lead, and of life in “Israel proper,” that is, in a society that presents itself as part of the developed, “first” world, one that prides itself for being at the forefront of industrial and technological innovation.

Leshem thus turns to the village of El-Sayed (alternatively spelled as el-Sayyid), a village that went unrecognized until 2006 and that is located about 11 miles east of Beersheba, on the road to Arad. The reputation of this village lies, however, not in its troubled relationship with the Israeli government, but, rather, in the fact that it serves as a home to a community with arguably the highest percentage of deafness in the world: about 5% of the villagers are deaf, 50 times the average rate in the general population. Given the extraordinarily high rate of hearing loss, deaf people in this community are fully integrated, and are neither marginalized nor considered abnormal. Indeed, the villagers have developed a unique sign language, spoken by all villagers, hearing and hearing impaired alike, which has attracted the attention of scholars.

Usurprisingly, Voices centers on the question of communication (or lack thereof), not only between hearing and hearing impaired, but also between Israeli Jews and Bedouins, between health providers and clients, between employers and employees, between academics and laypersons, and, obviously, between “recognized” and “unrecognized” citizens of Israel. It is here that the director distinguishes himself, for whereas much of this communication is dependent upon translators and mediators, Leshem masters his subjects’ two languages: Arabic alongside sign language.

The significance of this gesture is huge. As enthusiastic as many Israeli directors may be in exploring Palestinian and Bedouin lives in Israel, few have the linguistic skills to dub their interlocutors without the mediation of a third language (commonly English, if Palestinian or Bedouin interviewees do not know or refuse to speak Hebrew,) or of a translator. This is all the more true for those directors who have featured deaf subjects. In many films, there are oftetimes three parties to every communication, a fact that underscores the alienation and the distance of a filmmaker from their interviewee. Leshem, on the other hand, converses and interrogates the people of El Sayed directly. Thus his interviews present a flow of language, uninterrupted.

Voices soundtrack avoids music altogether and is instead made of speaking voices (when auditory language is used), from natural background noises, and from long silent sequences. It thus accentuates the transition between the different types of sound, making them all the more audible and punctuates—so Leshem says—the experience of hearing and not-hearing. While this approach is not altogether original, it does produce a haunting effect during the interviews done using sign language. Undubbed, we are allowed to hear the background noises alongside the gesticulations of the interlocutors, which are commonly covered by the noise of auditory language.

More specifically, Voices from El-Sayed explores the interaction of this unique community with the outside world. The film revolves around the friction between the villagers’ unique life Voices from El-Sayed Trailercircumstances and the assumptions that the Israeli state has about what it means to live in a modern country. Nothing in this context highlights this friction more than the attitude of the state to deafness, which it brands as an anomaly and an impairment to be corrected via technology, even eliminated through pre-birth detection and abortion. Thus, Leshem documents the initial encounter of the villagers with the Cochlear implant operation. The procedure, which is designed to provide a sense of sound to deaf and severely hard of hearing people, is included in the health coverage guaranteed by the government, and as Israeli citizens the villagers—notwithstanding the uncertain legal status of their settlement—are entitled to have it at no cost to themselves.

Surprisingly, this technology is not unanimously welcome in the village. Some of Leshem’s interviewees contend not only that they should not strive to alter the way in which they were born, but that a deaf person is actually in a better state than someone who is not hearing impaired. “A hearing person shouts all day,” says Juma, “and then his head hurts from all the noise. Being deaf is great. It’s quiet in our house.” Juma is very doubtful when another villager, Salim El-Sayed, decides to have his two year-old son undergo the procedure. A Bedouin family, Juma argues, does not have the discipline to go through the daily audiological training required to make the implant effective.

Yet primarily, Voices from El-Sayed seems to suggest, the friction between its Bedouin subjects and Israeli society is the result of the myopia of the state and of its “recognized” residents. A group of doctors and nurses from the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba visits the village to introduce the procedure: notwithstanding the great proximity of the village to Beersheba, and, similarly, notwithstanding their familiarity with the Bedouin population, which relies on the services provided by the medical center, this is their very first visit to such a village; as shall become clear, they are completely oblivious to the discrepancies between the environment in which health services are provided in Israel and this specific context.

In a touching scene, Salim El-Sayed, his wife and son are at the doctor’s office immediately following the operation. They are given the external part of the implant for the first time, and are instructed as to how to operate it. They are told to charge it whenever the device is not being used, particularly at night. Yet, as noted, El Sayed is not connected to the electric grid. The villagers derive their electricity from small generators that they can only operate for several hours at a time, mainly in the afternoon and early evening. Doctors and parents are likewise surprised and baffled by this unexpected obstacle. Though they have visited the village and have been told of its circumstances, regardless of their good intentions, none of the healthcare workers note that the Bedouins’ limited access to electricity makes them incapable of taking full advantage of their services.

Voices from El Sayed is distributed by Go2Films

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This question gains particular urgency in the light of two of the bigger productions in this wave of Holocaust-focused filmmaking: Brian Singer’s Valkyrie, with Tom Cruise, and Edward Zwick’s Defiance. The latter film in particular raises some disturbing questions about Hollywood’s fascination with the Nazi genocide. Zwick’s adaptation of Nechama Tec’s book of the same name, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, follows the four Bielski brothers, played by Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell and George MacKay, who survive the liquidation of the Jewish population in their hometown, in the eastern regions of Nazi-occupied Poland, and escape to the surrounding forests.

There, an ever-growing number of Jewish refugees join them, drawn by the charisma of the brothers, their familiarity with the area and their resourcefulness. The group survives by raiding local farms, and through aid provided them by organized Soviet partisan battalions in the vicinity. The film, however, focuses on the rivalry between the two older brothers, Tuvia and Zus: whereas Tuvia sees his mission in saving as many Jews as possible, leading them to the forests and providing for them, Zus insists that they cannot afford  to take care of the old, the sick and the very young, and that they should invest all of their resources in fighting the Germans. The rivalry leads to a split between the brothers. Tuvia remains with the larger group of refugees, while Zus and a number of men join up with the Soviet partisans and participate in their operations.

The uneasiness Defiance raises lies not in its faithfulness to historical facts. Zwick’s film is as faithful or, rather, unfaithful to the facts as any other Hollywood product. Nor does it lie in the banal dialogues the cast is made to repeat. Indeed, at times it seems as though the director has ransacked the history of Holocaust cinema in search of the most clichéd possible lines his characters could utter. Nor, once more, does this uneasiness lie in the decision to have the actors who play Jews, (most of them British), speak their lines in a heavy, presumably Polish-sounding accent. The dialogue of the non-Jews in Defiance, it should be noted, is in either Russian or German. One wonders why-if the film insists on authenticity- Zwick didn’t let the Jewish characters speak in Yiddish or Polish. Since the director chose English as the language of his protagonists,  why not the native English already spoken by the film’s actors? Nor, finally, does it lie in the heavy-handed direction that turns every scene into a climax so utterly predictable that it undermines the intended impact of the movie.

Defiance does, however, raise a few fascinating questions, most of all about the tense relationship between all involved: between the local Polish and Russian populations and their once Jewish neighbors; between the Soviet partisans and the Jewish refugees. Most importantly, it raises questions about the friction amongst Jews themselves. Several times Zwick alludes to antagonism between the Bielski brothers, who hailed from a less fortunate background, and some of their more bourgeois, intellectual followers. More importantly, Defiance alludes to the violence attributed to the Jewish resistance itself. Indeed, allegations have surfaced about incidents of rape, and even murder amongst the legendary Bielski partisans. Nevertheless, Edward Zwick brushes aside all of these crucial questions to focus on Defiance‘s core theme: deliverance.

Undeniably, the uneasiness Defiance raises lies in the very nature of the story it insists on telling about the Holocaust. Explicitly presenting itself as a contemporary adaptation of the story of Exodus, (the parting of the Red Sea included), Defiance is a story of deliverance from slavery to freedom, and the rise of a worthy Moses-like leader in the figure of Tuvia, the oldest Bielski sibling, played by Daniel Craig. In Tuvia, Zwick finds the reluctant leader who is forced against his better judgment to take responsibility for an obstinate and stubborn flock, to overcome continuous challenges to his leadership-including by his own brother-and to lead his followers through the wilderness to the promised land of safety.

That Promised Land arrives when Zus rejoins his brothers at the end of Defiance.  Accordingly, Tuvia leads the refugees, who were forced to flee their forest camp in the face of advancing German forces, across the marshes, only to come face to face with these forces. In a battle scene that seems all too reminiscent of Craig’s latest James Bond films, Zus and his men return to help the undermanned Bond, pardon, Tuvia, and together they handily defeat the enemy. As the four brothers, now united, lead their flock into the safety of the woods, Tuvia comments, to the sound of a rising music, "The Forest. It is beautiful isn’t it?" and Zus replies, "Yes, it is." After more than two hours, the audience can now have its satisfaction, its feel good moment.

Herein lies Defiance‘s problem. Considering what Holocaust survivors as well as historians of the Shoah have been telling us- with greater urgency in recent years- for those who experienced it, there is no redemption, no Promised Land, no real resolution. In fact, what is so disturbing about accounts of survivors is precisely the realization that they have never left the ghettos, the hiding places, the camps, the woods. They are still there, unable to bring themselves into their new lives, their new places of residence, their freedom. Furthermore, scholars now tell us that not only the children of these survivors are impacted by the traumas their parents experienced during the war, but so are the grandchilden. Indeed, some have argued that our society as a whole, Israeli society in particular, still operates under the impact of this trauma. In other words, we cannot leave the Holocaust behind us. We cannot enter any metaphorical ‘forest,’ as Zwick would have us, and recognize how beautiful it is.

The uneasiness films like Defiance raise lies not only in their refusal to take the plight of survivors seriously. Rather, it also lies in a refusal to take our own culture seriously. As long as we believe that we can learn something positive from the Holocaust, about moral values, brotherly love, courage, what have you, we will fail to understand the truly horrible essence of the Nazi genocide, under whose sign we still operate. What we call "moral values," "brotherly love," and "courage" took on completely different meanings during that time. None of this truly mattered in determining who would survive and who would not. In molding the Shoah into a story of deliverance,  Edward Zwick does not just turn the Holocaust into a piece of entertainment but, in a skewed way, justifies the Holocaust (like other wars), for bringing out the best in mankind.

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Eran Riklis’s 1991 film Cup Final, for instance, about the growing bond between a small group of Palestinian fighters and their Israeli hostage during the first Lebanon War, depicts the death of its Palestinian protagonists in a final shootout in a manner reminiscent of such films as George Roy Hill’s 1969 western, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. More recently, Joseph Cedar’s film, Beaufort and Tamar Yarom’s film on female soldiers who serve in the Occupied Territories, To See If I’m Smiling, have focused exclusively on the traumas suffered by Israeli soldiers during their service, leaving all images of Palestinians outside of their frames. Yarom’s documentary is particularly interesting in this context. Its name is taken from the story of Meytal, an IDF female medical officer, who served in Hebron and who was charged, among other duties, with the cleaning of Palestinian corpses to hide the signs of violence done to them by Israeli security forces. On one occasion, Meytal recalls, one corpse had an erection, eliciting embarrassed laughter from those soldiers who were washing it. When another soldier with a camera passed by, Meytal asked her to take her photo with the corpse. Now Meytal is eager to find out whether in the photo she’s smiling. To this end, she pays a visit to one of her friends from the military service, who still holds a copy of the said photo. Yarom’s camera focuses on Meytal as she takes out the photo out of the album, and records the growing pain on her face. The photo is never shown. Previous Israeli films have quite literally concealed dead Palestinians, and excluded it from their field of vision. In doing so, they have elided the most visceral and direct manifestation of Israeli violence to Palestinians. The final scene of Waltz with Bashir, by contrast, tears the cinematic curtain open, displaying Palestinian dead, almost as though they were being seen by Israeli eyes for the very first time. Yet, as the film makes clear, there is a price to be paid for such a visual honesty. Several mechanisms enable the final scene. The first is the traditional form of the narrative. Indeed, it is rather obvious, even banal: the movie moves straightforward from the director’s initial realization about the absence of memory to a final moment of “total recall.” There are few, if any surprises in the way the film illuminates the inhumanity of war. Such simplicity is required for the imagery in this scene to be effective.   Most problematically, the visual breakthrough of this final scene is combined with Folman insisting that no Israeli soldier is to be held responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It should be noted that, without having exonerated the IDF,  the film probably could not have become part of Israeli public discourse and would have been dismissed by most Israelis as aelf-hating propaganda. Quite ironically, however, Folman undermines this, as though he anticipates having to make this concesssion in order to show such unprecedented imagery to Israelis. Folman thus asks the commander of the Israeli tank squadron that was stationed just outside the refugee camps about when he first realized that he was witnessing a massacre. Folman’s growing bewilderment at the failure of the Israeli commander to realize what was unfolding directly in front of his eyes casts grave doubt on his assertion that Israeli soldiers were not culpable in the massacre. Indeed, it seems that notwithstanding his own statement, by focusing on the tactical support with which the Israelis provided the Christian militias, and on Israel’s failure to stop the massacre, Folman quietly implicates the Israeli army in the killings.

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Homeland (Beit Avi) – English Trailer

Dani Rosenberg turns necessity into merit, and makes the poverty of means into a formal principle that shapes Homeland. By and large, his film is a piece for two actors. History is rendered not through the perspective of large collectives, nor through the perspective of the family—literally or metaphorically—like many historical Israel films, but rather, through the perspective of the individual. The year is 1948, and Lolek, played by Itay Tiran, a young Holocaust survivor, arrives in the newly established state of Israel hoping to join his pre-war lover in Haifa. Lolek finds himself completely disoriented when he is dropped off from a military truck in the middle of the wilderness, made to repeat an oath of allegiance in Hebrew— a language he does not understand—to the state and to the IDF, and pointed in the direction of a military outpost on top of a nearby hill. The outpost is manned by sunburnt and muscular Mickey Leon, who is determined to transform the unsoldierly, slender and pale Lolek into an image of the Israeli sabra. To this end, Leon continuously abuses Lolek, both mentally and physically. Rosenberg’s film is the often-told story of Jewish immigrants to pre-state Palestine and to post-independence Israel, who were ask to shed off their exhilic mentality, to immerse themselves in the new society and to become new Jews: upright, strong, ready to fight and to sacrifice themselves on the alter of their old-new homeland. Yet, unlike the didactic Zionist-Israeli story that celebrates the Israeli melting pot, or the more recent, critical story, that points to the price paid by immigrants in their endeavors to become Israelis, Rosenberg’s protagonist resists the forceful, violent attempt to both undo and redo his body and soul. In taking this position, Rosenberg seems to be responding to the film often dubbed “the first Israeli movie,” namely, to Herbert Klein and Meyer Levin ’s My Father’s House, which was produced in 1947, but released only after the establishment of the state. The two films, which share the same Hebrew title— Beyt Avi (my father’s house)—also share the same premise: a young survivor who arrives in Palestine/Israel after losing his whole family in the Holocaust. Yet each film takes this premise in a very different direction. David, the protagonist of the original My Father’s House, fails to immerse himself in the kibbutz or in the boarding school to which he is subsequently sent, because he clings to the hope that he could still unite with his father. In search of him, David goes on a long tour of the land, a tour in which his sorrow is supplanted with admiration for it’s beauty and for Zionist achievements. Towards the end of the film, he is adopted by a Holocaust survivor and her Israeli partner, and all of them join a new kibbutz in the Negev. When the three arrive there, the kibbutz members uncover an old stone carving of a menorah. All gather around it, and one of them points at the carving and addresses the child: “This is your father’s house.” Rosenberg’s Beyt Avi paints a picture of a very different homeland. The film takes place in a desolated, uninhabited wilderness. This wilderness is not the setting for pioneering settlement, but of destruction, one that encompasses the whole land. By a military logic he does not understand, Lolek is shackled to the outpost, and is forbidden the opportunity to explore other parts of the country. Indeed, when he insists that he would leave for Haifa, the commander brutally assures him: “Haifa is gone! There is no more Haifa!” The commander undoes the Zionist slogan of turning the wilderness into a blooming garden, turning the entire country into a wilderness. There is no reprieve, the commander suggests, from the empty landscape and the scorching sun that burns their skin. Indeed, there is no reprieve from war, so one should give up the illusion of finding or founding a new home. Nothing breaks the solitariness of the outpost. The enemy has last been seen over three weeks ago, and the war is present only in the form of a radio broadcasting anxious screams begging for help. The only sign of war that, ironically, is also the only sign of life—past or present— are the haunted ruins of a Palestinian village. In an eerie scene Lolek, who is sent to the village to bring fresh water to the outpost, enters one of the destroyed houses, and is watched by the ghost of a Palestinian boy that hides underneath a bed. Lolek lies on the ground and stares back at him. The desolation of the land, the film seems to suggest, results from the devastation of pre-existing civilizations, not only Palestinian civilization, but Jewish exhilic civilization as well. Both are victims of the destructive forces unleashed by militarism embraced by the young Israeli state. The growing tension between Lolek and his commander cannot be resolved by anything but violence. In this, Homeland follows the footsteps of such films as Yehuda Ne’eman ’s 1977 Paratroopers, which likewise portrays the intense relationship between a fresh, puny and pale paratrooper recruit and his chauvinist commander, who believes that discipline and hazing would make a true soldier out of him. Yet, whereas all of the characters in Ne’eman’s film accept the soldierly ethos, whether they are capable of realizing it or not, Lolek rejects this ethos. In defiance, he challenges his commander with buffoonish, Charlie Chaplin-like antics that mock the commander’s chauvinist-military mannerism and express resistance to the demand to put behind exhilic values. The friction between the two, however, is not one between a native and a new immigrant, between an arrogant Israeli—who, in the effort to establish and secure a new state, refuses to acknowledge the emotional and physical needs of others—and his victim, as it might seem at first glance. The number on his forearm and, more than that, his nightmares reveal the antipathetic sabra to be but another suffering Holocaust survivor. The conflict is between two damaged newcomers and the divergent strategies they adopt in their struggle with the past in Europe and the present in an inhospitable country. Not only does the transition to Israel fails to relieve newcomers of the traumas they suffered in exile, the film suggests. It also leads them to victimize each other. The ambiguity that underlies the conflict between the two characters also makes ambiguous the most conspicuous aspect of the film, namely, its Yiddish. Homeland is one of only a handful of Yiddish-speaking films to be produced since World Word II. Most obviously, Homeland‘s employment of Yiddish marks the destroyed European culture that the new immigrants were expected to forget upon their arrival. In his insistence on speaking Yiddish and on using Yiddish humor, Lolek mounts a critique of the Hebrew’s militaristic character. Yiddish is the language that links him to his past home and murdered family, but also to the hope of a future new home and family in “Haifa.” Hebrew, on the other hand, is the language of war and of destruction. Yet, the conflict is not between Yiddish and Hebrew since, by and large, the dialogue takes place in Yiddish. The conflict seems to be between two types of Yiddish: between Yiddish that desires to become Hebrew and Yiddish that insists on its independence from Hebrew. The outcome of the film (which, for the sake of those who have not seen the film yet, I avoid from revealing) leaves uncertain not only which Yiddish wins but, more than that, what is the significance of the victory. Homeland offers not only a revisionist account of Israeli history, but of Israeli cinema as well. More than any other Israeli director, Dani Rosenberg explores the price paid by the individual for the demands put on them by the Zionist endeavor. Other Israeli filmmakers, no matter how critical of the Zionist project and of Israeli society, tended to mitigate the stress of this demand by placing their protagonists within the context of a collective—commonly represented by a small group of people or a family—and in doing so, submitted their anguish to its impersonal logic. By placing this community outside of the film’s frame and by rendering the significance of the struggle against its demands uncertain, Homeland turns that anguish into a challenge to talk about Israeli history.

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Ever since Israel’s became independent, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) have been celebrated for implementing mandatory military service for women. Universal military service was deemed a sign of the inherent equality that characterizes Israeli society and the progressive character of both the state and Israeli women. Still, for decades, military service for women was limited to auxiliary, mainly clerical positions. In the 1980s, the IDF began assigning female recruits to technical and instructional roles, but only in the past ten years or so, after a lengthy campaign that ended in an appeal to Israel’s supreme court, has the army revised its policy in regards to women and started assigning them to combat duties. Notwithstanding the unequal position of women within the IDF, filmmakers generally depicted military service in Israel as empowering women, and the changing attitude of the army towards women as a mark of a growing equality in Israeli society. Few ventured to show the travails of women within an environment that is still very much dominated by men and by male-chauvinist values. Fewer still, if any, have explored the effect of the violence experienced during military service on women, in particular the violence linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These two issues became obvious once women were allowed to serve in combat roles from which they were previously excluded. Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling examines the experience of women in an army at a time of conflict. But it should also be viewed in the context of what is by now a well-established tradition of portraying the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Since the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987, left-wing intellectuals have turned to the testimonies of soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories, soldiers who were willing to expose both the atrocities committed in the attempt to squelch Palestinian resistance and the traumas they themselves have experienced during their service, to critique the effect of the occupation on Israeli society. Yet, the soldiers who were questioned and provided the ground for such critique were all men, and so the violence and atrocities committed were inherently gendered and perceived as effecting, first and foremost, Israeli men and Israeli masculinity and only secondarily and indirectly, Israeli women. By focusing exclusively on female recruits, Yarom’s film raises the question whether one can hold to such a clearly gendered division of trauma. What are we to learn when the soldiers in question are not men, Yarom seems to ask, but women? What does a gendered perspective add to our understanding of what is taking place in the Occupied Territories? Yarom approaches these questions not from “above,” from the level of general political and sociological observation of the circumstances in which women find themselves, both in the context of military service and of the Israeli occupation. Rather, she approaches it from “below”: from narratives of the actual experience of individual women who found themselves—in fact, some willingly placed themselves—in these circumstances. To See if I’m Smiling’s impact lies in the accumulated effect of the particular incidents her six subjects recount for the director, and from their manifest struggle to come to terms with the role they themselves played in these incidents. The outcome is a nuanced and unsettling statement about what happens to human beings (in general, not just women) under these circumstances. From these six interviews emerges a portrait of a conflicted and contradictory experience. They reveal the difficulty of maintaining one’s image as a woman in a military environment that is still a predominantly male environment. On the one hand, women soldiers are urged to conceal their femininity. As one interviewee notes, women would adopt the speech mode, the high volume and coarse military language, of the male recruits; moreover, they would conceal their body within big clothes. At the same time, she remarks, all a woman has to do to gain favor with the male soldiers is to display her feminine side: the smell of her shampooed hair, her affection and care for male soldiers, etc. Their military service creates a continuous conflict between the need to repress and to display their femininity.

But more than that, Yarom’s film is about the struggle of her six subjects to relate their self-image as moral human beings with their evaluation of themselves and their actions during their military service. As the six recount, initially they were taken by what is commonly associated with the romanticized masculine perception of military service and combat: with the rush of adrenalin that are part and parcel of military action. More than that, they found service in the Occupied Territories to provide them with an exhilarating sense of power and control over the local population. It was like the Wild West, comments one woman.

Yet, as they are co-opted by their environment, the film’s subjects find themselves taking part, or even initiating, actions that they deem to be utterly immoral and in contradiction with everything in which they believe. Indeed, all tell of atrocities of which they were part: about abusing Palestinians civilians, concealing the brutality of Israeli soldiers in handling the Palestinian population, and even taking part in a pursuit that results in the death of a Palestinian boy. All six women thus struggle with questions about why they condoned what, in retrospect, they deem immoral; not only why they failed to protest and to report to the IDF’s Military Investigation Unit or the press when crimes and atrocities were committed but, much more disturbingly, why they themselves were willing to take part in such actions in the first place.

Increasingly, the six women relate, they found it impossible to find a bridge between their experiences in the Occupied Territories and at home. These seemed to be two wholly distinct worlds governed by different rules. Indeed, each world seemed to demand of them a different identity: one, the moral self of a presumably civil and free society, the other, an individual that willingly participate in oppression and cruelty. They don’t know who they are anymore.

Yarom’s film reflects this contradictory, conflicted narrative formally. To See if I’m Smiling is subsequently divided into two clear layers: a layer of interviews, in which the women, now discharged from the military, reflect in the comfort of their home upon their military service,interspersed with a second layer of footage from the Occupied Territories of encounters between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. Some of the footage is of the women during their military service. The viewer is thus presented with the demand to relate the apparent anguish of the six interviewees to the images of military action and, in particular, to the footage of the women during their military service, footage that shows them content, smiling and even laughing. The title of the film, To See If I’m Smiling, is taken from the words of Meytal, who served as a Medic and Medical Officer in Hebron. Shaken up, Meytal relates that one of her duties was to wash the bodies of dead Palestinians, to conceal signs of what was done to them by the Israeli security forces before the bodies are handed back to the Palestinians. One time, she recalls, one of the corpses had an erection, a fact that brought about embarrassed laughter from the soldiers who were washing it. A group of soldiers was passing by, and one had a camera. Meytal then asks a woman to take her photo with the body. The photo is no longer in her possession, but she is now eager to find out whether her face betrays dismay of the situation in which she found herself or whether she is smiling. The power of Yarom’s film inheres in the willingness of her interviewees to expose themselves so and to examine their experience in front of the camera. At the same time, however, the very fact that the film absorbs the viewer raises another extremely disturbing question. For what is held back, even forgotten by the progression of the interviews is how one is led to identify with the traumas of perpetrators of war atrocities. Indeed, such identification is possible only inasmuch as the misery of the Palestinians remains concealed. To show abused and tormented Palestinians would have made identification with the anguish of the perpetrators impossible. From this perspective, Yarom’s film reenacts the elision of Palestinians as human beings, an elision that is the basis of Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories. The question whether such an elision can be avoided remains open.

For more information on To See If I’m Smiling, check out the CBC News Sunday profile of the film.

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