There are so many intricacies to the existence and the politics of the small Middle Eastern country known as Israel that it’s nearly impossible to find someone who feels exactly the same way you do. There are those who condemn Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as apartheid and those who liken all Arabs and Palestinians to terrorists, and plenty of those at various points along the lengthy spectrum that divides the two extremes. In a stirring new documentary, based on a 90-minute one-man play, one actor and writer brings every opinion to one place, and it’s a formidable experience.

To truly capture every side and angle, Aaron Davidman portrays seventeen different characters, all with unique backgrounds and perspectives on what Israel means to them. Davidman changes his clothes occasionally, and sometimes his accent or inflection too, but this qualifies as a 90-minute lecture, rant, verbal exploration – however you want to define it. Davidman speaks quickly and with intention, jumping from one character to another with no warning and with furious intensity.

Davidman, an American Jew who doesn’t even speak with an Israeli accent, may not seem qualified on paper to analyze the situation. But it’s clear within the film’s opening minutes during an immensely powerful extended scene in which he covers the full spectrum of views that he absolutely knows what he’s talking about. He offers no judgment and presents all facts and opinions as such without putting special emphasis on any of them. He begins by trying to pinpoint the origin of this whole conflict, using the phrase “you might say” to suggest “The Catastrophe” of 1947 or “The War of Independence” in 1948 or further back when the British intervened during World War I. He intermixes tragedies and terrorist attacks which the Palestinians and the Israelis each claim without any warning, citing an irrefutably long list of potential causes for this permanent unrest.

Davidman has answers for every question and assertion – not a definitive breakdown of who is right or who is wrong, but rather the counterpoint that someone who does not agree would inevitably offer. One character he plays blames the Palestinians for inciting terror, and another shoots back that the settlements are the problem. About halfway through the film, Davidman encounters himself seated at the other side of the table and engages in a heated debate about the merits of Hamas and Fatah and who the true threat really is. One version of Davidman interrupts the other to note that he can read him like “a playbook for the American Jew,” to which his debate partner shoots back, “You’re an American Jew!”

This film drudges up a lot of problematic thoughts and elements that make the question of how to resolve this worsening conflict seem all but impossible. A reenactment of a pro-peace rally quickly turns to chants of “Death to the Jews!” as Davidman chimes in with the quiet objections of the peaceful protester who feels out of place and trapped when that becomes the prevailing sentiment, overtaking the true desire for harmony among peoples.

Just when it seems like there is some topic or argument that has not been mentioned, Davidman ensures that it comes bubbling up to the surface. The subject of the Holocaust becomes contentious when one Davidman character tries to anticipate his opponent’s next point and earns contempt for knocking down parallels between the Jews and the Nazis by reaching even further than his opponent had planned to, stopping short at the notion that the Palestinians have been oppressed and subjugated for fifty years. In rare moments like that, all of Davidman’s personalities take a moment to pause and acknowledge that not every argument can be addressed in a way instantly that feels truly complete or right.

Throughout the ninety minutes of director Dylan Kussman’s film, Davidman creates a number of characters with backstories that explain their views and the many events in their lives that brought them to their current place and perspective. Inhabiting and fleshing out those roles proves undeniably intriguing, and Davidman is particularly chilling when he begins passionately singing, chanting both Muslim and Jewish prayers with a convincing familiarity and spiritual commitment. Those moments, however, are not quite as strong as when Davidman simply spits out information and presents facts he has heard in his amassment of research for this film.

This film’s title has biblical origins related to wrestling with God, and the choice of Jerusalem as what is to be wrestled, since this film addresses all of Israel, is particularly poignant. A visit to the Wikipedia page for Israel, the most editable of all electronic sources, states numerous times that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel but that it is internationally unrecognized. Jerusalem is a hot topic that encompasses all of what Israel is, and for many is representative of the country as a whole.

There is no doubt that Davidman is still wrestling. By laying all of these clashing conceptions out and speaking them to an audience, Davidman underlines the importance of conversation. If just one person can come to at least hear what someone else says, perhaps there’s hope for peace. Even if that may not be possible or realistic, this is a fascinating character study of an immeasurably large population with a riveting central performance.

Wrestling Jerusalem will have its World Premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on July 27.

Image source: Aaron Davidman in Wrestling Jerusalem

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American President Barack Obama published an exclusive op-ed in Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Tuesday, affirming America’s financial support for Israel, calling for restraint, and urging Israelis not to abandon the pursuit of peace.

The article, which was originally penned in late June for Haaretz‘s Conference on Peace, was amended to include references to the three kidnapped and murdered Israeli teens, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, as well as 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Hussein Abu Khdeir, who was killed in a brutal vigilante attack on July 2.

“Budgets in Washington are tight, but our commitment to Israel’s security remains ironclad,” wrote the President. “The United States is committed to providing more than $3 billion each year to help finance Israel’s security through 2018. Across the board, our unprecedented security cooperation is making Israel safer, and American investments in Israel’s cutting-edge defense systems like the Arrow interceptor system and Iron Dome are saving lives.”

He went on to describe peace as “necessary, just, and possible… because it’s the only way to ensure a secure and democratic future for the Jewish state of Israel… Just as the Israeli people have the right to live in the historic homeland of the Jewish people, the Palestinian people deserve the right to self-determination. Palestinian children have hopes and dreams for their future and deserve to live with the dignity that can only come with a state of their own… All parties must exercise restraint and work together to maintain stability on the ground.”

Read the full piece here.

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Rachel Fraenkel, mother of murdered Israeli teen Naftali Fraenkel, has offered her condolences to the family of 16-year-old Palestinian Muhammad Abu Khdeir, reports The Times of Israel. Abu Khdeir was kidnapped and murdered by Jewish extremists in Jerusalem on July 2, in a brutal vigilante attack following the murders of Israeli teenagers Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrach, and Gilad Shaar in June.

Below is an excerpt from Fraenkel’s statement:

“Even in the abyss of mourning for Gilad, Eyal, and Naftali, it is difficult for me to describe how distressed we are by the outrage committed in Jerusalem–the shedding of innocent blood in defiance of all morality, of the Torah, of the foundation of the lives of our boys and of all of us in this country.

Only the murderers of our sons, along with those who sent them and those who helped them and incited them to murder–and not innocent people–will be brought to justice: by the army, the police, and the judiciary; not by vigilantes. No mother or father should ever have to go through what we are going through, and we share the pain of Mohammed’s parents.”

On Sunday, two Palestinians visited the Fraenkel family at their home in Nof Ayalon, where they are sitting shiva for Naftali. A few hours later Yishai Fraenkel, uncle of Naftali, shared his condolences with the family of Palestinian teen Muhammad Abu Khdeir. “We expressed our deep empathy with their sorrow, from one bereaved family to another bereaved family,” he told Ynet news website, according to The Times of Israel. “We expressed our absolute disgust with what had happened. He accepted our statements, it was important for him to hear it.”

Six Israelis were arrested on Sunday for the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, and three have confessed their involvement in the crime. Two Palestinians were identified for the kidnapping and murder of the Israeli teens in June, but are still at large.

Read Rachel Fraenkel’s complete statement here.

(Image: Rachel Fraenkel with Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat, via Facebook)

Related: Heartbreaking, Influential Moment: Rachel Fraenkel Says Kaddish For Son Naftali

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You’ve been at the forefront of American Jewish criticism of President Obama’s renewed push for Israeli-Arab peace. After a recent meeting with the President along with 15 other Jewish leaders, you confessed that you continue “to feel uncomfortable with the assumptions that underlie President Obama’s approach” to Israel and the Middle East. 

You’ve charged that President Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world is being conducted “at Israel’s expense.” For Obama, you say, “there is a need for the US to demonstrate that it can be tough with Israel to win back credibility with Muslims. We are seeing it already on the settlement issue…”

But being tough on Netanyahu about settlements is not at “Israel’s expense.” It is a blessing to Israel, given the grave threat which many Israeli military and political leaders have said the settlements pose to Israel’s security, to the very possibility of a two-state solution to its conflict with the Palestinians, and to Israel’s ability to remain a democratic Jewish state.   For the last eight years, we’ve had a president who recklessly squandered American prestige.   He had no credibility to broker an Israeli-Arab accommodation.   He made little more than token efforts to do so, when not trumpeting his outright opposition to negotiations with Syria, despite the unanimous advice of Israel’s intelligence and military brass, and its political leadership.  An American president who has regained the confidence of the Arab and Muslim worlds is quite simply a strategic asset to Israel.   American pressure over settlements is an investment in Israel’s future, a gift to the Zionist project.

Nor does pressure need to be applied simultaneously and in equal doses to satisfy some artificial notion of even-handedness.   As Larry Derfner points out in the Jerusalem Post, “The Palestinian Authority has been cracking down on Hamas for a long while, it kept the West Bank miraculously quiet during Operation Cast Lead, it’s enforcing the law in city after city… If the PA wasn’t giving us peace and we were giving it land – we’d be right to demand that Obama put all the pressure on the Palestinians and none on us.  But the fact is that Abbas and the PA are giving us about as much peace as they’re capable of, while we aren’t planning on giving them an inch; instead, we’re thinking only about how much more conquered land Obama will let us build on.”

You’ve said that President Obama’s “notion that we have to pressure Israel to show our bona fides to the Arabs is to buy into their distorted version of history.”   You’ve accused the president of ignoring the history of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.   But such criticisms stand reality on its head. Obama understands all too well why past peace efforts have failed.  His new way is designed to overcome the errors and missteps of the past.  By adopting a regional approach, he is more likely to gain wide Arab backing for historic Palestinian compromises on Jerusalem and refugees, issues which resonate throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.   By enlisting the help of Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, he stands a better chance of bringing about a unified Fatah-Hamas Palestinian government that will hew to the international and Arab consensus:  a government that will have both the will and the wherewithal to honor its commitments under a peace accord with Israel.

Obama recognizes that the US cannot help forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians while allowing Syria and Iran to continue to stoke Hezbollah and Hamas extremism. While Bush added fuel to the fires of Arab and Muslim radicalism, Obama is cutting off their oxygen supply, sapping Hezbollah’s political power and reinforcing the impetus towards pragmatism in Hamas.  Obama is finally ending the practice, perfected under Bush, of saying one thing–whether about settlements or the president’s commitment to help negotiate an accord–and then doing something else. 

You hold up President Bush’s “enunciation of the need for a Palestinian state, the road map, Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, and the Annapolis process in 2007” as having “provided opportunities for progress toward peace if the Palestinians were truly interested.”  You highlight what “Israel has done in recent years to advance peace:  Israel’s offer of a Palestinian state at Camp David in 2000, its unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, also in 2000, and its disengagement from Gaza were all steps upon which there could have been building toward peace.”  Instead, you conclude, “the Palestinians responded with rejection, suicide bombs and kidnappings, extremist politics and rockets.”

But this Manichean narrative of righteous Israelis and evil Palestinians – the stock-in-trade of right-wing hasbarah – is a cartoon version of what went wrong, ignoring true causes and effects. Annapolis did not fail because the Palestinians refused to accept another “generous Israeli offer,” but because President Bush did nothing to help the parties bridge the gaps, failing to apply diplomatic tools to encourage their agreement to a US-proposed compromise, as President Carter successfully did with Egypt and Israel.   Similarly, Bush did nothing to hold either party accountable for their commitments under the Road Map, even after promising to “ride herd” on both as he left the company of Sharon and Abbas at Aqaba.

The Road Map and Annapolis were built not only on the wobbly foundation of isolating and excluding Hamas and Gaza, but on an unrealistic, and ultimately failed, American-Israeli bid to topple Hamas by besieging Gaza and its entire population.   This siege, more than anything else, coupled with the lack of real progress on the ground in the West Bank–and not Israeli “concessions”–were responsible for the attacks which Israel has endured on its southern communities.   Had Sharon truly wanted to promote peace by withdrawing from Gaza, rather than to simply cut Israeli losses and bury any serious peace plan in “formaldehyde”–as his chief aide Dov Weissglas put it–he would have withdrawn Israeli troops and settlers from the Strip as part of an agreement with Abbas, rather than unilaterally.  In this way, he would have enabled the PA and Fatah moderates to take credit for a diplomatic achievement, rather than allowing Hamas to gain bragging rights before the Palestinian public that Israel had been pushed from Gaza only by its “resistance”–much as Hezbollah did with its Lebanese audience when Barak unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon.

By the same token, Barak’s move was largely motivated by Israel’s need to cut its ongoing losses from guerrilla attacks while Israeli troops remained entrenched in Lebanese territory.   It was a gift to Hezbollah, not a step towards peace, after Barak had walked away from a potential peace treaty with Syria, an act of political cowardice for which President Clinton and his chief Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, have criticized him harshly.   Barak balked on a Syrian-Israeli deal after Assad had committed to the US that under a land-for-peace bargain, Syria would insure that Hezbollah, its client, would be reined in, according to Ross.

You claim that the Arab world wasn’t ready to reach an agreement with Israel when Carter and Brzezinski were in the White House, and that the same is true now–as if nothing has changed in thirty years and there were no Arab peace initiative offering Israel recognition, normal ties and peace with the entire Arab world today; as if the rise of Iran were not providing powerful new incentives for the Sunni Arab states to end the conflict and form a close alliance with Israel and the US.

Nothing’s changed?   Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshal has recently said that his group would not stand in the way of a peace deal between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel.  Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin told the Israeli government that “Hamas rhetoric has changed in recent weeks. ‘Public statements by leaders attest to efforts by Hamas to appear interested in ending the conflict with Israel, based on the model of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in exchange for a long-term hudnah'” or truce–until Netanyahu silenced him.  Netanyahu’s spokespeople claim that these changes in rhetoric are purely “cosmetic” and that Hamas “remains rooted in an extremist ideology which fundamentally opposes peace and reconciliation.”

But the great Jewish historian Walter Lacqueur was closer to the mark when he observed in the 1970’s that “even in the war aims of religious or quasi-religious movements a discrepancy often exists between the desirable and the possible. . . All such movements have come at one stage or another to the realization that with an enemy who cannot be defeated, temporary compromises have to be made.  The old enmity, the odium theologicum, is itself subject to gradual erosion as such compromises become permanent; the formulas of hatred may linger on but they no longer carry the same conviction.”

The latest poll of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion, conducted jointly by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, between May 21-June 3, 2009, showed that “59% of the Israelis support and 36% oppose a two-state solution. Among Palestinians, 61% support the two-state solution while 23% support a one-state solution and 9% support other solutions.” Are you imposing an idealistic, romantic definition of what constitutes acceptance of Israel by Palestinians, rather than a practical and realistic view of what it takes for there to be peace between two countries – whether Israel and Egypt, Palestine or Syria?

It is a categorical mistake to suggest that the Arabs aren’t ready to make peace with Israel because some, notably the Saudis, are unwilling to start the normalization process in exchange for the partial settlement freeze Netanyahu will finally offer. His government has been unwilling to come to a full stop on settlement construction, as requested by the US and the international community, and as required by the Road Map.  Instead, Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will continue building Jewish housing in Palestinian Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, regarded by the Arab world as the future capital of a Palestinian state.   Does this strike you as a wise way to inspire confidence in Israel’s good intentions about a future peace?

As any schoolchild knows, but so many Jewish leaders pretend not to, there can be no two-state solution without sharing Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israelis.    What’s more, Netanyahu remains adamant about continuing to build in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including those in heavily populated Palestinian areas which have no chance of becoming part of Israel under a future peace accord.   To genuinely promote peace, Israel needs to start offering economic incentives to settlers deep in the West Bank to begin returning to Israel, rather than erecting yet more housing for continued settler growth in areas that Israel will most certainly have to leave in any peace deal.

The Saudis want to begin a normalization process only once there is an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.  Even if Netanyahu adopts a partial freeze on settlement building, they are rightly skeptical that he will countenance the establishment of a Palestinian state on fair terms.  Netanyahu’s long-standing opposition to a viable two-state solution, with a territorially contiguous Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, justifies their skepticism.  Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Netanyahu has failed to engender the kind of trust and good faith that would enable Arab leaders to begin an incremental process of normalization with Israel now.   Still, some Arab states–including Qatar, Tunisia, Bahrain and others–will probably agree to further normalization steps in exchange for a settlements moratorium.

Now let’s turn to what may be your biggest concern: that President Obama is pursuing Israeli-Arab peace with a genuine sense of urgency. I’ll address this issue, within the context of the dangers Israel faces with Iran, Hezbollah, Syria and the Palestinians, in the second part of this open letter, which is available here.

B’virkat shalom,

(Gidon) Doni Remba

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