Israel and Palestine in two films

Omar (Hany Abu Al-Assad – Palestine) 96 minutes

Common State – Potential Conversation 1 (État commun – Conversation potentielle 1) (Eyal Sivan – France) 124 minutes

Hany Abu Al-Assad’s Omar, which won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes this year, is probably the first film to use Israel’s ‘separation barrier’ in the West Bank (also known, with some justification, as the apartheid wall) as a prop. The eponymous hero, Omar, a young baker (Adam Bakri), scales it daily, to visit his friends Tarek and Amjad, who live just the other side but whom the wall has placed at an improbable distance. Omar runs the risk of being shot by the Israeli Defence Force and on one occasion is routinely humiliated by a patrol, once they are satisfied he is not carrying any weapon or explosives.

Omar joins Tarek and Amjad in a nocturnal sortie against the IDF in which Tarek shoots a soldier at a posting, fatally wounding him. Omar is then swept up in an Israeli raid and he disappears into the sprawling black site that is the Israeli prison system. A pair of cops – both, oddly, played by actors of Palestinian origin – try to wheedle the name of the gunman out of them; one (Joe Sweid) tortures him in scenes remarkably similar to those in Zero Dark Thirty but filmed with far less ambiguity, the other, Rami (Waleed Zuaiter) is more in the ‘good’ vein, and is able to half-coax an admission of guilt from Omar by passing as a Palestinian prisoner. Rami tries to get Omar to work as an informer and, when Omar resists, he turns him out into the world, figuring that the suspicion he has ratted out his comrades will be punishment enough (a similar plot device was used in Sergei Loznitsa’s In the Fog). Omar strikes a deal, promising to deliver the gunman to Rami within thirty days but he is only buying himself time, as he hopes to marry Tarek’s sister Nadia (Leem Lubany).

Omar is a militant, fast-paced thriller, that is notable for the way it constantly refers to a world outside the decreasing parcels of land Palestinians live on in the Occupied Territories. Omar and Nadia talk about fleeing the place, about going to Paris for their honeymoon, even though they each know it is unlikely. Jokes refer to distant lands, Omar’s younger sister excitedly criticises José Mourinho’s benching of Karim Benzema at the dinner table, an informer pleads for his life, saying he only informed for money to visit New Zealand, because he has never seen the sea. Hanging behind the desk in Rami’s office is a large-format high definition photograph of a beach, clearly intended to tantalise young Palestinians who have never seen the Mediterranean, which lies only twenty miles or so to the west. And as if the eating away of the Palestinian homeland were not bad enough, our hero is subject to even more claustrophobic closure, hemmed in by the suspicions of those in his own community and the demands of the Occupier. Al-Assad, who won a Best Foreign Film Oscar for Paradise Now, chooses a radical move to cut through the Gordian Knot. It’s a bold move and one unlikely to win him a second Oscar for its disavowal of a fictitious peace process.





That fictitious peace process has also led to the death of the two-state solution. Twenty years on, the Oslo Accords are in tatters, as Israel continued to violate international law by colonising the West Bank, and discontent with Fatah led to a hardening Islamisation of Palestinian society. The one-state solution has gained increasing ground over the past decade, championed by the late Edward Said and theorised by the likes of Ali Abunimah and Omar Barghouti. The main reason for its appeal is an acceptance that settlement building is so total now that a territorial Palestinian state, as envisaged by Oslo, is an impossibility. This was acknowledged by Tony Judt following visits to the West Bank in 2004, something which did not go down well in the West, where support for the charade that is the peace process remains a strategic imperative. Even sectors of the Israeli right, such as former Knesset Speaker Abrum Burg, are recognising the reality that Israelis and Palestinians may one day have to share the same binational state.

French-based Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan gathers together a number of people from both the Jewish and Palestinian camps and has them give their views on the possibility of a single state. These range from Omar Barghouti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, Palestino-Israeli Knesset Member Haneen Zouabi, Israeli academics Ilan Pappe and Ariella Azoulay, Arab rights lawyer Hassan Jabareen, Jewish poet Eliaz Cohen, Palestinian economist Leila Farsakh, Hadash party member Yael Lerer (who also has a cameo role as a lawyer in Omar) and Ha’aretz journalist Gideon Levy. The interviews are shown in split-screen and are filmed as binomial dialogues. The artifice makes the film more art-installation than anything particularly cinematic but Common State is compelling nonetheless.

You can argue that the principals are all of an intelligentsia far removed from popular sentiment on either side of the divide – it is definitely true that all those interviewed are broadly left-leaning and there is none of the toxic racial determinism so widespread among Israelis or the opportunistic Holocaust denial and anti-semitism that blights some Palestinian discourse. Still, it can’t be denied that this attempt at a ‘potential conversation’ is lucid and intelligent. The one-state solution is dismissed by many as utopian and detached from reality – given how neighbouring communities even in rich countries such as Canada and Belgium can’t get along – but the ideas broached here are about a shift in mentality rather than a project for an immediately tangible state. Roucham Marton, the only interviewee old enough to remember life before 1948, says it was a time marked by more tolerance than the present (despite real atrocities committed by either side) and that she prefers not to talk of love, ‘because love always ends in tears’. Sival, whose criticism of the Israeli state has earned him smears from the likes of French Zionist Alain Finkielkraut, is to be commended for this colloquium. The comments contained within it will seem inconceivable to many who are trapped inside the confines of two-state orthodoxy but in decades to come, it will be these interviewees who, for better or for worse, will be proven right.

Once I Entered a Garden – Avi Mograbi

Once I Entered a Garden (Nichnasti Pa’am Lagan) (Avi Mograbi – Israel/France/Germany) 97 minutes

Avi Mograbi’s 2005 film Avenge But One of My Two Eyes was not seen by many people outside of Israel or France but it is, in my opinion, the greatest documentary of the past decade. It was several films in one – a ruminative video diary, a reportage on the suicide-valorising Samson and Massada cults prevalent in Israel, a journey into the weirdness of the settler far-right (the title comes from a song by a Hasidic punk band), and a polemical testimony to the humiliating treatment visited upon Palestinians at IDF checkpoints. Mograbi, a long-time leftist who went to prison for refusing to serve in Lebanon in the 1980s (something his son has since emulated), is like Michael Moore crossed with Chris Marker, with a dash of WG Sebald thrown in for good measure. He is angry without being hectoring, persistently inquisitive and his films breathe discursive ideas.

After 2009’s Z32, in which Mograbi got a former Israeli conscript to re-enact the abuse of Palestinian civilians he was party to, he returns with a film that is more reflective and personal. Again, we have a film of protean form – Mograbi initially intended making a movie about a cousin of his father who lived in Beirut and who was bemused to be caught up in the new reality of Jewish-Arab relations post-1948. Much of that remains in the film, with letters written by the cousin read in French by the Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass overlaid on contemporary footage of his Beirut home shot to look like old Super-8. But the bulk of the film is recorded conversations between Mograbi and his friend and Arabic teacher, the Palestinian academic Ali Al-Azhari.

The pair search through old documents looking for traces of Mograbi’s ancestors and riff on everything from the Nakba, the relative freedom of movement of Israelis and Palestinians to hummus, olives and the Arab Spring. They visit Al-Azhari’s childhood home, from which his family was expelled in 1948, and which now bears a sign saying ‘forbidden to foreigners’. There is barbed humour: when Mograbi says his Arabic lessons are making Al-Azhari a rich man, the Palestinian replies ‘that’s payback for the Nakba’. The dialogue is in both Hebrew and Arabic (with the subtitles colour-coded to help the uninitiated distinguish them) with Mograbi clearly less confident in the latter, stopping from time to time to ask Al-Azhari how to say certain words. It’s a visible humbling of the big bearish man seen in Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (though, to be fair, Mograbi has always engaged in self-deprecation in his films) and his newly-grown moustache gives him an avuncular Mitteleuropean air. It is rare that you see the process of language-learning on screen and the resonance of the exchanges in Arabic might be lost on anyone who has not turned that significant corner in learning a language when the words finally start to flow.

Though Mograbi and Al-Azhari are clearly not terribly representative of their respective communities – Mograbi is well to the left and more conscious of his Arab heritage than the vast majority of Israelis and Al-Azhari, despite being dispossessed as a child, has a prestigious job and lives relatively comfortably by Palestinian standards – there is a real sense that we are witnessing a dialogue between nations. It is a languid dialogue, one in which Al-Azhari’s sprightly and smart eight-year-old daughter intervenes with perorations on racism at her Tel Aviv school, and it is reminiscent of a Middle Eastern My Dinner With André. You wonder if Mograbi has given up on the more confrontational demotic documentaries of his earlier career, but Once I Entered a Garden is a wonderfully rich work that traces a shared history in a region that too often seems irrevocably divided.

The Attack – Ziad Doueiri

The Attack (Ziad Doueiri – Lebanon/Qatar/France/Belgium) 102 minutes

The Attack, the third film by Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, is a rare examination of Israeli society by an Arab filmmaker. Filmed in Tel Aviv and Nablus on the West Bank, it was banned in Doueiri’s native land, as well as in all other Arab League countries, for violating laws forbidding the normalisation of relations with Israel. It was an obtuse sanction, though entirely predictable and surely one Doueiri himself would have foreseen. Israel does not come out of the film, based on renegade Algerian army officer Yasmina Khadra’s novel, terribly well, but Doueiri’s film is not especially partisan either.

Palestino-Israeli actor Ali Suliman plays Dr Amin Jaafari, a West Bank Palestinian, who has risen, in the face of prejudice and suspicion, to become one of Israel’s most brilliant surgeons. The film begins with him receiving the country’s highest distinction for his profession. He speaks of tolerance and understanding, noting that all Arabs are a bit Jewish and all Jews have a bit of Arab in them. The next day however, a suicide attack in Tel Aviv kills 17 people in a restaurant in the middle of a children’s birthday party. Jaafari treats the victims, one of whom refuses to be operated on by an Arab doctor. After returning home later that evening, he is summoned back in, to be told that his Christian Arab wife (Reymond Amsalem) – whom he believed was visiting her family in Nazareth – was killed in the attack and is suspected by police to have been the bomber.

Dr Jaafari is incredulous that his wife could have been guilty yet he is taken in for questioning and subjected to borderline torture by the police. He is eventually released but his position at the hospital is then in jeopardy and there is even talk of stripping him of his Israeli citizenship. His house is vandalised and he decides to visit his family in Nablus for what appears to be the first time in decades. This is where the film falters badly. There are too many questions to be asked of the back story. Would a Palestinian from the occupied territories seriously neglect his family for so long, no matter how embedded he becomes in Israeli society? And even if that is possible, why does he remain in regular contact with his nephew Adel (Karim Saleh) when the latter is up to his eyeballs in paramilitary activity?

For all Suliman, previously seen in films such as Paradise Now, Lemon Tree and Body of Lies, tries to invest his character with real emotion, he is hampered by a script that ordains Jaafari be little more than a binary value, to be switched back and forth according to the plot’s meanderings. He is either the ‘Good Arab’ of Israeli social taxonomy, or he is an Uncle Tom for the Palestinians. Doueiri, who started off as a camera operator on Quentin Tarantino’s early films before making his debut with the fine Lebanese Civil War drama West Beirut, produces a slick, tense film that is very much in the style of contemporary Hollywood thrillers. But it is a bit too talky to really pass muster as one; the film’s efforts to resolve in the final ten minutes the lingering tension between inter-racial tolerance and national resistance are also too easily won. The Attack has much about it that is admirable and it is for the most part an intelligent film but its overly-schematic nature and narrative short-cuts make it ultimately disappointing.

5 Broken Cameras – Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi

5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat/Guy Davidi —  Palestine/Israel/France/Netherlands) 94 minutes

Palestinian farmer-turned-video journalist Emad Burnat’s Oscar-nominated film 5 Broken Cameras is a sharp piece of activist documentary whose very existence is a blow struck against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

In the film’s opening sequence, Burnat lays out his five cameras, all of them smashed and unusable; the five of them are of progressively more professional quality, reflecting his own blossoming into a talented video-journalist. The film documents, in linear sequence, the lifetime of each camera, using the footage shot by each of them. Emad started filming initially just out of amusement, to film his young family as they grew up and to document the lives of his fellow villagers, in Bil’in, a hill-side village in the West Bank.

When engineers turn up one day in 2004, and seal off the villagers’ land to start building a Jewish settlement, Emad begins to film the weekly protests he and the villagers mount against the construction. (The arrival of the engineers is portrayed, quite sardonically, in the classic natives-meet-colonisers mould  – a coy but perfectly legitimate formulation.) When Emad’s first camera is irreparably damaged, he acquires a new one and continues filming. Cameras have been a vital tool for the popular protests against the Occupation in recent years, with both Israeli and Palestinian human-rights NGOs distributing them and training activists in their use. The Israeli Defence Force, unhappy with their illegal activities being recorded, do their best to impede the filming, either by coercion or outright violence – three of Emad’s cameras meet their end at the hands of either bullets or tear-gas canisters. The structure of the film, then, embodies the tenacity and the stubbornness of the villagers’ resistance, and, you might say, the Palestinian resistance as a whole. The cameras break but each time they are replaced and filming continues.

And all Emad need do is film. The IDF obliges with its actions, having a trigger-happy policy of shooting protesters they find irritating, even when they know they are in full view of the camera. Probably the most shocking scene of the film, in fact, is not the shooting dead of one of the villagers (which is shocking enough) but one where an Israeli soldier shoots a manacled prisoner in the leg, gangland-style. The military constantly threaten Emad, as well as other camera-men, telling him he is encroaching on a military zone (including once when he answers the door in the middle of the night). As the resistance to the settlement gains momentum – and draws support from Israeli and international activists – the IDF takes to swooping in the middle of the night and arbitrarily arresting the village children.

After several years of facing off with the IDF and thuggish settlers – mostly peacefully, with the occasional outbreak of stone-throwing by local youths, the village finally gets help from an unlikely source – the Israeli Supreme Court, which orders the Israeli separation fence to be moved, thus giving back some of the villagers’ land. It’s not much of a victory though as the same year, the Supreme Court also rules the Mattityahu East settlement legal; meanwhile more and more Palestinian land gets eaten away, making a further mockery of the Oslo Accords and the two-state solution, which is now dead in the water. The Israelis are, in the words of Palestinian-American activist Ali Abunimah, eating the pizza while negotiating over it.

There are two sides to many aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict, some much more asymmetric than others. On the Occupation, however, there are no two sides. Israel’s continued presence on the West Bank is a violation of international law, the Geneva Conventions, countless UN resolutions, the Oslo Accords and even Israeli law itself. Burnat and his Israeli co-director Guy Davidi may, naturally, be selective in what they show in their montage, as any documentarist will be, but the presence of Israeli troops and settlers on Burnat’s camera absolves him and Davidi of any responsibility to be scrupulous. Israel and its citizens are trespassing on land occupied following a conflict and the directors of 5 Broken Cameras are under no obligation to show their side of the story.

5 Broken Cameras is as much a testimony as it is a documentary. It is a glimpse of the long view the Palestinian people have come to adopt in recent decades, even as hopes have been dashed and their military and political representatives have been rendered ineffective. And the Palestinians, outraged as they are, have also learned to be phlegmatic. When Burnat and his wife and son Djibril, a child whose young life is itself documented by the film, went to Los Angeles to attend the Oscars, they were detained by US Immigration, who refused to believe his reason for being there. Though clearly unimpressed by the INS’ attempt at humiliating him, he shrugged it off, saying it was something he and other Palestinians experienced on a daily basis. Emad Burnat will have more cameras broken, and may even end up in hospital again, as he did during the course of filming, but he won’t be giving up the fight too easily.

A French Paradox

Following on the controversy over the Toronto International Film Festival's showcasing Tel-Aviv a couple of months back, the roadshow moves on to Paris. Le Forum des Halles, the excellent municipal-run cinemathèque in the Les Halles shopping centre is hosting 'Tel-Aviv : le paradoxe', a season of films set and filmed in the Israeli city, which celebrates its centenary this year. The season, which started yesterday and runs until the 25th of November, contains a far wider range of films than were shown in Toronto, both contemporary and from the past, such as Ephraim Kishon's Arvinka (1967) and Avi Nesher's Dizengoff 99 (1979). Unlike Toronto it also looks likely to be a more self-critical look at the city (the title alone suggests that) with prominent leftist filmmakers Eytan Fox, Amos Gitaï and Ronit Elkabetz among others appearing as guests, a series of debates on Tel-Aviv's bubble-like status as a tolerant liberal haven strangely free of an Arab population, and there's even place for Hany Abu-Assad's Oscar-winning Palestinian film Paradise Now, which tells of two Palestinians' attempt at a suicide bombing in the city.

But not everyone's happy. There's nothing like the brouhaha that followed John Greyson's protest at Toronto, but prominent pro-Palestinian activist Michèle Sibony (who, for what it matters, is herself Jewish) has written a letter to the cinema directors decrying the decision to showcase Tel-Aviv only ten months after the murderous Gaza invasion. Her letter goes a bit like this:

"You have entitled your homage "Tel-Aviv - the paradox, wishing, no doubt to suggest an ambivalence or a certain ambiguity. Tel-Aviv is not a paradox, it is rather proof: a 'Capital of Segregation and Apartheid'. Constructed on the expulsion and destruction of Palestinian villages, it has completely rid itself of any Palestinian presence since the so-called 'Oslo peace process'. The bubble, as it likes to call it, is a city as white as Cape Town was during the Apartheid years."

Even for those of us sympathetic to the Palestinian cause it's a drearily familiar tread through the verbiage of official letter-writing. Not that Michèle Sibony isn't entitled to her stance but it is curious that the season has failed to stimulate much protest beyond this, and Paris is certainly not lacking militants for the Palestinian cause. Is it the Parisian cinephilia that allows one to dissassociate unpleasant acts and behaviour from enjoyment of good films, or do most people see the season as being far from a whitewash of Tel-Aviv? I suspect it might be the latter. As for  myself, I'll be staying away, less out of conviction, than simply due to the fact I have seen most of the contemporary films showing, including Raphaël Nadjari's excellent Avanim, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's To Take a Wife and Fox's Walk on Water. I have films to watch elsewhere, not to mention fences to tend to before sitting on.

Distorting the Anti-Israel Protests in Toronto

John Greyson's entirely reasonable decision to protest the Toronto International Film Festival's City-to-City spotlight on Tel-Aviv (and the supporting letter from a group of activists, artists and intellectuals such as Naomi Klein, Jane Fonda and Slavoj Zizek) has been predictably distorted and misrepresented by Israel's backers. Greyson cites the war in Gaza (for which both Hamas and Israel were criticised for human rights abuses by the UN this week), the continuation of a long-established apartheid-style policy in the Occupied Territories as reason for his reluctance to allow his film 'Covered' to be shown at a festival which turns a blind eye to the reality of Israel's outrageous flouting of decency and international law:

To my mind, this isn't the right year to celebrate Brand Israel, or to demonstrate an ostrich-like
indifference to the realities (cinematic and otherwise) of the region, or to pointedly ignore the international
economic boycott campaign against Israel. Launched by Palestinian NGO's in 2005, and since joined by
thousands inside and outside Israel, the campaign is seen as the last hope for forcing Israel to comply with
international law. By ignoring this boycott, TIFF has emphatically taken sides -- and in the process, forced
every filmmaker and audience member who opposes the occupation to cross a type of picket line.

The follow-up collective letter to the TIFF protests the spotlight also, correctly pointing out the uncomfortable fissure between a city such as Tel Aviv, that admittedly has its admirable qualities, and the grim reality of Israeli state policy:

The emphasis on 'diversity' in City to City is empty given the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program. Furthermore, what this description does not say is that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada. Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto.

Israel's supporters haven't been long making their voices heard: Marvin Hier of the Simon Wisenthal Center told a press conference that "Tel Aviv is one of the freest cities in the world, warts and all: a model city of diversity, freedom of expression and tolerance, for Arabs and Jews." He added: "It is the height of hypocrisy to single out Tel Aviv. These protesters cannot masquerade their hatred toward Israel." One need only point out the fact that the Tel Aviv distict population is comprised of only 2% Palestinian Arabs, a shockingly low number for a city built on razed Arab villages, to show Hier's model of diversity to be the nonsense it is.

Then a number of Hollywood Jews (their words, not mine) have signed a letter of counter-protest, employing some breathtaking hyperbole to denounce the anti-Israel protest as 'a blacklist', saying that "Blacklisting them [Israeli films] only stifles the exchange of cultural knowledge that artists should be the first to defend and protect. Those who refuse to see these films for themselves or prevent them from being seen by others are violating a cherished right shared by Canada and all democratic countries."

Let's go back to what Greyson said in his letter (my emphasis):

Let's be clear: my protest isn't against the films or filmmakers you've chosen. I've seen brilliant
works of Israeli and Palestinian cinema at past TIFFs, and will again in coming years. My protest is against
the Spotlight itself, and the smug business-as-usual aura it promotes of a "vibrant metropolis [and] dynamic
young city... commemorating its centennial", seemingly untroubled by other anniversaries, such as the 42nd
anniversary of the occupation. Isn't such an uncritical celebration of Tel Aviv right now akin to celebrating
Montgomery buses in 1963, California grapes in 1969, Chilean wines in 1973, Nestles infant formula in
1984, or South African fruit in 1991?

and the collective letter of support (my emphasis once again):

We do not protest the individual Israeli filmmakers included in City to City, nor do we in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF. However, especially in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but a diligent close reading of those two statements reveals to me no hatred of Israel or its film-makers but rather points out the iniquity of doing what is in effect propaganda work for the Israeli state. I don't blame the likes of David Cronenberg, Jerry Seinfeld or Minnie Driver for standing up for Israeli filmmakers and it's quite possible that their knowledge of the controversy was at best flimsy or distorted by the pre-drafted letter of protest they were asked to sign. One must also bear in mind that the majority of the signatories are American, and in much of the US, on the left as well as the right, criticism of Israel is routinely tarred as anti-semitism. But all those signatories should at the very least read the two letters as they were actually published. There is no hatred of Israel nor is there any overly-emotive chest-beating.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I'm a great admirer of recent Israeli cinema, particularly the films of Avi Mograbi, Ari Folman, Shlomi and Ronit Elkabetz, Eran Riklis, Raphaël Nedjari, Keren Yedaya and Eytan Fox. Films by some of them were screened in the TIFF. Israeli films deserve to be seen, not least because they sometimes offer an honest, objective account of Israeli society that is at odds with some of the brow-beating nationalism of right-wing Israelis and their Zionist supporters (Fox's The Bubble is, ironically, a clear-eyed account of Tel Aviv's shortcomings as a 'diverse city'). But Israel, or Tel Aviv, cannot be treated the same as other countries as long as its government continues to flout international law, proceed with policies that border on ethnic cleansing, while at the same time having the gall to accuse those who oppose illegal West Bank settlements of supporting the same. It is likewise disingenuous of an Israeli filmmaker such as Samuel Maoz to claim he might not have won the Golden Lion at Venice, as he did for his war film Lebanon, had Jane Fonda or any other signatories been on the jury. Israeli films get a fair crack of the whip in international film festivals and I know nobody who suggests that they should be boycotted or shunned. Ken Loach was accused of censoring Tali Shalom Ezer's Surrogate at the Edinburgh Film Festival last year when he called for a boycott. But his target was not Shalom Ezer or his film, but rather the fact that the organizers had accepted money from the Israeli government to pay for Shalom-Ezer’s travel costs.

It's true that boycotts of Israel, be they academic or cultural, should be applied with care and discretion (I have no qualms whatsoever about applying economic boycotts) and though they are supported by some on the Israeli left, such as Ilan Pappe and Neve Gordon, they are opposed by others such as Uri Avnery. It is also true that some of those who take a pro-Palestinian stance are motivated more by hatred of Israel than a sense of justice for Palestinians. But the calls of protest against the Toronto International Film Festival were nothing but measured and reasonable.

Update

All credit to Roger Ebert, who, having initially condemned the protest, revised his position when presented with more facts. He said

I'm writing this the day after first posting this entry. I now regret it. The point I make about artists is perfectly valid but I realize I wasn't prepared with enough facts about the events leading up to the Festival's decision to showcase Tel Aviv in the City-to-City section. I thought of it as an innocent goodwill gesture, but now realize it was part of a deliberate plan to "re-brand" Israel in Toronto, as a pilot for a larger such program. The Festival should never have agreed to be used like this.

It's a brave, honest retraction, and one which aims to please neither side of the debate. It also confirms my suspicions mentioned above that some of the Hollywood figures that signed the condemnation of the protest might not themselves have been fully aware of the situation. It all underlines the importance of getting information out to combat the hasbara lies. Even staunch supporters of Israel can view things clearly when they are provided with the truth.

Flagging Orders

We have already heard of Irish hurleys being manufactured in Poland (it appears one-third of our camánaí originate beyond the Oder), of Palestinian keffiyehs being made in China, but hearing that the Free Tibet snow flag is being made to order in a factory in Guangdong despite being banned in China is the strangest piece of news yet.

While I'm quite sanguine regarding the reality of lower manufacturing costs in China or elsewhere these days and I'm not too sentimental about the decline in symbolism occasioned by this, surely this is a desacralisation of old nationalist shibboleths; exposing them to the cold harsh light of global economics may be the beginning of the end.

Bubbling Over

Eytan Fox's Israeli film The Bubble is a curiosity in that it has enough basic flaws to be considered downright bad but side by side with all these faults exists a surprising level of sophistication and radicalism that not only save the film but make it recommended viewing. This bizarre dichotomy is, structurally at least, reminiscent of Israeli society where some very unsavoury reactionary elements coexist with admirably progressive ones.

Fox is one of the progressive Israelis, as are most of the characters in the film, though he is realistic enough to realise that such voices are rare and isolated in contemporary Israeli society. The title of the film refers to the bubble that the secular, cosmopolitan leftists of Tel Aviv live in; the characters are similar to young people in most Western cities, working in graphic design, fancy restaurants, drug-taking, relaxed about sex (particularly gay sex) and so on. The film's trigger occurs when record-store owner Noam returns from his six-month military service at a West Bank checkpoint, meeting a handsome young Palestinian named Ashraf, with whom he starts a gay relationship. Ashraf is quickly absorbed into Noam's circle, as he speaks Hebrew with an Israeli accent (he is played by the Israeli Arab actor Joe Sweid) and is passed off as a Jew.

So far, so Romeo and Juliet. Except of course that the dramatic tension is missing because Ashraf's identity is unknown to the Jews in Tel Aviv and his whereabouts and sexuality unknown to his family back home in Nablus. When Ashraf's cover is blown in the restaurant he's been waiting tables in, he flees back to the West Bank, where his future brother-in-law Gihad, a radicalised Hamas operative, has plans to marry him off to his cousin. Fox and co-screenwriter Gal Uchovsky engineer the plot movements rather clumsily and the film never really convinces in this respect. The young friends also organise a beach party ('Rave against the occupation', as they call it) which they advertise all over Tel Aviv but which manages to attract only about a hundred people.

It is rather in the characterisation and the shrewd political intelligence of the film that The Bubble succeeds. While the young Israelis are sympathetic towards the plight of the Palestinians they have little real understanding of it and are themselves hidebound by their own received wisdom. Fox similarly offers a clear-eyed but sympathetic understanding of Arab family life. The dénouement is something that will have audiences (particularly in the Middle East) arguing over for months to come; some will see it as naïve or even grotesque, others (like me) will view it as a touching and credible synthesis of the tragedy that confronts ordinary people in the whirlwind of political crises such as engulf Israel and Palestine. Fox's film, like its predecessors Yossi and Jaeger and the international hit Walk on Water is unmistakably humanist and conciliatory but it cuts no corners in its analyses of Israeli reaction to terrorism or Palestinian rationale for the same. Its humane portrayal of Arabs alone makes it worth seeing and the opening scene where a Palestinian woman goes into labour at a checkpoint is a tour-de-force.

I also saw Tom di Cillo's latest film Delirious, in which Steve Buscemi's deadbeat paparazzo sees his formerly homeless assistant Michael Pitt rise to fame and bed booty-shaking R&B diva Alison Lohmann. The film is supremely inane in both conception and execution; Buscemi is on auto-pilot, Pitt is his usual catatonic self and you yearn to have both him and a cheap gun within easy reach. A measure of how stupid and sloppily-made the film is is provided by the recurrent sight of the boys getting pissed on what are clearly bottles of non-alcoholic Beck's. And Elvis Costello is in it for some reason; he must owe someone money. A lot of money.