The Idea of Israel (36 page)

An original angle on Holocaust memory manipulation and its relationship with the Mizrachi Jews has been taken by the prolific film director Asher Tlalim in
Don’t Touch My Holocaust
.
¹⁵
In the film, Tlalim monitors a group of Arab and Jewish actors from Israel who participate in a play about the Holocaust, and poses the question of what later generations should know and understand about the horrific event. Tlalim would go on to explore the exilic and Holocaust background of Jewish experience through his 2000 film
Galoot
(Exile).

Tellingly, both Sivan and Tlalim left Israel and emigrated to Europe. In exile, Sivan would make ten films, two of which dealt with the history of Palestine. One of his latest is called
Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork
, which follows the Zionist narrative through a multilayered deconstruction of the story of Jaffa oranges. It uses the Zionist takeover of the citrus industry in Palestine as a microcosmic struggle that represents the conflict in the Land as a whole. Sivan had already dealt with the history of Palestine. His second film was made in cooperation with Palestinian director Michel Khleifi; together they made
Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine–Israel
, a film that follows the fault lines of UN Resolution 181, the Partition Plan, and thus allows them to tell the story of the Nakba through the eyes of both victims and victimisers in a fascinating cinematic conversation.
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Sivan is one of the few Israeli film-makers who have engaged directly with the Nakba. In the early 1990s he was joined by David Benchetrit, whose documentary
Through the Veil of Exile
is both a tribute to and an uncensored stage for the victims of the 1948 catastrophe. Benchetrit’s film is a profile of three Palestinian women from
different walks of life, background and education. Each of them commences her story in 1948. Dalal Abu Kamar comes from the Al Shata refugee camp, Mary Hass is from Haifa and has lived in Gaza since 1967, and Umm Muhammad is from the Ayn Sultan refugee camp near Jericho. The year 1948 serves as a departure point for their personal stories. The story accepts, without any caveats, the chapter of refugeehood as it appears in the Palestinian narrative. The coerced lifting of people into trucks and their expulsion from their homes is accurately reconstructed and powerfully portrayed, as it would be in Palestinian films. By telling the story of Palestinians as real human beings and victims of Zionism – persons with names, pains and hopes, victims not just of 1967 Israel but also of the small and beautiful Israel that all liberal Zionists have nostalgically longed for – this film embodies everything that the cinema, historiography and literature of the classic Zionist era could not have portrayed.

The identification with the other side’s narrative comes out clearly at the very beginning of the film. An Arabic psalm of longing is played while a picture appears of a lorry overloaded with people, passing through arid land, followed by a shot of a refugee camp. The link between the refugees and the world that was wiped out physically in the war is personified in the story of Dalal who is the first witness in the film. The wiping out of her house does not take place in a vacuum; there is a wiping hand as well, that of Israel. Dalal represents a very significant chapter in the national Palestinian narrative, one which had not yet been validated in Israeli fiction. She talks about the sense of temporality that accompanied the first years in the refugee camp; it is this sense that explains why the refugees refused to build stone houses in the camps, and why they believed that the UN Resolution 194 of December 1948, gave them the right to return. This resolution was the basis for their hopes of return and repatriation, regardless of what Israel had done to the Palestinians’ homes or to the course of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

A different aspect of the story of dispossession emerges from Mary Hass’s narrative, in which she describes how the State of Israel’s Caterpillar D9 bulldozers demolished her home. Through its footage, the film confirms her account of Jewish families taking
over Palestinian homes in the neighbourhood of Wadi Nisnas in downtown Haifa. Her description corroborates those found in the documents made available in the 1980s as well as the analyses of the new Israeli history. It is interesting that Mary Hass on one occasion reaffirms the Zionist narrative claim that Palestinians left because they heard on the radio that they should leave, which was proved unfounded by both Erskine Childers in 1961 and Benny Morris in 1992, both of whom saw no evidence for such announcements.
¹⁷

Benchetrit, who is of Moroccan origin, went on to produce a trilogy on the Moroccan Jews. At the end of April 2004, while he was in the midst of making a film about refuseniks and the First Lebanon War of 1982, he went to the Israeli Ministry of Defense for a scheduled interview with the IDF spokesperson. Instead, he was handcuffed, pushed to the floor, and viciously battered by security personnel in the chamber, and spent a long time in hospital with a broken leg and a bruised body. The security team later explained that they thought he was an Arab.
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Not every film-maker went through such tribulations, but maybe this is why these critical, politically orientated documentaries remained the exception that did not represent the rule. Most documentary films were rather more inhibited. Made mainly for national television, they tended to be quite faithful to the official line. Although documentaries shown on television required scholarly consultation, most of the consultants hailed from the mainstream. The lack of empathy for the other side was evident when pictures of Palestinian refugees were shown: the running commentary did not disclose even a modicum of compassion, and the word ‘refugee’ was rarely mentioned.

Some documentary film-makers initially gravitated towards fundamental critique and then returned to the mainstream and tamed their earlier, more subversive instincts. Such was the case of Amos Gitai. At the beginning of his career, in the early 1980s, he already stood out. His first documentary film,
Bait
(home or house, in both Arabic and Hebrew), made in 1980, told the story of a house in Jerusalem undergoing refurbishment. The house had belonged to a Palestinian physician until 1948 when it was expropriated by the
authorities and sold to an immigrant couple from Algiers. The film introduces all the tenants and all those involved in maintaining the house, including the Palestinian masons. A house is often a symbol of stability and certainty, but after 1948 this house, like the homeland, became a symbol of conflict. The film acknowledges the basic Palestinian demand for return, while not questioning the legitimacy of the Algerian couple’s ownership. Similar themes can be discerned, but with much less conviction and clarity, in Gitai’s later films.
¹⁹

This careful navigation between a sober look at the idea of Israel, combined with an inability to be totally dissociated from it, comes to the fore most forcefully in
Tkuma
(Rebirth), an important Israeli documentary series of the post-Zionist era.
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Failed Navigation:
Tkuma

The connection between scholarly and media representations of the past during the heyday of the post-Zionist critique is best demonstrated through a focused look at the television series
Tkuma
. It presented the history of the State of Israel and was broadcast on the country’s official television channel in 1998, during the jubilee celebration of the founding of the state. It was meant to be the centrepiece of Israeli television’s efforts to participate in the festivities. The name of the documentary is very much in line with Zionist mythology:
Tkuma
means the resurrection of the Jewish people in the redeemed land of Palestine. But this explicitly Zionist title was attached to a television programme that in part conveyed a post-Zionist message, or at least experimented with post-Zionist interpretations of major chapters in Israel’s history. The title was the wrapping of the package, the framework within which the message was conveyed, and it blunted the sharper edges of post-Zionist criticism. Moreover, the post-Zionist views were presented within a traditional Zionist metanarrative that interpreted the reality of Palestine as exclusively Jewish. But while the history was still told as a Zionist story, there were indications that there was a counter-story as well. The fact that the other side’s story received less coverage than the Zionist one created an imbalance that
might have indicated to the viewer which story was the more truthful. Still, on several occasions the program provided Israeli participants’ verification of Palestinian claims. At times, even the narrator himself presented the Palestinian view as just, and in so doing left viewers with an ambiguous and probably confused impression.

The tension between the wish to retell the Zionist story and, on the other hand, the desire to be even-handed by presenting the Palestinian view takes different forms. Each segment is prefaced by a bombastic and sentimental pro-Zionist monologue by Yehoram Gaon, one of Israel’s most popular singers. A narrator then tells the story with great pathos, from a Zionist perspective, but at times the narrative is interrupted and challenged by eyewitnesses: Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, and, for the segments dealing with Israel’s conduct towards its Mizrachi citizens, North African and Iraqi Jews.

Given the demise of the post-Zionist approach, or at least its temporary disappearance in the early twenty-first century, one can assume the series did not have a significant impact. However, it is interesting to view it through its ambiguities, as these lie at the core of any future success or failure of critiques of Zionism from within.
Tkuma
demonstrates the tension between conformity and criticism, and exposed the abortive attempt to navigate safely between them.

Tkuma
had twenty-two segments, but I will deal here only with those relating to the subjects at the heart of the post-Zionist critique: the essence of Zionism, the 1948 war, and the treatment of Israeli Arabs and Mizrachi Jews in the early 1950s. The series was quite openly critical of Israel after 1967, but as mentioned in previous chapters, this kind of criticism fell well within the parameters of legitimate Zionist discourse. Hence, these later segments, though quite poignant and intriguing, were of less interest as examples of post-Zionism. Although the historical picture of the pre-1967 events was still very much ‘diet Zionist’ in character – in that it cherished the period before 1967 as blissful and just while attributing all of Israel’s wrongdoing to the 1967 occupation – the series did reveal significant cracks in this idyllic view. In general, it suggested that Israel was less moral in its conduct in 1948–49 than had commonly been depicted, that it was discriminatory and abusive in its treatment of its Arab and
North African Jewish citizens, and that it was aggressive towards its neighbours and inflexible when there was a chance of peace in the region. The post-1967 chapters showed how past conduct explained present behaviour, and how these early characteristics continued in various guises into the 1990s.

There were also more mundane reasons for the different approaches seen in the different chapters and periods. Though the series had a general editor, each segment was written, produced, and directed by a different team. And while a committee of five well-known mainstream historians acted as consultants for the entire series, the directors of the various segments tended to be far more critical and more post-Zionist in their views than were the general consultants.

As the program is devoted to fifty years of Israel’s existence rather than to the history of Zionism per se, the origins and essence of Zionism were minimally addressed, and those references to the pre-1948 period that did exist were very much in line with the official Zionist version. Hence, by not dealing with the essence of Zionism – for instance, by not examining Zionism as a colonialist project – the series’ overall message was a far cry from the message that emerged from the works produced by post-Zionist academics in the 1990s.

The two segments devoted to 1948 were important because they served as an overture to the entire series. One of the consultants for these two segments was Benny Morris. He was not a chief consultant (that is, a member of the consultative committee), but he was mentioned in the credits, and more important, one can feel his imprint. Some of the episodes described in the segments covering 1947 and 1948 read like passages from his book
The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949
. The most important effect of Morris’s involvement was the relative centrality accorded to the refugee problem in the historical discussion of the 1948 war. Hitherto, the refugee problem had occupied only a marginal place in the overall picture drawn by official Israeli historians. Not only did the refugee issue assume greater importance in the story presented here, but also included was a discussion of why the Palestinians had left their homeland. The answer, however, was a diluted Zionist and ‘Morrisian’ one: half the population fled, and half were expelled. The
segments made no mention of Israel’s traditional explanation for the exodus: a general Arab order for the population to leave.

The programme introduced the evidence through eyewitnesses; there were no historians, just participants. A few Palestinian witnesses mentioned their belief at the time that they could leave because they would later be saved by the Arab world, but none mentioned a call or an order to leave. Most told a story of outright expulsion and uprooting. The segments also dealt at relative length with the question of massacres. There was an admission that Deir Yassin was not an isolated case. Other massacres were mentioned in general terms, though only Balad al-Shaykh was referred to by name (on the very last night of 1947, Jewish troops massacred the men of this whole village, on the eastern outskirts of Haifa, as retaliation for an assault on Jewish workers in the nearby refineries). This was a far cry from even Morris’s own guarded accounts of many other massacres, let alone what is engraved in the collective Palestinian memory as described in seminal works such as Walid Khalidi’s
All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948
, or even what was since proven as valid by other works with a less Zionist tint.
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Still, an Israeli confession of atrocities committed in the past represented a breakthrough. In the course of the programme, a senior Israeli officer utters a sentence that has haunted me ever since I heard it. When asked about the ‘purity of arms’ – that Israeli oxymoron born in the 1948 war – he shrugs off the question with a bitter expression on his face. Of course, he says, the Israelis could not have adhered to the ‘purity of arms’ while fighting the civilian population. Each village became a target, he says, and they all ‘burned like bonfires’. He even repeats the horrifying description: ‘They burned like bonfires they did, like bonfires’ (
Hem ba’aru kemo medurot, kemo medurot hem ba’aru
). And in those conflagrations, he admits, the innocent as well as the combatants perished.