Here's Avnery on 'Paradise Now' and 'Munich,' among the most
powerful reviews or use of them I've ever encountered. -Ed
Uri Avnery
4.2.06
".Shall We Not Revenge?"
IF ONE wants to understand what the Palestinians did on election day, one has
to see the film "Paradise Now", which has been nominated for an Oscar for the
best foreign film, after collecting several prestigious international prizes.
It explains better than a million words.
Its makers - the screen-writer-cum-director, Hani Abu-As'ad from Nazareth, and
the actors, are Palestinians. (Amir Harel, one of the producers, is a Jewish
Israeli.)
The two main characters, Sa'id and Khaled, are suicide bombers. The film
addresses a question that is troubling everyone in Israel, and perhaps
throughout the world: Why do they do it? What makes a person get up in the
morning and decide to blow himself up in the middle of a crowd of people in
Jerusalem or Tel-Aviv? And some of the people also ask: Who are they? What is
their background? How did they come to be like that?
Today, a long time after it was made, the film also answers another question:
Why did the great majority of the Palestinians elect the very group that sent
these people to blow themselves up?
The film answers these questions. Not with slogans, not with propaganda
speeches, nor with an academic report. It does not preach, praise or get mad.
It tells a story. The story says everything. And since not many Israelis are
going to see it, I permit myself to do what is generally not being done: to
tell the story of the film until almost the end.
THE OPENING scene creates the atmosphere: Suha, a beautiful young Palestinian
woman of good family, brought up in France, approaches a checkpoint, one of the
innumerable roadblocks that dot the West Bank landscape. She faces an
intimidating soldier, a mustached face under a steel helmet, in a bullet-proof
vest. Their eyes meet. He does not talk. He measures her up and down, down and
up. He checks her bag, slowly, slowly. His eyes do not leave her eyes.
When he finishes, he returns her documents to her - almost. When she tries to
take them, he raises his hand. Let her make an effort. In the end, without a
word, he orders her with a movement of his head to move on.
Just a few minutes - minutes in which total humiliation, mutual fear and hatred
flow together. The viewer feels that the woman is on the point of blowing
herself up. But nothing happens. She moves on.
Two young men, in their early 20s, in Nablus, the central town of the northern
West Bank. Practically unemployed, like almost all the young men in Nablus.
They have no future. No hopes. Not even dreams. They can do nothing to help
their destitute families. They live at the bottom, in a mixture of boredom,
frustration, despair. Even the cup of tea that a servile but stubborn boy sells
them for 20 cents is cold.
They are bearded, but not fanatical. Religious like everyone else, no more.
They were born under occupation and are living under occupation. Nablus is
surrounded on all sides by roadblocks. There is no work. No nothing. Only
neglect and depressing poverty. The occupation is the central fact in their
lives. Everything begins with the occupation, everything ends with it.
.One of them, Sa'id, meets Suha. Something clicks between them. Just then the
two youngsters receive the message: you have been chosen. Tomorrow you will
carry out a suicide attack in Tel-Aviv.
.An abandoned building serves as the headquarters of the underground. Final
preparations: The beards are shaved off. Their hair is cut. They put on good
suits. They get their pictures taken. A short pep talk, without pathos, from
the chief, a "wanted person" who is a living legend (still living). The attack
is in retaliation for the "targeted killing" of a comrade.
The two look silently on while they are fitted with explosive belts. They are
warned that these cannot be removed without exploding. A spine-chilling moment:
the two see their pictures on the posters that will go up after the deed.
ON THE way. The fence is cut. On the other side, a military jeep suddenly
approaches. Khaled slides back through the breach, Sa'id continues on his way
into Israel. He reaches a bus stop, waits, sees a woman playing with her little
child. The bus arrives. The woman and the child get in. At the last minute
Sa'id hesitates, gestures the driver to move on - without him.
.Among the comrades, panic ensues. Where is Sa'id? Has he deserted? Betrayed
them? Run away? They search for him everywhere. Sa'id, still wearing the
explosive belt, secretly returns to Nablus, looks for Khaled. He comes upon
Suha. While they embrace, Suha says that it's the wrong way, civilians should
not be harmed, it won't achieve liberation from the occupation. But Sa'id begs
the chief to try him again, to give him a second chance. An important detail
comes out: Sa'id's father had been a collaborator and was executed. Sa'id wants
to eradicate the terrible stain, the shame that has pursued him from childhood.
"He was a good man, but weak," he says. "The Israelis exploited his weakness.
It's they who are to blame."
.Finally, the two comrades reach Tel-Aviv. For the youngsters from poor,
run-down Nablus, Tel-Aviv looks like something from another world - shining,
rich, unattainable. Skyscrapers. Girls in bikinis. People frolicking on the
seashore.
At the last moment, Khalid falters and tries to convince Sa'id to give up the
mission. But Khalid returns to Nablus alone. Sa'id goes on to avenge his
father's death.
.Last scene: Sa'id sits in the bus, surrounded by soldiers and civilians. The
camera focuses on his eyes. The eyes fill the screen. We are petrified by what
is going to happen in a moment.
All this recounted in a restrained cinematic language. There are almost no
verbal statements. On the face of it, a banal story, even with light moments:
Khaled is reciting his farewell message before the video camera, the camera
does not work properly, he has to repeat the moving message again and again.
Comrades stand around, eating. He looks at them, stops and has to start again.
And again. A comic interlude.
I STUDIED the faces of the people leaving the Tel-Aviv cinematheque after the
performance. They were silent and thoughtful. For the first time in their life
they have seen the terrorists who are killing us, who blow themselves up among
children, men and women. They see ordinary youngsters, who behave and react as
ordinary people. They see the occupation from the other side, the underside.
I sat in the dark cinema, and found myself in a situation of total dissonance:
we, the intended victims, who could easily have been sitting on that bus, see
everything through the eyes of our murderer. A thought strikes us: that force
will not help here. If we kill those two, two others will take their place. The
fence will hold up some of them, but not all of them. The Security Service,
with the help of collaborators, will prevent some of the attacks, but cannot
prevent all of them - and the children of the collaborators will come to
avenge. When there are people like that, who grow up in these conditions, some
of them will always reach their targets.
The film does not provide solutions. It does not even pretend to be balanced.
It exposes us to the face of a reality that we do not know, from an angle that
we are not used to - and tortures us with the tension of conflicting emotion.
And perhaps also prompts us to think about a solution that will cause Sa'id and
Khaled to turn in a different direction. A solution that will put an end to the
humiliation, to the crushing of personal and national dignity, to the
destitution and hopelessness.
A FEW days later, I saw another film that was nominated for Oscars, the
much-praised film of Steven Spielberg, "Munich". As it so happens, I saw it in
Germany, not so far from Munich itself.
On leaving the cinema, my German host wanted to know what I thought of it.
Spontaneously, without thinking, I said what I had felt throughout:
"Disgusting!"
Only later did I have time to sort out the impressions that I had accumulated
during this very long film. What had disgusted me so much?
First of all, the Spielberg style, a combination of the highest cinematic
technique and the lowest cultural content. It has pretensions to profundity,
with new and revealing insights, but basically it is nothing but another
American Western, where the good guys slaughter the bad guys and the blood
flows like water.
Some Jewish politicians protested against the film for equating the
"terrorists" with the "avengers". And indeed, in several places in the film the
"terrorists" were allowed to declaim some sentences in their defense, about the
injustice done to them by the Jews and their right to a homeland. But that is
only lip-service, a pretense, in order to give an impression of balance. But in
the portrayal of the Munich attack - fragments of which are dispersed
throughout the film - the Arabs appear as miserable, ugly, unkempt, cowardly
creatures, the very opposite of Avner, the Israeli avenger, who is handsome and
decent, brave and well turned-out - in short, the younger brother of Ari Ben
Canaan, the superman of "Exodus".
The Arabs have no qualms of conscience, but the Israelis have scruples in every
interval between murders. They hesitate every time when they blow up / shoot /
cut down one of their "targets"- which they do, of course, only after ensuring
the safety of the wife and children of the victim. They are not just killers,
they are Jewish killers. As an Israeli satirical slogan goes: "Shoot and weep."
The presentation of the affair itself is highly manipulative. It withholds from
the viewer some very relevant facts. For example:
That the post-mortems showed that nine of the 11 Israeli athletes were killed
by the bullets of the pathetically untrained German policemen. (The post-mortem
reports are kept secret until this very day, both in Israel and Germany. But a
powerful person like Spielberg should know about them.)
- That it was Golda Meir and her German colleagues - great heroes, every one
of them - who sealed the fate of the hostages, when they rejected the
kidnappers' demand to take them to an Arab country, where they would have
surely been traded for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
- That the Palestinians, who were killed in revenge for Munich, had nothing to
do with the affair. The Mossad was looking for easy targets and chose PLO
diplomats posted to European capitals, who were quite unprotected.
But most of all I was repulsed by the Spielbergian vulgarity that runs through
the whole film, including explicit sex scenes that are both gratuitous and
particularly unaesthetic.
The film contributes nothing to an understanding of the conflict. It is
basically a routine gangster film, which Spielberg centered on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to garner the longed-for Oscars that have
eluded him until now.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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