The Idea of Israel (10 page)

As a rule the Arab characters in
Dan and Sa’adia
are anonymous and part of a crowd, while the Jewish forces are humane, courageous individuals. The Arabs are always seen as a massive throng, emphasising the myth of the many against the few, but their numbers are also testimony to their inferiority. The inferior, incited Arab mob used to be as common a theme in Israeli movies about 1948 as it is in British films about the British Empire. Even after it became clear
that 1948 was not a war between few and many, Arabs still appeared for a while as a dangerous mob. Later, during the First and Second Intifadas, and despite the many transformations in the interim in the image of the Arab, mob scenes similar to those in
Dan and Sa’adia
reappeared in the visual and written descriptions of Palestinian resistance of 1987 and 2000.

The incited Arab mob, like the ‘Arab villain’ archetype in Israeli cinema then and now, is motivated by sheer callousness, embedded in ‘Arab nature’. For scholars, the force of these archetypes meant that Arab violence need not be explained, merely described. Thus one does not have to wonder why the Arabs in the orchard wished to destroy a boarding school. In the film, as in mainstream Zionist historiography, it is also unclear why the Arab states launched a war in 1948. In the opening scene, news headlines tell the story of the Arab invasion of Israel, the sirens in Tel Aviv. One headline reads, ‘A Boarding School Is Surrounded by Arabs’. Factual and fictional events mingle in the representation of a reality in which Israel was under siege and in danger of being annihilated. This siege mentality would not subside even as it became increasingly difficult to furnish support for its existence.

The absence of a logical explanation for the Arab attack on Israel in general and on the boarding school in particular signals the worst kind of violence: meaningless and cruel assault. Film is good at conveying unexplainable evil and special cruelty. This same theme appeared even more forcefully in an older film,
Ha-Fuga
(Intermission), made by Amram Amar in 1950, which tells the story of Miriam, a female Jewish soldier caught in the fighting by two Arabs and saved by Gideon, a typically omnipotent Zionist who is the new Jewish male and who is in love with both Miriam and another woman.

The romance is the main theme of the film but its depictions of Arabs are quite striking. In the main, they represent the absolute opposite of the new Jew, Gideon. They are potential rapists and worse. They have no respect for guns or friends. One of the captive Arabs is invited to play cards with the soldiers and shows himself willing to gamble away his rifle and that of his friend – the ultimate sin and crime in the eyes of a militarised society such as Israel.

Dan and Sa’adia
, too, engage directly with Arab characters. Although the Arabs are the enemy that defines the reality, their basic function is to provide the setting and background for a closer examination of the internal tensions in Jewish society between men and women, Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews, the individual and the collective. The Arabs in
Dan and Sa’adia
do not seem to enjoy the ordinary things in life, whereas the staff at the boarding school – the principal, the teacher Aviva, the poet Uri, the shepherd Yoram (who is in love with Aviva, who is in love with the principal) – are three-dimensional, humane characters. These people get hurt and wounded; they love and ache. They are real human beings with emotions and personalities, and thus the viewer forms a bond with them. Not so the Arabs who meet in the orchard – we know nothing about them, not even their names.

Another dismal, pathetic character who crops up in this and similar films on the war is the new Jewish immigrant, who is easily identified by his heavy accent in Hebrew and is often overweight and cowardly. This anti-hero is also an anti-Sabra. The immigrant appears as stereotypical as the Arab, but there is a difference between the two. The immigrant will eventually be modernised and nationalised, mainly through military service. But the violence of the Arabs is explained by their savagery, which directly as well as indirectly leads to thoughts, not of how to modernise them, but rather how to get rid of them.

Cinematic representation of the early chapters in the Zionist narrative relies in part on the visual apparatus of marginalisation and exclusion. Thus, for instance, Axelrod’s
Tree or Palestine
focuses on the history of the Jewish community during the closing ten years of the British Mandate. It is a collage of documentary footage, edited in both an amusing and a nostalgic way. It begins with a scene in which one can see Arabs and camels resting beneath trees. In the background plays the Zionist song ‘Anu Banu Artza’ (‘We Came to Our Homeland’). The Arabs in this scene appear as a pagan, primitive tribe. The narrator explains that they know nothing about mechanised agriculture. ‘Is this our coveted homeland?’ asks the narrator in a lamenting voice. The answer is no, not as long as ‘they’ are there.

This is no different from the representation of the Arabs in
Dan and Sa’adia:
essentialist, simplistic, reduced. It is typically Orientalist, but with one important variant: above and beyond the familiar Western condescension are additional thick layers of animosity, suspicion and racism. More blunt than dry academic discourse, cinema carries these emotions straight to the viewer.

More important, film presents the Arab as a danger to be removed, although it was not until the emergence of post-Zionist cinema in the 1990s that their actual removal was addressed in any Israeli feature or documentary about 1948. Nevertheless, the fate of the Arabs is an issue that arises in such films. They expose the typical colonialist dilemma concerning the evil enemy of the benevolent empire who foolishly decides to resist the takeover and occupation of his homeland. He is both harmless because of his primitive essence and yet dangerous because of his savagery, and therefore needs to be countered by a combination of sophistication and exceptional heroism.

This dual colonialist view of the indigene appears repeatedly in adventures such as the tales of Jules Verne and Rudyard Kipling. But in
Dan and Sa’adia
, there is a different formula: the savage enemy is defeated by children. One must then ask, How dangerous could the enemy be if children can outsmart and crush him? And indeed,
Dan and Sa’adia
directly and clearly exposes the problematic messages of the annihilation myth – how to reconcile the pathetic Arabs that appear on-screen as stupid grown-ups who can easily be overpowered by two children, with the belief that Arabs are as bad and dangerous as the Nazis? The film presents the Jewish community in Palestine as facing destruction, and yet the threat comes from a handful of pitiable Arabs. As a result, the contradictory messaging about the nature of the menacing Arabs undermines the myth of annihilation, even though this contradiction is softened somewhat by the contention that the unsophisticated Arabs are dangerous because of their numbers rather than their capabilities. In Hollywood, it requires physically and mentally superhuman heroes, such as those played by Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis, to defeat Arab and Islamic evil. Not so in Zionist cinema. There, the contradiction between a pathetic enemy and the myth of Zionist heroism is not so easily resolved.

Another example of the heroism of the young is the popular children’s story
Shemona B’Ekevot Ahat
(Eight Trail One), which was also made into a 1964 film, tells the story of eight children in a kibbutz who succeeded in a capturing a dangerous Arab spy whom the army had failed to catch. Throughout the film, the children sing, ‘We are united and fearless / Forward going and courageous / We will defeat the enemy.’
²⁷

All told, the Israeli sense of pre-eminence, as manifested in cinema, is a combination of a racist superiority complex intertwined with pathological hate. Just as the Israeli is the eternal villain in the Palestinian national ethos, so too is the Arab the eternal villain in the Zionist ethos. Often, one does not even know whether the villain is Palestinian, Syrian or Egyptian, since the Israelis did not recognise the Palestinians as a separate nation.

Court Film-makers and the Documentary

Documentary films that deal with 1948 are not easily liberated from the foundational mythology and negative image of the ‘other’. A prime example is a series of documentary films titled
The Palmach Tents
, which follows the war through the history of the Hagana’s storm-troopers, the Palmach. Some instalments in the series appeared as late as 1988.
²⁸
These films can be found in every secondary-school film library and show how little had changed in Israeli documentaries until the late 1980s. The first film in the series proudly surveys the story of the
Mista’arvim
(literally, ‘those who became Arabs’), the spy unit of the Hagana. It relates their adventures during their infiltration of the throngs of refugees expelled from Israel in 1948. Prior to this episode, the refugees had almost never appeared in documentary films; here they appear, visually speaking, but are not referred to as refugees. Rather, they are simply shown, unnamed apart from being identified as Arabs who left. It would take a long while for film-makers and historians to refer to the Palestinians as refugees, and even longer to ponder in hindsight the immorality of such espionage.

The ideology and culture of documentary films depend greatly on the historiographical consultants who work on these projects. In the case of
The Palmach Tents
, parts of the series, including the story of the
Mista’arvim
, were produced with the help of the official historians of the IDF. The second episode in the series was about the Negev Brigade; for that episode, the consultant was Meir Pa’il, whose challenge to the classical Zionist narrative on 1948 went as far as possible without exiting the Zionist parameters. Pa’il was the first to debunk the myth that the 1948 war was fought between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. Basing his analysis on a sober assessment of the number of troops involved, and their level of preparation and quality, he contended that the Jewish side had military superiority on every level in the 1948 war. This was the first-ever documentary to admit that Plan Dalet, which was prepared by the Hagana in March 1948, was in essence a blueprint for the takeover of rural and urban spaces in Palestine. In the film, Pa’il even goes so far as to declare that some villages were uprooted by force, although he maintains that they were the exception, and that most of the villagers simply fled.
²⁹
The third film in the series conformed more closely to the work of the official historians and returned to a one-sided presentation of the history and stereotypical images of the Arabs.

At the same time, during the first couple of decades after the 1967 war, when documentary films were still loyal to the mainstream Zionist version of the idea of Israel, a small group of brave and unusual individuals began to question the validity of this version in general and the 1948 chapters in particular. They paved the way for a substantial challenge that in turn fostered more open, and less Zionist, documentaries as well as fictional representations of the 1948 war. The following chapter tells their story.

PART TWO

Israel’s Post-Zionist Moment

FOUR

The Trailblazers

T
owards the end of his life, one of the early anti-Zionists in Israel, Maxim Ghilan, became my friend. When I met him, he was living in dire conditions, barely making ends meet in the harsh reality of Tel Aviv. And yet with the last penny in his pocket, along with my own small occasional financial contribution, he produced a fascinating monthly called
Mitan
, which literally means in Hebrew both a load and an IED, an improvised explosive device. The journal was produced on the best quality of paper I have ever seen, which of course tripled the expenditure and reduced Maxim’s living conditions even more. ‘Why do you insist on using such an elegant and costly format?’ I asked him. After all, as with all anti-Zionist publications in Hebrew that appeared both before and afterwards, we had more contributors than readers. ‘This is obvious’, he answered. ‘After the catastrophe hits Israel – and it will – only the best-quality paper will survive in the ruins, and people would then adopt our progressive ideas.’

Ghilan’s life story is not very different from the other individuals of the first generation of anti-Zionist thinkers in Jewish Israel. They were individualistic, marginalised, and in many ways quixotic. Their nonconformist and lonely existence should be juxtaposed with what we call in this book the post-Zionist moment, when their views were
briefly held by a large number of people. This chapter tells their story and tries to follow its trajectory up to the appearance of the post-Zionist moment in the mid-1990s.

There are two ways of becoming a Jewish anti-Zionist in the State of Israel. You either leave the tribe of Zionism because you witnessed an event conducted in the name of Zionism that was so abhorrent it made you rethink the validity of the ideology that licensed such brutality, or you are a thinker by profession or inclination who does not cease to ponder and revisit the concepts and precepts of Zionism, and the internal paradoxes and absurdities cause you to drift gradually towards a more universal, and far more anti-Zionist, position in life.

This combination of disgust at the way Arabs were treated in the state and the intellectual rejection of the very logic of the dogma motivated the early anti-Zionists. The academy was the last to be affected by such doubts and critiques, but when it was, its output was prodigious, reaching a volume never seen before or since. While future Jewish critics in Israel would rely on high-profile international gurus or well-known theories to explain their criticisms of Zionism, pioneers such as Ghilan attributed their views to a transformative personal moment.