Poster
on a Tel Aviv street: '40 years of occupation’
Whilst I was in London, I went to the Palestine Film
Festival, at the Barbican. Two of the films I saw were Matzpen: anti-Zionist Israelis,
by Eran Torbiner, which charts the Israeli socialist organisation (the conscience of Israel as Daniel Cohn-Bendit describes it in the film) from the 60s to now; and Galoot, by Asher de Bentolila Tlalim.
Galoot (Hebrew for 'exile') tells how Asher, an
Israeli in London, begins to see the Palestinian perspective through his
friendship with Khaled Ziada, a refugee from the Palestinian town of Faluja, replaced by the Israeli one called Kiriat Gat. Khaled is president of the Palestinian society at SOAS, where Asher’s
wife Ronit is doing her PhD. SOAS has a strong Arab student body. For the first
time, Asher and Ronit come face to face with people who fear and dislike them
simply for their place of birth: early in the film Ronit expresses her shock
that someone else should be afraid of her – afraid
of me? I’m a nice person.
Asher and Ronit start to examine Israeliness from
the outside. As Asher says, the perspective of ‘exile’ (living in London) is ‘an opportunity to see
things in a different way, giving perspective of distance, disconnection and
hardship.’ Intrigued, he begins to talk to Khaled, who at first does not trust
him, saying that every Israeli could be a Mossad agent. But in time, a
friendship grows, and Asher listens to hard truths about the Palestinian exile
that resulted from the creation of the Israeli state.
‘Faluja was the first time I understood as Jew the
tragedy of the Palestinians,’ says Asher. Faluja was Khaled’s home, his only
home. But now it’s Kiriat Gat and he can not return. Asher finally understands
this as he visits the site of Faluja, now home to Russian immigrants, seeing
Israel with new eyes.
Galoot has been criticised for
not counterbalancing with ‘the Israeli point of view’. But Asher does not
exclude the Jewish perspective – he just refuses to confront: ‘We must not
argue. We must listen.’ He lays beside Khaled’s narrative one of his
own – that of his exile from Tangier,
where he was born. Forced to flee in the dead of night by political threats to
the Jews, Asher’s family had to abandon all their possessions and home; and one
of his wife’s – who returns to the Polish village her murdered family came
from.
As Ronit confronts the fact that creation of her
homeland was predicated on Khaled’s dispossession, she asks how she can remain
in Israel. You can’t live here, and you
can’t live there, she says, from the neutrality of a London park. Her words
echo those of my Tel Aviv friend Gal: ‘What can we do? We can not change it. We
can not stay. But it is our home.’
After Galoot, there was a Q & A. ‘Have you shown your film in Israel?’ an
audience member wanted to know. ‘Yes,’ said Asher. And what was the response?
‘Tears, many of the Israelis were in tears – up talking until 4am.’
‘But why?’ responded the questioner, ‘why were the
Israelis in tears – surely Khaled’s story isn’t news to them? Don’t they know
the history of their country? I just can’t understand.’
‘That’s because you are English,’ said Asher. ‘You
are not Israeli. I mean, we do not know about this. When they hear these
stories it is shocking.’ It’s true – Israelis are taught almost nothing about
the Naqba, the Palestinian ‘catastrophe’, though many live near or on the site
of Arab villages, which today simply no longer exist.
Only 60 years after, the villages look like
ancient ruins – a pile of stone. One that I visited near my family in the North
sits on the top of a hill, and only when my aunt told me what it was did I
understand that we were not standing on a historical site from Roman times. No sign,
no memory, no trace. Not even a smashed gravestone to marked the spot where
once a people lived. Not even the broken names I found in a Polish
garden, site of a Jewish graveyard 60 years ago.
Some, like the ruins of the Elokbi family home in
the Negev, above, have been commemorated, after the destruction, by a sign.
This one reads: Here was the house of
Sheikh Suleiman Mohamed Elokbi, built 1936 and destroyed when the tribe was
expelled in 1951.
‘What you study in school is lies,’ says my friend
Isadora. ‘They tell us there was nothing here, that it was empty sand dunes.
They recreate history, and it’s crazy because the evidence is all around us.’
Another friend, Uri, tells me: ‘I grew up in
Shechmunis. I thought it was a Yiddish word until one day someone told me a
sheikh lived here before – the name of the Arab village was Shekh Muwannis. So I
asked my father, “where are the people who lived here before?” He told me they
had fled.’
‘We must,’ says Asher after the film, ‘take
responsibility for Israeli existence. How to take responsibility for Israeli
existence that recognises the Palestinian rights too – that’s the question.’
But he does not seem entirely hopeful: ‘Is it even possible?’ he asks.
Zochrot, an Israeli organisation, is trying to make
a start. Educating the Israeli public about the Naqba, they put up signs where
former Arab communities were,
restoring, at least, their names. Israeli Jews tear these signs down. This is
the same as the tears. Tearing down the signs and crying are the same.
You are an ordinary israeli, trying to live, pay the
bills and clothe the kids. Every day you travel on buses that sometimes blow
up. Taxis are a privilege for another type of immigrant – not you. You come
from Morocco, Yemen, and no, you can’t go back. Israel is your only home.
What can we do? We can
not change it. But it is our home. Most people, faced with such a dilemma seek to
erase – the feeling or the source. Asher suggests another way: ‘Israelis must
observe the reality and suffer it.’ But ‘to observe and suffer is harder than
seeing a bomb go off and eliminating the bomber afterwards’.
Indeed it is.
Update: this post has now been published in Hebrew at Nana. You can read the Hebrew version here.
