by Ilan Pappe
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.18
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.20
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 t
he 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.21 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.
As the programme also clearly conveyed, until May 1948 there was a paucity of fighters on the other side. In a segment that explored the case of Haifa, which was mostly based on eyewitness accounts, one could detect a more critical approach than could be gleaned from the account in Morris’s book, which talks about flight, not expulsion. But eyewitness accounts, together with rare documentary footage, showed an act of expulsion in Haifa. A tale about Golda Meir’s visit to the city and her uncharacteristic shock at what had been done to the Palestinian population there reinforced the impression that it was not an isolated occurrence. Apparently it reminded her of pogroms and made her consider, for a brief moment, the Palestinian tragedy and particularly the Zionist role in bringing it about. But this soul-searching did not last long, nor did it transform the future prime minister’s later anti-Palestinian stances.
Finally, on the 1948 war itself, the episodes showed how the houses of the Palestinian urban population were taken over, immediately after their eviction or flight, by Jewish immigrants. Unmentioned, however, was the story of rural Palestine, a major issue in the descriptions put forward by Israel’s ‘new historians’ and documented in the works of Palestinian historians, as well as constituting a major theme in Palestinian novels and poems. Here in Tkuma there was no reference to the obliteration of villages and the takeover of their lands, either for existing Jewish settlements or for the construction of new settlements atop their ruins, settlements that quite often bear Hebraicised versions of the old Arab names.
Considerable footage was devoted to the peace efforts after the 1948 war, the very mention of which was a novelty of sorts. In the collective Israeli memory, nothing happened between the warring parties from the time of the armistice arrangements until Oslo in 1993. Having once been attacked as a ‘deceiver’ by one of Israel’s leading historians for suggesting that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, did not seek peace with the Arab world after the 1948 war, I was therefore pleasantly surprised to hear the narrator assert that this was indeed Ben-Gurion’s position, reflecting the description in my book The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951, which had been published few years earlier. Nonetheless, the same narration ended not with the view (held by Morris, Avi Shlaim, and myself) that we missed out on peace because of Israel’s intransigence, but rather with the view offered by the mainstream Zionist historian Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s ambassador to Washington and then the president of Tel Aviv University, who claimed that peace was ‘elusive’.22
In sum, while these episodes relating to the 1948 war did indicate some of the findings of the ‘new historians’, and did show a desire to present the other side’s point of view, it must be pointed out that these revelations and sensitivities were expressed within a mainstream Zionist general framework. They were not the main issue. The sequences dealt mainly with Israeli perceptions of the events of 1948. The viewer thus took in the Palestinian point of view and the Palestinian disaster in only small doses.
There was an overall tone of sadness in the 1948 chapters. Melancholy music accompanied them
, and the Jewish eyewitnesses were carefully chosen to present a unified tragic voice. In fact, the 1948 war as presented in the programme was first and foremost a tragic event in the history of the Jewish people. True, this was a very different approach from that taken in previous documentary films, which tended to look at 1948 as a miraculous year of joy tinged with sadness. But the sadness conveyed by Tkuma was not about the cruelty or futility of war; it was about the need to sacrifice one’s sons for the homeland. In the same vein as liberal Zionism’s assertion that what happened to the Palestinian people was a small injustice inflicted to rectify a greater injustice (the Jewish Holocaust in Europe), the final impression left by the series was that the main tragedy of 1948 was what befell the Jewish community in Palestine. The Palestinian tragedy of 1948 was dwarfed by the personal stories of loss and bereavement on the Jewish side. Again, as with liberal Zionism’s construction of the use of force – a response resorted to only reluctantly, in the face of Arab hostility – the films showed a Jewish tendency to ponder the consequences of a just war, in the mode of the soldiers who ‘shoot and weep afterwards’, if I may again repeat the phrase that emerged as a major theme in collections of conversations among Israeli soldiers following the 1967 war. One suspects that a different director might have chosen footage that would have shown triumphant smiles and warlike enthusiasm on the faces of Israeli soldiers after they had occupyied and destroyed yet another Palestinian village. Instead, viewers of Tkuma saw the tormented face of a highly moral, civilised society that found itself, through no fault of its own, in the midst of war. I know of no other national televised representation of such events that devotes so much footage and energy to moral agonising over what, in truth, was a quite common crime against humanity.