We kiss your ass, General Boom,
If it were not for you we would have kissed Kloom [‘nothing’ in Hebrew]
I remember how you lowered your shoulders when the soldiers fell, General Boom,
I have lost my two sons, but if it were not for you I had Kloom
I remember how your red eyes were flooded with blood, General Boom
I was also flooded a bit with blood, but if it were not for you I would have nothing left but Kloom
This is why we love you, General Boom, your blushy cheeks in the receptions
and your upright chin in the evening papers
Therefore we kiss your ass, General Boom
If it were not for you we would have been left with Kloom.
In this passage from You, Me and the Next War, the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin ridiculed the most revered group of people in Israel’s ethos and history: the combat generals. Levin was born in 1943 in Tel Aviv and staged this play at a small cabaret in the summer of 1968, when the Israeli public was engulfed by messianic euphoria after the June 1967 war.1
From then on, scores of his plays displayed this unwillingness to accept the militarised, nationalistic, Zionist nature of the local culture, politics and human attitudes. He also masterfully brought to the stage the ordinary life of ordinary people, with all their miseries, cruelties and dreams. His play The Queen of the Bathtub, staged in 1970, was a series of sketches that left very little of the Israeli ethos intact. The bruised political élite reacted by censoring the play; years would pass before it would be allowed to be shown again. Other, no less biting plays followed suit in the 1980s and 1990s, always accompanied by public outcry and an attempt by the public censor to silence this highly original and gifted playwright, who died in 1999.
Levin was not the only courageous Israeli playwright, though. Long before the 1990s, Yosef Mundi, Joshua Sobol and many others understood that the stage was a space where the worst could be said through the voices of others. When theatre became less popular, and hence less important in the eyes of the powers that be, these playwrights became even bolder and began to touch the rawest nerves of Zionism, as did the scholars and artists of the post-Zionist age.
But they were only a handful. Israeli theatre, apart from these exceptional cases and the relatively open period of the 1990s, was not only loyal to Zionism, it was a blunt reflection of the idea of Israel. In his comprehensive 1996 book The Image of the Arab in Israeli Theatre, Dan Urian showed that in most plays, Arabs were portrayed as shallow, one-dimensional figures, the objects of the playwrights’ hatred, fear, and hostility.2 Directors generally embellished the racist texts on stage with ‘typical’ Arab traits such as sloppy clothing and slurred speech. These stereotypes were present in plays as early as 1936 and were not limited to the work of right-wing cultural producers alone.
Self-criticism in the theatre, as in other artistic domains, was largely limited to post-1967 Israel and focused on the moral implications for Israeli Jewish society of the never-ending occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This self-imposed limitation, namely, not to pry beyond 1967, was particularly clear in the plays written by liberal and left-leaning Zionists, which appeared in the wake of the First Lebanon War. Since the focus was the effect on the Jews, not the experiences of the Arab victims, in even the more seemingly subversive plays the Palestinians appear as cardboard figures playing secondary roles, while the fully developed Jewish heroes engage in shooting, killing, and torture, but then regret their actions.
There was a non-Zionist approach in the theatre as well, but it was marginal in commercial terms and had no political impact on the society at large. This approach appeared both in translated Palestinian works and in original non-Zionist Israeli plays. One of the translated works was a Hebrew adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s story ‘Men in the Sun’.3 The play, which appeared on the local stage in the 1980s, was a commercial disaster but hinted at the potential of such a glimpse into Palestine cultural production. It is the story of three Palestinian refugees who are trying to escape from Iraq and go to Kuwait, a journey that reflects the despair of being a refugee because of the Nakba. Original Hebrew works, however, were more popular. For example, some of Sami Michael’s stories were adapted for the stage, becoming the first plays to humanise Palestinians by endowing the traditionally shadowy figures with names, histories, and ambitions.4 In this context, one might mention fringe theatre, where one was able to see plays written by Palestinian Israelis depicting the occupation and the lives of Palestinians in Israel through personal and individual stories. An example of this was the 1994 national co-production in Jerusalem, by Palestinian and Israeli theatre groups, of a contemporary version of Romeo and Juliet.5
Yitzhak Laor, although primarily a poet, was one of the few Israelis who created clearly non-Zionist work for the stage, incorporating his general critique of Israeli militarism. Unlike the extroverted liberal Zionists, Laor was less interested in what happened to Israeli society as a consequence of the occupation than in the suffering of the Palestinians themselves. His play Ephraim Hozer La-Tzava (Ephraim Returns to the Army) included realistic descriptions of Shin Bet interrogation and torture; when staged in the mid-1980s, it was censored for a time because of the connection it made between Nazi behaviour and Israeli occupation policies.6
Joshua Sobol may have been less willing to tackle the essence of Zionism but he was very clear when it came to the evils of the occupation. In his 1985 play The Palestinian Girl, he provides a softer version of what Laor conveyed. A prolific playwright who was born in Palestine in 1939, he succeeded in covering in his sixty or so plays every aspect of life in Israel. More often than not, he did so critically, and occasionally even subversively. One of his recent plays, Darfur at Home, has one character shouting the following words, which capture very well the manipulation of Holocaust memory that was explored above:
If you really believed there was a Holocaust, you would not have allowed the Israeli members of Knesset to pass a law that prohibits giving a glass of water to a refugee [referring to the African refugees who began to reach Israel in 2005]. You in your indifference, and the members of Knesset you have elected, who mete out a punishment of twenty years to anyone helping a refugee, you are the proof there was no Holocaust.7
But this was the exception, not the rule. Mostly it was the horrors of the occupation that made their way into the more open-minded and, in a way, post-Zionist theatre of the 1990s. Those who produced these plays are still at it today, but the medium’s popularity has dimmed, and its share of ‘political’ plays has dropped dramatically.
In the early 1970s, the Israeli film director Ram Levy decided to adapt to the screen S. Yizhar’s (Yizhar Smilansky’s) famous story on 1948, ‘Hirbet Hiza’. The story was unusual in that the ethnic cleansing, in this case of a fictional and eponymous village, was described in detail, and raised some moral questions about the criminality of this policy through poignant dialogues between the soldiers.8
Levy went in search of a village, and in talking to Yizhar he discovered that the fictional village was based on a real one, in which similar events indeed did happen. But that village, like another five hundred or so, had been wiped out, and in its stead stood a Jewish colony. After touring the West Bank (in those days, Israelis could move quite easily in the occupied territory), he found a village that, according to Yizhar, resembled the one of 1948. Levy succeeded in persuading the mukhtar, the head of the village, to let him shoot the film there, but the mukhtar agreed on condition that the local villagers would not be used as extras. With the help of the area’s military governor, Levy then found a more cooperative village willing to supply the people for the film; as the director recalled later, they were transported in with trucks as if it were a military operation.9 The movie turned out to be a powerful fictional representation of the Israeli crime, which only one or two post-Zionist films of the 1990s succeeded in reproducing. The feature-film industry could have challenged the idea of Israel had its practitioners been willing to do so. We will return to it shortly.
The Israeli film industry travelled in a somewhat similar trajectory to that of the theatre. But when it took a critical stance, it went further than any other medium in presenting fundamental challenges to the Zionist historical narrative and discourse. Moreover, any change in approach to reality carried far more significance in cinema than in other forms of media. Film was one of the most popular pastimes in Israel, especially when one considers that the country already had an important and expanding cable system that broadcast commercial films on television about a year after they were shown in movie houses.
The pioneering works of this kind were produced in a highly unlikely place: the studios of Israeli national television. It is possible that this took place because directors who worked for the national television service in the 1970s, unlike their colleagues in the commercial or private film industry, tended to be given funding and not be constrained by ratings (there was only one channel) or commercial consideration. As a result, if they had a radical idea, they could at least make an attempt to translate it into a film – unless they were stopped by politicians, which did happen every now and then. Moreover, as long as there was only one state-owned television channel, considerable effort was invested in creating local drama, much of which was highly politicised.
Levy’s Hirbet Hiza was screened in 1976 on the national television channel, Channel 1, and not in the movie houses. In those days, television programming was supervised by a council of politicians, and when the film was prescreened, they banned it. In an unprecedented reaction, technicians and journalists in support of freedom of speech managed to darken the TV screen at the time that had originally been scheduled for the screening of the now-banned film. A public and legal campaign enabled its brief reappearance.
Subsequently, still using the national television channel, Ram Levy became one of the more prolific contributors to a genre of docudrama that heralded a wave of post-Zionist productions in the 1990s. It began with Ani Ahmad (I Am Ahmad), produced in 1966 before television existed which criticised the state’s treatment of Israeli Palestinians, and continued with Bread (1986), a powerful exposure of Mizrachi life in Israel’s development towns.
Outside the television channels, the film industry followed the nationalist agenda until the early 1970s more closely than any other cultural form except for children’s books. Arabs were depicted on the screen as stereotypical figures – evil, cruel, stupid, pathetic – who end up yielding to the superior Israeli hero. As mentioned above, a not uncommon plot involved Israeli schoolchildren single-handedly capturing armed Arab terrorists or invaders. In what I have been calling the post-Zionist cinema, that approach was radically transformed into a more complicated and humane representation of the Palestinians, in particular those who resisted Israeli aggression and occupation.
The First Lebanon War of 1982 catalysed local cinema’s move in this new direction. Israeli film-makers began to give voice to underprivileged individuals and groups within Israel, though the transformation was of the ‘diet-Zionist’ variety. None of the films deviated from the Zionist metanarrative or from the major chapters in the mythical historiography taught in the schools; rather, they limited themselves to Israel’s post-1967 Palestinian dilemma. Even so, and despite the fact that the film-makers preferred to tell the story of the conflict through romance, this was an impressive development if compared with the 1960s. On screen, the Palestinians became real human beings and, at times, even heroes.
Diet Zionism was replaced for a while during the 1990s with a bolder cinematic effort to engage directly with the essence of Zionism. In fact, film became the vanguard in the local Jewish attempt to reassess Zionism. The relative political openness of the early years after the signing of the Oslo Accords meant that critique and the representation of voices of the deprived could also sell well. Selling is the key factor for cinema, as it is for culture in general, and for a short while it transpired that a film with a radical message could be relatively profitable.
Compared with the academics, the film-makers appeared to be more open about their own ethnic, national, or gender agendas, which they discussed in interviews and seminars that followed film screenings as well as in dialogue written into the scripts. Films for the first time represented the world of Israel’s Arab Jews, whose socio-economic status had only slightly improved since 1948. The films portrayed their growing frustration with the prospering Ashkenazi upper classes, their geographical and social marginality in the development towns and peripheral slums, their limited access to financial resources, and their distorted image in the national narrative. Some of the film-makers who portrayed Mizrachi life also dealt with the Palestinians. Ram Levy, for example, whose above-mentioned films Hirbet Hiza and Ani Ahmad addressed the Palestinians’ situation, dealt with the development towns in Lehem (Bread), a tale of the helplessness and hopelessness of a North African Jewish family pushed to the geographical and social margins of Israeli Jewish society with very little chance of extracting themselves from the dismal reality.
Jad (Yehuda) Ne’eman, a film-maker and scholar who was a powerful voice in the 1990s, commented that those new films conveyed through their texts and subtexts a radical criticism of Zionism.10 Thus far, both fictional and documentary exposure of the abuses of Zionism or the problematic involved in the idea of Israel had had only limited impact on the society. The main reason had to do with the socio-economic background of the film-makers. For all its radicalism, there was still an Ashkenazi predominance in this new wave cinema: most of the films that could be classified as having a non- or even anti-Zionist stance depict the Arab–Jewish relationship in Israel from the perspective of yuppies in Tel Aviv. In the 1980s, Ashkenazi film-makers still dominated the film industry, and they were more interested in the conflict with the Palestinians than in the plight of the Mizrachim. A radical, leftist agenda was defined by one’s position on the Arab–Israeli conflict; not on social issues. Thus, because their agenda was political rather than social, these films could appeal to people living in relative comfort, who could afford to identify with the Other. They were, of course, accepted warmly by Israel’s Palesinians, and in that sense strengthened Arab–Jewish cooperation, but mass audiences in the more deprived areas may have received them differently.
Nonetheless, the fact that some of the films that depicted the Israeli as occupier and coloniser and the Palestinian as victim were shown for several weeks was an indication that they were intriguing enough to create empathy, or at least interest. Indeed, it does seem that the critique genre, whether hidden or fairly overt, was quite popular for a while. This popularity was the result of the curious fusion of an aggressively free-market political economy with the rise of multiculturalism in Israeli society. The continued capitalisation of the Israeli economy also explains the success of, and even the drive for, a more critical response to the local cultural market, not just as a fulfilment of an ideological agenda. As Pierre Bourdieu commented so aptly, both academic and cultural products represent not only political and social transformations but also economic products that need to be marketed.11 This is clearer in the case of the cinema than in that of academia.
In some instances, however, commercial considerations were secondary. What such film-makers wished to do was to connect, or reconnect, to the world they came from – and this was particularly true of Mizrachi and Palestinian film-makers. The Mizrachi film-makers were producing their more critical work at a time when the Mizrachi Jews’ overall economic, judicial and political conditions had improved. But improvement was not enough, at least in the eyes of these artists. They, like other members of their community, were in fact frustrated at the persistent social and economic polarisation within Jewish society in Israel and in particular with the marginal position of their own community in the national myth and narrative.
Yet despite these impressive forays into other perspectives, the treatment of the Other in films and plays was inhibited by the projection of an Israeli image onto the Palestinian. It was as if the other side could be understood only if its heroes acted like Israelis or subscribed to an Israeli concept of reality. For instance, in the 1986 film Avanti Popolo, an Egyptian soldier, speaking in a Palestinian dialect (which Israeli Jewish viewers would not notice), conveys the message of human values common to both sides by quoting Shakespeare’s Shylock. An Anglophile Egyptian common soldier must have been a very rare sight on the Sinai battlefield and yet he was invented to provoke sympathy from the Israeli audience.12
Some of the bravest attempts to show the world through the eyes of Zionism’s victims, as suggested by the late Edward Said, were woven into fictional or real tales of impossible love.13 Romance and sex sell, and romance was the main sweetener for the new views offered to Israeli filmgoers. Most of these films were modelled on a Romeo-and-Juliet sort of plot: a Jewish woman falls in love with a Palestinian man against the wishes of their respective families and societies. In reality, this was and is an extremely rare occurrence – and one which indicates how exclusionary the project of Zionism was. More than a century of settlement did not produce any significant romantic, let alone familial, ties between the settlers and the native population. No other settler society has been that ‘pure’, apart from the whites in South Africa.
The eroticisation of the conflict generates a sensual identification with the heroes. As with Hollywood films about African Americans, so in the ‘enlightened’ Israeli film industry the ‘Arabs’ were exceptionally handsome or beautiful. The focus on sex and beauty permits what psychologists call displacement: instead of identifying with the cause of the general suffering inflicted on the other side, the viewer identifies with the broken heart of an attractive hero. Also worth considering with regard to cooperation, friendship, and even romance across the divide is the interesting difference between the attitude of historians, especially in the new age of relativism and even postmodernism, and that of film-makers. While the historians may deduce an optimistic conclusion from such incidents in history, the cinema usually presents them through the lens of tragedy, as an indication of the unbridgeable abyss that separates the two sides and cannot be overcome. Thus, fiction is far more realistic in its depiction of relationships on the ground than the typical academic illusions about humanity and human beings.
Still, the films in which Jews apppeared as villains and Palestinians as heroes did seem to have an effect at the time. Switching conventional roles challenged the image of the Arab in the Zionist metanarrative. No academic work could reach such a broad audience or produce such a clear message. The best of this kind was the 1989 film Esh Tzolevet (Crossfire), which went beyond the subject of romance and presented, in a way never before seen in an Israeli feature film, a Palestinian perspective on the 1948 war. It warrants extensive mention here.14
However progressive some of the films appearing in the post-Zionist decade were with respect to the occupation and the conflict, almost all of them lacked empathy towards Palestinian positions on the Nakba, in particular the sense of catastrophe and the right of return. What the more critical films did was to challenge the 1967 occupation, although it is true that the Arab, in a timeless sense, does become more humanised and appears, on several occasions, as the hero.
Most of these films lacked a historical dimension; they were located outside any well-charted chronological or geographical framework. The viewer never knew whether the locus was inside or outside the Green Line, or what time or year the events took place. Even so, they did present a Jewish occupier/colonialist and a native Arab/Other.
Crossfire is one of the few post-Zionist feature films that, like the classic Zionist films, dealt directly with the 1948 war. Very few people in Israel have seen the film, either when it first appeared or afterwards, and its maker, Gidon Ganani, does not belong to the ranks of Israel’s hegemonic culture producers. Therefore it is not a good example of any salient trend or development. Yet it clearly shows the potential for an alternative representation of the idea of Israel.
The film is based on a true story: an impossible love affair between George Khouri, a Palestinian, and Miriam Seidman, a Jew. They meet accidently at a British checkpoint circa 1947. While searching Miriam’s belongings, the soldiers toss her basket on the ground, spilling its contents. George helps her collect her things and thus they become acquainted with each other. Miriam works in her mother’s restaurant in northern Tel Aviv, and George makes his way there on the pretext that he had to stop nearby because his car’s engine got overheated and he needed water. On his second visit, he is thrown out by Miriam’s brother, a member of the Hagana, and his mates. Miriam’s apology gives rise to another meeting and then another, always due to Miriam’s insistence and initiative. Although the meetings take place at intimate sites, such as the Andromeda Rock in Jaffa where they go for a night-time swim, they do not lead to a more intimate relationship between the two, because George does not take advantage of the many opportunities falling his way. As the overall situation deteriorates and tensions between the Palestinians and Jews increase, the meetings move to a British club. During one of those meetings, two Stern Gang terrorists enter and murder a British officer. Stern Gang members follow the couple on the suspicion that Miriam may be working with the enemy.
Miriam tells George she will never leave him, and it is her sheer determination that keeps the romance alive. Now the meetings are all in Arab Jaffa. But they are constantly interrupted by her brother, Shraga, known for his fanaticism and hot-headedness. He batters Miriam badly but leaves the couple alone. However, the Stern Gang hooligans finally find a pretext to move against Miriam and George: they both witnessed the killing of the British officer in the club and therefore have to be eliminated. The gang builds a case against them, which includes the allegation that Miriam assisted George to plan the attack on their headquarters in Tel Aviv. While Miriam awaits George for a final meeting in Palestine, after which they plan to leave the country for good, the Stern Gang executes her.
As mentioned, the template in post-Zionist movies about love affairs between Arabs and Jews ends in tragedy, specifically death. The futility of such a death and the predictability of such an ending are beautifully shown in a scene in which a Palestinian shepherd takes a picture of the two and gives it to Miriam’s brother, who fails to develop them and then has to create a photomontage in order to show the two together. This is the essence of the romantic relationship: artificial, liminal, and in reality impossible. Even the only seemingly feasible solution for such an impossible love – running away abroad – cannot materialise.
But beyond the overtly tragic message of the film, there are hidden ones as well, which turn this film into the only one I know of in which the Palestinian narrative of 1948 is not merely respected but also accepted as accurate. By itself, the execution of a Jewish woman by Jews challenges the conventional image of the bloodthirsty and inhuman Arab. Moreover, and probably even unintentionally, the movie went further than most in its historiographical view: it presents Palestinian viewpoints on 1948 as rational and deserving of empathy. The most illuminating scene in this respect is one set in November 1947, in which the patrons in an Arab coffeehouse listen anxiously to the wireless as it broadcasts the UN voting process on the partition resolution. This is the first and only time in an Israeli movie that the scriptwriter demonstrates an awareness of the fears experienced by the other side, which are diametrically opposed to those of the Jewish side. A scene of Jews listening anxiously, anticipating the opposite result of the vote, has appeared often in documentary as well as feature films since 1948, and it is followed by ecstatic dancing in the streets.
Another striking aspect of the narrative is how it is positioned with respect to the explanation for the war’s eruption. In the classic Zionist narrative, as mentioned earlier in the context of the film Dan and Sa’adia, the war breaks out for some unexplainable reason when the Arabs, out of the blue, decide to attack. Here it breaks out after the Arab governments lose the vote in the United Nations and David Ben-Gurion declares the Jewish state. By taking these events into account, the connection between the fury felt by the Palestinians and their frustration and consequent assault on Jewish convoys and settlements becomes clearer. This connection is explained in dialogue by one of George’s friends in a scene that takes place in a pool hall in Jaffa. He speaks about UNSCOP (the UN Special Committee on Palestine, appointed in the spring of 1947 to propose a solution for the conflict in Palestine) and the fact that it permitted Jewish immigrants to flood Palestine while it discussed the country’s future. It was clear that these new immigrants would be staying put, regardless of what the UN ended up proposing. ‘And now the Arabs will stay defenceless, after the British leave, when they face these immigrants’, says George’s friend. This narration reflects not only the Palestinian narrative of the war, but also some of the claims made by the new Israeli historiography about it.
Yet another aspect of this film is that it brings out the human side of the Palestinians, who appear as victims of Jewish attacks on Jaffa. In one of these attacks, George’s friend and relative Pierre is killed. George is seen stooping over his body and caressing his face. George is handsome and elegantly dressed; he drives a fancy car and is far more educated than Miriam. His English is flawless, and this we know because Miriam needs him to help her speak to the Brits. As it happens, all the major Palestinian characters in the film are Christians. This is first and foremost out of loyalty to the true story but tends inadvertently to suggest that the positive Arab image is limited to Christians. However, the Muslims who appear in the film in subsidiary roles are also depicted as normal, multidimensional human beings. Unlike in Dan and Sa’adia, here we know what they aspire to and what they fear, and more than anything else we learn what drives their actions. They win our empathy because their conduct is rational and because we are exposed to subtle and intelligent dialogue among themselves.
What contributes to the film’s credibility is that not all the Palestinians are positive and admirable human beings. Thus, for instance, after Pierre is killed, George and his friends plan to exact revenge. But this is in fact the reverse of the way Zionist historiography characterises not only the 1948 war but every conflict with the Arabs: an Arab action and an Israeli retaliation. Here the Israeli action comes first. In addition, the Arab retaliation in this case fails, because one of the Palestinians is greedy enough to sell for good money their plan to the Stern Gang, and the same person is also providing the information on Miriam that the gang uses to incriminate her.
The Jewish characters, by contrast, are quite negative. The worst is Shraga, Miriam’s brother. He appears in the movie with all the paraphernalia of a Hagana fighter and behaves like a mindless thug. To his underlings, when they fail to hit the targets during gun training sessions, he says, ‘Imagine you are shooting an Arab, or a British soldier – it will help.’ He contemplates expelling George from Palestine before deciding to kill him. And expulsion is the single historical fact that best connects the new Israeli historiography with the Palestinian narrative.
Even Shay, the military intelligence wing of the Hagana, appears to be acting on the basis of racism and fanaticism. They throw unfounded accusations at Miriam not because she constitutes an existential danger but because of her forbidden love for an Arab. Such a depiction could be found only in the boldest of the new historians’ works – namely, the possibility that the young State of Israel followed certain policies or that its political élite took certain decisions towards the Palestinians, not on the basis of security considerations, but out of sheer racism.
Nonetheless, one-dimensional Arabs are not replaced by one-dimensional Jews. Israel, Shraga’s best friend, is gentle and good-hearted, although he is torn to pieces because he is in love with Miriam and knows that this is why he collaborates with Shraga in the violent expulsion of George. Few members of Shay are appalled by the option of murder (but not battery and expulsion). Indeed, the Hagana’s image in this film is fascinating. Its representatives do engage in direct killings, but they debate and hesitate, much more so than the Stern terrorists. So, in a typical Zionist way, they are absolved from the accusation of violence for the sake of violence. It thus seems easier to attribute the violence in the film to the Stern Gang and not the Hagana. George asks Miriam, ‘Have you known any of the assassins of the British officer?’ and adds, ‘You are all brothers-in-arms.’ He also associates the murder of another British officer with a potential death threat to Miriam, posing the rhetorical question ‘You know what these murderers will do when they finish the British?’ The terms ‘murderers’ or ‘assassins’ appear in the film many times when the Stern Gang is mentioned. In the final scene of the movie there is a photomontage of the couple, along with a text which reads: ‘Miriam Seidman was executed and shot by the Stern Gang after being found guilty of treason. Her guilt was never proven, her name was never cleared, and those responsible for her death were never brought to justice.’
But this is not just a story of the Palestinian tragedy. It aspires to be a more universal tale about humanity in general. In general, when dealing with issues such as this, cinema has an advantage over historiography, as is made clear by the immediacy of this film, which could not easily be produced by a written narrative. It pointedly associates geography and politics. Thus, most of Miriam’s encounters with George take place on the beach where the border between Jewish Tel Aviv and Palestinian Jaffa runs. Only there is it possible for the two to detach themselves temporarily from the hostile environment. The director juxtaposes these encounters on the shore with discussions at the Hagana’s headquarters about Miriam’s fate.
The stark contrast between the two protagonists and the murky, hostile, violent environment is also achieved through the way George and Miriam appear on the screen, as well as the physical surroundings where they meet. They are both handsome, young, and clothed in beautiful fabrics, very different from the dreary khaki uniforms worn by those around them. They are filmed against sunsets and maritime panoramas, while the rest of the scenes take place amid the ugly hustle and bustle of militarisation.
Again and again, Miriam and George try to disengage from the national plot into which they were tossed. George throws a bomb into the sea that he promised to detonate in a Jewish area; Miriam’s face appears gloomy amid the sounds of cheering Jews, celebrating diplomatic victory in the UN. All this comes across in the film, despite the film-makers’ more limited ability to identify with the other side compared with the capabilities of the historians. Cinema focuses on individuals, and its creators can therefore more easily display sympathy with the other side – and with respect to one’s own national myth and narrative, calling up that sympathy poses a challenge. Generally, sympathy arises from emotive identification with a screen hero or from a more universal and critical view on life; rarely is it based, as is the case with historians, on new facts. New documentation for a film with a historical dimension is essential, but it is not the crucial component in the creation of a new historiographical picture of the past. Historical films of course have scriptwriters and directors who must support a historical plot with documentary material, but they can readily identify the more imaginative parts of the story. Even if a film tells a basically true story, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK and Frost/Nixon, or Richard Attenborough’s Ghandi, they are still an admixture of fiction and reality. Such licence is obviously a luxury that documentarians cannot permit themselves.
Esh Tzolevet was not the only film in Israel that exposed dilemmas and taboos. A few films went so far as to take on the manipulation of Holocaust memory in Israeli politics and discourse. Ilan Moshenson’s 1979 movie Roveh Huliot (The Wooden Gun), for example, conveyed Israeli uneasiness over the possible link between the Nazi wish to annihilate the Jews in Europe and the Zionist desire to see the expulsion of the Jews from Europe for the sake of the Jewish community in Palestine. Some of these themes were treated in television docudramas. Motti Lerner’s 1994 three-part TV miniseries The Kastner Trial, for instance, was based on the true story of a Zionist activist who saved Hungarian Jews by bribing Nazis and who later tried to cleanse his name in a libel trial but failed. The film highlighted the uneasy connection between the Jewish leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, and put forward the uncomfortable conclusion that the survival of the community in Palestine always came first. A 1995 docudrama by Benny Brunner, based on Tom Segev’s book The Seventh Million, focused on Jewish leaders’ decision not to become involved in operations to save Jews that did not bring survivors to Palestine and to concentrate on efforts to save Jews who were physically and mentally fit and likely to contribute to nation-building.
Beyond the makers of docudramas are the documentary film-makers, who intervene very little in the raw reality they film, believing strongly that it speaks for itself. One of the best among them is Eyal Sivan. An early film of his, Yizkor: Slaves of Memory, tested the limits of how far one can challenge from within one’s own national ethos and mythology. In the film he follows the manipulation of Holocaust memories in the Israel high school system during the period between the Passover festivities through Holocaust Remembrance Day Yom Hashoah, and up to the celebrations of Independence Day, Yom Ha’atzmaut. The camera hardly leaves the classroom or schoolyard, and an extended version includes an extremely poignant interview with Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who was mentioned in Chapter 4 above. For me the unforgettable remark in this interview was that the Holocaust is not a Jewish problem: ‘We did not do it. The Germans did, and it is therefore their problem.’ By contrast, the occupation should concern the Israeli Jews, because this is an evil of their own doing. Calling on Israel to focus on its own crimes and less on its victimisation was a demand rarely heard of even at the peak of the post-Zionist era.
Yizkor leaves the viewer with a mixture of optimism and despair. The school manufactures a false and unconvincing Jewish narrative of self-righteousness and victimisation that lumps together the ancient stories of the Hebrews in Pharaonic Egypt with accounts of Nazi Europe and the 1948 War of Independence. The students do not always seem to fall prey to this metanarrative, but neither are they offered any alternatives, and thus are likely to become the slaves of this manipulated memory in future. What it also shows is the grotesque business of enslaving memory for ideological purposes: there is an efficient use of materials employed for the various memorial ceremonies, which have an almost postmodern character in which everything is the same whether it happened five thousand years ago or yesterday. An efficient teacher, then, will instruct the students not to waste the posters describing the exodus from Egypt so that they can be used again in a Broadway-style presentation on the various death camps of the Holocaust. On Yom Hashoah, each student is assigned a banner with the name of one of the camps on it, and the viewer almost senses a competition among the children to receive the banner that represents the worst site of the Nazi genocide.
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.16
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
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.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.
Moreover, there seems to be a clear method in the way the Palestinian and Jewish eyewitnesses were chosen. The eyewitnesses on both sides ostensibly represented the rank and file, ordinary people. In reality, this was not so. On the Israeli side, the witnesses were highly articulate, usually senior officers, who described with great eloquence and sensitivity what they went through. The Palestinian witnesses, on the other hand, who were usually old men and almost invariably Israeli Arabs (not one had actually lived all his life in a refugee camp), presented clouded memories, often in broken Hebrew, usually in slogans, and not always coherently. This, I feel, was no coincidence. Even if unconscious, the selection represented a means of depreciating the Palestinian point of view. Had someone wished to create it, a very different impression of the Palestinian side could have emerged.
The segments of Tkuma that dealt with the 1950s, particularly the state’s attitude towards the Jews from Arab countries as well as towards the Palestinian citizens of Israel, likewise presented a partially post-Zionist view. The Zionist role in encouraging the local Jewish communities in the Arab world to leave for Israel was barely touched upon, though the illusions spread by the Zionist messengers were sufficiently conveyed. The main issue dealt with here was the absorption, or the lack thereof, of the immigrants after their arrival in Israel. The way the newcomers were treated by the more veteran Israelis clearly conveyed their negative attitude towards anything Arab – an attitude soon translated into colonialist policies in education and welfare. The process of geographic, social, and occupational marginalisation was strongly projected through the stories of individuals who eventually succeeded in carving out better lives for themselves. The message was: Israel was still the land of open opportunities.
With respect to this issue, there was one genuinely new piece of evidence in the film. I think very few Israelis knew that the general compensation Israel received from Germany was unevenly distributed among Jewish citizens of the state. The reparations, as they were called, raised the average standard of living of the Ashkenazi Jews but did not help the Mizrachim at all, thus further widening the socio-economic gap between them. An Iraqi Jew in the program tells how he noticed the material improvements in the public life of Tel Aviv – people wearing new clothing, more food in the stores, automobiles, new amusement places – whereas in his own neighbourhood, all he could see was stagnation and continued deprivation.
For me, the most acute reference in this segment on immigrant absorption – the one that made the greatest impact, and which I think encapsulated the essence of the Mizrachi immigrant experience – was a statement by a Yemeni Jewish woman who arrived in Israel in the 1950s. When reunited in front of the TV cameras with the Ashkenazi woman who had been her teacher forty years earlier, she asked why her teacher had chosen to work with such a deprived and marginalised group. ‘Was it because you were a Zionist, or because you felt it was your obligation as a human being?’ she wanted to know. The response from her former teacher was confused and unclear, but it gave the impression that ideology had been a stronger motivation than humanity and, as such, had led to some tough treatment of the newcomers by the earlier Zionist settlers.
In other footage, it appears that other Mizrachi Jews felt that the Zionist discourse concealed acts of manipulation and dishonesty. The episode on the Palestinian citizens of Israel, titled ‘The Pessoptimist’, after Emile Habibi’s book The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, was by far the best segment of the entire series, the only one that did not play the game of ‘balancing’.23 Here, the director clearly did not feel compelled to show ‘another side’ to the story of discrimination against the Palestinians in Israel, but instead communicated the impression that there was no other side, that there were no extenuating circumstances for the abuse and maltreatment inflicted during the eighteen years of ‘emergency rule’ imposed on the Palestinian citizens (1949–66). The viewers watched the expulsion of villagers from their homes in the name of security considerations in the early 1950s. Military governors admitted that they were kings who harassed the local population with impunity on a daily basis. What was missing from the analysis in ‘The Pessoptimist’, unfortunately, was the connection with the situation of the Palestinians in Israel in the 1990s; this chapter conveyed a picture of an almost inevitable process of modernisation and Israelisation of the local Palestinian minority. In any case, this segment, together with another one on Israeli behaviour during the First Intifada, provoked a political upheaval and caused the prominent Israeli singer Yehoram Gaon to resign as the chief narrator of the segments lest he seem to be supporting Palestinian fighters.
Interestingly, though Tkuma largely ignored the Zionist right (it was the Zionist left that it held responsible for the expulsions, massacres, discrimination, and manipulations involving the Arabs), Likud spearheaded the protests against what it termed a ‘post-Zionist’ programme. Indeed, Likud appointed itself guardian of national virtues, assuming responsibility for what the nation did and does. Thus, according to the Likud minister of communications at the time, Limor Livnat, it was necessary that all these deeds be presented as just and moral. The director-general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, Uri Porat, promised to screen an additional four segments that would balance the ‘distorted’ picture of the past. One of the reasons for the government’s wrath was the fact that the programme enjoyed very high ratings and the post-screening video cassettes were selling well. Although the Ministry of Education forbade Tkuma’s inclusion in the curriculum, there was a growing demand from high schools for copies to screen in the classroom, officially or unofficially.
In those days, the increased interest was not surprising. To adopt a wholly Zionist perspective on the past was seen as not only anachronistic but boring. Teachers and students alike wanted a refreshing angle, especially an angle that might provide an answer to the question of why Israelis found it so difficult to rejoice on their fiftieth anniversary. Indeed, it would seem that rather than celebrate their country’s jubilee, Israelis preferred to deliberate on the connection between their history and the present. The deliberation was painful and left little room for rejoicing. It forced the Israelis to abandon the pious posture so dear to both secular and religious Jews. Tkuma threw into sharp relief the contrast between the programme’s name – ‘Rebirth’ – and the reality of the nation after fifty years of existence, a reality that was unstable and insecure, since state and society had failed to reconcile with the people whom they expelled, whose land they took, and whose culture they destroyed. As became clear at the beginning of the next century, it would take more than a television programme with a mildly post-Zionist critique to make reconciliation possible.