Gilad Shalit and Paradise Now

Yossi Mendelevich, Yossi Zur, and Ron Kerman are back in the news in We're on your side because of their opposition to a deal over Gilad Shalit.

Their argument fails to acknowledge that hatred and terrorism against Jewish Zionists is solely a result of Zionist crimes. If Jewish Zionists do not want to be legitimate targets, they need only renounce Zionism, demand the abolition of the State of Israel, return the stolen country and stolen property to their rightful owners, and pay compensatory damages for the last 60 or more years of atrocities that Jewish Zionist invaders, interlopers and thieves have been committing against the native population of Palestine.

Because the three Zionist racists first hit the headlines with their political actions against the film entitled Paradise Now, I am republishing the review that the movie inspired me to write with the assistance of Karin Friedemann.

Some Comments on Hany Abu-Assad's Movie, Paradise Now
by Joachim Martillo with Karin Friedemann
Originally Published in Al-Jazeerah, December 2, 2005

[Paradise Now was directed and co-written by Hany Abu-Assad, who was previously the director of Rana's Wedding.]

Winner of several awards, including the Amnesty International Film Prize at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, Paradise Now focuses on the last days of Palestinian childhood friends Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), who have been recruited for a strike on Tel Aviv. When they are intercepted at the Israeli border and separated from their handlers, a young woman discovers their plans. On what should be their last day alive, they now have the chance to reconsider their actions and change their destinies.

Possibly because of the film's relentless grimness, Karin and I had difficulty connecting emotionally to the characters or to the story. The scene where Said lay in his father's grave should have moved us more. I think the movie could have used some moments of high absurdity in order to underscore the tragedy through which Palestinians are living and have been living for the last 58 years. We could only identify one or maybe two very brief moments of comic relief (and we were the only ones who laughed).(+) The obvious moment of comic relief takes place in the videostore when the proprietor tells Suha and Said that he could charge more for collaborator videos if his pricing system had allowed it. The other less obvious moment occurs when Said puts a recommendation about buying a water filter into his farewell video. (We probably should have seen more of Umm Said.)

Throughout the movie Palestinians never laugh. They don't dance. Their lives are boring and empty. There are not enough scenes of innocent children. There is nothing beautiful about Palestinians. They are not easy to like (even though in real life the opposite is true). The viewer may feel sorry for them but not deeply.(=) I almost have the feeling that movie has internalized the daily demonization of Palestinians as a sort of inferiority complex.

Nevertheless, the movie is well-paced albeit still probably too slow for an American audience. It kept our attention, but I have one major qualm.

It can be viewed or used as a rationalization for the wall that Israel is building because the protagonists Said and Khaled get through a fence fairly easily to undertake a suicide mission. Americans are continually indoctrinated that nothing justifies a suicide attack and might easily miss the context that Hany Abu-Assad has carefully crafted. In Black Sunday (1977), Dahlia Iyad carefully explains why her organization intends to undertake a terror attack on the USA (and makes a very good case for it), but Hollywood logic indoctrinates the audience in that movie and in every movie since that we Americans must ignore the reasons and just act to thwart the terrorists without addressing the underlying causes. Comparing Iyad's farewell speech with Said's is worthwhile.

I really did not like the scene where Said and Khaled were preparing for their mission. It looked as if it were borrowed from True Lies. In True Lies, the videocamera batteries run out as Salim Abu Aziz is taping a message to the USA about the nuclear attacks that he is planning.

Hany Abu-Assad clearly opposes suicide attacks(*), but the contempt that he evinces for the handlers(**) is much too much on the nose and conforms to hypocritical Zionist and American cliches. It reminded me of Gorlin's film Holy Land. There may be better tactics to use, but the Palestinian resistance simply does not have many weapons at its disposal, and suicide attacks do in fact hurt the Zionist colonizer population. Otherwise, Zionists and racist Ashkenazi Americans would not work so hard to delegitimize this tactic.

I have not followed the suicide bomber stories as closely as I should, but at least one handler vowed that after supervising 10 missions that he would undertake one as well, and he did. He also made sure his life was completely in order and ascertained that his family was prepared for the demolition of the family's home before he carried out his mission.

Paradise Now portrays the driving force behind the suicide bomber as an attempt to overcome feelings of humiliation and shame. The arguments (between Suha and Khaled) both for and against suicide bombing are weak. It appears that the issue has not been thought through too deeply -- both the politics and the psychological aspects. The movie tends to validate the Zionist view of Palestinians as pathetic and useless people who are "not nice." Their primary complaint about their lives in Palestine is boredom. Early on in the movie, instead of helping us to care about the heroes, we see them underpaying the kid who brings them tea and stealing a cassette tape from a customer's car.(***) They do not fit the "deeply religious" profile. They seem like a couple of jerks with nothing to live for. The Quran is used only as a way to soothe the nerves. It does not really provide inspiration. The entire movie is so full of nervous tension that we actually feel relieved when the guy finally blows himself up. But there is no real sorrow that he is dead, and no transcendent feeling of triumph of the human will over the body -- not even any real happiness that some bad guys just got blown up as we would experience if Stallone or Schwarzenegger had just wasted a unit of enemy soldiers.(****)

Undertaking any religious mission in the expectation of paradise is considered the lowest form of religious expression.($) People undertaking a suicide mission can be motivated by ideals of service to the community and love of God, and certainly an American volunteer for a suicide mission during WW2 would be so depicted in a Hollywood film. Even if Hany Abu Assad opposes suicide bombing, he should give the audience the opportunity to consider whether they might be motivated by higher ideals.

As we were leaving I overheard one of the audience say "But Israel has a right to exist," in an unsure voice, as if he were trying to convince himself of this standard cliche despite what he had just seen of Israel's effect on Palestinian people. So I think the movie did have some good effect. The entire theater was silent afterwards. No one had anything to say about it. That was probably the greatest weakness. A good movie should provide ideas for a lively discussion afterwards. Even a trashy made for television serialized movie like Holocaust (starring Meryl Streep) managed to create a discussion and even inspired Germany to remove the statute of limitations on war crimes. Maybe, Paradise Now is too intellectual, and we need a more trashy movie to encourage the arrest of active and reserve IDF soldiers as war criminals when they travel outside of Israel.

It was a good touch that Said chose not to blow up the first bus. In terms of hitting Israeli military personnel and avoiding civilian noncombatants, Palestinian suicide bombers generally have a better record than the IDF or IAF. I wish that the director had brought out this point more clearly.

The contrast between Tel Aviv and the brokenness of the Palestinian side of the green line should impress American audiences, but an American audience has no way to realize that everything on the Israeli side was stolen from Palestinians.

One aspect of the mission piqued my curiosity. Said and Khaled were dressed fairly close to a certain class of yeshiva bokher (student in a Jewish religious school), but without the black kippah (skullcap) any bus driver would have been suspicious of them.(#) To make them less conspicuous in the black suits, Khaled and Said should probably have worn a scapular with tassles or ritual fringes (tallit katan with tzitzit) in addition to a kippah. The tassles should have hung out. As they were dressed, I believe that no halfway alert driver would have let Said on the bus with the soldiers.

Karin and I were impressed that the late afternoon show of Paradise Now completely filled the theater auditorium. Clearly, in New York City there is a market for Palestinian focus films. I think it would do better if it had been released in an English language version and not as an Arabic language movie with subtitles.

NOTES

(+) I have to admit I had a similar reaction to Divine Intervention even though it had more comic moments. Audiences seemed to care far more about Raeda, Taher, Mazin and even Areen in The Olive Harvest by Hanna Elias. Hany Abu Assad managed to engage me far more with the character of Rana in Rana's Wedding than with Khaled or Said in this movie.

(=) It is worthwhile to contrast Paradise Now with the recently release Israeli film Walk on Water, which uses all the standard Hollywood tricks to get the audience to sympathize with a cruel Mossad assassin and to assimilate his point of view (including contempt for Palestinians). I have not seen Ushpizin yet, but it might also provide an interesting contrast.

(*)Karin's note: This was not my impression. It seemed that in some way, both Khaled, who did not go through with the attack, and Said, who blew himself up, were right in their own way. Sadly, neither of them used very deep reasoning to get there. What did seem clear was that whatever they did, there was no way out of their situation because the Israelis are stronger. This point seemed to be hammered into us. No one could come up with a better idea besides suicide bombing. And even that was more a symbolic act of low self-esteem, not a glorious self-sacrifice for the sake of a great Cause. The movie's strongest point was to show life on both sides on the fence. The view of overfed tourist women in bikinis compared with the Palestinians struggling to survive was striking.

(**) The handlers are fat and start eating while Said is filming his message. They seem more interested in self-preservation than concern for the bombers when the first attempt at the mission goes awry.

(***) A Hollywood film would make them obvious victims of undeserved misfortune. Instead, Said smashes the bumper on a customer's car. Then the Hollywood director would show some character development in some area not directly related to the central story line. Both As Good as It Gets and Walk on Water (Lalekhet al Hamayim) showed the hero becoming tolerant of homosexuals after expressing some initially hostile attitudes. A homosexual shtick seems de rigeur in current Hollywood drama.

(****) We saw very little of Israelis in the film. I presume that IDF soldiers are war criminals unless proven otherwise, but I have worked in the Occupied Territories. Perhaps the general Arab audience would make a similar assumption, but the general American audience would not. Was Hany Abu-Assad afraid to show how vicious and malicious IDF soldiers can be? Films like Apolcalypse Now and Little Big Man get distribution even though they show American soldiers as psychopaths. Was Hany Abu-Assad reacting to some sort of ban on the depiction of IDF soldiers as brutal or psychopathic?

($) Karin comments. Usually, when the Taliban shoot off their Stinger missiles they shout "Allahu Akbar" almost joyously - and when the enemy soldiers shoot at them they are so unattached to their own lives that they do not flinch. There is a spiritual state that they enter in war. Their entire being is dedicated to the service of Allah, both in their everyday suffering that they endure in His Name, and in their deaths, which to them is like a blessed going home. This spiritual aspect of war was completely absent from Paradise Now. Religion was portrayed as something to which pathetic and useless people cling as a distraction from a painful reality. Joachim notes that Karin expresses sentiments common among MSA members in the late 80s and 90s during the heady days when Arab Jihadis joined the fight against the Soviets in 90s and then helped to consolidate post-Soviet Afghanistan after the USA withdrew its aid and assistance.

(#) In the USA in addition to black skullcaps the type of yeshiva bokher that Said and Khaled were emulating might also wear a Fedora or Homburg depending on whether his yeshiva were litvish (Lithuanian) or yekkish (German) in orientation. In Israel such hats are more frequently absent.
Sphere: Related Content